No Lair update yesterday, sorry, oh well.
I'm tired. Anyone following the crap on my forums can guess half the story (the other half is strictly real-world crap, which I'll share when it isn't almost 1 in the morning.
As many of you may know, I'm going to redesign the Lair next year. I've already started working on some of the work; specifically, I've begun working on the redesigned (visually and technically) sidebar.
It will look very different from how it does currently, with a slick and clean look that will work well with everything else. From a technical standpoint, I'm finally going to have the effect that I tried to have on the site earlier, but ran into issues; those issues are alleviated when doing it in CSS, thankfully.
But the big surprise is that the sidebar, as it stands right now, is roughly half the size that the current sidebar.txt. The current sidebar is 6,461 bytes, while the new one is 3,386 bytes. Ultimately, this 4k difference won't have a super-huge impact on the user, but it does cut down the amount of data being transferred on a daily basis just a bit; in the grand scheme of things, it eases a fair amount of stress from the server (4k here and 4k there really adds up over a few thousand hits).
I feel I should note that Jon Pearse helped me out very much with the sidebar, practically coding the damn thing for me (though I'm styling his code quite a bit, the main markup isn't being modified very much).
Once the sidebar is done, I'll still have several other things to work on:
Those are just the things I can work on now. Once the Lair is closed for the year, I'll be able to start going through all of the content on the site, giving it a complete overhaul. Here's a list of some of the things I'll be checking (more for my benefit than yours):
That will, of course, be on top of the process of applying the new layout code to each and every single page by hand. Why am I going to do it by hand, when doing so is such an inefficient and slow process (not to mention painful)? Firstly, because I'm a bit of a control freak, and don't trust a program to do everything perfectly. I love BBEdit's search & replace, but I don't trust it to catch every single instance.
The second (and more important) reason is to make sure that I learn these new rules and follow them to the letter. I know HTML as well as I do for one reason alone: I had to drag myself through massive amounts of code in very long, mind-numbing projects. As a result, I know it like the back of my hand. If I do the same thing again, I'll be re-educating myself in a way that will make sure that it sticks.
The third reason is because I'm a glutton for punishment, it would seem. ;)
Gah, what a way to spend my first waking minutes on a holiday. Apparently, a spam bot hit blog.evula.net hard while I was asleep. After running through MT-Blacklist over and over, I ended up removing 946 items of spam. Yeesh. My own blog had about 50 spam comments, though several other people had a lot too (didn't keep track of those, though).
Grrr. So it was 4:30 yesterday, and I still hadn't gotten a call from Verizon about my new cell phone coming in. For a lack of anything else to do, I checked my messages. Sure enough, Verizon had called and left a message about my new phone.
Let me rephrase this: Verizon Wireless called my broken cell phone to tell me that my working cell phone was in. They were supposed to call my work number, because they "knew" that my cell phone was broken.
Arg.
So I now have a working cell phone... sorta. The backlit screen doesn't light up, which makes use in less-than-fully-lit places an impossibility. *sigh* At least I now have a working phone, and can stick all of the numbers I need into Address Book.
Alrighty, it's time for another Lair update. First up is the new content: a Review of Rammstein's "Reise Reise" album, by Prince GFono.
As for the title of this post... take a look around the Lair and you'll see a few tweaks here and there. For those with a good browser (ie: not IE, preferably Safari), you'll notice some cool drop-shadow effects on the headers (and elsewhere, including the rollover effect). I like the look of this, and will be getting used more next year.
A few other small changes: the Diablo 2, StarCraft, WarCraft 3, and Fallout sections all have title images that match their color schemes, rather than the default green. On the new Lair, things will be styled much better than they have in the past... I won't go into the details any more than that. ;)
The only other change on the site is to my personal site. It now has the same layout that the Store has, which is, in essence, just the regular layout, but all white. In keeping with the whole "taste of things to come" thing I've got going with this post, I can honestly say that, with the new Lair, my personal site (as well as the store, and my own blog) will all share the same layout as the rest of the site.
And here's what I'm really excited about: I finally came up with a new layout for the Lair. I was trying to get to sleep last night, and about 15 minutes after going to bed, it came to me. The last time I had an idea randomly pop into my head, it was the Noir logo. To make a long story short, it will be very cool, and as near as I can tell, should be quite doable in strictly CSS. This should make pp very happy. ;)
I've been such a freakin' recluse today. No phone calls whatsoever, all because I was a little too careless with my phone. Then tonight, after the show, I didn't catch wind of where everyone was going because I had to go lock up everything backstage, so it's quarter after 9 on a Saturday and I've got absolutely jack to do.
Grrr.
Well, my cell phone took one too many tumbles yesterday. Right now, it's just completely off, which I almost never do, simply because the only thing it can do is receive phone calls that I can't hear (though the outside screen does show the proper color for each caller).
I just got back from the Verizon store, where I was told they'd have a new phone for me on Tuesday. Gah, I have to go the entire weekend without any sort of phone (I don't have a land line, just the cell phone). Thankfully, my weekend is going to be socially dead anyway because of the show, but still, it's frustrating that I won't have a phone until Tuesday (at the earliest; at the worst, it could be after Thanksgiving that I finally get everything working again).
So today we had a "test performance" of a sort for the play that I'm doing, Little Women. To say that this has been a trying show would be a bit of an understatement. But first, some back-story!
I signed on to do the show as the ASM; for those that don't know, that stands for assistant stage manager. However, once I showed up to a rehearsal, lo and behold, there isn't a stage manager. Okay, crap. That means that I have (technically) a lot more responsibilities than I was planning on. The show itself is suffering from a couple of bad actors (and shaky line knowledge from a few other people, though most of the shaky-line folk are good enough actors to play it off well). Because I've had to shift gears from ASM to SM, I've been on book, which means that I've been horribly unprepared backstage (can't feed the actors their lines and figure out what goes where at the same, oddly enough).
So all week, I've been on book for the actors. Yesterday was the first time ever that I was back stage to sort out props.. and, as per usual, there were a few missing/temporarily lost props here and there (and actors who don't know what to do with their props). That's perfectly normal for a rehearsal where we have props for the first time. However, this week's rehearsals were our only rehearsals before today's two performances (at a school), and opening night is tomorrow. As a result, last night was very stressful, and I feel really bad about missing stuff here and there.
But at the same time... I've been a bit deceived about what my role would be, I'm working under very tight conditions, last night was the first time I'd ever been backstage for this production, the first time I'd ever had any of the props, and the first time I'd ever seen the show all the way through (actually, it was the first time it had been run all the way through, ever). To expect me to know where everything is supposed to be, or what everyone should do, is ludicrous. Anyone who may be disappointed or upset with the job is welcome to kiss my ass.
Anyway, now that you have the back-story, on with the rest...
So all week, the actors have been shaky on their lines, their blocking, their cues... all in all, frustrating stuff. Last night just outright sucked, with tensions running very high among the cast (everyone pretty much just wanted to kill everyone else); as a result, I didn't have especially high hopes for today's two performances. Then the show started... or at least, tried. It had such a rocky start, with lines getting dropped and missed cues. But, after that first scene, it went well. Eerily well.
We got through the first performance, then ate pizza backstage. You could almost see the tension being drained away from the actors' faces. They were joking around backstage, laughing and having a ball like they didn't have a care in the world, which was such a pleasant change of pace from just a few hours prior. They eventually ran just through their lines, hamming it up and ad-libbing wherever they felt like (which is always a sign of relaxation).
The second show was fine, except for the fact that the janitor didn't know the show was going on and just walked right across the stage. Grrrrr.
Anyway, I'm just glad that the ball is finally rolling on this. I have no doubt that there will be finger-pointing, though; this is a fairly political bunch, from what I've gathered. I really couldn't care less if anyone points it at me; I've been doing the best job I can, and given the circumstances, I refuse to take any responsibility for anything that may be awry. Oh well, I'm just going to try to get through this without any finger-pointing, since it's ultimately nothing but unproductive.
The last update of the year for the Lair will be December 13. This will give me plenty of time to do everything that I need to get done (both on the site and in real life) so that I have a lot done for 2005. Yehaw.
What this means for you all, aside from no updates for a few weeks, is that I won't be posting anything that gets submitted to me. I've purposefully pushed back the date a week so that a KOTOR2 review is a possibility (it comes out on the 6th). If you want to write a Review or Rant or anything else, get it to me by December 12 (not the 13th itself) if you want to see it on the site this year.
What this means for me is that I need to bust my butt to get all my half-done content completed. That includes a handful of reviews, a major update to one of the sections that is very under construction (even if I don't get all the content done, I'll upload it incomplete just to get the restructured site up), and touch up a few things here and there, before the major update. The oft-mentioned new Lair section probably won't go up until next year, due to the sheer size of it all; but at the same time, we might get a lot done and release at least some of it.
Of course, the Forums will still remain and you'll be able to post on them just fine; at this point, this will just be an update to the Lair. And since the old content won't be going anywhere, don't worry; I'm just keeping everyone in the loop with what is going on. :)
(EVula Sr. is the name of my tower's hard drive)
Yup, after only a handful of problems, I'm now running OSX 10.3.6 here at home.
Unfortunately, because of those problems (and because of an hour that was shot to hell by spammers on my forums), I'm not going to be able to update anything around the Empire tomorrow; there's just too much left to set up on this machine.
So, I'm finally going to be making the jump from OS9 to OSX this weekend. Hopefully. I finally got a new/used CD-RW drive for my computer; the current one is fairly busted, making it impossible to boot from a CD, as well as other stuff (can't rip MP3s off of CDs on my tower, I have to load them onto my laptop). All I have to do is swap out the old drive for the new one (which isn't fun; I just did the same thing last week to an identical machine at work, which is where this used CD drive came from). Then, once I have a fully-functional CD burner again, I'll start burning backup CDs of everything on my machine, starting with the Empire files (site HTML, Store Photoshop documents, etc), System Folder, email, and Applications.
Once I have absolutely everything backed up, I'm going to pop in the OS X.3 installation CDs that I borrowed from work, and completely wipe and reinstall the operating system. It won't be fun, but it will be thourough. After that, I'll have a dual-booting machine (once I load my old System Folder back in) so I can make the change at a slow pace if I want, but I'll probably try to stick to an all-X operating environment.
Once everything is up and running again, I'll probably get iLife, just so I can start playing around with GarageBand. I've wanted to try it out for the longest time, and I'll finally be able to. Yay! Who knows, maybe I'll start a GarageBand section of the Lair, or start selling music CDs on the store. ;)
Anyway, because of all this computer upgrading, an Imperial update on Monday is up in the air. If things go smoothly, I'll be able to start working on stuff later today, but getting my home computer running is more important than writing a Rant or Review for the Lair, sorry.
I'd also like to congratulate myself for managing to update my blog almost every single day this week. Go me. :)
Heh, I forgot to mention it. :)
So, yesterday I'm driving to work, and it had rained heavily the night before. There's this tricky little stretch of road where it literally zig-zags across (one 45° right turn, then a 45° left turn). I'm coming around the second bend when I hear breaks getting slammed and see a white car starting to head over the yellow median. I immediately try to get myself around the turn; if I had tried to stop right then, either the white car would have hit me head-on, or the car behind me would have slammed into me (which then also could have launched me forward).
Well, good call on my part. I whip right around the bend, but was still treated to a heart-stopping "crunch" sound that I'm certain could have been heard in the Vatican. It was horrible. So, after a bout of medium-to-high-level profanities from yours truly, I got out of my car once I pulled over (and made sure the white car didn't bail on me). I check the back of my car... and then check it again. "Where the hell is the damage? There's some scratched paint... or is that dirt? Oh, no, that's scratched paint. Okay, what the hell caused the sound? Weird."
So I walk back towards the white car, when a cop just happens to pull around the bend. Rolling his window down, he asks if I'm alright. "I guess so..." He pulls in behind me, turns his lights on, and I keep walking towards the old jerk who "hit" me. He's fine, his car's fine, the three of us go back to my car, acknowledge that yes, no real damage was done, and we part ways. I think my exact words to the other driver were "well, have a nice day." The cop seemed to get a kick out of that, for some reason.
So that was my excitement for the week. :)
Up front, I may or may not have mentioned this already: I've got two shows coming up between now and the end of the year. Suicide? I know. Little Women is first, opening the 19th (which means all next week I'll be working on it). The second is Hellcab, which opens on December 3rd (and closes on the 18th). Now, with that out of the way, I can get on with what prompted me to add this entry.
I was planning on going to a Hellcab rehearsal tonight. To be perfectly honest, the only reason I was planning on doing so was to ask out one of the actresses in the show (in my opinion, she's utterly gorgeous). However, rehearsal got cancelled at the last moment, since the director was feeling sick. Well... crap. Next time I'd be able to even come to a Hellcab rehearsal would be the 22nd or, if not then, the 29th. Wha.
Just now, I got an email from the director of Little Women, saying that tomorrow's rehearsal (which I was going to be attending) has been cancelled. Dammit. I'm scheduling my social life around these damn rehearsals, and they're falling out from under me. It's doubly-frustrating when I can't even get in touch with any of my friends (Holly and Olivia, check your damn messages once and a while!), and with my Xbox being dead... grr.
I'm going to be tweaking the layout of evula.com at some point early next year, which means I'm going to start working on it fairly soon. Because of this, I need to know if there's anything you especially like or dislike about the organization and/or layout of the Lair.
I've got my own list of things to get changed (most of which I'm not going to share, of course :P), but I fully realize that sometimes I just don't catch everything.
For those of you that like to be nit-picky, this is your golden opportunity.
Just to let you know, here are a couple of things that I've got on my list (taken from my personal notes, so please excuse the fact that it may or may not make sense):
* Fix footer tables to WIDTH="100%" so I can have fully 50% HR tags
* Ditch HR on sidebar; replace with border CSS
* Supplementary navigation
* Add <new section>
* Finish <existing section>
* Add <new section>
* Finish <existing section>
* Drop WarCraft 3 (?), at least from the sidebar
* Ditch text markers on sidebar; go back to images (totally?)?
* Implement <forthcoming empire service> into <existing section>
Anything else? Anything specifically that you'd like to see?
Today's Empire update is to the Store. Just in time for the holidays, I've added two types of Christmas ornaments. I also cleaned up a bit, removing the Athletic Jersey, which was cancelled a few months ago.
Several things that are getting worked on by yours truly:
I love the Blacklist. I don't think many blog.evula.net members are getting much spam because I've been checking it at least once a day; the difference between me checking the Blacklist and anyone else checking it is that I see everything on everyone's blogs. When a major spam bot hits several blogs, I can clean it all up quickly and easily.
Currently the Blacklist has 2747 entries, and sadly, it grows each day. For those that are curious, you can find the complete Blacklist here. It's pretty funny to look through there.
The only problem with the Blacklist is that I've accidently deleted a couple of posts here and there. There's also no way of whitelisting URLs or people; as a result, I'm constantly seeing Jshei and nemo pop up on my searches. I also accidently added blog.evula.net itself to the Blacklist (one of my own posts was one of the ones I accidently deleted). It isn't as bad now; like I said, I check about once a day, and so all I have to do is search the last 20 comments and I'll get everything recent. It's only when I haven't checked in a while that I end up with tons of results (and when that happens, it's easy to miss a checkbox that needs to be unchecked).
So, yeah, the Lair update was a day late, but hey, at least it's here. :)
A few new things here and there. There's a new Game Review up by SuperNova, and there's a new WarCraft 3 article by whyme. There are also 10 new jokes in the Joke Archive, but more importantly, there are two new categories in the Joke Archive: Gender and Politics. The Gender jokes are culled primarily from the existing jokes, so there are well over 30 jokes in there, but the Political jokes are a bit lacking, with a whopping 4. I'm working on that, though; I've got a couple of people (on both the right and the left) that are going to start forwarding stuff to me; I'd really like to see it fairly even, so I think this will work out well.
Work on the mysterious new section is coming along well. All of the information is outlined, and all that remains is flowing it in. We might even get done by the end of the year! :)
Sorry, but I didn't get quite as much as I'd hoped to get done yesterday, and I (fairly suddenly) have a production meeting tonight. As a result, I'm just going to take an extra day to get the Lair update together.