Up & North

07/06/2010 Life No comments

I’m up in the northner norths of Sweden now, sitting in the public library jotting down a few lines to let you know all that’s happening in my life at this moment and all that will be happening in it from now on. Right now not very much has happened… we drove up by car yesterday, a drive which took a few hundred kilometers and two days. The first night was spent by the ocean in a nice little hostel (though hostel is the official translation it’s a strange word, sounds much better translated directly from Swedish, to “travellers home”) with tiny windows, two floors and barely any other visitors. I didn’t think I’d get any sleep since the sun kept shining in through the unbarred window, a fresh breeze kept blowing in a bit too cooly, and an abonimable snoring nearby would innevitably keep me from all but resting. Woke up rested anyway though, surprise! The next night was spent at home sweet home, up in our summerplace, and I fell asleep exhausted this day after many hours driving /we took turns) and a whole lot of maintanence when we finally reached our detination.

The weather up here is gray and unmentionable, the internet connection is slow, and it’s not so warm yet seeing as the last snow just recently melted away at the mercy of rarely occuring rays of sun. I feel a bit lost without a steady and sufficiantly speedy internet connection and always overlying goal for the day, but in a day or two I know I’ll have settled in, there’s a lot to do here, or anywhere for that matter, and I’m too restless to just sit and roll thumbs anyway, so no doubt I’ll be taking on and overtaking a lot of projects this soon to come summer. Brr.

Apologies for the great amount of typos this post no doubt contains, I’m used to having my spell check rinse tham all away but it seems this computer doesn’t have one and won’t let me install one either. :P Later.

It’s Summer!

03/06/2010 Life No comments

See you all in three months. ;)

Burst of Design

02/06/2010 Design No comments

It’s been a long time since I made something with Photoshop. Usually I just mess around with Fireworks for site images and whatnot but now that the semester is coming to an end the Photoshop sessions have been pretty intense, I took a trip outside with my buddy Andreas with camera stand and all to take some professional photos for modification, a couple of busy weeks later I finally have time to upload them, hehe, hope you like!

Now this one I just did for fun, I wouldn’t leave such a sloppy patch of of replacement in anything I hand in. Making stuff fun is a breeze with Photoshop. :)

Pretty crappy, but it’s the concept that counts, amirite?

Now here’s something beautiful, a painting of the world, I’d call it colorfoam if it wasn’t so flamy. You might see the motive, but can you understand what it stands for? The deep thoughts are endless on this one. ;)

A contrast between the green and grey. I had to fade out the edges a lot to make the transition smooth, and the result looks pretty amazing if I may say so myself, though it would have been even better without the spray can in this one. It just looks out of place.

Taking Out the Trasssh

02/06/2010 Cyber No comments

A lot of things happening online right now, big sites going down, small sites going big, people disappearing, people reappearing & people not really doing anything at all. Is that anything new? Well not really, it’s just something I had to type out when going through the link section this time, so many sites where nothing is happening at all, so many sites that have just been abandoned, so many sites with new designs, so many that haven’t had a redesign in years. Don’t know which aspect I should complain a bout about? Either way, here’s an update of links, or more like an update on the Internet and me, whichever comes first.

I used to follow VBL at YT, he’s removed, seems like he swapped names to Bronze Lain (probably some copyright issue) and released an album, I actually bought the album, it’s good, and from now on I don’t need to follow him and wait for new music anymore, lmao, it’ll be out when it’s out. Hope he gets somewhere, though there are so many artists striving to get big nowadays. I recalled Tay Zonday, a YT hit I really liked one track of (Chocolate Rain) so I looked him up and he’s been recording like crazy lately, but all his new music is SHIT, plus he looks really stupid in the music videos, not in a goofy and good way, more like a bad uninteresting no-professional ehh… yeah. Anyhow, I used to keep an eye on Ronald Jenkees too, great synth artists. As some of you might know I threw together a mixtape on his beats about a year back, thinking about reworking it once I get better recording equipment (not planned, but it will happen sometime) but anyhow, that’s beside the point, the point is he hasn’t posted anything anywhere in a year now. He just disappeared straight of the face of the earth, no info about him anywhere, so I removed his site too, can’t save dead sites and keep checking back on them every month or so, it’s a waste of time, if he’s good enough I’ll remember him regardless and check back to his site in a year or something.

I was going through the anime sites thinking about how the fansubbing world has changed lately. Ever since Dattebayo stopped subbing Naruto things have been going downhill, it’s become a bigger industry in the US and thus the fansubbers are getting a bit worried about copyright issues and stuff like that. It’s no longer about getting the anime from Japan to the American audience, it gets there anyway, now it’s just like a form of piracy. The legit (free) fansubs and commercial fansubs, audio streams, dubs, everything all get mixed together. Some put them up to earn money on ads, some do it as a service, some just want their 15 minutes of fame. Most of the old fansubbers are still out there, like Dattebayo, Live Evil, Kaizoku, etcetc, but the world isn’t as compact anymore, the community is tight yet divided, downloading anime is starting to become the same as downloading movies, something not everyone feels morally prepared to do. Anime streams are popping up all over the place, presenting anime in FLV format, and I’ve listed one such site already, but it’s not the same quality anymore, not the same kind of dedication. Things have changed, and though the anime is getting better and bigger and gaining an audience even larger than before, the level of dedication isn’t the same. It’s not as exiting anymore. Or maybe I’ve just grown tired of anime? Who knows, but things are changing regardless. Dattebayo said in a recent PR that they plan on dropping Bleach too, and that sucks, because I used to admire DB, they release fast, they’re reliable, yet they don’t fuck their fans over. In a whole lot of years they’ve never displayed ads, never asked for money for their own cause, etcetc, they’ve stayed neutreal, hidden, like ninja in the shadows, like an underground network of sorts. Anyhow, just my two/four cents, case dismissed.

Over, Going Out

02/06/2010 Life 1 Comment

Oh man I’ve been busy the past few days, busier than in a long time. I’ve gone through virtually all site files compressing stuff … renaming stuff … removing stuff … updating stuff … adding stuff. I’ve checked all sites, all databases, fixed a bunch, backed everything up & now, woah, it’s DONE. Well not really, it’s never done, but I did what I set out to do and the sites should take care of themselves while I’m gone on a three month vacation. Did I say three month vacation? Yes I did, but more about that later, for now let’s focus on the tasks that were at hand until very recently.

Since later nights and earlier mornings I’ve been going through things I should have gone through decades ago. I’ve been uploading games that have been missing at Blazem for a long time now today, and sorting through the music section trying to freeze time if only for a few seconds so it won’t run out on me, and suddenly WP stops working all of sudden. I don’t wonder why, it’s probably due to some duplicate slugs, or plugin incompatibilities, and I know the Page Navi plugin was working things bad but I haven’t had time to fix it so I had to take a while and wait twice for the site to cool down before I could keep on working with it, but I was lucky, the whole thing could’ve crashed instead, that would have been the tip of irony.

Once the music was revised and reposted I swiped through the settings, plugins & database to kill any bugs that may have been lying around. Fixed the navigation plugin too (seems like it was PHP 5 incompatibility causing the trouble), because I really need to have it working while I’m gone from the site, it’s an important aspect for visitors when trying to browse properly. I went through the links page the day before yesterday and yesterday, started on the music page, finished that today, put up a much nicer placeholder than the old “will do” text on the gallery pages, updated the design page with active sites, status & an extra section, quickly went through the poetry, stats & main page … and then I was done with that. Started browsing through other parts of the site in hopes to fix the stuff page, or at least get a part of it done, there’s so many hours that need using it seems a bit unreal. I didn’t think I’d get the job done in a day, but I didn’t think it would take this long either. Still I’m amazed that have done as much as I have in such a short amount of time.

Anyhow, the worst part of the site work today was always not really knowing when the broadband connection would be quitting on me. It’s supposed to go down tomorrow, but who knows, maybe they switch it off a little earlier, and that would be a real disaster when I’m in the middle of negotiations and updations and file uploads and all the whatnots. Since I’m going on a three month vacation (yeah, three months, I did say that) we’re cutting down on costs by shutting down the broadband connection for three months, and it’s shutting down tomorrow. Feels like it’s a day too early when I’m so close to getting everything sorted out, but then again I could always stop writing this blog and get on with it instead. ;)

Speaking about ID3 tags (I am now), I’ve been wondering which version I’m using on my audio tracks and I still have to figure it out, but that’ll have to wait. I’ve updated all tags through the Windows (7) interface, they show up there, they show up on the site, and that’s all that really matters at the moment, it’s all good. I tried adding tags through Foobar 2000 earlier, and though they showed up in Foobar 2000, after that they didn’t show up anywhere else so I really won’t be doing that again, haha. Found a pretty good tag editing program but I don’t have time to learn how to use it right now, it’ll have to wait till after summer, thinking about using Yahoos tag automatic to revise my whole music collection, fix albums, tracks & everything without having to spend time on them one by one, because it’s growing pretty big at the moment! Not one of the most important things to do on my todo list though, actually it shouldn’t be on my todo list at all.

I created placeholders myself for two sites I’ll be starting work on after summer, placed Google ads over five other ones I currently don’t have any plans to work on & tried fixing the Blazem database quickly but it seemed to be too time consumable so I did a quickfix to make it work ASAP that will cost me some time when I get back (dragged a few thousand files into the wrong directories, that are currently the right directories since I put in the wrong commands in the SQL db), but at least it’s working now. There are about 284 games up on the site for you to play if you like and I have an SQL import with more games already done but I don’t have time to upload it now, I’ll start working on that too after summer and striving to get up to the 10K barrier, putting all games onsite, and then selling the gamepack for a whole lot of $$$. It’ll be selling for about $20, real cheap, so remember that if you’re looking at competitor prices this summer.

Fixed the design on Blazem too, real quick, and it’s now working. Will make it look better after summer but for now the main thing is that it’s functional, and I managed to get some ads up and running there too, and here too btw. Only a little adsense below the site header though, nothing that should bother you much, but it’s a good investment, would be nice earning enough to pay for the websites I run. My hosting is extremely cheap right now considering the amount of websites I am hosting, and the fact that I’m running them on a Shared account, a Reseller account & a VPS account, all three of them with one dedicated IP each! All this for less than most people pay for a single Shared account without even hosting as much on one account as I am right now. Btw, speaking about something completely different again, guess how much bandwidth this site takes up at the moment? Last year it was around 50GB per month, right now we’re up at 150GB, and that’s this server only. At least to me it seems like we’re starting to stirr up much heavier traffic all of a sudden. Why is that, you ask? Well it’s all thanks to WordPress! I haven’t mentioned it before, but having it as a base script instead of that old engine I had earlier (scriptet myself) is so much easier. Speaking about that old engine, I’ve been working on some BBcode for the old smilies, and it’s up and running now, you might see some smilies occasionally, and guess what, they’re all made by me. The code to include them is made by me too! And what’s even better, if I type in a traditional text smiley like this one :D it doesn’t turn into an image any longer, so I have two custom sets of smileys for every post I post, hehe. ;) I’ll be improving the system a lot after summer, but that shouldn’t of interest to you, should it?

Anyhow, it always feels great achieving so much, I’ve been working both day and night lately and I’m tired 24/7 but it seems I’m still efficient whilst in a days. Daze, I mean, that typo is a perfect example of what happens when your tired. I write things backwards, I type words that sound similar, I speak about ranomd bullcrap like right now. :) But, deadlines are great, especially ones that you can’t trespass, like when they’re shutting down the broadband connection, like now. I really have to get all shit fixed before then cause I really can’t do any more work after that. So that’s a good deadline, makes me feel stressed as hell right now, but at least it makes me work hard(err).

About university studies, I finished enough courses, but I haven’t finished all the ones I’ve started. I plan on just studying half time after summer so I have a chance on finishing all the projects I’ve started (and I’m close), finishing the courses that aren’t finished I hope (though the deadlines are long since passed) and do some great things I’ve been planning to do but haven’t gotten around to yet cause there’s so much old stuff left unfinished. Though I’ll have time for plenty of greatness on my three month vacation. :P

Back to CDB business. All the music files have been encoded with LAME (there are 977 of them) to 65kbps with fast VBR, don’t know what it means exactly, but what’s important is that they are much much smaller and they still don’t sound all that bad. It’s a balance between size and quality. I also added titles, years (that took some research), numbers & artist/album information for all of them, and you better believe that took time!! The music page is now done, the links page is refurnished, the design page is adjusted, the gallery page has a nicer under construction sign & I’ll be working on the poetry and stuff pages for as long as I can before I get disconnected … or until a few minutes after midnight. Cause if it doesn’t shutdown at midnight I might as well get some sleep and get up early instead.

Incase you haven’t figured, I’m posting this right before midnight incase the provider does follow schedule. After this I’m getting the sleep I haven’t been getting in a couple of weeks now and tomorrow I’m just going to chill, really, chill, ideally. ;)

Also, check out those new sidebars, pretty fresh!

SFX Planet (0:01)

02/06/2010 Music - All No comments

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