The Gamble Family (.Net)

This past weekend, my wife and I took a trip to Robbinsville, NC to celebrate her “18th” birthday. We spent the weekend in our favorite bed and breakfast, the Blue Waters Mountain Lodge. The lodge is nestled in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and it sits directly across the road from Lake Santeetlah, which is a 3,500 acre man-made fresh water lake.

We left home around 9 AM on Friday morning on our way to breakfast at the Cracker Barrel in Lebanon, TN. After a satisfying feast of biscuits and gravy, country ham, bacon, grits, and eggs, we started east towards North Carolina. The forecast for the day was mid-70s and sunny.

When we arrived at Tellico Plains (the start of the Cherohala Skyway), we dropped the top on the BMW so that we could experience all that nature had to offer as we drove the 45 miles from Tellico Plains to Robbinsville on the mile-high skyway. Most of the trees had emptied themselves of their autumn color, but there was still a nice amount of fall foliage to catch our eye. The drive across the Cherohala with the top down was totally enjoyable.

We stopped along the way to visit Bald River Falls, which are located 6 miles off of the Skyway, down a little mountain road. The road runs beside a stream, and it is very tranquil as you drive back to the falls along the twisty road with mountains on both sides.

Bald River Falls

We arrived at Blue Waters around 4:30, which gave us a couple of hours to unpack and relax on the front porch before dinner. After dinner, Cheryl and I went down to the lakeshore, built a fire, and watched the starts twinkle in the clear sky overhead. When you are out away from city lights, you can see so many more stars then you do in town. On this night, the sky was filled from horizon to horizon with what seemed like millions of sparkling jewels. The quiet stillness and peace of sitting under God’s expanse in total darkness and silence is simply to enormous to put into words.

Sunset on Lake Santeetlah

On Saturday, Cheryl and I took a ride on the Smoky Mountain Railroad. The train took us from Bryson City, NC into the Nantahala Gorge. The trip lasted about four and a half hours. The weather was chilly with drizzling rain, but the ride was still very enjoyable. It gets very difficult to stay awake as the cars gently rock from side to side and the wheels “clickity clack” as you roll along.

Smoky Mountain Railroad

When we returned to Blue Waters, we got all gussied up and had a totally mind-blowing dinner at the Snowbird Mountain Lodge. After dinner, we returned to Blue Waters and spent the remainder of the evening enjoying a cozy fire in front of the huge stone fireplace.

On our trip home Sunday, I decided that it was time for Cheryl to tackle the 318 curves in 11 miles that make up the famous “Tail of the Dragon”. If you search this site, you can find out more information and photos of what I’m referring to. Anyway, we left Blue Waters and headed north on US 129 towards the Dragon. As we passed Tapoco Lodge, I reminded Cheryl that “this is where it starts”. For the next 15 or so miles, I sat back and watched as Cheryl pushed the BMW through the tight swithback curves that the Dragon is known for. Several times along the way I could feel the back end start to ease out slightly as we went from left turn, to right turn, back to left turn. I think I even caught a smile on her face every now and then as I watched her trying to tame the Dragon.

It was a great weekend for us to get away. We got to spend some time alone, with no TV, no cell phones, no computers - just us, together, in one of the most beautiful places that we have ever found.

First of all, I hope my beautiful blonde wife doesn’t read this, because if she does, I’ll be sleeping on the back porch for days.

January: Took new scarf back to store because it was too tight.

February: Fired from pharmacy job for failing to print labels. Helllloooo!!! Those bottles won’t fit in the typewriter!!!

March: Got really excited. Finished jigsaw puzzle in 6 months; box said “2-4 years!”

April: Trapped on escalator for hours - power went out!!!

May: Tried to make Kool-Aid. Wrong instructions. 8 cups of water won’t fit into those little packets!!!

June: Tried to go water skiing. Couldn’t find a lake with a slope.

July: Lost breast stroke swimming competition. Learned later, that the other swimmers cheated; They used their arms!!!

August: Got locked out of my car in rainstorm. Car was swamped because the soft-top was open.

September: The capital of California is “C”, isn’t it???

October: I hate M&M’s. They are so hard to peel.

November: Baked turkey for 4 1/2 days. Instructions said “1 hour per pound” and I weigh 108!!!

December: Couldn’t call 911. “Duh”. There’s no “eleven” button on the stupid phone!!!

What a year!

Now that the dust has settled from my recent move to Parcom as my web hosting provider, I have upgraded my two “non-blog” sites to Microsoft .Net technology. My Code Library and Bike Links sites previously used traditional ASP scripting, but I have now converted them to ASP.Net. The benefit to you, my users, is that the pages are now noticably more performant.

I have been using NPSIS as my hosting provider for several years. Generally, the relationship with NPSIS has been favorable. They provided basic web hosting functionality at an affordable price, with reasonable reliability. There were some features (such as aggressive email spam detection) that I would have liked to have had, but I didn’t let that bug me.

My satisfaction with NPSIS began to faulter in August when the webserver that my sites were hosted on had a hardware failure. It took several days for service to be restored. Even when service was restored, it took several more days for all addtional components to be reinstalled. Addtionally, in the past NPSIS had been pretty good about about responding to emails for support requests (usually within the same business day), but recently, I have had to send mutliple emails to them to get any support from them. Attempts to contact them by phone resulted in unanswered calls. These issues prompted me to begin the search for a new web hosting provider.

After reading reviews of various hosting providers, I stumbled across Parcom.net. Further investigation revealed nothing but positive comments about their service. The list of components, add-on applications, features, and services offered by Parcom convinced me to give them a try.

Initial setup of my website was effortless. Within a minute of clicking the “Sign me up” button, I received emails welcoming me to their service and instructions on how to access the control panel to configure my FTP, Email, and Web sites. Once I accessed their control panel, configuration was a breeze. I FTP’d my content from NPSIS to Parcom, and literally within 30 minutes of signing up on their service, my websites were up and running. Since switching to Parcom, I have added their Anti-Spam Anti-Virus service to my email account. Doing this has reduced my daily SPAM emails from over 50 a day to under 5 a day. And, if all of this wasn’t enough, the ability to conduct a live online chat with sales and support personnel have been the icing on the cake. The performance of my websites on Parcom is significantly above what I experienced at NPSIS.

Here’s a short list of their offerings. It is not complete, but only a list of the items that I found to be significant:

• Microsoft ASP.Net 1.1 and 2.0
• Huge Disk Space
• Huge Bandwidth
• Database support for MS Access, MySQL, and SQL 2005
• PHP
• Very aggressive Anti-SPAM email service
• Live chat for support
• Video tutorials for account setup and configuration
• Huge list of 3rd party components and applications

If you are in the market for a web hosting service, I highly recommend Parcom.net. And, oh by the way, if you should transfer your account to them, please mention that you were referred by to them by Ted at TheGambleFamily.net. Hopefully they will give me credit for referring their fine service.