WELCOME to the personal home page/blog of Matthew La France. Please enjoy your stay.

1/29/2007

I'm not feeling that well and starting to get sick of not feeling well. :( I may go to the doctor's sometime soon, I'll have to see.

I've been watching Rizelmine recently which is funny as hell. I'd seen the first "season" I guess, 12 episodes at 15 min each, a while back. I just got the rest of the series and started over from the beginning. I'm enjoying it a lot this time, probably more than the first time I watched it. Not to sound dark, but it feels good to laugh a little, I don't tend to do a lot of that these days.

I've been trying to work on my web design skills again recently. I read some primer material on XHTML and CSS to refresh my memory a bit. I have a couple of more advanced level books coming in the mail I should be able to dig into at the end of this week. I spent today trying to get my two "blogger-powered" pages to XHTML validate but the fact that they contain blogger posts that include URIs with &s in them sort of messes it up. I'll have to see if I can just validate the code alone, not the actual page. Still, it's good to have worked on it and gotten them semi-compliant with XHTML transitional anyway.

I'm thinking about what to do with my sites and how to proceed with a commercial site again. It still seems to me that the best course of action is the one I originally decided on, the one I am avoiding. I have a huge writers-block going on and I don't know if I can fix it. I have to or I'm just going to live the rest of my life the way I am now. I know I can write and draw again. I just get very discouraged. That's not a plea for encouragement, it's just a fact. I need to come up with a method of dealing with it. I'm too old to coddle myself. I just need to stop running away.

BTW: Still working on the PSX Anime List some more. Messed around with the style sheet a little bit today and added some quotes. A few of my favorites include: "Born with a Kid's Station controller in my hand", "Where no SHMUP is complete without Lynn Minmay" and "Now hiring sailor senshi". ;)
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1/25/2007

I've been doing a lot of work on the PSX Anime List. I purchased a PHP script for a star rating and review system. I'm not at the point of learning enough PHP (or any really) to make one myself, it's far more effcient for me to get something like that pre-made, even if it costs me a little. $30 seemed reasonable enough for something that seemed like it would have the basic functions I was looking for. I took about a day and a half messing around with setting it up, testing, streamlining, and adding it to all of my game pages. Now anyone has the ability to submit their own review of any of the games on PSX Anime List. Plus I have the ability to approve or deny reviews via email, and moderate after the fact. I think it's pretty spiffy. I'm also going to start making regular posts on it to turn it into something of a news site for anime related game releases.

Now that I have the time and inclination I'm getting the desire to update my pages to the 21st century. Mostly I'm trying to re-think them in terms of their purpose, function, and traffic. I'd like to make some money from them if feasible. I'd like for them to reach their potential if there is any, and to consider what that potential is. I need to brush up on CSS and really think about where things are going with PHP and blogger and such. I think I didn't really used to get where sites were going with the "blog" format, or I didn't really see the potential of it. It seemed to limiting. Now I'm starting to see that is not the case, and I'm starting to "get it" a little. I think I'd like my pages to be more blog-like, though they are essentially blogs already.

I'm still stuck at that "blogger or not blogger" question. I'd like some of the features of a more traditional blog, but blogger is making you more reliant on their hosting. There are some new custom layout features that sound like it makes it a lot easier to mess around with the page formatting, but you can't FTP publish your pages when using that. I don't even know what that would do to my traffic and such, I guess domain traffic would be fine if I just redirected my domain, but I'm more concerned about search engines and stuff. It's tempting to try to do it all "myself" either learn a lot about it so I can code things myself, of go with the "buy or borrow" approach and use stuff that's available (like wordpress and such) that still carries the burden of a higher level of personal effort. I feel like I have a lot to think about. I think it's time to start exploring my options a little more and see what's out there that might help me specifically. BTW: I haven't forgotten about your offer Crystal. I may still take you up on that. ^_^
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1/19/2007

I'm having fun with my new part time job. I'm still trying to figure out how much money I'll be making with it consitently, but I'm trying to work at it more consistently. I've dropped a few hours at my other part time job. I'll have to see how it goes, but it's going well so far. I'd still like to be making some money completely on my own, I'm re-evaluating that plan right now but I plan to keep going with it shortly.

I've been working more on my translation of Hexa Space o1: Seren (see translation projects for details). It's been almost a year now, though I've only worked on it on and off, but I should be finished up with it sometime soon. I finally finished going through and finding the beginning and ending offsets for what I'm pretty sure is all the remaining text. Now I'm translating what's left and then I will just be manually (copy+paste) inserting it back in. It's crude but effective. I can't get all fancy so I don't mind slogging through some tedium to translate a game on my own.

Still wondering what's up with some of my other translation projects. Haven't heard from King Mike about 3x3 Eyes in a while, nor from Gideon about the other 3x3. I emailed ChrisRPG about Slayers today, haven't really emailed with him in over a year. It seems like he's updating RPGone a little more these days so I was hoping there might be some activity on that front. Bubblegim Crash still seems to be going well. I hear that someone beat the game, (I still can't get through the last dungeon). Shouldn't be too long on that. I forget if I mentioned, the remainder of the script for Lady Sword has been translated thanks to the assistance of one Grant Laughlin. He stepped up to the plate and offered his assistance. I still need to proofread and playtest the script, but progress is good so far.

God, there is a bunch that has been going on. Forgot that I've gone to see Curse of the Golden Flower. It was totally boring. The performances were pretty good. Chow Yun Fat is great in anything he does, he played a great Emperor of China. Still the movie was basically a drama about the royal family and it was just really not what I wanted to see. I thought it was going to be more of a martial arts/hong kong movie. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't very interesting.

I have my PM up to level 80 in Phantasy Star Universe so I can bring it on missions with me now. I've raised a GH-430 and she is cute and fun to have on missions. Better for soloing unless you are party leader a lot, I've been soloing a lot and trying to raise her battle level (she's lvl 2/100 right now). I've also switched my job from hunter (lvl 5) to force. I'm shooting for Wartecher right now which requires a force level of 5 and a hunter level of 3. It seems like it should be a fun job that let's you have some of the best of both hunter and force. I'll have to see how it goes, but I'm having fun working towards it right now.
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1/13/2007

My RAID 5 array has been up and working for a little while now. I migrated my PC components into the new case one night, and set up the array the next day. There is a story to tell but I don't feel like telling it right now so suffice to say it worked. The array probably took 3 hours or so to build (I left it going while I went to work) but it only took like 10 min or less to partition/format. It's almost exactly 700GB formated. Obviously some space lost to parity data and the 1024 byte thing, file structure, etc... I've been thrilled with the performance anyway. Everyone complains abou thte speed of RAID 5, but I've been experiencing transfers that are the same speed as normal disk to disk transfers. The only down side is that since it's a cheap card it's basically software RAID and eats up CPU cycles during data transfers. I knew that ahead of time so no real problem there. I can play videos off the array without any trouble, I'm genuinely very pleased with the whole thing.

Incidentally my drive naming convention has used the battleships from Martian Successor Nadesico (which themselves were named after flowers). My current partitions, Nadesico, Shakuyaku, Cosmos, and Kakitsubata consume all of the Nergal battleships, so my new drive array is named Crocus after the United Earth frigate of the same name from the show. My PC is named Omoikane of course. ;)

I got a new cable modem last night. The one I had was droping connection a few times a day, cutting out in the middle of phone conversations, etc. I thought it was the router which I replaced a few weeks ago, but that did not help. I also upped my service to 6 mbs but that didn't really change things either. I wasn't sure it was the modem, but continuing the process of elimination, I figured I'd better try a new one to see if it helped. Knock on wood, I haven't had a single lost connection since last night when I hooked it up. Tonight I was talking on the phone (VoIP), playing PSU, and I had a torrent running, no problems for about 1 1/2 hours (normally this would have flattened my connection withing a few minutes of the phone conversation). I'm hoping that's the last of my network connection difficulties for quite some time.
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