Living life

Man I didn't mean to let this journal go for so long without an update. Oops.

Been working overtime on Eaxia Online (www.eaxia.com), pounding out some much-needed releases, fixes, and command additions. We've recently had a huge influx of new players and in the past four months, our playerbase and gameplay rate has risen 522%. Needless to say, things have been crazy busy.

Besides that, I've been on a diet recently. Those of you who don't know me, I'm a bit chubby. Got a little extra junk in my trunk. Trying to lose a good amount of weight by the end of the year. Down 15 pounds so far (in 3 weeks), so I'm pretty happy about that. Doing it Atkins style more or less... mostly just low-carbing it.

In animal life: I moved my lonely five-lined skink in with my eight anoles. He seems much happier in there. I also moved my tank to a better position (across the room) to improve both light and the noise quality (farther away from my desk). We also set up a newt tank recently with eight fire-belly newts and a eastern newt. At least 3-4 of the fire-bellies died (two crawled out, two are just missing). Damned things! But they're cute. My fancy guppy tank suffered the loss of one of the males, leaving two females and a lonely male. He just got old I think. I also moved them off my desk to the spot directly behind my desk (where the anoles were). A few weeks later, an explosion of little guppy babies filled the tiny five-and-a-half gallon tank, so that's fun.

I rebuilt my PC to Windows XP Home Edition to try it out. It was difficult to adjust to from 2000 at first, but I managed for a bit. There's a few things that really piss me off: the Explorer and Find - Files utilities are horrible, services and other control panel applets are difficult to find and use, and networking is kind of a pain. More so than 2000 anyway. And now, I.E. has this recent habit of not keeping me logged into websites anymore. So, I'll probably be switching back to Windows 2000 soon. I haven't seen any improvements in games or anything else in XP, in fact, BearShare (P2P) tends to run like shit on XP. So screw it.

Helped my mom out with some computer problems. Took about 5-6 hours in total, but apparently her husband (my step father) had so much spyware and adware that it took AdAware Pro 3 sweeps of nearly 500 total detected objects to clear it out. They should be in decent shape now, but my god... how do you let something deteriorate to that level?

Few points of interest I've stumbled across recently...

First, there's a pretty sweet Flash program someone built that lets you combine different punk-style music bits together to create your own punk songs. It's called Punk-O-Meter and you can check it out at http://2flashgames.com/f/f-548.htm. I've made seven songs so far, but here are my two favorites. Let me know what you think:

------------99960---0---553---09------------99960---0---3---3---8-------9--------------------8---2---3---2---2---2-----------8-- -2-----2---2-----------------b------------3-7-1-------------2---5---2---5-3-7-1-----a-----2---5-2-5-2-5-2-3-7-1---------------- 

88881--81--81--81--83---5-1--81--81--8889-9-9-----9----------------------------------0-0-0---0---0---0---0---------0---0---0---- -0---c-b------------------------------------7---------007-007---777-007-007-007-4-5-4------------------------------------------ 

(To play them, go to Load and paste the above, one song at a time, into the text area)

Also, I came across this in my website browsing. I was simply amazed. Nothing can prepare you for it, either: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=e9744d33e932f0de0ec1d35d23523a44&threadid=830487&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

There's more to be said... I really did put off updating for way too long... but it'll have to wait for later.

Enjoy!

Weekends suck

Weekends used to be great. You'd stay home from work and just lounge around all day. Now it's all about squeezing every last minute of time out of ther weekend to run errands and handle game problems (that's when everyone else is around and they need help), etc. I haven't had a relaxing weekend in so long...

Ah well.

This weekend I worked on the game engine (Eaxia), set up hosting for a new domain, fixed a few script bugs (Eaxia), ran an event for the royal family (Eaxia), spent three hours introducing the evil god Khal (Eaxia), almost made this pathetic guy cry at this Itallian place we sometimes eat at, did our rounds of cricket-buying and other pet needs (oh yah, and groceries for us too), moved furniture (couches), organized a staff meeting, and ate cereal (the most important part).

For those of you who don't know me and think I must be a sadistic bastard about the kid working at the Italian place -- it was his fault, and I'm kidding about almost making him cry anyway. He and this other kid practically run the small place for their grandfather (they're not related, but I forget which of them is the grandson and which one isn't, so for the purpose of this story, we'll say 'their' grandfather) and they're always at each other's throats for comic relief. One guy just had a kid and the other has no girlfriend. A recent comment he made was that "it's great to be single!" until he made another comment about having been at a restaurant by himself on Valentine's Day. All I said was "still love being single?" and got "bite me" before he wandered off. Ahhh, isn't it great to NOT be single? That started the day off on the right foot, I must say, despite having to have moved furniture earlier that morning.

Okay, you're right -- I'm a sadistic bastard. But it was still funny to see something blow up in his face, him realize it, then walk off muttering to himself. That's what he gets for asking us eight times if Tina and I are married yet.