Not really true. But I've been horrendously busy/distracted.

Earlier this week there was this whole fiasco with my brother-in-law coming to visit with his girlfriend during a time 1) we were TOTALLY not prepared for visitors, 2) I was HORRIBLY busy because I had a lot to do absolutely no time and energy to do it all.

Having the distraction of relative strangers in my home (I didn't know the girl at all, and my brother-in-law and I have the language barrier) completely destroyed any progress I would've had on my work. I was extremely upset about that, and at the idea that we were expected to put up with their presence on short notice because he decided he wanted to leave home on a whim. It wasn't even an emergency or anything so much as just... moving with hardly ANY plan of where to stay and what to do for the next few days.

After all that, my RPoL posting was pretty much thrown off COMPLETELY as well, as I couldn't get the energy to do that, either. I just kept getting more and more behind, more and more exhausted. Even doing work for the Order of the White Rose in DR was more wearing than I would have liked. :(

Well I'm back, and I have a few things to say. (Note: I wrote most of this while depressed, and we all know how pessimistic I am when that happens.)

First of all: Linode! I have my eye on this. It's cloud hosting like Slicehost, but apparently even better price-wise. Even Drupal users are giving it praises. Looks so nice... and I am getting concerned with the lagging on HostForWeb. It's just getting incredibly bad and I'm tired of month after month being told to post my traceroute as if this is going to solve anything. :(

Lately I've been told there are load balancing issues, and they're going to fix it... but I've heard that one before too.

I'm just worried because I'm not particularly motivated lately. If I move my site, it may take me a while to set up. And that's fine for me, but not fine for other people I'm hosting. :/ I'll be doing this from scratch, so I have to install everything successfully, and I'm totally unsure I can do this well within a reasonable timeframe. After what happened with Slicehost (me just lagging on actually DOING anything with it) I'm worried it will be a waste of money, particularly since I am planning to order the $40/mo version and thus will be paying $80 a month until I migrate everything.

As for my recent vacation...

...you decide to code a bit of (not terribly well-written) php to access the last.fm API and print a "most recent track played" link in text on your current status block (see above). :P

I realized it's easy enough with the API being open to users who sign up and get an API key. This is the function being used, which fetches the most recent tracks played by a specific user. I just specified my own user name, limit = 1 for one track and the key I signed up for here.

Pretty easy stuff, didn't take me long after I poked around at the PHP XML parser documentation. Right now I'm using xml_parse_into_struct with a switch nested in a foreach (with a shortcut break as soon as I get all the info needed), but there's likely a cleaner way to do it than that. For now, it works, so I'll use it. :P I'd been wanting to have a self-updating "currently listening" app for a while now.

Still, took time I could've been writing rpol posts for. I'm going to seriously regret the time lost. :/ I'm incredibly sleepy. However I am going to upload some new, smaller gif versions of the Dark Siren and Ryshy chibis by shurelia. Woo. (Edit: All done, saved nearly 60kb in all!)

I won't make a habit of posting about this, I'm just in this facebook friend adding mood. n.n Send me an email if interested in me adding you to my friends list in Facebook. I'm still iffy about publicizing my RL name in relation to this site, so I am not putting the name of my account here. (Apologies to those of you with this on LJ RSS as it will be repetitive.)

On other news, apparently Drupal is now version 6.15. I SWEAR this always happens right after I update version. Argh! I'll probably procrastinate again and the same thing will happen with 6.16, too. *weeps* It never fails.

And now we are going to get groceries like we were supposed to yesterday. Gah, yesterday there was bank issues and we starved for like 24 hours. I know, not as bad as some people have it but man did it make me unproductive! Dark Siren needs food for writingz. :( But now we have lots of money and we're going to get some holiday treats and something nice for our private Christmas dinner (just the two of us. Yay!)

It's also gettin' really cold now! Hello winter! *brrrrr* Time to step out (I swear, like the first time in a week. :/ I know, I'm bad!)

I never did finish my Christmas cards and presents. So again postponed to sending them on MONDAY. I hate myself for that, but I had a really poor day trying to write the cards, having my ink run out, losing my temper and tearing one of my good cards up... o.O It was just not a day for finishing my cards. I'm pretty much overworked, and the sad thing is I don't even have a real job. I'm just a RPoL GM.

Why don't I have a job? Because responsibility makes me anxious. See, with GMing I can at least fool myself into thinking it's 'fake' responsibility because there's no money involved and people just play for fun. If I were to try doing the same amount of work but for money, I would freak out and completely freeze up. I'd be unable to produce anything.

It's similar with my webpage stuff. I have maintained my website and server for 10 years. I haven't been the best at it especially lately (what with rpol making me lazy with everything else), but I've done it for no pay, I've kept things afloat, I troubleshoot stuff for my users, or make them new accounts, etc. I do this almost without thinking about it. Sometimes it's hard but I get things done.