blog.LucasQualls.com

Somehow, I feel that I have taken a step up in the world today. I have my name on a business card. I know, I know. Anybody in the world with a little bit of time and a printer can make business cards. I’ve done that before too. But these were professionally printed. They weren’t that expensive, but they look awesome. However, in order to get them cheaper, I had to let VistaPrint put a little advertisement on the back of the card. Not that big of a deal to me.

I labelled myself IT Professional. I don’t have an official job in that field yet, but I do have a college degree showing it. I have a little bit of a side job right now working for a local business as their computer consultant. I’m looking for other businesses that possibly need that kind of work. If anybody knows of anything, feel free to let me know. Also, if you’d like one of my cards, just let me know. I carry them with me all the time now.

I’ve been meaning to make a lot of posts on here lately to catch people up with what’s going on with me. So here’s a little bit of it.

First of all, as you will see if you look through the archives, I only made posts for the first 5 days of my “Grand Adventure” vacation from a few weeks ago. We were gone for a total of 10 days, so there’s 5 days worth of information missing. I haven’t forgotten about what happened on the trip. I just realized after the 5th day that I couldn’t stay up at night writing blog posts if I wanted to get enough sleep to be able to enjoy the next day. And since I’ve been back, little nagging things like work and laundry and stuff have kept me from it.

Also, I’ve changed web hosts. I was with 1and1. I’d been with them since late 2008. I’ve had problems with them that I didn’t realize were hosting problems until just recently. I’ve tried installing a lot of different things that require MySQL databases and PHP. For example, I installed Gallery on my 1and1 hosting and got all kinds of 500 errors. I thought the problem was me not knowing how to work the thing. Well, then I started getting 500 errors when I tried to upload pictures to my WordPress blog. I knew that I knew what I was doing with wordpress, so I looked around the net for solutions.  It turns out that these errors are because PHP isn’t given enough memory on 1and1′s shared hosting. There is no good way to fix this. I had heard a lot of my geek friends from the NorthEast Arkansas area mention DreamHost. I’ve only been with them for a few days now but I am highly impressed with their service. They offer what they call “One Click Installs” of a lot of popular software packages for hosting, such as WordPress and phpBB3. This makes setting up new things very simple. It made transitioning from one place to another a breeze. I also have to hand it to WordPress for building an awesome export and import tool into the WordPress architecture.

Finally, I did some stupid stuff to my laptop and I’m having to run a full system restore on it right now.

Facebook test post.

I am in the process of moving all of my hosted sites over to DreamHost from 1and1. I was having some issues with 1and1 that I couldn’t seem to solve. Hopefully, DreamHost will not have these issues. The one-click installs for things are very awesome.

If you see this post, it means that the DNS has propagated to you and you’re seeing my new site. I will post more soon!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I found this plugin for wordpress called Shashin that allows me to insert pictures from my Picasa Web albums into my blog posts. I like this system because it means I don’t have to upload my pictures again to my blog after I’ve uploaded them to PicasaWeb. I would still like to figure out why the blog is throwing me error messages, but I can do that when I get home. For now, I know I will be able to post some pictures now! Below is a sample of a few from tonight. I will write up my full blog post about Day 4 and add some pictures to all posts tomorrow on the drive towards New York City!!!

I just finished watching the Microsoft press conference from E3 2010. Honestly, I was most impressed with their stage setup. I really like the big screens. But that’s just because I’m into things like that. On to the actual content.

Besides demoing the new versions of the same old Call of Duty, Gears of War, and Halo franchises, the whole conference was based on Kinect. Kinect was previously known as Project Natal and it is Microsoft’s answer to the Nintendo Wii. Basically, the system is a motion sensing camera that allows game play very similar to the Wii motion control stuff without having to actually hold a controller. They showed demos of a kid petting a tiger (which is a little weird) for the Kinectimals (horrible title) game. Some other demos included a dancing game from Harmonix and an exercise game from UbiSoft. All in all, the press conference was a little boring and seemed a little bit long to me.

The most impressive actual announcement, however, was the new Xbox 360 Slim. It has the same core components of the Xbox360, with a smaller, sleeker case design. It is supposedly quieter, although that will need to be confirmed over the next few days as people actually use them. It has a 250GB hard drive and built in 802.11N wireless networking. The price is the same as the current Elite model, at $299 MSRP. There was no announcement about a new arcade version, so I assume that line will be going away.

Here are some pictures of the new console, courtesy of @MajorNelson:

Also, interesting to note… At the time of this post, the xbox.com hardware site still reflected the old system. I guess they aren’t quite on the ball.

I went through my 1and1 hosting a little while back and cleared out all the databases except for a few that are running this site and maybe one other site in my hosting. I got rid of all the old forum databases. It was kinda bittersweet. Looking back on a lot of memories from a lot of years worth of posting and such. But they were all overrun by spam bots and everything else. Plus, nobody seemed to post on them much, plus I didn’t even go to them that much myself.

I’m writing this post because I’m wondering if anyone misses them. And also, i’m wondering if I started back a new set of forums, what should the URL be? If anyone can come up with an awesome URL I should buy to make a forum site on, I will purchase that URL and set up some new forums. Feel free to post on the comments to this post, send me a message on facebook, email me ( lukenova – at – gmail – dot – com), send me a text message (870 974 3949), or hit me up on twitter @lukenova with a message.

I personally think the RIAA are just a bunch of money laundering pricks. They charge $13-15 or more for a new CD from an artist, when usually there are only 2 maybe 3 good songs on the whole album. They only give a VERY small percentage of the revenue from the CD sale back to the artist. Then they wonder why people pirate it instead of paying for the whole thing. And even buying from iTunes seems a little expensive. 99 cents per song? That could add up to thousands of dollars if i bought every song I’d like to listen to at any given point in my life.

If they’d make song prices reasonable, I would buy them. By reasonable, I mean maybe like a quarter a song.

Here’s the way I’d set up iTunes if I could make their business model. I would make it to where you can buy iTunes credit, in increments of $5. $5, $10, $15, etc. You buy $5 worth of iTunes credit with a credit/debit card and then you have that money in your account until it is used. No expiration date. The idea here is that instead of them charging you 99cents every song and having to deal with the micropayment from a credit card and getting charged the credit card fees that eat into their profit, they only make one charge to the credit card when you buy the credit.
So once you’ve bought the credit, and they have you for at least $5 worth of stuff, the music is much less expensive: like say 25 to 35 cents per song.
And just for kicks, lets say if you buy $25 or higher worth of credit at once, you get like a 5% discount on everything you buy with that credit. That would make your 25 cent song into a 23.75 cent song. Something like that. I’d so totally use a system like that.

This is a test of making a blog post with Posterous using email from my Blackberry.
 
 
Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone provided by Alltel

Posted via email from lukenova’s posterous