Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I actually reached the status three days ago but never got round to posting about it. The important thing is though that I have now hit the million mark – I have over $1,000,000 on Vice City :D. Sure I will probably never go on the game again (although I did go on today which is what jogged my memory) and the amount has no real meaning but who cares.

Today has been quite a medium paced today. It is raining yet again so I decided not to head out, or so far I have decided to do that anyway. Although there is plenty to do inside and even if not and I get really bored I can resort to getting my digital camera out and uploading all those pictures I said I would so weeks ago.

In other random news I currently have two websites I am working on. One of which is going to be a collaboration between myself and JD although the project is still in quite early stages. I have done the basic page design with some cool News.com style JavaScript menus though :).

I just finished updating Worfolk News, the latest story is that Apple’s AirPort Express has been cracked. So much for Apple’s strangle hold on the market, first Real increase compatability and now  this. Isn’t it great the way everything gets broken down and destroyed. Even I am not sure if that is sarcastic or actually want I mean :?.

It’s still raining outside – yesterday saw unstoppable rain that went on for hours. We went out for a meal and after a long decision I decided not to bring my digital camera – wrong move. The round-a-bout next to the pub we were at had water over a foot high and the field next to the car park burst, leaving a big lake where the exit used to be.

The staff had lots of fun trying to get the cars out plus we got a load of free stuff too. On the downside, it’s still raining and I can’t say I want to go out in the rain. Maybe blue sky and sun will appear in the next four minutes, ya never know in this country. Whatever happens though I need to show off my new purchase!

I have more to comment on though. Although I’m not quite sure what it is. I have my driving theory test coming up on Tuesday and then on the Thursday my AS results come out. Should be a fun week.

Last night I got a good nights sleep or once. Well part of one anyway. Ya see, last night I actually turned my laptop off. This had two advantages, the first being that when I awoke to turn it on today it was cool when I touched it rather than the usual almost too hot to rest your hands on. The second advantage being that I need not have to try and sleep with the fan blasting out all night.

I say part of one though as I didn’t get to sleep until 1 am, and it should have been 2 am. Last night I watched LA Superhomes, One Tree Hill and Nip/Tuck until 11:10 when I turned it over to BBC1 to watch Oliver Stone’s JFK, choosen over Red Dwarf. It goes on for 3 hours though! And by 1 I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.

I guess this will give me an excuse to buy the DVD though :D. As a side note I am currently rewriting this – ie, the version you are reading is the rewriten version as yet again pLog lost my post due to authentication problems. It seems there is no way to recover lost posts either. But anyway what else is news? Well yesterday I spent my time at the skatepark with James. That has provided some interesting stories that will fill another post.

Also my efforts to video tape every episode of Dawson’s Creek continue but at the moment E4 are showing series 5. I really need series 3 or 4 as I am planning to buy series 2 on DVD but that still leaves me with a 2 series gap and I want to watch them all in order. It’s a hard life.

Despite the freedom of summer, a steady routine appears to have developed none the less. Each day when I wake it is time to update Branch Planet and a few other websites that need constant attention such as Worfolk News and TV Forge. And of course, check my emails. Something I used to hide away from but now I am staying on top of surprisingly.

>Today has a slightly different format, however. I am heading off to the Works skatepark with James to continue the skate video. I managed to clear two hours of tape space ready for the event so we should be able to get loads of footage. Well providing there is enough interesting stuff to video and the battery holds out.

As for editing the footage, my PCMCIA firewire card arrived yesterday and is now providing me with 3 full size 6 pin firewire ports. The mini port on the back of my laptop is now pretty much unusable due to my cable being messed up and because I now have so many wires running behind my laptop now that I have more extras and a new multi-socket to fit them all in.

As for Google News I am still nervously waiting to hear back from them.

Watching Cheers at the moment. It has been raining all morning which sucks as I need to go out this afternoon and tomorrow. But that is enough filling out space. I finished migrating Worfolk News over to the Linux server and I was thinking, now it has a remote MySQL server we could offer some mirror sites. It would probably require more domains :D.

Anyway so today was a big day. Today saw the submittence of Worfolk News for inclusion of Google News. I havn’t been able to reach the site for days now, I don’t know if it’s my ISP or what although I know it isn’t my computer. My anyway they were emailed from Worfolk Online so hopefully the site should be included.

So far we have got an automated response:

Thank you for your suggestion. We will review this source for inclusion
in
Google News.

We appreciate your support as we work to
improve Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

Looking good so far. I will keep everyone posted.

Today is a good day – I logged onto my Google AdSense account earlier this morning to discover I had earnings! After I started running the ads on TV Forge, I have so far had two clicks and earned around $0.06. Not exactly loads I know but when you consider that TV Forge only had one hundred page views yesterday it’s not too bad.

Hopefully with more episode guides and news, etc I should be able to wip up more traffic and make real earnings. If the ads do well I may also extend them to Emo Movies and Worfolk News. Although Fallen Nation will be sticking with the good old system of classic graphical ads.

As for what I am going to spend my newfound riches on, I am not really sure. I might be forced to bid on a Dawson’s Creek boxset today as I need one for my media project (yeah, that’s the reason ;). Although I am a long way off, I also fancy a new MP3 player but that is something else to complain about in the next paragraph.

Of course the obvious choice is an iPod. But I can name 6 reasons why it’s not suitable for my needs. One of them being I don’t want it to skip when I am jogging – they can claim it won’t all they want, a hard drive spinning at the speed they do these days is not mean’t to be violently shaken. Also I want to be able to swap around the memory so I want a DS / MMC based one – and I can only find one on Amazon!

I realise this is close to my first post but I have quite a few ideas I wanted to get down which are fading fast. My working title is of course relating to Channel 4’s showing of the movie She’s All That last night. When I get round to it I think I will be posting it on Emo Movies. It’s probably not going to make the homepage though, I have Shawshank Redemption to feature when Coyote Ugly has had enough.

Yesterday did see some productivity despite the internet outage (well the combined problems with my connection and the web hosting being down). I get several sites updated and fixed the problems with Maze Radio. You can now listen to all seven of the shows that we have so far recorded!

I need to have a good moan about MP3 players sometime too, that’s on my to do list. Though of course many of the ideas that could make Nerd Federation posts, do not as because they are so crazy, we tend to forget them before reaching the site.

One other thing I did want to mention is that I kind of went shopping on eBay again. Preparing for a skate video shoot this Wednesday with James, I bought a PCMCIA card to give me some new Firewire ports as the mini firewire port on the back of my laptop has gone. It was weird though as PayPal still had my old eBay username and didn’t update it when I updated it on eBay. So much for intergration.

I didn’t manage to get on and post at all yesterday, though that’s not though lack of topics. Some of the connections that our webhost uses got DDOS attacked so the IP’s has to be null routed for most of the day – leaving Nerd Federation, Branch Planet the new version of Worfolk News and several other sites offline. When they did come back online they were hideously slow.

I spent most of the night getting Worfolk News back online. The database is still in Windows server due it not requring to setup access hosts and because many other sites are set to loo there. But the main site is now on the Linux server. Hopefully Worfolk News can get included into Google News this month. After all it does have stories posted daily most of the time.

What else is going on then? It’s currently pelting it down with rain. I need to make it to Crossgates sometime today which isn’t looking too hopeful. I have several pictures and posts that I want to make that I will get round to eventually. As soon as I get all my thoughts out of the way.

I think I set the timer right to adjust for the sever location but anyway it is 8 am here. It feels like 6-7 though as when I first woke up I was wasted. Not sure why, I wasn’t up that late. I signed off messenger about 11:30 and watched the last 20 mins of She’s All That (well I watched it all, just the last 20 mins I was in bed). Then I read though an ASP.Net tutorial. Not the smartest thing to do at near midnight but I got some good information ;).

I am going to write some more articles for Cool Forge I think. Once I get my head around ASP.Net properly, I will write a first steps type article as I found it really confusing so I am guessing there are others in my situation. I mean ASP is my main scripting language and I still found it confusing. It looks simple enough when explained though.

This first paragraph you can skip if you are familiar with Google AdSense. I’m not too sure how well know AdSense is outside of the webmaster community so I thought I better mention it here. After Google launched AdWords, the boxes on the right of your search results that people pay for they decided to expand – Google AdSense was born, allowing webmasters to put AdWords adverts on their websites and get paid.

That’s the basics out of the way, now for the story. I was excited about AdSense when it first came out. Though Google rejected Audio Senate, they did accept Fallen Nation into the programme. So I logged and and added the code to the site, then sat back and waited for the revenue to roll in. But it never did. I served around 50,000 ads and made something like $0.20.

I had soon scrapped AdSense. Though logging into my account the other day I realised I must have it in circulation somewhere. But that isn’t the point – the point is I got rid of almost of all it, it earned me no money. The problem was that Fallen Nation is an online gaming site – very little content. So, finally after months of not using AdSense I decided to give it a chance of TV Forge.

TV Forge is very content based – the average page has over 500 words on it, with the episode guides ranging from 500 to over 1,000 words per page so Google has plenty on track onto. Hopefully then, this time I will get plenty of good ads (the ads I have seen seem nice and relevant in most cases) and if successful I will extend the tests to Emo Movies too.

Well I had to watch it. If for nothing else than being able to make jokes about the people who rescheduled their entire lives around Big Brother. Not that Big Brother is anything specially, many other shows could and do provide such fixation. But Big Brother was geared for it – almost 24 hour coverage on E4 and complete coverage online allows your live to disappear into the show addication.

Anyway more on the social commentary at some later point in my life. If for some reason you don’t know what the result was and are waiting then you will probably not want to click the more link. Still, I am guessing pretty much everyone will want to know. Of course my mum on holiday will so I am seriously tempted to make something up :D.

I guess deep down we all knew Nardia was going to win – in reality it is not like it was close so the tension built around was false.  If this year has shown us anything though it that it is likely to get eviler, tackier and with more characters in next year until the show finally dies a long and drawn out death.

Hmm, depressing and down beat I know but that’s the truth. I mean there are few shows that end with dignity, either drawn out or on the other side prematurely canceled. Endings like X-Files, Fraiser and to quite an extent Friends are welcome in today’s network executive ruled culture even if it does mean the show ending.