Some of the earliest memories I have of computer gaming look like this:

On the top, we have Ultima IV, and on the bottom we have Autoduel (based on the Steve Jackson pencil and paper RPG “Car Wars”). Both were games I played for an amazing number of hours, and both games had such rich and vibrant story lines, I wish someone would bring them back to life. I think both types of games would be perfect for Xbox Live arcade titles…

Wondering why all my sites were down for most of the weekend? Just when I thought our significant down-time days were behind us, something crazy happens:

“An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. According to The Planet’s website, at about 5 p.m. Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost. The Houston company, which provides servers for small and medium sized companies, said it has its entire support team working around the clock to get the servers back on line. They estimate they will be up and running by Sunday afternoon.”

I spent most of my weekend checking this forum thread hourly, trying to determine when my server would be brought back online. It didn’t happen Sunday afternoon - late Sunday night everything was still down, but this morning when I woke up I was happy to see things were loading again. Big thanks to our server admin volunteer Jorj Bauer for keeping a close watch on all of this and getting us back to live status while I was just waking up. Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

That’s the speed I saw yesterday morning when I did a speed test - 29.3 Mbps? That’s some fast downloading - too bad I never see anything close to that from any source, though when I see 1.5 to 2 MB/s downloads I certainly don’t complain. But look at that pathetic upload speed - not even 1 Mbps! That’s the thing I complain about to Shaw once every few months: I want more upstream bandwidth. When I’m uploading photos and videos, 1 Mbps just isn’t fast enough. And what’s ironic is that I’ve felt like my Internet connection has been a bit sluggish this week…

The. Best. Superhero. Movie. Ever.

(more later, gotta’ pack for Seattle, heading to Mobius 2008)

If for some odd reason you only read this blog, and don’t follow my “real” sites, you might not have heard about this: on Saturday night I launched my $5000 HP laptop giveaway contest ($5500 once you factor in the bundled software). Go check out this post on Digital Home Thoughts for all the details.

Yeah, ye old Thoughts Media sites are down - we were in the midst of moving to a new server, and something went a bit wrong. Doesn’t it always? I hate going to bed knowing that my sites aren’t up and there’s nothing I can do about it. It sucks. Hopefully by the time I wake up tomorrow, they’ll be back up. I swear, it’s a miracle that Google hasn’t punished us for all our down-time…guess their crawlers are more patient than I am.

All the details are found here, but if you have a Digg account, please do me a favour and Digg this entry. I really want to see this thing explode!

I continue to have fun with getting nicely isolated objects that would have previously been hard to extract without using the green-screen scanning method. Even coins are turning out quite nice…now I just need to finish editing all the rest of my Japan photos.

Note to self: do not, repeat, do not run strenuous MySQL queries on the database that runs all of your sites in the middle of the day. That’s just plain dumb.

Emails like this make all the work on my album art project (completed with lots of help from Ashley) worthwhile:

“I just stumbled upon your album page this morning, and I felt compelled to tell you how awesome you are. I have an obsession with album art too, and when I put my iPod on Cover Flowand something is missing, I die a little inside. I have been searching the internet for months [for] a couple [of] fairly random album covers (Big Shiny Tunes 7 and Now 4) and finding them both at the same time, in supreme quality, was the best the [thing] that happened to me all week. Uploading all those covers must have been a killer project, but because of it my iTunes library is nearer to perfection. Thank you, oh random internet stranger, for helping me on my quest to a
flawless Cover Flow.”

And that reminds me, I have to update it - I haven’t uploaded new images in almost a year now and I’ve added quite a few more CDs to my collection since then. I loves the music!