I was quite surprised by how many people asked me what happened to the blog after it disappeared.

The short answer is - I changed server hosts. That is boring though. So here is the long answer.

A little while back, I decided to change my email service for my site to “GMail for Your Site”. This is supposed to be a very simple & quick fix…..

….if you pay attention to what you are doing.

….if you know what you are doing.

….if you don’t get impatient.

I failed at all 3 of the above. I screwed up the settings change for my host & registrar. Not only did I stop receiving emails, but my site completely disappeared. After emailing the site host to ask for help & being told to essentially kiss off, I decided I’d had enough of them & their complete lack of customer support. (In previous incidents, they had proven less than caring about their customers.) So I switched my registrar & hosting to GoDaddy.

As such, all of my site content disappeared during the server switch. Life got busy & I had difficulty finding the time needed to set this thing back up.

But now it is back up. Now I know who reads this thing. Now I have a lot to talk about.

More to come tomorrow about what is going on.

Today I was reading about a new animation festival, the “Crested Butte Reel Festival”. Before seeing the name of the festival itself, I saw the url - www.crestedbuttereelfest.com. When I saw the url I read it as “Crested Butter Eel Fest” and could not understand why anyone would name an animation festival after an eel.

The “High Priority” flag is perhaps the most useless, most overly abused and most ignored feature of e-mail to date.

Well - I finally installed the new photo gallery on my site. It’s a full fledged version upgrade from the last one & from even a tertiary glance all the new slick features are glaringly obvious.

Hopefully, as the week progresses, I will be able to restore my old galleries & get some new photos up soon.

I am not quite sure how or why, but my site’s gallery has been broken for a few weeks now. Rather than try to fix it, I am going to take the opportunity to upgrade the gallery to the new version.

Hopefully it will happen within the week, though more time may be needed.

In the meanwhile, please enjoy the following link:

The Other Family

A long time ago, my buddy James said to me “I don’t understand why anyone would ever need ActionScript in Flash.” — or something to that effect. I have relished in making him eat those words over & over through the years of our friendship as his Flash abilities — more specifically his ActionScript programming skills — have advanced.

Well, James, what goes around comes around. I am going to eat my own words on a different topic that we have argued about so many, many times. I am hereby so utterly annoyed with my history of buying computers from companies that I am going to just build my own henceforth.

Let your years of serving my words back to me begin now, James….

Jon needs to watch his back at work. I just set up a photo gallery on my website and it only took me 15 minutes.

Now I’m not saying Jon is a bad PHP programmer, but it would have taken him like SIXTEEN minutes to set it up, so obviously I am a superior programmer. Even though these numbers are based purely upon theory, conjecture, a broken clock in my office and the fact that I only had to click a button to get the gallery running, I am still quite confident about how superior I am to Jon in my PHP programming skills now.

For my next conquest, I will develop an operating system to rival OSX & Windows. It shall be called “Ace is a Jerkass 1.2″

Steve Jobs did an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine recently in December of 2003 which Jon pointed out. Of particular interest to me was the following:

—————————————————-
Still, Apple’s market share seems stuck at about 5% in the U.S and 3% worldwide.

So our market share is actually greater than BMW’s — greater than Mercedes — in the car industry. And, yet, no one thinks BMW or Mercedes are going away, and no one thinks that they’re at a tremendous disadvantage because that’s their market share. Matter of fact, they’re both highly desirable products and brands.
—————————————————-

Now pardon my ignorance here, but an Apple computer in NO way compares to a BMW - and I am not talking about any sort of smart-ass “well one is a computer and the other is a car” thing here. I mean straight up in sense of market, competitiveness, use, and all other levels of reasonability.

For one there are scores of car brands & styles out there. Apple generally only compares themselves to Microsoft Windows when they discuss marketshare, competitiveness & other such similar matters. So while BMW may hold a small percentage of the market, to bring the contrary argument forth, Honda does not have a 95% marketshare of all cars being driven on the road today. So as such, that 5% is much stronger and more competitive.

Also - while almost all computers are pretty much equally and competitively priced, not everyone can afford a BMW. If all cars were in a competitively equal price range, I feel fairly confident that BMW’s market percentage would be much larger.

Steve, if you want to make a comparison, you need to make a reasonable one. Citing random statistics to try to make a point when those numbers have no relevance is - to quote our President - “fuzzy math”. If you really wanted to drive your point home you would have cited a more relevant statistic. Your comparison would have drawn a much stronger validation if it had been about the percentage BMW’s sold within its own car class. I’m betting you don’t know because all you saw was “BMW’s compromise less than 5% of all purchased cars in the world,” and thought to yourself “if I say BMW & Apple in the same sentence people will associate my computer company with higher quality products.”

The interview in its entirity can be found here.

Most of you are now aware that I sold my xbox. I would like to say it was a tough decision that I lost many sleepless nights over, but it wasn’t. I would like to say that I am better person with a much more interesting life now that I am socializing instead of staring at my television mindlessly clicking buttons, but it isn’t. I would like to say that I am losing weight because I am now in the gym during the hours I used to spend playing xbox, but I’m not.

So why did I sell the thing? Let’s break it down by the numbers.

1 - I needed to refocus my personal time. The animation bug has awoken within me from circumstances within my life recently. I figured with no xbox around to tempt me, free time would be spent better animating on the computer rather than saying I am animating while playing a game on that damnable console.

2 - I had a buyer. A coworker was constantly pestering me to sell him my xbox. Although he was partially joking, he was also partially serious. When I finally resolved myself to actually sell it, he was absolutely interested.

3 - The new games SUCK. I mean they blow ass. There are very few games I really consider to be good much less great. The few I do truly love are all available on PC. So even if the gaming bug does bite, I can still play them on my computer.

4 - Even if I made a bad decision, I still win. Xbox 360 is due out late this year. Should I realize the selling of my xbox was a heinous decision, I need only be patient for a scant few months and then buy the next generation system knowing I sold my xbox to a willing buyer while it was still worth more than a used kleenex.

So that’s it. The xbox is gone. My games are still here though. So I am selling the lot for cheap. $10 per game for anyone who is interested & 2 old controllers (the large size ones - not the puny S-Controls). Below is the list of games I am selling. Interested buyers can respond below or just contact me directly.

Armed & Dangerous
DOA 3
EA NHL 2003
EA NHL 2005
ESPN NHL 2K5
ESPN NFL 2K5
Fable
GTA 3
GTA Vice City
Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee
Outlaw Golf
Spiderman 2
Splinter Cell
SSX 3
SSX Tricky
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
Thief - Deadly Shadows

With the internal office move today, I had some free time. So I have finally upgraded my blog to MT 3.0. Basically all this means is that Ace’s smart ass remarks won’t show up on the blog until I manually approve them now.

You can all sleep contentedly tonite now.