Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I’m really having problems with my VPS at the moment. It’s been down since I went out last night some time (well that was the last time I had it online, I don’t know when it went down) to just now when I’ve had support bring it back online. Actually they just killed a lot of processes, I brought it back online via SSH. But yeah, it’s screwed and it’s really not good I’ve probably lost a lot of mail, visitors and in the end, revenue which is really not good. It better not start affecting my adverting, I know it’s effecting my traffic. It really needs to get sorted out.

My VPS has been crashing pretty much hourly all day. This sucks, I need to get the load down.

Ok, this is just silly. This is the 5th blog post I have made today and I wanted to keep it minimal today as I didn’t want my recent post, Is my future in application development? to be pushed too far down as I was hoping that one would actually get read and I dared to dream of actually getting people’s thoughts on the subject.

But I’m annoyed and when I’m annoyed I blog. Ok, so it was like an hour ago and Co-op closes at 10:30 on a Sunday so I ran up there as fast as I could and managed to get there before it closed. Only to find they had completely sold out of microchips. Which is what I went there for. Oh well, at least I can drown my sorrows with alcohol. Or at least I could if they hadn’t stopped selling it. The reason? Because they only told it until it said 10:30 on the tills which run faster than the clocks! How BS is that?!?

I’m thinking of killing time with some World of Warcraft now, although I have major patches to download which is BS as well, I just want to go kill some stuff!

It’s coming! Not only have I found out recently that Lostprophets will be releasing a new album soon but the long, long awaited sequel to Billy Talent’s debut is due to be released on June 27th! And I just know it’s going to be good. Plus I’m sure they will play some of their new stuff at gig. I need to learn the lyrics asap when the album comes out so I can sing along to everything at the gig.

Religious moderates are what make up the bulk of each of the major religions today. Generally a religion can be split into two groups – fundamentalists and moderates. This is most commonly seen with Islam although it can apply to any religion, there are plenty of examples in Christianity too and I have no doubt other religions that I simply haven’t had enough exposure to to be able to see clear examples of.

Fundamentalists tend to follow the religion to it’s exact words, they subscribe to it’s a teachings in whole. Moderates however relax the rules in order to fit into society. They don’t follow their holy book as closely. Therein lies the problem.

The fact is a term like Christian moderate or Islamic moderate is just a cover term. For bad Christian or bad Muslim. If you believe in one of the major religions then you believe that there is a god and he wrote (or dicated) the holy text and that we should all follow it. Whereas non-religion people don’t, that is the difference.

A fundamentalist will do this, they will follow the holy text as exactly as they can. A moderate however will not. They pick and choose what is appropriate in our society and what isn’t. What they are essentially asking us to believe is that this all-powerful all-perfect god that wrote the holy book got some of it right and some of it wrong. The all-perfect god that is therefore inherantly incapable of making mistakes didn’t get the holy book quite right and so therefore there are parts of it we should ignore as they don’t work in our society.

That is where the problem lies. When a fundamentalist starts a holy war or burns someone at the stake it’s because they are following their religon. And the reason why the moderate doesn’t do the same is because they aren’t. Of course this isn’t always the case but as a general rule it works quite well. The lesson here? it is the religon at fault because the fundamentalists that are blaimed in these events are only following their religion. They have not being dragged off their path of their faith, it is the religious moderates that have.

As I mentioned in my brief post last night, we went to Oblivion which is a wicked night. I’m stuck in a cycle whereby after Oblivion I think Oblivion is the best night out in Leeds and after Wendy House I think Wendy House is. I’m torn and I think this cycle is going to continue though right now Oblivion was the most recent so I’m going with that.

As usual we have a decent sized line-up, this time consisting of Michelle, Sarann, Fonze, John, Janine, Dani and Claire. After a drink or two in the Old Bar we headed in about 9:45 as it’s £1 in before 10 which is a wicked price so I don’t see why there was a total of about 10 of us in there. It didn’t get massively busy all night though, it’s a really underappreciated event.

Michelle and Sarann went for pizza just after we got in though (and failed to bring us back some!) and left before 12:30 and given Janine and Dani were elsewhere most of the night was me, John, Fonze and Claire rocking out at the far end of the dance floor. The music in Oblivion is so good even if they never play requests. Between us we requested Billy Talent, Gary Numan and Lostprophets, none of which got played.

On to the gossip section. About 2:15 (keeping in mind the event ends at 2:30) we were sat around at the top, Fonze was sat on one of the sofas. Next thing I know some random girl (who I’ve recently learned was named Becky) was sat next to him and then leading him away by the hand. And he went home with her at the end of the night! How did this happen? The student has overtaken the master. I mean, not that, that is is a challenge given that most people are way ahead of me already but I really did not see Fonze overtaking me.

I mean how? He has built up a lot more confidence since myself and Claire have been working on him and he does look a lot more attractive now we have him looking semi-goth with spiked up hair and eye make-up but it’s sooo not fair, why can’t I get used? I would have to struggle with my conscience as to what to do if I was in that situation but it would be nice to have the opportunity.

OMG like did my eyes deceive me or did that actually just happen? Some random (but hot) girl came up and started chatting to him 15 minutes before the end of Oblivion (which was wicked as always) and then led him away and then when we left at the end of the night she led him away again down towards the EB library and away into the darkness. He is sooooo going to get laid. And it’s soooo unfair! Why can’t this happen to me?

John: “Iv’e seen it all, Fonze wandering off with a random lass, amazing, good on him, he’s the man!”

It’s the middle of the afternoon and I am about the make my 4th blog post. Although to be fair I probably won’t make many more today, if any as I will be out all this evening and so won’t get a chance until after midnight. Unless I got to DEC-10 in which case I will probably end up blogging. But what is ironic is that yesterday I thought, right, I’m not going to blog tomorrow. Yet by the time I had gone to bed I had already blogged twice!

Anyway, so yeah, getting down to the post content. I’ve been thinking recently, that perhaps the way forward at least for the foreseeable future is application development with Particle Soft. In recent years, while I’ve worked on it, my main focus has always been running sites and communities and attempting to generate revenue that way.

While being in content has generated me some revenue, I have put a lot of effort in and the return given that amount of effort has not been great. Also maintaining content sites is more of a long haul, do a little everyday type thing. While I have managed this with things like daily celeb news sites, with application development it is something you can just not do for weeks and then attack like crazy for a week when you are really fired up about it which suites me well.

So perhaps I would be better focusing a lot more attention on Particle Soft rather than focusing on my content sites and see where that leads. I do have a business model for it which while it hasn’t really been implemented, has been somewhat developed (I half half a customer system written on the site, it still needs a lot more work but the foundations are there). Although I wasn’t planning in implementing the business model until the scripts were more popular which I think is the next step, bringing more attention to the scripts.

I think given I already have four products out there, one almost ready to release and many others in various stages of development it is something I am going to have to give serious thought to.

I really like the new version of Particle Blogger! So I thought I would post two screenshots. The first is the edit post page of the previous version. The second is the edit post page of the new version. The new admin panel is just soooo much better.

I’ve been talking about the new version of Particle Blogger over on the Particle Soft blog over the course of about a week now although I haven’t really made much in the way of a statement of progress beyond it is going fairly well and could be available fairly soon.

Well, I still don’t want to make any official announcements but I think on my personal blog I can go into more detail without worrying about that.

It’s basically finished. Tomorrow we’re going to upgrade our official blog and do some final testing and if everything works fine it will be released very soon. And it’s going to be a good release too. The admin panel has been major changed to be almost unrecognisable from the old one, save maybe a faint hint of the same colour scheme but it is massively better! Things like error messages, general look and layout, navigation just blow the old system away.