Rantings of a Madman

Updates suck so instead I’ll just ramble. In general, not much has changed on the site. It’s still pretty much as normal as it has been for the last 3 months or so. I could list things I should do (or want to do), but not entirely sure I could get the motivation to finish doing them (no motivation needed for.. some).

As far as WoW goes, still playing my DK on Undermine. With the addition of the new raid content, I keep somewhat busy on raid nights (25 mans on Tuesday-Thursday; 10 mans randomly thru the rest).

Still working at a local motel, night shift. Actually posting from the laptop I mentioned a while ago. I could potentially go for something higher up, but not sure.

Oh, I bought a projector. The Optoma HD20 is awesome. Bought a package deal, so got a fixed frame 92″ screen. Only issues I’m having at the moment would involve the top right corner of the screen. Left, bottom, and right sides are aligned pretty much perfectly. Top right corner bends upwards. It’s kinda odd. There’s also the issue that the included ceiling mount won’t really “fit” the projector. So I have it sitting on a table and as a result I’m sitting left of the center of the screen.

But aside from that, nothing really new..

Almost a year goes by and I don’t update. Was it a busy year? Nope. Am I just lazy? (The joys of rhetorical questions.)

So, I guess I’ll give a run down of 11 months in verbatim:

Wrath of the Lich King: now have 3 80s (Bery, Dae, and Clexi), recently got a 2nd account for the Refer-a-Friend EXP bonus (300% is very nice), and finding how easy it is to get gold on a server you have nothing on.

Fallout 3: Wasn’t as expansive as I had thought it’d be. Guess I was still on the mindset Fallout 2 had where there’s a lot to explore and 99% of it is unique. Mob difficulty is mostly based on your level, so you can’t run into Enclave patrols until XX level.

Hardware: Upgraded main machine so I could run Fallout 3. Went with a Core 2 Duo @ ~3Ghz, 4GB RAM, WD Raptor 300GB drive, and a GTX 260. 2nd computer started having issues (was an AMD Athlon 64 X 2, I think, with a GeForce 8600 [which fried so I had to use a 6800 I had lying around]) where it wasn’t handling hard drives (Had two 1.5TB drives plus a 400GB) correctly (File system failures when the drive was fine). Put most of the parts from the first into the 2nd and rebuilt first with a Core i7 ~3.06Ghz, 6GB ram, the Raptor drive, and the GTX 260. Bought a $40 Sparkle GeForce 9400GT to use to replace the 6800 in the 2nd. 2nd runs everything fine but Direct3D is causing the card to flash black screens at me randomly. Think it’s probably the crappy card. 1st has run pretty much flawlessly since I built it.

Site: Recently got reported for spamming. Apparently a modification I had installed to one of my boards had a major security hole in it and my site was sending out massive amounts of spam email. Turned off register globals, nuked a bunch of scripts on my account, and updated the ones I decided to keep. Joys of owning domain names.

With that out of the way, I guess I’ll talk to ya’ll next year.

P.S. Birthday in 2 days.

So yet again I am drawn to post. About what, I haven’t a faintest. But, aside from the petty and usually irrelevant drivel, I suppose I do have some minorities to report.

First, I nuked and reloaded the xfir Networks forum. Mostly due to the fact it was outdated. But secondary due to the fact I’m hosting a friend of mine’s “clan” so to speak–Kaotic Gaming Inc (talented group of gamers)–and have been doing more work with PunBB. It’s a good forum software I’ve been using since Invision board went pay-only. Plus it gives me a chance to screw around with PHP again.

Thus far I’ve done simple edits–people have made modifications like a private message system and whatnot. With my board, though, I get to do more. For instance, I implemented sub-forums, a feature I had on Invision boards and on Ikonboard before that. I may go further and implement something insane like an RPG system, but I don’t know yet.

Initially I released a “RegKey” mod for PunBB–one of it’s vices is that Bot registration is at an all time high.. one of my old WoW Guild forums I was hosting apparently became a link spam haven for bots… I’ve since removed it, but it did remind me that I need to be a tad more careful. I added the reCAPTCHA system to the forums and it seems to work well… better than my initial hack due to the manner I used to generate the keys. I knew about some of the flaws in the old system but didn’t bother to fix them.

Aside from that, I got a night-shift job at a local motel. Need to earn cash flow somewhere, I suppose. The nice thing about it is that I have 4-6 hours of “dead” time where I can just pretty much slack off. I purchased a laptop off Newegg which will arrive Wednesday… and as my luck would have it, the price dropped $50 2-3 days after I buy it. Joy.

That’s my update for the last, what, 2-3 months? No, I haven’t bothered to work on the logos despite needing to, and no I haven’t worked on a 3rd skin. As far as WoW goes, Bery is my latest 70. Not sure what will happen prior to Wrath, but you never know.

PS, Fallout 3.

I fixed the issues MarkONE was having with the new version of Firefox. No more blank space. Using margins again, which I was always weary about using, but appears to be working fine.

I may redesign the logos of both MarkONE and draeBlood since they don’t seem to be as fluid with the layout as I would have liked. Ideas would be appreciated and art skill would be even better as I seem to have lost mine.

Also modified the blog page to show the last post from both hosted blogs.

In other news, I’ve been outleveling Moltzan (Moltzanlight) and James (Jimboby) in World of Warcraft. My newest character, Clexi, is as of this moment a level 48 Gnome Rogue. Servers are down so I decided to fix the site and work on some other misc. stuff.

That’s pretty much all I have to say for the moment. I’ll eventually get around to making that 3rd skin for the site as well. Maybe. Perhaps.