Haven't managed to do a whole lot of anything other than school related stuff. Just...meh...exhaustion is the key word. Can't say a whole lot more!

Well those 9 months went very fast and here we are its all over now.  :)  I have a beautrful baby girl and I couldn't be prouder!  She was born on Tuesday and now that its over you will see a few changes coming to MudDomain!  More to come...

Finally managed to strip down Quickmud to the bare bones. Only have the required help files, limbo.are, midgaard.are and hood.are.  No errors, only crashed once because I forgot to delete some resets in midgaard. After I take a break and actually do something productive *coughstudy-write-paperscough*, I will try to get rid of Midgaard and try to figure out why Gangland is needed? I know why limbo is needed so no rocket science there.

Now that's a spicy meat-ah-ball! 

Oh yeah, and in case any of you *don't* already know, Arthmoor has the most kick ass set up ever! I typed make and was amazed at the speed. Samson, you da man :) 

I'm not even day 1 into this "project" I've undertaken. So far I've screwed things up so badly that my log folder is full :P

So glad I remembered to back things up.   I'm beginning to wonder if I can get this piece of crap off the ground :P

*keep smiling, light at the end of the tunnel, silver lining in every cloud*

If I keep saying that loud enough everything will be ALL RIGHT won't it?

Meh... 

I have decided to grab the bull by the horns and start a new project. I have always wanted to create an immersive roleplay atmosphere in a game.  So here goes!  I have never had any luck with finding or keeping a coder. So to prove that I can at least tackle things on my own, I am going to tackle the building end of things for now.  I want to rip all the stock areas out and rebuild from scratch.  Brave, big plans for such a little person, eh? I can build if nothing else. Maybe if I start out like this then a coder might fall into my lap :P

Just remember, I am not holding my breath waiting for a coder to fall into my lap. I don't expect that to happen. So to all those who have offered a bit of help here or there, I might call on you if I screw things up beyond recognition or can't remember all the things I used to know about Unix :P

Now I should get back to writing a paper. A big, ugly, nasty paper with teeth!

Yes, this makes *5* of them now. Every last one of them I've bought in the last 2 years now is dead or dying. I've already turned the previous 4 in for warranty replacement. This one will make the 5th.

After investigating the usual causes for blue screens of death - bad drivers, incompatible software, rogue code, etc - I've come to the conclusion the drive itself is showing the same signs my servers showed before. These things manifest more subtely on Windows boxes and if I hadn't suffered so many failures before I might have missed it entirely.

So once more, Hitachi will save my behind from another big fat mess. And to think, I just put the bloody drive back into a brand new motherboard and CPU and this is the thanks I get. At least the data is still readable so I can take the drive in and use the cloning machine at work.

And again, for the love of God, nobody buy Western Digital! This is just plain stupid!

It looks like MudDomain is growing.  Is it my imagination or are more cool people finding their way here? Tickles me pink, if one can imagine that :P

Now I think I shall go drink hot chocolate as it is horribly cold here. 

I have found that mudding is an unusual business. I remember the glory days of muds and wonder where those days have gone.  The cookie-cutter, mud-in-a-box era has really hurt mudding in general, but I think there are still some pretty cool ones out there.  Highly modified, with admins and players who care.  I just wonder if a time has come where the glut of unmodified, unloved muds will soon start to disappear.  If this happens I hope a new era begins for mudding--one where community spirit is strong, new codebases are released, and we start to take back our own from graphical games and the thievery of some pay-to-play muds. 

I don't think all of those things will happen.  There has been quite a bit of bad blood between certain sects of the mud community.  I don't think that can be easily resolved.  The other things I am quite hopeful about.  It probably will take a bit before things start to change.  Hopefully we might see a new day for muds. More of our players, skilled coders, admins and builders will return.  At least I have the dream.  That will do for now.

I am continually amazed at how rude and belligerent people are in this world, and for no good reason.  It never ceases to amaze me that professionals and administrators can behave in such an astounding way.  I can only say that I am shocked, but coming to expect this kind of crap more and more on a regular basis.  It comes as no surprise that this type of behavior only leads in a vicious circle like the "kick the dog, not the garbage can" thing after a frustrating day.  One person bitches at another, the second person gets pissed off, they bitch at someone else, and before long it's turned into the office without broadband on the Comcast commercial.  How the heck do we let ourselves get this way?

Any way! My "free" server has gone down.  So much for moocows and penguins!  I often think it is not meant for me to own or run a mud of my own. Now comes the real challenge--finding a good one to work on!

Learned how to make some pretty cool roll-over buttons in CSS.  I'm really enjoying this. Now if I could say the same for Circlemud coding :P