byte-smasher’s domain

That about sums up my feelings toward this site at the moment.  It shall possibly become of use once my album is done, but for now, it lays wasted. If anyone actually checks back here occasionally to see if I’ve posted, please comment so I know whether it’s worth my time to continue posting occasionally. I’m fairly sure most of the people who would be interested in seeing me post here interact with me on facebook a fair bit as it is.

Facebook. The death of the personal website. My creative energies are falling on blind eyes.

Symptom Checker
Results: 1 cause of Lack of energy AND Runny nose

1. Cocaine abuse
Stimulant drug with various effects…read more »

… I shit you not.

That was scary. Note kiddies: Always backup your websites.

Just in case any of you get a blank page where your Wordpress install should be, check the error page. If it contains “WordPress database error MySQL server has gone away for query” then click here and dont panic

Chances are you need to change the timeout in that file by uncommenting the line with =600 in it.  Apparently Wordpress automatic updates can crash your site whilst trying to update the database because of a misconfigured timeout! Yay!

For those of you that weren’t aware, Loading Ready Run kicks copious amounts of ass. LRR is to Video as  XKCD is to stick figures… well, kinda. Well, not really. But it is some of the best geek humor to grace the flash powered video world, and it hails from Canada’s very own west coast.  It started out as Graham stark and Paul Saunders making silly videos, and has since turned into the geekiest comedy troupe since… well… Monty Python? Were they even trying to be geeky? I’m pretty sure John Cleese has stated he can’t even use a computer… that aside, if you like such geeky things as gaming, or Commodore 64s, Loading Ready Run will probably rock your world… if only for the creative use of pixel fonts on their website.

Without further ado about nothing, here is a segment of their phailtastic fail-news series entitled “the phailhaus”:

[caption id="attachment_136" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Glass factory pwned by foliage"][/caption]

This is moby’s new favorite website. it’s probably been around for ages, but he just recently discovered it.

Many in the geek community will know of the term “Abandonware”, which refers to software that has been abandoned by its developers, and has essentially become morally neutral to pirate as a result. Artificial Owl, however, is a blog about abandoned manmade physical structures. Buildings… artwork… airplanes… even a sea of ship anchors left in a desert. The imagery on this site is absolutely fascinating. It’s like one of those books you find in someone’s bathroom… you know… the ones that result in someone pounding on the door going “Does it really take 2 hours to go for a shit?!?!?!”

http://www.artificialowl.net

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="dead forum is dead... just like sad cat is sad"][/caption]

I’m sad to say, there is absolutely no action on my forums. None. And by none, I mean there is some, but it’s mostly me… and even I am guilty of being a horrible slacker, and lurking not enough.

This would be an issue of great concern in times past, but these days, I know that my self worth cannot be measured simply by my popularity on some website I throw together for the heck of it… if that were the case, sad cat would be a sad, sad cat indeed.

No, I’m better than that… I know that my lack of hawt website action is nothing more than an indication that I have very productive friends who have lives packed with more activities and tasks than normal people could handle. They’d have nobel prizes by now, but they’re just too damned busy to meet with the award committee.

And those that aren’t so busy have become zombie slaves to the evil entity known as “the facebooks”. That’s right, bloggerdom has a new enemy, and it’s face is booklike. It seems that “hooking up with old friends” is now more important than hooking up with old friends. Damn you, friends. Damn you to a room. A room filled with sad kittens and mudkips. I herd u leik mudkips.

So will my forums end up thriving like they did in the hayday of my extended highschool career? The answer, my avid readers, is no. And I shouldn’t take offense to it. I’m simply one person fighting against the interests of many. Simply one cog on a lone gear in the machine called “the blogoblagosphereacube”.

So I initially decided to install Simple Machines Forums 2.0… for who knows what reason really… mainly because http://www.forummatrix.org/ shows it having more features than phpBB. That, and phpBB has known to be insecure as fuck.

But it just occurred to me: SMF is too early in the free software maturity cycle to really provide me with all the cool shit I want. phpBB, on the other hand, has been around long enough to have excellent integration with almost every blog out there including wordpress… it’s got more themes than you can shake a stick at (though I’ll probably end up modding this theme to work with it) … and it’s got an amazing number of plugin mods.

So that’s it. Common sense has struck me right in the forehead. phpBB it is.

That said, I just noticed wordpress is missing a much needed emoticon button.