Tom’s Two Cents

www.montastic.com lets you keep an eye on up to 100 sites. It checks every 10 minutes or so and alerts you if the status of your sites changes via email. You can even monitor it via RSS or by using Yahoo widgets. But email works just fine for me. The best part about it is that it’s brain dead easy to use.

Edit: I am not as impressed with montastic now that I have used it for a while. I have received several false alarm emails when the site isn’t down. And it seems to take it a long time to figure out that the site is back up. I usually get an email the day after I fix the site telling me that everything is OK. Not so helpful, but still not bad for a free monitoring service.

I just returned from a nice family trip in Southern California. There is definitely a difference between vacations and family trips. A true vacation, as in a rest or a break, would probably not involve kids. I enjoyed reading Justin’s take on The Happiest Place On Earth. It was fun spending time in the sun with Justin and Marion and Dave and their families. We played at the beach/pool and spent a few days at the Disneyland. Legoland was fun too. This time the kids had earned their own money, although somehow it all still came out of my bank account. Anyway, enjoy the photos…
http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/sets/72157605456925458/