For anyone that doesn’t know (which is probably everyone [in the entire world!]) I’ve been getting tonnes of registrations to the site from names/emails like JamIroloWrona/insimigrw@gawab.com and endummimemn/swaxicice@gawab.com. Obviously these are fakes, hopefully by bots, and should be prevented now since I’m using reCAPTCHA on the registration form.

And that’s about all I have to say. I know I don’t post on here very much ever, but ah well I don’t think anyone reads this stuff very much ever.

Tweaked the site’s theme to take advantage of tags (notice the tag cloud in the side bar) and did a couple other slight modifications. Author pages have been revamped, “pages” can now also be commented on (didn’t even realize this was possible at first), and the search results and other archival results also got a minor tweaking (you probably won’t even notice).

Anyway, that’s all for now.

So I finally got my grubby mitts on a copy of Super Smash Brothers: Brawl. Only had to wait almost 3 weeks from release date, sheesh. Oh well, I’ve been working so much lately I wouldn’t have been able to play it much anyway. Looks like I might actually get some time off for a bit though (fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc). For now, though, I think I’ll be going because it’s 06:46 hrs and I should probably get to sleep.

Quick note though, I did a bunch of little updates to the site, I believe it’s all XHTML 1.0 compatible (Edit: Scratch that, apparently I have a bunch of errors I wasn’t expecting. I guess I’m not allowed to nest <script> tags within <ul>’s. That sucks…), not that I’m really concerned about it, but it’s probably a good idea. I also added some nifty little bells and whistles here and there, like to the login dialog, and the sidebar menu. That’s all for now though, time to go.

So for those of you (all three) that pay attention here, you might notice there are suddenly a whole lot of posts from before 2007. No time travel involved here, I just imported a bunch of posts from my old site’s News/Blog list. This isn’t for any of you necessarily (though feel free to read them of course), more for myself (and maybe Ginnsu).

Just a heads up - almost none of the links in any of those posts will work, and the ones that do could be … bad. At the time of shutdown I had like 6 or 7 different people able to write posts to the old site (I was going for the equation of variety = quality) so the content type will differ from post to post (along with grammar and spelling), and some of those guys were just plain weird. :P You’ve been warned.

So yeah, I haven’t posted here in a while have I? I guess I should do something about that…

…

This is me doing something about that.

Anyway, yeah, I’m not dead, and the blog isn’t dead either, just comatose (the blog, not me, although when I’m asleep…). Call it hibernation for winter if that makes you feel better, although I’m really quite sure that what I say or do on my own personal blog really doesn’t have much bearing on how any of you (total of maybe 3 people) feel, and if it does – SEEK HELP. Immediately.

Anyway (I start a lot of sentences with “anyway”, did you notice that?) the reason that the blog has been so dead quiet is because I’ve been distracted (just like the title says) playing games (I believe the title mentions this as well). I bought Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii (wheeeee!) and it’s quite a bit of fun. I’m up at like 33 stars and I’ve been enjoying most of it. Also, I’ve been up at my friend’s place playing Assassin’s Creed (cus he gots da PS3, not me) like a MADMAN. I have to totally give him props, or cred, or whatever the cool kids are saying these days, because he’s totally let me monopolize his system for the last three days - enjoying the hell out of HIS game, which he hasn’t beaten, or barely even played – while he sits there watching or playing some DS game that he’s not as engrossed in as I am with Creed (which is what I’m calling it from now on because it’s shorter, although by adding this sentence to explain that fact I’ve kind of defeated the purpose). I’m currently up on the 7th assassination IIRC which means, to the best of my assumptive (yes that’s actually a word) knowledge, that I’m 2/3 of the way through the game, as it appears from the menus and such that there are a total of 9 assassinations, perhaps 10. I’ve not been collecting all the flags, as I’m dreadful at noticing them – I can’t count how many times I’ve been running down the street (in the game, I don’t run IRL [read: lazy]) and gone whizzing right past a flag just as Ed would look up from his game and go, “Flag.”
To which I’d stop my headlong rush through the crowd and say, “What? No way.. where?”
Then I’d meander back through the path I’d come and find the flag, sitting just barely off to the side, mocking me for not having noticed it – hell for not having picked it up by accident, I’ve done that a few times as well – when I ran past it not 10 seconds ago. At this point I’ll vent my frustration a little by killing some random guard, which may or may not set off all the surrounding guards, at which point I’ll either run away like a leetle monkey (?), or stick around and proceed to decimate my foes with my ability to counter every attack that comes my way – or get hit in the nuts when I try to grab (I need an adult!).

Shit, gotta wrap this up… uh… bye?

Me? I’ve been working a bunch, although no more than usual I suppose. I’m also going to buy a house… I think. It’s a little up in the air right now, but I was approved for a mortgage (foolish bank!) and I think I can even afford it (yay!). It’ll be easier with a roommate/renter though, so I might have a friend move in, then I can eat real food. Instead of just plain white rice I’ll be able to eat rice and beans! Healthy for the win.

On a website note… I really don’t know. I don’t have a freaking clue. The speeds were being terrible again, so I began to take up Globat on their whole, “switch servers” offer, and then they told me I would have to be responsible for all the backup and restore, etc, so I just kinda put it off and put it off… although I did do a file backup last night, so now all I need to do is backup the DB and I should be good to go. But now I look at my time log (I started logging the loadtimes of the site.. I think I mentioned that before) and it looks like I haven’t had a really slow load for about a week (70 and 30 second load times on Sep 6th), so now I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think I’m going to give it another little while and see if this speed up is a permanent thing before I ask them to move me.

Also, I just got this email, from one David W. Lloyd. Ever heard of him? He also goes by the pseudonym djpretzel. Now have you heard of him? … Yeah didn’t think so. Well he runs this site called OverClocked ReMix. It’s a site devoted to video game music (yeah that’s right, like the Super Mario Brothers’ theme) or, should I say, remixes of video game music. I used to be a big member of the site actually, have my own song on there, used to help judge submissions to the site, but I kinda stopped visiting there so much when I started working… Anyway, like I said, I got this email, and it’s basically Dave begging me personally (Ha!) to pimp out this new album that the site put out, that nobody seems to like or care about so far. I guess it’s all music from some game called Final Fantasy VII (however you pronounce that, is it “Vee”? “Vie”?). Never heard of it myself, but I’m told it was a big flop and nobody really liked it. Especially the music, so I don’t know why they’d go to all the trouble of having like 42 different artists working to make 45 separate tracks for some crappy game that came out like 10 years ago (the last few sentences are an example of sarcasm btw). But anyway, I figure I owe the guy or something since I used tonnes of his bandwidth over the years, and generally made a spectacle of myself in the chat room (then suddenly disappeared into the night), so here it is:

Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream

So, I’ve been checking the site over the last few days, and it seems that my loading times have shot up, er, down? … Whatever, it’s faster than it used to be, so I guess the guys over at Globat did something. The admin interface still loads a little slow, but then I think that might just be WordPress being… WordPress, heh. With the site running at a bearable speed now, I might actually do some more posting (yays?). Anyway, I think I’m gonna stick it out with Globat for a while, unless things go downhill again. I did a little bit of looking into other hosts, but didn’t find anything that leaped out at me.

So what’s been going on with me lately? I know all of the 2 people that check this site are just dying to know. I’ve fairly recently come into a full time position at work. The guy that had the full time position in town moved away, and since I was the next one on the seniority list (and also the most deserving, if I do say so myself) it was offered to me, and I took it. I now have guaranteed hours, 40 a week. I’m stuck in this one position though, they won’t allow me out of this site because “the patrol guard is the patrol guard, nothing else” and while I’m not totally happy knowing that I’m stuck in the one place FOREVARZ~!, at least I don’t have to worry about 2 weeks going by with NO work, or calls at 3am, asking me to drive out of town to sit on a patient… Though I still get calls at 3am telling me to go check out why the alarm at such and such a place is going off… So I’m happy, but still whiny. Although what else is new, eh?

Outside of work… I bought a car! Oh right.. old news. But I never did elaborate on that, did I? Even after I said I would. Well here goes. It has 4 doors. Ha!

I’m going to wrap this up now because Globat just took a big crap. Tried to check the blog for something and ended up with 30+ second load times? Talk about a big steamy pile of bullshit. Maybe I’ll keep looking after all. But I wanted to mention that I’ve recently joined that giant insanity fest called Facebook. I couldn’t believe how many people are on that thing, and I don’t mean schmucks that I don’t know, I mean people that I went to school with. As I said to one guy on there, “I’m seeing people I forgot existed.”

Anyway, gonna go now, hopefully I’ll actually be able to publish this post without Globat having an aneurysm (just checked the site again, 74 second load time!?! Holy Jesus H. Christ on a stick Batman). Guh-bye.

So I’m gonna try letting the blog loose again.  I don’t know how well it’s going to work, but I have to give it a try just so I can see how well it’s (not) working.

I’ve been back and forth with Globat’s tech support, (I think I had like 3 support tickets going or something…) and at first they weren’t even acknowledging that there was any problem. I kept getting replies that were basically, “It’s working fine, not our fault.” To be fair, they weren’t actually that rude, but that was the impression I got from them. But now they at least seem to be willing to admit that there might be a problem. I think the only reason I’m getting any attention though is because I replied to one of their automated, “Early Renewal GloCentive” emails with the following:

I don’t suppose that if I reply to this address anyone will even see this,
but just in case, I’d like to say that if things don’t improve with my site
soon I don’t think I’ll ever be renewing my account.

Although it still took them 5 days to give me a human response, and at first they were just like, “What’s wrong?” They even said that if I replied to that email, “it will go directly to our tier 2 techs to which I’m escalating this ticket to.” The first thing I thought when I read that was, “great, now I get to re-explain the problem, point out the support ticket I already have going, etc” but before I got around to replying to that email, I received a second email (with the new support ticket number, so I knew it wasn’t just a reply to the old ticket) that actually said their “SAs” (system administrators I guess?) are working on the slowness issues. So far nothing seems to have changed, the only thing that seemed to have had any effect whatsoever was when I moved all the WordPress SQL tables to their own DB, and CPG’s as well. That seemed to provide a bit of a speed boost, but that was something I did myself a while ago, not anything that’s happened recently.

I’m hoping that they weren’t just trying to butter me up with the whole “working on the slowness” talk, and that they actually ARE working on it. If I don’t see some results soon though, they told me to talk to them again and they’ll actually transfer me to another server, although unless they stop overloading their servers that’s just going to be another delaying action. Eventually the new server will fill up and the whole mess will repeat itself. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now though. But I’m certainly not going to keep my eyes closed to other web hosts.

So here we are again with another quick post. It’s currently 8:30am (jeeze, I just hit Alt+Tab to try and look at my clock behind my laptop) and I’m still awake from last nigh-er, yesterday I guess. Whatever.

I guess the site has been down the last couple days, I was just about to email Globat (my webhost) and ask them WTF was going on, but now it’s back. Obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this. It seems to be running slower than usual though, so I think I might still give them a shout.

I’ve been working a lot lately, 12 hour shifts, which I’m not totally used to, and it’s been leaving me rather exhausted (for some strange reason, I mean it’s not like I’m doing anything physically demanding), so I’ve been spending a lot of time sleeping and/or just laying in bed. Today my plan was to get up at 2pm, but I wasn’t able to sleep and now, like I said, it’s 8:30 so I’ll probably end up sleeping til like 4-5pm.

My last post said that in my next post I was going to provide more detail on the car I bought, so here it is: It’s gray. That’s about all I’m going to say for now (not like anyone really cares anyway, I’m sure) but next post, hopefully I’ll have something better to say, and more time to say it. Not that this hasn’t been long enough anyway, but it’s kind of stream of consciousness, so I haven’t had to think ahead about what I’m typing.

I also have to work again tonight from 20:00-04:00, then again tomorrow, then I’ll be at the port and I’m not sure what my shift will be like exactly, but it should be about 8 hours as well. Probably like 20:30-04:30.

Well that’s about it for this update.

Haven’t posted in a while, eh? Well get used to it. That’s kind of my routine. :P

I was quite busy with work for a while there. First, guarding patients and whatnot (talked about in my last post), I was doing shifts from 12 noon to midnight there, then I went straight out to the port for several shifts, which were 8pm to 4am (which I don’t mind, ‘cus I like the port, I can actually work on the computer there), then a day off, then back into the hospital for a patient from 8pm to 4am, and then things got a little fucked up.

I was supposed to go back to the hospital, for the same patient, at 8pm, so at 7:00pm I started getting ready and, on a whim, decided to call my supervisor to ask him about something (completely unrelated to the patient). Then I get informed that he needs me to do a 12 hour shift at 4am (when I would’ve been finishing the shift I was expecting to do, and going home to bed) because there’s been an outbreak of some kind of flu at the hospital. They want security to keep visitors out to try and contain the virus as best as possible. So, now, instead of doing my usual routine, where I get to sleep by 4am, I have to try and get as much sleep as possible, because eight hours later I’m going to need to stay up for 12 hours. And before anybody says anything, I’m not knocking my supervisor, he’s a good guy, so I’m sure if he had someone else he’d send them in for the shift, but I was pretty much the only person available.

So, I get some sleep, though not nearly enough, get in there at 4am, get informed by the guy I’m relieving that the virus is suspected to be a Norwalk-type virus, not necessarily deadly or anything, but really nasty. I’m told to basically refrain from touching things as much as possible or, if I do, to wash my hands after. This didn’t work really well seeing as the nearest washroom was like 50 feet away, and I have to sit in front of the door all day, so I was just using the alcoholic cleanser stuff that they have posted all over the place (although I found out later that the stuff doesn’t really help very much). The next day the shift changed, instead of having security on the door 24 hours, they switched to an 8am to 11pm schedule, which we split into a 7 and an 8 hour shift. So that day I worked the 8am to 3pm shift (another time change for me). Then that night at 12:30, just after midnight (so technically the next day) I was back at the port, for 12 hour shifts.

12:30am (or 00:30 hours), to 12:30pm, basically midnight to lunch. Very screwey, had my internal clock all messed up, but it was really the only way we could make things work, we’re a little *ahem* short staffed at the moment. Ah well, it didn’t last, only 3 days, and now I’ve got some time off. Though not necessarily because they don’t need me, but because as near as I can tell I’ve actually got that stupid bug that was going around the hospital and now I’m not allowed in there until 48 hours after the last time I exhibit symptoms (stomache pain, diarrhea and/or vomiting) of which I’ve only experienced two (yay no pukies!) and currently only experiencing one (… not the stomach pain). I almost enjoy it though, I put up with a bit of the “Hershey Squirts” as my friend would put it, and I get some time off work. If it goes on too long though it could be a problem, both financially and medically.

On a cleaner, less yucky topic, in my off hours I’ve been busy with the other family computer, or perhaps more appropriately the original family computer. It’s been set up in the livingroom for the past week or two but it still had a tonne of crap on it that we’d already migrated to the new computer and/or didn’t want anymore. A few days ago I finally got around to reformatting and reinstalling the OS on it and it’s now nice and clean, with only what Dad wants on there, which currently is Diablo II. It’s going to be interesting watching him get into this game, as it’s pretty well the first real computer game he’s played. It’s going to take him some getting used to.

On the topic of this site, while working the port shifts I have lots of time between patrols and visitors and whatnot to actually do stuff, so I’ve been doing some work on the whole wallpaper thing. If you keep an eye out for a “Wallpapers” link in the right sidebar, under the Home link (it’s not there yet), I should soon get a sort of beta version of the page working… Hopefully. I’ve also got a new page up there already that just acts as a full listing of all the registered users, and all the posts on this blog, and whatever else that ends up on the blog. Maybe the links…

Anyway, that’s enough for now, I’ve been working on this post for like 3 days off and on already, I think it’s about time I hit that Publish button.