Nico’s

So I checked my bank account statement online today, like any good conscientious bank user. Everything looks normal, until I get to notice the "pending" on a $120 invoice from my hosting provider, Dreamhost. The alarm is going off, that’s no pocket change!

I fire up the internets, and quickly find quite a few other people in distress about the same situation, to finally arrive at the official explanation: human error. One of the guys in charge of the billing operation did a few clicks in the wrong places, and all users got billed for a year or two of hosting, which starts at $120 and goes up and up.

The nerd community is outraged and understandably so. What if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and this billing error causes you to overdraw your account, resulting in penalty fees? Will they pay for those too? Will they bite the bullet and give away a free month or two of hosting? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s pretty respectable of them to fess up to their error, and to give a thorough explanation of what happened, and why. I mean, shit happens, but how you deal with it it’s what matters, and in my book, they’ve dealt with it just fine. Unlike some of the other users affected, who feel like after this, they cannot have their site hosted by Dreamhost any longer, I’m sticking with them, because they’re alright.

I’ve just updated my picture album to the latest version of ZenPhoto, and along with that, the latest themes. I’ve gone with this one called "StopDesign", which is making my album look as snazzy as ever. It’s great!

Along the newest features, I think you’ll find that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the pictures, so that you can just stay on top of the latest additions to my collection. Also, the comments are now better moderated, so no more spam for me to have to go back and check. Lastly, there’s a search function included, but this would mean that I’d have to add more meaningful names to the pictures, and descriptions. That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? I’ll get around to it sometime.

 I’m back! New design, new features, new ideas. Many things have changed in my life, and as such, it’s hard to know where to start. I’m thinking, and planning, so stay tuned! The best way to do that, by the way, is by subscribing to the RSS feed.

The blog has been updated to Wordpress 2.2 for a while now, and I’m finally catching up with the changes. It was just brought to my attention hours ago that the tabs/links up there weren’t working, so sorry about that! I think I’ve fixed it now, along with the handy translating tool that is on your right.

In other words, everything is operational, finally.

The lack of recent activity (and by recent, I mean over a month) by humans, and the increase of activity of spammer bots, the AFS forums have been taken down. It was a nice try.

The blog got pretty messed up, but I’m fixing it. Bear with me while things look weird!

TIA

I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress, and with that a lot of my customizations have been “lost”. Not really lost, but I just have to look at the old version and put all that into the new version. It’ll probably take less than an hour overall, but the problem is finding an hour of time to actually do it.
So for now, this is all running pretty vanilla. I hope you understand.

As a comment about the update in itself, I see quite a few little things that are new or different, and I like them all. Woooo, go wordpress!

I hope you’ve noticed the flags on the right. When you click on a flag, everything will be translated to the language of choice. Google does the job, so it’s not exactly accurate, but it does work remarkably well, and it should be enough for most people to get an idea of what I’m writing about, without knowing English.
Installing that guy was pretty easy too, it just took about 15 minutes to look at all the documentation and doing all the necessary changes in files here and there.

Speaking of installing things on the website, the AFS forums have received a lot of work. I’ve installed several mods, and gotten my hands dirty with PHP, MySQL and a bit of HTML. Everything seems to work fine too, so it looks like I did everything right. Which is good, because at least a couple of hours went into all the modifications and additions to the forums.

I’m tired. I’ve been sleeping 6 hours a night for the last four nights. And even though that’s a lot for other people, those other people get to sit in their fat ass all day. Myself, have worked 9 hours at Redemtech and then gone around town making calls for Computer Techs for a couple of hours.
Usually by the time I get home I’m ready to sit on my fat ass too, but that just doesn’t work for me. I’ve gone to the gym, done a few (very few) chores and tried to be a nice husband, looking and acting awake.
That’s why I haven’t been able to update the site, upload more pictures, or any other little project that I had.
But there’s a light at the end of this short tunnel: I have found a new job. I will be a Systems Administrator at Reno Imaging (also known as Reno Diagnostics Center).
I interviewed for the position last Friday, and this tuesday I found out that I got the job! That’s when I wrote here that I had some juicy news, and also when I put my two weeks notice at Redemtech.
This new job is just what I was looking for, too, and I’m very excited about this opportunity. I will surely be learning a whole lot, and I hope I can also show some of what I already know.

At any rate, because of that, I don’t care about being tired and working like a dog. In less than two weeks, I’ll be working more normal hours (8am to 5pm), and I’ll be doing something that I’ll probably enjoy a lot more. So yay for me, people, yay for me!

Of course this also means that all those updates are being postponed until whenever the hell. I’ll make sure to at least keep writing here, I’m sure no one really worries about all the magnificent features of this webpage.

The sequel to one of my favorite PC games of all time has just come out, and I got my copy yesterday .
So far I’ve only played through the tutorial and the beginning of the first chapter, and I’m liking it. There’s some minor issues that I’m still trying to work out, but this game will surely suck a lot of time, just like nwn1. Specially when online worlds start coming up

In other nerdly news, there’s an update for Wordpress (the blogging software) so I’m going to be updating here soon. If something crashes, I hope to be able to bring everything back up relatively quickly.