I guess I just haven’t been in a writing mood lately.
Yesterday, let’s see. I got up, did the weekly cleaning for a couple hours, did some more studying zope stuff. Took breaks to look through my mp3s, I had a lot of crap in there, and there was some stuff that I never listen to but I keep for, well, why did I keep them? Oh yes I’m a packrat! Many got the cut yesterday. I also went through and got rid of many that I had already made oggs of. The mp3 folder is down to 6.2 gb. The ogg folder seems to be at 5.6. I should rip more cds so I can get rid of more of my mp3s.
I think this is why I haven’t been in a writing mood, I have nothing to write about. My life has been very dull this week. We’re trying to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving. My Aunt Elaine called me a little over a month ago and suggested that she should come down for Thanksgiving, but she’d need to look at her finances and get back to me. Of course she hasn’t gotten back to me, and she has moved so I don’t have her new phone number, arg! I emailed my mother to see if she had my Aunt’s contact info, and she hasn’t emailed me back. Sigh.
So I was hanging out in #Andor the other day. In one day two people wandered into the channel after a search for `wheel of time irc` (apparently we are the 4th hit). That’s pretty cool, since the channel has been pretty dead lately, that’s why we widened the scope to all fantasy and scifi books. It’s pretty cool having more activity there. So a couple of the people there chatting on another server are in this “Idle RPG” they kept talking about it, and pasting attacks and seemed to be quite amused by it, so I asked them about it so I could see what it was all about.
The Idle RPG is just what it sounds like: an RPG in which the players idle. In addition to merely gaining levels, players can find items and battle other players. However, this is all done for you; you just idle. There are no set classes; you can name your character anything you like, and have its class be anything you like, as well.
Hmm, interesting. I downloaded the source for it and it’s a long perl script. You just make some changes to it so it joins the proper server with the proper nickname and then just run it. People log in and just sit in the channel. So on xelium we have it in #null (you get penalties for talking, parting, quitting, so we thought that was an appropriate, if geeky, name). So you’ll see:
-@R2Q2- PrincessLeia2, the Aes Sedai, has attained level 18! Next level in 0 days, 02:24:37.
-@R2Q2- PrincessLeia2 [74/134] has challenged peacimowen [145/146] in combat and lost! 0 days, 00:10:07 is added to PrincessLeia2’s clock.
-@R2Q2- Barenjager, the Demon, has attained level 5! Next level in 0 days, 00:21:00.
-@R2Q2- Barenjager [11/18] has challenged bluefox83 [5/11] in combat and won! 0 days, 00:01:28 is removed from Barenjager’s clock.
What’s the point? Well, there isn’t one really. Just one more channel to join when you hop onto IRC.
Speaking of IRC, there has been good stuff and bad stuff happening. We got attacked by another botnet last night. It’s really frustrating. I’m not sure if someone is provoking people to use the botnets to attack, or if this is just the price of running an irc server. If it keeps happening we’re going to have to consider taking it down (the rest of xelium will still be up, so we wouldn’t lose a place to chat). It would suck, but having mail and web sites is much much more important to us. On the good side, we can now edit the xelium website when we need to. It hardly gets any traffic, but it’s nice to have a good updated site to direct people to when we are showing off the server. And now that the help section is greatly expanded we can even point people to easily navigable help files for the services (easier than /cs help commands..) as well as lists of all channel and user m
odes. Oh and it’s not so mIRC/Windows-centric anymore, I made sure of that! We now recommend clients to download for more than once OS, and instead of saying “Basic mIRC Stuff” I dropped the “m” and made it applicable to general irc clients. I’m quite happy with it now.
I’m boring myself with this entry, too much IRC crap, I think I need to get out. Maybe tomorrow or monday I’ll have something more interesting to write. *wanders off*