Tag Archives: site maintenance

Jan3

What’s Wrong With Me?

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What’s Wrong With Me?

You know, some time ago, I changed my user name here to Captain Shenanigans for reasons that I don’t quite remember now. I think comedy? Who can say? I mention this for two reasons:

  1. I made this change well after the last time I made a post here.
  2. My poor posting history makes me think that I’ve earned this new moniker

This is the part where I’d sing that same tired old song about updating more frequently, but who am I really singing that song to? Let’s be real, its not like this is or ever was some high traffic hub of activity. I really write this stuff for myself more than anything. I don’t think I started out that way; I have vague recollections of having aspirations of being Internet famous back in the day (before it became equivalent with real life famous and all the terrifying things that come with that). In any event, that’s where I am now: writing for myself and not very good about keeping it up. I think it would have been really helpful over the past year if I’d been writing regularly. I know I certainly thought about it, but I never seemed to muster the motivation to do it. Instead I’d just waste time online browsing gaming forums or tech or science websites. When I think of the time wasted when I could have been writing or catching up on my Netflix queue or game backlog or book backlog… yeah, I need better time management skills. I don’t know why I keep not writing here and its very annoying!

I don’t want to make any promises to myself that I’m not going to keep, but I do want to write more. I’ve been doing a sort of OK job keeping Ask the Fatty going with beer reviews and I finally, FINALLY finished and posted those unpublished drafts of the two restaurant reviews I did like 4 or 5 years ago. I’ve been doing the review thing on Yelp and Google Maps (I’m a local guide now!), so I’m hoping that’ll get me in gear to write more both here and on Ask the Fatty.

I’m also thinking of a new domain name. I know this one isn’t all that old, but I fell out of love with it pretty quickly (and there’s another factor which I’ll discuss later). I’ve been trying to think of something new, but I’m running face first into a wall. I want something… I don’t know… evocative of tech or cyberpunk… I can’t quite describe what I want and that’s making the search for a new domain name even tougher. The few good names I’ve come up with were already taken, further compounding my frustration!

OK, not a promise, but a statement of intent. Not quite a New Year’s resolution, but more of a… New Year’s… thing that I’m casually gonna ease in to? I don’t know.

Tentative schedule:
Tomorrow – Recap last year’s epic shenanigans
Tuesday – Recap this year so far
At least every other day after that – Log my notable (to me, anyway) activities
Once a week – Backlog recap; what have I gotten through and what’s left?
Once a month – Drafting ideas for long form opinion pieces and/or fiction stuff that’s been rattling around my head for a while.

Let’s see how this goes. Oh, and Happy New Year! Here’s hoping its better than last year, or at the very least, filled with more writing.

Feb16

New Photo Gallery

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New Photo Gallery

A quick update today, since I have to head in to work early.  I went with a plugin called NextGen Gallery.  It doesn’t use WordPress’ internal media library.  Instead, it adds in an entire section for photo management handled by its own section on the dashboard.  It’s not a bad solution, once you edit it’s configuration files to allow for greater memory usage.  Apparently, it requires an absurd amount of memory to create a tiny ass thumbnail.  Other than that, and the slightly broken English its written in, its a pretty decent solution.  I would have preferred something more native, but it seems such things don’t exist.  I’m still in the process of uploading my pictures, but here’s the gallery so far.  Sometime tonight, I’m gonna have to integrate that link into the sidebar.

Feb14

Work Proceeds!

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Work Proceeds!

When I first decided to undertake this major overhaul of my site, I thought that I could just have my new domain redirect to my old one.  That works, after a fashion, but it didn’t really give me what I want.  I could either have it as a simple redirect, which would mean that the site would end up displaying my old URL and all the scripts would rely on it, or I could have it cloak or mirror the old one, which eliminates the display issue, but doesn’t do anything to address the remaining issue.  This means I pretty much had to rebuild my site at the new address.

Joy.

Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad.  I’m still using WordPress, so I was able to export my site from the old location and import it to the new one.  That brought over just about everything.  I just had to tweak a few settings and decide what I wanted to do with my gallery.  Currently, I have a Gallery2 installation at http://www.mytwistedmind.net/gallery/main.php.  That’s all well and good, but I don’t know how to effectively migrate that over, or even if I should.  I certainly have enough server space to do so, but its kind of a pain in the ass.  Gallery2 isn’t the most user friendly software ever made, and it comes with a ridiculous set of options that may or may not actually be useful. It also randomly slows down for no apparent reason and every so often I have to run some kind of database maintenance on it, even if no database changes have been made.  I’ve been annoyed with it for a while, but I’ve been using it so long that I was used to it.

With the recent versions of WordPress, its got built in media handling, and its pretty decent.  I can do almost everything I want, but the major hurdle I’m running into is that while I can make a page that displays a gallery of images, I can’t seem to make a parent gallery that shows a thumbnail and link to each of my galleries.  I managed to get something close, but there are no options to configure anything at all.  I can’t arrange the thumbnails in a grid, and reordering them is something that involves a tedious process.  Gallery2 simply displays them better.  I’ve debated trying some other software (Coppermine, ZenPhoto), but one of the things I’d really like is a consistent visual style throughout the site, which isn’t something I’m going to get with an external solution.

That leaves me with plugins for WordPress itself, which have so far been underwhelming.  Most of them don’t support the native media library functionality and end up replicating that in a less awesome way, and there seem to be some that promise some feature, but for whatever reason, said feature doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the plugin’s setup or configuration settings and documentation is pretty much non-existent.

And that’s where I am now.  I’m going to investigate my options further.  Maybe there’ll be a way to integrate some of the external gallery management scripts into WordPress in a manner that doesn’t suck as bad as Gallery2’s implementation.  Maybe my endless searching will turn up a plugin that does what I want.  Maybe I’ll be abducted by aliens, given powers that far exceed those of mortal men, and return to Earth as a masked vigilante.  What I know for certain is that in a couple of hours I’ll have to go to work, but all I’ll be thinking about is messing about with this site.

Feb12

Welcome to Project Anaphase

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Welcome to Project Anaphase

New year, new site design. I’m still tweaking this setup, and more changes to the layout will probably be made, but the theme and overall structure is set. I’ve got a new URL http://www.projectanaphase.com) that should be active shortly that will direct to this site. The old one will remain active for the foreseeable future; quite a lot of history there! Aside from the shiny new interface, you’ll see I’ve removed the Twitter stream and replaced it with a link to my profile. Gone is Facebook, since I don’t use that steaming pile of turd for anything. I’ve added a link to my Google+ profile along with a link to my Pinterest profile (which has become my new obsession, btw). I’ve got more pictures to add to my gallery (including the 2011 Electric Zoo — my swan song!) and a ton of things to update. My goal is of course regular updates, but this is something I’ve tried and failed before. I think it’s partly because its mostly been a rather vague goal, as shown here:

Me: “How often should I update?”
Myself: “More than I do now.”
Me: “Brilliant! I’ll start right away.”
6 update-free months later…
Me: “Bollocks.”

Yea, trying to avoid that this time around, so I’m setting a concrete goal. One post every other day. I’ve got WordPress apps installed on all my Android devices, and I’ve got at least one of those with me at all times. Plus, there’s my Chromebook and it’s 3G access. There really isn’t any reason I can’t meet this goal short of being a terrible human being. I am going to avoid being a terrible human being.

That said, I’ve got another responsibility I’ve been failing at. I’ve pretty much completely neglected I have certainly eaten since my last update there, and I even have a pile of pictures for reviews that are rattling around in my head. I’m not going to be redesigning that site because I still love how it looks, but I am going to stop being a lazy fatty and start updating there. The goal? One post a week. I think that’s a good target for the kind of site that it is.

Now, its off to tinker a bit more, then go to bed. I’ve got some shenanigans scheduled for tomorrow, after which, there will be blood updating!

Jun18

Ask the Fatty WordPress update

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Ask the Fatty WordPress update

Since the My Twisted Mind upgrade went so well, I’m going to try it here. I’m also going to turn on auto-update for WordPress AND Gallery on both sites and hope for the best. I’m feeling reckless, but I don’t care! I live on the edge, baby. THE EDGE! Here goes nothing!

(Cross posted to My Twisted Mind.)

Jun18

Holy crap it worked!

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Holy crap it worked!

The update is done and apparently everything went fine. I’m on 3.0 now and everything looks how its supposed to and nothing has exploded in my face like usual. I’m very pleasantly surprised. I… I almost don’t know what to do now. Maybe I’ll update Ask the Fatty tonight when I get home from work.

Jun18

WordPress 3.0… maybe

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WordPress 3.0… maybe

It’s become something of a tradition that I make a quick post before trying to update WordPress since each update seems to break WordPress badly enough that Dreamhost support has to fix it each time. Hopefully that won’t happen this time, but who knows. Just in case, here’s my heads up that I’m updating. I hope this goes out over the RSS feeds in time, and I’ll be cross posting this to askthefatty.com just in case. Luckily I can keep typing up my World Cup posts on my Droid, save them locally, and then publish them all rather quickly once the site comes back up. But that’s disaster planning. The update will go fine. Really!

Really! 😀

🙁

Jun17

World Cup 2010 Day 7 and Other Stuff!

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World Cup 2010 Day 7 and Other Stuff!

Earlier today I caught up on the backlog of games generated by my extended work week and then caught up on some other stuff, like the 400+ Twitter updates and the pile of Facebook statuses I had queued up. I played some Resistance 2, ate an entire pizza because I hadn’t eaten properly in days, caught up on some some shows in my DVR, and read up on some of the stuff that went down at this year’s E3. X-box 360 Slim, here I come! Well, in a month or two because I want to see if they burst into flames like the old ones did. And while I’m sad to see Criterion making a racing game that isn’t Burnout, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit looks awesome. It also looks like Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, which isn’t a bad thing since I really liked that game, but I’m pretty sure the Hot Pursuit title was already used by a Need for Speed game. By two of them, in fact! I’m not really sure what’s going on there. 3DS looks interesting, and can I get a hell yes for new PilotWings?!

HELL YES!

There. I knew if I left it to you jokers in the comments, I’d get nothing. MONSTERS!

Moving on… Kinect is a stupid name. Not as stupid as Wii, but damn near close. I think someone moderately drunk would have trouble deciding which name would be worse to bring home to have a drunken night of abandon with and then wake up the next morning, be startled, and feel shame and remorse. I sure hope it doesn’t become a dumping ground for ports of crappy Wii games that didn’t sell. Then again, if it does and they don’t sell here, maybe the crap-tastic developers behind them will get the hint that their games didn’t sell not because Nintendo players don’t buy games, but because Nintendo players don’t buy GAMES THAT SUCK YOUR WILL TO LIVE. Not that I’m bitter about constant streams of disinformation or anything.

The 3DS looks interesting, and 3D or not, I’m sure looking forward to the games they’ve announced for it like Mario Kart, PilotWings (HELL YES!), and Metal Gear (!). Definitely one to watch. Oh and Goldeneye Wii remake? Awesome. The only thing better would have been a Perfect Dark Wii remake, but at least I’ll be able to get Perfect Dark HD once I get the redesigned 360.

Sony doesn’t seem to have much good stuff for me this year. Playstation Move? Move where? So it’s Wii HD, basically. Wiiiiiii! And the garbage names continue! Oh and a paid PSN subscription? The hell with that. The thing that grabbed my eye was the new Twisted Metal game! That. Looks. Awesome. I don’t care if it does everything, I want it to do Twisted Metal, and then I will be happy.

On a completely different note, it occurs to me that this category system I have going on the site is in direct conflict with the tagging system I have. I almost feel like it should be one or the other. The tags are definitely more flexible, but I feel I could get some use out of the categories if I go back and redid them all. Of course, that means redoing the categories on all the posts I already have. Good thing I go for years without posting a thing! 😉

OK, enough nerding. Time for some World Cup! I took notes while I was watching, and I was going to pretty em up and make them into real sentences and everything, but I’m too goddamn tired. So here are my notes on each game, edited for readability, continuity, and such. It’s a different format than what I’ve been posting, but its been a busy day and reworking all this into real paragraphs and article structure would take longer than I’m willing to commit to it right now. Besides, I want to play more video games before I go to bed. Maybe some Super Mario Galaxy 2. [insert ridiculous Mario sound]

    South Africa vs Uruguay:

  • There was an exciting moment near the beginning when Forlan chips it in off of crossbar from long range. Gooooooooooaaaaaaalllllll!
  • South Africa got pretty outplayed.
  • You know you’re an accident when your parents name you Surprise Moriri. Yes, there really is a South African player named Surprise Moriri. Awesome.
  • An unexpected red card for the South African goalkeeper Khune, who has done an excellent job thus far, leads to point scored on the penalty kick.
  • South Africa came to life second half, but not enough to save them.
  • Late 3rd pt for Uruguay to put the final nail in coffin.
    Argentina vs South Korea:

  • South Korea ends up scoring an own goal off of an Argentinian corner kick. Hilarious! I probably shouldn’t love own goals so much, but I laugh every time.
  • Higuain nicely heads in the second point for Argentina.
  • Argentina is more offensive minded, but South Korea has been getting back into it after the own goal.
  • Argentinian carelessness leads to a lone SK striker stealing the ball and a goal! The score now 2-1 in favor of Argentina.
  • The pressure exerted by both teams has been high for much of the game and there have been several good shots on goal.
  • Holy hell, Argentina launched a wicked assault! The first shot was saved, the second went off the post, and the third was gently tapped in past everyone! Beautiful play!
  • Another fearsome Argentinian assault leads to another goal and now Higuain has a hattrick!
  • Final Score is 4-1 Argentina.
    Greece vs Nigeria:

  • Nigeria scores on Greece about 15 minutes in on a free kick which was awarded for a yellow card offense that the Greeks should never have committed.
  • Kaita earns a red card and gets ejected for freaking out on a Greek player after the ball was out of play. It was a silly foul and it puts the Nigerians down a man for the rest of the game. Good thing they already have a goal scored.
  • Greece scores via a deflection off of a Nigerian player just before the half to tie it up. Things are a lot more tenuous for them now. Credit to Greece for seizing the opportunity.
  • Nigeria blows a fast break. Caught out Greece, the first shot is blocked and the rebound should be easy goal but they don’t get a good foot on it and end up kicking it wide.
  • After a series of fantastic saves, there was just one too many assaults for the Nigerian goalkeeper and he let a rebounded kick get by him. It was a valient effort, but I don’t think Nigeria will be able to pull off a draw. To make matters worse, several injuries are forcing them to use their subs and hurting nigerian play quality.
  • Prediction correct, Nigeria loses 2-1. On the upside for Greece, they scored their first ever World Cup goal and got their first ever World Cup win.
    France vs Mexico:

  • A more physical game that we’ve seen thus far, France and Mexico seem to be pretty evenly matched. No major runs by either team yet and we’re going into second half scoreless. There was one almost goal by Mexico, otherwise good goalkeeping both sides. A game where the teams are really well matched can either be really exciting, or really not. Unfortunately, so far this one is the latter. While the skill on display is great, it’s not edge of your seat stuff.
  • A fantastic but possibly controversial goal for Mexico give them the lead! There was some question as to whether Javier Hernandez was offsides, but it looked like he was right at the edge and the call could have gone either way. His grandfather scored against France years ago and now he gets to follow in those footsteps. Pretty amazing!
  • A penalty kick gives Mexico another point. We have another first! The first Mexican player to score in three different world cups is Cuauhtemoc Blanco! (Try saying that three times fast!)
  • There were lots of yellow cards handed out this game
  • Mexico takes it! Pretty unexpected, given France’s last World Cup performance.

Do you know, I just had a thought. A somewhat startling occurrence, I know, but hear me out. I think I may do a liveblog kind of thing for future posts. That might work better because it captures my thoughts at the moment and I don’t have to worry about turning notes into fancy pants writing. I’ll probably forget less stuff to include too. Maybe some open source, embeddable twitter-like app. I very nearly think Dreamhost has something like that available. Hmmmm…

EDIT: I just realized that the timezone setting on my blog has been wrong for… quite some time, shall we say. It looks like it was calculating times in UTC or some stupid nonsense like that instead of my local time. Good job! Because that’s useful! It’s fixed now, but all my old posts have timestamps that appear to be off by about 7 hours or so. Can you feel that, WordPress designers? I’m flipping you the bird as hard as I can!

Jun6

A Few Quick Notes…

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A Few Quick Notes…

Some stuff! I did it today! Read!

  1. Google has developed an online font api thing that lets you use fonts that aren’t even on your computer machine on your website. They had the Droid font available, so I just converted the site to use that instead of Trebuchet or whatever the hell I was using before. Isn’t a trebuchet some kind of medieval siege weapon? I think it threw rocks like a catapult or something. That’s a stupid name for a font.
  2. Cat!
  3. So it turns out I should have previewed what the site looked like before I started writing point number 1 up there. Seems like the Droid font gets a bit cut off no matter what size I make it. Letters like g and y have their little tails chopped off, and we can’t have that! Aside from the humanitarian reasons, it just looks faintly ridiculous. So back to Trebuchet or whatever the hell it was before. Boo!
  4. I’ve had Symphony of Science on repeat for the past few days. I’ll be writing a follow up post to that shortly. Possibly even today!
  5. I just found my eMusic gift cards from before they redid their pricing structure to include 100% more suck. I’ll have to redeem these things and violate their site before they expire.
  6. It’s totally a lazy Sunday today, but I’m going to see if I can get both of my pending candy bar reviews done today. Also I have to look into the Picassa thing for this site.
  7. I need more days off!
Jun4

It’s-a me! A new theme!

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It’s-a me! A new theme!

So I fixed the old theme, but then I realized I’d been using it for around two years. So after fixing it, I promptly changed it. This new theme here reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy, so that makes it full of win. Speaking of which, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is super awesome. I haven’t made too much progress yet, but so far it’s definitely more of a challenge than the first one. Of course, I’ve had to split my time between that and Homeworld 2, which I finally got working on Windows 7 through some… shall we say unconventional means. In any event it works, and I’ve got the Point Defense Systems (PDS) mod installed and running and its awesome. Homeworld 2 is probably the game that comes closest to being able to simulate the epic space battles of the Honor Harrington series of books, even more so with the PDS mod. The only thing I’d change is raising the limit on the ships that you can build so that you can set up truly massive space battles. I mean, only one superdreadnaught equivalent? That’s beyond lame. I think with PDS you’re limited to 9 capital ships at once. That’s no proper fleet! At best it’s an understrength task force! The mod has such a deep order of battle, but you never get to really take advantage of it because of the low limit. Hmmm… that gets me thinking… I wonder if there’s a way I can go into the mod files and alter that. I think I just found a project for my weekend! And on that note, I’m off. Work tomorrow, probably with more OT like tonight, so I need my sleep.