Tag Archives: fojar

Space Ninja History

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Space Ninja Cave Painting

I first got online in the early 90s. While some of my friends were goofing around on BBS‘s, I was using my dad’s Compuserve account to post icons I had designed for Windows 3.1. Later on, in 1995, I had dial-up Internet access at home, and a friend had shown me Joe the Circle, one of the first webcomics. This really kick-started my interest in web design, and I had a website on Geocities that year. The idea for Yellow Number Five was born around this time. I graduated high school in 1996, and my early website (which was already coded by hand) moved to Xoom, and then later to my first ISP, SpiritOne, when I started working at Egghead.

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one confusing mess and much geekery

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Okay, so I just got off the phone with the somewhat helpful girl at Qwest, who is upgrading my DSL from 256/256 to 640/640. The reason I’m getting this upgrade is so that fojar can come live at my house, which has a variety of advantages, including allowing Steve to cancel his phone line (to use his cell) and DSL service, and get rid of the cables that run all over his house.

Now, being the type of guy who tends to map things out in his mind, I’ve already come up with a rough concept of what the networking situation is going to look like in my house after fojar arrives

  • The phone line exits the wall and travels around my desk to plug into the DSL modem, which sits on top of my computer.
    • Aside: the phone line exits the dsl modem and plugs into a DSL filter.
    • The DSL filter plugs into the back of my computer, in the modem I have for receiving faxes.
    • The phone line exits my computer’s modem, and travels around the wall into the caller ID box, sitting on top of a speaker.
    • The caller ID box has a phone cord running into my cordless phone’s base unit.
    • The cordless phone is usually stuffed between the couch cushions.
  • An ethernet cable runs from the DSL modem up the wall to plug into my 5-port switch (which is a fancy type of hub).
  • One ethernet cable runs from the switch back down the wall into my computer, giving it a static IP and leaving it outside of the fojar firewall, meaning I can now netmeeting with Steve!
  • Another ethernet cable runs from the switch across the room, into the back of Fojar, giving it a static IP address so it can continue to serve the world with Pokey and Hatelife.
  • Out of the second network card in fojar comes another ethernet cable, which travels back across the room and plugs into a 5-port hub, which will probably sit on top of the switch, just to be cute.
  • An ethernet cable exits the hub, travels around the doorframe, and up into the moulding in the living room, and travels all the way around the room, and back down around the doorframe into Annie’s office, where it snakes around behind some books to plug into her machine, which will get a shared internet connection from Fojar.
  • Any other computers, such a laptops or my other Windows 2000 computer, will also plug into the hub and gain a net connection through Fojar.

TOTALS

  • 1 DSL Filter
  • 1 5 port switch
  • 3 dirty magazines
  • 1 5 port hub
  • 2 static IP addresses
  • 4 phone cables – over 20 feet total
  • 5 ethernet cables – over 70 feet total

An Exciting Week for Fojar

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“My life is all of a sudden difficult because fojar’s down…”
– Annie

Yes, it’s been an exciting week for Fojar. First, the virus crashes the router, cutting the connection, then Steve finds out that Fojar was hacked, necessitating a reinstall, and then he finds out that the ongoing downtime is the result of USWest deciding to delete that DSL account that Fojar is using.

And it’s been a busy week for me as well. Between trying to load fojar and my email every five minutes, I managed to get quite a bit of stuff done. I scanned some photos of Gavin, the one-year old Annie and I hung out with in Ellensburg all last year and posted them to my homepage. Then I succumbed to peer pressure and created a new hammerspace strip, so you can all stop sending me hate mail.

I also completed two “new” skins for Rusted. I put new in quotes because I actually made these designs two years ago for Hatelife v.1. They got implimented about a week before the crash that led to the creation of Hatelife v.2. One is a nice black-and-white design with lightweight graphics called “distress,” and the other is a colorful text-only design called “blue text.”

And, in case that wasn’t enough, I also have been working on my weekly art project. I’ll be getting it online pretty soon, but I wanted to show off the most recent piece. While looking at a photo of the three agents from the Matrix, I realized that I had head shots of Miles, Steve and myself at the right angles. A little photoshopping later, I managed to produce this lovely image of Agents Havelka, Johnson and Vandehey.

Agents

Operation: Portland

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All the pieces are falling into place. In a few months, I will be able to kick back with a cigar and proudly announce “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together!”

Yes, in just three weeks, I will be back in Portland, kicking ass and taking names (and living with my parents). Annie will be in Tacoma with her family, where she has a summer job babysitting, and is having minor surgery on her ear. Hopefully by the time her job starts in September, I will have found a cool job and a good place to live. So Operation: Portland is proceeding according to plan.

And the KillingMachines front is slowly but surely advancing. Every time I tell Steve what the next feature we need on KMorg is, he tells me there’s no way that will work with the existing code, and proceeds to make it work anyway. He’s like my own personal Scotty (from Star Trek). I’m working on the design features, and I’m hoping things will keep getting better every day in little ways until we’re running the BEST WEBSITE EVER.

And if that wasn’t enough, Studio Fojar might pick up again! Steve is very interested in finishing up a project, and when I get back to Portland I’m going to get back into it, and in addition, Urn is probably going to join our ranks! He’s interested in doing artwork and level design, which is exactly what we need!

Hooray for Fojar!

In Which We Shut Down Everyone's Accounts

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Earlier this week, we set up some new user accounts for people. We did this for a variety of reasons, but the main ones are that people have asked for accounts, and we wanted to try something new. Now, for another variety of reasons, we have shut down some of those accounts.

I was never entirely comfortable with the concept of giving away a bunch of admin accounts on the site, but we had received many requests, and one person in particular accused us of being “elitist,” and suggested that the site would never grow if it remained just the three of us. After talking with Steve about it for awhile, we decided to give accounts to a few people and see how it went.

This is where we got pretty nervous. We were basically giving up editorial control on the site, and we weren’t sure how it would go. To be honest, we didn’t like the way we saw the content level of the site was headed. The more we talked about it, the more I realized how unhappy I was that we had given out so many accounts. We finally came to the conclusion that a smaller number of accounts would be best, and so we left three accounts in place and shut down the rest.

I apologize to any of you who are put off by this decision, but it’s not going to change. This site is not now, nor was it ever intended to be, a large-scale community forum. We feel that retaining these three accounts will provide a nice counter-balance to us, while still maintaining a high level of quality in the posts.

One final thing I would like to point out is that this site is not a democracy. This decision is not open for debate. This is my site. I own the domain. If you don’t like the way I run my site, that’s too bad. I will do what I like with it. The reason I refer to “us” making decisions on the site is that I value Steve and Miles’ opinions, but the final decision on any matter on this site is mine.

I was absolutely stunned that some people felt it was acceptable to criticize the way we run this site, insult us personally and then demand a user account! I don’t owe any of you anything. If you like the way we run this site, that’s great. If you don’t, that’s just too goddamn bad. It’s my site and I’ll run it the way I want to.