It’s been quiet the last couple of days as I’ve been playing games, mostly.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2.  I’m enjoying most of it, but the mining is intensely boring/tedious.  I’m also not thrilled about the onboard AI (aka EDI).  Seems like an unnecessary addition to the game.

Also, I’ve been beta testing an upcoming MMORPG called Dawntide.  It’s a sandbox fantasy MMO game with a lot of potential.  Although it’s currently listed as in the beta stage, there are still a large number of issues that some people would consider an alpha stage.  In either case, it’s interesting, but I haven’t been able to do much due to a very unpleasant framerate of 1 in the only city constructed (atm).  Nonetheless, the potential is there.

However, even with the time spent with these games, I’ve been sick.  As a result, I’ve only spent a couple hours a day or so with either game.  I am feeling better now, for the most part; just tired, mostly.

On a different note, due to my own security measures, I’ve noticed that certain normal connections to the site have been blocked.  There are a variety of reasons for this and, for my own safety, I have no intention of unblocking these connections.  Typically, ‘normal’ users shouldn’t have any problems visiting the site.

I’ve been handing out money hand-over-fist these last few days and it’s insane [of me].  The domain transfer was a success.  Of course, I had to pay the remaining amount of charges at the other registrar in the Netherlands and it seriously makes me wonder why it was costing so much money.  In any case, my costs now are low and manageable – so much so, that I’m going to go through a similar process once more.

I’ve had khevorslanding.net since 2003 (looked it up) but most of that time, it spent its life in Europe.  Having said that, since I’m trying to firmly entrench myself into Canada (my home country), I figure why not make it official… so I’m looking to buy another domain name – namely one with a .ca.  Of course, this means, once more, that I have to wait for funds to come available (this time on Feb. 11th).  Then all pointers will move from my current .net to the new .ca.  At least, that’s the plan.  Next May, when khevorslanding.net expires, I may not renew it in favour of the new .ca domain.  That’s a fair bit in the future though and I make it a habit to not plan ahead; causes gray hair.

For the moment, I’m happy.  The transfer is complete; I’m almost broke as a result; and my online life is slowly making something of a come-back.

In another ditch effort to try and get the ‘@font-face’ to work on the site (in order to embed a font), I decided to play around one more time.  The results… I got it to work.  I’m quite nicely shocked.  I spent hours, the other day, trying to get this css ‘directive’ to work properly to no avail.  Thing is, I did it this time the same way as before yet I couldn’t get it to work for the life of me.  Go figure.

The details of the domain transfer are in the stages of being finalized.  This process was a little late due to certain funds not being available when they were supposed to be but that’s neither here nor there.  Soon enough, my domain will be sitting in Canada instead of overseas.  Makes me happy to think that, for the first time in almost ten years, all aspects of my site will be, geographically, on my native soil.  Of course, nothing ever occurs in my life without something going wrong and screwing it up.  As a result, I’m waiting for the ‘other shoe to drop,’ as it were.

I’ve been playing around with both Windows 7 and this blog.  I am still getting used to the former and I’m practically in love with the latter.

I’m running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (I think I mentioned that in a previous post) and it’s mostly working the way I expected it to.  There are some features that surprised me – such as the automatic sleep mode.  It’s not fun to go to bed expecting your computer to remain functional only to wake up and find it shut down (in sleep mode).  Not good if you left the computer to do things while you slept (such as downloading a large file or installing something or running a web server).  So I hunted that down and reset it.  Also, there are still some driver compatibility issues that still need to be addressed (i.e. the ability to run a full screen game without having to shut off other monitors in a multi-monitor setup, and the ability to force two channel stereo sound through multiple ports on a sound card) but I expected these things.  The OS is new, after all.

As for this site, I’m tickled pink with it.  There are a few things that I don’t completely understand why they don’t work when, in reality, they should (such as @font-face in css for font embedding), but aside from that, slowly personalizing this place has been an interesting experience.  I’ve been making websites for a good number of years but it never occurred to me to create the functionality this site now has.  I might even get ambitious and add more themes to the site to further expand on the elemental themes that are there (such as death, dark, metal, and wood – these would complete the theme sets).

Lo and behold, I went out and got myself Mass Effect 2.  What’s more is that I remembered I had saved my games from Mass Effect [1] so I could import them.  Quite a few things have changed  (namely combat) but the general feel and universe are the same.  It’s refreshing as most sequels seem to lose that with their drive to make the game ‘better’.

Having said all of that, if you’ve never played the original, I would recommend that you do so before playing the sequel.  Not because of the advantages you get for importing the character from it, but so that you’re not thrown for a loop because you’re dropped into the middle of a story and are scrambling to learn the history.

I’ve also dug out the old game, Freelancer.  My son and I have been playing it in the multiplayer but since Microsoft long since dropped their global server, other fans have made up for it by creating a new global server.  Sounds insane to me, but I’m thankful for it regardless.  Unfortunately, it meant adding a fan-made patch in order to connect to that server and treat it as a global server from your end.  Minor detail really.

It is still a great game even though it’s more than a handful of years old now.  The only thing about it is, I thought the graphics were a lot nicer than they actually are. LOL.  I guess our memories do play tricks on us.  Either that, or there is still a setting somewhere that I haven’t properly put to rights.  Either way, it’s still fun – even though I had to learn space combat all over again.

Ok, so this theme I’m testing now is not my own (I was having trouble figuring out what I wanted to make), but damn… if you use Vista or Windows 7, you won’t have troubles seeing the insipiration for this theme.  It even has a taskbar (and apparently the place is loaded with functions and things I haven’t discovered yet).

There are several themes you can choose from when you visit (in the taskbar menu).  I have enabled registration so if you want to register, feel free.  If you have a Gravatar, then use the associated email address and it will show up in the taskbar “start” menu as well as along-side any comments you make and in your user  profile.

Provided you have cookies enabled, whatever theme you choose from the start menu taskbar, will be saved for you.  I’m currently using Fire, but I like all of them.  Feel free to explore.    I know I am.

Huge kudos to Inanis (author of the theme).

Also, with the enabling of user registration, I’ve also added some registration security (against spam registrations).  I haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet, though, even though it’s active.  As a result, I apologize if it’s not working quite right yet.

– Update: I’ve tested the new registration security and it works quite well from what I’ve seen.  For WordPress users that are interested in the plug-in I’m using, you can find it here =>Simple Anti-Bot Registration Engine.