NEWCOMPUTERNEWCOMPUTERNEWCOMPUTER!

My boyfriend brought me my late Christmas gift tonight. An AMD X4 620 processor with 4gig of ram, an NVIDIA Geforce GTS 250, new DVD burner and 2Tb secondary drive all wrapped up in a nice new case. EEEEEE!!

I can now play Oblivion with the highest graphic settings! And Assassin's Creed! AND I can go out and get Dragon's Age next little extra money I have!!

Oh wait, I have to reinstall FFXI. And wait for it to update. And get all my files off Rosaleen Quad and move them over as well as redo my Firefox plugins and learn Windows 7. Eh, small price to pay for SHINEY NEW SYSTEM! SHIIIIINEEYYY!!

Some girls go gaga over jewlery or flowers. I'm giddy because of a new computer. I guess that just reinforces the geekness. HEEEEE! *happy dance*

Ok, sick all weekend and yesterday, so I don't mess with any of it. I did check yesterday and even with clearing my cache and all, still not working. I come into work today, decide to try again, and it works without me doing anything. o.@ So, yeah. No idea why it's having trouble at home.

Ok, while I can still pull the posts out of b2evo and display them here, I can't seem to get the blogs to work as a blog page with the skins. I have no idea why. >< Last time it did this, I had to delete b2evo and reupload to get it to work. I REALLY don't want to have to mess with that again! It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have plans for using the actual blog function for a couple of things. I have a couple sites that would work well as just a straight blog, with some plugins for a few extra things. So I really hope I can get this working. Blaurgh.

Ok, I think I finally have a solution in place that works. And what's more, I got it working on the gwg as well. w00t! So, yeah, we'll see how that goes. At least I know have good backups for everything, and if b2 doesn't work out, I know I can import all the posts into Thingamablog. Which is a nice program, but I wanted something web-based. But I'll keep it bookmarked in case I need it.

In other news.....snow. Yeah. We've got about 4-5 inches in DFW area, and it's still snowing. The roads aren't iced over YET, but I have a feeling they will be tonight. Possible three-day weekend! And I really want to build a snowman. ^_^;

Blogger announced recently that they were terminating the ability to publish to a blog via FTP. Which is how I've been making news posts here for the past 9 years, as well as to the gwg, jade/graphics, and even the little FFXI character blog that I started. Basicly, they're saying that to continue using Blogger, you either have to use their free hosting, blogspot.com, or point a custom domain to their servers. Which means all content on your blog must be on their servers. Aside from the problems I have with what basicly amounts to forcing all their users to store information on their servers, (thus, placing it completly under Google's control), my site basicly only uses Blogger for the news posts. Nothing else. Everything else on my sites is maintained by me, on the server that I pay for. I would not be allowed to upload said items to Google's server. I would also not be allowed to use my own scripts, such as adding my Twitter up there and linking to my devArt account, as well as linking new graphics on the sidebar.

In short, I, and many other Blogger users, are getting screwed. Now, Blogger says that only .05% of users actually use FTP, which I don't doubt is valid. But I have a feeling that almost ALL of those .05% of users are actual bloggers, whereas a lot of the blogs I see on blogspot are just spam pools. I somehow don't think this will benift Google, since almost all of the people that chimed in on their announcement blog have said they're leaving. And many of those have very large blogs. Will that make a difference? Probally not. At this stage, I honestly don't have any faith that Blogger will reinstate FTP usage. Will I stop using Google enterily? No, actually, I won't. I don't really use my gmail account for anything, but I still love and use Google Docs (though, I will spend my free time this week backing up everything from there, just in case).

I honestly don't expect this post to even be noticed, knowing how few people actually see these posts. But, it was something that needed saying, so if there are some odd testing posts over the next couple of months, you'll know why.