Shyzer.com

I’ve been working on Shyzer for the past 8 hours and I just asked myself if I’m not sitting here wasting my time.

It looks like I’m gonna go with the Flickr Pro account. I actually installed the 4Images program I talked about earlier (here’s the demo on Shyzer I was playing with) and it works just fine, but the thought of uploading all the photos and thinking of captions and crap for them again simply was not an appealing thought. Plus it just doesn’t look right, what with the way the categories and photos are displayed. Plus, Flickr is so much cleaner and with the promise of no outside ads being run and unlimited storage / bandwidth, I think it’s the smartest decision. That’ll clear 600megs off my server and free that room up for some other things I’d rather share

I figure I may as well stay up all night at this point and keep working on Shyzer. My problem is that I have so many ideas and things that I want to try to do, that I fail to focus enough and get anything accomplished. Here’s to hoping I can finish at least one of these ideas by the end of the week and have something to show for it.

I’ve officially reached the end of my patience with the Shyzer Gallery software (which is oh-so-cleverly named Gallery) and am going to be ditching it. They came out with an “upgrade” back in September and frankly, the only thing it upgraded were the number of headaches their software would give me over the course of a week. I’ll spare you the mumbo-jumbo, but as it currently stands, it takes me 8 minutes to upload a single picture.

Eight minutes per fucking picture.

No thank you.

So, I’ve spent today backing up my pictures and am going to spend tomorrow moving over to something else. As of now, I am considering switching to either 4images, Coppermine, or pay $24.99 for a Flickr Pro account. I would go with one of the two free software, but they both could have me wanting to strangle myself just like Gallery has over the past few years. And while Flickr costs money each year, there are some cool plugins with Wordpress that I could use.

I thought about taking the damn pictures down altogether, but once I thought about it and looked at the stats, I actually realized how many people visit the darn things each day. So since people seem to enjoy them, I’ll keep them around - albeit in a new format - and anybody who wants to see me in a freaking dress at 0300 on a Tuesday morning will still be able to come to Shyzer and have a peek.

Shyzer’s new Christmas themed layout is up and by “Christmas themed layout,” I simply mean I grabbed a carton of egg nog, took a photo of it, and photoshopped a Santa hat on me.

Don’t even let it be said I forgot about Shyzer during the holidays!

You might have noticed that Shyzer’s been acting funny lately. Then again, maybe you haven’t been here in a few months and are thinking to yourself, “why the hell do I even come back to this place?” Either way, I know it’s been weird for some people and hopefully it’ll be settled out by tomorrow. I switched Shyzer’s IP to a new one and it basically just took a few days for the Internet to cycle through and notice the changes.

Sometime soon, I’m gonna clean some space off of Shyzer to make room for some new videos I’ve recorded lately. So, if you have any favorite movies or anything, you might want to DL them just in case I take them off Shyzer soon. They’ll always be available by request though.

Sorry for the short entry, but I’m tired and I’ve had a bit too much egg nog & rum. God I love the holidays. My rum & cokes are replaced with a seasonal beverage, Christmas music literally fills the house all day as my mom plays the same 6 CDs repeatedly, and Christmas decorations blanket the house. You can’t ask for more.

I’ve decided to go ahead and admit defeat. There’s no way I’ll be posting regularly here from Aussie seeing as how I’ve been here a week and posted a grand total of one time. So unless I find a computer while stumbling around drunk one night, don’t expect much more from Shyzer until November.

Thank God that’s over with…

As you can see, I’ve made some changes here at Shyzer Industries. During my final few days in Australia, I decided that when I got home, I wanted to give Shyzer a new layout. A few weeks later, I decided that I wanted to switch from MovableType over to Wordpress. Then last week, I decided I wanted to switch hosts. So, I figured why not do it all at once and kill three birds with forty-eight stones, because in all honesty the number of problems I ran into trying to do three major things like that at once made it such a bloody hassle.

But now it’s done and frankly, I enjoyed the challenge. Along the way, I learned quite a bit about MySQL databases, I picked up some php coding skills, and I became dangerously competent in Photoshop. I know, it’s frightening. And to think, it only took me staying up until 0900 every morning for the better part of a week to accomplish everything!

First off, this theme is centered around the images about. I use the plural version of image, because if you haven’t discovered this yet, it changes. Every time you reload or go to a new page on Shyzer, the image above will randomly change to any of the ones I have in a certain folder. At last count, there were 46 of them, but I’ll be adding to it as I come across more images that I find reflect the mood I’m looking for. And of course, I’m sure I’ll grow tiresome of some and delete them.

Basically, the inspiration came from this photo, which I fell in love with the moment I laid my bleary eyes upon it. The green on white struck me as beautiful at first, but then I began to love the idea of what was happening in the photo. In my mind, the guy in that picture up and decided to just pack a bag and take off. Hop on a train, let it carry you to an unexplored land, get off in the middle of the night, and just go where your feet carry you. I had that feeling when I was on the plane going to Australia almost eight months ago and it’s such a wonderful rush. It’s where I see myself right now too; poised to take yet another leap into the unknown and knowing absolutely nothing in the future is certain. I just can’t wait until I get to experience that new domain just over the horizon.

All of the photos I’ve used convey that feeling to me in one way or another. Some are of people actually traveling into the unknown. Others are of people dreaming about it. Or at least that’s what I like to fool myself into believing.

Not everything is fully functional on the site right now and Lord knows I have plenty of tweaking to do, but all the interactive stuff should be running. The search function should work, the tag board should work, the comments should work, all the link in the right column should work other than “Sub Pages.” But with that said, if you find anything screwy with the new layout, by all means let me know so that I can fix it. I’m 99% sure this layout works in Internet Explorer too, but dear God was that a battle. Seriously folks, you’d be doing me and yourself a huge favor if you’d just switch over to Firefox. But I digress.

[edit] I just found two things that don’t show up in IE, the horizontal bars separating the sections in the right column and . Damn you Microsoft, I hate your shitty products! [/edit]

Anyways, hope you enjoy the new look. Now I’m off to go catch some z’s before the rest of my family wakes up.

Shyzer will go offline sometime around Monday night - Tuesday morning and will be down for up to 24 hours. During that time, you may find that your life is empty without your favorite website, so I suggest you do one of the following Goob approved activities:

Go visit another site. There’s plenty to pick from down there on the lower left hand side of Shyzer.

Go have a rum & coke. They’re quite delicious.

Watch some baseball. There’s only a week left to go and even though my team is buried in the standings (Hello high draft pick for the second year in a row!), I am captivated by the playoff races. 10 teams are on the brink. Too bad there are only 6 ladies looking to dance. I love this time of year.

Make up a song. Sing it aloud. Loudly. While naked! Trust me, the naked part makes it fun.

If you’re not gonna drink that rum & coke, at least send it my way. Chances are I’m sitting here sweating bullets, trying to get Shyzer back on-line and configured correctly.

And if all else fails, get the fuck outside. It’s gorgeous here in Virginia right now and I’ve been happily spending my days outdoors doing manual labor. Fresh air is good for ya, you know?

See ya Tuesday evening folks.

Anybody who visited Shyzer yesterday around 1100 was most likely greeted by a simply splash page laced with profanity and obscene gestures (they were there, even if you couldn’t see them.) I was this close to calling it quits or at least to packing up Shyzer for a three month minimum hiatus. There was a potential database critical failure that I somehow led myself to believe had occurred and the prospect of losing 24 hours worth of work was not promising whatsoever. Throw in the fact that I had a website hacked the other day, thought it might be happening again with Shyzer, realized my backups were amazingly outdated and you can see why I pounded a few drinks this morning muttering “fuck it.” But all is well now, crisis averted, and Shyzer is here to stay, yada yada.

You might be asking yourself, “24 hours worth of work? What the hell are you talking about?” Well, skippy, go take a look at the archives. No, ignore the weird white line encompassing the page, I still I have no idea what’s causing that. Or why the Shyzer Blog logo in the archives is black or at the very least a dark gray. What you need to focus on instead is that I finally did what I was talking about a week or so ago. I’ve spent 7 or 8 hours per day for the past three days importing each and every bloody comment from Greymatter into MovableType. Why? Well, that will become a little more clear to y’all in the very near future =)

Doing this little endeavor, I learned a few things about Shyzer that I honestly didn’t know beforehand. Allow me to share.

• Somehow the baton for “Biggest Comment Whore” belongs to Angela, who has outright blown the competition out of the water for over two years now. Starting around March of ‘03, she just started commenting and hasn’t stopped. This is easily the biggest shocker to me; I had no idea how much she’d commented in all.
• Stan made three separate comments over the span of 6 months saying some variation of “This is the first time I’ve ever commented on Shyzer.” Well done, my boy.
• A total of 16 people have left comments linking to now defunct websites. Some of these people I remember from back in the day, others not so much. I tried going to their websites to see who they were, but I was either greeted with an “Error: Cannot find www.crappysite.com” or with some search engine from a company that goes around buying expired domains. And to think, Shyzer could have become #17.
• Fellner didn’t comment once before April 30th, 2004. Sax didn’t comment before April 14th, 2004. Jaime didn’t comment before August 25th, 2004. I’m not faulting any of them, I’m simply saying that in my head, I seem to remember all three of them commenting here on Shyzer since day one. I didn’t realize how many new people started commenting around the time I switched from Greymatter to MovableType. This also means that Fellner was beaten to commenting by LeeSill, who left his first comment on February somethingorother, 2004. Sucker.
• Some of the steadiest commenters have been Ally, Angel, Caitlin and Shipman, who all started commenting early and still do to this day. I figured Waynus or Clay might be in that group, but neither of them comment nearly as much as I thought they did.
• I didn’t realize much more than this, but I had already made this bullet, so I figured I should put something here. How about a fun statistical fact. I have over 150 comments. Angela has over 100. We’re the only two to crack triple digits.

Anyways, there you have it. 24 hours worth of mind numbingly boring work and that’s what I come up with.

The past few days I have spent hours upon hours working on my websites / computers. While in Australia, I brought along my family’s camcorder and captured some great footage that I wanted to share with the world. Unfortunately, when I tried to upload said footage to my computer, it froze. I restarted the computer, it froze. I went to the bathroom, it froze. I cursed to the Gods above and it…….that’s right folks, it froze. I have no idea what’s going on, but we here at Shyzer Industries refuse to let something as simple as complete and total hardware malfunction stand in our way of bringing you sub-quality material that you force yourself to even chuckle at. Give me another day or two and hopefully I’ll have it worked out.

Also, as I was going to upload some pictures in the gallery, I was told that I needed to upgrade my software. I was promised that it would be “Smooth, fast, and easy!” so I went ahead and hit the upgrade button. SIX HOURS LATER I opened my window, was greeted by a rising sun, and screamed at the top of my lungs that I was quitting the Internet.

Alas, I managed to complete the upgrade and even more astounding, upload a few hundred pictures. First off, there’s the pirate party that Dutch Dave and Luke threw right before we all left Newcastle. Dutch was returning to Europe and Luke was moving away, so they figured why not throw a going away party? I simply had fun running around with a pirate hat on my head screaming “ARRRRRG!”

Next we have my pictures from the Sydney Farewell Trip that Hannah, Keeley, Simon, Tim, and Tom accompanied me on. My plane left early Thursday morning, so in order not to miss it, we all went down Wednesday morning, goofed off in Sydney all day and night, and then went to the airport the next morning.

From there we move onto some family pictures. As soon as I left Australia, I met up with my family in Minnesota to spend the 4th of July with them. If you remember, Tommy and I went up there last year for the 4th to hang with our aunt, uncle, and nephew, but this year my mom, Jeff, and all my siblings joined us.

And finally, some pictures from graduation as well as a few other random shots. From now on, I’m going to be sticking random family pictures in this category.

Next on the agenda for Shyzer is getting these videos uploaded, updating the cast pages, converting all the old GreyMatter posts into MovableType and THEN upgrading to Wordpress. After that, might I dream of making a new layout?! Of course, my every other three days ranting will go on in-between all this!

Actually, I take that back. I already have a post typed up for tomorrow about how I caused Hurricane Katrina. Bet you’ll never be able to guess how!

I just lost a 1,000 word entry due to my own stupidity. I copied the post, deleted it from the document since I no longer needed it, went to upload it, got distracted by something else and copied four little funny jokes to e-mail to a friend. After e-mailing them, I went to paste my post and was greeted with…

Four jokes that are not so funny anymore.

Anyways, the gist of the post was, “Hey look, there’s some new music down in the RadioBlog.” It’s been what, 65+ days since I updated it last? Yeah, sorry bout that. The countdown from 100 to zero has also been placed on hold until I can get my other websites off the ground.

The music selection down there is quite random, but I’ve been listening to that playlist on repeat for the past week or so. The Vanessa Carlton is a poppy little tune, the Thirsty Merc is some Australian music, the Hootie is from their new album (and is the best song of the bunch IMHO), the Gorillaz is a song my siblings and I absolutely adore, the DMB is folksy and off the top of his head, the All-American is…well, funny to listen to when you realize what they’re singing about, and the Alexi is a sweet and breezy tune.

Like I said, it’s late and I’m tired. I’m getting up bright and early with the kids tomorrow to get them on the school buses, so I need my rest. However, I have some massive updates planned for Shyzer that shall be uploaded tomorrow / technically today / whenever I wake up from my nap / whatever you want to call it. Until then…