Well, it had only been four years!

I was cleaning out a closet the other day, and was surprised to find many of the innards for my old PII 450 machine (c. 1998). All I needed to resurrect it was a power supply and a hard drive. $70 and two days later (I love newegg), I had her up and running.

This, of course, provided me with a new ISA-slot-equipped home for my Roland LAPC-1 and Roland SCC-1 MIDI cards. So, I took this opportunity to make some recordings and update the Ultima Digital Music Archive (UDMA) with an entry for Ultima Online.

At some point, I do hope to upload some recordings from Ultima Underworld as well as Ultima VIII: Pagan (game was terrible. But music was great!).

Yes, the UDMA is still there. On the right under “Defunct Geekery.”

No, my wife doesn’t understand. Bless her.

Howdy All.

Well, shortly after getting the ol’ site looking less like crap, I noted that WordPress 2.0 had been released.  So, well, the site looks like crap again.  Apparently, making the site look like crap again was a necessary step in performing the upgrade.

Well, I’m embarrassed that the site has gone so long with the default WordPress skin. I was always quite proud of the custom design I did for Dor-lomin v2.0. So, it’s somewhat disappointing to me that Dor-lomin v3.0 looks like poop.

So, to make myself feel better, here’s a screenshot of what the site used to look like. Perhaps seeing this every day or so will motivate me to work on getting my WordPress skin built.

We’ve moved to a server that provides me fifteen times more server space as well as MySQL and PHP. This new server only costs $7.95/month whereas the old server cost $25/month for less space and bandwidth and the old one would have charged a lot more for MySQL and PHP. Here, it’s just included for a lot less.

I should have done this years ago.

I’m taking this opportunity to kill off some seldom-used areas of the site and I’m also obviously giving WordPress a whirl. I’ll miss the old site layout as it was a custom design by yours truly (using notepad!) and made use of some nice artwork by friends and online aquaintances. But, WordPress is amazing. Once I got the old GreyMatter posts imported, I found about twenty spams in the comments almost instantly and deleted them very easily. I never would have found them (and deleting them would have been a pain) with GreyMatter.

The power of WordPress continues to impress me. But I obviously need to give its templates some work as soon as I brush up on CSS and the template formats.

Though there’s a lot new, please note the “Defunct Geekery” links to the side. I didn’t want to quite get rid of it all.

Though I have no idea why I upgraded other than so I can do this. .

🙂

I was looking for an email, and I found this dialogue from the Simpsons in a an email to a friend. I wish the show were still this good on a regular basis:

Marge: “You changed your name to Max Power?”

Homer: “Yes, dynamic isn’t it?

Bart: “I love it Max!”

Marge: “But how will the mailman know what to do with your mail? Did you think of the mailman before you did this?”

Homer: “Yes, briefly.”

Marge: “But what about the tatoo on my ‘you know where’?”

Homer: “Oh Marge, they have acids that can burn that off!”

Marge: “But I fell in love with Homer Simpson. I don’t want to snuggle with Max Power.”

Homer: “Nobody snuggles with Max Power! You strap yourself in and FEEL THE G-s!”

Marge: “Good Lord!”

Well, I just upgraded the back-end here to Greymatter v1.21d. Thankfully, I lost no data and everything appears to be working correctly. Please notify me of any odd behavior!

The Ultima Digital Music Archive now includes Ultima VII: The Black Gate & Serpent Isle.

Those of you who have lives will not know what I’m talking about. Good for you!

For those of you with a more geek-ish bent, I have udated the Ultima Digital Music Archive.

The Ultima VI archive is currently the only one available. However, I have re-recorded all the MP3s so that they are now clearer and louder. They now also loop properly rather than fading out. Finally, it was brought to my attention that “Engagement & Melee” was missing from the archive. It is now provided. Enjoy!

Some more good news about the archive. I recently received more space from my web host. So, I should have room to post at least a few more archives. Ultima VII: The Black Gate/Serpent Isle is next. Followed (probably) by Ultima Underworld.

Ultima VII is perhaps the best music ever done on the Roland LAPC-1 and really shows off what it could do. Much moreso than Ultima VI.

Things are operating pretty smoothly since the upgrade. However, you may notice some aesthetic changes as well as intermittent outages while I continue to tweak things.