First of all, you will probably notice that at this point in time the design of the site has been changed. This is due to the fact that along with the recent upgrade on the server to WordPress2.5, I have finally done away with K2. K2′s developers are “hard at work” (using their words – not that I don’t believe they are) to publish a release that fully supports WP2.5, but honestly I don’t much care anymore. K2 was a huge boon when the core WordPress installation didn’t do a lot of the cool functionality that K2 could provide, but nowadays the added bonuses just aren’t worth the headaches to me whenever the need to upgrade WordPress comes about. The past two upgrades have gotten completely messed up thanks to K2, meaning I couldn’t use the theme without some form of a “patch”; the upgrade to 2.5 rendered the entire admin section useless without either performing a database removal of the reference to K2 or, thanks to one intelligent soul who figured this out and shared the solution with others, adding some code to the admin login script so that you could actually log in to manage the site. Sorry K2, it was fun while it lasted but I’m moving on. It’s true that other themes may themselves have unforeseen compatibility issues with future upgrades, but they typically don’t hook into the core functionality of WordPress nearly as much as K2 did so future speed bumps will be much easier to overcome.

You also may have noticed a bit of downtime if you were checking in on things while the server got rebuilt by Troll. So if you did happen to try and check in, and the site wasn’t here… sorry. Things seem to be going smooth now that everything is back up and reinstalled though.

Also, you may have noticed I’m trying to post more often again. A lot of stuff has been going down lately which kept it difficult to keep up here for a while, but I’m getting it back on track; for better or worse I suppose, depending on your point of view.

That’s it for now. I’ll have some information regarding a little article I’m writing for a trade publication in a little bit, but until I get things finalized a bit more (eg: I’m closer towards completing the article) I’m going to keep it more under wraps. As it is, I won’t be able to publish the contents until it would be printed anyway so it could be some time before too much more information becomes available on it anyway. I’ll keep you in the loop.

• In management, go to “users” and then deselect the checkbox for using the visual rich editor when writing posts.
• Re-format the URL of my youtube link to use the “youtube/v/RaNdOmStUfFgOeShEre” convention rather than the “youtube/watch?v=RaNdOmStUfFgOeShEre” view. This second one threw me for quite a loop before I finally tried the different format and discovered it worked.

Not having very many gadgets or plugins installed at BT, I did some googling and found this one called “YouTube Brackets”, which emulates the functionality given to wordpress.com users (which I am not, since this is installed on a standalone machine) letting you use this methodology to post youtube links instead…

• [ youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaNdOmStUfFgOeShEre]

Just remove the space after the first bracket and you’re good to go! Sometimes I love people on the internet, this makes my life so much easier.

Not much to talk about tonight, but I did want to post this youtube video of myself from a tournament just over a week ago. It’s such a heart-breaker… 355′ feet to the basket too.

Needless to say, I’ve been pretty busy lately. Keeping up (or trying to) with organizing the disc golf tourney I’m running next month, my office just moved locations and has been keeping me busy with work besides, doing the family thing and starting to work more on the yard now that the warmer weather is upon us. It’s just been crazy.

I’ll try and break things up into more bite-sized pieces, but I did have to post about this – I now remember why I stopped playing Mario Kart:DS online. Looking through my catalog of games, I saw MKDS and said to myself “huh, maybe I’ll go on WFC and see if I can still find anyone online.” It’s a testament to the title’s popularity how easy it was for me to find a game in “Worldwide” mode; I don’t think I waited more than 2 minutes total to get 3 opponents in the queue, which is darn speedy in my opinion for a DS game that’s been out for a year and a half. Unfortunately, in my three opponents I found three of the five archetypes that you will find when trying to play MKDS online (the first three were my opponents: I suppose you could put me in the fourth category, since even in my hey-day of playing MKDS I still wouldn’t have put myself in the fifth category).

1. The “Win/Loss Glitch” player – This guy you see who joins the race and you say to yourself “wow, 762 wins and only 23 losses! This guy must be awesome!” No, unfortunately he’s just a guy who plays a lot and knows how to exploit a bug found in the game where he can remove his losses simply by disconnecting before the first race even starts. He fills a slot so your game will start the setup process, but you almost never see him on the track.
2. The Loser – This is the player who has a record of 0-5, obviously hasn’t played much so you can’t really look down on their record if they took the game online and they obviously have owned it less than 24 hours. Unfortunately this is also the player who always drops after they lose the first-of-three races. The Loser is also likely either 8 years old, or at least is as mature as an 8-year-old.
3. The Sore Loser – This guy is much different than The Loser. Probably sporting a W/L rating around 66%, he can beat a lot of the competition out there but he still can’t hang with the big boys. Most skilled players can beat this guy without using items or snaking, perhaps just using a well-placed sparks boost here and there. This is the guy who will go into the third race with you and drop out halfway through when he throws a tantrum after realizing that no, there really is no way he’s even going to take a single race from you, no matter how much you try to let him “keep up with you”.
4. The Big Boys – These are the players who are able to get 3-star rankings in the game (not just on some tracks or GP’s, but have achieved the bona-fide “you have gotten 3 stars on everything” status), race time trials in order to work on their lines, and can snake in their sleep – they also don’t think snaking is “cheating”. You’ll rarely see a Big Boy quit a race, although sometimes maturity issues may make a Big Boy act like a Sore Loser.
5. The MKDS Lifers – Most games have them, especially racing games… the fans of the title who devote their entire lives to being good at the game. The Big Boys can get a flap of 18 seconds on that track? The MKDS Lifer can get a flap of 12.6. You remember the asian kids who took over your college’s computer labs from 9pm until 9am so they could play Starcraft? They’re probably either still playing Starcraft, or have become MKDS Lifers. If you get into a race with them, you already lost.