Real Life – Page 4 – The Kind Healer

Popping my Head Up

I had no intent of not writing a RSS-able entry in the past two months; In fact I’ve been tweaking away at the site now and then, its just not in areas that will be noticed much by sites like MystBlogs. :p

Anyway, the obligatory ‘what’s been going on since April’ post:

-> The Slug (NSLU2-Debian), he be toast again (shortly after my last post, ironically). I’m fed up with the rather convoluted way that I have to connect to it, so I’m looking at just getting the smallest entry-PC you can get (about $200 at MicroCenter) and dump Debian on it. Maybe dual-boot it with OpenSolaris. :)

-> New video card: nVidia 8800 GT from Palit. Despite the iffy reviews that came out of NewEgg, its looking good so far. Only problem now is that I no longer have any inhibitions to add mods for Oblivion…

-> Continuing the overclock: I’m up to 3.0 Ghz on the Q6600 (that’s 375×8) and stable; Rolling back the HSF to the stock one helped with that, as well as replacement exhaust fans on the case. I will update the PC page at some point, but in most respects now my system specs match Craig’s.

-> Back on SL, heavily: After two months in There, of all things a golf tourney in SL gets me involved again. I’m fiddling with sailing a bit more too, and exploring why the durn Viewers like to crash so much (I think that’s been mostly solved as of yesterday – more testing to do).

-> planning for vacation and Mysterium: I had planned to goto Boston for Mysterium before I heard about Wolfie’s death. Now I will definitely be there, perhaps trying to make a ‘boffer safe’ Riven dagger as a demo (need materials from James – perhaps while at DexCon – or visit an appropriate store). Making a sheath for this could get complicated…

-> My health: Don’t worry, good news here. :) I’ve been experimenting with something called ‘colloidal silver’ (which, according to the FDA, I’m not allowed to explain what it does – I’m NOT kidding!). Things are progressing well, and I may bring samples of the stuff as well as the generator I use to make it.

-> Blue Belt: Last and definitely not least, I earned my Blue Belt at Tiger’s (around late April). This was despite the sore wrist going into the testing period, but I just dealt with it and endured. I really should start getting pics for this…

*Reviews the above* Ya know, even if the new MO were available today, I still don’t think I could join atm. It’s just too busy in my life. We’ll see once the servers are up again.

/salute
–TSK

Sheesh (Fun /w Comment Spam)

Ya know, It was an ideal life about one – or even two – years ago, when I started this site up. I just wanted someplace to quietly rant about things, in my own way, and to otherwise get my mind off work.

To that end, I wanted a way to prevent any major monitoring and/or admin work with the comment system. [I don’t believe in removing comments altogether, but I’ve thought about it multiple times!] Various methods were in place over time, but two are still in place for about a year now – Bad Behavior and (currently) Akismet (the latter *only* because I happen to have a WP account from the original LL weblog requiring a login – that got me a free API key in the deal).

Up until this week, I only had 30 comments tracked by Akismet as spam – not bad for a semi-known site. But in the past week, thanks to the prior post (and the mentioning of two little words) I’ve been inundated with another 18 comment spams over three days. This is impressive only because this is *after* Bad Behavior is preventing bots from even reaching here in the first place! And checking past articles related to Akismet, it appears to be due to their lagging behind (and in some cases, its also placing valid posts into its moderation queue).

So, I’m looking pretty hard at another service – Defensio – which, amusingly, Akismet’s own weblog introduced with a smile and a wave just this past winter. I’m also in the process of enabling OpenID and related referrals on my site, so that I can post to other sites without any major issues (Gwyneth’s site is a good example, actually). For WP that’s actually relatively simple – a couple of plugins – and off to the races. Will post on that later.

/salute
–TSK

Heading to the Modern (WebLog) World / Migration Guide

Just spent the last two hours doing many upgrades on the main site:

-> WordPress 2.3.x (I’d give 2.5 a whirl but Fantastico is not allowing that yet). Removing the two offending lines per the upgrade note fixed the issue of my earlier attempt.

-> Upgrade and/or removal of a bunch of the existing plugins/widgets (the most notable of which were Bad Behavior and Akismet).

-> Upgrade the theme (blog.txt) from 1.1 to 4.01. Again, latest can’t be grabbed due to WP 2.5 incompatibilities (though the idea of having gravitar support irks me – as the theme selection suggests, I prefer simple). One plus is that this version of the theme now can be done in three-column format, which I’m taking advantage of; With a few other tweaks, it now nicely fits the entire width of my old 19″ LCD with no bottom scrollbar (and still readable!).

I suppose the T_S_Journal should have the same treatment done, but I’m still debating its takedown. A peek at the UruBlogs page (my first look in about five months), shows that it has focused back to ‘external’ content *salutes to Whilyam and Tweek* and that is swaying me back to maintaining it again. I’m also an immediate fan of Tweek’s ‘markup’ for KI images and will be using that if needed.

—–

Oh, side note: I’m finally planning out the ‘guide’ for SL that I mentioned in the MOUL forum, and that some folks had approved on. The big thing that I wanted to have was something similar to Wikipedia’s NPOV (or as close to it as possible), so I’m crafting a notecard to drop on certain residents asking if its OK to include their weblog or other links on my document. This will probably include a couple established sites that are critical of the ‘Labs and have reasonable arguments.

Also – at some point – I hope to include There.com and the MMOs that most have interests in – but either with external help or lots of personal free time. I will track down a new plugin for external contact in a little bit (probably within the hour of this post) so that anyone curious can ask directly.

–TSK

Snow? What Snow? :P

It’s been snowing pretty good tonight, probably the worst I’ve seen this winter (hopefully making it the last one too). Current reports are saying that it’s not going to end until 1 AM Sat (EST), which will include a layer of ice too (argh!).

But the main reason I’m posting, is because of the rather novel way one of the apartment porters is clearing the light, fluffy snow: A high-powered leafblower. :) Works amazingly well too.

The only problem with that is he’s right under my window, keeping me awake. Oh well, at least its Friday.

/salute
–TSK

Recap of 2007 / What Kept Me From MOUL Recently

Various discussions on the MystOnline forum has prompted a good point from SuperGram, which I wanted to address more publicly here, regarding my own absence the past several months (and why I’ll be scarce for a couple more). It’s going to end up being a recap of my activities for 2007, after the last St Pats Parade (which was around when the DST Hell ended and the next round of work stuff began).

So, in no major order, what was happening with me in ’07:

The DST Hell: Already mentioned in past posts for the year, it was no small feat in making sure that 1200+ hosts across two continents were ready for the DST changes – in eight weeks. ‘Nuff Said.

Travian Hell/Bitterness: My one major tactical mistake of the year (long-term) was getting involved with the browser MMO Travian. Short-term, it was fun, and really cool – I got to interact with a bunch of really nice folks and I hope, one day, to meet some of them RL. But this reminded me of my old personal promise, which was never to get involved in a combat-oriented MMO again (Diablo II was the last one – if you could count it as such – and 9/11 ended that).

As Travian approached its endgame (as they play instances in 10-12 month ’rounds’), involvement increased dramatically. It ended up beginning to affect my life enough that my boss noticed, and asked me to cut back on whatever I was doing; I did one better and quit, after realizing that I got caught into ‘addiction’ mode again, which is easy for me to do in this sub-genre. This realization of course left me bitter about both that game specifically (for additional reasons I won’t go into) and computer gaming in general.

I’m currently on a a forced detox from online environments to get me out of that state of mind (really, you don’t want me in-cavern just now); I should (hopefully) re-appear with regularity sometime next month. The fact that I’m following and posting on Uru/MOUL forums again is a good sign that I’m ready to re-dedicate some time to this.

Work & RegNMS Hell: I’ve posted before about RegNMS too; Though as an individual wanting the markets to do well, I’m happy about this change, as someone having to deal with its infrastructure changes I’m not at all pleased about it (mostly because that every growth calculation I ever used in the past 7-10 years got tossed out the window in the course of ONE MONTH).

Work & Moving Datacenters: In mid-Dec, we had the pleasure of ending a 16-month datacenter move and shutdown project. The fact that every server that I was given to move did so without major incident was an extra plus for me, but costed me my sanity for awhile (dropping Travian, above, helped with that tremendously). The main upside of the whole thing is that I have a desk again (after 6 years on 3rd shift – nearly half my time with the company – this is a big thing to me). The long-term downside is that I have to commute again, but with a fair amount of Uru/MOUL work being done through forum and other outside stuff, it should not affect things going forward.

Personal Health: 2007 was the year that I really started dabbling with trying to get something akin to ‘in shape’ again. I’m not looking to lose any major weight (I like being 180 lbs, as I didn’t feel drunk for a week after donating blood – like what happened when I was 140 lbs). Instead, I am more interested in getting back the strength and stamina that I had back when I started work – preferably at my current weight.

To that end, I’ve devoted more of my time dabbling with various types of exercise; Right now I’m having fun with a place called Tiger Shulman’s (despite their website being my initials getting me annoyed), and doing their routines instead of traditional exercise (which I did first half of the year) has more forcefully sparked other areas of my health to be looked at. I had my first physical in nearly two decades, just a couple months ago; Ended up that I’m very short on D3 (no surprise since I get very little real light) and the doctor has wholeheartedly endorsed what I’m doing now. I’m also working again on dealing with my acne, which is just plain annoying.

My Mother’s Health: Not the least by any stretch, but as I have financial responsibilities to my mother (who has no health insurance atm – she’ll hopefully have MediCare next year) that has taken some of my time last year – and will continue to do so for now. The distance between here and her house is problematic at times (read: traffic getting worse), which is making me re-think when I visit.

—–

These are the primary factors that I’ve been away, and will determine how much time I’ll be on in the future. I do intend to re-allocate time for MOUL again, that’s a given; It’s just the amount of that time actually in-cavern will likely be smaller.

/salute
–TSK