TonyV

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You're welcome.

I'm thankful for having a job! A few weeks ago, that was seriously in doubt. The company I work for decided months ago that they were going to lay off around half my department and outsource around half of who was left. I was one of the ones who ended up getting outsourced. The company we're being transferred to is actually matching our previous salaries and benefits, and even giving credit with the new company for all of the time we worked at the original company.

While thankful for my own situation, I'm also hopeful for those who are unemployed. I've been in your spot before, when I got laid off at the tail end of the dot-com bubble bursting. It was extremely frustrating and demoralizing. When you feel like you're at your wit's end (and I know you do), please remember that things will get better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but don't give up. I assure you that ten or twenty years from now, you'll be like me, what you're going through will be just a rough part of you life that you had to go through to get where you'll be then.

I'm also thankful for the cool stuff I get to play with as creator of the Paragon Wiki and part of the Titan Network. I'm so geeky that stuff like working on backup scripts and performing upgrades and tuning services is my demented idea of fun, and I get to do a lot of that in my spare time. I'm also thankful for the overwhelming interest that people have in the sites. Aggelakis, since you've posted in this thread, I'll call you out by name. If the Paragon Wiki were still just my project, it would suck in comparison to what it's like today thanks specifically to the hard work of people like her. Here's a full list of administrators; if you run across them, be sure to give them a nod and say thanks.

I'm thankful we have cool people in the CoH community who do things like set up the Real World Hero charity drive. Yes, maybe it's a merciless plug, but the charities they're sponsoring are very worthwhile organizations, and as you're mulling over how thankful you are, I hope you'll stop by and drop something in the bucket. Every dollar really does count! It's a great chance to not only show the sick, the children, and our brave service members that you care, but to show the world in a tangible way how cool City of Heroes players are. Do eet now!

I'm thankful for my family and friends. My mom and dad both passed away a few years ago, and I have just a top-notch group of sisters that would drop everything on a dime if I ever needed anything. I also have some really good friends who are close, including Belle, who a bunch of you on Infinity probably know. She may very well be the coolest person on the planet, and she has limitless ability to keep things sane and fun. Lately, she has even been helping me to live a bit healthier, and helping me to do little things to live more economically and ecologically.

There's a bunch of other stuff too, but this post is already getting a bit too long. Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving!

We were upgrading from Ubuntu Server 9.04 to Ubuntu Server 9.10. A bunch of things were upgraded, including the kernel, MySQL, php, Apache, and other low-level stuff. In the process, some config files were also updated and/or changed. I thought I had it all mapped out, but apparently something in the config was still wonky. I've been poking around with it all day, but we were just having too many outages. It will have to wait until later. Can't have an unstable server now, that's no fun!

Okay, we've been having this weird issue where after an hour or so, for no discernable reason, the CPU is spiking to 100%, causing all of the web sites to stop responding. I've tried to diagnose the issue, but so far, I haven't been able to figure out what it is. Believe me, I don't like our server dying every hour either, so I remounted our system mirror from this morning and rebooted into the old version of the OS.

This is effectively a "drop back and punt." We'll try again some other time once I have a chance to go over the logs and metrics and try to get some idea of what was causing the problem.

All of the data is stored on a separate partition, so if you've edited wiki pages, uploaded character info to CIT, posted a picture on Faces, etc., all of that is still intact and good to go. All of the work today was on the back-end only.

*gets out and kicks the server...

Okay, try cranking 'er up now!

Okay, everything should be up and stable now. Let me know if you have any trouble!

Well, we've decided that since we have the server down doing big-time backups, we're going to go ahead and cut loose with the server upgrade. Hopefully it won't be long, I'll post updates as I have them. Right now, we're transferring all of our backups to an off-site storage house in the event that something goes so hideously wrong that we have to restore everything.

Hey all, I'm going to bring down the Titan Network server for a few minutes to mirror our system volume. Just normal, routine maintenance (for now). A little later, we might bring down the server to upgrade our server software. When that happens, I'll post a reply to let everyone know. In the meantime, all of the Titan Network sites will be offline for the next few minutes.

Hey all, I'm trying to figure out if this is a problem on just my system, or if others are experiencing it too.

When I tried to log in tonight, I snagged a patch and it applied it. I got the normal EULA screen, clicked Accept, and then... Nothing. I tried launching again. I click Next like I always do, then I Agree, and then it just dies. After accepting the EULA, CohUpdater.exe isn't launching CityOfHeroes.exe. Looking at my chat logs, the last time I successfully logged in was at 5:57pm Eastern on November 16 (Monday).

If I create a shortcut directly to CityOfHeroes.exe and put the -project "coh" command line parameter after it, it launches fine. It's only when I try to launch it using the normal CohUpdater.exe shortcut that I have problems.

When I run CoHUpdater with the -console 1 option, I get the following, which to me looks pretty normal:

Funny how old-timers tend to get jaded so quickly. Yes, we've done a lot of this same stuff for the last five years. But what about those people who haven't been here five years?

I mean, consider how cool the event was in October 2004. Hardly anyone had seen a freakishly giant creature like Eochai at that time, Croatoa wasn't even in existence. We were all pretty stoked back then, and that was just one giant monster roaming around. We didn't even have that hero event channel to let us know where he was.

Now consider if you had just joined the game within the past year. This event is huge. I mean, my god, giant monsters, creatures you've never seen before, getting stuff from knocking on doors that don't do anything the rest of the time (especially the costume salvage for free that usually costs big $$$ at the auction house), changing your avatar into any of a buttload of enemies, umpteen badges, defeating banners strewn around zones, fighting off hordes of zombies (say what you will about it happening all the time; unlike during the Halloween event, usually people are so jaded of it that there aren't enough heroes grouped up to spawn the Elite Boss Nightmares), no sun in the city anywhere... I mean, it's definitely a lot different than the normal game.

Please remember as you think about how you've been doing this for years that not everyone has, and they deserve that same coolness factor that we've been spoiled with for a long time now.

And the banner stuff is pretty cool. I'm so glad it's not just another standard "Defeat x and collect badge" kind of thing.

Okay, quick update. The name has been renewed and is in good standing. All of the sites should be resolvable again as of around a half hour ago.

I did over our last maintenance. I try to avoid suggesting that people change their host files becuase if, god forbid, we change IP addresses again, it can get really confusing really quickly. Nevertheless, if someone wants or needs access to the site before this gets resolved, they can edit their host file as described in this post: Option 2

/ramble

Man, I love Doctor Who. I wish we had more shows like it.

True story. When I was an early teen, my aunt, who worked for the local PBS station, suggested that I watch it. I really hadn't watched public television since Sesame Street (with the notable exception of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, but I digress...), and being a snotty kid spoiled by Hollywood, considered it, well, lame.

Nevertheless, I plopped my hiney down and watched about an hour of it one Saturday night. It was a Tom Baker episode. I didn't realize at the time that the epispode was two hours long. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the series ran on most public television stations here one episode after another, with no commercials, through an entire story arc. (It was originally broadcast in Britain, I believe, in 15-minute cliffhanger segments. Personally, I like our way much better. )

So anyway, an hour in, I thought that it was one of the most awful shows I'd ever seen, turned it off, and didn't think about it again for probably a couple of years.

Then one night, I was really bored. Nothing to do. I turned it on and decided to give it another go. It plodded along unmercifully, but by the end, I got interested in the story, and when all was said and done, I felt, I dunno, satisfied. So the next week, I watched it again. This time, I ended up genuinely interested. By the end of the third whole episode I watched, I was hooked. (It didn't hurt that his companion at the time was Loise "Leela" Jameson, who is the epitome of sexy sidekicks, and I was an impressionable teenager!)

Ooh, brief Doctor Who funny tangent. I was well hooked on the show and had been watching it for at least a couple or three years. A couple of Saturday nights in a row, though, as teenagers sometimes do, I had something going on and missed it. No worries, I thought, it's not like the episodes really built on continuity; they were all pretty self-standing. So anyway, the following week, I plop down and start watching. Instead of Tom Baker, I see some straight-haired young blond guy in the opening credits. "What the fudge?" I thought. Did Tom Baker leave the show? Who was this guy?

After watching the show, by which time any explanation of regenration had been bypassed, I was sitting there griping to my mother. "They've got this new guy, and he doesn't even look like Tom Baker! I mean seriously, what are they trying to pull? Do they think we wouldn't notice? He doesn't even act like the Doctor!"

It wasn't until much, much later that I figured out the whole regeneration thing.

Still, I pine for the Tom Baker days. Eccleston was great, Tennant was great, but I still don't think they had anything on Tom Baker. Eccleston and Tennant are just a shade too dark for my taste. I still like them, but Tom Baker will always be The Doctor to me.

Oh, while I'm reminiscing, I think that the most incredibly moving moment I've ever had in front of a television set was Adrick's last episode. The episode ran long here. Keep in mind that sometimes there were a few more or a few less 15-minute segments in an arc, so a show here might last two hours, two and a half hours, sometimes even three hours or more. We didn't subscribe to TV Guide, so I never really knew how long an episode would be until I watched it. Also, keep in mind that we had ZERO previews, no Internet, no 24-hour cable channels dedicated to revealing spoilers, and the mainstream media never printed a damn word about the show, so every episode was a complete surprise.

So anyway, at the end of Adrick's last episode, they didn't run the normal credits. Instead, they rolled the credits in silence over a background of a broken star. I was literally staring at the screen speechless. Seriously. Dumbstruck is maybe closer to what I was, I didn't know what to think, but I had never been so utterly shocked like that, and I don't think I ever have since. One episode of Firefly came close, but not quite. And go figure, it wasn't even a Tom Baker episode.

My second favorite Doctor is probably John Pertwee. A few years later, after they stopped making new episodes, the public television station started running the series from the start, as much as they could given that a lot of the early episodes were missing. William Hartnell just didn't do it for me. Patrick Troughton was way too whiney. John Pertwee, in my mind, is the first actor (and one of the few) who really "got" The Doctor. Plus, I really dug how he was made so vulnerable by being stranded in one place and time. Can you think of any punishment more excruciating for someone for whom all of space and time is his playground?

Peter Davison was always kind of "blah" to me. He didn't really add much personality to the role, in my humble opinion. Which is really a shame--some of the best writing for the show happened while he was at the helm! He had started to get better by the end of his run, though. I hated Colin Baker. No no--I loathed Colin Baker. I didn't get to see enough of Sylvester McCoy to make a good judgment before the show was yanked off the air.

The Doctor Who movie with Paul McGann was a travesty. I remember telling some of my sci-fi geek buddies that Doctor Who would make an excellent American television show and/or movie, if it's given a decent budget, but only if they got the original writers to work on it and didn't try to "Hollywoodize" it. If that's what they had in mind, I'd rather they just not make it. I wish they hadn't. It sucked. Hard.

Eccleston was really good. Tennant, especially by the end, was really good. This new guy, though, not having seen him, I'm very skeptical about. Doctor Who is supposed to carry a bit of an, I dunno, patronly air about him. He needs to be able to pull off being an authoritative figure. Tennant was barely on the edge of believable in that respect, but he did have his moments. Now they've gotten someone even younger. Not that they need another William Hartnell, but damn, at least get someone in their mid- to late thirties.

I'll wrap up my thoughts on the show with this. I absolutely adored Nyssa. Best. Companion. Ever. Smart, sexy, and fun, she was the complete package. That character is one of the first television crushes I ever had, and decades later, I suppose I still have that crush. I so wish the she had killed Tegan in her sleep and made it look like an accident, but otherwise, she was perfect.

/endramble