Modwest Blog

November food drive: Can you help?

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by Jennifer Stephens

Modwest is holding its fourth annual food drive through Wednesday, November 23, 2011 in honor of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on November 24, 2011. 

We would like to invite our customers to join with us during our last week of this event to help us beat our 2009 top donation year of 138 lbs. (62.6 kg) of food donated to the Missoula Food Bank.

If you are close enough to Modwest headquarters, we invite you to drop off your food donations at our office located at 110 Caras Drive, Missoula, Montana 59802 facing the Caras Park Pavilion. Donations can be received between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Tuesday, November 15 through Tuesday, November 22 and on Wednesday, November 23 up until 10 a.m.

If you are unable to drop off a donation at Modwest and would really like to participate, we encourage you to hold your own food drive wherever you are. Let us know how much food you were able to donate to your local food bank and, after the holiday, we will let everyone know how much food was donated by Modwest and its customers. Across our nation and the world, there are record numbers of families who need that little extra help. This is a great opportunity to give back to your community, especially if unemployment is high.

Food donation guidelines from the Missoula Food Bank are listed below. For guidelines in your area, contact your local food bank or health department.

Suggested foods:

• Canned meats (i.e., tuna, chicken, salmon)
• Canned and boxed meals (i.e., soup, chili, stew, macaroni and cheese)
• Canned or dried beans and peas (i.e., black, pinto, lentils)
• Pasta, rice, cereal
• Canned fruits

Foods that cannot be accepted:

• Homemade items
• Noncommercial canned or packaged items
• Alcoholic beverages or drink mixes
• Open or used items
• Rusty or unlabeled cans

Thank you in advance for participating in the Modwest annual food drive! We look forward to hearing from you!

Jennifer Stephens, MBA is the Customer Engagement Manager at Modwest, a Missoula native and Gonzaga University J-school grad who loves a good latte, music, and social media. She can be contacted at jstephens@modwest.com.

2010 Modwest Thanksgiving Food Drive

Thanksgiving is Thursday the 25th of November, and the Modwest Team will be taking the day off to spend with families and friends.

Last year, we ran a week-long food drive, and collected 138 lbs of food for the Missoula Food Bank, an organization that distributes 250 tons of food every year to local families in need. We're going to try and beat that record this year by starting a little earlier!

We'd love it if you could help out. Just drop off your non-perishable food items at our office at 110 Caras Drive in Missoula; that's alongside Caras Park in the Wilma building in downtown Missoula, Montana. We'd like to receive all donations before 5PM on the Tuesday the 23rd so we can deliver them on Wednesday morning. Thanks!

 

Posted by: John Masterson, Modwest Co-founder

 

Customer Profile: The Art of Good Food

As requested in the Modwest Community, we're starting up a series of posts in which our customers and their sites are featured here. We'll kick things off with "The Art of Good Food", a Montana company that was a recipient of the 2009 Ecostar Award, sponsored by Montana Pollution Prevention Program and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Here's a transcript of our recent email interview with the owners of the site:

Modwest: What is the purpose of your site, that is, what is your site meant to accomplish?

"Provide information about my company and products, give general information about terms and techniques relative to my products, and provide my customers an easy online purchasing experience for my products."

Modwest: What sort of software application(s) does your site use?

"Drupal, Secure Certificate for online ordering."

Modwest: What do you envision is the next step for your website?

"I would like to fine tune the site and then use a pay-per-click advertising to generate more traffic and sales this fall. I would also like to add more pictures featuring my products and their consumption."

Modwest: What do YOU like best about your site?

"I like the simplicity of my site, it is comfortable, easy to use and doesn't throw a lot of distracting stuff at customers."

Modwest: Anything else you'd like to share about your webhosting experience with Modwest, or in general, that may be helpful to other Modwest customers?

"I am totally loving my experience with Modwest.  I called Modwest in a panic when another host started disabling part of my site and my former programmers decided they were tired of working on it.  Within one day, Modwest put me in touch with a web developer who got my site moved over to Modwest without a hitch.  I am also loving the fact that I was able to pay for the hosting in one big package, saving me money and eliminating the month to month billing."

"Modwest has the best customer support in the business as far as I am concerned.  They will do their best to answer your questions and solve your problems.  They keep their servers up to date and rarely does that required that you up date your website. I also appreciate the newsletters and them keeping in touch with me."

 
If you're a Modwest customer and would like to be featured here, please contact our Community Manager.

2009 Thanksgiving Food Drive

UPDATE Nov 25th: We just delivered 138lbs of food to the food bank. Thanks to all who helped!

Thanksgiving is next Thursday the 26th, and the Modwest Team will be taking the day off to spend with families and friends.

Last year, we ran a week-long food drive, and collected over 100 lbs of food for the Missoula Food Bank, an organization that distributes 250 tons of food every year to local families in need. We're going to try and beat that record this year.

If you would like to help out, please drop off your non-perishable food items at our office at 110 Caras Drive in Missoula; that's alongside Caras Park in the Wilma building downtown. We'd like to receive all donations before 5PM on the Tuesday the 24th so we can deliver them on Wednesday morning.

Here's an interactive map if you need help finding us.

View Larger Map


-JM

Let There Be Wifi

Our office is located right on Caras Park, arguably the focal point of the Missoula community. There are community events there most days in the spring, summer, and fall, ranging from Out to Lunch and Downtown Tonight to Hempfest, Kidsfest, and Brewfest.

Since we're so close and sitting on a boatload of bandwidth, we thought it'd be good to share with the community, and so this summer, we deployed outdoor wireless devices which give pretty decent coverage throughout the park. Set your laptop or handheld to connect to the "Modwest_Public" network, and you should be surfing in no time.

Enjoy, Missoula!

Photo by Dan Leithauser for Missoula Hempfest.

A Day in the Modwest Life: Tom

"A Day in the Life" is our most requested blog topic currently, so here's another installment. Featured today is Systems Engineer Tom.

Here's the play-by-play:

Uptime: 16:33, Calories burned: ~4500, Calories consumed: Not enough, Emergencies: 0,  Commuting close calls: 3

6:47 - Alarm, in form of local child-of-the-80s radio station, goes off.  I press snooze 1 time, giving four more minutes of sleep.  The song playing was the single from U2's Pop album, Discothèque. I'm tired because my wife, N, and I stayed up too late last night watching 30 Rock episodes on Netflix. 

6:52 - Feed cat who purposely knocked food off platform.  Yes, master... 

6:53 - Move clothes from washer to dryer -- all of my running clothes in there, sitting overnight.  They are 12% musty, so I'm using a new dryer sheet to compensate.  Being cheap, I tend to use fabric softener sheets 3 or 4 go-arounds.  Not this time. 

6:54 - Check on sick kitten that we are fostering from the Humane Society -- she's cloistered in bathroom, with no explosive bodily expulsions today.  Yes! 

7:07 - Slicking in edgy hair fixative product, realizing hair has become too long overnight to be effectively chunky punk. 

7:11 - Go out and feed chickens.  The sun is up and they know I'm coming out at about this time, so they stack themselves next to the door and topple out when I open it.

7:14 - Attempt to wake up N.  No dice. 

7:16 - Get breakfast cereal.  I eat breakfast every morning before work, so I can be focused.  That's not true; it's like a fad diet, where the only allowed food is cereal.  My teeth will probably pay the price one day, but the double-pour-and-eat-action sure is convenient.  The stay-fresh container, or as Mitch Hedberg said, the fresher, is down to the dregs.  So, my meal is all bran, no raisin.  It turned into brown Jell-O when exposed to milk.  Sproing. 

7:17 - I sleep extremely heavily, so I now check phone for alerts I slept through.  If I do this before getting ready, it sucks me in and the whole day is thrown off.  There were only two load beeps for one of our VPS servers -- not uncommon when dozens of containers are performing maintenance at the same time.

7:22 - Attempt to wake up N.  Another swing and a miss. 

7:23 - Feed fish.

7:23 - Check if new MySQL backup solution worked last night, catch up on email. 

7:30 - Stall a bit because I don't want to be early for my run with Marianne, co-worker and 50% of Team Modwest Half-Marathon. 

7:35 - Actually wake up N!  Feed the dog. 

7:38 - Borrow N's Body Bug.  I've been meaning to see what the device thinks of my metabolism and the run today seemed like it would make me look bad-ass.  Unverifiable numbers! 

7:45 - Start biking downtown to meet Marianne for run.  My commutes are always by bike.  I've logged over 6000 miles while working at Modwest the past 6 years, according to the Way to Go Club.  My commuter for the whole time has been a 2003 Diamondback Topanga Comp.

7:50 - Avoid crazy drivers;  they're apparently confused about the road construction and are occupied telling their phones all about it. 

7:55 - Stow bike in bike locker leased by Modwest and run to meeting place.  Good on them for fostering alternative transportation by providing secure storage. 

8:05 - Shouldn't have dawdled, arrived late.  Starting run. 

9:30 - Completed run, walking it off.  Here's the route. I am good going up hills, Marianne's good at downhill.  Descents shred my knees.  This is my last longish run before the Missoula Half-Marathon. 

9:40 - Marianne bought me a Powerade Ion-4 Advanced Electrolyte System (Sour Melon).  While being unnaturally radiant green, it was not sour.

10:12 - Answer Ops chat question about automount maps.  We're using autofs in a clever and troublesome way so we can have multiple environments in parallel. 

10:15 - Install TV antenna Janiel picked up for the office -- we've had a TV in the rumpus room since we moved in nine months ago, and it doesn't get any channels.  Blasphemy!  Turns out we only can easily get PBS through all the concrete of the Wilma. 

10:45 - Back at desk for "queue cleanup day", the day the Ops team does digital janitorial work and slays a few odd jobs -- But, checking support first. 

10:55 - Repaired John's broken drop database attempt; he was testing some recent problems people had on db0. 

11:00 - Got some music going -- Muse, then Infected Mushroom. 

11:45 - Cleanup queue mostly handled.  Moving on to little queue inversion projects.

11:52 - Stomach growling, Powerade not cutting it.  Cheese'n'crackers time.  Sharp. 

12:15 - Cage flag created for system tickets.  The Ops team has two ticket queues, one for time-sensitive requests, and another for long-term projects.  These frequently need kung-fu in the data center.  This flag ought to alleviate the question, "Do you guys need anything in the cage?" 

12:30 - Working on wrangling our log/temp/etc file management utilities so they're doing their job with our storage changes.  Even though disk space is cheap, I don't believe in being sloppy, so I've made this my pet project for the day. 

1:13 - Music ran out.  Midnight Juggernauts and Kasabian.

2:30 - Finished adjusting and documenting mw_cleanusertmp for now, ran it and freed 20GB+ of space. 

3:00 - Finished tuning and documenting mw-compressoldlogs for now, ran it and freed almost 30GB of space.

3:15 - The day-in-the-life epic saga typing continues, in terrible form. 

3:20 - Back on log rotation.  If only we could just use logrotate. 

4:00 - Got error_log truncation working on a new fileserver.  Freed nearly 20GB of space 

4:21 - Found out N and I might not get to go fishing at nearby Georgetown Lake tomorrow because the ER where she works apparently thinks paying loads of overtime is a good idea. (We actually did get to go, and caught over ten Rainbow Trout between us.  It was all catch-and-release.) 

4:25 - Packing up to go home and check on le chat.  (N working a 10 hour shift, so kitty may be stressed without companionship.) 

5:00 - Kitten checked, fed, box cleaned.  Catching up on the day's email.  I try to ignore email for large portions of the day...for efficiency! 

5:15 - Making miva_shuffle script for support team.  This script does a song and dance to remedy some occasional file locking problems we encounter with Miva. 

6:00 - Jonathan helped me navigate our arcane postgresql backups for our beta webmail system.  Gah!  It was missing a directory, that is all. 

6:15 - Done with miva_shuffle.

6:22 - Wrapping up work, giving animals evening meals.  Headed back downtown to meet N for Downtown Tonight. 

6:50 - Talked to Marianne about POSIX file permissions -- a customer struggling with getting two users RW access on the same files.  Modwest HQ is right outside Caras Park, the hub of downtown summer events.  Lucky for me Modwest cares about my results, not my schedule, so it was easy to get some support work done as I came through to the park. 

7:00 - Filled John's Chair at the Downtown Tonight Modwest booth and talked with Heather.  He was evaluating the brews, she was certain she'd forgotten everything computers while on vacation.  Full-Grown Men was the band for the evening. 

7:10 - N's here! We're eating at the Thai Spicy booth, Me - Green Curry Chicken, N - Cashew Nut Curry Chicken 

7:23 - Ilsa's Lemonade for drinks. 

7:45 - Broccoli calzone, I can't remember the real name, for a chaser; I'm still hungry... 

8:00 - Bike loaded in car, going to see N's dad, self-deprecating fly-fisher extraordinaire.  (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extraordinaire -- "Unlike most English adjectives, extraordinaire follows its subject."  I never noticed that was particularly unique.  Man, this writeup is informative AND entertaining.) 

8:30 - Got a fly fishing knot lesson -- the knot we learned is supposedly not in any of the books out there, it seems actually a passcode that grumbly guys with waders and wild hair use to identify the non-posers. 

9:00 - Three episodes of 30 Rock while doing house chores. 

11:20 - Bed.

Got other ideas for the Modwest Blog? Let us know in the Modwest Community.

-JM

First Fruits of the Modwest Community

A couple weeks ago we launched the Modwest Feedback Community.  Already, we have heard important ideas form customers and implemented changes in response!

Here's a few examples:

• radiohead correctly pointed out that while Subversion (svn) is available in all Modwest shared hosting accounts, we hadn't done a very good job of letting people know. We quickly made a few changes so that it shows up on the big features page as well as the main webhosting page under Site Management. Thanks radiohead!
• In a comment thread, squiggle advised that our System Status page should continue displaying maintenance and issue alerts for more than just a few days, to aid our clients in debugging any issues they may be tackling. We took care of that a few days later, and now the last 30 days of notices display. 
• In an OnSite feature request topic, bryanb suggested we provide a more direct way for site owners to get into webmail. Turns out that already existed but we never told anyone! There are two options:

http://webmail.modwest.com
https://beta-webmail.modwest.com

As an example of what's being discussed right now, here's a recently popular topic (click it for details!):

So, we'd say our "kick off" was a great success. If you haven't visited recently, check it out, and participate for a chance to win real prizes like this one:

-JM

Thanksgiving Food Drive

Update Nov 25: Thanks to generous customers and staff, we delivered over 100 lbs of food to the food bank tonight. Thanks all!

Thanksgiving is next Thursday, and the Modwest Team will be taking Thursday and Friday off.

This year, we thought it would be fun to have a Thanksgiving food drive to benefit the Missoula Food Bank, an organization that distributes 250 tons of food every year to local families in need.

If you would like to help out, drop off your non-perishable food items at our new office at 110 Caras Drive in Missoula; that's alongside Caras Park in the Wilma building downtown. We'd like to receive all donations before 5PM on the Tuesday the 25th so we can deliver them on Wednesday morning.

Here's an interactive map if you need help finding us.

View Larger Map


-JM

Photos from the New Office

Well, we're finally mostly settled, and Chris, an Internet Application Engineer at Modwest, has taken some gorgeous photos of the new Modwest office space. Check them out if you're interested.

The historic theater building we're in is also downtown's largest concert venue, and tonight, Ozomatli is playing, an "urban-Latino-and-beyond collision of hip hop and salsa, dancehall and cumbia, samba and funk, merengue and comparsa, East LA R&B and New Orleans second line, Jamaican ragga and Indian raga". 
I suspect we'll be treated to a sound check shortly. ;)

-JM