Golden Anvil

As you can probably tell, the new server is up and running. Everything is nice and fast now. There might still be a few residual issues. I need a new router, because my current one keeps needing to be rebooted, so that could prevent you from getting to the server. Also I still have a bit more work to do in order to get everything transfered to the new machine. While I'm doing that, issues might prevent me from having the server up at all times.

Still, things are getting close, and things are definitely better now than they were. Enjoy!

Some of you might be wondering who this SaberSnail person is. Well, it's me, Kheldar. A new year brings with it a new name, and for my first post I figured I would explain the new name.

It started when I purchased a new game, StarCraft II. This is a popular real-time-strategy game, and it was my intention to not just play the single player campaign, but also to participate in some multi-player online battles. This was helped a lot by the fact that 3 others at work also bought the game. We ended up playing together for a while, and had a lot of fun.

Welcome back everyone. Sorry about the server down time. I forgot to post a warning ahead of time until what was likely way too late for most of you, so this all probably came as a surprise. Oh well, it's over with now. It would have been back up sooner, but I forgot to change one setting, and that delayed things by a day.

On the plus side, my server will now dump data to you at a 10 Mbit rate. That probably won't be particularly noticeable here on the blogs and forums, will should definitely be noticeable on the photo gallery. It should also help in cases where a bunch of people are on the ventrillo server at the same time. Anyway, so hopefully that'll be nice.

Part of this change was that we dropped our regular phone line (now that we're on fiber optic), and switched to cell phones. So, send me an email if you didn't get an email with the new numbers (and actually want to know my new phone number).

I'm getting a new IP address sometime today. That likely means that the server will not be accessible until the IP address and name resolution get all synched up. So, if you get some kind of dead page trying to get to anything on this site, that's most likely why.

Welcome to the new year everyone. As some of you already know, this is the start of GABloPoMo (Golden Anvil Blog Posting Month). What this means is that I have challenged the members of this site who have blog posting privileges (essentially just members of my extended family) to post every day this month. To help encourage this, I even offered two levels of prizes, one if someone posts every single day, and one if they manage four times a week.

So, expect a lot more activity in the blogs this month. However, because blogs can be posted with various permission levels, you may not see a blog post every day from the regular posters. They may still be on track to win the pize though.

I wanted to pass along a few tips to help in using this website.

• The sidebar contains a "Recent posts" link. Use that link to see a list of any changes that have been made recently. This will list new posts as well as new comments, and includes a link to take you directly to the new post or comment.
• Feel free to comment on any of the blog entries. Posts that you can see have been intentionally made visible to allow others to read and (if desired) participate in any feedback. This is intended to be a web site not just for my family, but also for friends of my family.

I'll leave this post stickied for a while. I may eventually take it down and replace it with an FAQ page.

Well, welcome everyone to the brand new Batishko web site. Most everything should be up and running properly, but please feel free to contact me if there are problems with anything. The easiest way to do that if you don't know my email is to leave a message in the Meta forum. Feel free to post there too if you have any suggestions on improving things. Anyway, I hope to see you all back here often.

Well, with the new year firmly arrived, it's time to get back in the habit of writing blog entries. My objective is to have 2-3 posts per week. We'll see how long that keeps up.

It's been a nice vacation, and I'm not particularly looking forward to going back to work. Mostly I've had the chance to read, watch some movies, and play some games.

Still, I've found some time to begin preparations for a roleplaying game I've been planning to play with Sareth. It'll be a mixed political/action game where Sareth plays a prince who is trying to recover his birthright. I'll be using the Reign system, which I recently discovered. This system has rather interesting rules to handle characters who lead or are part of a large organization.

The problem here is that I get busy with stuff, so I don't feel like taking the time to blog. Then when I do have time to write, I feel like I have a big bucket of stuff that I need to blog. So, that just delays things more.

New idea.

No more rambles when I'm behind. Instead, I'm going to try and post shorter blogs about just a single topic. That should help me post more often, and may lead to be staying more current with things.

Now I just need some kind of list to keep track of the things I want to blog about...

Topic for next time: Where does my time go?

Well, as you may or may not recall, in a comment on my first post I was wondering how often I'd be updating after the first month had gone by...

Look, I'm still here!

That bodes well. Now we'll just have to see if I can keep it up for another month.

What's that? Why aren't I playing Vanguard? Well, actually I just got on a couple minutes ago, and it crashed. I'm taking that as a sign, and I'm going to get some other stuff done today. Maybe get some reading done a little later.

For now, I do need to do some planning for tomorrow's RPG session. I need to come up with an interesting twist or two in order to keep the plot interesting. Since I'm not used to the whole WWII superheroes genre, I feel like I'm struggling to come up with an interesting story. Mrs. Kheldar assures me that she's having fun, but I'm thinking that she's biased.