“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way….”
That’s what I kept hearing as I was trying to finish Portal, a very neat video game from from Valve, that comes as a part of the Orange Box. Silly me, I kept running around the levels in a semi-confused state, rather than using portals to be faster and more efficient, and David kept reminding me of this.
I also kept forgetting the concept of portal physics / gravity, which, while quite useful, took me some time to master, as it’s somewhat different from what I’m used to here on Earth.
The basic premise of Portal is that you’re running through a set of test chambers and learning about (and how to use) Portal guns. The guns allow you to create a set of portals, and teleport around within the test chambers and you’re required to solve puzzles involving the placement of the portals (among other things). Only certain surfaces will allow portal placement, so this makes it kind of tricky at some points.
I found it to be very fun and quite humorous. Without giving the ending away, I will just say that if you’ve played this game but haven’t finished, YOU SHOULD. The ending was just great. If you haven’t played at all, YOU SHOULD. Check it out, it’s fun. Oh, and don’t forget… the cake is a lie!

So for the last month or two, I have been having website issues. First off, I deleted the entire public_html directory… OOPS! Luckily, I was able to recover everything, and was very happy to have everything back.
Unfortunately, at this same time, i tried to upgrade to Movable Type version 4.1 (from a very old 3.2). My ISP doesn’t give me ssh access, and the tools available just were NOT working. Finally, after many many hours and a lot of frustration on my part, I got it installed. Much to my horror, it was incredibly slow. There was just no way I was going to be able to use it. So then, I embarked on trying to figure out how to get back to version 3.2. I was able to do this, but it was not the solution. It was slightly faster after I reverted, yet still much slower than I was used to.
Turns out my ISP has been having performance issues and despite my best efforts, they don’t seem to want to help me. Yesterday, they announced maintenance would be done on the MySQL server and that new hardware would be added. And what do you know, it works now! I’m writing my very first entry with MT 4.1!
I had a little snafu with my password being wrong, but I think that was they’re issue, not mine.
Now I can finally get to work on redesigning the site and weblog.
More book / movie / video game reviews on the way!

I was browsing on cnn.com to get my news fix for the day, and I ended up at Global Voices, which is a collection of blog articles from writers blogging all across the globe.
I have a feeling that I am going to find all sorts of interesting things to read about now!
Oh, and if you like to show your support to free Fouad Al-Farhan, a Saudi blogger being held for refusing to write an apology letter to the government concerning his blog expressing his opinions, click here to sign the petition.

I’m only making one New Year’s Resolution this year…. and that one resolution is to not make any damn resolutions this year. Everyone always makes these fabulous New Year’s Resolutions… get in shape, lose weight, get a new job, get married… but how many of us actually keep them and accomplish them? How often are we lamenting in February how hard it will be to keep to those goals, and how often to we find ourselves failing?
Here’s a list of the most popular resolutions, and while all of those are fine things to resolve, I’d rather just DO IT, instead of making some silly resolution that I’ll never keep simply because of the fact that it was a New Year’s Resolution.
Anyway, that’s my tirade to start the new year.
Happy New Year everyone!