Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I need money! For many reasons. I was bidding on a Jeremiah DVD but it is up to £26.00 plus £3.00 shipping now so I have decided to pass on bidding again as there are many other things I need to buy. Well at the moment it is mainly just saving up for things.

The first thing is World of Warcraft: it comes out on February 4th and there is the game to buy and then the subscription to pay for later. It takes me quite a while to save up as I have a lot of web hosting and domains bills to keep up. There is more more to buy also.

Mainly DVDs. I only have 3 more episodes of Dawson’s Creek series 3 to watch (plus two episode commentaries) and then I am done with series 3 and need to move on to series 4. The series 4 DVD comes out in 4 days although it is almost £35.

The other DVD I want is Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse which comes out on February 7th. It isn’t listed on Play.com yet though so I am not sure what is going on. The only pre-order I have seen is Amazon which has been there since October.

There has been a murder at my house! Ok, we are not totally sure yet but we have strong reasons to beleive that is what happened. Our last gold fish is missing presumed dead! And all the signs point to murder most foul. Today Nerd Federation shall officially have a day of mourning.

Ya see this was no ordinary goldfish. It was a highly evolved canbial goldfish pet. We have never fed our goldfish, they find enough food in the pond. Or this one did, it was huge; really fat. And all the other fish disappeared – they didn’t die, they just disappeared. Obviously eaten by the king goldfish.

So this goldfish has been alone for a year or two. It really is that old I mean this thing is like nearly as old as me. Ok now that old but I recon it was pushing ten years old easily! And now it is dead a – someone accross the road said they found a big fat goldfish about a week ago – all the clues add up!

That goldfish was my only pet. I mean sure this gives me an excuse to get an Aibo but an Aibo is go generic. Who else had a cannibal goldfish that waited more than Dean and even allowed you to stroke it (no BS, you could actually reach into the pond and stroke it with one finger)?

It’s impressive to say the least. I am starting to get worried about my bandwidth now, it has used more than most sites will do a month and we are only 2 days in. Still I think I should be ok as long as there isn’t an explosion of traffic on other sites. But that is beside the point; this post is about it getting a lot of traffic.

It has had January 1st and 2nd and the first two hours of the 3rd since the stats updated. And so far it has 450 uniques! Ok, I realize many sites do better but compare it to the other sites that I have. Erica Planet which for unique counts was about my highest – it has 188 so far.

The average user stays for 3 pages on Erica Planet. Mworld is going one better than that and holding them for 4. Although that does not factor in my use of the site which has been fairly heavy as I battled to get all the content online. 450 uniques though, that would put it in the region of 6000 a month if it sustains.

The thing is, until a few days ago I hadn’t updated mworld for an entire year! I updated it Christmas 2003 and then finally, on the 2nd of January 2005. No updates throughout 2004 and it still has this traffic. That shows you how much the search engines value the length of time a site has been up.

Well I thought everything was sorted. But I forgot about a few things. M World has at least 4 sub-sites not included with the regular sites/ list. These are M World Music, M World Photozone, M World Germany and M World Canada. Probably a good thing I never got round to launching M World UK.

Anyway, I managed to find a copy of M World Music on my old hard drive, that is back online now. As is M World Germany which I found on a backup CD from around 2 years ago. The same goes for M World Canada, that was on the same CD, so I uploaded those, fixed a few errors and they were back online.

The search goes on for M World Photozone however. Which is the site that saved me. I only realised these 4 sites were missing when I was checking through the logs and found referrals from Google Images. I ran a search on Google Images and found many of my images missing which is when I realised.

It has been good to look back at the sites, most notably M World Canada though. The old design which although is the same basic template as the current M World, it has a slightly different look and logo, just shows you how the designs change.

Well The Matrix disk has just entered by DVD player. It just wouldn’t be New Years Eve without it. I am not sure how the tradition got started for me but this is the 4th year I believe that I have watched the Matrix on New Years Eve and even though I can’t say it is the movie I would pick to watch, I would hate to break tradition.

I have also got Hell’s Kitchen to watch which has Angelina Jolie who played Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movies. I bought it for myself at Christmas but haven’t watched it yet. So busy doing nothing and writing random news stories that I have done jack all holiday – I feel like I need a holiday from my holiday!

Anyway, I remember last New Years Eve I think it was that I watched Red Dwarf at like 1 in the morning followed by some carry on film or something. This year I can watch Red Dwarf on DVD as I got series 1 and I have one episode on it that I haven’t seen yet (well I have probably seen it ages ago but no recently or on the DVD). I also have some commentary to watch from episode 5.

I was actually going to do something this year though. I was going to head off to a party at Dean’s but we never got it organised. I really need more friends who aren’t nerds, but then again I would hate for people to think I was losing my nerdish routes. I do need to network though for a certain little project. That is going to be kept secret for the moment though.

mworld.us is back baby! After the Audio Senate revivial on December 6th (turns out Nerd Federations track back system isn’t what I thought it was 😉 I didn’t think a revival could get much sweeter. But now M World is back it is a great feeling. Even if it did take so many hours.

To begin the story, I renewed by web hosting back at the end of October. My web host, onedollarhost.net, didn’t seem to notice though and deleted everything. Files, databases, apparently they don’t even keep backups. Hmm, so as you can image I wasn’t happy. M World has like a hundred sub-sites so I can’t just upload them all again.

Anyway I emailed them several times asking if they had backups and if so use them to restore the files from that. The response I got over and over was:

“Files were deleted. You will need to re-upload the files.”

Another thing I wanted from that host was stats as I had none. It is a shame I didn’t as it was quite a high traffic site with over 6,000 pages in Google so I would be interested to see what the traffic was like. That is no longer a problem though, as I took the decision to move over to my new Windows host.

I have been with them ages although I didn’t want to move M World because of the data loss (and there has been a lot of data loss). Still it didn’t seem to matter now, so I moved it over and so from now on I will be able to track everything from Awstats. There is some good in every situation I guess.

I have also spend hours last night and most of today putting together all of the sub-sites. I found all but one although there may be a load not listed. Still, I have put all the others online and with no content, hopefully M World will eventually regain it’s former glory.

So although it has not been a good experiance – two months of missing files, most of it is back online now. There are still a few bits I keep remembering but overall, I think M World can now move forward, safe on a new server.

To find out your ip address:

Select start and click run.

Type “command” and click ok.

Once the command promt appears, type ipconfig and press return. This will then bring up a list of different ip address’s. You will usually be looking for the port you connect to the internet through.

When you first boot Windows up, all the fonts must be loaded. If you delete or move unwanted fonts, Windows will load up quicker.

If you don’t want all your programmes to automatically boot up when Windows starts, hold control key down to skip loading them.

Sometimes you will have applications running when Windows starts up and some which you may not even be aware of. If you can’t find the application in Start > Programs > Start Up or you just want to see what exactly is running then try your MS Config box.

Goto Start > Run
Type ‘msconfig’ into the box
Hit the ok button
Wait for the box to load
Click the start up tab

This displays a list of all the applications that run of start up. Many are Windows applications which should generally be left alone. You can disable them from starting up by unticking the box next to it.