…For sitting around totally wasting time! No, not for fighting. What? You were expecting me to say “fighting?” My, aren’t you strange.
A little while ago, Apple bought me an early Valentine’s Day / birthday present: the latest album from J-pop group Round Table, featuring the vocal talents of Nino. Entitled “April,” the album contains “12 cute tracks” of cheery, happy music that really defies being shunted into any one particular genre. This is the same group that recorded the ultra-catchy main title theme for Chobits, and that song is represented both in its original form and in a “New Step Mix” that’s really cool. I hear that I’ll be getting some more musical enjoyment, this time from Thailand, before the month is over, so I’m looking forward to that. Thanks Apple!
As I write this, my primary server is town. I call it “primary” because it hosts my…uh, former web domain, as well as my email accounts. It’s been down for an hour and twenty minutes, ostensibly due to a failed network card. How it could take a data center that long to switch out a network card boggles my mind, so maybe it’s something more than that. Of course, this affects my Pooch’s website and email too. If you’re reading this, Pooch, hopefully these guys will get their shizz straightened out pretty soon.
I watched some of the third season of Red Dwarf during dinner tonight. The entire season as a whole should be entitled “Red Dwarf 3: Suddenly, a Budget!” Because after two seasons of cardboard sets, incredibly bad video effects (“what effects?” mostly sums them up) and a wardrobe consisting of the same clothes every episode, all of a sudden it feels like a different show. Complete spaceship sets, location shooting, rudimentary CGI…it’s pretty good stuff. And of course the biting humor is still there, although at times it seems like it is trying to be a bit more sophisticated than before. The downside: The changes were so sweeping, and absolutely none of it explained on camera, that it feels like there should have been a whole ton of stuff that came before that none of us saw. Almost like you got the wrong disc and it’s really season twelve or something. Pretty cool seeing a show evolve like that, as the BBC realized how popular it was and heaped money upon it.
I put Freelancer back on my computer for some reason. I remember being enamored with that game in 2002 or whenever it was, and felt like a little space combat action, so back onto the hard drive it went. The first thing the game said when I ran it was, “We can’t figure out what your video card is!” Absurdly, it seems that because my Radeon 9800 Pro did not yet exist when it was coded, the game has to complain that it may not run at all because it has no idea what my video hardware is. First time I’ve seen something like that since the early nineties; usually modern software is future-friendly. No matter, though—the game runs fine, and silky smooth at 1600×1200, no less. Something to be said for a well-written 3D engine, that’s for sure. And the game is still a load of fun, despite being pretty repetitive and nowhere near as free-form as it was touted as being. I was so into the space combat mood last night that I decided to fire up Battlestar Galactica on the Xbox again, but I didn’t have anywhere near as much fun with it. Oh well, at least the TV episode of BSG that aired later that night was suitably tasty.
This morning I found an email from my web host stating that unless I upgraded all of my blog-type software to its latest respective versions, they were going to disable my account. Now, this wasn’t a personal threat; they sent the same email to their entire customer base. But it reminded me that I had a few old copies of Movable Type languishing around on my other domain, as well as the CMS I use to maintain a certain “Developer’s Area” that shall go unnamed. So I spent about 45 minutes either upgrading or deleting stuff. That was fun. Apparently some of this stuff—Movable Type especially—is quite susceptible to various exploits and script injections, and my hosting company has been experiencing a lot of server bog because of such attacks. I wonder if that’s got anything to do with why this server has been so punk-ass slow lately.
So the other night I had this dream wherein I was back in college and I decided it would be real financially smart to move out of my apartment and into a house. Yeah, sounds great. Only problem was, when I got moved in, I realized somebody else was living there and I was going to be stuck acting as a roommate, and my bedroom was basically the closet. And then I found out the current owner was my real-life sister in law’s real-life boyfriend. And then his girlfriend showed up, and it wasn’t my sister in law, it was Brenda from Six Feet Under. OKAY, THIS IS SCREWED UP, I remember thinking, after which I woke up, thank God. I also remember that I was still talking to Apple long-distance via the Internet, and besides her, the only part of the dream that was exactly as it should be was my Trans Am. Trusty steed!
<checks mail> Hmm, my primary web sever is still offline. What the smeg is going on? Ah, just checked the host’s forum and got the update from the president of the company. Everybody’s pretty stumped; the server’s OS is not recognizing any NIC that is put into it, even though it boots up fine and there are no error messages. Right now it looks like they’re going to have to wipe the machine and restore the OS from a backup, and they’re not even sure that will solve the problem. So, no email for a while yet.
All right, I’m out of here!
