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did you change your haircut?

Continued from: here

It’s been a few weeks now and I have to say that I’m really, really impressed with OVH.  I now, appropriately, take a pause to thank my good friend Andy for being kind enough to answer my numerous stupid questions.  This is an impressive feat given that I was conjuring up questions like a magician does doves before making the switch.  So thanks mate!

Slowly, one by one, the sites have been restored.  CS-B.net ended up being the guinea pig upon which the redesign of this site itself was based.  Consoleforums.org is back on the mean streets of the web and now running on Simple Machines Forum software which brings it somewhat full circle (I’ve definitely had enough of switching forum software!).

The personal sites haven’t made their comebacks yet but this is mostly due to the fact that they really are only used for e-mail addresses and not much else.  The work sites are however up and running again and I feel much more secure knowing that they have survived a hosting switch without incident (i.e. no e-mails were lost, so no disruption to the businesses).

Whilst all these site uploads and settings changes were being done, I managed to find time to get some software running on the hosting box.  As stupid as it is in reality, I was quite pleased at being able to get an Eggdrop bot to run without any major issue.  More pleasing was the fact that all the numerous stupid minor issues were only caused by my knocking out a few typos at my regular rate.

Things are therefore, looking good.  Back to the uploads!

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Something is different about you…

MYstIC G / v2

Well, some things change but other things stay the same.

After a number of years I’ve moved a number of my sites away from Lypha and am now with OVH.  There’s no major reason for this save that with the work stuff we’re uploading bigger and bigger files and as the price is comparable it seemed a sensible move, especially considering that with the OVH option we’ve effectively got root access to a box so things are very much “can break / will break” as well as “are broke / can fix / no wait”.

As you can see I’ve totally changed the theme again.  I much prefer this as I think that people like to read things more when they’re broken up a bit and it doesn’t hurt that the theme isn’t horrifically ugly to boot.  So, much respect to the author who’s link can be found at the bottom of the site.

So what’s staying the same then?  Well, everything else I suppose, the same old rubbish shall be typed, the same 3 (if that many) people shall no doubt read ignore it and I’m sure at some point some stupid script kiddie will fill the uploads directory with shit… (no shocks there).

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O2 Broadband

Well, that’s it.  Sky Broadband has now been de-activated as I’ve received my “you’re all sorted, enjoy” e-mail from O2 earlier today.  So far it all looks promising as nothing has gone wrong and everything has happened on schedule.

The fun shall begin once I make it home from work this evening and I shall let everyone know what the hell happens as I go along.  Should the worst come to the worst, at least I have a stonking new single player game that I can play while I tear my hair out!

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The Idiot Box

The nights have drawn in and so, out of sheer laziness, my attention has been grabbed by the TV whilst I await the arrival of Left 4 Dead 2.

Unfortunately so far tonight I’ve suffered bad singing (Queen songs deserve better but then since Queen have released YET ANOTHER greatest hits CD, perhaps they’re getting what they deserve… and this is a life long fan writing here) preceded by an awful filler episode of Dr Who.

Making the Doctor go somewhat mad with power was not worth the wait and was a horrible follow up to the quite entertaining battle with the Daleks that ended the last full season. Oh look, we’ve filled a whole hour to have Ood Sigma re-appear! Here’s hoping the Christmas special is a drastic improvement.

Whilst the time slowly ticks by before the arrival of new (i.e. not on Dave) Top Gear. It’s worth saying that the new series of Dollhouse has been even worse than tonight’s episode of Dr Who. In fact it’s got about the same level of storyline as Who but stretched over several tedious hours. Good old Fox doing what they do best, canning the good (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) in favour of the bad. Hopefully T:SCC will get the Family Guy resurrection that it deserves!

Bring on the trumpets… motors!

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Back from the dead… (again?)

Well, I’ve been getting rather bored recently of not doing anything with my websites again.  So, having had enough of watching it sit there in ruins for far too long I’ve just switched Console Forums from phpBB3 to SMF.

As usual there isn’t a major reason for this.  The decision has been made purely on the basis that phpBB3 seems to be shit at preventing annoying bots from registering (100+ a day for over a year despite the board requiring activation by hand).  SMF on the other hand has been up for a couple of days with a nice little plugin that seems to have held all the spam registrations at bay 😀

The next one on the list is to try and get Akismet up and running on it.  That would be a bit more difficult as I have found a nice little plugin but it’s a bit out of date and I’m no wizard when it comes to code!

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Firefox Add-ons

Being the overly helpful chap that I am, it has come to my attention that you can now build useful collections of add-ons for Mozilla Firefox et al.

This is quite a good idea and I’ve used the opportunity to create MYstIC G’s Hand Picked Helpers which are a simple bundle of extensions that I use to make Firefox that bit easier.  At the moment it contains:

  • DownThemAll!
  • BetterPrivacy
  • Add-on Collector
  • Adblock Plus
  • Leechblock
  • British English Dictionary
  • SkipScreen
  • Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO)
  • Greasemonkey
  • Xmarks
  • Sxipper

I’m sure that the list will change over time but the general focus of the add-ons that I use will still centre around getting any firefox on any box up and running with favourites and logins whilst removing the dross of the net that nobody really wants to deal with.

Let us know if any of you find it useful!

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Zombietastic

It’s funny, a few weeks ago I played Half-Life 2 through to the end for the first time, mostly because I was feeling unwell and had nothing better to do.  More recently, I’ve found myself playing a lot of Left4Dead the newer Zombie flick styled release from the same company, Valve.

It’s made me realise that, quite scarily, I don’t think that I’m a massive PC gamer anymore.  Now, for me this is freaky when I consider that I used to spend hour upon hour playing every day to the point that the wonderful people at AlienPants actually employed me to do things with gaming servers.

At first glance these look like conflicting statements, i.e. “a lot of Left4Dead” and “I don’t think that I’m a massive PC gamer anymore”, but hear me out.  Left4Dead has pretty much become the only title that I play on the PC.  There has been very little else on the PC lately that has enticed me into playing it for more than one or two goes.  When I consider that back in the day I played more varied Half-Life mods than I did full blown console titles, that is quite sad and a little scary.

I think I’ve almost completely regressed to being a console junkie.  Is that a good or a bad thing?!?

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Come on…

Pump Crank it up, you’ve got to Pump Crank it up… Crank 2 is an absolutely awesome flick.  The story picks up from the point at which the first movie ends and whilst it didn’t feel like it had the pace of the first film it was certainly just as humerous.

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Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish

Well, it seems that it’s the time of year for the businesses annual Quality Assurance external audit.

Past few years we’ve got through them with no problems. When it comes to this years inspection, I’m not so convinced all will be so smooth.

Think it’s something to do with things coming in 3’s, be they bad or good.

After some thinking, it’s my gut feeling that I’m due 1 more from the chain of 3 (first two being: 1] single & 2] insurance).

Something going abysmally wrong at work would pretty much do a tip top job of rounding off the trio.

Let’s hope I’m wrong!

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Keep Rolling On

People are funny sometimes.

A few days ago I helped a mate of mine distribute a couple of thousand keys for the Warhammer Europe open beta.

The beta launch didn’t exactly go smoothly to say the least, but these things happen, after all that’s part of the process with betas.

Suffice to say, the response to the difficulties could be summarized generally as ‘outrageous’.

It’s a shame that so many people feel the need to pour scorn on things unnecessarily.