Mostly Game

It looks like my test message to my Jirel email address came through okay this morning, so I think I’m officially moved; still need to get my game stats pages working again, though.

If you’re seeing this post, then the DNS update has propagated to you and you’re live on the GoDaddy host. I messed up various things with my seat-of-pants migration, but the Wordpress stuff all appears to be working okay. My email may be bouncing right now as my new account setup has a status of “Waiting on MX record” — which I don’t understand, because all my DNS entries should be updated and correct; I may have to contact support, which thus far has been excellent.

Also, my game stats pages appear to be broken right now, but I’ll mess with that tomorrow. Time for bed!

If you play MMOGs at all, and especially if you engage in player-vs-player (PvP) combat, you know that INC means “incoming.” I’m moving my hosting from GeneralHosting to GoDaddy. I have free hosting that comes with my domain registration, which will trim $8 a month from my online expenses, plus GoDaddy gives me more control over my site configuration, including DNS settings (CNAMES, etc.), MySQL database creation and control, etc.

There may be a short hiccup when I make the cutover, but otherwise I expect the transition to be pretty smooth. Once I have done mine, I will work on moving over my in-laws’ site, HowardsCustomFlatheads.com.

See you on the other side!

Okay, I’ve just set Jirel.com to default to this WordPress blog. Game stats are offline till I get the old 2004-2006 data integrated into the 2007-2008 database; this may take a little time because I’ll have to update all the game IDs from the old local index to match the BGG game IDs of the new system. Plus, add some stats filtering since it will be tons of data again. With a little luck and perseverance, I’ll have all that done and back up by this coming Saturday’s GCG night.

So, someone over on BGG discovered One Hundred Pushups and, not content to suffer alone, got a whole slew of fellow geeks on the program. Not only am I on the program, but it’s gotten me fired up to get serious on fitness in general.

My brother-in-law Adrian is a CrossFit trainer. I hadn’t really looked into what CF is until now — I like their holistic approach to fitness, rather than a narrow view of only strength, or aerobic conditioning, or whatever. I like that the approach is the same regardless of age and current fitness levels; instead of changing the program, you simply adjust the difficulty of the exercises (e.g., can’t do a muscle-up? replace it 2:1 with dips and pushups). The same philosophy is used from kids to the elderly, from the novice to the elite athlete.

If I can just maintain this hunger (for lack of a better word) for getting into shape for long enough to ingrain the habit, I think I can stick with it. That’s part of the appeal of the hundred pushups program. It’s six weeks long, doing workouts three times per week. I don’t really care if I make it to 100 in the alloted time — I’ll be happy to actually stick to a program for that long and use that to springboard into regular exercise. I’ve been the Y three times so far, using the stationary bike machines to get a cardio/leg workout, ramping up the difficulty each time. I’m eying all the Cybex machines they have there, although CrossFit is more about free weights/exercises.

I’m even trying to leverage this into other areas of my life, particularly game design. Brian and I have no shortage of ideas and designs percolating, but we too often let them slide for other activities, like the pure time-sucking entertainment of Warhammer Online. We both have families and work, but it all boils down to setting priorities. I’m trying to put fitness and game design back up at the top, two things that I enjoy and want to commit to, and which will both pay dividends later in the forms of health and creative satisfaction (and maybe even the odd royalty check here and there).

Edit: … and actually, starting and maintaining a real blog is part of this refocusing effort. It’s a commitment to my primary reader (me); if anyone else reads this, it’s just gravy.

Phew. I think I’ve settled on a blog name, a theme, and what I want in the sidebar. I entered a bunch of links, so I think I’m all caught up on setting up the site. Now, um… do I have anything worthwhile to say in the coming days? Months, years?

I’d like to get settled on a set of tools (widgets) and design (templates and themes) before I get too far along in this blog’s life, so prepare for an onslaught of test posts.

Here, let’s try out YouTuber for embedding video. I present to you: the Large Hadron Rap.

Next: crosslinking. I get my game info on over at BGG aka BoardGameGeek. (Those should be hyperlinked automatically.)

Okay, I’m finally pulling the trigger on a real blog, thus WordPress makes its entrance here.

NewBlog is just temporary, heh. I’m browsing themes and plugins and thinking about what kind of direction I want to take with this thing. I’ll probably make this the default home page on Jirel.com before too long, and then link to my ASP-driven game stats pages.