I'm currently working on converting this blog + a whole bunch of other sites to Drupal. I'm also restructuring my entire server and database setup. So far, it's a bigger task than I had imagined. You can read about my efforts if you wish on my work-in-progress blog: News @ Gameslate.

In the meantime I've been posting less here, not so much because I'm so busy, but when I've got something new on the horizon the incentive is low to add to the pile. It's mostly just an in-my-head thing, because logically I know that a couple more articles in a database of ~1000 isn't going to make much difference in the conversion process, but still it doesn't feel as productive.

I'm looking forward to this blog thriving in my new working environment. I have a few world domination plans here and there. ;)

It's been...

• 3 years since I started playing World of Warcraft.
• 9 years since I owned my first dedicated webserver.
• 10 years since I became spoiled with broadband.
• 11 years since I first played an "MMORPG".
• 13 years since I started this website / blog.
• 16 years since I began working in the videogame industry.
• 18 years since I first played a "MUD".
• 20 years since I received my first "Internet" email.
• 24 years since I owned my first computer.
• 25 years since I learned my first computer language.
• 34 years since I first played a videogame.

It seems almost unfair for me to switch from Wordpress, the plucky blogging CMS has served me so well. It's not as though it has let me down, it's just that I need something different now to fit my needs.

No, this blog isn't going anywhere and I'm not even dumping Wordpress quite yet, but I do plan on organizing all of my various content sites under a single CMS umbrella and that's just something Wordpress isn't designed for. I'd still recommend Wordpress to anyone that wants to setup a blog with very little fuss but all of the standard blogging features, it really is great software.

I'm moving to Drupal, you can read more about that on my other blog, the not-quite-as-entertaining one over at News @ Gameslate.

This will be kinda like ending a love affair. *sniff*

I'm in support of the current Hollywood Writers Strike.

I'm not a big union supporter overall, but when they're fighting for a fair deal, it's hard not to be behind the WGA on this. I was shocked to learn that writers typically receive no part of Internet re-airings of media and that their DVD residuals are so small and haven't been negotiated since the VHS days.

The whole TV & Movie entertainment system has always seemed a bit crooked to me, the way they wash their money through separate companies for each type of media that they reproduce the original work on. I really don't understand how they get away with paying people differently whether its broadcast, in theatres, on tape, on DVD or streamed across the web.

I understand there must be a lot of complexities involved in the earnings of media once you involve the numerous licensing deals... like, how much does an actor get paid for their likeness on an action figure? Should that be included in the overall earnings of a film so maybe the foley guy sees a piece of that (although I doubt the foley guy gets residuals, but it's just an example)? It's confusing, for sure, but I'm also pretty convinced that the major corporations and networks use / abuse that confusion to their financial advantage.

The last major strike, if anyone recalls, was a complete disaster for TV viewers because it so deeply affected the quality of scripted TV shows for years and years.

I just upgraded and reinstalled my server yesterday. Everything had gone smoothly in my dry-run tests on a local machine, but a bit of bad RAM that needed to be replaced caused a wee bit 'o troubles and more downtime than I'd planned.

It's not very often that I experience direct server downtime. The uptime on my server was approaching 3 years since the last full reboot, but it was also long overdue for a kernel upgrade because it was limiting my software choices.

So now here we are, running on a fresh install. There are bound to be little issues on my various sites with the newer software. I've tried to kludge in a few brute force fixes right away, we'll see how that works. I'll also be fiddling with some new features, so don't be surprised if some things break. Hopefully only minor things. ;)

Just a small lesson in web etiquette that some people tend to miss. I know it's pretty easy to use the 'ole nets these days, what with Myspace and Facebook and all, but there are some basic concepts which most folks should understand.

The old "don't be a dick, right-click and save-as" motto still exists as far as I'm concerned. Embedding content from Youtube, Flickr and the ilk is obviously cool, they provide those links right there to promote their bandwidth for your own personal usage, that's what they're there for. Copyright is also something fairly flexible: case in point, the Trogdor image below I originally used to reference the fine folks at homestarrunner.com, a typical example of fair usage.

I'm not going to get on any high horses here, just realize that embedding images from sites where the theme is not a shared-hosting service is asking for a bit of abuse at your own expense.

I know, I could set all of the images stored on my server to disallow referring, but there are circumstances when I'd like to use my own storage elsewhere (ala forum signatures and whatnot) and I'd rather not micromanage that. So when someone else treats my server like their own personal storage facility, like say... for their Myspace page, I have a tendency to do something like swap this:

for this:

Before you tell me how evil I may or may not be, consider that the standard photos most people substitute in these circumstances are tubgirl and goatse.cx. I think I'm being rather kind, comparatively speaking. Pretty soon I'll just remove the image and they can have a nice pretty broken image icon instead. =P

I've just made a small update to the MMOROG comments->forums bridge, enabling a template theme that matches my blog better, although it still needs more tweaking.

Overall, my forums site will still use the LeftHandPath theme, but I'll work on making appropriate themes for all of the sections supporting my other sites. This is all part of my attempt to consolidate forums for the numerous sites I update.