confectionary malfunction

this is your rig on sugarcubes

Archive for October, 2010

calgary ahoy

Oct 27

Posted by kiki in life, travel | Comments off

I landed just fine in Calgary last night. I think the city knew I was coming because this morning there’s a healthy dusting of snow over everything.

Each time I come back the city looks a little more different. Even the downtown skyline isn’t one I recognize any more. It’s strange, turning down familiar streets and seeing unfamiliar landmarks shoulder-to-shoulder with the old. I mean, that happens everywhere– Toronto is notorious for new shops vanishing within a handful of months of opening– but it’s different to see it happening in the place I still call home.

Differences aside, the traditional Albertan friendliness hasn’t changed, and that’s something I definitely miss, living in TO.

I’m still getting over the fact that I have a whole week off. I know Banff is on our list, and I’m actually going to visit more folks than just Trez and her kin this time around, but I’m really looking forward to taking my 7D out and seeing what I can see.   

today’s collected inspiration

Oct 17

Posted by kiki in animation, japan | Comments off

I have a soft spot for stories where tiny people meet and make friends with us regular humans. Arrietty the Borrower is looking good. Trailer says: “This is the story of the coming together and coming apart of a ten-centimeter tall girl and a young boy” (or something close to that effect).

Not to mention, ゲド戦記 (Tales of Earthsea) was also finally released recently, although I didn’t see it up for viewing anywhere near me. I’ll have to wait for the Blu-ray on that one.

Another animated thing I’m excited for is the new 3D Le Petit Prince. I hear it’s 26 episodes, and that in each episode he goes somewhere completely different (odd and exotic for a 3D TV show, seeing as that’s a lot of built-out). There’s a bit of art here.

fully functional?

Oct 11

Posted by kiki in gaming, life | Comments off

Seems like everything is finally working!

The move over to Dreamhost was not without its bumps with regards to WordPress. I made the mistake of thinking that the “backup” tool was what I needed; turned out it spit out an unusable SQL database dump. Export was what I wanted but by the time I’d figured that out my site URL was already pointing at its new home. It took me a good chunk of yesterday and all morning today to find a workaround, which involved editing the old SQL database by hand, but now all my old WordPress posts have transferred and everything is working again.

My friend Mike has been a Dreamhost customer for years; possibly for as long as I’ve known him. He’s never had any complaints, and as particular as he can be about technology (not as particular as myself, mind) I thought that him being a satisfied customer was the highest compliment a company can be paid. As is always true when he gets me to try something new, either directly or indirectly, I am not disappointed. There were so many things I wanted to do with my old Yahoo hosting where I was told either it wasn’t possible or it wasn’t something they were interested in supporting; all those limitations are now gone with Dreamhost. Plus, hey, I get a shell account with Emacs again!

This site’s going to be changing. I’ve spent most of this year figuring out what I want to do and how I want to accomplish those goals; I hope that the coming months see me with more time to do just that. I’m going to start by talking more about gaming in general. In particular, I want to start writing game reviews again. I think the last time I did so was three or four blogs / hosting services back. Reviewing games is good for understanding how games work, or moreover, how and why they fail. I might start with Mirror’s Edge soon as I can find the time to finish it.

moving house

Oct 10

Posted by kiki in Uncategorized | Comments off

This is just a parker post for the moment. I’ve just upgraded from Yahoo to Dreamhost.  I’ve disabled the link on the main page.  It turns out that the SQL backups WordPress sends aren’t as easy to restore from. ^_^;