bamed.org

This weekend I had the pleasure of participating in a stress test for the upcoming Lord of the Ring Online MMORPG. And all I can say is WOW, or should that be W.O.W.(World of Warcraft). It has an improved graphics engine, but the UI is almost identical to WOW. It really played about the same as WOW, but being in Middle Earth, and interacting with characters I am familiar with improved the overall experience. Needless to say, I had al ot of fun. I played as an elf and went through the main quests for awhile. By Sunday afternoon I decided to stop playing quests and do some exploring, since the stress test ended Sunday evening. So I started at Thorin’s Hall in the West, and travelled through the Shire, through Bree, and through the wilderness to Rivendell. Unfortunately I could not get much further than Rivendell. Whete I went North or South out of Rivendell I had to cross through narrow paths guarded by various level 40 monsters, while I was only a level 10 elf. So I formed a felloship, and the five of us tried to run through the Misty Mountains, but we never made it. So I gave up and went back to Rivendell where I talked with Aragorn, Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, and Elrond. It was fun even though I was sick with a cold all weekend. The game is released April 24, and I’m thinking about pre-ordering it and being a Founder !

So I got tagged

The Rules: Each player of this game starts with six weird things about you. In the end, you need to choose six people to be tagged and list their names. People who get tagged need to write a blog post of their own six weird things as well as state this rule clearly.

I have no intention of tagging anyone else though, I don’t think I even know six people to tag.

1. I have 3 bad hard drives in my gaming computer at home.

2. In my home we have 3 laptops, a gaming computer, and an HP server (It is actually from their server line. It IS NOT simply a workstation that I call a server), plus at least 4 other computers in pieces in the garage. I also have spare parts lying around the house. (i.e. I found about 512MB of SDRAM in my sock drawer, right next to the IEEE1394 cable and 802.11b CF card.)

3. Adam needed a hard drive once and I said, “I think I have a 250GB SATA drive in my car.”

4. I was trying to setup a wireless connection at the last moment when I was going to teach a class but didn’t have the necessary equipment, it then ocurred to me, “I have a Linksys 802.11G Wireless Bridge in my car.”

5. Meus X-Archa Infractus Est. (Which when translated from the original Latin means, “My X-Box is broken!”)

6. I took a year of Latin and a year of Spanish in High School, I then took a year of Greek in college, but now I’m studying Klingon.

The past couple of days I’ve been working on cleaning up a virus that infected one of my client’s Windows Server 2003. It was a real pain. It took a while to get it cleaned up, then I had to clean up some stuff in the registry, then I had to reset some values in the register. After all that everything still didn’t work. It was there Primary Domain Controller that got infected and no one could connect to it. After trying lots of things I ran dcdiag on it and discovered that no one had the rights to access the computer from the network. So I added the “Domain Users” and Administrators groups to the proper security policy and the network came back up and running.

I hate viruses! And of course they are running Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition, plus I make certain they have all their regular updates, but they got infected just the same.

FYI, I have a few clients I do work for after hours.

I don’t blog much…have you noticed. I certainly intend to, but I get busy. There’s so many projects to work on.

It just so happens one of my latest projects involves blogging. We were using .Text for the church’s blogs, but it wasn’t working out that great. The main problem we were having was that we were getting overrun by SPAM comments. The configuration wasn’t didn’t give us any options to filter out these comments, or to require comments to be approved, or to disable comments all together. Any one of these would have satisfied my users, but none of the above would work. So I’ve been looking into other options.

This of course is why I first switched to WordPress here. I like it and it gives me control over those same options I was looking for, but I wanted a multi-user/multi-blog site like we had before. There is a multi-user version of WordPress but it ONLY runs on Apache. Unfortunately our host runs on IIS. So I’ve looked into other options, and have recently setup Community Server. As it turns out, the guy who created .Text went to work for Telligent and now works on Community Server. So the next version of .Text became Community Server. There were even upgrade scripts to convert all the data. So I worked on it all weekend and got it up and running. Now we’ll see how it goes.

The other big project I’ve been working on is the CHCC forum. We’ve been using PHPBB, which I HATE!!! As does the rest of the staff/leadership and thus it hasn’t been utilized at all in recent months. So I’ve looked into other options. One of these options is Community Server. It has a forum as well as blogs and other stuff. (Note: I like it!) I’ve also setup a couple of other test sites. One running FUDForum(another one I like) and one running PunBB(the one http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org is running). We’re going to try them out and decide in the next week or so which one we’ll stick with.

So… who is the ‘we’ I keep mentioning? Recently, CHCC has combined the Communications and the IT Department into a single Communications and Technology Department. What does this mean? Well, we’re still working that out, but for the moment it means Nathan and I are working together, under the skilled supervision of Wade, to enhance CHCC communication and technology. We meet weekly and work things out together. It’s all fairly new, but I think it’ll be a good change. Alot of what Nathan and I do are just two sides of the same coin, so if we work together more we hope to get more done. For example, the CHCC website. It falls under my jurisdiction to make sure it works, to take care of any code that needs written, keep the MSSQL database in good working order, and any other purely ‘technical’ things that need done to set up new features or keep it working. It falls under Nathan’s jurisdiction to gather content for the site and publish it, make the site look good, etc.

Anyway, that’s enough blogging for now. I’ll try to get back and blog more later.