May 2008

So as I finish up work for the night I decide that instead of going right to bed I want to kill some people and steal some cars. I go to turn on my Xbox 360 and to my horror and shock I had 3 red quadrants on the 360.

Yes that’s right I have received the Red Ring of Death on my 360. As any 360 owner knows, this is the worst problem with that a 360 can have. Basically it means that some hardware in the machine has failed and needs to be repaired. I bought my Xbox in 2006 so I should still be covered under the three year warranty that they issued out a few months back. I am going to be calling them tomorrow and hopefully I can send it out by Wednesday of next week.

Up until now I haven’t had a problem with the console. It has provided hours upon hours of entertainment for me and I hope that Microsoft has a quick turn around time. Who knows, I heard you don’t get your Xbox back so maybe I will receive one with an HDMI port, though I doubt it.

For some reason I love cards like that. Not many people send them during the holidays anymore, you usually get ones that come out of a box of prewritten cards with the only uniqueness to them is that the person who sent it took the time to write your name and sign theirs. I think that is pathetic, honestly. What is the point of taking the time to send out holiday cards if they aren’t going to be done with care and a bit of uniqueness to each card?

The card above is a personal picture card that can be made and sent out during holidays. I think those cards are a great idea, not only just around Christmas, but also for birthdays and just days when you want people to share in experiences with you, but couldn’t be there. What I mean is they would be great for birth announcements, or to tell people how your trip was. They could be used as wedding thank you cards, or anything you want really. It is when people get lazy and use the same old cards is it that people won’t remember it. If they received something personal like that then you have a better chance of them keeping it, or at least having it stand out in someone’s mind.
Photo Cards

Think about that for a minute. One little change and everything could be different. My aunt acts more manly than her husband did, but if she had a penis she would be a man. It is kind of like that car commercial where one little change makes a big difference, and replacing a vagina with a penis would definitely be a big change.

I am not quite sure how big of a change that would be though, like I said she was already more manly than her husband. I don’t mean any disrespect, but she is the one who fixed things around the house, went fishing, and loved camping. She learned it from her mother, so I wonder if she had the anatomy of a man if she would be completely different. Who knows, she might be the girliest man alive.

Before I started experimenting in PHP on my own server, I was trying to figure out how to host my own Windows server off my computer. A few years before someone told me about PHP, I saw that I could use the same stuff I was learning in QBASIC and Visual BASIC on a website. Of course I never got it working and I never did go to windows web hosting because I found PHP.

While PHP and MySQL is good, I have found that there are simply some things that would be easier on Windows. It seems that with the time Windows has had to develop their server and database software they have more features and you can essentially do more with the built in tools.

I don’t think BBella is feeling well. She has had diarrhea for a while, plus she doesn’t seem as playful as she normally does. It sucks because we can’t afford to take her to even the cheapest vet down here. If she doesn’t get better in a few days I think we are going to figure out how to afford to get her looked at. It might not be a problem though, but it could affect some future plans we have.

The nominees for the 2008 Webby awards have been announced. Among the nominees are lifelock, which will protect your identity to the point where you could actually give your social security number to strangers on the street and not have to worry. The reason they were nominated is because they rely on their website as their main source of getting the information out there. While the television commercials help get their name out there, the website really tells you how they do it and encourage you to sign up via their website. It is fitting since a lot of identity theft is used to purchase items online since it is harder to catch someone online than if they were in a store using a card in your name.

I am trying to figure out how to write a shopping cart script that will work with PayPal. So far I can’t figure it out, I think I am going to have download one and then see how it is done. It disn’t so much getting it to PayPal, it is making it go from a successful payment to an invoice number. I am going to try and get that done today.

I have been thinking about booking a tour with Trusted Tours & Attractions. I have been to New York a few times, and I love it there. There are always going to be things to do in New York that you can’t do in other cities, but I think I would go visit a new city, like Philadelphia or Atlanta.

I think Philadelphia would be a great place to visit because it has so much history that is tied to the hisory of the entire country, and Atlanta I have wanted to visit since I saw it in an episode of Futurama. I am sure there are more Things to do in Atlanta than just taking a tour of the Coca Cola plant and the airport, but maybe it is one of those things that you have to be there before you know what to do.

I signed up for the Trusted Tours & Attractions newsletter because I love to travel and also they are giving away a $150 itunes gift card. Who knows, in the coming months I might be on sightseeing tours in some city in the US, I just need to money and figure out where I really want to go.

Why can’t women say what they want? If a guy was asked what he wanted he would tell you, a woman will put out signals and signs. Why can’t women be more direct?

I am usually good at picking up signs when I know I am supposed to be looking for them. Anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas, I know I need to be looking so I pay close attention to signs that Krissy leaves. It is when I am not looking for signs that I have a hard time picking up on them. Like today she wanted Chinese food for dinner, she won’t say what she wants, she just wants me to know. After about two hours I figured it out, but why can’t women just say what they want?

When I get a new car, I am going to get one that has GPS Tracking. The reason is that it would lower my rates and it will help me retrieve the vehicle if it gets stolen, or even misplaced at the mall. That has happened before, we were all ready to have the car reported stolen and it was just in another parking lot. With it I would never need to worry about making that mistake again.

Apparently a Robocop Remake has been announced as in development over the weekend. After six not so good sequels, along with a television show, I think it is about time. I loved Robocop, and there is some good stuff in the sequels. Honestly I think there’s only two things in the movie sequels that were good (when Robocop tells his widow that they made him to honor her husband, and the death of his partner, Lewis). As for the made for TV movies, they were all right but half way through it turned into another movie all together, featuring Robocop and his new Robo buddy. A reboot might just be what the series needs, but if they decide to do sequels to it hopefully they won’t be as bad as the previous ones.

On a subdomain I have been creating a script for a client and it wasn’t until then that I realized how important it is to have a good host when you are trying to get things up and running as quick as possible. You don’t know how many times I get annoyed when I am uploading something through Dreamweaver and it is taking forever to complete. Of course when you are going at a good speed and you have to wait for the FTP to finally start working you get distracted and you loose the momentum that you once had.

To be quite honest I am a very loyal man. I am loyal to the people that I trust, the people that I like, my girlfriend, and even though they may have a less than perfect track record, companies that I have been using for years. I have been using my host for years, ever since I first put up my first page on Lep’s Lair. Back then though I didn’t realize how different hosts were. I saw someone who had it and I had gone to her site for years so I signed up without reading any web hosting reviews or anything.

If I was in the market for a new host today, things would be different. I wouldn’t just be reading reviews on their sites, I would be looking for sites specifically for host reviews. Back when I signed up, I didn’t realize how pivotal a choice of choosing web hosting could be. Really it could make or break your business. Of course back then I wasn’t really looking to start a business or anything like that, I just wanted to be able to put PHP code up, who knew years later it would turn into this big thing?

If my site gets bigger and I am making more money then I might consider switching hosts. I have been keeping up on web hosting articles, just in case I have to switch down the line.