I seemed to have a lot of technical ranting in here so I decided to break the post up by themes.  If you aren’t into the technical ranting or start to lose interest just skip to a different colored text. 

<ultimatepc>
Even before I got back from New Zealand I had started to purchase the pieces to build my ultimate home computer.  Believe it or not I am not a gamer, but I still needed to build a giant PC with the newest shiznit because I run so many things at once on my system.
</ultimatepc>

<boasting>
Right after I got back I went and ordered all the missing pieces for my computer.  Spending more money than I had because to me a computer IS my lifeblood.  I purchased 2 monitors (one 24″ and one 22″ that was also a HDTV) an insanely large computer case with water cooling. 

The rest of the computer was a QX9650 (quad core, extreme processor 3.0ghz per core that can be overclocked and has 12 megs of cache), 4 gigs of DDR3 1600, an Audigy X-FI sound card, Some fancy 802.11n Wireless card, a nice Radeon video card and 6 terabytes worth of hard drives (though I owned most of them already.
</boasting>

<technical rant>
Here’s the funny thing.  I fix computers for a living, tis all I do.  I am VERY good at it.  However when I built this and turned it on the first time It was working, however it started randomly resetting.  I surmised at that time that it was either the really expensive power supply or that it was not grounded properly.  The grounding being the more likely. 

<thanks>
Still, a HUGE thank you to my friend Kevin who helped me with this.  Because even though I had “tried everything”, I didn’t try everything twice… He also dealt with me bitching about how he was doing things and didn’t back down.
</thanks>

<name>
I needed a name for this computer but I had already named a different computer Evil.  I briefly thought of naming it “Woman” because it is awesome but has been a huge pain in the ass all at the same time.  I decided instead that I would get over the computer being a bitch and just name it LSD. 

Why?  Because it started as a bad trip but is now awesome.  I figure it’s “all tripped out”.
</name>

<XP-vs-Server2008>
In a side note, I have installed both XP Pro 32bit and the 64 bit Server 2008 (supposedly 12% faster than vista) on here and I have done my own comparison tests. 

By far the fastest computer I have ever used, though it seems sad that vista/s2008 both run slower for me.  I mean what a cruel joke for Microsoft to play.
</XP-vs-Server2008>

I suppose I should have written this dream down hours earlier than I did, but somehow it’s still fairly vivid in my mind half a day later.  That being said I thought it worth mentioning. 

Technically I had had absinthe last night… A new legal absinthe in America that is actually made in the proper way.  However, it was hours before I went to sleep so I doubt I can give it credit for the lucid dream.

In the dream I was taken to a place that was underground somewhere.  There was a forest outside and I could smell the sap.  There was a city very close to the forest however I could not identify it, except to say that the buildings were tall, and it was fairly run down.

There were many people who were there with me and I was there willingly and happily.  My understanding was that I was in a place where they were going to unlock the hidden potential of my mind.  After what seemed to be a quick check-up to see if I was healthy they took me to a crowded room with long tables and somebody walked with me to a table.

The person who was standing next to me quickly stepped back and said “whoa” and then told me that my aura was amazing.  I smiled and then he gave me instructions on what I was supposed to do and then he gave me a pill which I perceive to be a hallucinogen.  I sit down and am then given some kind of über-healthy food (which tasted really good).  I ate the food up fast though I had to pause for a couple seconds while the colors changed in front of me.

I was talking to one person at the table I was eating at.  I cannot recall all the details of what was said, but I know that when I finished my food and conversation I was supposed to take my tray back and then wait for my next step.  However I decided to walk outside of this room. 

Upon exiting the room I was above ground and was watching people who were on one of the next steps where they were being tested.  The instructors were wearing army style camouflage and giving strange tests.  The main test I saw involved a washing machine somehow and people pouring some blue liquid into a container that was on a scale and they had to pour an exact amount of liquid into it very fast without going over. 

I then heard some of the questions they were asking and I memorized the answers and went back inside.

I was immediately told that they were ready for me and I was sent into another underground room where I saw a woman and there was some spinning mirrors and I was supposed to spin them and in doing so I would choose my instructor.  I asked if I could just have her be my instructor and she smiled and said only if that’s where the mirrors stopped.  I told her that I clearly wanted her to be my instructor so I would make the mirrors stop spinning there.

That’s exactly what happened then.  So we are then somehow sitting in the back of a convertible car, on top of the back of the car like you would see in a parade, and driving down the ruined streets talking. 

Well mostly I think I was just flirting with her, though I can’t recall what was said now. 

Now I can’t remember the tests, or if I actually took the tests or if the woman just lied and said I did, but somehow I got a perfect score.  Well the woman makes a point to tell me to leave where I am ASAP and tells me no more and disappears. 

I then walk back to the area where people had been testing and eating and nobody is there.  Not a single person that I can see is there after a little bit of looking I decided to heed the woman’s advice and I took to leaving, which turned into escaping. 

More military people appeared in my mind though not in my visual perspective.  They were talking about me and reading a piece of paper that just had my social security number and the fact that I had gotten 6 out of 6 on the tests.  The people started to freak out that I got a perfect score and that the woman (they said her name but I don’t know if I ever caught it) had let me escape.

They all grabbed guns and various weapons and started frantically searching for me using ground troops, satellites and other various means.  I had seen these things in my mind so I knew I was being hunted and I was running really hard and trying to get lost in various run down buildings, outside of the satellite coverage. 

The military men started referring to me as some kind of rebel leader who must be killed, though they might have just been saying that to the grunts to try to get those people to kill me.  It was not clear exactly what they wanted me dead for.

I had just rounded a corner or some building that smelled like a gym locker when my phone rang with a text message and woke me up saying “Happy Halloween“.  

Grr, go to the bathroom, have some water then back to sleep, try to resume my dream. 

Not sure if my dream actually resumed but I managed to fall asleep again and I found myself in a solid black room talking to some decorated military man.  He appeared to be trying to help me in some way and just when I was about to figure that out…. my phone rang and said “Happy Halloween!“. 

So I got up, used the bathroom, drank some water, grumbled a bit and then tried to go back to sleep.  This time it wasn’t going to happen so I just got up hoping that I was not going to get caught, but not knowing what I who or what I was hiding from.

Now, this was a lucid dream.  VERY vivid, and even stranger is it all seemed to go in a specific order with events happening and me going through the events like normal life.  There was not much time where I was teleporting from place to place, which is what normally happens in my dreams, so I am very curious as to what this dream was trying to tell me. 

So my nose hurts today. I didn’t do anything last night that would cause my nose to hurt today, unless somewhere in the process of drinking last night I passed out and somebody punched me in the nose.

This is the current theory I am going on, since I have been drinking every night for awhile now. Not so much because I am trying to, but because I have been hanging out with a lot of different people and when I do that virtually all of those people tend to drink as a way to pass time.

Drank today too.. But that’s because it’s Tuesday and I go out to lunch with a friend for cheap hot wings and beer every Tuesday.

So now you know what I have been doing, so lets talk about what I haven’t been doing.

I haven’t been working. Not on PC Repair to get paid, and not on the website (to theoretically someday get paid).

No excuses, just been in my own little world digging music and thinking.

The results of this thinking and music listening have caused me to change my goals once again. I have decided to pay off all the debt I have amassed since getting back from New Zealand and work my ass off towards being able to go to Europe this summer.

I have friends in Prague that I would like to visit and after that I have decided that I would like to backpack my way to Sweden, passing through Germany, Poland, Norway etc..

Now to do this I am not a college kid with a trust fund, so I will need to amass a small fortune in the next 6 or 7 months to do this. However I have some ideas on how I might achieve this (anybody feel like buying a kidney?).

What will make this trip different than when I went to NZ is that I “moved” to NZ and took a bunch of stuff with me. This time I will be taking a backpack and just the essentials. That means I will be selling my projector and other junk (though I will keep my laptop so I can still work on the website), and I am also unsure of how long I will be staying at this point since it will be totally dependent on the way I finance the trip.

One of the ways I might pay for the trip would be to convince somebody to “invest” in my website. Then I could just pay to have some of the scripts made that I want, or hire people to update and maintain sections as these are things that take an insane amount of my time.

Will try to update blog more often. I have just been distracted for sept/oct (though I actually answered some ask-a-smartass questions).

So as if the site going down frequently hasn’t been enough, today the hard drive took a shit.

Site has been down virtually all day. Now the hard drive for my server has been replaced and the data for it cloned to a different server.

So that’s one less issue for site to have.

Lets hope site stops having meltdowns, so I can work on it and then get it to the point where a new, better server could be purchased.

So for about 24 hours there has been a script that my friend so generously made for some beer (yeah, beer) that helps make sure my site can be loaded and my email can download. All it does is “restart apache” every time the load jacks up too high. Apache is the web server for those not in the know, and it’s what is causing all the issues.

You load the games page and each game you load will very briefly use 1 to 3 % of the CPU power of my server. Once the game is loaded it is no longer using any of the server CPU and is just using your CPU. However ever since the additional traffic came to the site from collegehumor.com, 80% of my traffic just plays games. So if 90 people decided to load a game at the same time, the server flips out because it is using too much processing power and it prevents anything from working. So when this happens the site becomes unreachable and those people not able to load their games probably still can’t load the games.

So now, when too many people are doing things at once the web server will go off for a couple seconds, which will prevent whatever they were trying to load from working, however in a couple seconds they would be able to load their game and new people will still be able to get to the site.

Okay, it is obvious this is just a “quick fix” and not a real solution. I’m sure nobody likes it when apache is restarting and they can’t load their game or change page. So my more permanent solutions will be:

1) Cut down the CPU load of my games page. Hopefully the new design will do this, though honestly I have no idea if it’s the java applet or the current design causing the extra processor load, so new design may not fix it. This however will need to come pretty soon in case it is the design and the way the games load.

2) My dedicated server only has one processor. Seems as my site is getting more popular it can’t handle the extra traffic with just one processor. So I need a more expensive dedicated server with 3 times the ram and 4 times the processor. Funny thing though. I lose money on the site as it is paying for my current server. Not enough to bother me, but enough to not be willing to pay for the new server myself.

So as soon as I get the new games page up I will be looking for a good deal on a new dedicated server (I’d like to stay with current company as they don’t bitch about my content at all) however I WILL NOT buy it until I can get at least 2 months worth of the cost of a fast new server in donations.

Site is expanding, and I have been spending too much time trying to fix the speed instead of making new content. Not to mention that I have been working on the site and not on my computer repair business so I am starting to go broke :(

Anybody have a good cloning device?

The site has been running like crap. The past few days it has been really hard to even get to the site, let alone stay on it.

This has been driving me nuts because I have had to spend all my time TRYING to fix the issues instead of expanding the content of the site. By this point I wanted to be done with the theater design and wanted to have a test version of the new games page up and running.

However when you can’t load the site you can’t work on it. I’m sure a lot of people are getting discouraged with using the site as well since it has been running so shitty recently.

I am new to server administration and the site is run on it’s own dedicated server. I have tried to ask other people for help to figure out the problems, but to this point nobody has been able to fix the issues.

My guess is that somebody is trying to do a denial of service attack to the site to try to ruin it or lower it’s ranking.

Anyways, it’s driving me nuts and I’m not writing blog posts, not updating the videos on the theater, not creating the new games page or music pages, not answering many questions, not putting up the new artwork I have been collecting etc..

So tonight I am bribing one of my friends with some quality beer in hopes that he will be able to find the problems. He is a server administrator for GoDaddy.

So hopefully by the end of the night the server issues will be fixed and the site will return to normal and I can go back to working on the sections and content.

Haven’t been writing much of what’s been going on in the last month.  My mind has been overloaded with thoughts.  Realize that last October was THE hardest month of my life, and so so much has happened in the last year.

The other day I went to court. The reason was to defend myself against a DUI charge that I had occurred only 5 or 6 days after moving back from New Zealand. Yeah, good timing, I know.

1st Case (license be suspended): I won my MVD/DMV hearing, mostly due to my massive amount of machismo (though it helps when the cop doesn’t show up). It was important to me to win this since I do mobile pc repair for a living, though my lawyer warned me that I might not WANT to win that case because if I were to take a “voluntary suspension” at this hearing, they could NOT give me an “sr22″ on my insurance causing it to go through the roof, even if I got a DUI in the criminal case. I was feeling righteous so I won and declined the suspension.

2nd Case (Criminal): Now if I got a DUI in this case, in Arizona several things would happen.
1) License would be suspended (even if i won the first case)

4) I would end up in “Tent City” for 10 to 30 days in summer. Yikes (worse than min security prison).

So given the above facts I decided to shell out for a lawyer for this case. Knowing that around here even with a lawyer a lot of people fail, I decided that I absolutely must win so I hired the best damn DUI lawyer there is in Arizona. Well, at least according to research on Google (who can’t be trusted since they are working on world domination).

An amazing lawyer costs $5000 just to hire him, to research and work for you. Then another $5000 if it goes to trial. Think the smartass is rich? Heh, wrong… I just don’t let things like “lack of money” prevent me from getting what I want.

Enough hype, the results are: Did not go to trial to save myself $5k, took a settlement offer of “Reckless driving ($478), a mothers against drunk driving class, traffic safety school ($120) and 30 hours of community service (no big deal, I will just design a website or something for somebody).

Still between that, living overseas and deciding to run my own company full time, money is pretty tight.

I don’t worry about things like that though because, when in need I always manage to find enough to get by, and I am fully capable of getting a new pc repair client every single day if I try.

Ultimate goal is to just barely get by for 6 months to a year so that I can make this website my only focus and complete my enormous to-do list. When list is completed the site will work kind of like a shady version of Facebook, only will have the added benefit of users being able to create new content, pages, art, or other contributions and then contributors will get their own donate button. The theory is that say somebody besides me designs an amazing page that people spend a lot of time on. Then that person has the potential to make donations from people who appreciate it.

So last night I spent a good chunk of time answering random people’s questions on uk.answers.yahoo.com. I know, I could have just answered some of the zillion ask-a-smartass questions I have ignored this year, but those take actual thought and telling people how to fix their own lives on yahoo is quicker.

Anyway back to the negative spew. I have been trying to keep my mind occupied on things the past couple weeks, but the only thing I have going is roommate drama. Oh don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with my roommates. The drama comes from the fact that are also getting hit with one bad thing after another. You know, crappy changes at work, traffic tickets, medical expenses, loss of a TV wall (yeah it was my projector that exploded, but it effects us all and we are no longer hanging out in the same room much anymore).

Well tonight, it hit another point where one of my roommates got 2 flat tires and a DUI… (and he got the DUI just because he was changing his tires at 1am… they are assholes in AZ) and is very depressed that he will be getting automatically fired from his 74k/yr career and he won’t be able to afford his child support payments and he has had so much other financial hardship that I don’t believe he even has all of his rent money that’s due this weekend.

I have advised him that the people who have succeeded the most in life are those who have hit rock bottom (and then we proceeded to have a discussion about how he could not go beyond the rock bottom since it’s really strong rock… shaped by Ancient Egyptians).

He will be okay, because he has kids that he cares about so he will find a way to survive. I will keep reinforcing that and trying to share some of my perspectives on how the universe works which might change the way he looks at where he is and how he will get better…

Still, today is my mother’s birthday and I refuse to end things on a negative spin, so I will tell you that it can only get better from here because tomorrow we are having a lingerie party at our house (that I assume I am paying for everything). I mean you gotta know that you are doing something right when you get asked to host one of those…

Also I bought a new domain (absinthemynd.com), and had some amazing ideas for how to use it, which I suppose is also slowing down me making this site successful so for now I have decided not to develop it until I finish at least 1/3 of my to-do list for thesmartass.

FYI: I predict that the next week is going to be pretty hard on me, so it will go one of 2 ways. I won’t work on my site at all, or I will throw myself so deep in my work so that I can’t think of anything but.

P.S. Here’s my Yahoo Answers Profile. Lemme know if I gave them good answers, or if I should stick to answering only smartass questions.