My interview with two nice gents in the FF7 hacking/modding scene who you might've heard of-- Qhimm and Ficedula.

Bah.

...who posted this reply:

The majority of online games that I play are first-person shooters (only with certain people/clans, mind you). I've played an MMORPG (Phantasy Star Online) before, but got bored with it after awhile.

So in other words... girl gamers are not always what you assume they are :P

Not much to report today. I've been working on various pages (Images and Media, Downloads, Games, Links, and all the Site Info stuff). Right now I'm plugging away at the Awards, which is getting a makeover not unlike what I'm doing with the Games (which is what, you may ask? You'll see ^_~).

Talked to Ambigore on AIM yesterday (mainly to see if he had any info about the domain registrar login). Looking back on our conversation, I get the sense that he was smiling (kindly) at the mess I'd gotten myself into...

More to come...

After a second email from Taryn and much noodling, I managed to get into the FF7 Citadel's FTP account. The webmastership has been passed on. Now I'm wondering what exactly it is I've gotten myself into.

The server seemed to be a bit slow when I logged on, but not horrendously so. I'm currently copying over the entire site to my hard drive, and it's been going for about half an hour now, if not longer. After everything is copied, I'm going to check out the log file, which has apparently grown to a gargantuan size (794102645 bytes... DAMN!).

What I'm mainly looking for here are the bandwidth requirements. I'm thinking of hosting the Citadel on my own account (for various reasons), but I need to see how much juice it requires on a monthly basis. I also want to see what it currently has for .htaccess and robots.txt files... could trim off a lot of the future bandwidth consumption by altering those.

In any case, the Citadel is being overhauled-- the three (or more) year-old HTML is being chucked for a new, streamlined, dynamic format that requires CGI, PHP, CSS, and a host of other acronyms in addition to the aformentioned HTML. I've also done a new design to go along with all of this, using images from Advent Children. Needless to say, I have a lot of work ahead of me.

I've already started with some of the reworking: aside from the main templates (which probably still need a bit of tweaking), I looked at the source for some of the current pages in Mozilla, and copied them over to my text editor to make cut-n-paste ready drafts for the new site. Oh my... what a lot of mistakes I found. Add on top of that all of the HTML I'm chucking/altering due to the addition of a stylesheet, not to mention all the missing files (at least thirty of them), and I have quite a job to do.

Day Three >>

My wiki has been Google-bombed!

Heh. I wish. Currently, the Final Fantasy Wiki holds the top spot for "Final Fantasy Wiki", but it doesn't hold the coveted "Final Fantasy" spot. Truth be told, if such a thing happens, I'd like it to occur the honest way... but I'm also intrigued by the wiki itself being one big Google-bomb waiting to happen (as Cy-Dogg has suggested) ^_~

No, the wiki's sandbox had been hit by four links from one of the nigritude ultramarine competitors. I thought it was just plain old spam at the time, and not only edited the page, but banned the IP. When I went into the FTP account to change the revision cache itself, I realized just then what it was... hey, it's that Google optimization thingie I read about on Slashdot! Did I care? Nope. Spam is spam. The source got edited anyway. :P

EDIT 6/03/04: It's happened again! *edits page*, *bans IP*, *edits source*

Animators don't have it any easier than you do!

Sure, animation jobs have been going overseas for over twenty years now, but as the Korean animation industry has matured (so much so that it pumps out work that rivals much Japanese anime), the inbetweening and coloring gigs are moving to-- you guessed it-- India! Check out AWN's Career Connections if you don't believe me; seems like a whole lot of the studios hiring artists these days are in India (an even greater incentive for one to rely on their own networking skillz and mad connections... if they have them in the first place, that is).

Hi all!

It seems I have a fan! Hello, joyof! I guess either you're someone I know who's somehow mamaged to work out who I am behind the mask, or I've succeeded in writing something interesting. I hope it's the latter. Anyway, I've added you to my friends list.

By the way, the only reason I haven't posted recently is because I've been extremely busy and haven't had time to read the discussions in depth. Hopefully that will change soon.

Bye for now.

It's so nice to have mod points when a thread like this one comes along. Sure, I have my own piece to say about girl gamers (being a girl whose LAN group is predominantely male), but it was so much more catharthic for me to mod down all those sore loser boys-- I mean flamers, and mod up the few who had interesting things to say :)

My site is temporarily closed. I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience, though I shouldn't have to, since it's not even my fault! My hosting company is having serious server problems... even now -_-

I've already figured out a workaround, but it may be a week or two before I can get the site back up. Stay tuned...

UPDATE (Jan 1): The site's pages are back online, but the front page's counter seems to have been reset, my CGI-bin is AWOL, and there's some serious login issues for various other aspects of the site. In other words, it's not fixed yet, but at least y'all can read fanfics again :P

UPDATE (Jan 8): I have Plesk access again! I have FTP access again! But strangely enough, all of my email accounts have been wiped out *_* Plesk is also telling me that there are no web_users, despite the fact that all three of the subdomain sites are active, AND the files are accessible via FTP. Oh, and the permissions on some files seem to have been reset -_-

Right now I'm backing up the blog and ClawCo subdomain-- the only two parts of the site I don't have up-to-date, concrete backups of.

UPDATE (Jan 9): Email's working... and all the archived emails are still there. w00t :)

If all goes well, I'll be moving the site on Sunday.

UPDATE (Jan 11): I backed up a helluva lot of email yesterday and opened a new account with a different (and larger) hosting company this morning. The new nameservers have been indicated in my domain's preferences, and should take effect by tomorrow afternoon. So in short, the site is down again; but at least this time, I have some measure of control over it.

Oh, and in between backups and whatnot, I've been playing Dark Cloud 2. Very good game... I recommend it.

UPDATE (Jan 12): We're back online, baby! Once Claw's subdomain goes up and I have Horde (webmail via IMP being one of the few features from my old host that I really miss), Greymatter, and whatever assorted other scripts set up, I'll be good to go. Hopefully. Keep those digits crossed..

UPDATE (Jan 15): This should be the last update. Two Greymatter folders, one Active Guestbook, and one Horde/IMP installation (thanks again for the help, Cy-Dogg!) later, the site is almost entirely restored, with some new features to boot! The last thing I have to take care of is the matter of a counter, which I'm going to do through a third-party service this time, so I don't lose my numbers again (which were in the five-digit range when the site went down). Now to email my readers and (loose definition of a) staff sometime in the next few days, and let them know that the Blue Shinra Project is BACK!!!

UPDATE (Jan 15): Nope, guess that wasn't the last one. Everything's up and running smoothly, save for the counter (not set up yet) and the webmail (currently exploring options other than Horde/IMP)...

UPDATE (Jan 17): Site's been updated, blog entry's been written, peeps have been emailed, and by some kind of 1337-ish divine intervention, the backups for my hit counter and guestbook have been found, and promptly transferred over to their proper places. For the counter, I ended up with LiveCounter Classic again, as I couldn't find anything better within the limited amount of time I have (ahh well, not a bad counter to have ^_^). And the webmail (Uebimiau this time) is still a little buggy.

My man got me this as a surprise. See why I love him so? :)

Chillout is the Easy Listening of my generation.

I need to vent.

Having looked at my domain's logs last night, I found that certain people are still leeching images off of my server, despite whatever polite cease-and-desist messages I've sent them. And on top of that, a particularly large file was being hijacked by a new leecher! I promptly changed the names of the images, edited the related pages, uploaded these new jpgs and html files (while taking any old ones down)... and promptly began searching for information on how I can prevent this from happening again.

So far I've downloaded at least three CGI/Perl scripts, but none of these seem to work (or have the features I want). There's still one that I have to try out, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. On the other hand, there's also .htaccess, which will most likely screw up where I keep the files that myself and a subdomain client use for our own personal remote linking, but it seems like the best option at this point. I still have to do some more research, so at the moment it's up in the air as to what I'll end up doing :P

I noticed yesterday's Slashdot story called Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge? and it reminded me of something that happened to me this week.

On Monday, I bought a remix album by Puffy (aka Puffy AmiYumi), a popular Japanese pop duo (the album I got was PRMX Turbo-- it's damn good). For my own convenience, I promptly ripped the CD in iTunes. Using the few song titles listed in English, along with my knowledge of some of the Japanese-titled songs, I was able to attach names to most of the tracks, but there were a couple I was missing. I went online and Googled the group's name (with English results only, of course). One of the first links listed in my search was to CDUniverse, an online music store. I checked it out, only to see that PRMX Turbo was listed as being a Puff Daddy album! Out of curiosity, I checked out Puff Daddy's discography on the site, and saw that most of the imports listed were Puffy albums!

I emailed CDUniverse and told them of the error, and got a response from them yesterday. Now, Puffy's albums are in their rightful place, but I shudder to think what would happen if someone had Googled (or Froogled) Puff Daddy in the past and accidentally bought a Puffy CD...

I guess if there's a lesson in this, it's that the internet, as a source of knowledge and information, is very much a work in progress. We need to make sure it can be as reliable and as truthful as can be. Therefore, I say if you see a factual error online, point it out (or, if possible, fix it yourself). The 'net will be a much happier place :)

The Democratic National Committee now has an official blog. The title? Kicking Ass. I don't know whether to say "Cool" or "Oh good Lord".

In other news, I'm playing the PSX version of FF7. Having only played the PC version before, the differences are stunning. Best differences: the stereo soundtrack that isn't dependant on MIDI drivers, smoother integration between FMV segments and pre-rendered/sprite-based segments, and MUCH smoother battle animations. Worst difference: the PSX version's translation (apparently, Square and Eidos cleaned up the script a bit for the PC port).