It’s been a crazy week and I haven’t been at the computer much; sorry for lack of updates, and I’ll write something more detailed when I have time.  I’ve been working since 6am today however, and it’s 11:40pm and I have at least another 3-4 hours of work left to do, before attempting to take the weekend off.

Anyway although it’s been a busy day, I took some time out to buy myself a new phone.  I’ve had a shitty phone history - every phone I’ve had ends up breaking.  Some because they are poorly made(3 fucking Razrs), some because I’m an idiot(sure I’ll respond to this text message in the pouring rain), and others because I let my son play with it when he was 2, and he drooled all over it.

Last year I bought a Japanese Iphone knockoff, and it sucked.  The touch screen keyboard was useless as a child would have problems keying stuff on it.  The navigation etc sucked too, and overall it was just a piece of shit.

I kept putting off buying a new phone.  I was debating with going with another Razr just so I could text again, or waiting for a new iPhone or something to come out.  However I’ve been thinking a lot about my life lately, and the fact that I don’t get out anywhere near as much as I used to.  A large reason for that is because I hate going places because if I am away for a few hours the e-mails etc can pile up.  Worse, I pride myself in customer service, and if someone e-mails me saying “Hey I signed up for Full Tilt Rakeback” I want to be able to respond to them within an hour or so max.  In the rakeback industry, customer service is the one thing that can really make you stand out over other sites.

So yeah - I went for one of these:

That is a Blackberry Bold and will hopefully make my life a lot fucking easier.  I managed to get a good Rogers Rep on the phone, and got it for just $250.  It’ll also be at least $50 a month which is a bit meh, but it should make life a lot fucking easier.  No more will I have to go to the computer during commercial breaks to see if any e-mails have came in, etc.

I’ve been aching for a Blackberry for awhile.  I actually bought one a few years ago(around the time I had Scotsmanality Deux just started) but returned it within a day as I didn’t want it.  Really at that time I just didn’t fucking need it.  Now I am pretty sure it is going to be one of those things that within a week, I will wonder what I did without it.

Anyway more luck to do - but I am excited about the Blackberry yay!  It should arrive next Wed-Friday.

So today was shitty for the most part.  I got a lot of key work done in the morning, and Risto was off work and asked if I wanted to play some Rainbow 6 Vegas 2.  I said sure no problem, give me 30 minutes to write an Aced.com Poker Affiliate Program Review for the Poker Affiliate Bible.  So I do that with about 5 minutes to spare, tell Risto to fire up the XBox, post the article to my site….

….and everything fucks up.

Suddenly when you would visit the site, it wouldn’t load, then would time out.  So I enlisted the help of Frank, my go to guy for techy stuff.  So the two of us start brainstorming.  There’s no easy way to see what the problem is, so we start by eliminating all problems.  First I upgrade Wordpress.  Still broken.  Next I upgrade all plugins manually.  Still broken, one hour gone.  I remember I installed eaccelerator recently, so we remove that, recompile apache - still busto.

After testing out a few different things, we finally narrowed it down to it being a specific theme/design issue.  Okay great.  After a bit more work, we figure out it’s in the functions.php file, and narrow it down to the code which posts excerpts for password protected categories.  Some other issues crop up, but we manage to fix them all finally.  This took about three fucking hours, and it ruined my day.  After this was done, I told the wife I was going out for a bit, grabbed my coat and just headed the fuck out, feeling really pissed off at the world.

I caved and bought a pack of smokes and this made me feel better.  I headed up to Blockbuster to rent COD World on War, and saw Halo Wars there.  Craving a good RTS, and going on the recommendation of Nateeasy, I rented it.  Came home feeling emotionally drained, went for a shower, got into my PJs, and felt a lot better.  Relaxed and watched the Celebrity Apprentice with the wife, as my day turned around.

Then with the wife up in bed, I was busy finishing off a few work related things, when I remembered Halo Wars.  I put it on just to try it out and HOLY SHIT - it’s everything I want in an RTS.  Nice and simple, easy to navigate etc, nothing too dumb in it - I fucking love it, and am ready to buy it and all I have did is play one skirmish.

Anyway yay - that’s put me in a great mood, so now I am off to bed, and then tomorrow I’ll be back to conquer the world.  Fuck I feel good.

I bought my son a Norcent X1A5 Digital Camera a few months back.  In January, it wouldn’t work.  The lens was open a bit, and when I turned the power on it would give me three beeps, the light would come on, then the camera would turn back off.  I googled around for a solution, however all I saw were people with the same troubleshooting issue.

I wasn’t able to return it to the store, and Norcent have went bankrupt, so I was unable to get it repaired under the manufacturer warranty.  However I recently discovered what the problem was and how to fix it.

Basically - the lens is jammed.  It’s because of the piece that goes around the lens glass which states what type of lens it is etc.  It’s a little bit too big, and jams it.  So what i did was take it off - this was very easy, I put pliers around the base, yanked at it a few times and boom, the plastic piece comes off, and it is now working again.

So if you’re having the same problem try that, and it should fix it.  Here’s a picture of what it looks like after the fact:

About 2 hours ago I ordered a 16GB USB key, and a 1TB External Drive off NCIX - just got the e-mail that it was shipped already!  That was fucking fast.

If you’ve ever run a website, no doubt you’ve had to use an FTP program at one time or other. From when I first started using them, I used WS_FTP.  This was a great program for awhile, however by the time we entered this century it started to show its age.  A few years ago I decided to switch.  I tried out pretty much all FTP Programs out there, including the likes of CuteFTP and SmartFTP.

I finally settled on, and paid for FlashFXP.  It was a great program, very fast and slick.  However lately I’ve had a lot of problems with it - mainly when it came to overwriting files.  It has a “technology” in it where you can upload 10 files, and if 1 of the files currently existing on the server is the same as the one you’re uploading, it’d skip it.  Great idea in theory - but the formula it used was basically “IF NEW FILE SIZE = OLD FILE SIZE THEN SKIP” which sucked if you had made a minor change.  Like if you had changed your password from “1234″ to “5678″ on a wordpress config file - yep, it’d skip that.  And then it started forgetting the formula, and just plain refusing to overwrite.  I even told it to overwrite every fucking time, and I still got that _ files skipped message after every transfer.

So I went out again looking for the best FTP Program, and I finally found FileZilla.  Seriously, if you need an FTP program switch to FileZilla.  The interface is smooth, and it does everything you want while remaining very simplistic.  Oh plus it is open source(and thus free), and those sort of projects should ALWAYS be supported.  So if you’re looking for the best FTP program, get Filezilla.

I should note - I don’t earn anything for plugging them or anything.  I just like to throw in my support when I find a quality program like that.