Don’t you hate it when you make an error in a conf file and then the server works fine until you go to sleep, only to wake up and see that your server has been down for hours on end?

Yeah, I hate that too.

Anyways, it picked a reasonable time to be down.  Most visitors to site are in America and that would of made it go down between 11pm and 7am depending on where in America they were.  On a Sunday night that’s not so bad of a loss.

I am however glad that I have a cron job setup to “check the health” of my server though.  It was designed by my friend to help me survive getting slammed by traffic by kicking people off and restarting the web service so that new people could get to the site.  The bonus is that it determines server load by checking to see if it can load my site via the web.  So this morning I had 60 emails telling me that apache had restarted ever time that job had checked the site. 

I highly recommend a script like that to everybody who runs their own server.  Just cURL your own server with cron job and if unreachable restart apache. 

Anyways.  I have been adding lots of new features lately.  Most of them for my site moderators/admins, so it might not have been noticed by everybody else.  However site will soon be automated and have constant new stuff on it, as well as noticeable improvements in user experience and interaction with the site.

So everybody be sure to make an account on the site.  You login once and you will stay logged in for the next year so it shouldn’t be too much of a nuisance.  I am working to make Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts authenticate on my site as well.  Technically they already do, but I haven’t gotten them to “link together” with existing accounts, which I feel is important.  Still even though you don’t see it you can already connect to site with your Facebook and Google accounts.

Soooo.  Today went well.  I was busy kicking ass and taking names when I kicked too hard and my external hard drive enclosure fell on the floor.  Well it seems that hard drives don’t appreciate a little freestyle jumping and it refused to boot.

I went downstairs to one of my friends place and tested the drive on his desktop computer.  The drive when turned on made lots of lovely noises, but just wouldn’t turn on so I am SOL.

What this means:  I have lost 900 GB of data that was available to me while in Prague.  I lost app installs, all my movies and my music.  Now I am not a stupid so my music is still on my desktop computer which my friend has been taking care of while I am out of the country.  The 400gb worth of movies, well they don’t matter.  They are mostly lost, but the internet keeps getting faster and I will just be able to stream whatever movies I want from my own site if I need a movie. 

Yet, this is still rather tragic as it was very nice to have a massive amount of music on shuffle while I worked.  I can go back to listening to last.fm, however in order to do that I need to launch a date cracking software, that launches an IP hiding program and makes me look like I am in America… before I use last.fm since they started charging per month to use their service overseas due to licensing issues.

Don’t worry about me replacing the expensive drive, as it is still under warranty, though I can’t send it back until I am back in America so I might as well not start the RMA now. 

So if anybody would like to pay their respects to my formerly amazing media storage device, there will be a moment of silence immediately proceeding your reading of this post.  I would set a time, but then we would all have to synchronize watches cell phones and I just don’t see that working.

So a company called GGF (Global Gaming Factory) has announced it’s intention to purchase the Pirate Bay recently.  Well they have gone further and have decided to make it a pay site. 

This will still be a torrent tracker, but to use it you need to pay and that money will go to pay off the copyright holders.  Well I laughed at this, and thought of suprnova and how it once died for being the first real piracy tracker out there that everybody used.  The guy who created it got sued and harassed and threatened at his home.  Yet today it’s back up and running again as a good ol’ fuck you to the people who wanted to take him down.

How I see it: 

Avast ye maties, you come to this island you will pay me a fee and
then i will charge you for that which you are getting free on other
trackers. BUT, as a consolation you will get to feel less catholic
guilt and have to go to confession less for your vile sinning ways.

When will old people (media companies) learn, distributing content to as many people
as possible makes more profit for the people who made the content.
piracy increases distribution and interest in products. because people
pirate windows 7, they blog about it and other people find their blogs
and become more interested in it and then they pirate it at home and
decide to buy it for their business.

In 1999 the offspring was the most pirated band on the internet.  They also had the highest selling album.  Back then I made compilation cd’s and gave them freely to my friends, who then became fans of musicians they had never heard of and ended up going to their concerts at local festivals.

New media distribution won’t conform to old systems, learn to work the new systems in new ways to increase your profitability.  If you really want to work with the new type of media instead of fight against it then start making content that isn’t restricted by a bunch of DRM (digital rights management simply means that you buy content for one specific platform) and you give it to me on super fast servers faster and more convenient than I can pirate it then I will buy it.   I buy games on the playstation store because it’s convenient and I am lazy. 

Anyways, you can pirate the new RTM version of Windows 7 (build 7600) at btjunkie.org or isohunt.org, and help improve their sales to businesses and OEM manufacturers by creating more of a demand for it.  They really have worked out a lot of the bugs that plagued it for me on earlier versions and I think business and OEM’s should pay for it.

I have lost too many friends and family members throughout my life.  So my personal philosophy is to not hold a grudge for too long.  I held one against my friend Chris for well over a year, but it was simply because of how I perceived a situation between him and my mother and one always has to take a side. 

Another person I was very good friends with, Mark, still to this day holds a grudge against me.  Something about me stealing his car, using his washing machine and moving to New Zealand.  IDK, we were very good friends for years.  But still, when you are a stubborn bastard you will hold a grudge until the less stubborn of people earnestly try to fix the situation.

Here’s my thought process.  One holds a grudge and then every time you have an association that reminds you of that person you get upset.  I do not like being upset or in a bad mood, so if I make up with those people my thoughts will be primarily good.  State of mind is everything, and all we have in life is our perception of reality. 

So yesterday I made up with my friends from Prague.  The ones I flew here to visit in the first place.  They think I wronged them, I think they wronged me.  Whatever, it’s all the same now.  I mean because of how things went down I know more people than I would have and I have a beautiful place to live in the best area of Prague (I will be uploading photos of my loft as soon as I finish writing this). 

We will probably never be as close as we used to be, but we have both agreed to put the situation that went down behind us.  It just seems to me that it is better to have friends than enemies. 

I went to this Mexican bar (yes one exists in Prague, there was even one Mexican there playing La Bamba and other bad music) with them and a couple of their other friends yesterday evening.  Since it was an American holiday they were giving 50% off on all American alcohol and food.  So we all got cheeseburgers and some Jim Beam.  I thought my bill would be quite high, even with the half off discount but it seems the staff had not been writing down what all we were eating and drinking properly. 

So Martin took the liberty of telling them what each one of us drank.  Hmm, coulda sworn I drank two or three times that amount.  But no matter, perhaps that was a different night :)  We left for the night and I jumped on the tram that went back towards my place.  Didn’t actually have a pass, and if you get caught without a pass it’s 1000 CZK fine, but that made it a more interesting ride home.

Anyways, I honestly don’t want to drink as much as I have been doing since I have been here.  However every person I meet here drinks, and so that’s what you do when you hang out with them.  I understand that though since the beer is cheaper than the water.  People move here to drink cheap beer and wine. 

Speaking of alcoholics, I was woken up this morning by Jason calling me.  He was mumbling something in his thick Irish accent that I couldn’t make out.  Eventually he asked what time it was and I told him and he said to go back to bed.   I did, but got up in another hour or so and walked over to his restaurant which shouldn’t have been open but it was.  I walked in and there was broken glass all over the floor. 

He made me some coffee, and I went to buy him some cigarettes.  He insisted that his staff would clean the place up, that is what they are there for.  His poor employees ;).  It seems that his wife is out of the country for a week or so, which just gives him more of an excuse to get drunk.  He himself could not remember what happened.  So I will keep Jason as an example of what not to strive to be.  He has a successful restaurant, and is actually a pretty nice guy, when you get his sense of humor…. But drinking that much all the time would cause me way more problems than it’s worth.  Besides, I am not Irish enough to keep up on a consistent basis.

“When is a mistake not a mistake? When you have learned something from it”
Ann Uplands

“Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame”
Benjamin Franklin

“Change is the Process of Life Itself”
Neale Donald Walsch

Had I not come home with maybe 1500 CZK more than I left with the other night I decided that I really needed a phone. 

Nobody has been able to get my iPhone 3G to work with a local pre-paid sim.  It just site there and won’t activate, and iTunes says it’s not able to.  Still, it’s unlocked and at home I use it with T-Mobile so one would assume T-Mobile would work here as well. 

Well one would be wrong.  So today I spent 1499 CZK to purchase another phone and 400 CZK worth of pre-paid credit.  Now I can actually give people my phone number, which is much easier than telling people to email me or call a US phone number.  The number is +420 736 779 188, I give that out freely since incoming calls are free in virtually all countries except America so feel free to call.  Though I still do not expect many calls since you would have to pay international fees to reach me, though I am awake during Arizona time of 1am-1pm (just add 2 hours for central time) so I figure it would probably be somebody drunk dialing me.

Also I made a direct, easy to remember link for virtually all my pictures since I had somebody who’s not on Facebook ask me to see the pictures of my trip. 

http://tinyurl.com/jamesphotos

I got locked into Starbucks last night.  I went in 20 minutes before they closed and they didn’t notice me going into the basement so when I left at 10pm I had to yell into the back to get somebody who was closing to notice me and then unlock the door just to let me out. 

I suppose it would have been a fun survival story, had they shut off the lights and left me here over night.  Though I would probably end up stealing food/coffee and then some camera would get me thrown into a nice foreign jail.
 
Opened registration on my site.  I actually broke it when I first made it and everybody’s had the same password (that they didn’t know).  Have since fixed it, so register an account on the main page of thesmartass.info.  Right now it doesn’t do much, but it will become needed in the near future to use most of the site.

Anyways, have a kick ass day. 

I went for a jog the other night.  On that jog I went to the top of Petrin and was going to crash a private party but nobody looked that interesting there so I went back down the hill and on my way back home I decided to stop in and talk to this guy I know who owns/operates a 4 star restaurant.  I have a beer, and then another couple beer and am poured some shots. 

Eventually well after closing hours Jason decides that drinking at his place was no fun and we needed to go down the street.  A beer and a couple oversized shots (slivovitz is awful) later and I was fully expecting to just say thanks and walk home.  So far, including his resturant and this place I had spent 200 CZK, which was way lower than it should of been however he didn’t charge me at his restaurant.  So Jason was very insistent that we walk up the street to the casino since he had 2 chips from a previous night still. 

He cashed the 2 chips which totaled 1100 CZK in value.  I wasn’t going to play but he gave me 3 or 400 CZK worth of chips and insisted it was all mine.  So we were playing blackjack and I started winning every single hand and he started losing every hand.  After the dealer got 21 three times in a row I decided to cash out.  However I still had 2000 CZK ($108) left.  Well this was fantastic and I was willing to just give it back to Jason, but he wouldn’t have it. 

I was totally ready to be done. I mean I was drunk and had gained some money.  However this was not good enough to end the night for him.  He had to find a Herna Bar (which he said was a nonstop/open all night bar, though I have since found the translation to actually be a gambling house).  We walked around the area but when we couldn’t find one so he waved down a cab. 

Of course I was paying for everything else tonight (err that morning, since it was already after 4am) and the cab drove us somewhere into the Jewish district to some bar that was still open. 

I ordered 2 beers, though I could barely drink my own after all the shots I had had. 

We quickly made friends with 2 random people, one of which looked like he could be Jason Statham’s brother.  The other was an English girl.  At first I assumed them to be a couple but soon found that they didn’t know each other either. 

The girl called a cab for herself and was sitting outside waiting for it, while Jason and this very friendly but brutish guy were inside arm wrestling and talking shit.  I decided to go hang out with the girl outside until her cab came.  Her cab got there and she kissed me and departed.  She was rather fun, considering I never even caught her name. 

At one point we actually left, it was 7 something and we just started wandering around the city.  Nothing was really open, but somehow we ended up at a KFC that actually was.  There were all sorts of crazy stories told on the way back, but I didn’t get back to my loft to go to sleep until 10:30am, when I very quickly passed out.  Though I was amused since Jason didn’t go home, he went straight to his restaurant to open it for the day. 

Ok, I had a lot of fun but holy shit that was a lot of drinking.  There is no way I could do that on any kind of a consistent basis, and I do fear that he will be trying to get me to go out every week.