Wow, that was confusing to fix.  I needed help to find the problem.  Seems that when I added a new domain name to my server through my control panel somehow the configuration got reset to the default so it was looking in the wrong directory for my website and showing a forbidden file for the main page and a 404 error for everything else. 

Now the reason it was tricky to figure out is the control panel still said it was pointing to the correct path and why wouldn’t I trust my control panel? 

I will be leaving nasty posts on the control panel forum tonight.

So I wake up on Saturday morning and try to load my site and it times out.  WTF!?  So I reset the server and then jump on.  Only seems to take another hour or less for it to happen again.  Now the annoying thing is my statistics haven’t been working in a week at this point so pinpointing the cause of the slowdown is a bit more complicated and I had things that I had planned to do. 

Well here was my discoveries. 

1st the company that holds the dedicated server this is on had a Denial of Service attack early in the morning.  They were able to stop it, but that took it’s tole on my site. 

Next it seems that somebody very stupid, but persistent was trying to hack into my site with an exploit, creating needless errors in my logs. 

Then came the somewhat cool things that until today I was unable to verify because my statistics were broken.  I got slammed by popular sites linking my site to their front page.  CollegeHumor.com was one of them and Gorillamask.net was another.  These are both very popular sites and landing on their front page ensures that you will get a lot of traffic all at one time.  I was also submitted to digg.com, however the submission on digg was ignored due to there already being a duplicate submission for my site from 2 or 3 years earlier, so nobody digged the new submission.  I was amused by the collegehumor page since they actually call links “hotlinks” which if you have ever sat and listened to me for awhile you would know that hotlinking to entire pages is evil.  Obviously they just choose to mean “Hot Links” instead of hotlinks, and they weren’t being evil, but nice in linking to me. 

Okay so now there is a ton of new traffic, and in typical fashion they go directly to the nintendo or sega pages and then just keep reloading the games over and over since they can’t choose one to play, which makes good use of the cpu and ram.

Well it gets worse, because it seems there was a problem with the script I use to write the new blog posts on the main page.  One of them had been trying to write to a cache file, but had been unable to do so because the cache file was read only.  Had the server nto slowed to a crawl I would have never found this problem at all because I am not the one who figured it out, my server host was feeling generous and helped me to see that. 

That meant that every single person who loaded the main page did 2 things, they generated a message in an error log and they had to use more server cpu in order to load the list of my recent posts. 

Crazy eh.  Well, I welcome all the new return visitors and will tell you that the games page which you came here for will be expanding and changing a LOT in a week or two, so stick around and tell a friend.  Hopefully my server can handle all of you. 

So today I had to return my keg to BevMo (giant liquor store a couple miles from me). So in the process I realized that I hadn’t eaten lunch and was a bit hungry. Now it’s Tuesday and I always go hang out with one of my friends for beer and 20c wings at Buffalo Wild Wing. We were planning to meet there within a couple hours, so I figured if I ate a big meal now I wouldn’t be hungry.

However as I returned my keg and got some more beer I noticed a Red Lobster was open in the same parking lot. So I ran in there, walked up to the counter and asked for some biscuits. 6 amazing Cheddar Bay Biscuits for $2.15 with tax. Well, there is nothing wrong with that price and I was more than happy to eat 5 of them and give one of them to one of my roommates.

However being that it was the most satisfying snack of my life, I thought I should publish the recipe for it.

Cheddar Bay Biscuits

Prep. Time: 0:15

2 cups Bisquick® baking mix
2/3 cup milk – low fat okay
1/2 cup shredded mild cheddar cheese – low fat okay
1/4 cup butter OR margarine – melted
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
parsley flakes – as needed

-Combine Bisquick®, milk, and cheddar and beat with a wooden spoon for about 30 seconds.
-Spoon onto a lightly greased cookie sheet.
-Bake in 450 degree oven for 8 – 10 minutes.
-Combine butter and garlic powder and pour over hot biscuits; sprinkle with parsley.

Notes: As we all know, restaurants have access to ingredients home cooks do not. In this case, I’ve been told Red Lobster® uses their Shrimp Scampi butter mix (a powder) to flavor their biscuits. So, this recipe is as close as a home cook can get to the real thing.

I’m sure most of you that frequent my site know my sister died last October. What you don’t know is that Sept. 13th is her birthday.

Well, I plan to throw a very large party in her honor. However I was thinking the party wouldn’t start until 2pm. Seems it started a little early when everything died all at once… With a bang….

All the video players on my site were converted the other day to use an API somebody made and it requires the videos to bounce through their site and get back to mine. Well, the guy broke something and then went to bed I think. So at exactly midnight all my video players died.

That’s nothing. I was too busy to notice the video players because I heard a LOUD bang in the living room, when I was strangely for once in my bedroom and somebody else was using the projector to play my ps3.

The loud bang was the sound of my projector bulb EXPLODING.

This bulb costs just under $400 and I have been telling all my friends about how it might just last forever, since I have reset the timer twice and it probably has 6 or 7 thousand hours of use on it. I figured the “possible explosion” thing the guide book warned of was bullshit.

I can’t open it right now and see how bad the damage is and see if it was contained inside the bulb or if the projector itself is somewhat fucked because we have just got it mounted on the ceiling using some crafty shiznit and it will take effort to pull down.

So my thought is that my sister is haunting me, and she knew that I would eventually come to the conclusion that the bulb would have died soon anyways, so I couldn’t be upset about it.

However I am throwing a bigass party in her honor today and would have appreciated it if the projector would have been usable for the party. Or maybe to keep it interesting the bulb could have exploded at 11:59pm on the 13th while people at the party were watching it. I mean how often do expensive things explode at a party?

cheers & fu (hey, that’s my sister’s favorite camera pose)

Also here’s some new music for you. I stuck this and some new “magic” on the music player. This playlist is called Pain. So despite the things that have gone down at midnight I will try to throw a great party tonight. Should have a lot of people here throughout the day. Hopefully they are content to eat, drink and be merry and don’t feel like having a 12 foot video screen to entertain them.

Packers Vs. Vikings. It’s kind of like the age old rivalry between Pirate and Ninja. I mean anybody who goes for one group/team will clearly not change their mind unless they are a fairweather fan.

I have 3 roommates. Now somewhere along the line it got determined that we should bring a VCR in so that we can screw a cable into the back of it, and use that to output to my projector. This means that now anybody can watch mindless television shows with shitloads of commercials and brain rotting time.

I tend to NOT want cable or satellite to be hooked up. When it’s not I am much more productive and though I still download a ton of tv shows, none of them have commercials and all of them are not just being on for the sake of being on.

I am not much of a sports fan either. I mean I don’t mind sports, but don’t actively follow it. Too busy trying to create the world’s greatest website I suppose, but I just never got into it.

Well my projector is now projecting football games onto the wall. With the projector now on the ceiling it projects to be at least 10 feet wide. I have taken a picture to show this, however due to how large it is I had to angle the picture just to be able to show something besides the tv show itself.

Yeah, it really is that big. I assume most football fans would wet themselves to see such a rivalry like this projected onto a giant wall. However that is not where the real rivalry comes from.

Our house contains 2 Packers fans, and 2 Vikings fans. I mean that’s the weird thing about Arizona. Very few people who live here were born here. Talk about havoc, I mean every single play somebody cares.

To me it’s more of a people watching event, since you get to see how both sides react to the same situation and how once again perspective is everything.

Well, my only worry is that it will drain the bulb of my projector. I have reset the timer on it twice now. It continues to display a pretty damn good picture despite having thousands of hours worth of use. Perhaps the whole “light is only good for 3000 hours thing” is total bullshit just trying to get me to buy a new bulb. I mean the actual instruction book tells me that if it is used past it’s time limit or if the timer is reset that it might EXPLODE.

Oh well you will see something angry post about that when it happens. For now I will just let it go. I hope I just don’t end up with cable turned on all day while I try to work. I always end up watching some educational program, or some program about people being haunted that causes me to be unproductive.

So the other day my roommate broke my last absinthe glass I had at the house. He breaks a LOT of glasses / glass wear in general, though to be fair I had been the one to break my other absinthe glass.

I’m not bitter about the glass, he will buy me a new one next time I order some more absinthe. No big deal. Why I bring this up is because I noticed something that happened because of the glass being broken.

I stopped drinking absinthe. I haven’t drank any absinthe since he broke my glass. Well clearly the glass does not have magic powers, and I should be able to drink my elixir even if I don’t have a fancy goblet to drink out of. Oh don’t get me wrong. I’m still drinking, I have just been drinking disaronno or brandy instead.

So tonight I am discussing brilliant ideas with one of my other roommates Mike, and I am listening to one of the most unique and original musical albums ever made (Fear of Pop, Vol. 1 by Ben Folds in 1998).

Oh, I suppose not many people know of this album. Here is a quick ass review of the album somebody gave on Amazon, to help you understand where my mind was while listening to this:

What a weird freaking album! No melodies… barely any songs. Just a bunch of noises and talking (sometimes screaming) to odd drum beats. There isn’t even much traditional instrumentation, like piano, guitars or bass. It’s ODD. No, scratch that. It’s remarkably ODD. Which is why I keep listening. I can’t figure it out. My wife won’t let me play it in the car, and even my more liberal and open-minded friends can’t listen to it. It’s a head-scratcher that will challenge your concept of music. I don’t think it’s any good, but I like a challenge. So I give it 4 Stars.

Anywho, not having a goblet I got out one of my captain morgan glasses which is fairly large, and I poured 2 shots of absinthe in. Then I added some Shasta Cream Soda. Theoretically this does not sound like a good combination. However it is fantastic.

I recommend this to everybody. Don’t have absinthe laying around and don’t feel like buying some? Try Jagger. It still has that strong liquorish taste, though it might end up a bit too sweet. Hard to say, but worth a try.

I think today was one of the first days in a week or two that I have not drank.

It’s not that I am an alcoholic. It has just worked out that way. Sometimes there is nothing to drink in the house except absinthe… and other times I end up hanging out with friends and having some beers.

So tonight I figured I would just not drink anything. However now I seem unable to fall asleep. I am thinking about shit. Stupid shit like needing to stop at the bank tomorrow and things I could do on my website; which is especially annoying considering I already have a list of 53 items to do on here.

I am thinking I should have just drank tonight. I mean that should make me tired enough to just pass out without all that pesky thinking.

Had somebody else come to me and said they were having trouble sleeping I would tell them to just write down what they were thinking so they would know that they would not forget and then they wouldn’t have to focus on those things anymore. Technically I am doing this by writing it down in a blog post, however I also work for myself which means that I really have no reason to sleep since if I get tired during the day I can just go to sleep then.

I considered starting a polynap regiment. Basically I would use brainwaves and white noise to zonk me to sleep and wake me up 26 mins later before I have reached stage 2 sleep, and I would do this a few times a day.

There is this guy in the UK who runs a blog on doing this who made all these mp3’s that I ganked off his site awhile ago. However if doing that gives you enough to continually blog about it means that it is a real pain in the ass to do.

I mean if you are hanging out with other people it would seem weird if you needed to just go and leave for half an hour every 3 or 4 hours.

Well one of these days I will put those polynap mp3’s on my audio page. I have a lot of ideas for how to revise the audio page and I figure even if you aren’t making it the only way you sleep, a good power nap now and then can be very beneficial.

So now I am up. I figure I can work on the site. Probably will start by working on bringing back my magic 8-ball. Of course the last time I used my 8-ball script was on either animeden or animesins.com back in the 90’s, so I will probably want to make it a bit better looking.

I could tackle the user registration or the page editing for the theater, but that seems a bit lofty for a sleepless smartass to handle right now.

Who knows. Maybe this is the real secret to getting things done on my site. I just need to stop sleeping so that I can spend more time making new shiznit.

Oh as a side note, some german trance guy joined the site radio’s group and it’s making me have to click next a lot on the site radio. The radio is made up of all the music people in the group listen to on last.fm. So it’s simple, I just need more people to join the radio so I can start to hear different music again. I know, I can always switch stations but this keeps it interesting. So join the station and shape what I (and I’m sure others on this site) listen to: http://www.last.fm/group/I+Like+Shiny+Things

Thx,
The Sleepless Smartass

One finds the most interesting things on Google Images by accident.

Figured it was worth sharing. Suppose it’s fake, but it’s amazing even if it is.

So naughty…

Other news: I have added a dictionary. You can access it from front page or by typing /dictionary/word or /define/word on address bar. Currently it’s a fairly normal dictionary, but I plan to go “urban” on it and let people submit their own words and definitions.

Other other news: I added Bruce Lipton stuff back to the theater. Watch it. Even if it seems above your head. The guy is a genius. Could change your entire life.

Other other OTHER news: New Google browser is fast / sexy. Download it