My computer is getting... quirky. For a while yesterday, my extra keyboard buttons (volume control and CD tray) weren't working. I defragged stuff and repaired the hard drive today, and that functionality has returned. However, now Outlook Express (which I still use because I haven't switched over to Mail yet) is working at all.
Right now, I'm seriously looking into getting a new computer. Apple's got some damn good deals on the store, with one in particular tempting me. Specifically, a refurbished 20-inch iMac G5: 2.1GHz, SuperDrive, 250GB hard drive... all for a measly $1,299. If my computer is still acting up this weekend, you can bet your ass that I'll be placing an order on Monday.
Yes, I finally updated the Lair! The new content? Well, just a review of King Kong, but hey, that's a hell of a lot more than has been added in the past six months. :P
Also, the addition that I've been working on for the past few days is finally finished. I'm now an affiliate with MoviePoster.com. As such, I've added a link to every movie review that lets your order a poster of the movie being reviewed. It's an extra (possible) revenue stream for me, but I'm not even going to pretend that it will net me tons of money. Honestly, I just think it rounds out the information on there quite nicely. Also, it lays the groundwork for the information table to add more functionality to pages; this probably makes little to no sense to you now, but once you see what I'll be rolling out on the Lair this year, you'll understand.
For those of you that like to nit-pick, I actually posted this a little after 12AM Tuesday morning; I hit a bit of a technical snag that prevented me from actually posting this on Monday. I just edited the Authored On date. It's only fair, since I had all the new content up on Monday and all...
So tonight, I'll be at the opening night for Metamorphosis. I know everyone in the cast except two people, but more importantly, Molly has a role in it. Huzzah for that.
Saturday, I'll be seeing another show that sports a cast almost entirely consisting of friends.
Sunday, I have a theatre party for my next show, Mother Courage. The show is with one of the bigger theatre companies in town, so I'm pretty psyched about working with them.
Of course, I'll be working on Monday's update in my spare time. I made absolutely zero progress last night, but I'm not terribly worried about it.
Looks like it, though it's more accurate to say that it is a trojan horse. There's a topic on it over on the Ambrosia boards, for those that are curious.
Is the sky falling? Not quite. In the roughly five years that OSX has been out (seven years, if you want to get technical), this is the first actual bit of malware. No Windows user can make that claim. Not only that, but we don't have spyware, and can run our machines 24/7 outside of firewalls; do that with a PC and begging for a paperweight. :)
I'm curious to see Apple's response to this "threat."
What I'm working on for Monday's update is proceeding at a nice little clip, although it is taking a bit more time than I initially thought it would (that would be because the site I just affiliated the Lair with doesn't make it easy to rip images off their site). I'm about a third of the way through the movies, then I move on to the music.
As I'm telling Cha0s right now, this will just be a small content update; a review or two, some tweaks to the Reviews (which is what I'm talking about above), maybe some quotes. I talked to Pikeman last night, and he's apparently got a Rant in the works; if he gets it to me by Monday, it'll get added as well.
I hope you and yours have had a good V-Day. If you're single, you can look forward to buying tons of cheap candy tomorrow. ;)
Not quite a Lair update, but I did update my personal site a bit. Specifically, my list of Xbox games and shows that I've done.
A cheap excuse for an update? You bet! It also gave me a half-decent reason for a blog entry (since I've got nothing else going on in my life right now), which makes 8 posts in a row. Hot diggity damn.
The stuff I was planning to get done didn't, for various reasons. Partly because I opted to play Battlefront 2 with Courtney and Bryan, partly because... actually, no, that's pretty much the reason.
That said, if I have another week to do stuff, I won't be so rushed, can make sure everything actually works, etc., which leads to a much more relaxed Emperor, which is the most important thing (remember, the more relaxed I am, the less probable it is for me to send out the execution squads!).
Also, this is my 7th straight blog entry. I can't remember the last time I was posting this consistently... maybe I'm going for a decent average, and posting en masse for the two solid months I ignored the blog altogether. :)
So I wake up this morning and jump on the computer to check the level of spam (yes, I work on the Empire the moment I wake up; apparently I have nothing better to do). Son of a bitch, there's 2,500+ comments on my blog (as opposed to the 710 I had when I went to bed). Apparently the spam bots had a field day while I was sleeping.
It's sort of funny though, since it was only my blog that was hit, as far as I can tell (so far).
However, it's still pretty frustrating that I have to take care of this all the damn time. I might be switching blog.evula.net over to another system sooner than I thought, just so I can have some free time to work on the Lair...
I just deleted 22 blogs that had 0 entries. Considering the average age of these blogs was an entire year, I figure no one will be terribly surprised if they try logging in and can't. I'll deal with the blogs with only a handful of posts at some other point.
I have successfully vanquished the spam on blog.evula.net. This doesn't mean it is entirely gone; of course there will be the constant barrage that I'll be contesting with, and there are still a few scattered spam posts here and there, but on the whole, most of it is gone. I estimate that I've deleted somewhere around 8,000 comments, and 6,000 pings. I'll be spending some time Saturday killing some more.
Hopefully this weekend will allow me to get some work done on the first evula.com update of 2006. Nothing crazy; just a review or two. The determining factor, though, will be what else I've got planned; Saturday is my 2-month anniversary, and if I can spend time with Molly, I'll opt for that over the Lair.
Something else I want to do with Monday's (possible) update is add a bit of pizzazz to the Reviews. I've had this idea floating around my head for a while, but lacked an internet connection; I have found that it's really difficult to get online to get images and links when you don't have an ISP. And they say technology has advanced... Anyway, the update will provide me with another way to make money off the Reviews. It isn't anything crass; trust me, I don't want to stuff up my website with ads out the wazoo (and I'll never have pop up/unders). I think you'll agree with me when you see what I'm talking about; it'll actually add a bit of functionality to the Reviews, which is the most important thing to me.
Once all this spam stuff and update are behind me, I'd like to start discussing (with pretty much anyone who will listen) some of the things that will change on evula.com in 2006. I brought my laptop with me to the theatre tonight; I've got long stretches of time, so I figured I could get some Lair work done between scenes. I was able to tweak the front page so that it better matched what I had planned, but doing creative coding like that on my laptop is horrible inefficient; I could have done the same thing in half the time on my tower. I think I'll just read a book tomorrow and Saturday (with a review of it coming soon).
I'd like to point out that I've somehow managed to post to this blog for four days straight. This is a terribly impressive marathon for me, but don't expect me to keep doing it; eventually life will dwindle back to it's usual mundane nature, and I'd rather have high-quality posts than mindless drivel.
I'm still clearing out spam; I've been doing this since Sunday, but at least I've made some fairly good progress. I'm down to 2,805 comments in my own blog (from a maximum of 6,000).
Part of the problem is that a lot of the spam is really old; right now, I'm scanning the past 2,000 comments, and only 57 hits came up. Currently, I've narrowed down my spam searching to just my blog, as it is the worst off of the entire system (probably because it's the most linked-to). Once I get several thousand of my own comments out of the way, it'll be easier for me to search-and-destroy the spam on the other blogs.
I've gotten a couple of other blog.evula.net members to de-spam their own blogs for me, which has really helped.
The other thing I've been doing is closing up the comments for not only my old posts, but other people's, too. Have no fear, those-who-actively-use-their-blogs; I'm not modifying your posts. I'm talking about blogs that have 4 entries, but those are a couple of years old. Once all this crap is finished, I'll be emailing people and deleting the innactive blogs. I've already got the green light to trash a couple of old ones, but for right now, I'm just closing them up (so they can't get worse) and manually harvesting the older spam URLs.
Once all this is taken care of, I'll be (a) investegating an alternative to MT 2.64 (either the latest version of MT, which will cost money, or the free alternative of WordPress), and (b) starting to post more about my actual life and plans for the Empire.
I'm still sorting through literally tons of spam (don't hurt your brain trying to figure out how digital information could have physical weight), but I did get the comments feature working again. I reserve the right to turn it back off again, though, if spam starts slipping through as I'm trying to clear out everything.
There's a lot of spam on blog.evula.net. So much so that it is difficult to get it all. I'm slowly churning through everything, adding new addresses as I come upon them, but it's slow going (I already accidently deleted a comment from Leah about rent; I didn't realize it until I saw squibix.net on the list of sites to add). I've already gone from 6000 comments to 4790.
For those of you with blog.evula.net accounts, just hose down your blog with the de-spammer, and it'll take a bit of the workload off me.