A Geek's Life ™ » Site news

New warning on videogame packaging

Michael Gaines — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:05:29 +0000

In light of yet another death from someone who didn’t have the brains to pick himself up and do whatever he had to do keep himself from dropping dead, videogame companies will now be placing this warning on all packaging.

Zune guy does it again

Michael Gaines — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:49:54 +0000

I’m just speechless. First, we all laughed at the Zune tattoo guy. Ha ha, very funny. I’m sure we all thought he got his 15 minutes of fame and that was the end of it.

Sorry, no, he’s not ready to give up his time just yet.

It pains me to post this pic on the site, but the humor and silliness factor weighed out, so here it is in its hyphenated glory.

EDIT: Ok, funny or not, I couldn’t stand looking at that pic on my site so I turned the picture into a link.

Click here

Site slowly coming together

Michael Gaines — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:45:06 +0000

I’ve been on vacation at the Jersey shore the last few days. I had two goals (other than relaxing with the family):

Work on getting the web site up to date (while on the beach)

Work on some problem spots with my sketching (while on the beach)

I also wanted to finish editing Episode 47 (while on the beach) but I left the memory stick in the monitor before I left

So the only thing I could do was work on the web site. I got a good chunk updated, but not everything. I’m working on a slow internet connection in the hotel we’re staying at so there are times when it takes a while for things to update. At least I have an internet connection so I can’t complain too much.

I’m sorry if anyone tried emailing me before I got my email working last night. The only place I posted the URL for this site was on Veronica Belmont’s blog comments so I didn’t expect anything. I log in today and found several emails and blog comment approvals. Damn, the internet works fast .

I had to copy all of the Blogger posts manually, and some aren’t done yet simply because of the time it takes for things to happen here in the hotel. I’ll get them done tomorrow when I get home, as well as get Episode 47 edited (it was a FUN show!). But now I have a way to get these posts backed up when needed, and if I ever want to bring my blog to another content management system, I can do that.

I settled on WordPress

Michael Gaines — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:17:30 +0000

A few months back, I struggled with which blog solution to use – Blogger, WordPress, or MovableType. I’ve been the most familiar with MovableType since I use it on the World of Warcast site, but I was upset with the licensing issue, and there were some little things about MovaleType that weren’t fixed in the last few months. I eventually settled on Blogger, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. It was useful for those people I knew that had other Blogger accounts and I was able to post comments on their blog, but that was about it. The worst part about it was that there was no good way to back up your blog. Sure, you could tell it to email your blog post to yourself, but if you edited it, you didn’t get an updated email. It was not a very good solution. MovableType and WordPress allowed you to back up your blog with a single click and save your blog to an XML file.

When it came time to pick a new domain name, I decided that I was going to go with WordPress since it seemed to be the most versatile. I’m still going to use MovableType for the Warcast site, but from now on, I’m going to suggest WordPress to everyone.

My new home

Michael Gaines — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:46:53 +0000

So here it is, my new home on the net. A few years ago I tried to get starman.com, but the owner wouldn’t budge on selling. I had starman.cc for a few years, but it was a stupid web site name. Who uses .cc? Nobody. I’ve learned that everyone by default uses “.com”, so after getting fed up with this silly starman.cc, I decided to try and come up with a clever web site name. For two weeks.

Everything clever is taken. I’d come up with something funny, check to see if it’s registered, and sure enough it was. After thinking of a few site names, I came up with warpfactorzero.com. It’s geeky and funny at the same time. I like it, and I wasn’t about to spend another two weeks thinking of another name. If a better one comes up, I can always register it and point it here.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh

Michael Gaines — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:38:40 +0000

WoW + Second Life

Michael Gaines — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:52:11 +0000

I’m talking to Alachia and the subject of Second Life came up. I’ve never played it, and neither has she, but I thought of something funny. What if Blizzard added Second Life-type functionality to WoW? Want to buy Barrens? Go for it. Want to turn Crossroads into a night club? Cool. What about putting a burger joint in Thunder Bluff? I think it would be cool to burn the homes of the other faction to the ground.

Blog reconstruction

Michael Gaines — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:06:40 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been struggling with which blog to keep, and which editor to use. I chose Blogger simply because it’s easy to use, I can link it to a web site I already own, and it’ll email my posts (poor-man’s backup).

I have crap going as far back as the 90′s. Hopefully Blogger won’t crash if I put a date of 1991 in here .

Finding the right blogging solution

Michael Gaines — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:59:39 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to find the right blogging solution. Everyone seems to love Blogger which is fine, but I kept thinking that there’s something better. The problem is that there’s nothing PERFECT.

Blogger’s great, but it’s major drawback is that there’s no way to back up your blog like you would an SQL database. The best you can do is have each of your published entries emailed to you. I’m not thrilled to death with that solution. Also, if you use Safari on the Mac, you can’t see the text formatting menu when using the “Compose” tab, so it makes editing harder unless you use Firefox. Nothing against Firefox, I use it on Windows, I just happen to prefer Safari on the Mac.

I used MovableType for a while, but it suffers from not easily being able to upload and scale images.

You can use Blogger with a personal server, but the problem with that is you have to pay to use that server. I might try piggy-backing my blog using Blogger with worldofwarcast.com since I’m already paying for that.

I tried WordPress. It’s very, very nice but it suffers from a clunky dashboard, and if you use their servers to host your blog, you have to pay them to be able to edit the CSS for your template. However, they do have a VAST array of templates available. Using images on it is very clunky though. I had serious issues with how it used images. Blogger gave me no trouble with images at all.

I thought I could use iWeb, but you have to use a Mac and you can’t use web tools to publish.

So the best I could do is use the free version of Blogger right now, simply because everyone else in my little group uses it, and you can each log into your Blogger account and be linked when you post comments. It’s not the best solution, but it’s the best I could find right now.

DING! 40

Michael Gaines — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:24:23 +0000

I finally dinged 40. Unbelievable. I didn’t think I’d make it this far this fast. Well, regardless, the first thing I did was buy riding lessons. I already bought the Black Stallion Mount from Menethil Harbor so all I had to do was run over to the Eastvale Logging Camp and get the riding skill for level 40.

No sooner do I announce it in-game does Alachia pop into my Vent channel and congratulate me. She also showed up in Goldshire to see my shiny new mount.

I have to steal her picture since my screenshots have been randomly been showing up all black for some reason.