I hope everyone's 4th of July weekend was filled with lots of booze, explosives and marginally legal fun :P. I feel a strong urge to post something well, can't really think of much to post about. In lieu of the holiday, we called off the weekend raids and other than a couple of rounds of WipEout HD I didn't really do a whole lot of gaming. I did though, play with the server quite a bit so uuh, if anyone noticed, it kind of went down for about 5 minutes then rolled back to a restore point earlier that morning. Whoops. Oh, there is also a footer at the bottom of this site now if anyone cares...

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood finished up its 64th and final episode this weekend. I don't know if it is because I am fairly oblivious or if it is because I haven't been actively into anime fandom in uuh years, but I didn't notice a whole lot of buzz going around for Brotherhood, given how many people are watching it. I guess everyone got it all out during the first television series?

Anyway, FMA:B follows the manga's story line. It thankfully rushes past the overlap and splits off at around episode 16 or so. Past that point, it is a very different show than its predecessor. The early parts of FMA:B are still kind of heavy on the dumb short jokes but not to a grating degree. The manga's storyline is well paced and plotted out as expected. It is probably one of the best new anime series that i have seen in a while for whatever that is worth.

The animation, particularly the combat scenes retains its quality throughout the entire series which is notable given its length. In fact, the pacing and the story quality in general were right on track for all 64 episodes. It never at any point diverged off into a filler story or degenerate into a clip show. It's still worth seeing the first series. I think FMA:B assumes that you have seen the original show based on the amount of content that was cut from the first part of the series in order to cut down on the repetition. Awesome show, definitely recommended.

Does anyone have any good suggestions as to what we should watch next? Other than a half-assed viewing of Durarara I really haven't picked up any new anime series in several seasons. It's about that time of the year where the new summer season series start to come out anyways so I might just do the, "download the first and second episode of anything interesting" bit again and see how that goes.

Anime Expo was this weekend. You know, for as long as I have lived in Southern California I have never bothered attending that convention. I would say maybe next year, but we are tentatively planning on attending PAX next year (I formally announced it on the internet so it will happen right?) so I don't know how my vacation and the con schedule will be.

To the two people who signed up for Linode via my referral code: You both rock.

Yay finally! This site should be up in full working order, minus a few modules that I need to reinstall and reconfigure (the weblinks module for the blogroll stuff and some admin features that no one other than myself will care about). I've hopped from one shared provider to the next over the course of several years and have never been really very happy with any of them.

Being too lazy to just setup and run a virtual server, I just tolerated it. But lately, between this site, the guild site, guild forums and whatever else I play with on this account, I've outgrown shared hosting. So I finally purchased a VPS account over at Linode and installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Nginx (a faster/lighter alternative to Apache that supposedly is better than Lighty in that it is more stable and doesn't leak as badly), MySQL and PHP.

All is well so far. I'm not really a Linux guru, so if the site implodes: Whoops. I probably shouldn't have played around with that setting...

There, site should be in more-or-less full working order, though some images might not be functioning until I restore them. I might have forgotten to do a database backup before doing something earlier and something bad might have happened as a result...I'll re-add the blogroll, link page and whatever else is missing later. I might as well update all of the links while I'm at it; Half of the sites listed have stopped updating.

Edit: Okay ummm, I think I have outgrown my shared hosting plan between this site, the guild site, the guild forums and whatever else I have squeezed on this cheap account. My yearly contact is up in two months, thinking about migrating over to either Linode or Slicehost.

I need to find a stronger detterent for comment spam. It's starting to return...

There is a working Wowhead loot link filter for Drupal if anyone is curious about how to use the [item] bbcode tags. The old module died quite some time ago and there hasn't been a good working alternative until recently. I also finally got around to re-doing the guild homepage and migrating it from the ghetto fugly vBadvanced portal over to Drupal. Yay!

Guild business as usual. We finally have a fairly stable 25-man Ulduar run going on the weekends now. We were low on folks for the past few weeks since returning from our short pre-3.1 raid hiatus. We are though a bit short on tanks, I guess I should finally gem, enchant and upgrade the trash pieces in my tanking set for the sake of being viable for off-tanking. I have a metric fuckload of badges to burn.

So I've been really super lazy about my professions for the past oh, several months? I am 5 points shy of the skill cap on both blacksmithing and enchanting...which was somewhat alright until the epic patterns started dropping in heroic Ulduar (by our loot rules only max level crafters are eligible to roll). I have all of the mats that I need for both professions rotting on my banker. Shame on me.

Tangent: If you haven't seen the new Star Trek movie, go and see it. It is really quite good, independent of me being a huge Star Trek fan. JJ Abrams retained the spirit of the old series without the Trekkie fap. /wants to see it again.

If this post magically vanishes within the next few days, it's because the module broke or something like that. I am playing with a drupal fotonote module that allows for flickr/facebook style css-rollover image annotations. Unfortunately though, it kind of hasn't been updated in a long ass time and doesn't do 100% of what I want. But close enough.

My work area hasn't changed a whole lot since the last desk post in 2007. Overall, I am happy with my setup. It is comfortable. I will though, probably ending just buying a normal HDTV and a larger primary monitor sooner or later. The TV-card works like a charm and all, but I can't really change the channel AND play a full screen game. It's also annoying swapping between analog and digital whenever I use the PS3.