(Phaysis)

Ooops.

So, uh, this site suffered an unintended outage. I tried to access my journal last night to make an entry and got this. I was disturbed that I couldn’t use my site. So I went to the website control panel to see what the trouble was, and my login was rejected. Perturbed, I raised the alarms and sent an email to the support team at my host provider, Prohosting, asking to know why I could not use my website.

After that email, I checked my ancient email account at Juno to see if Prohosting sent me anything there like a technical notice of a planned service outage. I’ve had this Juno account since ’97 and I keep it around as my backup technical contact for both my website and my domain name registrations, should something happen with either. It can be said that I never, ever use my Juno account, so I typically log in once every, eh, six months just to clear out the Juno-sponsored spam.

What I found among all the nonsense was a string of automated emails from Prohosting’s billing department declaring that my credit card had been declined. Declined. The first of these messages was back in February, followed by notes stating that my account would be disabled in March, immediately proceeded by a handful of other automated messages reiterating the fact that my credit card had been declined by my bank and that the past-due amount was indeed rising. I was incensed.

I have had this particular credit card for a good year and a half. When I last got a new number, I dutifully updated the billing info. This card does not expire until next year, yet Prohosting’s support team said my card was declined due to my card being past its expiration date. Somewhere, someone screwed up; whether it was one of them or all of me, I still had a locked website and something had to be done.

The only thing to do was to send a second message to the support team, with a copy to the billing department, revealing the evidence gathered from my investigation. My hat was in my hand. As soon as I clicked “Send”, I went to the credit card update form, submitted the details, and hoped for the best.

Support unlocked my site intact by morning, and billing had charged the past due, dropping the penalty fees, to my updated card info. $108 dollars later, here we are.

My wish, my regret in this, is that in none of that time did Prohosting try alternate avenues to contact me. I have an administrative email address at this domain that I check regularly; I have the option to use this address in my profile as my technical and billing contact. But for the sake of safety, should something go wrong with my domain registration, my webhost’s email system, or (as in this case) billing, I would not be able to contact them for problem resolution. So that’s why I still keep my Juno account around. Just in case.

And there it is, the problem. The problem is one of neglect. Neglect on my part because I don’t regularly check my administrative accounts. Neglect on their part because any human operator would have seen the contact form on this site and attempted to alert me. I have been with Prohosting for over nine years, since I first started this website, and I think it is for that reason alone they let me slide for so long. I’ll hold that to their credit.

Haven’t been doing much with the site lately, as you may notice. Got several projects going on, mostly just development work. It’s all hobby, so take it for what it’s worth.

One thing I’m working on / was working on is a simple note tool called Raganotes. It was intended to be a tool to allow me to take quick notes, give them a title, and make them available. It’s a small experiment in pulling together some functional Perl building blocks: CGI::Application, Template Toolkit, Class::DBI, and Apache::Session. It’s a way to get my head wrapped around using these blocks in the assembly of a larger Content Management System for my site, a way of getting experience in doing so, finding methods that work, dipping my feet in the pool. It started from my overriding frustrations in building my CMS, a fast-and-loose attempt at coding something before I lost interest. What resulted was something that was kinda quick, I mean in the grand scale of things the month of building time was quicker than my past years of working on my site. I lost interest a few times, got stumped many, but I got it functional. Just not complete.

I think what I ended up with was something with way too much functionality to it. Instead of letting the user log in, make notes, add titles to them for quick browsing, publish them, search, edit, delete, undelete, copy, etcetera, what I got was a mashup of features that overall seem really cludgy. I had a vision, lost it during development, and then gained a vision that was hazily similar to the original, and now I’m stumped again. It’s mostly a user interface thing. So I’m letting it rest for a while.

My most recent project is my game, Chrontium. I started this back in 2004, some time before AJAX was an internet buzzword. It uses some advanced javascript, images, and realtime communication with a server to provide gameplay for users. At the time, it was fairly groundbreaking, yet I had only shown it to a handful of other people and promptly sat on it for months, years.

I’ve since gotten a new fire for Chrontium, and now, in the past 2 weeks, I’ve polished up the engine, redone the graphics, went from using GIFs to PNGs for true transparency (and much faster rendering in Firefox, et al). I’ve also done some cleaning up and changes elsewhere in the game code, I’ve rearranged the development file tree, and I’ve optimized the stylesheets and code to work in IE and Firefox (others forthcoming). Things are working rather nicely, but there’s rough edges. I also still need to build the server-side stuff, the database end, the user management, the scorekeeping, the game parameter controls, the message boards (which might come later), and all that. If it’s worth a damn, and gets popular after I post it here, I might relegate it to its own domain. We’ll see.

An associate of mine asked me why I didn’t simply use Flash instead of Javascript. My first answer was simple: I hate Flash. Really, I seriously do. My second answer: I want to prove to the internet community at large that Javascript, and the browsers they run in, are coming of age for realtime gaming applications. Anywhere you can use sprite graphics, you can use Javascript and images. I can’t wait until my first public release to see what issues, comments, or praises come my way. Will be interesting to stir a buzz.

But I’m not even finished enough to be concerned about these things. Really. Until then, I have my head down in the work.

Phaysis has undergone a domain transfer. If you’re able to read this after April 14th, then things went according to plan. For several years running, I’ve been stuck with register.com as the registrar for my domain; it seemed that any time i tried to transfer out, my domain ended up expiring before the tranfer completed. This year, I managed to remember to transfer early enough, but just barely.

The new registrar for Phaysis.com is GoDaddy; much more economical than register.com. So instead of paying $35/yr (those’re old school rates left over from when register.com was the only domain registrar) I’m now paying less than $9. And now both of my domains (including glassdoor.net) are at the same registrar. How much better could it be? Heh.

Ok, so enjoy the site, read the sparse journals, look at the old art, and send me an email through the message gateway. Remind me why I should go through this trouble to have a website.

Just a quick update:

I’m working on making the html of Phaysis a little more robust. It’s still a little screwy in IE (all versions), but looks fine in Mozilla. Netscape 4+ is just right-out. :sighs: Really goes against my drive for cross-browser, cross-platform design techniques. It’s a learning process, at least. :shakes fist at the CSS gods:

I haven’t written anything substantial on the website engine in roughly 2 weeks. Been too busy doing other stuff, and sitting down to code this particular chunk of program code is taxing at best. I wonder if I’m going about it all the right way, or if this chunk is really necessary. :shrugs: I’ll make some decisions about it soon.

I visited Texarkana last weekend. It was good to spend some decent time with my family saturday night. None of my sister’s kids were sick, her husband was available, and mom was doing well, so we all had dinner together at mother’s house. I decided to forego visiting some people, namely Moderne Primitives, in order to hang with the fam for a few hours longer, and it was worth it. It almost made the 13 hours (!!) on the road last weekend worth it (where the hell is high-speed rail when we need it?).

I smelled natural gas around my apartment complex’s courtyard last night, and it kinda freaked me out. When I came home from work this afternoon, I still kinda smelled it, so I called the landlord. His assistant told me that the landlord was over here at this complex this morning and noticed the smell. He investigated and found an open valve in the vacant apartment directly underneath mine! Holy shit! It’s since been closed, but I’ll still keep my paranoid nose in the air for it. That shit scares the bejeezus out of me; everything I own, car excluded, is in this apartment. Ugh

My 11-day absence from Mojo’s has been kind of refreshing. I’m spending more time at home lately, which is kind-of a good thing. I’m also out doing other things that I skipped-out on when I spent all my time in one place every night. I’ve found it surprising how much larger this town has gotten now that I’m not a regular anywhere. Breaking habits is the first step to listening for Serendipity’s call. She knows my number.

And you folks who “miss me” know my number too.

Hey.

Ok, I’m kinda bored. Have a few project ideas. I know which project I need to be working on – Glyph, my website engine, for one. Hmm. Working on this journal script gave me a few ideas and helped me clarify, for myself, some methods in doing what I want to do with the main engine. It’s just sad that the total “working time” for building this engine is, um, something like 3 years. And still no palpable results. But that’s changing.

No, really.

Ok. So work sucks. The work itself is kinda light right now; it’s just the interpersonal bullshit between workers. Had a coworker cuss me out unexpectedly last week. I was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, and I was there to receive his misguided anger. What makes me even more angry is that he hasn’t even apologized. I don’t expect him to. We haven’t said two words to each other since the incedent. Whatever. Fuck ‘im. The whole thing only clarified to me, in bold, beautiful colors, that I’m not there to make friends. Apparently, workplace comeradery simply doesn’t exist there in that department.

Ah, well.

Enjoy my site, what little there is of it. Funny that I pay $20us a month for web hosting space (with a slow database server, at that), and $34 for two years of domain name purchases. Aah, phaysis.com. How you are a labor of love. Hopefully soon I’ll get around to cleaning things up around here, giving everything a uniform look. It’s all kinda cludged-together right now. Priorities, man.

Priorities.

Ok. If you’re reading this, then, um, message me or something. Ok? It’d be nice to know someone out there visits my site. My server logs show me I’m getting a lot of hits from viewers that aren’t of the human persuasion. Damned bots. Ah well. So long as Google visits.

Show me some love.