October 14th, 2005  ·   Life Update Wow, I suck. I need to quit letting this page go by without updates for so, so long. Lot's of stuff has happened in the past year and three months. Let's see... milestones, milestones: the first would be the start of EverQuest II, I suppose. That was mid November 2004. Tina and I started playing at the dawn of the game's launch and were instantly hooked. Addicted, very badly, I'd say to be honest. We've had a lot of terrific times in EverQuest II, but really spent far more time than we should have playing, neglecting responsibilities and each other for more than a year now. That's a lot of what contributed to us splitting apart, really. I can't blame the game, but I definitely blame that the problems we had and didn't focus on finally reached untolerable limits as a result of spending far too much time in a pretend world. Ah, the follies of life that we learn from, eh? So, officially, ten days ago now Tina and I decided that our relationship is over and done with. So I may be moving again... soonish. Not sure where or when. I hate moving... I hate uprooting, I hate re-adjusting, I hate leaving behind shed shells of my life and attachments asundered. I've done it far too many times. The statistics on it, I've read, are that the average American moves seven times in his/her life. I'm in the twenties, personally. I really miss Colorado and the beautiful outdoors there... the fresh mountain air and the snow. If I had to choose, I'd try to move back there, though the cost of living is exceptionally high. A great, long-term friend of mine invited me to stay with her and her boyfriend for a while if I need too. She's so great -- I hate to take advantage of a "gotta move" bail-out when I'm not sure how long I'd need to get ready to move to a more permanent place, but I just may. God bless her heart. She also paid for an expensive trip to DisneyWorld for me and Tina to hang out with her. I hate that I couldn't pay her it all back, but I can't say I let that ruin the vacation for me. That was about a month ago now. Man, I had a blast. The ride lengths were SO short everywhere, so even though we were only there in the parks for two days, we got to do everything AND MORE than Tina and I did last year when we had four days (okay: three, it rained heavily one of those days). I also had a close encounter with death about two months ago, right when Hurricane Katrina hit our town (great timing). I was out doing some yardwork with Tina late in the evening and must have got bitten by a mosquito. Apparently they can carry several virii and while most people (80%, statistically) have no reaction and never know they've been infected, some people (19%) have minor-flu like symptoms. Me, on the other hand, had a case that's very rare where it hit me hard. I was infected with viral meningitis, which infects the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal column. My physician said that in his twelve years of practice, he'd only seen one other case like mine. I made a full recovery within a few days, but it was very scary. At first I just started forgetting how to do things, but inside of an hour, I couldnt use my right arm anymore, I couldn't talk, etc. But I'm fine now and none the worse off for it. Well, except maybe a tiny patch of hair on my arm that hasn't grown back in yet. First time having an I.V. in me. In fact, it was the first time for a lot of stuff at a hospital, including spending nights there, being in the I.C.U., having all kinds of tests done on me like E.E.G., C.A.T. scan, M.R.I., spinal tap, etc. They weren't able to re-grow the virus from the spinal fluids they got from the tap, so they couldn't determine the particular brand of meningitis, but it's likely that it was West Nile. That's it for now. Will write more later as stuff progresses. Ciao! July 23rd, 2004   ·   System Upgrades Rich and I (my business partner) were able to draw some extra funding recently, which we're using to purchase new and upgraded server equipment with. Actually, he's purchasing a whole new server and keeping his old server as his personal PC -- I'm upgrading my personal PC and Tina's since we already have a dedicated server with decent hardware. We'll be using Tina's old machine to help handle some of the services that the dedicated server manages, such as acting as a fileserver for LAN and FTP, and possibly our website too. We'll see how it holds up. I compiled a summarized specification list for both my PC and my server over the years, including the new upgrades we purchased. Take a look! July 14th, 2004   ·   Return From DisneyWorld Well it was a long vacation, but well worth it. We drove down from Birmingham, Alabama to Orlando, Florida, taking as many back-road highways through Georgia as possible. The trip down took us 12-13 hours and the return trip about 11, but next time I'm sure we can trim it down even more. Excluding days spent driving, we vacationed in Disney for four awesome days and it was well worth whatever we spent. Tina got to meet my parents for the first time, which went well. Tina took a bajillion pictures on this trip like you would not believe. Pictures everywhere. You can check them out at www.CaffeineAndPizza.com/Disney. She also got to spend her birthday (July 11th) at Disney too, so it worked out really great for us. But now we're back and it's time to mow on through the programming fields... back to the grindstone! May 25th, 2004   ·   Where The Hell Have I Been Everyone else has one, figured I should too: Create your own personalized map of the USA or write about it on the open travel guide. This will expand a bit this summer, when we drive from Alabama to Florida (DisneyWorld) and will cross into a few states along the way. May 23rd, 2004   ·   DisneyWorld My mom (who lives in California and I'm in freaking Alabama) wants to come visit this summer, so we were all (her, me, Tina, and my stepfather) thinking of taking a trip to Orlando, Florida and going to Epcot Center, Disney-MGM Studios, DisneyWorld, etc. Cool, yes? I've been to DisneyLand about a dozen times, but never to DisneyWorld. We just back from some errands. Man I blew a load of carbs today. Barq's root beer, huge Quizno's sub sandwich, Mt. Dew Code Red. Suck! Oh well, gotta live life ;) Been playing a lot of StarCraft Brood War lately. I always use cheat codes (at least BLACK SHEEP WALL/map view), but it's still fun. I also plopped into Diablo II: Lord Of Destruction for a few minutes so my characters don't auto-delete, but lost interest after about 10 minutes. Check out me and Tina's Diablo II page at www.CaffeineAndPizza.com/DiabloII. I've been trying to support Tina's beaded jewelry habbit lately. She has taught me how to make a few designs too and it's something to pass the time while watching TV, so it's not all bad. Check out some of our creations at www.Glitterer.com. Working on two other pet projects. If I get anywhere with them, I'll post their addresses too. ;) May 23rd, 2004   ·   Living Life Man I didn't mean to let this journal go for so long without an update. Oops. Been working overtime on Eaxia Online (www.eaxia.com), pounding out some much-needed releases, fixes, and command additions. We've recently had a huge influx of new players and in the past four months, our playerbase and gameplay rate has risen 522%. Needless to say, things have been crazy busy. Besides that, I've been on a diet recently. Those of you who don't know me, I'm a bit chubby. Got a little extra junk in my trunk. Trying to lose a good amount of weight by the end of the year. Down 15 pounds so far (in 3 weeks), so I'm pretty happy about that. Doing it Atkins style more or less... mostly just low-carbing it. In animal life: I moved my lonely five-lined skink in with my eight anoles. He seems much happier in there. I also moved my tank to a better position (across the room) to improve both light and the noise quality (farther away from my desk). We also set up a newt tank recently with eight fire-belly newts and a eastern newt. At least 3-4 of the fire-bellies died (two crawled out, two are just missing). Damned things! But they're cute. My fancy guppy tank suffered the loss of one of the males, leaving two females and a lonely male. He just got old I think. I also moved them off my desk to the spot directly behind my desk (where the anoles were). A few weeks later, an explosion of little guppy babies filled the tiny five-and-a-half gallon tank, so that's fun. I rebuilt my PC to Windows XP Home Edition to try it out. It was difficult to adjust to from 2000 at first, but I managed for a bit. There's a few things that really piss me off: the Explorer and Find - Files utilities are horrible, services and other control panel applets are difficult to find and use, and networking is kind of a pain. More so than 2000 anyway. And now, I.E. has this recent habit of not keeping me logged into websites anymore. So, I'll probably be switching back to Windows 2000 soon. I haven't seen any improvements in games or anything else in XP, in fact, BearShare (P2P) tends to run like shit on XP. So screw it. Helped my mom out with some computer problems. Took about 5-6 hours in total, but apparently her husband (my step father) had so much spyware and adware that it took AdAware Pro 3 sweeps of nearly 500 total detected objects to clear it out. They should be in decent shape now, but my god... how do you let something deteriorate to that level? Few points of interest I've stumbled across recently... First, there's a pretty sweet Flash program someone built that lets you combine different punk-style music bits together to create your own punk songs. It's called Punk-O-Meter and you can check it out at http://2flashgames.com/f/f-548.htm. I've made seven songs so far, but here are my two favorites. Let me know what you think: ------------99960---0---553---09------------99960---0---3---3---8-------9--------------------8---2---3---2---2---2-----------8-- -2-----2---2-----------------b------------3-7-1-------------2---5---2---5-3-7-1-----a-----2---5-2-5-2-5-2-3-7-1---------------- 88881--81--81--81--83---5-1--81--81--8889-9-9-----9----------------------------------0-0-0---0---0---0---0---------0---0---0---- -0---c-b------------------------------------7---------007-007---777-007-007-007-4-5-4------------------------------------------ (To play them, go to Load and paste the above, one song at a time, into the text area) Also, I came across this in my website browsing. I was simply amazed. Nothing can prepare you for it, either: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=e9744d33e932f0de0ec1d35d23523a44&threadid=830487&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 There's more to be said... I really did put off updating for way too long... but it'll have to wait for later. Enjoy! February 19th, 2004   ·   Weekends Suck Weekends used to be great. You'd stay home from work and just lounge around all day. Now it's all about squeezing every last minute of time out of ther weekend to run errands and handle game problems (that's when everyone else is around and they need help), etc. I haven't had a relaxing weekend in so long... Ah well. This weekend I worked on the game engine (Eaxia), set up hosting for a new domain, fixed a few script bugs (Eaxia), ran an event for the royal family (Eaxia), spent three hours introducing the evil god Khal (Eaxia), almost made this pathetic guy cry at this Itallian place we sometimes eat at, did our rounds of cricket-buying and other pet needs (oh yah, and groceries for us too), moved furniture (couches), organized a staff meeting, and ate cereal (the most important part). For those of you who don't know me and think I must be a sadistic bastard about the kid working at the Italian place -- it was his fault, and I'm kidding about almost making him cry anyway. He and this other kid practically run the small place for their grandfather (they're not related, but I forget which of them is the grandson and which one isn't, so for the purpose of this story, we'll say 'their' grandfather) and they're always at each other's throats for comic relief. One guy just had a kid and the other has no girlfriend. A recent comment he made was that "it's great to be single!" until he made another comment about having been at a restaurant by himself on Valentine's Day. All I said was "still love being single?" and got "bite me" before he wandered off. Ahhh, isn't it great to NOT be single? That started the day off on the right foot, I must say, despite having to have moved furniture earlier that morning. Okay, you're right -- I'm a sadistic bastard. But it was still funny to see something blow up in his face, him realize it, then walk off muttering to himself. That's what he gets for asking us eight times if Tina and I are married yet. February 19th, 2004   ·   Yawn Busy day, but I've been tired since the moment I dragged myself out of bed, so it probably only seems that way. Had a weird dream about flying a space ship and giving out alien technology whereby a block/cube of cheddar cheese tasted both like cheese and mango (mmm mango). But the citizens of Earth couldn't stop fighting over it and so I had to take it away. But then I woke up, so who knows what would have happened. Mmm now I want mango. January 30th, 2004   ·   Moved Wow, lots of stuff has happened! I moved (to Alabama... ew), ate Thanksgiving turkey, celebrated Christmas, and am back at the Eaxian grindstone again (as if I would ever stop). I don't have a whole lot to say for the moment, but this page needed an update, so here it is. By the way: blueberry bagels rock. August 16th, 2003   ·   New Video Card Mmm. Got a new video card today: nVidia GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 4x 64 MB DDR. <drools> Horizons looked pretty nasty without it. Horizons is a game I'm beta testing from Artifact Entertainment. I'm not much on graphical R.P.G.s, least not for the long run, but this one's not half bad -- plus playtesting is free while it's in beta, so who can complain, right? I play a Dragon Healer for now. I probably won't play the live game, but it's given me a lot of great ideas. Here's my dragon: And casting a spell: There are more screen shots from Horizons, the world of Istaria, here: CLICK ME August 15th, 2003   ·   Me Time Welcome! This is my page. About me. A little self-centered, it would seem, but I'm not that bad. I figured that I've been designing websites over the past five years and should probably have one of my own, so here it is finally.