I’m posting two DSAs this week because last week was a complete failure, as you probably (haven’t) seen from last week’s post.  Great start, I know.  You might be wondering, “Gee Robert, why don’t you just start this week instead of trying to do two this week?”  Because then it wouldn’t fit into the “New Year’s Resolution” category I threw it in, that’s why.  Also, because this whole Minecraft server thing ended up being a ton more work than I thouht.  The simple story is that I couldn’t port forward to my Minecraft server because each of my 3 routers were assigning a different IP address to my computers.  Fortunately, I don’t have to take responsibility for this mishap since we hired some technology guy to do everything for us.  After discovering the problem, I swooped in and fixed everything, setting up our routers as bridges instead of actual routers.  That was last Monday.

Since then I have been struggling to set up my server with the best plugins and extensions so that my server is the best server in all existence.  This means tons of permissions to write on top of the commands I have to learn.  Luckily I have a great team that’s helping me populate my little world with building and the sort, as well as cleaning up after our one griefer attempted to destroy everything we worked so hard to create.

The bottom line is that I have successfully created a Minecraft server that I will continue to work on until it is the epitome of awesomeness.  This means about 4 hours of tedious work a day, but it’s worth it.  In addition, a friend wanted to start a YouTube series along the lines of Yogscast on my server.  Unfortunately, my computer is the only one that is powerful enough to run the screen capture software as well as Minecraft, which means I have another project I get to work on.  The good news?  I have a video of me testing my equipment on the server.  It’s basically just me running around the server on day 2, but it’s a video, so everyone should love it.  And that is pretty much the synopsis of DSA: Weeks 1-2.  I promise, the future weeks will be more entertaining and tangible, but I’m starting slow.  Wouldn’t want to raise the bar too high would I?

The server IP address is 184.78.246.104.  Join us, we’d love to see you there.

Look at me writing another post when I should be sleeping.  It’s becoming a habit.

I drew this for you.  Do you like it?  For New Years Resolution Week 1, I’m setting up a Minecraft server.  This is my 5th attempt, but this time I WILL make it work.  The basic problem is that I have to port forward through not only my modem, but two routers.  Not only that, but ClearWire (my ISP) is terrible.

But I’m not just saying that, I even have a story.  I got on customer support today and was greeted with a man who had a very strong foreign accent.  Now I don’t have anything wrong with people with accents, but I just wish they wouldn’t take up customer service jobs where a majority of their customers are not used to dealing with said accent.  Anyway, he asked me for information to verify my account.  The problem?  I had none of it.  Luckily the questions got progressively easier until I found one I knew the answer to: my address.

Now I won’t complain about this since it obviously worked out for me, but I would like to note that security questions don’t really do much good if you can just ask for a different question.  Either way, I got through that trial. Then he told me he couldn’t help me, but there was someone who could.  Please note that I hadn’t even told him my problem yet.  15 minutes later, I’ve finally been connected to the person who supposedly could help me.  Guess what?  He had a stronger accent than the last guy.  I asked him to repeat everything he said, and usually just guessed at it anyway.  Luckily I had done everything he told me to do a thousand times so it wasn’t do difficult to guess at the next step.  Once he was done, he told me I had done it.  I had port forwarded.  Granted, he didn’t realize that my two routers assigned their own ip addresses, but when I explained that to him, it didn’t matter because he had read his script, and I had done it.

I thanked him for his time, and hung up.  That was at 1:30, roughly 12 hours ago.  Since then, I’ve been hard at work researching static IP addresses, assigning different channels to the routers, bringing all of my computers into the same room to simplify the configuration, anything to try and make this thing work.  No cigar.

So I’m writing this to say that I haven’t given up on my resolution and next week you’ll jut get two.  Because I’m sure you all are just holding your breath.  Especially since no one reads this but spam bots.  Either way, it will get done, there will be a MineCraft server, and it will be awesome.  Period.

I’ve never really been into the whole “New Years Resolution” thing, but lately I’ve been noticing a bunch of resolutions that have caught my interest.  They’re the “Record a Song Every Friday for a Year” and “Take a Picture Every Day for a Year” trends, and some of them are actually fairly interesting.  Granted, they aren’t technically resolutions, but they have the same sort of ring to them.  Anyway, it got me thinking about what I would do if I wanted to do one thing a week, or even a day, and the truth is that I can’t really think of one specific thing that I would want to do that frequently.  Maybe write a post here, but I would like my posts here to be more about content than numbers.  As if you could tell from my previous posts: 2 site updates and an image test.

But I think I’ve come up with an idea.  Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech a couple of years ago, and while it wasn’t the best I’ve heard, one of his statements really caught my ear.  He said:

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

While I really enjoy the sentimentality of this idea, it’s flawed.  There are times when you have to do things that you really don’t want to do.  I mean, every day I go to class is a day that I do something I don’t want to do.  But most people realize that sometimes you need to do something unpleasant in order to enact change.  No, I think the real genius behind what Jobs said is the emphasis on personal satisfaction.  You won’t be successful if you aren’t proud of what your doing, if you never do something that gives you a sense of accomplishment every once in a while.  With this idea in mind, I decided on my own “New Years Resolution.”

Consider it official: I will do one awesome thing once a week.

It may not be something awesome like doing a triple back-flip on a trampoline or producing an entire dubstep track, but hopefully it’ll be something interesting.  I plan on posting what I did each week on this site, both to keep me honest and to keep track of what I’ve done.  At the very least I’ll post a story or description of what I did.  At best, I’ll have a video to show.  Who knows, this will either work out great or be completely lame.  Either way, I think it’s important to do at least one thing that I can be proud of a week, so that’s exactly what I’ll set out to do.

Speaking of proud, I finished my first draft for another college application essay.  I really tried to push the envelope with this one and separate myself from the competition, so we’ll see how everyone likes it.  It follows below:

“For nearly six months I have been faced with one of the most challenging experiences of my short life.  Grades had always seemed trivial and biased to me, I wasn’t the star quarterback for our undefeated football team, and I hadn’t spent years volunteering to build a large hospital for Ethiopian burn victims.  I knew I was the proverbial diamond in rough, that I had something to offer, but I was forced to acknowledge the fact that my application wasn’t very convincing.  But all hope was not lost!  Through this essay, the powers that be saw fit to throw me a lifeline, to give me a chance to soar above the unending sea of the mediocre.

This opportunity was not without strings however.  How was I to distinguish myself from every other middle class white boy?  Every topic has been covered.  I don’t have some awe-inspiring experience.  I don’t mean that I didn’t have interesting experiences, but how am I to compete with Rico, the small underprivileged youth who grew up in downtown Detroit and mastered the violin raise awareness on drug abuse?  Yes, I made that up, but I’m sure there are examples no less inspiring.

My frustration over this predicament grew, but that frustration gave birth to an idea.  I decided to take matters into my own hands.  I would set out to create my own experience.  I waited until the local ski resorts opened, donned my gorilla suit, blew up an inflatable banana, and picked up my snowboard.  Jeers and cheers resonated in my wake as I approached the lifts.  On the lift I sat next to a small Asian women dressed in all pink.  She never even looked at me.  At this point I was seriously considering the psychological implications of wearing a gorilla suit snowboarding while holding a giant banana.

My worries were quickly put to rest.  Despite the fact that I was a little rusty, I received a ton of support from boarders and skiers alike.  Initial shock was replaced with cheers of amusement as I zipped past, my fur rippling in the wind.  Each time I fell the crowds were greeted with the sight of a gorilla desperately chasing a giant banana as it slid away.

The experience does not compare to Rico’s violin playing, but I believe it accurately reflects what I bring to a college environment.  I strive to make an impact, even if it requires snowboarding in a gorilla suit; I possess a positive outlook with a dash of creativity; and I am willing to whatever it takes to achieve my goals.  If however, this essay doesn’t provide you with a through image of what I would bring to a college environment, I would like to formally invite you to go snowboarding, or skiing if you are so inclined.  You may wear whatever you desire, but I shall don my gorilla suit once again in order to show you the remarkable attributes that I would bring to your school.”

And on that note, I’m finished.

 

To be completely honest, I had big ideas when I was first designing this site, but now I’m not really sure what to do.  At this point there isn’t much more to do on the back-end aside from adding features, so now I have to face the reality of actually posting content.  I have a few drafts started, but writing about myself has always been my Achilles Heel when it comes to writing.  Which is fine, unless you’re trying to start up a personal website.  Then it doesn’t work so well.  So I’m running into difficulties.

But hey!  It’s not all introspective!  I also wanted to use this post to test out the picture-posting capabilities of WordPress.  Which is good news, because this means that anyone who sees this post will have the opportunity to see me at last year’s snowboarding trip!

I was dared to wear a onesie and cape snowboarding last year.  So of course I obliged with much gusto.

If this site were an actual project that was worked on by professionals and the like, they would say that it is finally out of the beta stage, meaning that it’s kinda sorta officially done.  But it’s not an official project worked on by professionals, so this just counts as another update.

Regardless, all of the key features for the site are here and working properly.  That said, they aren’t finished and I don’t think they ever will be.  There are so many changes and additions I want to make that I think this project will probably never end.

Just a few of the things I intend to add:

• Comment nesting.
• Admin panel support.
• Settings page to make this an ‘official theme’ (this means an edit-able color scheme, modifiable width of various elements, change-able text for footer, the ability to add taglines, etc.)
• Add images to the navigation on the sides to better represent what each tab is.
• Better comment format (support for line-breaks, bold, italics, underline, etc.)
• Support for mobile.
• Support for browsers that have javascript disabled.

And there’s like 50 other smaller changes I intend to make.  But for now, it’s good enough.

Also, this marks the site’s ‘official’ release because I now have about me pages and stuff!  They’re on the right, so check ‘em out!  The pop-up effect will probably annoy a few people, but I’m of the opinion that it’s absolutely awesome, so they can just deal with it.  I’ll probably post all of the code for my site at some point so that people can understand what I’ve been working on for the past couple of months.

And I think that’s it.  This site is kinda officially up, but really, it’s just Update Number 2.

I leave for California tomorrow for Turkey Day in which I consume vast quantities of food and basically do nothing.  So, as usual before a flight, I get an unnatural burst of energy in which I find myself unable to sleep.  So I spent more time on the theme for this website.  About 6.5 hours at this point.

But hey, I finally converted most of my html-based site into php, which means the theme is looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself.  I’m actually feeling pretty proud of myself since it looks a lot better than most of the WordPress themes I’ve seen (ok, it will look better than most of the WordPress themes I’ve seen) and it’s by far the most complex project I’ve worked on.  It’s far from done,  a mere child fumbling around in his attempts to take his first steps, but I wanted to publish something so that I could get on with content.

On the note of content, yes I am using WordPress, but I’m not planning on treating this as a blog.  I might post stuff like this periodically, but more just because I can than anything else.  That and I like writing.  WordPress just provides an excellent platform for posting dynamic content.  More than anything I plan on just using this site for bragging rights.  Because that’s all that matters right?  That and I’ll be posting pictures and other websites I’ve done.  Fun stuff.

I ran into a huge roadblock with the pop-up pages that I had in the original html design, so that’s occupied most of my time as of late and I haven’t taken the time to fix the links on the side.  Once that’s done I’ll get around to adding photo albums, updating the comments, and improving the navigation.  After that I plan on writing a tutorial for anyone that wants to learn how to create their own themes.  Most of the tutorials I’ve found have contained quite a few errors and weren’t very detailed, so hopefully I’ll do a better job when the time comes.

Anyway, it’s almost 3 am and I have to be up at 4:45 to go to swim practice so I’m gonna wrap this up.  My cookie and Vitamin Water induced high is starting to wear off and the bone crushing exhaustion is starting to set in.  And I still need to pack.  Sleep is for the weak.

EDIT: My God this post is terrible.  I need to remember to save drafts and edit later so I don’t end up posting terrible stuff like this at 3:00 on a Wednesday morning.  I’m going to apologize to the world but leave this up because I feel that my website should have SOMETHING on it, even if it’s as terrible as this.

EDIT to the EDIT: Yes, I am talking to myself, but I like to think of it as if I’m actually talking to the website itself.  Wait……… that’s not any better.