Twev1701.net

Well, it’s been raining for about 5 days now, and so far there realyy haven’t been too many problems for me…until now.

I got off the phone with Jess around 11pm, and went downstairs to do some laundry. That’s when I noticed the 4 inches of water in my basement. Apparently, the drainage ditch I dug last 2 years ago during Hurricane Ivan broke–or so I thought. I started to clean out the water, and once I got it all out of one roon, I relieved the pressure under a wall in the adjoining room to drain it. That’s where the problems began.

I noticed that the water in the carport section of my basement was coming for the other section of the basement. It wasn’t until I started to drain that section that I realized how bad it was. Long story short, I found out where the water was coming in, and there’s not way to fix it right now. It’s actually seeping, scratch that, pouring in from under the foundation. I cleared the carport section 3 times, and redug my ditch. The ditch works great, but there’s no way to keep up with the sheer volumes of water coming at it. I estimated that I’m getting 1 inch per 5 minutes down there. Granted, once it reaches about 6 inches at the garage door it seems to start flowing out by itself, but that’s hardly a solution. I’ve spent the last hour getting the water out, to only have it fill back up in about 15 minutes. At this point and time, I can’t beat it. All I can do it wait until the rain lets up and see if I can get more out before it has a chance to refill. I even tooka picture of the manhole cover at the end of my driveway. It has about an 8 inch plume coming out from the cover. The pic is over at the moblog. –>

So, my only option right now is to wait a few hours and see what happens. By the looks of the radar, this all won’t be over until sometime tomorrow morning though. Me thinks Trevor may not be going to work tomorrow beacause he’ll be cleaning up from his flood.

Speaking of flood, they are evacuating parts of Wilkes-Barre tonight, and the flood gates are supposed to go up tomorrow. Should be a fun time!!

I downloaded the Prey demo last night, and I got to play it for about an hour tonight.

This is the first time in literally years that a PC demo has made me want to go out and buy the game.

Th gamplay is fast, but with ‘puzzles’ that make you think. The graphics are very nice, and the physics are top notch. And to top it all off, it’s fun!

Here’s a few screen caps I took from the game.

On to other topics, there’s some new pics of the kittens ovar at the moblog. –>

I knwo some people have commented that they would like to see a “Back” and “Forward” button on the moblog to see the pics, and this is something that I am working on. The script I have does not do it, so I am going to have to rip apart the script, and re-code it to inclue that function. Shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it may take a while.

Other than that, I’m just enjoying a nice night of games. Later…

As you may or may not have seen already, there have been a few changes around here. Some have been invisible to you, as they have been on the back end of things, and other have been pretty major. Let’s get to it!

First and foremost, my moblog on Textamerica is gone. What happend is this. In a nut shell, Textamerica has decided to stop have a free moblog for everyone to use, and start charging us all $99 a year for the same service we’ve all been using for free. Fuck that. So, with the looming dealine of having my moblog deleted, I grabbed all of my pics off of there and decided to look for a new moblog host.

At first, I thought about going back to Buzznet, where I had my first moblog. But, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to them. So, I looked into Flickr. It’s a great service, but to really take advantage of it, I would need to pay $25 a year. Not as bad as $99, but I am cheap and wanted a free solution. I even looked into moblog.co.uk which is another great service, but I was afraid one again about it not needed my needs. For a free solution, I though of using my Picasa Album BETA account, but then it really hit me. Do I really want to entrust my pictures to another 3rd pary company only to have then screw me and force me to either pay or take my years of pics somewhere else? With that said, the solution was sorta simple.

Not to bore you with software mumbo-jumbo, I am now hosting my own moblog. I found some nice software that intergrates with Wordpress, and gets the job done for me. So now I don’t have to worry about someone taking my pictures away since I now host all of my own content. This is especially great since I no longer have a daily/monthly upload limit. There’s also a link in the above tabs in the header to take you directly to the moblog section. Although I should warn people on dial-up…June is very heavy. I uploaded all of my old pics from Textamerica — all 220 of them — so when you open up June’s archive, it’s rather massive. Consider yourself warned. In addtion of have my old Textamerica posts, there’s also a link at the top of the moblog page to my first moblog over at Buzznet.

So right now, the only thing I really don’t host myself is my video blogs. I could actually host them, and may one day. But for now I think I’ll still leave that to a third party.

Onto other news, Jess is going away tomorrow afternoon and probably won’t be back until late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. So, that means the Twevman gets to have the house to himself. That means some serious computer time and gamage. In fact, I just installed the new Prey demo, and am looking forward to playing it tomorrow night.

On the kitten front, they are all doing great. They all have their eyes open and are walking now. In fact, they’re starting to explore a little bit. I’v posted some new pics of them over at the new and improved moblog. –>

That’s about it for now. Sunday night Jess and I usually spend it watching TV together as a nice way to end the weekend together. Plus, since I am opening tomorrow, and she’s leaving around 3pm tomorrow afternoon, this will be the last chance I get to see her until she gets home. See ya later!!

Saturday’s party was a complete success! We’ve heard back from just about everyone and they all had a wonderful time.

The day started out good enough with near perfect weather. As the guests arrived, everyone seemed to just fall into place. We were really worried about people being alienated, but that didn’t happen. After an hour or so, everyone was talking and mingling amongst themselves.

While the first people came around noon, it wasn’t until about 2pm that I fired up the grill. For about the next hour, I cooked about 60 hamburgers, 20 hot dogs, and 2 rings of deer kilbasa. We honestly had so much food it was disgusting. After we all got done eating, we hooked up a sprinkler for the kids, and they had a blast running through the water while we all just relaxed for a bit. While everyone was drinking casually, me being the host, decided to hold off until later. So, around 8pm Kelly and I looked at each other and deicded it was time to start drinking.

The drink of choice that night was cherry vodka and pepsi. JP, who rarely drinks, decided he wanted something but didn’t know what. So, I offered to make him something. Knowing his tastes, I made him a vodka and maountain dew. Although he drank it, he said it would be better with Sierra Mist. It was about this time though that we ran out of cherry vodka. So, off we went to the store and got some more. While there, JP asked me to pick him up some apple vodka. Not one to deny anyone vodka, I got him a bottle as requested. Two drinks later, JP was drunk. This was the first time I had ever seen JP drunk, and it was odd that he was drunk so quick. I asked him how strong he was making his drinks. I told him I was making mine strong (about 1/8 cup vodka) and that I was just starting to feel the effects. That’s when his eyes went wide. “Oh fuck dude, I’ve been putting in a 1/4 cup of vodka each time”. Mystery solved.

I got pretty drunk that night, as did JP, Kelly, and Mike. Jess didn’t drink since her mother’s beans were killing her stomach, but she still had a great time. Sara ended up driving JP hime around midnight, and Kelly and Mike stayed the night. In the morning, I woke up around 8:30am with Jess and we had just about everything cleaned up, including power washing the driveway, by about 9:30am. this was perfect since it was starting to get hot as hell outside.

Sunday was spent mostly lounging around. We watched some TV in the morning with Kelly, and after she left to go back to New Jersey, we went down my parent’s house for some swimming and some free pizza. After we came home, we watched some TV again, and went to bed around midnight. Very close to a perfect weekend.

BTW, picture from the party can now be found over the my moblog. —>

So the past few nights have been spent proparing the house for the party on Saturday. In case you don’t know, or forgot, Jess and I are having a party for our wedding party and our parents this weekend. It’s kind of an ice-breaker so that everyone can meet before the big day. It should be a blast!

We went today afetr work to Sam’s Club and got lots of meat for the party. We also got all of our paper goods, as well as some snackage.

The party is supposed to start around noon or so on Saturday, but I was just informed that Kelly, Jess’s Maid of Honor, is coming up tomorrow night and staying the night. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if she stayed all weekend, which is cool since I really like Kelly. Plus, now that she is coming up tomorrow night, that means we have an extra hand to set up everything!

As much as I don’t want to go, I have to go to work tomorrow for a few hours. Then it’s home, but the yard, and then start setting everything up for Saturday afternoon.

The weather right now looks good. It should be sunny with a high around 90. Well have plenty of shade for everyone and air conditioners inside for those who whish to bask in it. All in all, it should be a good time!

Man, it has been one busy week! I’m not sure really where to start…

Work has been hellacious. That’s all I really feel like talking about that subject.

Jess and I had a great weekend together. We went shopping all day Saturday for our wedding bands. We started out around 10am heading an hour south to Frackville. I treated Jess to lunch at Chick-Fil-A, and then we started ring shopping. Once we got done there, we started heading north again. We stopped again in Dickson City, and hour north of where we live, and had dinner at Texas Roadhouse to talk over our options. After we decided on our rings, I went to Scranton to get mine and Jess’s back in Wilkes-Barre.

Sunday was a nice semi-relaxing day around the house. My friend Lisa came over with her 2 kids to see the kittens. They only stayed for about an hour, but it was fun. After that Jess and I decided to go for a walk around Wilkes-Barre since it was a beautiful day to try and find some places to get pictures taken after the ceremony. Alas, we did not find any places we liked. Oh well.. After that, we cooked some burgers on the grill, and watched “Firewall”.

This week is all about getting ready for this weekend’s party. Jess and I are hosting the entire wedding party, parents, significant others, and children on Saturday for a get-to-know-you cookout. It’s a nice little get together so everyone can meet each other before the big day. So, in prep for that, Jess has been painting the living room, and we went looking today for a new couch. Although we did find a couch, we found out it has to be ordered and will not be here in time for the party. So, we’re holding off and that for a bit. Tomorrow, I start working on the outside of the house and Jess is continuing on the inside. It looks like we should have some good weather, so it should be a fun time.

For now, I think it’s time to spend some time with Jess watching some more episodes of “Ghost Hunters”. Tomorrow I should be able to finally upload a new wallpaper. So until then, later….

Everything has been moved over to the new server at my new host, and everything is up and running….well…almost.

I seem to be having some problems with my sub-domains, but I hope to have that resolved very soon. What that pretty much effects right now is the images inside the posts. They are served from files.twev1701.net, while is a sub-domain of twev1701.net. This doesn’t effect the wallpapers, so no worries there. So, until then, if a post in the archive seems incomplete, it’s probably because it’s missing a graphic from that sub-domain.

All in all, it was a pretty painless move. Had some slight SQL problems, but once I broke the master backup down, and loaded each DB individually, it all worked.

I’ll explain why I moved hosts once I get the sub-domains up and running. Once thing at a time…