Just an update, since we've been excessively quiet for the last couple of weeks..


We closed on our new property in Texas today and will be moving to our new 25 acre farm over the next couple of weeks, at least in part. (More on that later.) Anyway, this site (and everything else we host) will be down from roughly April 3rd through April 15th while we make the transition and travel with our servers.


Overall, the good news is that we got the 25 acre farm we were bidding on and the new 2450 square foot, 5 bedroom/2 bath house that Dragona & I "custom designed" to put on it and will be moving in very shortly. But the bad news is that it's going to take us a couple of months to move there and the servers will be down for a couple of weeks (again) during the initial transition.


The current plan is pretty complicated and still very much subject to further change as we go. Basically, we're heading back home tomorrow and should be there sometime Sunday night. We'll spend about three days packing what's most essential and dealing with scheduling utiltity cut-offs and making sure that our old property is being looked after while we transition and retrieving our pets. Then we'll head back to Texas to drop off our trailer full of stuff & our pets at Dragona's grandfather's farm until we have a house to put it all in. Then we head out to New Mexico for the next (final?) stage of the court saga I've been living and to retrieve our children. Then we come back to Texas to move in to our new house which should be ready for us by then. After that we will wait until mid-May when Dragona's brothers get out of school so that they can help us deal with multiple vehicles so that we can complete the move. After that, I'll either be putting the old house up for sale or finding renters for it.


In the meantime, wish us luck!

Sorry for the late update for everyone.. The last few months have been hetic to say the least... Conner and I got married in Albuquerque on January 24, 2009. It was a beautiful wedding and we even got a week long honeymoon (with no kids!)
We are currently in the process of getting ready to move, buying a house, etc... So we will be fairly quiet still until we get done with that...

The Royal Family




There are individual pictures in the person's blogs.

Thanks to Shadow & Zeno for bringing this to my attention!

It seems that Mudding (and consequently MMOs) has turned 30 years old. There's an article about it at Massively which has also been linked to and elaborated on at Slashdot.

I apologize to any who were inconvenienced by the last few days while everything was being transitioned to the new server and everything's not quite done yet, in fact, but the web sites are all back now and we're mostly operational again. ( Read more... )

All over the internet today, there have been folks posting personal sentiments about the news. One of my favorites that I've seen so far was "Gary has dropped to -10 hit points." I even got a text message about this today, and the person who sent it was right, at the least this news merits a moment of silence which I hope you won't mind sharing with me. After, by all means, feel free to comment if you'd like.

( Read more... )

This time it wasn't the cable company nor the power..

One of the two hard drives in the server has developed a series of bad sectors.. Friday morning (around 3am ET) the file journaling system noticed them and, as an automatic safety measure, put that drive into read-only mode. Unfortunately, the MySQL database that runs these forums (and quite a few other things on here) became unusable, but because I was still out of town, I couldn't safely reboot/repair anything until I got back home tonight. When I finally did get home, I rebooted the server (at or about 9pm), but it required manually running something called fsck three times to "fix" the drive enough to get the system back up.. this process took almost four hours (I got it back up at or about 12:45am, do the math yourself..) so the mud was down along with the mud's forums, my family site, etc (every thing I host) for all of that time and we didn't have any internet available to us to let anyone know by any other means either. I offer my apologies for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused anyone, but it really was unavoidable.

At some time in the relatively near future, I will have to bring everything down again to replace that hard drive, though I'm still not entirely giving up on the idea of replacing the server itself instead as the hard drive is no older than the server and both are due for replacement anyway.

I've upgraded these forums to version 1.4.0, though I have not upgraded the skin so you may not notice any changes yet, I'll update this if/when I decide to upgrade the skin, though with the drastic changes built into the newest version of the skin to go with the new version of these forums, you won't need me to tell you to see the differences. I promise.

Samson has made available a module that reports who's visited here today and we've got it now!

On the front page, check it out! it's to be found right under all the news listings (including this post). The way it works is that it lists everyone who's visited since midnight (U.S. Eastern Time) when it resets itself. Just keep in mind that it only lists folks once they've dropped off the list of folks who're currently online.

Samson reported (and provided the fix for this) on the official QSFP site that there was a "[Bug] Attachments to news posts do not produce a link in the text, Fixed in 1.3.6" - it's fixed here now too.

There have been no members online today.