So my Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts are now all linked together. The missing link is my blog… and I figure if this blog is to be resurrected it really needs to also automatically make itself known in my facebook and twitter feeds. So, let’s see if this works or not…

Update: Oh yeah baby! We are linked! All systems operational… blog, facebook, twitter and youtube are all up and running! The “Wuggle in your face” campaign for 2010 can now begin lol!

There you go… 3 simple words that should hopefully explain why this blog has been so neglected the last couple of months. As I mentioned “The Guild” in my last post it shouldn’t really be too surprising that I had to go check Warcraft out should it???

Anyway, I’ve been busy playing my main character of a human warrior… if you’re curious to see how I’ve been progressing (level 48 at the time of this post) please go check out my stats on the armory by using this link.

The last few weeks have been very frustrating computer wise…

Firstly, a few weeks ago, I discovered all my sites (then hosted by a provider called Siteocity) appeared to be offline with a notice saying they’d been suspended and I needed to contact billing.

At first I assumed I had accidentally missed the renewal date but it turned out that instead, somebody had been using a script on my sites, to run some malicious code to try and steal customer details from some American bank!!!

After initially convincing Siteocity that I had no idea this was happening they agreed to put back up my site on the basis that I removed the offending security loophole. As I had no idea what this loophole was they advised me it was a “Hacked Forum” - now a forum to me is a discussion board… so I said the only forum I had upon my webspace was one on LibNET but I agreed, if that was what was causing the problem, I was happy for them to remove it.

Anyway… 24 hours later my site is back up and online… all good I think! I wander through the site, checking everything is working as it should and I notice that the polls script on the front page of LibNET appears to have been broken. Now I simply assumed this was as a result of Siteocity stuffing it up by having my site offline and then restoring it… it never occurred to me that this was the “Hacked Forum” to which they had previously referred.

So, I fix the poll script and all looks good! Great, back to normal….

 24 hours later… Site down again!

Now what? I go back to Siteocity live support chat and I am informed that my site has been taken down again for the same reason as before and that they are under strict instruction never to restore it again!

After numerous emails, some of which were very detailed and long, I believe I had explained the situation from my viewpoint and the fact that I am not psychic and do not know that their comment of a “Hacked Forum” was actually to be read as “Poll Script”

But it was a total waste of my time. They had made their decision to remove the site and would not even give me a refund for the period of credit I had with them.

Luckily, after several days of pestering them I eventually managed to get a backup of the whole site and have now finally managed to relocate it all to a server at Bluehost… well, except LibNET, which is currently still down and I need to have a closer look at before I put it back up in its current form as I don’t want a repeat performance.

Anyway, you can probably imagine how pissed I was to have all this stuffing around! Not what I needed to be doing although I guess on the good side it has put me back in the mood to do some webpage stuff so I’ll probably finally get around to updating my pages again now.

And Siteocity, you SUCK! So, if anybody reads this who is looking for a web host, let this be a warning to you… at Siteocity you are considered guilty without trial, you will waste your energy if you try to write them long emails, they will just ignore most of what you say and send extremely rude emails to you… half their support staff seem to be linguistically challenged when it comes to communicating in English and if you ever want a refund, not a chance! DO NOT USE THEM! I will make it my quest now to bad mouth them all around the net!

Oh, and btw, I’m not saying Bluehost are necessarily the best web host on the net, but it sure opened my eyes as to what a much better deal you can get than with Siteocity.

So, that’s my server woes of the last few weeks… oh, and don’t even get me started about setting up my father-in-law’s new computer that didn’t like his old Alcatel modem! That’s been another saga within itself…

But anyway, it’s all good now! I’m cool!

Well I still haven’t changed from the old Alcatel Speedtouch Home modem yet but I have changed the filters on the phone line to more modern ADSL2+ compliant ones. I did buy a cheap DSL-G604T router/modem off EBay with the thought this would replace the Alcatel and my D-Link DI-524 set up but I’m having extreme difficulties getting the G604T to sync with the ADSL line… very odd… not sure if its a crappy unit that I’ve been stung with off EBay or whether it is just a pain in the ass to configure.

Either way, I pretty much gave up on it for the moment and purchased on EBay a Netcomm NB5 modem which I’ll use with the DI-524 instead. This was also pretty cheap but at least it is supposedly brand new in its box so hopefully shouldn’t give me any issues.

I’ll probably either resell the G604T or, if I can figure out how to make it work as a repeater/access point I may be able to make use of it in getting my wifi signal to our outdoor rumpus room… guess we’ll see how we go on.

Anyway, the point of this post, even on my half-way-house ADSL2+ set up, and bearing in mind my 3km or so distance from the exchange, I just downloaded a 720MB torrent at a rate of around 700kB/s meaning I downloaded it in just less than 18 minutes! I’m pretty impressed with that… it used to take me about 2 hours on my old ISP.

Well the churn to TPG successfully occurred as scheduled on Wednesday, 18 June although I am still awaiting the new ADSL2+ modem I purchased off Ebay. I’m also still using old ADSL1 filters from 5+ years ago so I know they need to still be updated too.

So, bearing that in mind, and the fact I’m still using the old non-ADSL2 compliant Alcatel Speedtouch Home modem and a D-Link DI-524 router my new speeds, per speedtest.net, are 5324k down and 662k up.  Thats a 4 times increase in download speed and a 3 times increase in upload speed.

So… alls good! Will update the speeds again when I get all my equipment upgraded.

Changing your ISP is a bit like changing your bank, insurer or superannuation provider. It is a task that we seldom do. And so it is with a little bit of sadness that, after over 5 years good service, I say bye bye to Netspace.

And why am I leaving? Well… to be honest, Netspace tried to offer me a free upgrade to ADSL2+. Sounds good? I thought so too and was very nearly on the verge of signing up but decided I perhaps should take the time to look around at what else is on offer. And this dear Netspace is where your free offer ultimately backfired as I discovered a much better plan on your rival TPG. An ISP I originally used at dial-up speeds when I first moved to Australia.

At a price of AU$69.99 per month, which is $10 less than I was paying Netspace, I will now get ADSL2+ speeds and a download limit of 150GB which is a remarkable 90GB’s more than the ADSL2+ plan that Netspace was offering! Admittedly I’m doubtful I can leach 150GB per month but its nice to have the option!

As regards speed on ADSL2+, that remains to be seen and no doubt I’ll post about that soon. I’m not expecting too much as I’m about 2.5kms away from the telephone exchange however, looking at TPG’s statistics I can see closeby users in my street are achieving download speeds of about 9Mbps with upload speeds of just over 1Mbps. Of course, I think I will need to upgrade my modem and line filters to get that speed as I’m still using an old Alcatel Speedtouch Home modem which isn’t ADSL2+ compatable and filters that are 5+ years old. Guess we’ll see what happens next week when hopefully the change occurs… got to be an improvement on my 1500/256 plan though!

Using speedtest.net tonight I am currently getting speeds of 1284kbps down and 210kbps up. Will give me something to compare to when the switch to TPG occurs.

Today I purchased a 4gb USB sandisk cruzer. There are various reasons I purchased one of these but without going into detail the prime reason was my annoyance with the restrictive document management system that has been imposed upon my workplace.

Anyway, I just figured I had purchased a 4gb memory stick… nothing too exciting there! Until I realised the thing came pre-installed with some U3 software… what the hell is this I thought? Well now I realise it is software designed to run directly off the USB device without leaving any trace on the PC upon which you are using it. Doesn’t sound that exciting but after realising this meant I could stick Open Office software, Firefox and even a SNES emulator upon it which I could then easily use on any computer I plug it into I realise this was something indeed worth investigating further!

I also discovered the pre-installed cruzersync program was also very useful in backing up my email and accounting software everytime I plug it into my PC.  And some nice web editing software and FTP clients so I can update my webpage from any computer when I feel in the mood to do so. Not bad… not bad at all!

Yes I’m a nerd and yes, this technology is apparently a couple of years old and its probably old hat to most people reading this blog but hey, I’m impressed!

Tonight with the kids in bed early and the wife away at work I decided I would make amends for the fact that the kid’s webpages had not been updated for a long long time. I have therefore been busy uploading photos and comments on all their pages so if you are interested please visit the pages of Quinn, Zoe and Leon to see what they’ve been up to over the last 6 months or so.

I’ve also been quite busy on Facebook these last few days… I must admit I had signed up to facebook a long time ago but dismissed it as being of no interest to me however I will now confess I have changed my mind about it! Having spent the last few days tidying up my page there and adding a few new friends I have to say it really is a very clever network and I suspect I will be utilising it a lot more during 2008. It has already allowed me to catch up with some old friends who I had slipped out of touch with previously.

If you haven’t used Facebook before I recommend you perhaps give it a go and, if you have tried it but dismissed it as I originally did, now might be a good time to give it a second go. And… if you know me, don’t forget to look me up and add me to your friends list!

It’s been a week or so since I last posted so here’s a little summary of what’s been going on:-

We got our new Inspiron 1420 Laptop from Dell and a nice new LCD monitor for the second PC in the computer room. The laptop is excellent and it’s very cool to be able to sit in bed surfing the net and listening to mp3s and video streamed via wifi from the computer room. The new 19″ monitor I purchased with the laptop has also perfectly finished off the computer room now which, in my humble opinion is near perfect with 2 nice desktop computers and a MAME cabinet all linked together in there.

Obviously a lot of my time has been spent over the last week or so in perfecting the network to ensure that all machines have the latest up to date software and that applications such as email nicely synchronise between machines so there is no issue if you check email on say the laptop and then later use a desktop PC. Took a lot of time and a bit of frustration but its all paid off nicely.

In other news I went for my citizenship interview last week and, by the end of the week had already received a letter confirming my citizenship had been accepted and I would need to attend a citizenship ceremony shortly so I can fully pledge my allegiance to Australia, get myself on the electoral role and finally get myself an Australian passport.

And the kids… well Leon’s crawling improves by the day, Zoe gets cuter by the day and Quinn gets more and more addicted to Hamsterball each day although I have to say I am impressed how well he is now playing this game. (I just wish it had a nice LAN option so I could play him on another PC rather than having to play 2 players by split-screen which I do not like)

And… I nearly forgot… I turned 36 years of age! Argh I’m getting old!!!

Take a look at these specs:-

Pentium MMX 233 with 4.3GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, 4MB Matrox Millenium II graphics card, 24x CD ROM, Soundblaster AWE64, ADI 15″ Microscan monitor, 4MB Diamond Monster 3D.

Hmmm…. how about AU$4700?, That’s £1930 or US$3,885 at the current conversion rate.

Sounds ridiculous? Well, apparently that is the price I paid for the above computer back in September 1997! Amazing how things have changed in 10 years!

Coincidentally I have today actually purchased a new computer… my first laptop! Yes, I’ve always been a desktop kind of guy but I’ve finally given in and purchased a laptop primarily so Muppet can do work on her WuggleWear website from the lounge and thus be able to keep an eye on the kids at the same time.

I wonder if I keep the receipt for 10 years whether I can make a similar post in 2017 and be in shock at the price I just paid for a laptop?

Maybe they’ll be free in cornflake packets by 2017?

Fits of nostalgia often find me coming back to Doom and tonight I discovered (and yes, I’m probably slow and it’s been around for years) an online port of Doom called ZDaemon.

Very nice and user friendly and within 10 minutes you’ll find yourself online in a game of Doom with up to 16 players! It’s even a piece of cake to set up your own professional looking server to host a game on.

Only problem I found was that a) there was a lot of empty servers and b) why does nobody play straightforward simple deathmatch games any more? Anyway, if you’re reading this and feel nostalgic for a game of Doom… drop me a line and I’d love to try it out with you.

Have you ever purchased something and then said to yourself “Why the hell didn’t I get one of these earlier???”

Well that is exactly how I feel after finally bothering to buy a wireless router for the computer room. I had always felt in the past that I really didn’t need one of these as I don’t use a laptop and primarily stick to the one main PC in our computer room.

However, that room is also home to a second PC that I don’t use that much and one of my MAME cabinets which also is obviously run by a PC.

I therefore decided it was about time the 3 of these machines got to talk and know each other so decided to buy a D-Link router off ebay. It arrived on Monday of this week and in absolutely no time at all I had all 3 computers connected and all happily surfing the net. This of course led me to setting them up to play some multiplayer games such as Doom and Need For Speed III which, although both are very old, you need to remember I’m a nostalgic kind of person! Besides which Need For Speed III actually plays very well on the arcade cabinet and looks great!

Now of course I just need to teach my eldest son how to play NFS3! Obviously Doom is out of the question otherwise I’ll get the wrath of Muppet upon me!

And then of course there is the bonus of now being able to, finally after all these years, play the Nintendo DS on the wifi network. Therefore I’ve been happily playing against people around the world on Tetris DS although I admittedly keep getting my ass kicked! If anybody who knows me also has a DS they use on the nintendo wifi network please get in touch! I’d love to play against somebody I actually knew rather than a complete stranger.

Anyway, nice to finally have a well set up network… at least my brother in law can now stop complaining that there is no wifi if he comes down here with his laptop again!

Following on from my last post I spent a bit of time exploring MySpace and discovered many more good songs from several unsigned artists. However it soon became annoyingly apparant that most of the artists who have their songs up there only allow you to listen rather than download their songs.

Although I can understand the reasons for this I would personally like to put a few of these tracks on my MP3 player so I started to investigate and was surprised, a few clicks later in google, as to how easy it was to find some software that circumvents MySpace and allows you to download tracks to your computer.

Therefore, if you are looking for a tool to snatch music tracks off MySpace, may I recommend the MySpace MP3 Gopher which is very simple and easy to use. All you need to find is the MySpace profile ID number of the artist you are interested in, which you can pretty much grab from a link to say their photos, and away you go! A nice little tool! Not sure MySpace would agree but hey, you just need to accept the hackers are always a step ahead!

You may not notice a great deal of difference… but this blog is now running on Wordpress rather than B2Evolution.

I decided to change from B2Evo for a number of reasons… the first being the fact that trying to have the ability for people to leave comments on the last version of the blog was a nightmare and saw the comments section getting overrun with spam, the second was the fact that I was running a very old version of B2Evo but, because I had modified certain files, I was reluctant to update it to the latest version as I knew this was going to cause no end of hassles.

Luckily a great script allowed me to migrate to Wordpress with very little effort and it also took very little effort to then get the layout looking similar to the old blog. The admin section is just as good, if not better than B2Evo, and you are now able to leave comments again!

So hopefully everything is for the better but no doubt time will tell…

Well my enthusiasm for LibNET appears to be picking up pace and, since my last post to the blog, I have reduced the list of 25 steps down to 18!

Admittedly I have picked off a few of the easy steps first but hopefully I can knock this down another 5 or so over the weekend… the fact that I’ve just contacted my host to try and negotiate a deal to get 400mb more webspace should certainly help me finish off the galleries and get some of the TV clips uploaded.

Ahh I do remember fondly the good old ego rubbing days of LibNET! Can I relive it for a second time… well, I’m feeling quite confident! Time will no doubt tell…

In a post to a mailing list I frequent, known as XXL, my ego was today stroked by a message talking about a French Mylene Farmer forum getting nostalgic and talking about Mylene Farmer websites that existed around 10 years or so ago.

Apparently my old website LibNET was referred to several times in this discussion which made me think that it really is a shame that I have a new version of LibNET sitting on my server collecting dust that I originally started nearly 3 years ago but lost interest in finishing.

Tonight I wiped off the layer of dust and had a surf around my unfinished project and I must say it still looks good, at least in the eyes of my ego! I therefore spent some time assessing what needs to be done to bring the site up to a launch status and have made up a list of 25 steps that need to be carried out to reach that stage.

The question now is whether I can clear those 25 steps and actually launch the site or not! Some steps are relatively painless, others are going to require a LOT of work. And another issue is that I do not believe I currently have enough space on my server to do everything I want to do so that will also need to be upgraded if I do manage to get down to the last 5 steps or so.

Oh well… I’ve made the list! Now we just need to see if I can find enough enthusiasm and also enough time to work down it!

No blog entries for nearly a week? Why? Well… partly caused by some greek ‘friend’ introducing me to a silly game called Desktop Tower Defense.

This is an extremely annoying web based game that, at least for me, once you have had a few games you just have to keep playing and playing until you can get the elusive perfect score!

If you have time to waste and are confident you will not be sucked in and addicted go to the link above and try it out… my current high score to be beaten is 5,587. Good luck! And don’t lose your sanity!

I’ve been rather quiet over these last few days in the blog but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been around on the net.

Far from it… in fact I’ve been helping to try and get a website off the ground that although of little interest to most people who visit this blog may be of great interest to the few of you that have a history with IRC channel #mylene which, 10 years or so ago, was a HUGE part of my life.

Following a few reconnections with old friends from the channel I’ve set up a wiki page at http://www.wuggleworld.com/mylene to try and track down all the old faces from the channel and give people an update as to where those old faces are are today.

So far it is going very well with some very interesting discoveries being made as to where people are and from getting back in contact with some people whom I haven’t spoke with for years…

Unfortunately though I realise that 10 years on the net is a LONG time and not every hunt is proving to have a happy ending… damn why do people have to change their email addresses so often! I’m going to have to hire a private eye to find some people at this rate!

Oh well… having lots of fun with it for the moment.

A few posts back you may recall I was raving about the Nintendo DS port of Doom. Although I am still regularly playing this (always good to have the Nintendo DS at hand and play through a level whilst rocking Leon’s basinet with my foot!) I have also rediscovered Doom on the PC via the excellent Windows port known as Doom Legacy. This version of Doom works perfectly under Windows XP and makes the game look particularly fresh again by the fact that it allows it to be played at higher resolutions.

I must say I have particularly enjoyed playing again through the episodes of the original Doom… its been years and years since I played episodes such as “The Shores of Hell”. This nostalgia also made me also pull out my old Doom Wads that I had personally made back in the mid 90’s and allowed me to enjoy them all over again.

If anybody is interested in my levels, which I personally rate as well above average when compared to the numerous crappy pwad files that littered the internet in the prime of Doom, I figured I would upload them and give out the links here…

My levels are, in the order that I think I built them (ie, the best are last!), as follows:-

DMHSEWER.WAD
NITEMARE.WAD
DMHSIEGE.WAD
DMHMORT1.WAD
DMHOFTD.WAD

Playing these also made me download a copy of WinDEU 5.24 which is a Doom level editor. It didn’t take me long to regrasp how I built my levels so watch out, I may even get around to building a brand new level soon!

A few days ago my computer went bang again and, although I was not intending to update my PC until 2007, we’ve taken the opportunity of buying a brand new system which is what I’m typing this blog entry from now.

At the moment I’m in the initial re-setup phase although my room is also a mess because I purchased a cheap old P4 1.7Ghz basic shell of a system to resurrect my old machine in as, it’s 2 hard drives of 60gb and 120gb were still full of a lot of files that I need to have on this new machine.

All has gone relatively well with resurrecting the old machine although I’m having some trouble, as I always do, with getting the two networked together and talking to each other. Oh well… sure I’ll figure it out soon.

In other news, we had our first barbecue of Springtime today! Spring officially started in Australia yesterday and, with a beautiful sunshine/blue sky day of 21c we decided to have pork chops on the barbecue this evening. I also wore my shorts! First time I’ve been able to wear shorts in the daytime since we visited Queensland back around April this year… feels good!