The Big V

So this is the second time I’ve had to post this because I’m an idiot and somehow published it originally while stripping out all of the text.  Pretty annoying.  To that end this is the short version.

So on the recommendation of a friend i switched to Gandi for my hosting a year ago when I was looking for a new host.  They were just launching their hosting service and were only charging $7.50 a month for it.  This seemed pretty good and although it was a ‘beta’ featured they seemed to be on top of things.  Unfortunately although things started good on Gandi they had a huge datacentre failure early on and my server never seemed to recover.  Gandi support claimed everything was fine but it wasn’t and there were serious 24/7 slowness issues with it.  They recently announced that their beta period was over and starting in January they would be changing the price to $16 a month.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I immediately decided it was time for a new host.

Snazzy Logo

On the recommendation of a number of friends I settled on Dreamhost.  Their service is pretty cheap but there was a of caveat, to not pay any sort of setup fee you have to pay for a year in advance which costs about $120.  I wasn’t really happy about this but luckily my friend had a coupon I could use to get $47 off of that price (it turns out these coupons are actually fairly common and he gets a kickback, which is fine by me).  In the end that works out to about $7.50 a month which I was already happy with so I decided to go for it.  After a year you can switch to monthly payments which I’ll probably end up doing as I don’t really like the concept of paying for 12 months of something in advance.

The migration to Dreamhost itself went great, very slick and easy.  My domain name was about to expire and they even had a promo on where if I switched them to be my new namehost they would renew it for another year for free, so that was a nice bonus.  Unfortunately I did run into a major problem though.  There was some sort of serious bug with my new server communicating with the mysql databases, it was causing massive slowdowns/internal errors. (basically the site was completely unusable)  I reported this to Dreamhost last night and at first they replied back that from what they could tell everything was fine!  This was obviously not the reply I was hoping for as this wasn’t the case so I replied back to that effect.

This morning there was unfortunately no new reply and my server was still completely screwed up.  I submitted a new ticket to Dreamhost with very specific details and eventually they did get back to me that they were detecting a problem and would try to figure it out.  Almost 24 hours after I reported the problem they did get finally get back to me and were able to resolved the problem.  As I suspected there was a pretty big mysql db issue and dreamhost kept kicking it up to higher level analysts and then to an engineer who was finally able to solve the problem.  It bothers me that it took 24 hours to fix the problem as I was a brand new customer and not expecting a problem, it also pisses me off that they didn’t believe me when I first reported the problem, but eventually they did fix the problem and as of right now the site is running very smooth.  It’s already much faster than Gandi ever was so I hope it stays that way.  We’ll just have to see!

Well I’m back from my post wedding PAX/Seattle trip (I still don’t know how I convinced Melisa to allow us to go to PAX before we go on our Honey Moon) and like last year I had a great time.

Unlike last year though I didn’t really have that much fun at PAX and instead had much more fun in Seattle.  I’m not sure why, all the games in the expo hall that I was interested in I felt like I was going to buy anyways, I didn’t really feel the need to see anything that was there.  Maybe because now that I’ve been before it sort of just seemed like more of the same.  The Enforcers were more annoying this year, there was almost no swag, the developers didn’t seem as interested in talking to normal people about their games, etc etc.  Most annoying of all though is that every event with a major line started at least 30 minutes late, they didn’t start letting the thousands of people into the main theater until after scheduled times for the starting of events had already past, and it takes a long time to let 2000+ people into a big room in an orderly fashion.

The whole thing was fun but I may skip it next year.  With that said I still saw some awesome things and boy do I crave Fallout 3.  Bethesda by far had the best expo section, they seemed like the only company to actaully put any money into their show.

uh.. also I got married last week (and still got to go to PAX, yay my wife), should probably post that.

So, The Dark Knight.

It was incredibly good, I saw it in IMAX over the weekend while Melisa was out of town, and then on Monday when she was back I saw it agan in a normal theater.

I highly recommend it.  I was most impressed with the Harvey Dent story, I had no idea they were going to put so much stuff into this movie, thankfully it was two and a half hours long (although it never feels it)

I believe in Harvey Dent

Well we finally pulled the trigger after months of thinking about it, I’m picking up my new Black Mazda3 Saturday morning and it’s pretty exciting.  We got a pretty good deal in the end after some negotiating but it was tough, we came in off of a referral so we were already getting “employee pricing”, the problem being that employee pricing is higher than it used to be.  It really seems like over the past 6 months dealerships are really not negotiating as much as they used to.  Ah well, we still got some good savings on the car and they “threw in” all weather mats and wheel locks.  As a bonus we also are getting to drive around in a loaner mazda3 for this week until mine comes in (it’s being delivered from Victoria) which is pretty cool and seems to be a pretty rare thing.

We ended up with a Black Mazda3 GT with the Luxury package.  What’s nice is the GT includes everything in the GX/GS trims as well as the comfort package.  All the specs are below and I bolded what I think is especially awesome.

Base GT:

- 2.3L engine with sequential valve timing
- 156 hp
- 150 lb./ft torque
- 17″ alloy wheels
- 205/50R17 tires
- ABS with Electronic Brake Force Distribution (EBFD)
- 4-wheel disc brakes
- Dual front air bags
- Side Air Bags
- Side Air Curtains
- 5 Speed Automatic with Tiptronic
- Anti-theft system
- Exterior temperature gauge
- Auxiliary Input
- AM/FM/CD player with MP3 capability
- 6 Speakers
- Front heated seats
- Leather wrapped steering wheel
- Leather wrapped shift knob
- LED Hannabi taillights
- Sporty bumpers
- Side sill extensions
- Body coloured grille
- Sporty fog lights
- Tri-mode electrominescent gauges
- Piano black interior trim
- Air conditioning with micron air filter
- Map lamp
- Driver and passenger sunvisor with illuminated vanity mirror
- Glove box lock
- Front rain sensing wipers
- Auto light control
- Lumbar support
- Trip Computer
- Cruise control w/steering wheel monted controls
- Rear center armrest with 2 cup holders

Comfort Package:
- Power door Mirrors
- Heated Mirrors
- Power Locks
- Central Locking Switch on Driver and Front Passenger Doors
- Keyless entry with 2 key fobs
- Power Windows
- Power Window Switch Illumination
- One Touch Down Driver’s Side Window
- Illuminated Entry
- Steering Wheel Mounted Audio Controls

Luxury Package:
- Leather seats
- 6-Disc in-dash CD changer
- Automatic climate control
- Xenon headlights (HID)
- Power driver seat with (8 way adjustable)
- BOSE sound system
- Sirius satellite radio
- Speakers (7 vs. 6)
- Chrome finish on exterior door handles
- Moonroof

I’m pretty excited, hopefully Saturday goes without a hitch.

Wow what a disappointment all around. People have been hyping us every day to see this episode for more than a week and now that we’ve seen it… ugh.

The ending was very predictable and I was hoping they weren’t going to do it, but of course they did which just confirms that Moore couldn’t help himself from making a real world earth allegory, and how if stay on our current pattern we’re all going to nuke ourselves to death.

The whole ending just could of been way more interesting, I predicted every scene (Tigh giving himself up to Adama, giving up the others, etc..) eventually Melisa told me to shut up heh. But at least that scene was interesting, but then of course they didn’t actually space Tigh or any of the others and all of the tension that had been built up in that airlock scene was completely lost by the ending.

Also there was way too much stupid hugging before they bothered to even check out what was going on on the planet. That scene makes no sense compared to how the characters act in every other episode of the series, unless Apollo has turned into a male stripper. We know that they have the ability to check radiation from space (the Cylons especially, which is how they found New Caprica), wouldn’t they of detected the aftermaths of World War Nuke on earth?

And what about the 4 cylons that had been hiding in the fleet all this time. After they find earth all of a sudden nobody cares about them anymore? Adama magically was cool with Tigh again? Plus they don’t seem to be worried about where/whot the 5th is model is and none of them seemed to pick up on how Diana said the 5th is not in the fleet. (Luckily Helo at that time was not in the fleet and was instead on the basestar, so that doesn’t ruin my Helo is the 5th model theory)

And one of the biggest problems and something I’ve been saying this all season, Tory is the most uninteresting character on the show and by far the lamest of the new models. Nobody has any vested interest in her character at all (she is no Billy). She kills Cally and this is never followed up on, other than the fact that she “likes” being a cylon, and is the first to go to them, and because of this she is allowed to just kill people because in her mind that is what Cylons do!!! So many posibilities, she killed Cally so she could be with the chief, she killed Cally so that she woudn’t tell anybody who the Cylons were. Instead she killed Cally to show how Cylons are moody and how she was trying to fit in. Ooh man good thing Cally died for that!!!!
I love this show but I’m just not jazzed at all, no interesting cliffhanger really. Either they do the New Caprica bit over again, or they just go back into space and search for a new planet, either way nothing has really changed and the fact that it’s going to take 6 or 7 months for a new episode to actually air really does not help keep people interested and coming back for more.

So I finally got unlazy and set my gallery back up.  Once of the side effects of this server change is that I got to set up everything myself this time, which means instead of doing www.website.com/gallery I changed it to gallery.thebigv.org which I prefer.  (not that anyone else cares about this, but who cares about those people)

I’m using Gallery2 again, which seems to basically be the defacto standard.  At some point I’ll have to play around with the hundreds of modules out there that you can use for gallery2, for now it’s quite vanilla, but it’s very functional which is the main thing.  Now I just need to import my pictures back in there, there aren’t too many though.

Well that was interesting.  Tyler decided he didn’t really want to be the admin of a server for our little group of guys, and really I can’t blame him so it was finally time to get my own server.  I settled on Gandi as my new host and you may have noticed the blog was down for a bit and then back up last week for a short time.  Well unfortunately a 2 days after I set this puppy back up Gandi suffered a massive failure (to their credit they are working very hard to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, I got very good support from them, and they gave me a refund for the month) which was incredibly annoying.

In any case that is all behind us now and the site is back up again.  Maybe this time I’ll even update it!  I forgot to back up my old uhh.. post(s) so a fresh start it is!