What a morning. I woke up sometime between 7:15 and 7:30 … a little late but well within my “no need to panic” window.

I grabbed a diet coke, checked my email, and loaded up one of my favorite web sites. This process usually takes about 10-15minutes and would put me firmly into the “ok, I gotta hustle” window.

I probably shouldn’t have spent the time required for this little morning ritual, but I was up rather late last night and I needed the diet coke badly (in fact having had it, now a few hours later, I’m in desperate need of more of it).

Anyhow, at about the time I expected to look at my watch and see 7:30 perhaps even 7:45 … I looked at my watch and saw 8:40!

I’m pretty sure I didn’t fall asleep at my desk, but whatever happened, having just rolled out of bed I was now in the “ok I need to be hailing a cab” window.

I was a bit later than normal into work, but only by 15minutes or so … it’s amazing how quickly someone can get out the door when they have to.

Well I hope you all had a great weekend, found alot of eggs, ate one perhaps two – and maybe even three – chocolate bunnies, and are ready for another week … for another week is upon us.

I also hope that you all have taken advantage of the DavidMeade.com Claims Department. So far it’s worked quite well and we’ve had about 6 users claim over one hundred pieces of content! It’s going well enough that I may not even need to run phases two or three at all!

My email appears to be working again, and it’s been a banner weekend of web development here. DavidMeade.com and DougMeade.com have both enjoied some significant improvements to the back-end systems that run each site. I’m really excited about some new content I’m going to be able to provide if the development here continues according to plan … but more about that next week.

I’ll probably take down the announcement at the end of this week, but we have a few fairly prominent hold outs *cough*Gina*cough*.

Having only just finished my “roll-out-of-bed-Diet-Coke”, I’ve yet to endure any truely blog worthy events, but the day is young. As always, stay tuned, if something blogish happens you’ll here it here first!

The quoteboard is new and improved, complete with all the famous old quotes! It’s now easier than ever to submit quotes, and they will be approved faster than ever thanks to an improved review system.

Be sure to visit the quoteboard and rat out your firends for all the funny or shocking things they’ve said lately!

Uhg. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not, but I’ve been having some serious email issues lately.

Basically I could only send email if it was very very very small in size. Too much text (or God forbid an attachment) and it wouldn’t send. Instead I’d get an error message that the email server could not be found.

Well it found it just fine for small emails … it was the large ones that would hang. Because I love all of you and scan my email messages for viruses before they are sent out it would usually (read always) get hung while scanning those large emails for viruses.

In desperation I turned off outbound email scanning (screw all of you). Still my Anti-Virus (AV) program INSISTED on being a proxy for outbound email even though it wasn’t supposed to be doing anything at all. And still the email would hang and my AV program would toss up an error saying the server could not be found.

In desperation I UNINSTALLED the AV program (and the firewall, etc that was of the same brand).

Suddenly a particular email that was stuck in my outbox for about 2 months went through just fine.

Ah ha! I thought. I knew it was that damned AV program.

I sent scolding notes to the AV maker and started looking through my collection of vendor business cards for a name of someone in product development for the company (working in security you get these sorts of things). I didn’t find a name, so I put Todd on the war path on my behalf.

Last night I uninstalled everything made by that company and installed a competitors suite. I fired up the email client and sent off a large attachment to test …. it failed.

I nearly wept.

I called my ISP for help. (I hate doing this) I had been to their website and they mention this brand of software and this error and had some fixes (all of which I had tried about a million times already).

When Earthlink answered the phone I was ready for a battle and started off explaining that I was a network security professional, that I understood the internet, AV, and he needn’t dumb things down for me … I wasn’t in the mood.

He had me read off my email settings (to his credit, he believed me when I told him I’d tried everything he was supposed to have me try first).

As it turns out …

My ISP had changed the server name and port I was supposed to be using for outbound email. How I was to know this I don’t know, but the bottom line is … while it wasn’t really MY fault, it certainly wasn’t the fault of the AV maker, or my poor computer … both of which endured some serious scolding.

Anyway … I think I can send email again. However this morning I managed to totally screw up my inbound email server settings … so I’m not sure I can receive it now.

Great News! The DavidMeade.com Claims Department is now open!

The Claims Department allows you, as a registered member, to take credit for all the blog comments, news comments, guestbook entries, etc that you made way back before there were such things as registered users at DavidMeade.com.

Now that DavidMeade.com content has all been migrated over to the new systems – and our members have had time to register themselves – some really cool new features for you, my beloved members, to enjoy here at DavidMeade.com can finally be delivered.

Be sure to visit the Claims Department and carefully (and accurately) select those old pieces of web content gold which you authored here at DavidMeade.com!

Not only will you be staking claim to your documented brilliance, you will also gain edit rights to those pieces of content.

Make sure credit is fully given where it is due. Visit the Claims Department and take what’s yours. When you do, you’ll see your post count and rank here increase (and new mouth watering features based on post count and rank may be coming to you soon!).

As always, stay tuned for upcoming updates and new features. Read the blogs, COMMENT ON THE BLOGS, and be sure to visit the Claims Department today!

Link: Claims Department

I got the Photos section working again! ( Just for you Jess )

Let me know of any bugs you find.

Well I sat down tonight to tweak some things on the website, and I actually got quite alot done!

There’s still so much more to do though (a webmaster’s job is never done). I spend far more time designing / coding / revamping how the site works than I do actually using it.

Doug and I watched a few demo movies for a piece of software used in video editing. He and I have talked alot lately about starting an audio blog or even a video blog.

The advantage is not only is it cool, but it may mean more frequent updates. The video thing is a long shot, and frankly I can’t see myself doing very many of them (They take alot more work than a text blog would). But the audio blog has potential. An audio blog could be recorded on my cellphone (it has a voice memo recorder) as I walk somewhere for lunch, or to the L as I leave the office.

Well … stuff to think about anyhow. In the meantime I have to get the photos working again, get the Other David Meade’s list back, and maybe even toss up a feature or two. (update: photos are working again!)

I should have XLM/RSS feeds available by the end of the week however if anyone is dying for them.

There have been many fixes to davidmeade.com over the past few days. For example, when you comment on a blog or news item you will now be sent to the proper page afterward.

Also, all of the old News articles, and all of the old Guestbook entries have been moved over to the new system! This is good news for lots of really techie reasons, but it should let me do some cool stuff that you’ll like in the near future.

The next steps for me are to polish some of the formatting on the site, fix the photos section (just for you Jess), and get RSS feeds working. Once that’s done, I hope to move the quoteboard over and give all of you my registered users a way to ‘claim’ posts from the old system (and then have them count as you in the new system).

I’m also toying with the “Features” link which I still havent used in this version of the website, and idea for user-blogs, and the Other David Meade’s list.

All in time, my friends, all in time.

As most of you may already know … some time ago (about two years ago) I was introduced to the world of MMPO games (Massively Muliplayer Online). These are games where A) you HAVE to be online to play the game bacause B) You login into a world that continues to progress (with the thousands of other players) even when you aren’t playing.

I’d heard of them before of course, I’d even tried them before – but I never really got into them until I tried Star Wars: Galaxies (SWG). I played that game for two years. Although I still have my SWG accounts, I haven’t actually played that game in a long time. Why? Because World of Warcraft (WoW) came along (oh and also because SWG kinda sucks … but that’s another story).

I have played and love each of these. But lately I’ve not even been playing much WoW.

But fear not … there is a new one. It releases in a few days. It’s The Matrix Online. Players “jack in” to the matrix and play as a newly awoken human into the world from the Matrix movies.

I’ve preordered the game, and am downloading the client now (pre-orders get to play the game a few days before it releases). So I’m sitting here downloading, listening to Radio Free Zion, and reading up on the game. It sounds awesome. Firstly the graphics are great, the sounds are awesome (the Sound FXs and Music from the Matrix movies are great and they’re in game), and from what I’ve read there is alot of content and active work on continuing a plot from the movies.

I haven’t played it yet, but hopefully I will get a chance to tomorrow evening (if this download EVER finishes). I’ll let you know how it is…because I know you all care so very much.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!

I hope everyone is wearing green and made whatever plans are needed to get yourself some green beer tonight.

I’m extremely busy at work today (and this week) so I wont have a really long and gut-busting-funny blog in all likelihood, but I’ll try to have a greater number of some shorter updates to make up for it.

Be sure to read the news section as I’ve made some updates to the features here and hope to have a few more this month. (For example, registered users now have an edit option for comments they leave.)

The next big change to the site, btw, is likely to be a fix. Whenever you comment on a blog or a news article it should take you to a thank you page – that’s not currently happening, I’ll see what I can do to fix that this weekend.