So I got out of work at 10:30 tonight. I was packing up to go off to a weekend of relaxation at about 6 pm when someone came over and said the site was blowing up. I looked, and sure enough it was. Worse was, I couldn’t connect to the server to see what the heck was going on. The ssh daemon had died. Performance got worse and worse until finally no pages were being generated. And blah blah blah.

The details aren’t germane.

But as I went through this some part of my brain was watching me go through the stages of a tech emergency: Continue reading “Work”

As you can see, we’re in a bit of a transition state just now. Moving to WordPress, the follow-on to the b2 software we had been running (listen to me with the “we” stuff as though there were more than just me here).

I think I’ve got all the data imported, though I’ve dropped all comments since 90% of them were porn spam and I don’t have the time or patience to clean it all up.

Tonight I’ll start working on look and feel…

Comments now need to be approved, so if you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, that’s why. Down the road I hope to figure a way to make comment appear immediately for friends, but have to be moderated for strangers (just to keep the spammers away).

I don’t know where this hit of gaming goodness came from. I mean, its February, not December. E3 is still a ways off. Its supposed to be a quiet time for gaming, and yet there are SO MANY great games laying around my house.

I spend a LOT of time this weekend playing Champions of Norrath on the PS2 (exclusively on the PS2). Its a fairly basic hack & slasher a la Diablo or the console versions of Baldur’s Gate. I enjoy this type of game on the PC, but I love ’em on the console. Kicked back on the couch, a bottle of Woodchuck Amber close at hand, the home theater system lending power to every slash of the sword…it’s just a wonderfully visceral experience. I played a bit online with a friend, and that worked well too, once I took my router out of the loop. Its nice to see the PS2 getting some online cooperative love.

Besides CoN, the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo was out this weekend (you can get it for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux). Good lord, what fun. I’ve always preferred Unreal to Quake, and UT was one of my favorite and longest lasting games. UT 2003 was good, but this version really breaks loose. There’s a new game mode called Onslaught that has teams having to control linked nodes in an attempt to assault the opposing base. These nodes act as ideal choke points and really keep the action pumping. And the even bigger change is the addition of vehicles, both land and air. Finally a game that makes Halo seem dated. I loved this demo so much that I already pre-ordered the Special Edition.

But wait, there’s more! I’ve also been sucked into Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the GBA (though I play it on the excellent Game Boy Player accessory for the Gamecube. This isn’t a new game, but I was just turned on to it. Yeah, its a farming sim…but its incredibly addictive.

And still NFL Street and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles await my attention. The first is a really fun arcade football game that I really enjoy. FFCC though, I’m still deciding on. Its another action-RPG but I’m not sure the single player game will hold my attention.

Anyway, even with all this gaming I found time to watch a whole bunch of A&E’s Horatio Hornblower movies. I loved the HH books, and I’m loving the movies, too. I bought all 8 at Christmas, and watched the last 5 or so this weekend. Very nicely done and highly recommended.

Thank goodness for 3 day weekends, eh? Of course, I still wasn’t ready to come back to work…. 🙂

So last night I was watching an old Nova program called Mars: Dead or Alive. It originally aired, I believe, on Jan. 5th, but my Tivo is majorly backlogged.

Anyway, it’d been a pretty crappy day at work (big surprise) and I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Then I learn, from this program, that the programmers working on the Rover AI software didn’t have it finished in time for launch. Instead, they had to finish it up while the vehicle was en route to Mars, and uploaded it via radio signal. Now, the software to handle the flight and landing was all done..this was just ‘on the ground’ stuff. But still, can you imagine the pressure? Knowing that you have to finish this project in the alloted time, and can only test (presumably) on a simulator? If you don’t get you code fixed in time, the mission ends up a failure. Sheesh!

After hearing that, I stopped feeling sorry for myself. Heh.

In other news, I’m at the 95% mark in that infernal Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time game. So close…but the farther I get, the harder it gets. I know reviews have complained the game is too easy, but I’m the first to admit my twitch gaming skills are pretty weak. This has been a real challenge for me.

As for this site, I’m looking at some new blog software that will, I hope, give me more features that I’d like to include. I actually thought about writing something from scratch…then I had a rare moment of honesty with myself and admitted I’d never finish such an undertaking…

Three and a half months since my last post here. Man, the place is dusty…again.

Consistency has never been one of my strengths, but undaunted, I’m ready to try this again.

I suppose my first project should be to get a more robust blogging package. I read other blogs and drool over the cool features. b2, as far as I can tell, isn’t being developed anymore (though in all honesty I haven’t checked lately).

There’s no point in trying to recap the last few months right now. But to bring things up to speed, I’m currently playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on the XBox. I’m intending to play Horizons on the PC, though I never seem to get around to actually logging in. I’m re-reading O’Brian’s Master and Commander after seeing the great film adaptation (and I’m enjoying it much more this time around…I guess I’m getting a bit more patient with age). I’ve been watching A&E’s Hortatio Hornblower movies (bought the collection at Christmas) and…I guess that’s about it.

Very much looking forward to Champions of Norrath on the PS2, btw…

A co-worker is…let me say “enthusiastic” about weather and she sends out a weekend weather report every Friday. Today’s held this snippet of info:

In other news, a strong geomagnetic storm is expected to hit planet Earth today, “with the potential to affect electrical grids and satellite communications,” Associated Press reports. “One of the largest sunspot clusters in years developed over the past three days and produced a coronal mass ejection, similar to a solar flare, at 3 a.m. EDT Wednesday, forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The disturbance was expected to produce a geomagnetic storm rated G3. A G5 storm is the strongest.”

“In area, [the sunspot cluster] is 10 times larger than the surface of the Earth,” BBC notes.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been saying to myself “I gotta get the blog going again. I need to write up Middlesex and Final Fantasy Tactics and Lord of the Isles and .. etc etc.” And then it feels like I’m too far behind and I’ll never catch up, so I just say “Ah, I’ll do it later.” and never get any farther.

So as of today, I’m going to just let the past float away and start back in with the here and now. Maybe I’ll find time to back fill a bit, but if not…better to get started than to not blog at all.

In gaming: I finished Brute Force on Sunday. Very entertaining game. Pretty much straight action; no cut scenes to speak of and a very thin storyline. But still fun. Also got back into EverQuest in a semi-serious way. Had a couple of evenings with a good group of friends that was quite fun, but the solo game is still a bit slow for my tastes. Plus physical ailments make long stretches of gaming on the PC painful these days. Lastly, played more EVE: The Second Genesis. That warrants its own post, I think.

In video: Watched the second disc of Saiyuki. This series continues to grow on me; I really enjoy the bold style of the artwork and the ‘camera work’ that bridges the gap between graphic novel panels and film. Sadly, disc 3 won’t be out until the end of July. Also watched a couple of Tivo’d episodes of the new The Twilight Zone series. Kindof a mixed bag so far. I’ll watch a few more before I decide whether it warrants a season pass or not. Oh, and I saw a great episode of Robot Wars, my current guilty pleasure.

So, Memorial Day Weekend ended up being 3 days of pouring rain. Hooya!

Well, on the bright side I had no big plans anyway, and it did give me the chance for some hardcore media viewing. Over the course of the weekend I watched A Beautiful Mind, Donnie Darko, Metropolis (an anime film, not the old classic), The Fellowship of the Ring (extended version, natch) and the anime tv series Dual: Parallel World Adventure. Whew! No wonder my eyes are tired.

In and around that, I went through a compressed MMO cycle with Planetside. I have several phases I go through whenever I get into an MMO. First I obsess about it. During this phase I can think of nothing else and I orient my life around maximum playing time. Once that intial intensity burns out, I go into my mainstream phase where I just play and enjoy the game like a normal person. Lastly, I go into disgruntled phase where I’m no longer truly enjoying the game but I still play out of habit or out of the hope that I’ll have one more grand adventure.

Generally this cycle takes 3-6 months for me to work through. With Planetside it took about a week, most of it compressed into this past rainy weekend. I’m truly hoping that it was just a glitch in the system and that the next game will last me 3-6 months again.

And its still gloomy and rainy. Everything is starting to stink of mildew and damp. And the more it rains, the more I want to go home and pull the covers over my head for a week. Except its too warm for that, isn’t it? Heh. And I have “The Most Boring Conference of All Time” to attend this week (OSCOM: Open Source Content Management). Yippee!

Another weekend on the road coming up. Bad, bad timing…I should be spending this weekend combing the ‘net reading E3 coverage. Oh well, what’s done is done. At least next weekend is a 3-dayer!