The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

So you might have noticed that I haven’t posted here for four months or so.  I’ve been doing my posting back over at my LiveJournal page, mostly because I was tired of comment spam.  But I still have things I want to do with this site, and keeping the current WordPress setup is easier than starting from scratch again.  I am not a website designer, it seems.  Anyway, don’t expect any kind of strict adherence to this, at least not right away, but eventually you’re going to get “real” content over here, posts with substance and whatnot, while all the random braindumps will still go over on LiveJournal.  I’ve also disabled all commenting over here… email me if you really want to say something.  I like email, I swear!

A month-long trip to France is, looking back on it, a massive shift in life.  I’m having a hard time remembering what regular life is supposed to be like, now that I’m back in Davis.  It’s been a good four days or so since we landed back in the US of A, and things still aren’t even close to back to normal.  The cats, luckily, forgave us pretty rapidly for abandoning them with friends for a month, so at least they’re doing their usual catty things.  The fish are still with a friend in the South Bay, and will be collected this weekend, when we go away from home for another few days.  Yay for fish and pageant events, I suppose.  We’ve spent these past few days taking care of a bunch of random things… money issues, food shopping, pet supplies and rehabilitation….  We did take a little time out to rent and watch Little Miss Sunshine (Lauren Shiohama, who plays the minor role of Miss California, deserves a great, big, hearty YO.), but that’s been about it for relaxation.  Aside from a three-hour stint of World of Warcraft and a go-karting outing with Ryan and James, for me.

I guess it never ends, really, having tons of things what need doin’.  We’re going back down to the South Bay again this weekend in order to see friends there, work a pageant event, and pick up the fish from Anne’s.  The house is still a mess, mail still needs to be sorted through and taken care of, a kitchen still needs to be cleaned and partially restocked….  We’re receiving a goldfish (set to be christened Lieutenant Tasha Yar, Chief of Security) who will need to be settled in.  After that, I can get started getting the motorcycles back up to decent running spec (new tires for Faye, new… uh… functioning for April), wash the cars and do some oil changes and other maintenance, read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows….

I’ve also got about 1100 photos from our France journey to sort through and upload and such.  I’m thinking about doing a daily retrospective on the trip, illustrated, of course, over the next month.  I was going to start immediately upon our return, but I think I’m going to set myself to start it on Tuesday.

Finally, a small administrative note… the blogs of Dani and James, both good friends of mine in the real world, have been added to the Links page.  Hi, guys!

I just had a pretty decent game of Supreme Commander with Ryan… us against two Supreme AI.  We got creamed in short order the first time, but got our revenge the second time, with the assistance of T1 bomber-rushing on one of the two AI to take him out of the running early.  The rest of the game amounted to us stalling the other AI with suicidal base attacks while teching up, taking his infrastructure apart with T3 artillery, and striking targets of opportunity with T3 strategic bombers and T3 gunships.  We may suck (especially me) compared to serious SupCom players, but it’s fun for us!  I managed not to let my base stagnate this time around… usually I start forgetting to build upon reaching T3… I’ll set a bunch of things with long build times going, and then I’ll forget all about my base and run around like a maniac with a small group of units, get them killed, get my base attacked, and sit back until I die or Ryan saves me.

The Transformers trailer… wow.  It looks like it’ll be a fun action movie (as expected of Michael Bay), with no substance whatsoever.  And forget about adhering to the source material… Megatron isn’t a gun, and you can’t even tell what any of them are supposed to be when they’re in humanoid form.  Half the fun of the old Transformers was that you had a robot with distinctly recognizable car (or whatever) parts as arms and legs.   Bumblebee as a new Camaro, though, I can live with that.  And Megan Fox… I’d like to have a relationship all over her face.

The Alvin Maker books (Orson Scott Card) are pretty good, as expected of Card.  I’m going into the fifth book (Heartfire) soon.  My favorite character so far has been the judge who presided over Alvin’s trial… pity he didn’t get a bigger part.  Judicial pwnage ftw!

It looks like we’re not having that comment contest, since nobody seems interested.

Oh, and I’m now officially enrolled at Wyotech, in their chassis and powertrain program.  I start in October.  Nine months of eating and breathing cars, and doing terrible things to make them go faster.  You can bet Faye won’t come out of it stock.

First things first.  I’ll be installing the newest version of WordPress soon, so if anything breaks, I’m sorry.

Now, then.  I’m thinking of running a contest over the next couple of weeks to try and drum up some comments on the site.  I’ve got a pair of $25 Banana Republic shopcards I can use as prizes, valid through June 20th.  I was thinking that I’d give one out for the 100th comment (we’re currently around 20), and the other for the most entertaining or thought-provoking comment.  I’d probably let the contest go through the end of May, and then mail off the cards to whoever wins, and if nobody wins one or both cards, I’ll just use it or them myself.  :D  What do you guys think?  A strong showing of comments on this entry will convince me to run the contest.

I switched the site theme to Almost Spring by Beccary.  It seemed like time for a change, and the new theme copes with 500px wide images, which I use often, better than the old.  One of these days I’ll be arsed to figure out my own custom theme for the site… or not.

I poked around the site’s info pages… made tiny changes to the About Us and Our Pets pages, updated the Alliance Vehicles page with current information on the Ninja, and started putting up a few new links on the Links page… nothing big.  Just trying to build some momentum on adding content to the site. 

The Links page now has some links, with more to come.  I also made the main column here 50px wider, to accomodate images autoresized by Flickr.  Now the sidebar stuff is a little too close to the main content… I’ll fix that when I figure out how.  That’s what I get for not actually knowing HTML and CSS!

The About Us page has been updated with a new picture, hopefully less blurry, and some links… nothing exciting, though. The Alliance Vehicles page has been updated with a small bit of new information. The Our Pets page has been updated with a bunch more pictures, in hopes of making this a legitimate blog! Finally, the couple of links I had in the sidebar have been removed. A Links page has been added, which is currently blank, but will be updated with links soon. The idea is to make this page my own Internet portal, with easy access to all of my own favorite pages and forums, which hopefully will also invigorate the update process for readers.

The Alliance Vehicles page has been created and updated with information about Eug’s vehicles.  The future will bring Alice’s car, as well as other interesting vehicles Eugene is involved with or has wrenched on.

The Nook has finally been reinitialized! It has now become the Franco-Taiwanese Alliance, to reflect current events.

Welcome! Try not to break anything, please.