Twev1701.net

I’m weak.

It’s been years since I have played an MMORPG (Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Game) and I swore that the next one I would play would be the ever postponed ‘Stargate Worlds’.

I’m weak.

While it is true that there have been many an MMORPG that has come out since I stopped playing WoW (World of Warcraft) that I have been interested in, I have been strong. I have stayed true and held my convictions.

I’m weak. They know my weaknesses.

So what happened a few days ago? I started playing a new MMORPG. One that I had held out playing for all of 3 weeks after it came out. But it called to me. It whispered into my ear at night. I knew exactly what to say and what I wanted to hear. It got inside my head and I was helpless.

Captain Trevor Shafer

U.S.S. Daniel Jackson

Yes, I am playing ‘Star Trek Online’ and loving every minute of it. And yes, that is indeed my ship, the U.S.S. Daniel Jackson.

I am weak and I make no excuses for it. But to put everything into context, I have been a Star Trek fan for almost all of my life. I remember staying up with my father late on Saturday nights as a small kid and watching the Original Series (Kirk, Spock, McCoy…) on our local PBS station. Then, when I was around 13 or so, I turned into what most people would call a Star Trek nerd. I still am to this day. I am the guy who knows all the useless trivia, both on screen and behind the scenes. I’m the guy that can receite dialogue while watching the episode. I am the guy who goes to Star Trek Conventions (and was a dealer there for a few years). And yes, I am THAT GUY who owns and wears on occasion, a Starfleet Uniform.

And for those wondering what my wife has to think about all of this? She’s totally cool with it. She has know virtually from day one how much I love Star Trek. Online, I have been going by the handle ‘Twev1701′ since 1994. Even though she was bit frightened the first time she came over to my home by the sheer volume of Star Trek stuf I have, she was cool with it and never asked me once to give any of it up. She was even cool enough to let me and my guys wear Starfleet Communicators (Next Generation style) on our tuxedos in our wedding!

Me and My Bride

Me and My Guys

Christmas has been great this year. Not only was it Jackson’s first Christmas, but I also got some pretty kick ass gifts this year as well. Here are some of my favorite gifts:

From my beautiful wife Jess, I received several new shirts. These were no ordinary shirts, but some very sweet geek shirts from Think Geek. Here are my favorites.

Streampunk Skeleton

Ship In A Bottle

Ecto-1 in Pac-Man

Ports

All of the great gifts from my wife were acquired on Christmas Eve, where we spent a nice, quiet night home alone with our son.

Then on Christmas Day I got to do something I haven’ done in years — spend it with my family. We had a great day telling stories, opening gifts, and laughing. One of the highlights for me was having my grandmother, who is 92, there for Christmas. It was nice seeing her have a great time with all the grandkids, and great-grandkids, under one roof. Gift wise though, I got lots of great new clothes for work and around the house. Although, as nice as they were, I would say that this was my favorite gift from Christmas Day.

Apple Magic Mouse

Finally I can ditch the cursed artifact known as the Apple Mighty Mouse and have a real mouse that’ll really scroll. In fact, I have been using this mouse now for a little over 12 hours and I can’t image every going back to a Mighty Mouse.

I have work today from 2pm-10pm. After that, it’s home and off to bed. I’m off tomorrow and that means it’s Christmas — Part 2. The second part being my wife’s family. We’re heading down to see her dad and his wife in Easton in the morning, and then her mother and sisters in the afternoon in Phillipsburg, NJ. Then it’s back home, find room for everything, and back to work the next day thru New Year’s Day.

So far though, this has been one great Christmas!

I have now gone through every single iteration of Twev1701.com that archive.org had and transfered all of the missing pre-Movable Type posts to the database. Granted, there are some huge freakin’ gaps in the archive, but this is the best archive I could find of my site that had some of my missing posts. The oldest post in the archive now dates back to September 16, 2002.

I wish there was a way to get pack all of my old posts from the days of using NewPro and Coranto, but sadly, I think this will be the best we will ever get to that dream.

To celebrate, I think it’s time to fire up the PS3 and play some ‘MK vs. DC’. FIGHT!

I have been asking myself this question for the better part of an hour now. I should be sleeping right now, but I ended up taking a 3 hour nap on the couch after dinner with Jackson and am wide awake now. Thank God I am off tomorrow else I might be in a little bit of trouble right now.

Anyway, I started going though on of my favorite time killers Archive.org. I typed in my original site’s address (twev1701.com) and started making a local visual archive of my site. In doing so, I started reading all of the old posts.

Time for a quick history lesson. My site started back at the end of 2001 with the purchase of the twev1701.com domain. I then purchased hosting, and tried to figure out how to make my own blog. I ended up using a program for the actual posts called NewsPro. It was a PERL based program, and quite easy to install and use. The downside was that it used its own database, not my MySQL. This meant that when I needed to re-install NewsPro or change servers, I could not do a simple dbase backup and restore. To be honest, I never really thought about that. I never could have imagined back in 2001 that I would still be doing this 8 years later. Anyway, when the time did come for me to change servers, I upgraded to the newest version, which was then called Coranto. In doing so however, I lost all of my previous posts. Eventually, years later on January 27, 2004, I installed a true blogging script called Movable Type. Then, a few short months later in April of 2004, tragedy stuck when I was screwed over by my then web host and lost not only my domain, but my entire site. Luckily, I had a backup! I then purchased the twev1701.net domain name that I use to this day, and got myself a new web host. In doing so, I decided to switch over to WordPress. I converted by local copy of my Movable Type dbase, and viola! I still use WordPress to this very day.

Why the huge history lesson? Because in looking back at the old twev1701.com archive, I got to thinking about 2 things. First, has my website become so complicated now, that the fun of tweaking it is gone? Secondly, am I the only person who misses static pages instead of dynamically generated database driven pages? I know it’s very 2002 thinking, but color me nostalgic. Don’t get me wrong, I love the automation that modern day scripting has afforded webmasters such as myself. But there’s still something to be said about a nice, hand coded site.

Another thought I had (and a project for another day) while looking though the archive is to go back and salvage as many old pre Movable Type posts that I can and adding them to my WordPress database. The one nice thing about that is that I can preserve the date and time of each post. It would only take a few hours to do, and I think having the inclusion of these vintage posts would benefit my site overall. Yep, it’s settled. That’s another project added to my list.

I believe I have finally fixed my ongoing issue with Photoshop CS3 and Snow Leopard. Thanks to some online research, starting your Mac in Safe Mode (hold down Shift while booting) and running the applications that are crashing on you, will completely reset that program’s permissions. I was skeptical, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t work!

Even though I fixed Photoshop, I’m still considering doing another system wipe and another fresh install of Snow Leopard, this time however, not importing my settings and programs via Time Machine. My biggest reservations are my mail, my iPhoto faces database, and my iTunes database. I’m most concerned about my iPhoto faces database, and from what I have read, the only way to preserve it is to use the Time Machine import. It’s still something I am going to have to think about.

There’s a slight change in this site’s format, starting today. what I have decided to do is separate the wallpaper section from the main blog.

I enjoy posting the wallpapers and they generate a lot of traffic, but I always thought having them on the front page of the site along with my blog entries detracted from the meaning of the blog posts. So, with a little bit of code, I have come to a happy compromise.

Wallpapers now have their own page, which can be accessed by clicking on the tab up top. In addition, you can now see what the latest wallpaper is by looking at the sidebar on the right. That will change automatically with every new wallpaper uploaded. All you need to do is click on the image and you’ll be transported to the entire wallpaper archive. So you see, the biggest change is that you won’t see the wallpaper posts on the main page anymore. If you’re concerned that you may miss a few, you can do one of two things. One, you can follow me on Twitter since I tweet every post (username: Twev1701) or you can go to the wallpaper page and subscribe to the wallpaper RSS feed. Either way, you’ll be notified as soon as a new wallpaper is posted.

I finally got around to upgrading my Mac to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) last week. I did a simple upgrade on my exiting OS X 10.5 (Leopard) install. Since then, I have noticed that my system started throwing more and more beach balls. Today, I finally got a chance to sit down and do what I wanted to do from the get go — a clean install of 10.6 Snow Leopard.

First thing first, I started backing up all my data to my external 1 terabyte drive. After about 15 25 minutes of backing up about 30 gigabytes of information, I threw in my Snow Leopard DVD and restarted my Mac.

I was greeted with the OS X install screen. I went into Disk Utility and erased my main HD. Once the drive was erased, I initiated the Snow Leopard install. The install took about 20 minutes, after which my machine rebooted. After grooving out to the OS X ‘Welcome’ movie, I started the setup process of my new, fresh Snow Leopard install. I had anticipated starting off fresh, and migrating all my data from the backup I had made that was now residing on my terabyte drive. This is when I was pleasantly surprised.

After the initial setup, I was greeted with the data migration screen. This is where it asks if you want to transfer settings from another Mac. Low and behold there was an option to restore settings, files, and applications from a Time Machine backup. I grinned like a kid who just snuck a pre-dinner cookie. I had it restore my information from my latest Time Machine back, which was less than an hour old. After 30 minutes of restoration, I was greeted with my desktop. By ‘my desktop’, I mean my EXACT desktop that I had before I erased my HD. Everything was there. All my applications were there, all my files in my home folder, my screen saver settings, my dock icons, etc. I was impressed!

In about an hour’s time, I had wiped my hard drive, installed a clean copy of Snow Leopard, and restored all my settings, files, and applications, making my computer look exactly as it did before the erasure. And under the hood, I now have all of the benefits of the new Snow Leopard code, without any remnants of Leopard mucking things up.

Why am I making a big deal out of this? Because this sort of thing simply does not exist in the Windows world I came from. When I have to wipe the HD and reinstall everything on my PC, I’m looking at a sold 3-4 days of work to get it about 80% of where it was before the wipe. With Apple, it took an hour.