Well hey, would ya’ look at that? My site’s working again =o) Yeah, I know, there are some missing pages, broken links, and areas of the site that simply don’t work at all, but it’s starting to all fall back in place again. I had so much to talk about, but now I can’t think of anything… so I’ll just start off with what I did today and how I got to the place I am right now (curious?)

check this baby out! As it turns out, I ended up not frying my little LCD like I had previously thought. It turns out I was just trying to hook up the darn thing from an incorrectly written circuitry schematic for the whole LCD. Anyway, I finally got it working pretty well. All the scripts (for unix) that I find that’re written for the (really fast) lcdmod driver are for 16×2 screens and mine is 40×2. After a little bit of time picking at the code, I finally discovered how it worked, and was able to write a plugin for xmms (like winamp, for uinix-type oses) that showed the songtitles on the top row of my lcd, and a TWENTY BAND VISUAL EQUALIZER on the bottom row! The original code only supported six bands, I modified the code for twenty! Sweet! Here it is pictured for you. Once again, I set the exposure time to about half a second, so it looks a little flushed. The text is dark black and not see-through, unlike the picture suggests.

This morning I went to school (it’s a Tuesday, I have school on Tuesday, in case you’ve forgotten already) I had a test in my stupid little Music Appreciation class… I dont think I did well on it X_x I am pretty sure I got a B… if he grades on a 1-point curve, I’ll get an A… but I know that won’t happen. /sigh/ At least I know what I need to get on the final test now to pull an A in this course. Stupidity… the dumbest class I’m taking I’m getting the worst grade in… Allrighty then. After that, I went to comp II class where I gave a presentation about a dumb little poem. It was a ‘group project’ and the class was split into groups of three. I lucked out because my group had only two people in it. This made it easier, because I was able to work with Huy (the other person in my group) and get the project done relatively quickly with a pretty good (in our opinion) final result. However, today there was a little messup… Huy and I made a powerpoint file a week ago at school. Huy modified it and emailed it on Sunday. I modified that and put it on a disk so we could show it today… but Huy brought his own disk and he said he modified it after he emailed it to me. Well crap! Luckily, I had my trysty ‘ol laptop in my backpack and I was able to whip it out as class was starting. Talk about a crazy race against time ^_^:; We got a halfway merged project and popped it on a disk and threw it in the projector. The thing went pretty well, but we went over our time (15 mins) and I think that might seriously hurt our grade… An interesting (bad) thing about this project is that a large chunk of our grade comes from the students in our class. It’s one of those dumb peer evaluation things. Yuk. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out. I just ate lunch and studied/reviewed for a math test for the few hours I had… I then went to the math class only to find there was a blue note on the door saying class was cancelled and the test would be next class. So, here I am, in the library for another hour and a half, waiting for the next class to start. Currently, the class will start in exactly 48 minutes from the time I type the period at the end of this sentence. (whoa, that was freaky)

I’ve ranted on this already, but I’ll give a formal explination on the topic of why my site’s been down for the last week. As you can see from the chart beside this text (if I remember to put it in after I write this paragraph) I have spent a lot of time worrying over this most stuid of issues. Here’s the deal. I started getting so many people going to my site that the bandwidth they took up was starting to significantly strain the little crappy internet connection that I was running my servers on. For those of you who have been in a coma for the last six months, I host(ed) my own website with my own computers in my own room on my own internet connection. It was awesome. I had complete control over my website and its computers and was able to do almost anything with them. I had my website tied into shared drives/folders on my network and modifying my website was a breeze. Also, since it was just a normal computer, I had hundreds of gigs of space to work with for my website (storing only legitimate and open source software, of course ^_-). The downside? The speed of my website was limited by the speed of my own home internet connection. My ISP (roadrunner) caps upload bandwidth to only 40k a second, causing someone viewing my website to have to wait about ten seconds for it to load completely. When there was more than one person viewing my site at one time, this amount of time would increase a lot and appear slower for everyone who’d view my site. In short, I made friends with an awesome guy who just so happened to be the familymember of a guy who owns a hosting company in NY and when we started becoming friends he got me hooked up with an awesome server of my own on some mega-fast internet connection lines. (technical jargon: dual oc3 lines, fiber optic internet, somewhere around 551 megabytes of upload bandwidth per second). Durring the time I was transitioning from the servers in my room to the servers at the professional hosting company, I had to change the domain name (scottishot.com)’s settings so it’d point to the new server. Durring this time, it’d work for some people, and not for others… and I don’t feel like writing this anymore. I’ll just say that it normally takes about 12 hours, is supposed to take no longer than 72 hours, and it took me over 150 hours X_x Durring that time, I couldn’t even view my own website. I just had to sit and wait… so, there ya’ go.

This gives me an idea… I like to think (wishfully?) that I know a little about computer stuff. If I took over three days of work to get this LCD to work because of all the poorly written documentation for the thing, imagine how hard it would be for a newbie (no offense) to do!? You see, lots of my ‘friends’ have been IMing me lately saying they’re going to be buying a LCD to playwith and/or getting one for Christmas, and I know how tough these things are to set up from the lack of GOOD documentation! Now that I got mine working and know how easy it really is, I think I might start writing a few pages (with pictures) showing how to set up a lcd screen like mine. From there, I could post sourcecode for plugins for different apps (gaim? Xmms? Mail programs? Standaloners?) that could get people kickstarted into writing software. Add some more projects, examples, tips, tricks, and maybe even a forum, and I think it could turn into a really useful website that lots of people could go to to get help. What do you think? If I wanted to make some profit, maybe I could sell kits with all the stuff you need and a printed-out doc… or possibly even a video on how to set it up? (dvd?) Oh how fun the ideas are to think of. What about AimPoo? I don’t give a crap. (haha, crap, get it?)

I saw the ‘official’ Animatrix collection yesterday. It wasn’t really great when it comes to any incredible storylines or really intelligent dialogues, but I’ll admit, some of the surrealistic scenery and camera angles made it really cool. The Animatrix distributed dvd is just a collection of short films that people drew and/or computer-rendered. The picture by this post is of a girl in one of the shorts. From what I’m to understand, they took the body of Aki Ross from the movie Final Fantasy and gave her Asian features for this little film. I almost passed out when she blinked =oD The way they animated her eyes were awesome ^_^;;;;; ok I need to move on before I get myself in trouble.

Yes, my dad pulled in the garage forgetting there was a tree on top of the car. Luckily, nothing bad happened, but I had a hard time keeping from bursting out laughing XD I thought it was the funniest thing, and had to take a picture. Oh boy, the Christmas memories and stores I’ll share with my grandchildren… I tell ya.

Ok, well, I’d best be off. I’m going to need a few minutes to fix the images after making this post =o) I’ll most tonight (maybe?) and/or definitely tomorrow. It’s nice to talk to all of ya’ again. I’ll be working hard to bring this site back up, but the progress will be slow, and you still might get broken links and/or images here and there, so work with me. Thanks for your understanding =o) –Scott

note: this post is seventeen hundred words X_x

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