Shadefire.com

So, my laptop arrived this week, and I have to say it is pretty awesome. Only a few minor issues with it. The first was about a three week delay in which the website said it was a ‘work in progress’. As I did not need it in a hurry, that did not worry me much, but it turns out the sound card I wanted was out of stock. This no doubt was the most significant factor in causing the delay, so to avoid making me wait any longer, they downgraded to the standard one. A bit of a disappointment, but not a big problem at all. I am impressed with how quickly it arrived after they notified me about sound card situation.

Now the only problem is, until I actually travel somewhere, the laptop will just sit around collecting dust. I have no real use for it while I am at home and have access to my desktop computer. Oh well, at least it is one more thing I can tick off my checklist.

Well, I spent three years “I really should apply for my passport”, but finally I actually did it. Today my passport arrived, and frankly, I am appalled at my own laziness. The effort required was quite minimal when I reflect on it. Oh well, at least I am one step closer to going overseas.

On another note, last week I took the opportunity to place an order for a Dell XPS laptop, so I can take it on my forthcoming travels. There was a 10% discount on all XPS models, which was one of the main motivations for me to buy the laptop so soon. It seems the 10% discount also appealed to many other people, because for the past 9 or so days since I placed my order, the computer’s status has been ‘work in progress’. My desktop only took I think two days before it was finished being built. The Dell website currently estimates the laptop’s date of arrive as the 28th Feb. Personally, I do not see it happening, but I suppose it is possible if it is shipped from the factory in the next few days. If memory serves, my desktop took only two days to travel through Australia Post.

As you can see, I have made a new layout for the site. There is alot of tweaking still needed, and don’t even think about trying to view it in Internet Explorer, but it seems to be functioning so I will leave it at that until I am in the mood to trouble shoot the specific little problems.

So for the past three or four months, I have been playing a game called Wonderland Online. Its a nice little free game, and it was in-depth enough to keep me interesting while playing, but also not so in-depth that it required me to spend all of my waking moments playing it (like World of Warcraft did). Unfortunately, I have now well and truly lost interest in Wonderland, and I have been looking around for a new free game to get into.

The problem with free online games is they are, understandably, no where near as advanced nor polished as a subscription based game. Having already played Mythwars (I think that’s what it was called), Trickster Online, Fiesta, Wonderland Online, and recently Maple Story and Pi Story since quitting WoW, I find all of them have at least one or two flaws which just really bother me. Not to mention that they are all just cheap clones of the big subscription games. For example, Fiesta is basically a toned downed, buggy imitation of WoW, while on the other hand, Trickster Online is like an improved version of Ragnarok Onine. I found it to be quite a well developed game (especially considering it is free), but I still found it pretty tedious to play.

So for now, I’ll be keeping an eye out for another game that might get my attention. I tried out Pi Story just this afternoon, and it took me only about 15 minutes to work out the game was too annoying for me to waste time on. Maple Story managed to last 3 days before I got tired of it

Welcome to the third new face of Shadefire.com. While I had a great new design planned for a long time now, the one you see now is not it. This is a simple rush job that I threw together. I do not know whether it was a database or some hosting software upgrade, but recently all the database connections through out my custom-made content management system became incorrect. Instead of going through and updating them all, I decided to make the switch to Wordpress, which hopefully will save me alot of effort in future endeavours to maintain this website. I have decided to take this opportunity to start a fresh blog. I will not bother to repost the old blog entries (who even reads them apart from webbots anyway) so stay tuned for more lack-of-updates!