Looking back on the 6 topics covered I can't really say that any of them will fail to keep me occupied over the next few months. Each of them provides plenty of fuel for the blog. I think that being a self-aware blogger kind of hurts the genuine nature of a personal blog. This certainly is no where near becoming one of those professional blogs which are very self aware. I believe I have attempted to balance between the two types for too long. In the end I think the point is that the blog will focus more on my personal ramblings and stop attempting to achieve cohesion which I always fail at reaching.

This blog has been dragged through so many blog applications. It has spent most of the time in wordpress. I have decided that I will just keep it on the wordpress site instead of hosting it locally. I will then just use RSS to feed my homepage with. I have moved the blog so much in the past due to changing web hosts. Only once did I leave behind wordpress because of a wordpress problem, and even that was my own ignorance for not updating it. Hopefully by hosting it here things will be more stable and the chances of my entire blog getting lost will disappear. I missed my blog. Later, -junc

I have moved the site to a new web host. The move was pretty much perfect. The new server is a Windows Coldfusion Server that supports PHP. Wordpress runs great on it. As a result of the move I'm no longer offering any sort of web services or hosting. So any mention of that in previous posts is now null and void. Not that I had time to deal with that crap anyway. On the gaming front I found this little quote on Gamespot: "Considering that Guild Wars Factions was released earlier this year, it might seem that ArenaNet has packed a lot of new content into Nightfall in such a short development time, but Strain said that the company's development strategy is starting to pay off. ArenaNet has two teams working on Guild Wars, and each team has 12 months to develop a new chapter. Because the goal of each new chapter is to introduce a new way to play the game, it's safe to say that the future of Guild Wars looks bright. For now, Guild Wars Nightfall is scheduled to launch on October 27." -GameSpot I interpret this to mean that at least once a year we will have a Guild Wars "expansion". Perhaps twice a year. Which makes me giggle with glee. Over the past week I have been thinking about Guild Wars and the Nintendo Wii. It has really got me wondering if there is any point in buying a new game system when I'm so addicted to a PC game. Then I found a list of launch titles and went through them. I came up with the following ten games as must haves at launch: Need for Speed: Carbon Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII Call of Duty 3 The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Rayman Raving Rabbids Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent Rampage: Total Destruction Excite Truck Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Metal Slug Anthology These are all set to be released on the 19th of November along with the console. Except Rampage which will be released on the 20th. The lack of a big RPG is pretty glaring there. This will hit Nintendo pretty hard I think. There is also a glaring lack of Mario and Metroid in that list. If they were launch titles they would have found their way into it. Putting together that list built up my excitement again though. I will most definitely be picking up my Wii on the 19th. later, -junc

I updated the theme. A little brighter and hopefully easier to read. I also changed the count down timer to the release date for Guild Wars: Nightfall. Once it is out I will switch it back to the Wii timer. I picked up the Nightfall Pre-release pack. Some nice stuff in it. About 15 minutes of music, some wallpapers, and bonus items. It was only $5.00 so I won't complain too much. However, I was hoping for a new trailer. It just included the trailer that was released about a month ago. This weekend is the big preview event for Nightfall. I'm pretty excited about that. School starts on Wednesday so I'm not sure how well I will be able to keep up on the blog. I will try though. There hasn't been a whole lot in gaming news lately. Today the Space Quest Compilation came out. Pretty much 6 Space Quest games and DOSbox. King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Police Quest compilations also came out. The DOS box thing is kind of disappointing. You would think with all of the amateurs out there that have reverse engineered interpreters for the games that Vivendi would put more effort into it. I've seen a lot of posts around the interweb with people complaining about the Wii price. Kind of silly if you ask me. I was really happy to see that most of my assumptions about the rumors were true. I predicted that September 14th the date would be announced, it was. I predicted that the price would be $250.00, it is. Okay, I didn't predict anything, I read it on the internet, so of course it was true! I picked up Lego Star Wars II for the PC. It was only $25.00 at Target ($30.00 with a $5.00 gift card). It is about as exciting as most of the reviews I have read have said it is. Which isn't all that exciting. Pretty much it is the first one but with the Original Trilogy. This should have been done first, but then again if they were just now releasing the second trilogy, I don't think it would have done that well. It is cute and fun. A little sluggish on my computer at times for no reason. I guess they updated the engine which was kind of stupid. How good do you need to make plastic blocks look? Does it really take a newer better bigger engine to do so? I guess this is why I am becoming a Nintendo Fanboy. later, -junc

I put up the google ads and web services section. I also finished the design and got everything to W3C validate. I have a lot of CSS warnings, but no errors. I will work on them over the next few days. I also still need to expand the about section. I have a list of hobbies and interests around here somewhere to put up there. I'm getting two books on wilderness survival today. Pretty excited about those. I really need to buy some hiking supplies soon. It would have been nice to do that this summer. Maybe next summer. I would probably need to buy for two since my girlie isn't quite as fanatical about it as I am. Today will mark day two of the diet pill experiment. Things went really well yesterday. I wasn't just energetic, but I also felt really good. When I came down it was pretty slow. At one point I think I did manage to push myself too far. We went to the park for a walk and I got a headache and kind of woozy. After sitting down for a minute though I was okay. I think the pills give you more energy than you are able to handle when all you've been doing is sitting on your butt eating crap from two years. Heh. I really need to get a spell check for wordpress. I think once I have that I will be pretty happy with this software and the way it has turned out. Oh, I made a cool little "powered by" icon for wordpress. It is at the bottom of each page. later, -junc

Okay, so it is time for a real update. A real post of some sort. But, first, more technical crap. I disabled the must register to post thing, but kept the ability to register. This will make it easier to track the size of my "community". As far as the spam thing goes, since comments go to moderation first it is not such a big deal. I also enabled akismet, the wordpress anti-spam thingy, so hopefully that will help. Anyway. I have a few projects going on at the moment. The top of the list is occupied by the Keptosh Novel. Years in development, things finally seem to be coming together. I'm trying to work with the Weekend Novelist approach. Most of the plot development was spent in Dramatica, specifically with The Writer's DreamKit. I recommend the book and software if you have trouble getting a plot into a decent outline (if outlining is your thing). The Novel template included with The Writer's DreamKit is worth the $35.00 (buy it from Amazon, not the publishers site). The Dramatica Book (which is also available in an older edition for free online) is pretty decent for working out character archtypes. All in all though the whole Dramatica thing is just a fancy version of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. Maybe even a dumbed down version, I've never read his book. All of that stuff means nothing if I don't start writing though. That is what the Weekend Novelist is for though, It provides a pretty decent 52 week program for writing a novel. I recently purchased the second edition of that book and so far I'm a little disappointed. I haven't read through it all yet so I won't slam it yet. Hey, this is getting pretty long, so I will wrap things up. My other big project of the moment is trying to learn 3DS Max. Summer quarter I am taking a C++ class and a time management/study habits class. I'm pretty excited about both of those. later, -junc

Most of the downloads are up. I'm still working on the pages, need to add some info to a few. Obviously I've converted everything over to WordPress. I'm eliminating the forum, wiki, moodle and everything else I had on the server and just using this. Everything I've been doing with the site lately has been in the name of providing things for a community. Except, I don't have one. So, having just a blog of my random rants where people can still get the downloads they want seems like a better way to do things. If a community starts to build up around the blog and it seems as if people are reading it I will add a forum if it is needed. If you can't find something feel free to contact me. As far as I know everything that has always been up is currently up. later, -junc