Benign Thoughts

I’m really, really sorry I haven’t posted in a very long time. I’ve had a lot of things going on with XMG and I’ve also been watching a lot of Lupin III (I love that show). So anyway, today I’m posting a fully fledged blog entry. I do not know when I will be posting the next one, but hopefully it will be soon.

As I said, I’ve been busy with XMG. I think I should go into detail with what’s been going on at XMG. First of all, about a week ago we had this problem with random 404s. People would get 404 errors on files that do, in fact, exist. Occasionally, they’d be redirected to this page that tries to install a trojan on the user’s system if they’re using Internet Exploder. For a while I was trying to fix the problem and we thought it was DNS Cache Poisoning. I went on vacation in New Hampshire for a few days, and when I got back, I found out that they solved it while I was away. Turns out a php script was causing it. Anway, I’m gonna go for a little now since I need to upgrade XMGFree’s version of wordpress….

-10 minutes later-

Alright, XMGFree is upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress now. Everything went smoothly. Another thing I’ve been working on at XMG is the forum. For some reason, people have been inactive lately, so I’ve been posting more to try to encourage replies. There have also been a lot of support requests, so yeah.

Liek, OMG! Look! IE7’s icon and logo was released. Look how shiny it is. It looks like something ripped off from a mac. And see, look, there’s a new color! It’s not only blue, now it’s blue AND yellow! It’s amazing! It’s fantabulous! It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen! I mean, come on. What’s wrong with the old icon? Just because it’s a new version doesn’t mean they have to go and rip off Apple’s sexy aqua style icons. It’s just sad, in my opinion. Oh well, at least they’re keeping it consistant (every version’s icon gets a bit shinier). Besides, hopefully instead of upgrading to IE7, they’ll upgrade to Opera!

I bought a Last.fm subscription a few days ago! I love it. Now anyone can listen to my music for free, and I get a wider selection of radio stations! Hoorah!

Oh well, I’m done now. Hopefully I’ll post again soon. C ya.

Please don’t lecture me, but I’m really sorry I haven’t blogged lately. I’ve just been so busy lately with that life of mine (pfft, I wish!). I promise, next weekend I will blog again, and after that I will be back on my regular schedule, but all this week I will not be online since I have a lot of stuff to do.

XMGFree signups are reopened! Yep, you heard me correctly. We finally have enough things sorted out to reopen signups, so sign up if you need free hosting. Oh yeah, don’t use www in your subdomain, it’s a waste. In fact, NOBODY should go to www.benignthoughts.com. It’s benignthoughts.com and that’s it. No www. I’m trying to get away from www because it was a bad idea to begin with. In fact, I want www.benignthoughts.com removed from google, and just replaced with benignthoughts.com. Right now I have two rankings, one (www) on top, and one way below, which doesn’t have www and it’s kind of a waste, so if anyone working for google is reading this, yeah. Please.

Don’t mess with #WordPress. Yeah, if any of you hadn’t heard yet, this guy ripped off Shawn Grimes’s layout and ended up like this See Something Unpredictable (Bobby’s blog) for details.

So yeah, that’s it. Once again, if you have any issues with anything on this site, please let me know via my “contact me” form. There’s a link in the header. C ya!

Hey everyone! I have a few things to blog about today, so I figure I’ll just jump right into it.

No more school! Yep, I have no more school until September. This means I will be up later and I’ll be putting more time into Opera, XMG, and TMR.

Yes, I know TMR’s going rather slowly. This is because I haven’t talked to either of the other DJs: Eric S. and Casey S. Both of them are now DJs on Novastream so they will probably have their hands tied up with that for a while. Hopefully things will pick up in a while, I don’t want to have to abandon this project, and I probably won’t. I want to go join Novastream also, but I can’t since I’m on Linux and they use this request application thing that requires Winblows. Maybe I can run it in WINE…

If you visit XMGFree regularly, you might notice some changes. The main thing right now is that the forum is being centralized. Members will keep their accounts and no posts will be lost, but last night and today we moved the forum and did some modifications to the skin, such as new logo images and such. The old XMGFree forum is now the XMGNetworks forum. We’re not exactly sure how this will work, but it should hopefully work out well.

Well, that’s it! Keep in mind that this site is ALWAYS run on the latest Wordpress from Subversion, and it’s highly experimental, so if you encounter any problems, let me know via the email form. Thanks!

Well, Scott came out with a new AudioBlog a couple of days ago, and talked about the Japanese Ring. For those of you who haven’t seen the American version (The Ring), it’s about this video, and if you see it, you die in a week. I don’t know the American names since I haven’t seen the American version, but the Japanese version (not The Ring Virus, just Ring) is supposedly a lot better. Well, it scared the crap out of me, and I’m currently trying to get my hands on the sequel, the prequel, and Ring Virus, another version of the original film, except the girl is a young woman, apparently. If you haven’t seen the American or Japanese Ring/The Ring/Ringu, see it now and read this later. Next I’m just gonna talk about my day today so far anyway. Nothing interesting, you can always read it later. Now go to blockbuster or the library or something and get one of the movies.

Soooo! How are you doing? I’m fine, thank you very much! Well, I had my trombone thing today. You know, the NYSSMA Festival? Basically, you prepare a piece beforehand, and then you play it along with 3 songs and a sightreading piece, and he grades you. It’s rather fun. Well, I screwed up. I screwed up big time. I made the world’s dumbest mistakes playing the piece. I had to play it with the repeat at the end, so I fixed them the second time around, but it was still really dumb. I got nervous and worried about miscounting the rests, and my counting got all screwed up and I got lost in like, the easiest part of the song. I messed up parts that I didn’t even mess up sightreading it, and I did good on the ‘hard’ parts. It was insane.

Signups on XMGFree are open again! Yep, now you can sign up for free(!) hosting and get accepted within a few hours. We’re faster than some automated places. However, when Lee recompiled some stuff when the server was screwed up, something messed up the acception/rejection script, so we won’t be accepting or rejecting anyone until this is fixed. However, once it’s fixed, we’ll be good. I promise :-). [edit: it's fixed]

*looks around* So, did you see the movie yet? It’s insane, isn’t it. I’m trying to get my hands on an english translation of the novel, and once I find one, I might just have to write a review on it. Thank you and goodbye.

Woo! No School! Alright, I have no school today so I figured I would write in my blog, so here I am. I don’t really know what to say, so yeah.

Alright, there is now a shoutcast up at radio.xmgfree.com. Right now, our shoutcast server is down for some reason, but then it’s up you can expect a good variety of music and other cool stuff, like comedy and stuff. When I dj, I play all sorts of stuff, from Metal, to classic rock, to backwards songs, to Weird Al and other parodies. It’s really fun, especially if you’re in the IRC chat at irc.xmgnetworks.com port 6667. The channel is #xmgradio, so if you ever decide to tune in, join the IRC.

Tomorrow’s my birthday! I really, really hope I get my iRiver H-320 like I asked. If I don’t, it won’t be the end of the world or anything, but I’d just be a tad dissapointed. I have a feeling I will get it though, because my dad never said there wasn’t a chance or anything, and a package is supposed to come today for my dad’s “new plant” for his “fishtank”. It seems very important to him… hmm… I wonder what it is?

Damn, Opera 8 is awesome so far! These guys are really working hard on the engine. With each new beta, it gets a little faster and the css support increases. Yeah, with Beta 3 there is hardly any problems, except with some alignment when you move your cursor over a link in some places, but I think that’s the CSS, not Opera, since it rarely happens, and it only happens on IPB sites.

Maybe I’ll post more later, maybe I won’t… It depends on whether or not I’m doing something else. Oh yeah, and the flame? Yeah, I hate this one, it’s so cheezy. I was playing around in GIMP and this came out, and it would be a waste if I didn’t use it…

Ok, I’m really sorry for the delay in blog posts but now I’m finally back. Yes, back as in I’ll be trying to make a full blog post, with an image in each one, every day. I don’t really have an excuse for not blogging. The only one I have is the fact that this host is so freaking slow, but that’ll be changing soon so hoorah! Anyway, lets start!

I feel like I need to reintroduce myself since I haven’t blogged in like, forever. Anyway, I have some non-interesting stuff to write about tonight (I’m actually writing this Tuesday night at 11:00, but it will be published on Wednesday). This includes some UP updates, some school crap, and maybe a little more.

UnrealPages is a major success! We recently upped the plan size to 100megs//5gigs. I think that’s pretty reasonable, don’t you? Well, I’d use UP as my host if we had GD2, which we don’t. I kinda need GD2 for the title images, you know? Speaking of the title images, I’m not sure if I told you guys yet, but I’m using a plugin now. Don’t worry, it’s based on something based on the original script I used, which I based off of a script I found. Whoa, that’s confusing.

This sucks! I got a “C” in Social Studies this quarter, so because of that I might get my computer taken away all freaking quarter. Isn’t that crazy? I’ll still probably blog from school or something, but over a “C”, I mean, come ON! I have the class at 7:13 in the morning and I’m used to waking up at 2:00 in the afternoon! Of course I’m not going to do my best if I’m still sleeping. I mean, I’m find in all my other classes. Well, that’s a lie. I’m probably doing pretty badly in English right now. Yes, English. Here I am, Blogging, taking a class in Creative Writing, and I’m doing badly in English. I owe that to the Poetry unit. Yeah, I can’t write a poem for my life. Wait, that’s also a lie. I can write poems, but only if they’re allowed to be on what I want to write about. I don’t like being told what to write. You should know that by now. However, there are some things, such as love, that I WANT to write a poem about, but they always come out cheesy so I just stop writing it. Yes, I’m afraid to write a poem about my feelings. Crazy eh? That’s what a poem is anyway: a way of expressing feelings that normally can’t be put into words. God, I hate poetry.

Mmmm… Stage Band! In case you didn’t know, I have stage band for 2 hours every tuesday night. However, I have a little something to bitch about right now: Stage Band (which I’m in) is opening for the Concert Band (which I’m also in). This means that I’ll probably have to play for quite a long time. Yeah, I mean, since when do you open for yourself? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Ok, I’m done! mm… that was a nice entry. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this up.

Yes, the free host, UnrealPages is FINALLY open! This means that you can go over to UnrealPages.com, sign up on the forums, make a minimum of 5 posts, and then sign up for your free hosting. The catch? Well, we only accept fairly good applicants, like blogs and things that we think will be worth it and not just tossed aside. However, we have a pretty juicy plan:

a subdomain of user.unrealpages.com
No ads!
50 mb of space
1000 mb of bandwidth transfer per month
5 mySQL databases
FTP access
your own online control panel(cPanel)
great technical support
and more!

The “more” includes perl, cgi, auto-installable scripts, etc…
For now, our ad campaign works like this: for every 25 posts on the forum, you can 5000 adviews for your site. Now, this only works for hosted sites. Soon, we’ll be using google, but that’s a special promo :-D.
We also have 5 gmail accounts up for grabs, so once again, the place is UnrealPages.com. Yes, that’s UnrealPages.com: Free hosting never tasted this good. Come try a scoop.