My blog is back, unfortunately, missing the past two years of entries. Which, in my opinion, were probably the most interesting of the total six years I’ve invested into this site. I think it’s safe to say that this past July and the months following were pretty much the most difficult times of my life. In addition to my catastrophic personal life taking an unexpected nose-dive into oblivion, I had the privilege of God himself destroying what little of my life that remained, materialistically speaking.

With one stroke of lightning I managed to lose the following:

• TV
• DVD Player
• Nintendo WII
• Wired Router
• Wireless AP
• Mac Mini NIC
• Server NIC
• Desktop NIC
• Server Hard Drive
• Cable Modem

And yes, I use surge protectors and battery-backups. This is Murphy’s Law in full effect, folks. I got the Wii replaced, as it was still under warranty, everything else was either without warranty or literally had just expired the week before. Yeah, no kidding.

Looking at that list, I’m rather humbled by the loss, had this electronic disaster happened in..say, June, I probably would have been completely devastated, as everything in that list completely ruled my entire existence to an extent. I devoted so much of my time and passion into computers, web design, etc., that I neglected so many other precious things in my life that deserved my time, attention, and passion. I honestly never realized how consumed I was with all these “hobbies”. Too little, too late, as they say.

So that list, it’s not much of a loss, it was more of an eye-opening, reality check for me. My forced trip into technophile rehab, if you will. Everything on that list is replaceable, it’s what I neglected in my obsession with all of those items that’s irreplaceable. Unfortunately, the past is the only thing that I can not change. Not to say that my addiction to technology is the root of all of my flaws or the catalyst for everything else that failed to work in my life recently, but it had a role. What it comes down to, I guess, is sometimes you need to unplug for a while.

Also, if a computer gets a little sluggish, maybe unresponsive, you don’t have to throw it out and replace it, sometimes a good reboot is all you really need.

I think it’s time to end this entry, as I’m using computers metaphorically now to describe my own personal dilemmas.

I might be dropping Who Needs Oxygen.net in place of a new name. I impulsively purchased two new domains the other day, but I’m still feeling a bit indecisive. My two new choices for my blog title and domain are: alpha-geek.net or ilovetheinternets.com. AlphaGeek.whatever is taken in almost every variation you can think of, fortunately, no active blogs under those domains, so I grabbed alpha-geek.net. I bought iLovetheInternets.com because, well, because it’s just funny.

I’m leaning more towards alpha-geek.net, but I don’t know. I’m still going to keep whoneedsoxygen.net, but it will no longer be my blog’s name. I just can’t decide…

My (former) hosting company decided to drop my service without notifying me of it expiring. Of course, leaving me without a backup and a lot of phone rage. After explaining to them that they breached their own TOS, I was able to gain access to my account for 24 hours, with a cost! Bastards! They charged me $10 for 24 hour FTP access to get whatever I needed. Originally, they tried to charge me $20 for this “courtesy service”. Amusing, since they charge $7.95 a month for hosting.

The entire process took about 10 days, at which I was without receiving e-mail and the site was officially gone. I have officially recovered (as of yesterday) from ipowerweb’s complete ignorance. Not including the price I paid to backup the site, I have hosting, domain hosting, e-mail, sub domains, the whole nine yards…for free. So neener, neener, neener.

If you see anything funny, broken links etc., etc., let me know. I’m still trying to fix the comments so that a commenter can be e-mailed when someone replies to their comments. Whew, glad that’s all over with.

I’m going to start something new called Friday Funnies. Every Friday I’ll post an entry generally geared towards humor. However, your laughter is not guaranteed.

I forgot that in August there is another anniversary: Who Needs Oxygen.net’s anniversary. Three whole years of weblogging. Jebus.

Thanks go out to Dave for suggesting WordPress to me. It took me a little while but the switch from Movabletype to Word Press is finally finished. The only thing I wasn’t capable of doing was the dropdown categories without a ‘go’ button. When I used the code to have the page transferred after selection (the same used for the monthly archives) it wouldn’t validate. I got fed up with fiddling with it and left it as is, it works, just not the way I want it to. A task for another time.

In short, WordPress is a breeze to setup. The only minor obstacle I had (aside from the dropdown menu creation) was adjusting to the new tags. Which, after a few minutes, became much easier.

My major reason for switching was NO MORE REBUILDING. If you have tons of entries, archive monthly, daily, and categorically, you know how much a pain rebuilding can be in Movabletype when making even the slightest of adjustments. One click and it’s instantly published.

I like the way, after setting up the main index template, WordPress automatically configured the archives and comment pages by integrating my design. A nice time saver.

WordPress is a powerful content manager, simple in its appearance but bold in functionality. Combined with all of the plugins that are available and a great support community, WordPress is absolutely superior to the other content managers I’ve used.

Thanks to the Subscribe to Comments plugin from ScriptyGoddess it’s now possible to be notified via email when someone replies to your comment.

I’m going to explore and add some plugins. If you’re thinking of switching to Word Press, try it, I promise you won’t look back.

Today and tomorrow I will be finishing my move from MT to WP (as time permits), implementing and testing new plugins, and changing the default template to it’s original form.

I had such a blast in Orlando, I’ll post more about the trip, perhaps along with pictures, when I complete the site.

My lack of updates isn’t a result of neglect and blog abdandoment syndrome. My domain and hosting expired, to add to that sudden surprise it took 2 days to contact my domain and hosting provider to find out all of the other details. I personally think that this particular company is run by 12 year old kid’s in their mom’s basement.

In order for me to renew everything it would have costed almost $150.00. Which I think would have been a huge waste. I decided that I would just renew my domain and build my own webserver and not even bother with the added expenses from my host when I can do what they do, only better and from home.

So, throw in a couple of more days of actually trying to get ahold of someone that works at said company to renew my domain.

The renewal didn’t take long, my server is setup and running, the only thing is is that my website is STILL active on their servers.

I put in a DNS change request 3 days ago and of course it hasn’t been changed and I never received a response.

Anyway, here’s the deal. I’m going to continue to use their hosting as long as it’s here and as long as they continue to point my domain at their dns servers. In the event that you visit here and this site isn’t up I have a mirror running at http://wno.blogdns.net. Not much longer after that, hopefully my domain will propagate and everything will be back to normal.

Oy. This isn’t supposed to be here.

Well, it is. Just not hosted by ….

ah, ….

Stay tuned for an update by Monday.

Everyday I get a new comment, always something nice and ALWAYS a link to increasing my penis size, child porn, and Jennifer’s first webcam experience.

Like most, I delete them. However, due to my previous Movabletype error, I am unable to rebuild these entries.

I’m thinking I might have to do a reinstall of MT.