LOOK EVERYONE, all of about two of you wonderful readers. I finally updated the software and theme on this site. When was the last time I bothered changing the theme or modifying it in any significant way? 4 years ago?
Site Stuff
Sweet! I had missed this bit of news somehow.
Celebrating our success includes you, our customer. In honor of our birthday we are increasing disk space on all plans by +25%. This is available now to both new and existing Linodes.
I’ve been hosted on handful of services and so far, Linode is the only one that I have been almost 100% satisfied with in terms of both product delivered and support received. Though to be fair, I think my needs had outgrown a shared hosting environment when I had switched over. But still, no retarded billing issues, no outages other than one or two issues with the datacenter isn’t too shabby. Keep up the excellent work! Also, I have more disk space on this account than I know what to do with at the moment. Suggestions?
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.
One of these days I should do a follow-up response to the ever so popular WoW vs FFXI post from 4+ years ago since folks still seem to respond to it o_O. I’ve been pleased with how WoW has noticeably evolved as a game over the past 5 years. I’m curious if FFXI players feel the same way about their game or if it has stagnated, especially in lieu of the FFIV MMO announcement.
It’s hard to write responses to responses to topics like that because most people, myself included are naturally biased towards the game that they play. Not too many people do high end content across multiple games simultaneously. I can’t imagine how much time that would take, it’s hard enough as it is squeezing WoW time in. Anyway, the main topic of this post:
I swapped web hosts around two months ago. I was previously hosted with Hostican on their basic shared hosting plan and am now on a Linode VPS server. In a nutshell: Shared hosting means that there is a web server with many folders on it. Each user is assigned one of these folders.
Shared hosting is great for small sites: It’s cheap, easy to use, and (usually) fully supported. But while most shared hosting solutions offer near unlimited bandwidth and disk space, the CPU quota per account is usually very low. Shared hosting is also very inflexible in terms of server configuration if you wanted to say…use something other than Apache or install server toys for the hell of it.
Linode offers Xen powered VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server). This means that there is a big machine divided into many smaller pieces. Each of these pieces is essentially a separate server with its own IP, CPU allotment, RAM, disk space and operating system. It bridges the gap between shared hosting and a dedicated server (way too expensive).
I’m on a month-by-month payment schedule for my Linode because I wanted to try it out before purchasing a longer commitment. Since I’m pretty happy at the moment, I think I will just go ahead and pay for a whole year since it’s cheaper. Anyway, I’m very happy. The server was fairly easy to setup and is fairly easy to maintain…I don’t really have to do a whole lot to it other than pretty basic maintenance and stuff like that.
Obligatory self promotion: I have a referral code if anyone by chance is interested in signing up. I would highly recommend using them as a VPS host if you have Linux knowledge or are interested in investing time to learn.
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 deterrent 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.
Games/etc from left to right: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition, Hal Leonard Guitar Method, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Into a Dark Realm by Raymond E. Feist, Wrath of a Mad God by Raymond E, Feist, Good Omens by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman, The Sims 2: Apartment Life, Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 2, 3 & 4, Grand Theft Auto IV & Resistance: Fall of Man.
The white drawer is fairly new; It was $40 at Ikea or something. I took up playing the guitar early this year, so here is my setup. Fun fact: Because of the way I like to sit (I’m right handed and lean to the right) and because my computer chair has armrests, I keep kinking guitar cables. Need to remember to sit differently….
When did I build this machine? Two years ago? It still performs fairly well, though the CPU is a bit of a bottle neck at this point. I will probably build a new machine in a year or two. Whenever this machine starts crapping out or whenever I am no long able to run new games at fairly high settings (probably the later).
All of the WoW item mouseover links will completely break until I update all of the tags. All of the entry images will too until I do the same. I’m going to probably also condense some of the guides (like all of the gemming and resist gear articles) for the sake of organization. I also took the liberty of pruning off all of the really really short posts and all of the really really pointless posts. Ideally, everything will get re-tagged whenever…
Cheap Raiding Consumables
I’m a cheapskate. These are all of (or most) the instance specific consumables, which are usually pretty easy to obtain. Also, though not listed below, the unstable mana/healing potions are available via the repeatable Skettis daily quest if you can catch the NPC. My bank is perpetually full because it is half filled with odd BoP items :/
Unstable Flask of the Sorcerer: Only usable in the Blade’s Edge Mountains Plateaus and in Gruul’s Lair. If you are too lazy to actually kill the mobs and manually buy the potions from the BEM NPC, like me, the flasks are usually available on the Auction House for really cheap (50s to 3g on my server, depending on the flask). There’s no excuse NOT to be flasked it Gruul, these are seriously easy as hell to get.
Shattrath Flask of Fortification: Same as the normal Flask of Fort. You can purchase these with one Mark of the Illidari, a BoE token that drops randomly off of trash in the higher end 25-man raids (depends on how your guild distributes these). Only usable in said instances.
Red Ogre Brew & Blue Ogre Brew: 3 Apexis Shards each. Only usable in BEM and Gruul’s
Crystal Healing Potion & Crystal Mana Potion: 50 Apexis Shards and 40s each. Kind of expensive but equal to a super mana/healing potion and usable anywhere.
Bottled Nethergone Vapor & Bottled Nethergon Energy. Only usable in TK; They drop off of any mob in any TK instance.
It’s been several months to a year since I’ve last posted. I’m actually posting this entry as a test on a Drupal test account to make sure that nothing screws up when this site goes live. Changes made: Updated to Drupal 5, dumped the old Drupal database, separated the guild site onto new domain, didn’t bother reskinning a new theme (the default theme looks nice and is sufficient).
The old database had 7 years of blog entries, ported from 3 or 4 different blog/content management systems, from around 3 different hosting sites. I was somewhat reluctant to dump it but honestly, most of it consisted of MySpace quality blog entries. Though, I do however plan on porting over any articles on the old site, any images, and any content that I deem useful or interesting in some way.
Actually, when I have the site configuration and all the modules set up to my taste, I might just swap this installation with the current one that is up on the main page, and delete it whenever I am finished porting junk over.