Systemdown Chronicles

Around this time every year I start to feel the call of the wild urging me to go camping. Time to drag out all the camping gear from the past year and see what condition its in. Between the different members of my family we have enough equipment for a small army to survive for weeks in a forest. So this weekend I need to travel down to where it is all stored and pick up the things i need to start the season. This means I have to setup all my tents and see if they need to be cleaned again. This is always a pain to do on your own, as my big tent is on its last leg, or poles in this case. It has been put up so many times by just one person when it really is a three person job, and this has caused the poles to start to crack from the stress. I will be using my big tent as the community tent during events this year as I have done at past events. This makes it very easy for people to bring new comers to pirate events that are not equipped for camping. So it looks like we will be inheriting a new tent this year, a ten by ten tent from my girlfriend’s parents. Now we will have a total of 4 tents that I will be bringing to events this year.

With spring in full force, I am inclined to get out and do things outside of my basement home. Its time to explore the options outside, such as going to the drive in. I have not been to the drive in in a few years. Ever since they tore down the drive in that was in Lebanon to put in the Super Walmart a few years ago I have not been to another one. So this weekend we will try to make the drive up to Dallas to the Motor Vu and see Monsters vs Aliens and Knowing. I am excited to get out of the house and do something, so this should be fun.

Oh its that time of year again. I leave tomorrow for The Gathering. Oh happy day. I can’t wait for a fun pirate filled weekend. Hope to see you there. That is all. See you later.

    I have been on a roll lately. Things are starting to move faster for me again. I have been working hard on so many things I can’t seem to make enough time to do them all. Firstly I have been working for Kumoricon the majority of the time. With tier 1 and tier 2 already ended we are about to mail out both at the same time. The reason for the delay is do to many factors, the major one being free time. The little bit of free time I get I try to dedicate to getting things done.

    The next thing occupying my time is looking for a new job elsewhere. I have reached the point were I do not want to work for my current employer anymore. So this means looking for work anywhere in the state. This could be a good thing for me. I am truly tired of the city I live in. There is no real culture here. When I say culture, I am referring to things such as unique restaurants, niche business, etc. So needless to say I have been on the look out for a new place to live.

    I am also working hard on getting my online business up and running. This is a slow process as it seems to have been place in queue behind the other things on my plate. I still have a large amount of data entry to do on the site before its ready for full release.

    And one of the other things I have been doing is trying to reduce the amount of things I own. I am Craig’s Listing a lot of the bigger things and then later this summer I plan to have a garage sale to get rid of the rest.

    Also one of the back burner things on my list is getting the Washed Ashore website updated. I need to add the preregistration page to it soon.

So I have been sick as of late. I left work early on Monday and have been out till today. I fell i should be able to return to work on Friday. So for the entire time that I have been stuck at home I have been working on setting up all my websites on the new hosting provider.

I have been hard at work editing code on three different sites including this one. This sight is one of the more complex of the three. The main site I have been working on is http://www.anime-fanatic.com/ and this site is running oscommerce as its main software. On top of this there are some other pieces of software helping run the site as well. One of these is phpmyvisites, which allows me to keep track of all my visits. I am using this one installation to keep track of all my sites, not just Anime-Fanatic. The other piece of software is craftysyntax, which is a live help chat software package. These have all been integrated into the site to help my customers. I also run www.washedashore.org, a site dedicated to the annual Pirate event held in Lebanon Oregon. This site uses CPG Dragonfly as its interface. And last but not least this site, The Systemdown Chronicles which runs on Movable Type Open Source. I am proud to say that all my sites run on Open Source software that is free for anyone to use. 

I have also been busy working on getting the Kumoricon registration information entered into the database fore the last couple of days. I have a few more things to get sorted out before I can start to mail out the badges to everyone.