Vista shipped

Finally some good news from the “upgrade nightmare” front. Finally, finally, they shipped my upgrade copy of Vista Business on tuesday (so basically just on the day I ranted about them not shipping it, lol, did they read my blog?! ;))…now it should be only a matter of a few days until I hold it in my hands, the excitement :)

Letting go…

I’m usually a “collector” type of guy, but it’s time to let go. Last week I decided that I would let go of my proxy network (browsetastic.com) and put it up for sale at the MarketPlace of the great SitePoint Forums, where I’m an advisor (moderator).

Although the number of inquiries was huge, the number of bids was little…at least in the beginning. Then, it happened pretty quickly. After I posted a BIN, it was sold within 24hours…which leads me to believe that the BIN (12x net monthly revenue) was a little low, but hey, I’m not the type of guy who’s whining afterwards. I’m happy that I sold it at the price I did and all that’s left is to wait for the money to roll in and then getting everything setup to make the transfer smooth and easy…

…and on the upside, I’ve still got more than 40 sites to my name, so I’m not really retiring from the website business…and with the cash raised in the sale, I’ll get myself a new laptop (among other things) which will be put to good use in my upcoming diploma thesis… ;)

Waiting for Vista

Man, this really sucks. Now, I’m usually not the one to jump on the train right away anyway, so it’s basically not the biggest deal, but slowly I’m getting annoyed. Why? Because I ordered a WinXP license with an upgrade coupon back in december when I built my new pc. So far so good. I then sent the upgrade coupon to Modus Link (the company handling the upgrades). That was in the first week of January. Since then I’m waiting and waiting and waiting…

Today, I checked the status again and the upgrade claim has finally been approved. Well, that’s the first step, but the thing still isn’t shipped yet. Are you kidding me? Three months and you’re unable to send me a dvd with a license sticker? Hello?! Absolutely ridiculous! The only upside: by the time I receive my copy I can be absolutely sure that there are drivers for everything in my pc and on a funny note: maybe SP1 will be already out by then ;)

Finding the culprit and WordPress support

After waiting and waiting and waiting on someone to have a look at my post on the WordPress support forums – without any luck – I decided trying again, finding the culprit that was causing the posts to be empty that is, not to post on the forums again.

In the end, I did nothing more or less than what I did right after the move. I don’t know why it is, but as you can see, it worked…although it didn’t work last time…hmm…weird stuff there…and although I can’t exactly figure out what went wrong here, I’m glad that everything seems to be working again.

…which brings me to the WordPress support forums: No offence guys, but my experience (granted that I tried/needed them for the first time in, well, something like 3 years) was horrible. No responses, no hints, no questions, nothing and it’s not that I didn’t try to provide as much info as I could on my problem…this is really disappointing, but hey…’s all good, I know how forums work, it’s all based on voluntary basis and well, if it’s on volunatary basis (aka you don’t pay anything for it), you can’t/shouldn’t complain if you don’t get anything out of it. So, no offence when I say: I just know that next time I run into a problem with WordPress again, I won’t even bother posting in the “troubleshooting” area, as it’s a complete waste of not worth my time…or as the orangutan from Doctor Doolittle would say: “Gracias por nada”

TV series galore

Well, recently I spent quite some time catching up with new and old tv series. Roseanne was a real flashback…I can still laugh out loud when I see that one. Some of the old series I enjoyed for a long time are still running, so I have to follow these, namely emergency room, gilmore girls, smallville, las vegas and 7th heaven. Now I added some new ones to my every groing “need to watch” list:

1. NBC’s heroes – I absolutely love this one, I just can’t get enough, I’m really looking forward to every single episode, it’s just so thrilling.

2. Are you smarter than a 5th grader – rofl. This concept is so funny (and embarrassing for the candidates)!!!

3. COPS – how could I miss this all this time?!

4. American Chopper – always entertaining, I just love the custom bikes…

5. Poker After Dark (I don’t need to get too deep into this one and the following one, you can always checkout my pokerblog for more on poker)

6. High Stakes Poker – so addictive.

…and by just looking at that list of stuff I realize, I watch too much TV ;)

End of the year, time for some upgrades

Well, it’s been a while since I last upgraded my pc…almost 3 years…

So, I decided it’s time for a new one…some funky dual core stuff or something and yup, there are lots of possible configurations.

First decision: Intel or AMD?

I know that Intel’s Core 2 Duos are powerful, fast and sexy…but they’re a little more expensive too…so I thought I’d go with AMD, yet again…(my current system is an AMD Athlon XP, the one before that was an AMD, …)…

Second decision: Fastest/expensive, medium/alrighty, lower end/cheap

I decided to go with middle ground…an AMD x2 3800 it is, the Energy Efficient version of it – that’s perfect for a smaller case and it’ll help me save some energy costs, after all my pc is running most of the time. Combined with a funky mATX board, 1GB of ram (for now), 500GB Samsung SATAII (16MB Cache), DVD-burner, DVD-Rom and a nice mATX case by aplus…

aplus blockbuster

The case arrived today and I’m hoping that the rest will arrive tomorrow (it was sent off by the shop today)…it’s going to be fun to build a pc, haven’t done that in a while…

Ooooh and I almost forgot, I ordered a new copy of Windows XP Pro…117€ including an Express upgrade coupon to Vista business….sounds like a good deal :)

I’ll post some pics once I’m done building…

Oh how good it feels…

…once the pain is gone. The weekend started off on a bad note: tooth pain. Went to see the dentist on friday evening. He did some drilling and filling. The pain seemed to be less, but not gone. Fast forward to saturday night and it feels like a knife is sitting right in one of my teeth’s nerve. Ouch. Pain killers. Sunday: ooh, not better, but worse. So I head to the emergency room and they say there are two explanations:

1. One of my teeth is inflamed

2. One of my teeth is dying

As they’re the emergency room and no dentist, they say that I should take painkillers and wait and see if the pain is gone by tomorrow, if not I should visit my dentist so that he can have a closer look.

Fast forward to monday and I’m still not better, so I head out to my dentist and he drills again. I head home, half my face still numb from the anesthesia, but the pain seems to be the same. So I head back to the dentist another hour later and my doctor is already on his way home. Cool. So I see his colleague – good thing that there are two doctors. He starts the diagnosis again, does some xray, then does some diagnosis again and we identify the tooth that is probably causing the problem. He says that the pain is caused by the nerve and that the only way he can help me is to open the tooth, kill the nerve and inject some medication to fight the infection.

I agree and he injects me with yet another anesthesia and we wait until half my face is numb. *lol*ÂÂ As soon as he opens the tooth and puts his needles and stuff into the root of the tooth, the laughing stops though. Oooooh the pain. The nerve of this tooth doesn’t give a shit about the anesthesiaÂÂ and so I try not to rip the hand rest off the dentist chair as the pain shoots right through me…when he’s finally done, the pain is gone though and I’m happy to report that I’m doing fine today…the only thing that still feels a little weird is a little pain in the surrounding area of the tooth…I guess the tooth doesn’t like to be “killed”…

Oh well…at least I’m back to (almost) normal now…another visit to the dentist later on to check on it and then I’m off to work again tomorrow…

Lots of catching up to do…

…well, what can I say. I’m madly busy these days. Why? Because I started my internship in early september and so I’m mostly “at work” most of the weekdays (leaving early in the morning, coming home, knackered, in the late evening)…so nothing too spectacular to report, apart from the fact that I’m missing some sleep.

Missed the chance to get some extra sleep on saturday, when I scheduled a business meeting at 9am – what did I think ;) ?! But at least I got some extra sleep and some chillin in today. Missed our footie match (we won 3-2 and are back in the hunt for the championship), but watched another good game.

My father had some VIP tickets to the german first league basketball match Ludwigsburg (10min from where I live) vs Trier. Ludwigsburg was unbeaten so far in the championship race (4 Ws in 4 matches). So we drove there early and met up with my aunt and her son and had a really good time – it’s always nice to watch a game in Ludwigsburg’s “Rundsporthalle” as it’s a rather small building and the vibes are just there. It’s awesome. In the end Ludwigsburg held on to win the match 84-81. So now they’re still unbeaten (5Ws in 5 matches) and are on top of the table. Nice.

Now it’s almost midnight again, so it’s time for me to log off…better catch some sleep before the week begins in less than 7 hours ;)