Site additions

Small update today. I fixed a couple things that were bothering me and cleaned up the right frames a bit.  The big new feature is that I've added my twitter to the page (oooo aaaaah).  So that is kinda neat, there is a pretty decent plugin to wordpress that snaps right in.

I also added the my blogroll back onto the right side, that was giving me problems a couple of weeks ago but today I realized what I was doing wrong and boy do I feel silly.   In any case now there is a link to say Ben's page, my sentiment in the post below still stands.

Hosting Change

So this is the second time I've had to post this because I'm an idiot and somehow published it originally while stripping out all of the text.  Pretty annoying.  To that end this is the short version. So on the recommendation of a friend i switched to Gandi for my hosting a year ago when I was looking for a new host.  They were just launching their hosting service and were only charging $7.50 a month for it.  This seemed pretty good and although it was a 'beta' featured they seemed to be on top of things.  Unfortunately although things started good on Gandi they had a huge datacentre failure early on and my server never seemed to recover.  Gandi support claimed everything was fine but it wasn't and there were serious 24/7 slowness issues with it.  They recently announced that their beta period was over and starting in January they would be changing the price to $16 a month.  This was the straw that broke the camel's back and I immediately decided it was time for a new host.

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PAX 08, Less Fun than PAX 07

Well I'm back from my post wedding PAX/Seattle trip (I still don't know how I convinced Melisa to allow us to go to PAX before we go on our Honey Moon) and like last year I had a great time.

Unlike last year though I didn't really have that much fun at PAX and instead had much more fun in Seattle.  I'm not sure why, all the games in the expo hall that I was interested in I felt like I was going to buy anyways, I didn't really feel the need to see anything that was there.  Maybe because now that I've been before it sort of just seemed like more of the same.  The Enforcers were more annoying this year, there was almost no swag, the developers didn't seem as interested in talking to normal people about their games, etc etc.  Most annoying of all though is that every event with a major line started at least 30 minutes late, they didn't start letting the thousands of people into the main theater until after scheduled times for the starting of events had already past, and it takes a long time to let 2000+ people into a big room in an orderly fashion.

The whole thing was fun but I may skip it next year.  With that said I still saw some awesome things and boy do I crave Fallout 3.  Bethesda by far had the best expo section, they seemed like the only company to actaully put any money into their show.

uh.. also I got married last week (and still got to go to PAX, yay my wife), should probably post that.

Zoom Zoom

Well we finally pulled the trigger after months of thinking about it, I'm picking up my new Black Mazda3 Saturday morning and it's pretty exciting.  We got a pretty good deal in the end after some negotiating but it was tough, we came in off of a referral so we were already getting "employee pricing", the problem being that employee pricing is higher than it used to be.  It really seems like over the past 6 months dealerships are really not negotiating as much as they used to.  Ah well, we still got some good savings on the car and they "threw in" all weather mats and wheel locks.  As a bonus we also are getting to drive around in a loaner mazda3 for this week until mine comes in (it's being delivered from Victoria) which is pretty cool and seems to be a pretty rare thing.

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Gallery is back up!

So I finally got unlazy and set my gallery back up.  Once of the side effects of this server change is that I got to set up everything myself this time, which means instead of doing www.website.com/gallery I changed it to gallery.thebigv.org which I prefer.  (not that anyone else cares about this, but who cares about those people) I'm using Gallery2 again, which seems to basically be the defacto standard.  At some point I'll have to play around with the hundreds of modules out there that you can use for gallery2, for now it's quite vanilla, but it's very functional which is the main thing.  Now I just need to import my pictures back in there, there aren't too many though.

Back Again (again)

Well that was interesting.  Tyler decided he didn't really want to be the admin of a server for our little group of guys, and really I can't blame him so it was finally time to get my own server.  I settled on Gandi as my new host and you may have noticed the blog was down for a bit and then back up last week for a short time.  Well unfortunately a 2 days after I set this puppy back up Gandi suffered a massive failure (to their credit they are working very hard to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, I got very good support from them, and they gave me a refund for the month) which was incredibly annoying. In any case that is all behind us now and the site is back up again.  Maybe this time I'll even update it!  I forgot to back up my old uhh.. post(s) so a fresh start it is!