I have been a little bit removed from the scene lately, and that is due almost entirely to life events happening . What time hasn’t been taken up with everything happening in life has been spent staring at my screen wondering how to write.  See, in all this time since I’ve last written anything of note, a LOT has been happening. I’ve tried writing about about most of it, but just can’t seem to get back into the groove.

The real issue is that I expect a lot of myself as a writer (which is funny when you consider how poor a lot of my writing is).  Simply writing a paragraph on a subject isn’t enough for me, and so what could just be a little blurb about something turns into a 4 page essay.  About three paragraphs into the essay, I have to step away from the computer for whatever reason and when I get back, I’ve lost all track of what I was doing.

Now, there are a couple options a site faces when this happens.  I could always shut the site down, but frankly I like having it here.  Stolen Droids has lasted a lot longer than any other site I’ve worked on, and I want to see it last a bit longer.  Another option would be to rededicate myself to writing small novellas about every topic my mind comes across, but I only have so much time in the day and it feels like I’m getting less and less of that.  The third option, and the one I’ve decided to go with, is to do less “editorial-style” posts.

What does this mean, overall?  Well it means that instead of daily articles describing the moral implications of a new type of biodesiel and its effect on quantum string theory, it means you might get a lot more one paragraph posts about how cool something is that we found online.  If you look back over the last few pages of posts, that’s kinda what we’ve been doing anyway.

So, I hope you enjoy the site.  We hope to be here for a long while.

For whatever reason, every site that is on this account has been shuffled off this internet coil except Stolen Droids.  While I greatly appreciate the fact that our most visited (and technically complex) site has not been deleted, it doesn’t really help me bring back any of the other sites that just suddenly don’t exist anymore.  The account is actually under fellow SD member Schmidty, who graciously allows us space and pays for the monthly bill.

I’ve done many migrations before myself, and I know that they can be a real pain in the rear if you don’t plan accordingly for the project at hand.  The best way to avoid this kind of issue is to . . . well, PLAN for the project at hand.

Allow me to give you a snippet of the message we got warning us about the move.

Your username and cPanel password will remain the same.

* Migration Date: December 24, 2009

* Migration Start Time: 10:00 AM MST

* Migration End Time: (estimate) 08:00 PM MST
* Old Server IP: 69.89.31.235

This move was supposed to take 10 hours and, according to the rest of the email, the only real issue we’d suffer was the global DNS system having to replicate the new IP address of the servers.  It is now January 8th.  A 10 hour move is now in it’s 380th hour.  According to the host’s technical support, they have moved 320 of 856GB of data.  Just doing some rough math puts that at a speed of 234KB/second (or about 1.8Mbps).  For comparison, a modern DSL connection is about 6Mbps.  My connection here at work is 10Mbps.  A USB connection is 480Mbps.  Most modern data centers use Gigabit Ethernet to move data which moves at (as the name suggests) 1Gbps, or 1024Mbps.

So, somehow our host is managing to do this in the slowest way possible and in the mean time just leave all their customers out to dry.  Not kidding here; it’d be faster if they moved things by floppy disk!

Thankfully, they are remarkably easy to get ahold of.  In fact, the front page of their site has a handy chat box!  Of course, it’s meant for sales, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it too!

Ann A. [2:29:38 PM]: Thank you for contacting the Sales Team. Please give me a moment while I review your question.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:29:38 PM]: Why have you screwed up my site?
Ann A. [2:29:53 PM]: Hi, let me transfer you to tech support. One moment please.
Tyler [2:32:17 PM]: Thank you for contacting our Live Chat! Please be patient as I am often on several different chats at once. Thank you!
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:32:17 PM]: Why have you screwed up my site?
[2:32:54 PM]: Hello?
[2:33:04 PM]: {site name removed}
[2:33:12 PM]: and nearly every other site on the account
Tyler [2:34:19 PM]: Let me take a look here.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:39:38 PM]: Any luck?
Tyler [2:41:11 PM]: Yes you’re account is being migrated.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:41:30 PM]: And has been for quite some time, it seems.
[2:41:46 PM]: Before, when I was told that the data had simply been lost, I recreated the site.
[2:42:13 PM]: Now, the data is all still there (according the file manager anyway), but you get a 404 whenever you try and hit the site.
Tyler [2:43:36 PM]: That is most likely due to the migration. Nothing will be concrete until the migration is finished.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:43:51 PM]: So the old site is inaccessible
[2:43:58 PM]: the new site is inaccessable
[2:44:04 PM]: and the ETR on this is . . . when?
Tyler [2:45:59 PM]: It looks like a few days to a week, due to the large amount of files and disk space.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:47:36 PM]: OK, when we got the notification from you that a migration would be happening, it wasn’t exactly made clear at that time that 1) everything would go FUBAR on us, and 2) it would be that way for up to a month.
Tyler [2:49:28 PM]: I’m sorry about that. It is a very large account.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:51:03 PM]: I understand that, and I can feel for your situation.
[2:51:34 PM]: But is this the only account this is happening to? Shouldn’t this have been taken into consideration when the migration was being planned?
Tyler [2:52:13 PM]: the migration is a script that is automated, there is really no way for us to estimate the duration of the migration.
FIRST TIME SALES QUESTION [2:53:01 PM]: Well, in the future, you might want to consider creating yourself a new script.

Now, I’m not going to go and blast the name of our host (though anyone who knows what a WHOIS search is won’t have any problems figuring it out).  Part of me fears that if I anger them too much, Stolen Droids will also be wiped out.  I’m tempted to be grateful that everything here is working perfectly . . . that is until I see that WordPress wants to upgrade the database to the newest version.  Again.  Like it has done every time I’ve logged in for the last few weeks!

So, if we’re not here suddenly, you know why.  In the mean time, I think I’m going to try and make some offline backups!

The Jibblies are a kind of psychic shock caused by a painting of an evil Demon known as the “Rocoulm,” whose catchphrase is “Come on in here.” Before I show you the full horror of the Jibblies, I should tell you that when you see the Poopsmith character during the following video, make sure to click on his head to unlock an easter egg scene which you would otherwise miss. It’s worth it.

You can now view the Rocoulm’s full Jibblies rampage here. Do so at your own risk.

It’s no secret that I love Penny Arcade.  I’ve read through all of them enough times that I can quote my favorites and still laugh (yes, at myself).  What’s really funny is when I see something else entirely and it reminds me of a strip from long ago.

From February 2, 2007

Normally this would be worth a bit of a chuckle, and then we move on.  However, I was looking though the Sunday ads and saw this:

]]> http://www.stolendroids.com/website/life-mimics-art/feed 1 http://www.stolendroids.com/video-games/haloolympicscom-just-launched http://www.stolendroids.com/video-games/haloolympicscom-just-launched#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:05:06 +0000 Schmidty http://www.stolendroids.com/?p=1064

Now, we just need to use him for target practice.

If you love Halo 3, and would like to participate in a new style of playing, then join Halo Olympics!  I just launched the site today, and we are planning a lot of exciting venues in the future.  

What is Halo Olympics you ask?  Well, I came up with the idea a while ago when I was taking screenshots of a multiplayer match I played online.  I came across this one posted here of my character doing an arial through the air.  I got the idea of creating a Halo Olympic club where we would do whacky things like Arial Jumping.  It doesn’t stop there though.  The amount of things we can do in Halo is only limited by our creativity, and the number of people that help. 

So, tell all your friends, and join today!

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

I love having a Geek Wife.  Not only am I married to someone who understand me, she also introduces me to more geek items that I wasn’t aware of.  She introduced me to the website that NORAD set up to track Santa Clause on Christmas Eve.    http://www.noradsanta.org/

NORAD tracking Santa just off the North American coast in 2007

It has now become a tradition on December 24th (Just as the International Date line crosses over to December 25th) to visit the website and keep an eye on where Santa has visited.  The website will update every five minutes with different reports and videos on where Santa has been.  At the time that Santa is scheduled to pass over our place, my wife would run past the kids bedrooms (they would be tucked in by that time) playing the Christmas bells (luckily we would already have the presents under the tree).

How did NORAD get in the business of tracking Santa through the skies?  On December 24, 1955 an advertisement had been placed in a Colorado Springs newspaper asking kids to call Santa at the number printed and they would be able to keep track of Santa’s location through out the world.  The only problem was the number was listed incorrectly in the ad.  Instead of ringing the store, it rang to Col. Harry Shoup at the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center.  A ton of calls came in from excited kids asking where Santa was.  Instead of hanging up on the kids, Col. Shoup asked his operators to find the location of Santa and report it to every kid that called.  This started a tradition at NORAD that continues until today.  Using satellite systems, high-powered radars and jet fighters several hundred volunteers track Santa and respond to telephone calls and emails from around the world (from both adults and kids).  The Track Santa website with NORAD is translated into six languages.  The 2006 tracking effort alone had 1 billion hits to the website (from 210 countries), a half a million calls were made to the hotline and over 12,500 emails were received.

Perhaps NORAD should alter their motto to “Deter. Detect. Defend. Deliver.”

This time around, we’re asking if you have an affinity for Lego products.  This could be interpreted as your love for the amazing video games, the great, if not elusive, playsets, or even something as simple as the pens or keychains.  Even if you think they’re really cool and wish you could buy them but don’t, that’s still an affinity.  Now is the time that you vote.

And, like with everything else that hits a massive surge, we have moronic advertisers who try and cash in on it.  That in itself isn’t so bad (hey, it’s capitalism!).  What’s bad is the fact that they try and do it with automated scripts.

Just a few years ago, the public was all in a tizzy because of browser cookies; little files that save on your computer that track where you’ve been.  The fear was that if sites know where you have been, you’ll have no privacy.  This was by design, as cookies help your browser remember your passwords, form data, and personal settings.  However it also meant that anyone with advertising related cookies could also track what you were looking at the post and target you for specific email and banner based advertising.  If you went to a lot of gaming sites, you’d start to get gaming e-mails.  If you went to a lot of porn sites, well, you know.

In the end, people gave up on the fight against cookies when they realized how much easier they made web browsing.  Fast forward to today, and we have Twitter.

Twitter is a service that allows people to sort of just shout out into the internet whatever happens to be on their mind at the time.  You can follow just a few select people, or you can view the entire worldwide queue as it updates (sort of like the “Party Line” of the 80′s, where everyone is all talking into a phone at once).  It’s a fun little service that can be relatively harmless, so long as you don’t start broadcasting really personal info.  However, somewhere, some marketing exec had the idea that they could get free market research by simply filtering through the Twitter queue and looking for specific keywords.

Makes sense, in theory: You want to know what people are saying about the new Toyota Prius, so you search for the word Prius.  That in by itself is actually really smart; you’re not bugging me with a survey, and you’re likely to get more accurate information!

Then someone in advertising got ahold of the idea and gave it to their evil half-brother in the spam industry.  Suddenly you have these scripts scouring EVERYTHING on the web and linking your Twitters, blogs, MySpace, Facebook, forum posts to whatever crap they are trying to sell.

Anyone who can read knows that these links are automatically generated and have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand.  Schmidty gave me a perfect example when he looked up his own daughter’s name.  Not a single one of those “reviews” has anything to do with the actual product!  Stolen Droids’ own spam queue is perpetually filled with horribly coded comments from bots who try and pass themselves off as interested readers (if I approve the comment, they link back to their host site to provide potential traffic).

Some of these are pretty well worded:

“Hey, I found your post when I searched for {whatever}.  I’ll look around the rest of your site, but it looks really interesting.”

Those I have to actually follow the link back to what they list as their homepage before determining if they are legit or not.  Others are a little more obvious:

“I loved your post on %subjectname% here on %blogname%!  Can you tell me more?  Come visit my site %authorname% and we can talk about it!”

What, is the web suddenly a Windows environment editor?  

Currently, SD seems to be permanently linked to a site is about “Adult Party Games” simply because of our post about Never Winter Nights.  Simply by having the word “game” in the title, it somehow qualified to be added to their list of “friends”.  

So, in an attempt to hit as many lists as I can think of (in an effort to both annoy spammer scripts and maybe generate hits) I’ll be filling my tags for this post to see what we get!