Spinning Dick Catastrophy!!!!

Thursday, May 29th, 2008 | Site Updates | 3 Comments

Haha, so I re-opened my forums today right? AWESOME!!!! WOOO!!! YEAH!!!!!

Ok now that you are done cheering, I launched it today. Confident in my coding skills I did some fancy mod_rewrite rules real quick and told everybody it was launched… before I tested it….

Seems that I had been “stopping hotlinking assholes” by taking ALL forums and forcing them to see “Meat Spin” when they tried to link to images or content on my site. This was working GREAT since I didn’t have a forum.

However, silly me I go and bring the forum back and don’t test my rewrite rule and then tell everybody to go check it out. Then they all start freaking out. So I open Internet Explorer and sure enough, all the images that looked fine in MY firefox browser started showing up as meatspin. I mean every single image was being replaced w/the freaky tranny getting ass-packed.

Hour earlier I had even been told that the logo was nasty and I should get rid of it. I said yeah, it’s not that great but I’ll get rid of it eventually”. Of course I thought people were seeing some green lines… NOT a tranny mess.

Yes, it even made a grown werewolf cry.

..::sigh::..

Oh well, all better now. Temporarly making forum open in new window until i fix layering issues and make popup for the chat so it doesn’t take up same scrollbar space.

Octopus Love

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 | Life | 5 Comments

[10:36:19 AM] Mom says: ok, was just wondering how your vacation from all technology went
[10:37:09 AM] James says: not bad… drove around entire island on a scooter one day
[10:37:26 AM] Mom says: sounds like fun
[10:37:28 AM] James says: also cut myself on some coral while escaping from an angry octopus one day…. You know, just the usual stuff
[10:37:55 AM] Mom says: why did you want to escape?
[10:38:11 AM] James says: because this other guy pissed it off and it started to shoot ink at us
[10:38:32 AM] Mom says: it was probably a female octopus who wanted to get all 8 arms around you
[10:38:37 AM] James says: haha, that’s it
[10:39:04 AM] Mom says: the ink was just so nobody else could see the nasty things you were doing

My Shiny New Cook Islands License

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 | Life | No Comments

So I have a shiny new class AB drivers license that I can use in many
countries as a full license. It has the most god awful picture on it, so you know it’s authentic! Anywho, figured you would want to know how to get your own license from this wonderfully small island.

How to get a motorcycle license on Cook Islands in 10 easy steps~

1) Rent Scooter. Yes, this is the first step, because if you first went to the police station to talk to them they would tell you to go rent a scooter.

2) Make sure you can fucking ride it… I mean it’s an automatic scooter… Not real tricky…

3) Stand in line at the police station and fill out the forms that are stacked up by where you are standing in line.

4) Show them a license from any other country (doing this lets you skip the written test even if your license was not for a motorcycle to begin with).

5) Pay $15 NZD ($5 for the written test you are supposedly taking, and $10 for the license / road test)

6) Walk up to police officer outside and he will tell you to drive around the block and then turn right at the stop sign and go around a roundabout and back to the station. He tells you to be sure you are using your turn signals and then make sure to turn them off after you turn, and also tells you to come to a complete stop at the stop sign.

7) Drive around the block with cop following you, and then hope it starts pouring so that he closes the test early and just tells you to go back to the station.

8) Stand in line again (getting a license is about the ONLY thing the police station does here, and they close on Sundays… if you need something after hours you need to call the police at home.

9) Stand in front of place where they take your photo for several minutes until they say, ok it’s done and you then get a shiny new drivers license.

10) Go back to your own country and drive around being a road hazard until an officer pulls you over, then you can give them your totally valid license, and tell them to put the fine on that :)

This IS a 1st Class Ticket

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 | Life | 1 Comment

The airplane kept not boarding. There were no announcements about flight NZ848 over the speaker the night I was supposed to fly out. All there was to indicate when my flight would leave is a status board that kept saying 5 minutes until it boards. Well other flights that were supposed to be boarding far later than mine were already boarding… Still, I was confident that they would not be boarding my flight, or at least would not leave until they made a final boarding call.

So I kept drinking at the airport bar. Made a nice single-serving friend there and talked about everything from Rugby to economics to snorkeling on Rarotonga. Well sure enough there was a boarding call for the flight I was on, only saying it was the final call. So I ran down to the gate and was the very last person in line to get on the flight and they closed the doors behind me.

Having drank enough to kill a small rhino, I felt very embolden and instead of going back to my assigned seat I sat in first class like I was meant to. Well one of the flight attendants then checked my ticket, and I looked at her with complete confidence and said “This is a first class ticket” as I showed her the ticket.

She then smiled and said thank you and offered me something to drink, to which I decided champaign would do.

I sat back with a nice smartass grin of satisfaction as I stretched out my seat and moved the one in front of me forward as well. That was the most enjoyable flight ever, out of pure enjoyment for what I had done.

Got off the plane and walked through customs and security in seconds having only one small carry-on bag and then proceeded to ask people how to get to Tiare Village.

Seems the lady who runs it always picks everybody up from the airport when the planes land since everybody on the island can hear the planes land. However she was not there to do such a thing. Some people at the airport called over to Tiare Village and when nobody answered they actually figured out what the lady’s full name was and looked her up in the phone book and called her at home (it was 5am at this point). Still no answer, so one of the guys there gave me a ride and dropped me off at the door.

I chilled out for awhile outside but after a couple of mosquito bites I “broke in” to the kitchen/living room area of the hostel I was staying at.

There wasn’t a couch long enough to sleep on in there and I didn’t want to just steal a bed from one of the rooms since I had no idea how people would react to seeing some stranger just sleeping in one of the beds, so I stayed up until 8:30 or so when this guy Michael got up and I told him my story.

He told me to just go take a bed and when the lady came in he would tell her about it. So I did, but at that point the sun was out, and there were about 30 roosters making there cock noises, so I could not sleep and I got up 15 minutes after I had lied down.

When the lady got in she had not gotten my reservation or money… hmm… But there was another guy that had been there for a week who booked from the same site and she didn’t have his money either. Well, she felt bad for not getting me, but not That bad since she charged me for an entire day since I slept on one of the beds for 15 minutes. ~$!$$!!!

Oh well, it was only $17/day!!!! I will survive.

TSA In Raratonga For Next 3 Days

Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | Life | No Comments

I will NOT be on my website for a few days. I will not be taking a computer or using a computer during my island vacation. Yes, I am flying from New Zealand to the Cook Islands… Because I can.

You will just have to carry on without me. Yes, I know that means 20 or 30 people won’t be able to figure out the controls on the game systems, and there will be no movie updates… No blog updates… (read old stuff.. it’s good shit).

No Tech Vacation

Goat Curry

Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | Life | No Comments

So last the other night my house mates threw a no holds barred Curry Battle with their friends last night. So several people showed up with their own personal curry and then we all tried everybody’s and did a blind vote.

Ever heard of friends getting together and doing something like this? Yeah, neither have I.

After this I question if the word curry really means the same thing here because in America the only curry I have ever had was more or less specific flavored water. This stuff was marinated meat / potatoes / vegetables and other random things.

There was one curry with Goat meat in it. Another was made with pumpkin, one with lamb, one with chicken etc… etc…

Ok, I stopped writing this post several days ago and here it sits… unpublished, unfinished, missing thoughts and views about goat curry… SOOOO instead I will just make a conclusion.

Conclusion = Kiwi’s love bastardizing traditional dishes and making them better.

Magical New Radio

Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | Site Updates | No Comments

So I went and totally rewrote the music section on this site. I did some crazy hackage of last.fm website and made something that can generate radio stations from their site on mine. Then I went a step further to make it so you can play them on the fly.

Just type in http://thesmartass.info/music/artist/The Beatles

Or something like that and a radio station would be generated with music from The Beatles and Similar to the Beatles.

You could also type: thesmartass.info/music/tag/Werewolf and generate a radio station with songs that people have tagged with the word werewolf (like Little Red Riding Hood).

Then I added back all the streaming radio stations and some playlist.com features…

Then I went and made an mp3 and a playlist search. You can do the google mp3 hack by typing thesmartass.info/mp3/Metallica One

Obviously replace the words Metallica One with the artist and song you want to find an mp3 of. Works really well to find open directories with mp3’s in it.

More 2 come. ~

Google loves me, this I know, for they cached my blog posts so!

Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | Site Updates | No Comments

Ok, so I got clever today and had this thought that Google comes to my site enough and has a pretty good fucking memory….

Sure enough, with the help of Google’s cache and my own memory for the name of the posts I wrote, I have restored most of the posts that died. Seems they didn’t cache one called Catching Up, but we will assume there was just rubbish in there anyways.

Ok, well it took awhile to get all of those added back, so I didn’t take the time to restore the comments that were cached 2. Honestly sometimes the comments were the funniest thing, but such is life.

I put them back on one post but it was a pain to break them different people’s names, which is needed for them to make any sense. So I will just have 2 wait for people to write new / clever things.

Fudged Up Databases

Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | Site Updates | No Comments

Ok, so there was this little problem on my sites. Basically it was a permissions problem, and since I didn’t know the exact cause the easiest way to fix the problem was to move everything on my server under the smartass user to another user account.

I did this, and my control panel confirmed everything was moved and I did a check to see that all the files had moved, which they had.

So I restarted the server to confirm that my site was still running properly off the new moved files and made a change to site and confirmed that it worked from new account. So I deleted the old “empty” user account.

Then all of a sudden my site would not load…. Hmm, the files are still there.. WTF. Dug around a bit more and it seems that my databases were gone… Seems they don’t move when you change owner (like they should).

Now, I am a reasonable person. I have a backup right? Hmm… I knew there was some automated process I never got around to doing when I setup a dedicated server for myself…

Ok, I found a backup of all my 8 databases. However there is one problem with that. The backup is from March. That means that anything I have written since then is gone. Ok there is one post that “girl says” had a copy of, so I will be able to restore that one if I choose.

Well, I don’t want my history erased so I will remake the posts… but not really. Instead I will make new posts about the same things with slightly more of a current twist and hopefully more humor, since DAMN was that stupid on my part to not have a backup. I mean everything I wrote about my roadtrip in March and April is gone, and everthing I have written about living in New Zealand is also gone….

UPDATE: Google loves me, this I know for they cached my blog posts so!!!!!

Sleaze Prevention

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | Life | 1 Comment

SO tonight I was supposed to go to Gina’s (where roommate Martin works and told me I should work) and then when he got done with work we were going to go to a gay bar and sing karaoke. Yeah, no joke, that was the plan. Didn’t much care, going out is going out and I need as much of that as I can get.

Ended up at this place called “Globe Bar”, where there are a bunch of college age girls.

Seriously as soon as I had a drink I was hitting on some girl. Ended up holding her hand and then kissing her just because I could and knew she would kiss back. However after that I felt a little sleazy because she tried to drink her drink and wasn’t doing a good job of it. At that point it was obvious that she was really drunk.

Her friend found her and confiscated her drink and then cockblocked me. Honestly I was ok with this, because even though I found her very attractive I would have felt like a total shithead if I had gone home with her while she was that fucked up.

I mean is it that much to ask to want to actually connect with a girl, instead of just taking advantage of one?

Friends here were telling me to peruse her after her friend took her off, but I had more self respect than that.

Then later that night some girl cut in front of me at the bar where I was waiting to buy drinks. Her method of doing so was by grinding me. I wasn’t attracted to her, and she was playing dirty pool so I did not appreciate her cutting in line, but didn’t feel like starting fight.

Anywho, b4 I went out drinking tonight I ate at Gina’s… It was my turn to pay for meal, but for just Jo and I it was $92, which seemed high since Martin said he gave us some free Wine. Anywho, Jo owes me fancy dinner now, and the food at Gina’s was good.

Sleep Now~