I read of Connecticut Broadcasting School’s close on Facebook when Geoff Fox posted a update. I really didn’t understand the enormity of the situation. I thought that this was a single school with 50 students who no longer could operate. I just came across the story from WJLA – the ABC affiliate in Washington, DC. JLA reports that CT Broadcasting School operated 26 separate campuses in 16 different states. Geeze, I’m kinda shocked I’ve never heard of them.

The worst part of the story is how the students got treated. Apparently an email was sent to the students after finding the all the doors locked.

…said the school is closed. They’ll be no class until further notice [and to] contact the corporate office.

Wow. Some kids were only weeks away from graduation and won’t be able to get their diploma. The tuition was $12,000 and they won’t even get that back!

The school blames the closing on tightening private student loan markets. The school’s lender, Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial, seized control of all the school’s accounts. This rendered the school unable to proceed.

There is no good way to resolve this. I just sat thinking for 10 minutes on how I’d handle this and I didn’t come up with anything. I guess that’s why I’m not a college president.

My website decide to take a small break this afternoon for about five hours. If you tried to visit during that time, all you got was a simple Error 500 message (wonder what error 1-499 are?). Anyways, I was really ticked because this was the second time in two weeks this happened. Not only can I not access this site, but I also can’t access the site I’ve been spending every waking moment developing.

I called 1and1, who is my server company, around 3:30pm. The first guy I talked to was less than helpful. He seemed like he had better places to be. Needless to say, that call didn’t help anything.

I called back at 5:45pm and talked to Nadine. She was very helpful and explained exactly what she was going to do to fix the site. She said I’d receive an email within 30 minutes regarding the status of the fix.

32 minutes later…

As we monitor your two websites:  jacobwycoff.com and [deleted].com it
is still displaying an Error 500.  We already escalated the case few
minutes ago.
We will get back to you once again via email for further update.

The site finally was back up around 8:45pm. It sounds weird, but while the site was done, I didn’t know what to do with myself. This new site is just so consuming that I get in the zone and lose track of time. We are rolling the site out next Wednesday. Until then, I’ll be working out the bugs.

Today was a very productive day for me, even though I didn’t ‘work’ much.

I made great progress on the new website and it should be up and running in a week or two. Joe and I worked on content for the page. I used the program LogMeIn to access Joe’s computer and show him how to use WordPress. Before I know it, Joe is poking around the website to get acquainted. The motto for our website is “The One-Stop-Shop For Tomorrow’s Weather Today”. To deliver on that promise, we will be offering forecasts, technical discussions, blogs, video forecasts, and more. It truly will be a place for everyone to visit.

Everyone I’ve showed the site to likes the layout and design. We are trying to make it as user friendly as possible. This means crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s many times over. All in the hopes for a great site.

Ultimately Joe and I would like to make some money of the site. We are brainstorming ideas how to make that work. That is for the future. For now, we’ll be spending our free time making the site. Don’t worry, you all will be the first to see it.

So as the phrase goes… just another day, another dollar. (Can I take the lump payout now?)

Saturday became a day of computers for me and my relatives.

My computer has been more than cranky the past few days, so I made an appointment at The Apple Store in Towson. (side note: Apple has the best guarantees, customer service, and technical support of any company I’ve seen) A few minutes later, the tech guy had my computer up and running again. Still not as fast as I’d like, he helped me pick out new memory options and gave me self-help instructions to install it. A visit to newegg.com (I’ll post about that site later) tripled my memory – from 512mb to 1.5gb – for only $50. I was feeling pretty good about the purchase… but I’ll let you know what happens when I install it.

My aunt has been having trouble with her laptop for the past month or so. It was over four years old so she decided it was time for a new one. We ended up finding a HUGE deal at Staples. She got a hp computer that retails at $1,400 for only $800. This has it all – bluray player, tv tuner, all kinds of media libraries… my aunt will probably use it for Microsoft Word and Solitaire.

While shopping around for my aunt, my uncle stumbled upon a laptop he liked. He bought an Acer mini-laptop with a 8.9 inch screen. It has everything a regular laptop would have, except for a CD/DVD drive.

That leaves us with my aunt’s old laptop that I’ll be upgrading in the next few weeks. I also plan on building my own computer to hold all my new website files.

Lots on my plate… I’m just happy to have my Mac working again.