For those who have their blogs hosted on blogspot or tumblr, why not get yourself a new blog address that’s not bound to you.tumblr.com or you.blogspot.com? You don’t have to move or tweak anything related to your blog content, you just change the address. You don’t even have to worry about losing readership as your readers will automagically load your new blog addresses when they go to your old URLs. It might, however, affect your page rank. Honestly speaking, I don’t give a damn about PR, so whatever. Any pro-page rank comment or smart ass comment will go down the drain.

Let’s keep this entry jargon-free, shall we? Here’s a (not quite) checklist.
✓ You’re a casual blogger who isn’t planning to make 1 million moolahs out of your blog
✓ You blog for fun, and you want to inject some element of fun into your blog, starting from your URL
✓ You want to change from a-super-lame-and-long-subdomain-name to one that just screams you

The most fun way to change your blog address is to get yourself a subdomain from freeDNS @ http://freedns.afraid.org. There are thousands of domains that you can choose to be a subdomain of, even http://yourchoice.afraid.org. Registration is extremely easy. You can start creating subdomains right away.

STEP 1: REGISTERING & SETTING UP A NEW SUBDOMAIN

So after you’ve registered and confirmed your e-mail address, welcome yourself to the simple and straightforward interface. First, you’ll want to choose your subdomain. Click on [add] and proceed with the next screen. At the dropdown for ‘Domain’, choose any of the suggested domains or click on ‘Many many more available’ and then the ‘Shared Domain Registry’. Find the domain you like from the extensive registry of domain names and click on the name that you want to bring you back the subdomain setup screen.

The subdomain can be anything you want. Your name, or whatever.

Blogspot Blogs
Here’s an example of setting up a subdomain name for blogspot blogs. Do ignore the crude name example

My new blogspot address would then become http://whatta.shit.la

Tumblr Tumblelog
Here’s an example of setting up a subdomain name for Tumblr tumblelogs:

My tumblelog URL would then change to http://1827.bot.nu

Save and voila!

STEP 2: CHANGING EXISTING BLOG’S URL

4. Enter your subdomain name that you’ve set up and save all changes. Just like that, you have a new unique blog address

Tumblr Tumblelog
1. From your dashboard, choose the tumblelog you want to edit (if you have more than one) and ‘Customize’.
2. Under ‘Info, ✓ the box ‘Use a custom domain’.
3. Enter your subdomain name that you’ve set up and save all changes. Just like that, you have a new unique blog address

There you go, one of my hobbies. I love how unique I can make my web addresses even when I don’t buy a new domain name. I also enjoy looking at blogs with interesting URLs. Enjoy your new addresses if you go through with the steps~

© 2010, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

Writing For People vs Writing For Oneself

People are hard to please. When you write for an audience, you lose your freedom of speech. What started out as ‘I write because I like this topic’ becomes ‘I write this because many people like it’. It’s horrible. It’s like you’re doing a 3000-word assignment and hoping to get A+, but in the end managing to scrap only a B+ at most (Oh my, why am I comparing this to assignments? I really need to get mine done ASAP.)

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to writing: People who literally begs for comments and reviews.

Let’s take good ol’ dumpster Fanfiction.Net. You find people begging for reviews everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Worse still, there are noobs who write comments like ‘I won’t update the story/add a new chapter until I get at least [insert number here] reviews, so READ AND REVIEW PEEPS. Kthnxbai!’. Seriously, what the effing hell is wrong with those people? That’s even worse than begging. Ordering readers you don’t even know to review your story, especially when you’re new and still struggling with grammar building readership, is a big no no. Ugh.

Right. I’m rambling. My point is that when we write for the purpose of meeting someone else’s expectations, our tone of writing is noticeably different.

The Web Hosting Scene

Why can’t we have subdomain hosting that rocks on the English speaking side of the world too? I don’t need more domain name. I want something nice and cool and isn’t long like thisismydomainlolz.TLD

I’m kind of dismayed that we don’t have services like the ones offered by Japanese companies like Lolipop, Chicappa (and all other services under GMO), Stepserver, Sakura Internet and some other hosts. They provide pretty list of domain names to choose from for your subdomain. It’s paid service, I know that. I also know that many people frown at having to pay for a subdomain hosting. Random reader who accidentally stumble upon this entry might think I’m crazy, huh.

Yes, we have many free hosting services. You can have subdomains if you don’t have a domain name but your host would have lame names that don’t mean anything to you. I wouldn’t want my site to be hosted on a subdomain with the word ‘host’ in it. It’s just so uncool. So not unique. If there’s a company offering paid subdomain hosting with great support, with choices of domain names that actually have wonderful meanings, I’d be glad to pay. What we have over here is domain name squatting. I fucking hate that lame ass strategy of buying domain names and keeping it, looking to sell it for 1 million bucks (excuse the exaggeration, please). At least develop the damn domain OR design a better looking ‘parking lot’ for the ‘oh so beautiful’ domain names. The closest I could find is the cute free hosting at Bubble.Nu. Some pretty awesome domain names available there.

The practice of holding back expired domains for years and years and years is another infuriating thing. After estdomains went poof, and the registrar of one of my domain names disappeared along with it, keeping me from renewing the domain (That guy I was dealing with was Malaysian!), I’ve been waiting for that domain name to be released. But nooooo, it just had to be kept. Fuckers.

Okay. Signing off now before I get more too aggressive offensive.

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

-Before moving to Sharkspace. With WP-Super Cache half-on. Last straw? Lol -

As much as I love Media Temple, the move just needed to be made because I won’t be able to support the hosting cost. Maybe I’ll go back to it after graduating and getting my first pay, but it’s goodbye for now. Anyways, after two months of hesitating, I’ve finally made the move. I’ve moved to Shark Space because observing it for two days shows that sites hosted by Sharkspace loads faster than some other hosts I’ve been eyeing. The move, however, is not flawless.

1. Missing visual editor in WordPress 2.8.4
I was frustrated when I couldn’t get anything done to restore it back to how it originally was. I tried re-installing wordpress, deleting and replacing wp-admin and wp-includes folder – nothing works. I thought it was permission problem. Checked the permissions and saw everything CHMODED perfectly. The SCP transfer from {mt} didn’t have trouble at all.

The only thing that worked for CT to restore the visual editor was to add the following line to wp-config.php

define( ‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false );

I’ve never used this line before.

Oh well, I’m not the type to bother my web host until I’m damn sure it’s beyond my capabilities (but hey, Shark Space has this utterly amazing response time! I’m totally impressed~). It’s not pride. It’s just learning to be independent. For now, this seems to work. When things stop working, maybe then ‘ll find another solution or finally relent and plead for some help from the technical team XD

2. Missing directories for Add-on Domains & Subdomains
To avoid clutter, my add-on domains and subdomains are always placed outside public_html folder. The weird thing is… I couldn’t access the files inside the folders. They all seem to be missing. I thought I’d get 500 or 503 error messages when I tried to access some files directly (files that I know are there), but I got 404! I’ve deleted the domains and subdomains. I’ll try again and see what happens then.

3. SMF Database Restoration Error
Apparently, the new database doesn’t like all strings connected to the smf_shop plugin. Everything else worked fine. Just that one plugin. Something about MySQL version. I should have see this coming.  I was moving the databases from version mySQL 4 to mySQL 5. Ugh.

It would be wonderful if I can solve the missing post body problems with Junjou. If thep problem persists after the move, then maybe I’ll consider starting afresh with new content and keep the old entries in a subdirectory in case someone wants to access the old contents still.

Right. Back to work.

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

I ran out of internet bandwidth while doing this, so the page load was SLOW. This is a problem on one of my WP blogs after upgrading to 2.8.1. The other blogs, while hosted on the same server, are all fine.

Right. A screencast, for once. This just shows how pissed I am right now at WordPress and whatever glitch it just put me through. It even pissed me off more than this pissy internet connection I’m experiencing (been two days). I was writing a new post at Junjou when this happen. The screencast shows only the editting, but the same thing happens when I try to publish a new post. Once I hit publish, everyhing would disappear, leaving only the title, catagories and tags.

Going to post revisions is totally hopeless because I’ll be greeted by blank posts. So far, Junjou’s the only blog experiencing this problem. I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong with it. Could it be one of those many bugs in WP 2.8.1? Could it be one or some of the plugins? I don’t think the latter is the case because all of the plugins over at Junjou are almost the same ones I installed on Caramel Toffee. Losing a long post is so frustrating. I don’t feel like writing another version anymore.

On a happier note, I’ve just released a Tabula Rasa theme for Dreamwidth:

Live Preview: affogato // Info: Le Petit Graphix

I’m currently trying to make a WordPress version of it, one-column and two-column versions.

p.s/ I currently have over five Dreamwidth codes to give away.

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

I actually have no idea why I’m being extremely picky about choosing a new webhost. Maybe I’m creeped out by the WP-Memory-Usage plugin showing me that on PHP 5.2.6, a very small blog like Caramel Toffee uses at least 20.2mb memory. Imagine throwing two more WP blogs, one Wacintaki Poteto board and one SMF board into the pit. The ease of mind only comes because I know at least 99mb memory is allowed by my current host. On Tektonic, I was always reduced to tears because of the VPS memory issues. On Hostgator, I was asked to either upgrade to a dedi or leave because of memory issue PLUS server load.

Oh, the heck? Caramel Toffee only gets 300 visitors at most per day. On normal days, it’s either 50 or 125 or so. Even Junjou only gets 500 to 1000 visitors per day and our forum isn’t as active as it once was. So what’s killing the memory? Poor scripts?

Oh, back to the memory usage stuff. On PHP 4.4.8, Project Catharsis uses up 15.6mb, but that’s understandable because I’m using NextGen Gallery plugin. I still need to be careful, though because Lax Host only allows 32mb memory limit. I don’t think I’ll move PC from Lax Host. It only costs me $10/yr with the free domain. The only dissatisfaction I have with Lax Host is that I have to manually CHMOD folders to 755. By default, new folders would be assigned to the permission of 775. I realised this when I was trying to get my CGI scripts to work. I kept getting 500 error page. Ugh.

I installed Akismet too late from getting Project Catharsis to accumulate over 1,800 spam comments labeled as ‘Awaiting Moderation’. Thank goodness for Akismet. Got it to check for spams, managed to get all messages labeled as spams and delete them all in one go. I need to remember to disable comments because PC is only using WP as a CMS, not a blog.

Basically, what I’m looking for in a new host and what I need are: Apache 2.2 or Litespeed, PHP 5.2.x, MySQL 5.0.x or 5.1.x, CGI/Perl, SSI, extra bonus if the server supports SQLite. If t supports multiple domain hosting, I want each domain to have its own root, not just an add-on domain where it points to public_html/addondomain. In other words, True Multiple Domain Hosting. SSH is a big plus because I’ll be needing it to do SQL dumps and direct file transfer from good ‘ol {mt} to the new host. From what I’ve read, most free site migration services only extend to sites previously hosted on WHM/cPanel. Well, what the hell? If I’m on WHM, why the hell would I even want to waste time waiting for them to migrate my sites when I could damn well do it on my own easily from the control panel? Somehow, the offer sounds very unattractive.

I’ve been offered reseller accounts, but I don’t need a reseller account. I don’t even need unlimited anything because well, it is limited (inodes, CPU, whatever else – what’s the point of having unlimited storage when you only have, say, 50k inodes?). I only need around 2-10GB of space with at least 10GB monthly data transfer (50gb-100gb at most).

Although paying for a whole year of hosting is money-saving, I don’t think I can do that. This is not about chucking out a lump of money. It’s about satisfaction. I like being able to pay on a monthly basis because then I could cancel my account and look for other hosts if I’m not satisfied (or need more features) after 3 to 6 months. I’m capricious that way. If I don’t like it, I move on.

I was seriously considering going for Vector Level until this evening when I get the glorious Page Load Error message. Their main site was (and still is at the point thentry is being writen) down. So much for still having 100% uptime for July (I checked their Pingdom). Hosts I’m still considering now are: Crucial Paradigm, Site5 and Webfaction. I’ve been considering A2 Hosting too, but then I won’t get the multidomain hosting that I want although their PHP memory_limit is set to an atractive 128mb. Aquarius Storage has 100mb initial memory limit which you can ask to be raised, and Pronet Hosting has the limit of 64mb, but the latter’s offering super cheap 1 year of shared hosting for signups in July – I figure they’re going to get heaps of signups. Then there’s AnHosting and Midphase, Pivotal Web and a bunch others which promise high performance hosting. I also looked at Malaysian hosts like DataKL, Mercumaya and Serverfreak, but of course they only offer yearly signup (like AnHosting and Midphase).

I need something of high performance because I’m developing something (more like experimenting) with RoR (pretend you didn’t hear that from me). Searching the web for something like ‘Top 10 Webhosts‘ is of no help. Most of them are listed as TOP 10 because they offer very attractive affiliate rewards. I believed them, once, and went for Hostgator. It brought me to tears six months later and I started cursing ‘unlimited plans’ like there’s no tomorrow.

This post is getting too long for my liking. I shall go back to lamenting and searching and comparing, then.

p.s/ Webfaction is winning my heart like WHOA at the moment~

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

Painted with the plugin

1. Plugin Info

Original Author: Yakumo

Applet by: Shi-chan

Additional colour pallete by: Wonder Cat Studios (of the good ‘ol BBSNote and PictureBBS)

It’s really not true when I thought there’s no effort to make Oekaki readily accessible for us WordPress users. This wonderful Shi Painter Plugin for WordPress is made by Yakumo-san with the original Shi-chan’s Shi Painter applet. This plugin is made and tested with the Japanese version of WordPress 2.6, but I tested this with WordPress 2.8 and then 2.8.1. It works purrrfectly.

Additionally, you can download and install Dynamic Pallete by Wonder Cat Studios (download DynPallete.lzh HERE), so long as your computer has the capability to extract files in UTF-8 mode, you’ll be fine. I don’t recommend using WinZip or WinRar. Get either Zipeg or 7zip to get the job done.

2. Installing the Plugin

You can download the plugin, the applet and the pallete separately or click the link provided below for the plugin. The .zip file contains the plugin and the applet.

Shi Painter Plugin Version 1.2 by Yakumo (72) - 270.72 kB

If you want the extra colour pallete, visi WCS by clicking on the link provided in the plugin info and unzip pallete.js in the same directory as the SP plugin. Please do leave a comment if it works or if it doesn’t work for you.

For WordPress 2.7 and above, install the plugin by using the plugin installer and activate it. Now, continue with configuration and using the plugin.

3. Setup and using the plugin

a. First, go to Settings >> Oekaki Shi-Painter to configure your Oekaki Shi-Painter

b. Choose your interface: Simple or Pro (I like it Pro, so I chose Pro here)

c. Save Changes

d. Now go and add a new post. Click on Add Image and you should see ‘Oekaki Shi-Painter’ in one of the many options~

e. Set the canvas Size and title, and then click Exec Paint. Draw away~

f. Hit upload when you’re done, as per usual on all other oekaki boards. You’ll be transported to the Media Library where you should be able to see your newly painted picture.

g. Insert into post and DONE. Go have some fun and draw some more

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

Web Diary Professional with PaintBBS & Shi-Painter/Shi-Painter Pro integration
私の新しいシンプルなＰ－ＭＥＭＯです：）　これからもっとお絵かきをする！ (LINK)

I wonder if there are English versions of their softwares, because all of them are really cool~ It’s a bit sad that you need to understand Japanese in order to fully utilise their scripts. I spent one day getting Web Clap and Web Diary Pro to work (because I desperately want to use the integrated PaintBBS, Shi-Painter and Shi-Painter Pro that WordPress and Wacintaki Poteto have been depriving me of). After hours of getting either ’500 Internal Server Error’ or ’403 Forbidden’ and a few more hours of tweaking the skin files, I now have a fully working Oekaki Log (or P-Memo, which sounds cuter). I’m so happy, because now my oekaki belongs to only me instead of a whole community. The fact that it’s actually a blog is a big plus.

I was deciding between Nicky!, Web Memory and Web Diary Pro for a few days before settling on the last of the three. Nicky! is pretty decent, but not as flexible as WDP. If you’re thinking of installing your own oekaki blog, I recommend WDP to the extreme (LOL). Here’s some extra bits of information to those who aren’t familiar with web claps and the likes:

• Web Clap: It’s widely installed on Japanese sites, including blogs (like those hosted by FC2). Webclap is simply a script that let visitors ‘applaud’ your website content. They can also leave comments if they want to. It’s like the karma system, only web clap means giving good karma. I wonder if they have something like Web Boo! for the opposite effect. Hahaha.
• Oekaki: The downside to being familiar with oekaki is not knowing how to exlain what it is, like what I’m feeling. Just think of it as drawing using Java appletsand then publishing the piece of art as a blog entry (or in a more popular case, pictures on bulletin boards). See, I suck at explaning what oekaki is, so feel free to Google it up if you need more info. PaintBBS, Shi-Painter and Shi-Painter Pro (the last is my favourite) are three most famous applets ever created for this purpose. Why the heck isn’t it integrated with WordPress yet?! EDIT: Finally found the most useful Oekaki plugin! Details in this post

As I was working on the scripts, I drew myself a brand new avatar. I think is decent. I don’t know. It might be one of the most decent avatars I’ve ever made for myself.

Notice that all of them are in the same colour scheme. This is because I’ve designed for them to be integrated into my fanwork gallery, Toffeepops. Yup, that’s my finalised circle name. The last was discarded, and I registered under Toffeepops instead. It’s cute anyway. Toffeepops is multi-hosted, but the main gateway is hosted by 2Style, under the domain Sweety.Jp. I wanted Psycho.Jp, but I made a very stupid mistake… by giving them the wrong e-mail address. Moron. This is a part of Project Catharsis and the simplest site I’ve planned/made since 2004. It’s like going back to basics – less coding, more styling. Lol.

Okay, I can’t stay awake. I need to go to sleep for a while even though it’s only 7.55pm.

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

Sleeping from 7pm to 1 or 2am, and then stay awake doing random and not so random stuff like:

• Proofreading documents I’m asked to go through for quality control
• Translating Japanese doujinshis, mangas and novels for various scanlation groups (and individually). It is enjoyable, but very mind-breaking. My eyes are swirling from all those Kanji characters. Apple of Eden’s works are still okay (though the long discussion between Lal, Kusakabe and Hibari in ‘Sayonara Hibari Sensei’ is so full of kanji that my brain hurt), but Electrocks tendency to use difficult kanjis is a different case.Arrrr.
• Abusing my worn tablets, sketchbooks, pigment liners and pencils to draw randomly. I need to finish my doujin “Inori” (the title may or may not be changed to “One Million Sandcastles” to match the fiction version), start working on Eleven Fifty Nine and finish at least the darn prologue of “Parapsypchic”. I’m still in the process of drafting out the whole Parapsychic universe including school curricula and organisations and a whole democratic and legal system. What have I started?
• Brainstorming for the Doujin Overload 2009 Art Competition. It needs to be hand-drawn, which I think is fair for everyone.
• Revamping Project Catharsis (http://project-catharsis.com). All of them. I reinstalled wordpress and cleaned up the tables. The site now is totally backed up by WordPress, CushyCMS and NextGen Gallery. I’ll need to work on integrating my manga viewer script with the site.Since I’m a sucker for cute applications, I love CushyCMS~

I tried to get WordPress blogroll to appear alongside the list of pages, but no matter what I do, using the template tag without arguments was totally hopeless. The original one was this:

[code lang="php"]

• Home

< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2&sort_column=menu_order'); ?>
< ?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_li=&depth=2'); ?>

[/code]

It went out of line so very horribly. Being a total noob that I am, I tried to free the default values for title_before and title_after, but it still looked ugly. In the end, I gave up. I simply created a navigation icon that kind of look like wp_list_pages. This is what ended up with:

[code lang="php"]

• Home

< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2&sort_column=menu_order'); ?>
< ?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&category=2&title_li=&depth=2&title_before=&title_after=&class=page_item'); ?>

[/code]

I don’t care anymore. As long as it’s not as horrible. I still get a decent drop down link list this way.

p.s/ I need to go sleep for a while. I should update my Dreamwidth as soon as I wake up or I’ll forget. Again. While I’m at it, I might as well draw and write for Kamikorosu’s next journal entry (moving into canon timeline now, finally).

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

Friend A: Why aren’t your journals on Blogspot?
Friend B: What’s Livejournal?

They’re so internet savvy, so it appals me that they don’t know about Livejournal. I can be sure they have no ideas about the LJ Strikethrough that shook the blogosphere or the recent development and emergence of Dreamwidth. If you ask me to compare Blogspot with WordPress, Livejournal and most recently Dreamwidth, I’d say Blogspot is MOST DEFINITELY on the bottom of my list. Heck, even Vox is at least ten times better.

Purpose of A Blog, and Privacy Level

Is it personal or commercial? Why are blogs suddenly popular after a few years of it’s initial existence? Why do everybody have blogs now? Some keep blogs for commercial purposes, but some wants it to be personal. It makes me wonder why personal blogs are kept on Blogspot, which offers no post privacy filters. If I want to keep it personal, and allow only a few to read my entries, or even keep the blog entries to myself, I would choose a blog provider which allows me to control ‘who can certain entries’. It’s more effective than making the entire blog private. Sometimes, you want to share your entries with select friends. Sometimes, you just want to keep them to yourselves. Sometimes, you want to share your entries with anyone at all.

This is why I love Livejournal (LJ) and Dreamwidth (DW) so damn much. Of course, I love InsaneJournal, Greatestjournal, JournalFen (IJ, GJ and JF respectively) and other LJ-based providers too, but my best experience had been with LJ and recently DW. I can make it so that my blog entries can only be read by friends who also have accounts there. I can make it so everyone in the WWW can read them. I have that freedom.

The new development of Dreamwidth (currently in open beta) is even more wonderful. New privacy options let me have greater control of my journal entries. If you were to have a look at my DW now (http://adlina.dreamwidth.org), you can only see one entry when I actually have a total of 5 entries. Same with my Livejournal. Out of 325 journal entries (I’ve been using LJ for six years~ 325 is a small number, sadly.), the public eye can only read 160 of them. The rest are either private or shared with friends, who are DW/LJ users.

Ongoing Conversation and Meaningful Discussions

LJ and DW makes me feel alive. You write something, someone clicks reply, and you can click reply on the person’s comment. In other words, the wonders of threaded comments (like WordPress, but we all know WP is a bit slow to implement this features). Have a look at a sample comment thread from my LJ:

It’s an ongoing conversation, people. It looks alive. If you have something you disagree with, you can always argue. The arguments can continue. Other people can also join in the discussion. The thread doesn’t have to be between two people.

If you want to one person’s comments invisible to other commenters, you can screen the comments. This way, no one knows about your private discussion with the other person. You can also delete their comments if you want to.

Sense of Community

You can join and create communities with LJ-based journals. What’s the point of keeping your short stories or poetry or even songs to yourselves? Joining specific communities can help promote your artistic pieces. Share them with other people and get into discussions about them. It’s your chance to get feedbacks and even constructive criticisms. The latter is hard to come by these days. Comments of “Wow, it’s cool!” is getting so old and lame and bleh.

One of the communities I’m in helps me with my language learning. It’s very useful when you have native speakers correcting your works and help you improve. Information exchange, file sharing – you name it. We have it all.

Friends Page / Reading Page

You don’t have to individually open each blog to read your friends’ newest entries. You don’t even have to subscribe to their RSS feeds if you don’t feel like it. Just click on your friends page, without the apostrophe, (or ‘reading page’ in DW) and then you can read the entries of everyone you have access to. If you want to comment, just click on comment straight away. Easy as that. Your friends page will also show newest posts in communities you subscribe to if you don’t filter them out. I usually filter communities and individuals

You can always go to your profile and click on ‘view entries’ for friends or communities. Instant filter

Conclusion to Friend A: No, I will never have a working journal on Blogspot.

To Friend B: I hope you have a clear idea now.

© 2009, Adlina. All rights reserved. Please link back to this page if quoted.

Hidayah and Syazwan Feeding the Fishies

Family and Chocolate Cake: Mama and I baked a chocolate cake last night for the whole family. I didn’t have enough butter for the topping, but it turned out ok. Even the spatula was gone. I had to spread the choc over with just a spoon. It turned out quite ok, though, for a rushed cake. My brother went back to Kuantan with his wife and kids earlier this evening. I had fun with the kids. They’re so naive, how cute! Sometimes I think time flies by too quickly. My brother’s already 32 years-old, going on 33 and my eldest niece is going to be a preschooler in a couple more years. Wow. And I’m going on 22 this year! Okay, denial mode ON now! Before they left, they gave me RM250 for pocket money *is grateful*. Now I have more spare fund to ease my worries where rent is concerned.

Streamyx: PPoE auto mode doesn’t work anymore. I have to login manually. It started around 7.35pm last night when the link suddenly went down. I panicked for a while before logging in straight away into the router management. My login info was gone, and all IPs were reset to 0.0.0.0. The status showed all services in red.

I called 100 at around 9pm. I have to salute the customer service this time for being prompt. The recorded message was saying ‘We’re sorry, but our c–’ when a guy picked up the phone and asked me what’s wrong. Before he could ask me to do what normal protocols usually require (ipconfig, ping IP blablabla), I told him I’ve done all that and gave him the IP number and the packets sent/received from the ping. Before he asked what OS I’m using, I told him I’ve tested the connection on Vista, XP, Fedora, Ubuntu and even Mac (I still have my old iBook LOL). I didn’t lie. In my state of panic, I practically brandished all of the gadgets and tested them one by one. I even told him direct connection didn’t work.

And so my report was filed. A moment later, I calmed down completely. I logged in to the router again and played around with the settings. A little bit of tweaking here and there lighted up the data LED, and I was delighted. ThenI found out that I can only do manual connection. Well, sucks, but for some reasons, manual connection is so much faster – proven by downloading some backup files from my Myotherdrive storage account.

One strange thing is that while not logged in, my currency converter widget works perfectly well. It usually demands a connection to the internet to function. Without connection, it will show ‘No data’. So why? Such a mystery, or that I’m just a moronic noob in this field.

Traffic Spike: There was a sudden spike in traffic because of the eduFire post yesterday, which left my jaw hanging. I’m glad I’ve switched servers, or the site would totally be down. More than 300% over the usual daily traffic. How scary and this siteisn’t supported by advertisements to cover for unexpected damages. Must be careful.

Doujin Overload 2009 & Manga Studio EX 4.o: I got the license! Now I’m clearing out my laptop’s space to accommodate this new program. No more shaky outlines even if the tablet’s precision is not up to par. I guess I’ll practice more. Hijrah is getting really excited about this year’s Doujin Overload. We’re thinking of reserving a table this year. We’ll see how things goes, and if we have the budget. I don’t have the confidence. She’s always the more professional one anyway (and she’s good with people). The problem with July is that it’s winter. Auckland’s rain is always unforgiving (last year we had a storm, said to be the worst in a decade).

Stuck Pixels: The blue vertical line of doom is back for the second time. I think I’m frying the graphic card because I leave the laptop open for way too long, or the LCD is being a darn prick. Since it doesn’t show over white background, I don’t mind much. I’ll let the laptop rest tonight and try to get rid of the pixels tomorrow when I wake up.

Ah… Less than a week left before I fly back. Do. Not.Want.

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