kevinsnet

I've been quite busy as of late dealing with Inerail work. We've had problems with our datacentre (or more importantly, their transit) going up and down while we're not looking. Usually the problems are fairly brief but sometimes they're quite drawn out. Even the brief ones hurt, because of what we do with VoIP. Makes things slightly annoying. Unfortunately, we're running out of capital and with a lack of stability we're losing customers, so we're not able to get our stuff somewhere more reliable yet. I've been racking my brain for a solution and I think between Chris and I we've finally come up with one, but we're still gonna need some money to pull it off. We're hoping for a small business loan of some sort.

There's not much else I've been doing really, I went on a WoW kick for a few months (level 47 Shaman yay!) but I've had to back off because I've got so much to do that things are getting hectic, so I haven't been playing that really, at all. I've barely had time to blog anything, so all my updates have been done by Twitter. I went LARPing last month, enjoyed it so much that I'll be going again next month after my trip to the UK.

Now that things with Inerail are starting to settle down at least a little bit, I'm gonna try to update my website, not another total makeover, but maybe just a facelift. The layout is just so boring and monotonous, I wanna do something slightly different with it but I have no idea what.

Ah well, we'll see. ^_^

...ended up downgrading back down to a basic LJ account. I still have CSS control over the main page, just not the individual comment pages. Good enough for me. Don't really feel like dealing with the ads. :P

So I've just been redesigning my site to make sure everything renders correctly in IE (as much as I hate to, but I'm on the hunt for a job and having a broken site really won't help matters). And while I was doing that I decided it was time to make some updates I've been meaning to make, improve some stuff here, fix this, tweak that, make sure everything still worked smoothly after the migration from my old VPS to it's new home on Inerail's servers. During this I decided I wanted my LiveJournal to better mimic my site's layout, at least partially, so it wouldn't look to bad. Granted, I've got some nifty PHP that polls both my LJ and Twitter for posts and puts them on the site as well as RSSes them for combined output, but I still felt my LJ should look half decent. So I signed up for the ad-filled plus account (actually, the ads aren't all that bad. I was expect to have a sudden relapse to my DeadJournal days, the ads on there were horrible, but this doesn't even come close) and slapped in some custom CSS (some of which makes the ads slightly less ... intrusive?) that helps the LJ's layout to mimic that of my site, and if I do say so myself, it works quite well (at least in Safari and Firefox Mac, haven't tested it in any other browsers yet, but I will xX'). I'm quite pleased.

During this time, I got curious, and actually READ all my old LJ posts [most of the older ones being friends only anyway], which date back to July of '05. Then I also decided to read my old DeadJournal (dating December '01 to roughly August '03, with a few occasional posts afterwards). Man, was I an angry, pissed off, angsty, depressive cunt as a highschooler. How did I have any fucking friends?! :P To my friends from Shawnee? Thanks, I appreciate it. ^_^ ... some of that actually takes me way back though, I had a lot of fun reading all that.

For those of you who haven't heard, CompUSA is closing down. S'about time too, it's been long in the making. Everything must go, we're having a full store liquidation. We figure we'll probably be employed up until the end of January when they'll finally let us all go. It's kinda weird being in a closing store. The place is pretty much a constant state of "last day of school". Simply, no one cares. About anything. At all. It's great :P

On the other hand this has left me looking for a job. Got a few leads, hopefully one of them will pan out, been sending out CVs all over the place (yay for craigslist ^_^). I got myself a LinkedIn (some of my friends recommended that as a way to go). We'll see what happens. In the meantime, myself and a business partner have started a small IT consulting, hosting, software dev, and design company. Check it out: Inerail LLC. If you're my friend and you buy some type of hosting (VPS or dedicated or colocation or whatever), I promise you get a discount :P (There, that was my obligatory shameless plug.)

Unfortunately, CompUSA's closing put a rather large kink in my plan for education and emigration. I have to figure out how I'm going to go about these things (seeing as how the two of them were kinda tied together). With luck, it'll just have temporarily put them on hold, although I'm *still* looking for a better way to actually move country, without the pain and price of a 4 year education from another country. If that's what it takes, though, I'm up for it. Sadly, I hope this doesn't delay my plans. They're already taking longer than I would've hoped. By several years -_-. Ah well, we'll see what happens.

But no matter what, I'm excited ^_^ I'm packing currently (or, rather, have been supposed to been packing while I've been doing all these journal updates and readings and whatnot) as I have a flight in ~18 hours to LHR. I get to see everyone again, yay ^_^_^_^! I've missed everyone. I'll be "in town" from the 27th to the 4th, figured I haven't missed RF's new year's party since the first time I went over there, might as well keep a good record :P

Will this be updated perpetually from this point on? I hope so. I'm gonna try to put the effort in. This week you should expect a semi-longwinded post showing how I have absolutely no life that discusses two things very near and dear to me: technological standards, and science fiction. ^_^ Yah, that'll be a doozy, I know.

If you read this on my website's blog page I think you'll find that I keep a decently updated twitter feed that also blogs to that page, or you can hit that directly, but my website produces an aggregate RSS feed of my twitter and livejournal. My facebook status is also now synched to my twitter status.

I've done some re-design work on my website (Kevinsnet.com) and now my LiveJournal (kevinsnet) is powering portions of my "blog" page. The comments system (which isn't in yet, but will be soon) is separate from LiveJournal's, meaning that comments posted on LJ will stay on LJ, and comments posted on my site will stay on my site. I'd prefer my site be used, but this works too ^_^

LiveJournal makes a good backend for powering the Blog section because it's designed for it. I trust their code more than mine. They already have a system for managing posts, editing them, and controlling them in place. I'm just utilising it. Ultimately, I think this works well. I did it on the previous revision of my site, albeit not so elegantly (from a code perspective) as this time.

I'm gonna try to keep on top of this. As much as I like the idea of it, I don't have much time. But I'll try. ^^'