It’s getting close to a month of this site living on it’s new, improved?, or at least hopefully improved home on the servers at (mt). As always there are some good things to be said and some really big annoyances that need to be solved soon for this service to be considered acceptable even by my current for personal use standards. The big pro’s were super easy activation, a very pretty and simple to use control panel, the amount of separation that is given between the various domains and subdomains and just about everything else really. It would probably be a lot easier to say that the service is good with the exception of and that’s where the story really begins.

MySQL - is slow and sometimes entirely fails to respond causing any database driven sites to totally not work. Granted (mt) have admitted that there is a problem and they’re working on it, I just wish they worked on it faster and/or with better results.

Database User(s) - yep, that’s right, for now you only have one. This is great and all if you manage all of the sites on the account, but somehow I’m hesitant to just leave my MySQL credentials in others configuration files, even if I do sort of kinda know them mostly.

I’ll stick with it for now, for another month at least as I don’t have any critical uptime demands for now. But if it doesn’t clear up by then I’m definitely looking for some new hosting. It’s been a fun adventure between all the hosts I’ve used so far and I actually have to say that I’ve really never had a bad experience, which is awesome I think and exploring is always fun

I don’t really know where to start for this one, but I’m already getting that feeling that it’s going to be long So in advance prepare for a well formatted wall of text with hopefully half decent grammar most of the way through. Even now I still have just one category for posts, and that’s the ‘you can never go wrong with it’ Uncategorized; really though I think pretty soon I’ll have to expand on that. It’s hard to write things that are more personal and things that are just interesting from a say technical point of view in the same post and still keep it interesting for everyone, or even to keep it all together for yourself, the writer. Oh well, we’ll see what happens: Adam did it right with devsushi and ah, maybe I’ll just copy that idea eventually. So without further time delaying and topic diluting words I give you this random composition of the day.

Adam (McEmo) and Sharon showed up on Friday with gifts of sweet and delicious candy. Half of which ended up being presented to ResNet staff since there was no way we could finish all of it and still be alive. For the record they still make Kinder Surprise and Emo got a monkey thing that kinda *falls* down a tree, Sharon got a soccer field, yeah what are the chances of that, and I got some weird bush tree that has leaves on its arms. Anyway we also went to Williams, it was supposed to be Bubble tea, but you’d be amased how popular that place can be on a Friday and there was no way we were getting in. But not all is lost and here are some pictures to prove it that fun can be had anywhere and at anytime, and no no drinking involved whatsoever

Meet Adam “Emo” McFarlane. We met at ResNet, as if that wasn’t a huge surprise for those in the knowhow of how I seriously meet most of the people I know. He’s emo, he bought us the drinks at Williams after a rare breakdown of happy generosity. Say hello to him and congratulate him on succesfully beating engineering.

Yeah, she’s awesome. Some of you may know her as Sharon, more affectionately known as Shrimpy the camp counselor you always wished you had until you electrecuted yourself with a fork in a socket. Anyway, she pretty much dominates English and East Asian studies and makes for great times.

We are trained professionals and know what we’re doing. Kids don’t try this at home or in public places until you are thoroughly certified. Please note the correct administration of the shocker.

Moments later… no charges were filed in the violation of this delicious chocolate muffin. For those interested the ingredients are salt, ice cubes from a chocolate caffeine thing, sugar, more sugar, love pokes and it tastes absolutely salty through trial and error.

After that adventure we got back and yeah, get this played Monopoly. By now anyone here from the super cool crowd is probably laughing, but eff that, who doesn’t love Monpoly once in a while, for extra geek points we got the Star Wars edition. Unfortunately most of the figures were missing, why didn’t I see that at this university. Oh well whatever, I cruised to 2 solid and fun victories out of the two games we played. Notable moments include me never getting the community chest, the tiger which Sharon brought over a month or so ago and I adopted being my play figure, Princess Sharon visiting the Jedi Council with all of it’s high class hotels 2 or 3 times in one game and the always underrated Moisture Farm (make your jokes here)

Back onto the serious subjects, I’m probably going to work for 4 more months and take some distance ed courses. That’ll give me plenty of time to get this faculty switch over with and a hopefully happier career in something that I’m not starting to seriously regret doing. Computer science and programming was fun, and I loved it, and I still do on some level. The times when I was writing those programming contest with Pat, Mark and Eddy were absolutely off the hook hilarious and always worth it. What’s that, Ontario finals, whatever we’re playing Euchre right before it starts other teams are studying, we come top 10… that’s the stuff. Speaking of programming, well not really, but I’m probably going to get a Wii at some point this year. After hiping it up huge at the office I decided I probably won’t want to wait in line and be one of the first. But Alice now is with her friend, and she used that against me today, so now it definitely has to be this year, and with an extra work term instead of another $6000 deposit that’s going to be at least possible.

For anyone curious right now, I’m listening to Starsailor - Four to the Floor (Thin White Duke Remix), if you get the original it’s a lot slower and doesn’t have the prevalent dance beat that this version has. I like both, but this one feel way more lively, Andrew is probably going to hate me, but it’s on repeat for a bit. Also we don’t know how, but the UWDC hub just hit 960 users online, quite frankly we have no clue how we got 100 extra users overnight, but whatever I have a screenshot and that’s all that matters.

Something dramatically and silently failed on my milkbox server. As of the latest the motherboard seems to be getting at least some power, but not powering on per-say. As I don’t have a power supply to test with I guess we’ll see in a bit what super creative things I can come up with

This is one of those interesting twists of life where on one side I am being employed by the Housing Technology department at this university here and on the other hand I’m a student of the university at the same time. So, it’s always interesting to kinda watch the story from both sides and try not to comment on either; normally you’re biased towards a specific side, where here I know both sides of the story and it’s kinda like you’re stuck in the middle and it sucks! Students: ResNet is terrible, rawr, rawr, pitchforks and torches ( I work for ResNet); ResNet: We’re doing our best to fix this asap ( Sup guys, where’s that router? ).

I am not even going to remotely deny that there is something entirely wrong with ResNet and needs to be fixed, and fixed like a month ago already. When I give up trying to do some ResNet work from home because ResNet doesn’t allow me to actually do it can you imagine how annoying that would be if you were doing an assignment. And it’s not intermittent, it’s like that every single night, with the exception of usually Friday’s and Saturday’s when enough people go home to make it usable.

I’m not even really sure what my point is, well I have several undefined ones, but ResNet needs to get fixed. The mob needs to calm down, and actually try and do this the proper way through *coherent* complaint emails to the proper people, maybe not flipping out on 2 or 3 people who are helping you with the hub about ResNet would be helpful too. In the meantime I understand the frustrations and take my chances on my Rogers cable line, for which yes I am paying extra, but hey at least I have a consitent way to get things done. What happened ResNet, you used to be cool, and then this

I got new toys!

For those who may or may not remember I was getting hugely tired of having to play dancing games with my Bell cell phone in front of my window to try and get some workable form of reception and sending SMS messages was a complete hit and miss. So, me being jealous of the 4 bars of reception that Andrew’s phone seemed to provide I did the only thing that made sense and tried to switch. Of course I wouldn’t be writing about it if that part wasn’t fun either, since I wanted to get a Motorolla L7, but that was coming soon, turns out that was basically coming like almost never. So after some more reading, the internet is not only for porn, I decided to just get the Sony-Ericson W810i, which was in stock, was smaller, had a better camera and was cheaper too.

The combination of above and the release of Final Fantasy 12 pretty much meant that the geeky side had to be satisfied and with good company in tag we made it to the mall. It was seriously cold yesterday, and today it’s warm and sunny — although with remnants of snow from last night, but back into the proper timeframe! The sales lady at Rogers seemed to be completely insane, then tried to tell me some lifelong story of her switching jobs or something like that, this was of course mostly prompted by the fact that their computers weren’t working right and at least for one point I seriously though she was going to break the phone trying to get the battery cover back on — but at least she was enthusiastic

Did I mention the phone has a 2MP camera, which is awesome considering all the uses I can find for it and at the same time when you think about it not that long 2MP was huge even in proper cameras. I’m still playing around with all the ‘oh cool’ features as I didn’t get to do a lot of that last night, the only bad thing I’ve found so far is you seem to have to put mp3 songs through this DRM encoder before you can use them as ringtones, oh well.

In other things, the UWDC Facebook group is well on it’s way to growing, it was feeling lonely so I decided to spam some suggestions that people should join it! I banned some people last night, but that was promptly reversed by Sharon, and it being her first ever hub admin command I couldn’t say no ^^

It’s Friday, sunny, and I can’t wait for the day at work to be over and go home, clean up a bit, get groceries, hopefully play my new game with a controller which I should be getting for copying the game for someone — yeah huge warning: FF12 won’t work with non Dualshock 2 controllers as I found out the hard way — and then catch up on some Heroes amongst other things later tonight.

Well, after some solid free morning excercise moving things from our shady drug dealing basement I’ve gotten around to moving my blog and most of the site over to media temple. This whole (gs) setup is fairly new, and yeah I already found some issues, but I think they have a community of clients which demands that they can’t suck and I’m really looking forward to this hosting. We’ll see how it all goes in a bit… more to come as I get more moved over and setup!

For the first time I’ve watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I think I got the order of the words right this time around. Thanks again to all those who came out, the bunch wasn’t as big as for the dinner, but that’s understandable given that it was absolutely freezing cold that night and that it was kinda a weird event. As an interesting count of sorts, 4 guys, 3 girls, we’re totally breaking the UofW averages here : )

Actually went to the wrong theatre, thankfully they’re located a staggering 30 seconds from each other, we were kinda worried about tickets. As apparently the only people in line who didn’t have tickets were us, but that worked out alright. Thanks to Sharon’s never going first nature I snuck in the ticket buying there, so I believe that makes us 1 and 1 in that department. Met some friends, ok truthfully just one, one of my friends from London sister goes to UofW now. She was there with a group and all costumed out, which actually brings me right to my next point, we were right in the middle of the theatre and everyone at least around us had costumes, the others without hid in the back.

Then it began!

It’s hard to spoil the movie, but what I have to say is that without the proper audience there is absolutely no way that movie can work. The audience, at least those, that know what they’re doing make up at least half of the entertainment value of the movie. I probably missed most of the lines that one character says in the movie, but who cares, telling him to get off the screen and calling him boring was so much more entertaining anyway. And in no particular order, I have rice, bread, cards, sprinkly things, at the time wet hair, and whatever else to prove that I was in that theatre and watched a really fun movie!

Molly’s needs to start giving us discounts, or at least rides from places where we go there, the walk there from the movie theatre was pretty chilly. We missed the bus by probably 20 seconds at most, and I’m honestly not sure why no one though of running to catch it. Oh well, -3 people we made it to the warm embrace of honey garlic wings, these cheesy sticks, some fries and of course the keiths, heiny, guiness, and a random assortment of shots, 1 of which I’ve never tried before; It was good. Thanks to Thad on some of that tab, and the rest mostly worked itself out, of course someone cheated! Oh and we almost tripped the waitress, someone almost got sick, we almost got kicked out, we almost stole a pint glass and oh yeah, the debit machine robbed us.

Now I think I’m going to close with while the song detailing the true meaning of the internet is coming to and end.. oh yeah for porn!

edit: a slight addendum in the comments =P

Had one of my two interesting meetings this week. In hindsight this one wasn’t really important, but was necessary to get the politics of work out of the way. Some people just seriously overreact to like everything that threatens their power bubble. Grow up, you’re not the sun, the universe doesn’t revolve around your desires and you don’t know everything, so kindly prepare to be wrong, a lot. If I had to guess I’m probably wrong on something at least once or twice a day, and that’s fine, because I can live over those moments without wasting other peoples time. Of course this also means that my 2nd meeting now has to be tommorow. I gotta be honest, the closer it is the more anxious I get, kinda scared really. I mean there’s nothing stopping my course adviser guy to just tell me ‘no’, then I don’t even know, I’ll probably beg on my knees or I’m seriously screwed.

Without a long explanation, I can’t really move back in in London. I can’t afford to just casually take a semester off, so that doesn’t leave me a whole lot of options and I mean I can see the hole and need to figure out someway to avoid it and do it quickly and in some managable way.

And here comes the ADD moment, some curious facts about the UWDC hub. We’ve now peaked at 880 concurrent online users, around 26TB of total shared, and we’re hoverng around the 30GB/user mark, which is all really cool considering it’s running on pieces of my old computer running CentOS 4.4 from within a milk crate, yeah no joke.

I think I may have finally got the look idea that I want to make for the theme for this place. Maybe get started this weekend, but probably not, going out on Friday and I think there’s a movie to go see on Saturday it being so close to Halloween and all!

Watching Top Gear - The World’s Greatest Rally Cars, looks fun, wish I could just get a racing car once in a while and just go driving, looks to be entirely too fun.

Speaking of fun, kinda want to do a top something post of some kind, everyone does it and who knows maybe I won’t chicken and submit it to digg, just for kicks, even if I don’t get any feedback on it whatsoever, I’d just be curious.

Thanks for the title S.

Hello?
Hi its me what’s up baby?
I’m sorry listen, I’m gonna be late tonight so dont stay up and wait for me ok?

Let me tell you the story…
And I said “Hi, I got a little place nearby; Wanna go?

First of all, let me say I think I won! Of course it is probably fair to say that there really were no losers.
I’ve now erased this second line of the paragraph a few times, because I really am not sure how to describe it, or wether I want to even attempt to. But it was just fun! Between fitting the whole thing at almost no price (and being a university student you have to consider these things), continuing on with helping someone out with not having to walk in the rain at 2am, moving back to relaxed Saturday and the late night that followed it. Russel Peters: Outsourced, could have been better, but has it’s genious moments — definitely not as good as the first appearance, which by now we’ve all seen. Which just about ties the story into Sunday.

Did I mention I spent minutes and minutes trying to string some songs together for writing all of this, gave up, and now randomely an appropriate song is playing right now without any of my intervention (and no it’s not the earlier quoted song or the band ^^ ). The summary is I think after waking up at around 2, I didn’t actually do anything at all, I swear to god, I didn’t even eat until we went to a chinese place at 7. I did nothing that could even remotely be counted as productive, destructive, or in any of those similar categories, but, I’d really not want to trade that Sunday for any other way of how it could have gone. It was fun, it wasn’t too long, it wasn’t short, it wasn’t glorified, it was just that good, period.

I think in closing my friends in London are going to start to hate me soon with all my excuses for why I can’t come down, but if all weekends are like this one I’m just going to keep coming up with those, by the way, I guess a kegger on Friday (Nitish would be proud), I’ve honestly not gone to an official kegger before, but then again parties at Mike’s are just as good or better, I’ll have to take a scientific poll after : )

ps: the song was resurection by the ppk, space club mix