Four Island

On the first day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: An extremely weird rant on what Starla did last weekend.

Hi peoples, and welcome to the first day of Kirby Week. I'm sure you're all super-spectacularly excited for the upcoming holiday, yes? Well, today, I'm rewinding a bit to the weekend when Advent 2 ended and Kirby Week started. Some weirdly cool things happened that I fell like talking about.

First, on Saturday, I was bored. I didn't know why I was bored because I had plenty of things to do: work on Pillowcase, work on FourSearch, implement many of the pending renovations currently required around Four Island, work on the HKRPG site, work on one of my games, or anything else listed in The Bet. But, instead, I continued to be the queen of procrastination, and did nothing.

So, it was with boredom that I opened Google Reader. Oh yes, that's right, it's Saturday, none of my usual humor blogs had updated. I did notice, however, that TimTam's feed had over a hundred unread items in it. I decided to work that number down to a reasonable (0) amount.

That totally didn't work. The first post I read was a list of Lifehacker's best posts during 2009. Among that list was an article on how to install the Homebrew Channel on the Wii without needing the Twilight Princess hack. I had previously found out about the Homebrew Channel (it was The Daily WTF, actually) but was always annoyed because I didn't have, nor had any intention of getting, Twilight Prinecss.

Excitedly, I fetched my SD card from my broken camera and followed the instructions. Amazingly (because cool things that I want to do never work), it worked perfectly. The Homebrew Channel sat peacefully in the Wii system menu and I was ecstatically excited.

If you know me, you may not know that, among my normal programming, I also like to indulge in some homebrew programming. I've written for the GBA and the DS (both required special cartridges to put the homebrew games on and both have been lost by my evil siblings) but now I could possibly write something for the Wii! And as I was pondering this, the perfect training exercise that would get me into programming for the Wii popped into my head: I would port Maze Of Life to the Wii!

For now, however, I just wanted to play something fun. I ran back to my computer and looked through the list of homebrew applications to find something cool to play. As I was scrolling through the list of games, one caught my eye. POWDER. I sort of freaked out at that. POWDER is an extremely fun roguelike that I (during my DS homebrew days) had previously playing on my DS. I remember it to be an extremely fun game. I don't, however, remember being any good at it. :P

So I downloaded it (and a few other games including a super-cool looking port of SuperTux) and loaded it onto the Wii. I immediately became hooked. Yes, obsessively so. I played that game for two hours straight today, and many more not in succession. I even found the Linux version of POWDER and started compulsively playing it on my computer. I was even.... doing well, occasionally! :P If you've never played POWDER, you must do so. Seriously.

One other cool thing I did on the Wii was downloading the port of Visual Boy Advance (a GBA emulator). I had this emulator on my computer and (during my GBA homebrew days) used it to test my GBA games. However, it was difficult to play actual games on it because the keyboard isn't the intended controller for these games. So, I couldn't enjoy my Kirby Amazing Mirror ROM (I had lost the physical copy of this game years ago and really wanted to enjoy its amazing funness again). So, my grand idea was to use the Wii, VBA and the Classic Controller to play the game in its full greatness. And what do you know, it totally worked. Yippie for me. :)

So, I hope you've enjoyed this randomly long post. I'm off to play POWDER now.

Wow. Nobody even attempted to misguide me into thinking The Fourm was alive and well. And I'm pretty sure I voted "LADY GAGA IS AWESOME" three times. So there. :P

SADLY YES CRY O_O FSDSF - 3 vote(s)! Um.... whut? It's a series of electrical impulses, it cannot die. - 0 vote(s)! LADY GAGA IS AWESOME - 3 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

Sorry I updated late again, but yesterday I was having this weird problem where I wasn't able to log in. I tried logging in and it wouldn't even give me an error message. I eventually figured restarted Google Chrome and it worked, oddly, and that leaves me with no excuse as to why I didn't update the poll yesterday. Oh. :P

Anyway, has anyone realized what today is? Yes, it's Kirby Week! For those who can't be bothered to follow the link and find out, Kirby Week is the third week of advent, the week in which is candle is pink. I know, I know, I'm hilarious, right? :P

Anyways, it's become a bit of a tradition (how can I say that? I started it last year!) to do something special for the week on Four Island. Last year I wrote a series on how to write a blog system (and yes, that series was a total failure :P), but with my dismal posting rate this year, I don't think I can. This year, my Kirby Week goal is to publish one post everyday this week. Yes, you heard me, I'm going to post.

I can hear you all gasping.

I've prepared (okay, that's a lie, read: I'm going to prepare) 5 posts, one for each day of the week. They probably will not be related, but my goal is to ensure that there is at least one post in pending queue by 12:30 every day this week. Be prepared. Be prepared.... to throw things at me if I don't live up to this goal. Seriously, if I fail, throw full bottles of wine at your computer screen. Thank you.

And if you've noticed, yes, I'm continuing another Kirby Week tradition that even extends back to Kirby Week 2007, the Kirby Week poll. :P

PEOPLE VOTED! Well, I think they did. I can't see how many people voted (only the percentage of votes on each option) without looking in the database, so for all I know, as I had voted for the first option, that someone simply voted for the last one and no one else voted. :P Well, we'll soon find out! :P

Will I ever fall in love? I have, with this album! - 1 vote(s)! No, I don't want a sip of Up & Go - 0 vote(s)! What? - 0 vote(s)! I might be wrong, so indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

Oh.... um, ahem. Nothing to see here, move along! :P Btw, I FINALLY MANAGED TO UPDATE THE POTW ON TIME!!!! PARTEH!!!!! :P

Gah, another two-week poll. I should really.... stop doing that. And I should really continue working on Pillowcase. Speaking of Pillowcase, here are the results!

YES!11!!!ONE - 3 vote(s)! No, 'tis archaic - 0 vote(s)! Maybe, cheese - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

If you didn't get the archaic joke, read Drifty's The Girl In The Story. Unfinished as it may be, it's still very funny. :P

I've been noticing something with the Poll Of The Week. From some locations (by which I mean actual physical locations, as in another house), the AJAX Poll Of The Week doesn't work. I think I may modify the POTW so that if the AJAX request fails, it does a normal, non-AJAX request. The only reason I'm not sure I'm going to do this is because of the uncertainty of whether or not voting on the POTW will refresh the page, which could be very annoying.

Hey.... there's something different about Four Island.... Well, Fouripedia's back! Like, duh. :P

Fouripedia was removed when I created the 7th layout because I couldn't be bothered to fix it to conform to the new layout/it was hideously broken anyway. Well, I've made some changes. First, I've done some SSO magic, so now, if you've logged into the rest of Four Island, you've logged into Fouripedia as well. It also looks nicer and integrates well with all available layouts.

So, now that Fouripedia's back up, what're you going to do? WRITE PAGES FOR IT YAYY!!!!! :P

Even if you know me, you might not know that I am not good around glasses of water. Seriously. If there is a glass of water around, I am very likely to accidentally spill it. Lol, really. I've spilled water on books, homework, precious memories and expensive electronic equipment. And this is a problem because I'm almost over-hydrated, I drink way too much water.

So, it was just a matter of time before I did something with a glass of water that I would really regret. Sunday, November 8th, 2009. 11pm. I was in bed, with a glass of water on my bedside table. I got up to go to the bathroom, and as I did, my hand spazzed and I spilled my glass of water all over my laptop computer.

Yes, you read that correctly. Go back and read it again if you're not sure. I spilled a glass of water on my computer. I immediately pulled the battery out and dried it off with paper towels, but, being the impatient idiot I am, decided to try to turn it back on after only 7 minutes instead of the generally accepted 72 hours. It actually turned on.... for about 30 seconds, after which it would not turn on at all. The power button did nothing at all and even inserting the AC adapter wouldn't light the charging light at the front of the computer. So basically, I killed it. What's worse is that I got that computer on November 9th, 2008. Yes, you read that correctly too, I killed my computer an hour before it's first birthday. Oh, irony, it just keeps coming back.

So, after switching between freaking out and lying on the floor doing nothing for three days, we finally brought it into Geek Squad at Best Buy. We waited for an hour and a half on that line, and even tried turning the computer on while in the line, but it didn't work. When it was our turn, I placed the laptop on the desk and, seriously, the guy put his finger on the power button, pressed it, and the computer turned on. ???? I know, very weird.

I was ecstatic that the computer was working as I was expecting that it would have to be sent off to someplace for weeks and that I would have to survive without a computer. But, the enthusiasm didn't last. My precious fourie was spazzing a bit. Most of the keys on the keyboard didn't work, but luckily, the arrow keys did so I was able to boot into Linux. However, one of the keys must've been stuck because the username prompt kept filling up with "u"s and it was nearly unusable. The tech person told us that the computer would continue to get worse until it completely died, and advised me to buy an external hard drive to back up my data to. I ended up getting a 500 GB Seagate drive (which was really exciting because I'd never had an eHDD before) and left feeling very happy because my computer was at least working.

It didn't last. When I got home and tried to back up my data, I was having a ton of trouble with the eHDD. Eventually, I decided it was corrupted and was annoyed that I couldn't use it. Instead, I returned it and bought a flash drive (the exact same flash drive I use to backup trindla) and now use mondoarchive to backup my laptop nightly.

My laptop has been getting better, though. The spazzing keyboard has stopped, and even though I have to use a USB keyboard now (which is very annoying), the computer doesn't have any other visible problems. I even ran an extensive (it took 30 minutes) test on my hard drive and it came up as completely healthy. So, here I am, typing up this post on my precious little laptop. It's just so resilient :P

The moral of this story is, if your hand spazzes when it gets too close to a glass of water, don't put a glass of water next to books, homework, precious memories or expensive electronic equipment. :P

EDIT: Lol, I keep saying that I killed my computer an hour before it turned 1 year old, but I actually just found that November 9th has nothing to do with my laptop. November 9th 2008 was the day Four Island went back up from it's extended downtime. OCTOBER 9th was the day I went laptop-searching and found this computer, but October 12th was the day I got it. :P

The Gates Of Sleep! For those of you living under a rock, The Gates Of Sleep is my band-name-alias-type-thing-with-lots-of-dashes. One day, while playing the Debut Album game TimTam posted on the Fourm, I got the band name "The Gates Of Sleep", the album name "I Might Be Wrong" and an album cover depicting four glasses of differently colored liquid. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever and that it should be a real band/album.

So guess what I did. Yep, I gave myself more work. I started making music for this album. My first song was called "You Are So Wack" and sampled various songs, as did my second song, "Just Dance Under My Umbrella". I wanted to have some original work, though, so I then created "All Alone". Then, one day while making ice tea, I got the idea for the song "Ice Tea" which became extremely popular for some weird reason. :P I actually ended up making a video for it.

10 more songs and 2 bonus tracks later and I finished my album, "I Might Be Wrong". You can listen to it online at its website. Beware, though, it's very weird. :P Actually, making this music was very fun for me and I'm considering coming back with a second album next year. I've already got the album name and cover art for it. :P

By the way, this is the 250th post on my blog. :D

Okay, so last night, Drifty and I were talking about how I give myself a whole ton of work (Four Island, The Sabrina FanWiki, True Falsities, Pillowcase, Endlenge, whatever story I am currently writing for Four Fiction, KFM, FourPuzzle, my annual RPG and more....) and she dared me to do the following things in one day:

• Make 3 Pillowcase comics
• Write a Four Island post
• Write up an episode of Sabrina
• Write a True Falsity
• Finish chapter 1 of my novelette
• Work on my current programming project

Now, it's 3:56pm and I'm just completing the final item on the list. However, I didn't exactly follow the bet. Instead of making 3 comics, I made 6. Instead of writing one post for Four Island, I wrote 3! (The other two will come out daily, as per usual)

I didn't, though, write up an episode of Sabrina. I had decided that I was going to do that task first, and I went to the FanWiki to see which episode I needed to do next, and it was very evident to me that I hadn't visited it in a while. Every single page had been replaced with spam. And I mean replaced. The original pages weren't in the history so I couldn't revert the spam. So, basically, the Sabrina FanWiki has died. That's why it's been removed off of the Website Projects list. It amuses me, though, that I procrastinated from that project for so long that I didn't even notice it being covered in spam.

I still think I won the bet, though, Drifty, because I doubled my Pillowcase output and tripled my Four Island output. So you have to follow up with your side of the bargain. :) Oh, and my awesome True Falsity? The Gates Of Subliminal Messaging. :)

Um, whut? Half of you are alive and the other half.... don't care? :P

Yes - 1 vote(s)! No - 0 vote(s)! No, but neither are you. - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent (What?) - 1 vote(s)!

Gah, the Poll Of The Week is quickly becoming the Biweekly Poll. :( I have to stop being so lazy. I still haven't written posts on how I fixed my Ubuntu problem, The Gates Of Sleep and how I totally broke my computer.

As some of you may know, Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago. I was really excited because each new version of Ubuntu comes with great new features and other improvements. However, the upgrade process needs to be improved upon.

As some of you may also know, I have never undergone a peaceful Ubuntu upgrade (except for Hardy to Intrepid, and incidentally Intrepid is my favorite release of Ubuntu :P). Gutsy to Hardy failed mid-download the first time, after which the upgrade button stopped appearing in the Update Manager, so I had to download the alternative CD and upgrade using that, which actually took 8 hours and resulted in Four Island going down for a while. Intrepid to Jaunty was done in a situation without my laptop charger (which technically is my fault) which nearly resulted in my computer powering off in the middle of the upgrade (which would have been bad). And now Jaunty to Karmic is not an exception.

The first thing I did when I got home on the day Karmic was released was to boot into Ubuntu, open the Update Manager and click "Upgrade to 9.10". I was then informed that downloading the required packages would take 27 days with my internet connection. Umm.... not quite acceptable. So I switched to the wired network, after which the download halted. I was confused, so I thought of restarting the download. No. After I clicked cancel, the Upgrade button vanished from the Update Manager just as it had done in the Hardy upgrade and do-release-upgrade wasn't a help either.

So I decided to do what I had done with the Hardy upgrade and download the alternative CD. Except, for some reason, my Internet connection was wavering like crazy, so I used the torrent to download it. At the rate it was downloading, it really would have taken 27 days to download. So, for some reason, I switched to Windows and tried downloading the torrent there. Surprisingly, it completed within an hour.

I then switched back to Ubuntu, mounted the ISO as a fake CD drive and upgraded using that. I was then notified that the disc only contained 1200 of the 2052 packages I required to upgrade. What?!?!?! Why wouldn't the disc contain all of the packages if it was meant for networkless upgrade? Annoyed, I let it download the rest of the packages, but it only managed to download about 100 of them because my Internet connection was so bad.

The next day, when I was out, I used a free WiFi network to download 200 more. However, there were still 600 packages I needed. When I got home, it downloaded packages for about 8 hours. Finally, the download completed and the upgrade started, though I fell asleep before it finished.

The next thing I knew, it was 3 AM and Ubuntu was showing a message stating that the upgrade was complete and that I should restart. Internally rejoicing, I restarted the computer. I noticed the new boot splash and the new login screen. It looked a little memory-expensive to me, but I let it pass and logged in to see my beautiful new OS.

The first thing I noticed was that the mouse no longer worked. I'm seriously, the mouse wouldn't move or click. At all. I opened a terminal using my majestic keyboard skills and googled the problem. Absolutely no helpful information on it at all. And the next thing I knew, the entire screen had gone gray and was covered in spazzing "E"s. ....that wasn't good.

I restarted (I actually had to pull out the battery to get the computer to turn off) and the mouse still wouldn't work. The gray screen problem hasn't yet reappeared, but my productivity is majorly impeded by the fact that I cannot use the mouse. I deeply hope this problem will be fixed soon because I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with 9.10.

So, there's my Ubuntu upgrade experience. Not very positive. Has anyone else here done the upgrade? Post your experiences in the comments section. Bye!