Minimally Exceptional

That’s a good question. I see today that I haven’t posted anything since prior to March. Whoops.

I have unfortunately just not had the free time I had hoped for over the last few months. Between working, illness, family obligations, other obligations, home improvements, and whatever else has come up, writing (gaming or otherwise) has just not made the priority cut.

Not that it ultimately matters, since no one reads my mindless drivel.

I have a few gaming related posts coming. They are mostly drafted. I have some reviewing/editing to do, and I hope to have them posted over the next couple of days. Better late than never. At one point I was intentionally holding them back waiting for something else to come together – I now see that it’s not going to come together as quickly as I had hoped, so I’m going to go ahead and start posting my gaming stuff here again. I’ll expand on the cryptic shit later.

The website that was gotjenkins.com is no longer. It was a bad play on a stupid, overused pun in the first place, it isn’t funny now, it was never really funny, and so I felt like it was time for a URL change. While gotjenkins.com will still get you here until the domain expires, home sweet home is now MinimallyExceptional.com. It’s a huge URL. I know. Sorry. Well, not THAT sorry, but whatever.

Over the last six months or so, I have pretty much exclusively talked about gaming and gaming related stuff, mainly as a result of “the backlog”. Writing about that stuff is not ending. However, I’m hoping to actually include some, you know, non-nerdy real life stuff again. This is a first step in that direction, I suppose.

So, to sum up: I’ve been a shit bum. A bunch of gaming posts are coming. Then a post about the cryptic little-project-that-could. Going forward, hopefully some more consistently timed activity with more well-balanced subject matters.

I recently switched hosting services. Previously, I was using Hasweb, which when I signed up with them four or so years ago, they were a great deal. If I pay for a year in advance, I get 5GB of storage and 100GB of transfer for about eight bucks a month.

I wanted to be able to upload and make available for download the concert recordings and DVDs that Laura and I have put together – I want to distribute them, but my upload is capped at a low enough speed that seeding through bittorrent isn’t feasable. Obviously, HTTP access isn’t happening on 5gb of space.

I started looking for a new host a few weeks ago, and found HostMonster. Their plan looked great, had lots of storage, and tons a bandwidth all for a reasonable price. Sounded great, until I read the terms of service. No profanity, not offensive content.

Fuck, I guess that’s out.

Eventually my search lead me to Hostgator. Hostgator also had a great plan. I’m paying $15 a month for 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth – more than enough for what I want to do. I signed up, changed name servers on my domain, and was up and running within a few days. Overall, the process was much less painless than I expected it to be. I was expecting flurries of emails to and from support desks and techies trying to move all of my stuff from host A to host B. This was much easier than the other web change I made, which was registering Laura’s domain at somethingferretrelated.com and changing the main domain associated with my hasweb account. That was a little more painful.

Anyway, after a few days of uploading, downloading, md5 checking, et cetera – the first set is available online. Info files aren’t there yet but they will be after this weekend.

In the downloads section there is now the Greg Howard 2005-07-15 DVD, the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Early DVD, and the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Late DVD. The Matt Nathanson / Graham Colton / Kyle Riabko show at the Gargoyle in 2004 will be going up next, as soon as the graham and kyle discs are ready. Yes, this is the ripped pants show.

So anyway, I’d like to think that’s a pretty significant improvement/addition to the site. There’s finally content available here other than my petty bitching and geeking out. Go nuts and download them if you want them – I’ll password lock the directories if/when I run out of bandwidth.

So I think I’ve finally found content software that I can work with, instead of working around. Movable type was nice enough, I guess, but it just seemed like I was constantly trying to patch CSS to make things work – not just the MT generated pages, but the HTML pages that I created as well.

Wordpress seems to solve all that. Not only does it seem easy enough to apply dozens of different formats to this system on the fly, but Wordpress can easily manage my HTML pages for other content as well – now I can make one change one time and have it automatically change my story pages, my photo pages, et cetera – no pain in the ass involved.

The other really great thing about it is the Falbum plugin, which I have to thank Lauren for turning me on to, which lets me take all of my albums from Flickr and integrate them (almost) seamlessly into my layout. Setup of Falbum was kind of a bitch – the falbum website has basic installation instructions, but doesn’t really give any information about how to use it or make it work once it’s installed – but I’ve managed to get it working well enough for now.

I’m going to stick with a theme from the theme directory for now, but as I figure out how this all fits together, I’ll probably design my own.

So anyhow, this is what things look like for now, but that can all change in a moment’s notice if I find another theme that I like. If I had you linked before and now I don’t, I just forgot when I was updating the blogroll. Let me know and I’ll fix it.

And perhaps the best part of this whole thing is that after 8 or so years of bullshitting around and trying to ghetto rig something together, I can finally share photo collections on my site. Those nancies photos from 2001 might just make it up yet.

I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to title entries. I’d sit here for a long time – probably more time than it took to write out the entry itself – trying to come up with something to call it. Now I know better – I write the entry first and title it later.

Anyway, not really what this is about. I digress.

The spam comments have really been out of control lately.

It used to be that I would post an entry, and after a few weeks or months, the spam comments would start coming in. Tons of links to bullshit websites about all kinds of things from viagra to online poker to breast enlargement pills. Easy enough to fix, since it was always the older entries all I had to do was disable comments.

Now I post an entry and there’s spam comments within a week. And I don’t mean just a few, there’s dozens. I deleted eighty eight just last night when I logged in to post the consumer terrorism entry.

I don’t want to just close comments entirely, although in all fairness it’s probably not that big of a deal given that my site traffic is at an all time low. So I’m not sure entirely what I should do.

I’m thinking that the ‘right’ way to handle it is to just start over. I had everything working really well with greymatter, but my webhost issued a decree from above that, due to what were apparently pretty significant security flaws, they were no longer going to allow the greymatter scripts to run on their servers. Which is really kind of unfortunate, seeing as I liked greymatter a lot.

So then I moved to movable type, which seems great, except for the fact that instead of building my website design around the movable type engine, I rigged movable type to work with my design. My design is just OK anyway, so I’m not opposed to throwing it out and starting over with a chassis that is built around the engine in the first place. I’m sure that it will probably make things easier in terms of design change and updating, which is something that I’d like anyway. Plus by starting over I would be able to use the modifications and extensions that are out there for things like spamblocking.

Scrapping this and starting over seems to be the answer that comes up with any website question that comes up. It just doesn’t seem like my website does what I want it to anymore. I think what I want to do has changed, but I haven’t implemented. And I’m not sure I know how to implement. I’ve been more of an accountant and less of an IS geek lately, so to say I’m rusty would be an understatement. I still want to keep the weblog portion going, but there’s other things that I’d like to do on top of that, and there are things that I still have up that I want to go away.

So I’ll figure it out. Maybe. I hope.

So let’s be honest here. I’ve ignored and neglected pretty much everything that has to do with this site. Why? Don’t know. Been pretty busy – the second half of 2006 was both pretty busy and pretty shitty, so it never really occurred to me to post on a website.

Why else? I have a problem. When I have something worth posting about, I never have time to do it. When I have time to post, I never have anything worthwhile to say. As a result, it’s been almost a year since I’ve done anything on this site, which is costing me about $9 a month to maintain. Sure, I’ve hosted some neat files for various online communities, but I could do that with yousendit.

Since this is January, it’s not too late to add it to my resolutions, of which I had a few (and now have more.) In no particular order:

1) Buy a house. Seriously folks, it’s time. If not a house, I at least need to get an apartment or something, but it’s time to go. I’ve worked hard to bring my $13,000 of credit card debt from college down to a reasonable $3,000, and come tax return time that will be gone too. So, pending Laura getting a ‘real job’ and being able to help with the bills, it’s time to move. Moving is also the first step to marriage, which also needs to happen one of these days.

2) Eat better, Lose weight. Let’s not sugarcoat it, I’m a bigger guy. A ‘Man of Substance,’ as they say. That doesn’t mean that I’m a fat ass, or obese, or anything like that, but I can stand to lose a little and eat better, given the health problems in my family. Don’t go crazy – I’m not planning on becoming a fitness guru or picking up some hardcore workout routine, and I still have no plans to start eating salads and drinking protein shakes, but some basic diet adjustments will help me greatly – drop the fried bullshit, cut back on the junk food (let’s be honest here – I’ll never stop eating ice cream entirely), and scale back some portions. Stop the bleeding, as they say. I would like to lose a little weight, but I definately don’t need to gain any more, or I’ll be on my way to being one of those blow-up round bottomed punching bag toys.

3) Drop the OCD. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I have some serious OCD/paranoia issues. First, I have a fire paranoia. When I leave the house, or leave work for the day, or whatever, I have to make sure that everything is turned off, unplugged, locked, or otherwise properly dealt with. Computers need to be off, the iron unplugged, the space heater unplugged, the ferret cage locked (even though the ferrets can’t open the doors,) the Wii unplugged, the modem turned off, et cetera. It’s not so bad that I check all of these things. The bad part is that I feel like I need to check them over and over again. Almost as if that I don’t trust that I’ve already taken care of it the three times I already checked. Ask Laura. Or my coworkers. It’s bad. It’s like I proofread, and then proofread two or three more times before I finally decide that it’s probably OK and click send. In short – I need to cut that shit out.

4) De-Stress. It seems like more and more lately I worry about everything: What if I pissed off Laura’s dad? What if I get diabetes? What if they don’t let me into the venue with my gear? What if they’re going to fire me? What am I going to say? What if Laura doesn’t get the money she needs for school? What if I move out and suddenly can’t afford it? What if (insert name) thinks I do a shitty job at work? I need to relax, forget about the bullshit drama and what-ifs (especially the things I can’t do anything about), and stick to the clarity of reality.

5) Take this website seriously. It’s obvious to me now that there are lots of things broken about my site. I need to make it better. I need to fix broken links. I need to get rid of old outdated crap that doesn’t make any sense anymore. I need to post with some regularity. I need to change the crappy color schemes. I might even need to overhaul things completely. Long story short, I need to make it work. Not only does it make sense for it to work, but that will also help me keep my geek-knowledge from deteriorating, because if it’s use it or lose it, I’m certainly not using it these days.

So that’s what I’ve got. I know, I know – no one cares. I haven’t looked at the logs lately, but I’m willing to wager that people stopped paying any attention at all around July of last year, and that’s fine. Even if I’m talking just to hear myself speak, I feel like I should at least say it how I want.

so it looks like, due to an automated comments spam-bot, i need to close comments on all posts except the newest one, meaning that anyone that wants to comment will only be able to do so on the top post.

i’m actually pretty pissed about it. does anyone have any tips or tricks on dealing with these things? i’ve had 64 spam comments from some poker playing asshole, and all of the links he’s spamming don’t work anyway.

anyhow, yeah, that’s it. i’ll make a post with some meaningful content sometime today or tomorrow.

and peacock: i’ll do your book thing this week, i swear, but i need to do it from home so that i have access to my bookshelf.

so i’m thinking it’s time for ‘the wall’ to come down. it’s been visible and accessible for years – since way before the rest of the website – and i don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the rest of the site was originally an extension of that piece… quite different from now, where the wall is merely an extension of the rest of the website.

i haven’t updated it in aeons, and i read through it yesterday only to find that i no longer necessarily agree with a lot of what is posted there and that some of the stuff [probably the stuff I put on there, as opposed to the stuff that Jason put on there - it originally was a joint project ]

so anyway, i think i’m going to scrap it, maybe move it to the archives/old versions section, and replace it with something else. i have an ever growing list of things that someone should NEVER do, so i might compile that and put it up… i dont know. we’ll see, i guess.

random tangent: i found an email address for a girl that i used to be good friends with, but the email address was from years ago and i wasn’t really sure that she still used it or that it even was active anymore. i emailed her, just for shits and giggles, and it really is her. she replied, and i replied back a few days later…

it really makes me kind of happy because i don’t have enough good friends to just lose contact with one for no real reason. she moved to florida about 5 years ago and i haven’t really talked to her since, so being able to track her down after all this time is, in my opinion, pretty cool.

so remember my massive credit card debt? yeah, i’ve cut it in half since i’ve started this new job. i split the one big credit card (14.9% interest) to two smaller credit cards (5.9% and 7.9%) and i’ve been able to completely pay off the 7.9…. now i can start working on the 5.9. i can actually start doing responsible stuff now – you know, saving money, preparing for my future, all that business.

speaking of responsible stuff, lunch is about up, i guess i should go back to work…

that’s kind of been my whole frame of mind with the website lately. i always mean well – i often say ‘i’m going to post something – anything – tonight.’ and i rarely do.

so i’m going to give this a different spin for a while. we’ll see how often i update when i post from work on my break.

i’d rather do it from home, but i can’t just seem to be motivated about it…. so i’ll do it from work. any port in a storm, i suppose.

i’ve actually got lots to talk about – new dmb news, album stuff, work stuff, video games, so i’ll try to hit it in order as much as possible over the next few days.

starting with christmas.

christmas was good, i guess. i don’t especially remember anything too out of the ordinary, and it was a pretty good time. we spent christmas eve with laura’s family (WAAAAY out where the buses don’t run.) we weren’t there very long, maybe a couple of hours, but we ate and bullshat for a while. tried to catch up as much as possible with laura’s cousins that are our age. turns out one of them moved in town, only a couple of miles away, which is cool. laura and her always talk about hanging out but never do. anyway.

christmas day was pretty standard. we opened presents in the morning and went to church with mom’s side of the family. since we were having christmas dinner that night with the same people and needed to prepare, we skipped lunch with mom’s family and went to my dad’s parents for a while. my other two siblings were there, which is always cool since i don’t see them much, and steve’s stories of drunken debochery are usually pretty entertaining.

christmas night was pretty cool. we hung around with my family for a while, went to laura’s house for dinner and presents with her family, and came back to my house, where everyone was doing drunken karaoke revolution 3 on my PS2.
THAT was scary. melissa doing britney spears, my mom and aunt doing whatever the hell it was they were trying to do, and craig being a total rockstar and singing some tunes like a real champ.

that’s about it. after that some people left and some others sat and had drunken arguments till all hours of the morning. good entertainment to be had by all.

my christmas gifts included a handful of video games, some dvds and cds, a new cordless phone, an acoustic guitar encyclopedia, some clothes, a shot glass chess set, money and gift cards, and some other stuff I can’t recall off the top of my head.

not a bad christmas, by any means. they seem to be getting progressively better since 2001, especially now that my cousin’s baby is growing up a little bit and hitting the ‘cute and adorable’ stage.

more catch up later, i promise. if anyone still reads this.

oh, and i’ve got to give a ‘whats up’ to my fellow procrastinator sweet baby james. i read your message you left but never got around to leaving you one.

well, as you may or may not have noticed, i’ve been out of commission the last few days. here’s the scoop.

the entire blog portion of my website was controlled by greymatter for a long time. as long as i can remember.

anyhow, i get this email from the manager of my web host saying that greymatter is now banned off of their servers because, apparently, greymatter opens up some massive security hole that was being exploited left and right, and entire servers were being wiped out.

so i had to shut down all the scripts and everything that basically ran the site. so i’ve been spending the last few days scrambling to find a similar program to greymatter that i could use to keep things in line.

moveable type it is. not your typical moveable type, though, as i threw out essentially everything that came with it and moved my gotjenkins 4.0 layout into it. users of moveable type probably can’t even tell that it is moveable type at all.

needless to say, this is the fastest design/coding/implementation overhaul of this website EVER. hopefully everything works okay, i haven’t had a chance to test everything out – but it should be fine.

fyi – everything BEFORE this post was imported from greymatter. so any comments from those posts are located in the ‘extended entry’ section of the posts, and new comments are disabled on everything before 2004.

i think this is probably the best layout i’ve done for this site yet. i like the way it looks a lot, and there’s a few ‘hidden’ things that i’ll bring out when i have a reason to.

a word about the color scheme – i have about 7 color schemes that i can change at will for the entire site. the purple one that is currently up is modeled of the colors of my leopard geckos. i like it, but i have a lot of other colors i like too, so i don’t how when i’ll change it yet.

anyhow, that’s all from me for now. i’ll post some non-computer related real life stuff soon.

so, i’m working on some server configurations and ‘cosmetic changes’ (that you all will see pretty soon, at the rate i’m going,) and i stumble on the list of search engine keywords that returned gotjenkins.com as a valid search result. this is just for feburary ‘04 – i should start doing this more often.

in order of frequency:

john bonham s death
www.ehowa.com
smokepotgetpaid
devil went down to georgia
spike
ehowa
pityriasis rozea
devil went down to jamaica
lauren lavoie
jamaica
jenks
m-65 c
esearch
brett
kurt kobain s death
ehowa.com
chris farley s death pictures
brian jenkins in and out
devil went to jamaica
pictures of baby canada geese eggs
fuck mastercard
devil went down to jamaica song online
bonham s bikes
games and animations
people mooning camera
im only driving this way to piss you off bumper sticker
the dan orr project
writing on the restroom wall
chris farley death
brian jenkins
im sick of this shit
shockwave flash titties
ignorant motherfuckers
fuck the middle east bumper sticker
syphillis rash photo
writing on the wall of death
nine guys you ve fucked
lazy motherfuckers
windows hangs at spalsh screen at startup
how much is a bonaroo ticket
female cop mullet
boondock saints quotes
rollerblade bumper sticker
the devil went down to jamaica
download free devil went down to jamaica
smoke pot get paid
joe peschi
chris farley s death
brettmonster
burn copyrighted cd s
pink floyd the wall and camus
knights in white satin
b&p motherboard
devil georgia
kurt kobain
nights at white castles
contact email addresses of brian
debockery
picture hanging heigth on wall
dan orr project
stupid motherfuckers who think they know something
john belushi do you always take drugs? whenever i can

some obversations: deaths of kurt kobain, john bohnam, chris farley are still frequent hits, as are the ‘devil went down to jamaica/georgia’ songs.

couple of questions though.

who the fuck is dan orr and what is his project?
why can’t all these lauren lavoie fans figure out that her website is lauren lavoie dot com?
how do you b&p a motherboard?
WHO IS SEARCHING FOR DEBOCKERY?!?!?!

i was pretty amused by some of the new phrases, though. ‘fuck mastercard,’ ’stupid motherfuckers…,’ ‘female cop mullet,’ ‘nine guys you’ve fucked,’ ‘i’m sick of this shit,’ and the bumper sticker ones all made me laugh when i read them.

anyhow, that’s it for now. i’ll post a real life update when i’m done with my cosmetic changes.
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