Confirmation Hesistations

I know, I haven't exactly been keeping up with my 30-day trial promises. It's a tough thing, for sure. My goal now is not so much to succeed 30 days in a row, but to become more aware about what I should be doing. Anyway, I'm just throwing something out here real quick before I head off to bed. I am having my Confirmation ceremony tomorrow night. For those who aren't sure what that is, it's a Christian sacrament that signifies your devotion to the Church. Anyway, a question to throw out to all of you: Have any of you had Confirmation before? How was it? If you didn't, what is your religion (or lack thereof)? Just fill me in, okay?

Also, I'm making a little progress on dream recall. I'm remembering fragments of dreams, at least. I'm planning on making a new blog that will serve as my dream journal. It may get put up tonight, and it may not. In any case, you'll hear from me tomorrow once Confirmation is over.

And so it begins...

Well, I must say it's been a long time since I've blogged about anything. There's a lot for me to catch up on. For one thing, I've decided to blog here every day as a 30-day trial challenge. The idea came from Acmlm's Board (II), and here's my post in the thread. As you can see, I also mentioned cleaning my room and writing down my dreams. Neither of those are doing so great right now. I've been kinda busy, and I haven't remembered any dreams to write down yet. Hopefully that'll change.

In other, overdue news, as some point my PC got messed up. I had to reinstall everything. This meant I had to start basically all my computer games over from the beginning. some of them haven't even been reinstalled yet. Also, my parents finally managed to find a Wii on sale over vacation. They promised it as a Christmas present, but everyone else bought them first :(. We also replaced the broken DS with a DS Lite, and the PS2 refuses to work now. Stupid disc-read errors...

I have a stupid orthodontist appointment tomorrow, and I know he'll yell at me because he expects me to brush 4 times a day. :P I guess that covers everything in a nutshell. It's kinda late, so I'll go into more detail tomorrow.

A slightly bumpy move...

Well, as you might have noticed, this blog has officially moved. I came to the decision of signing up with ZendURL and decided I might as well move my blog there. It worked out okay, but I lost most of the customized sidebar features I had like the label listings and the Game list. I may or may not find a way to put those back, but it's all good for now. I will probably be adding a message board soon, too, so stay tuned!

Edit: Oh, how stupid of me! I doubt you know where I moved the blog to. It's at this address now.

The Free Webhost Runaround

First off, I apologize for not being here lately. I've had some sort of persistent, cold-like symptoms all weekend, and I stayed home sick from school today. I haven't really done anything this weekend; my All-State music auditions, church, CYO (which is pretty much Sunday school), and school were all canceled. It started with a bloody nose on Saturday morning, and... well, I'm sure you don't want the details. The good news is that I'm starting to improve.

Now, earlier today I was searching the web looking for a good website host. I figured most anything was going to be better than Verizon's packaged deal. They offer a pitiful 10 MBs of space, which will not cut it if I start uploading my programming stuff again. It didn't take long for me to realize how hard it is to find stuff for free, however. My needs started simple - I wanted at least 30-40 MBs of storage. I soon added a requirement that I just couldn't handle forced advertisements - If I could get an ad-free blog, why not an ad-free website? This, of course, narrowed my options considerably.

I found a few ad-free options with a good amount of MBs - some offered in the hundreds of MBs. But I scanned their terms and conditions, and a good portion of those placed restrictions on which files you could upload. Namely, most of them didn't allow .zip files, which was simply unacceptable. I also really wanted the convenience of FTP access. And then I also decided that I may want to experiment with PHP in the future, further limiting my choices. Eventually, I found this review site, which had many reviews and a detailed search engine. This made my search much, much easier.

Have I come to a final decision yet? Of course not, but I've narrowed it down to three. Ripway offers a 30 MB deal, and mentions my three biggies right on the main page, in the first paragraph. They seem the friendliest, too, but I worry that even 30 MB may not be enough. ZendURL, on the other hand, offers 200 MB of space and a rather long list of features I don't even know about. (Webalizer WHAT?) It seems like a better deal, for sure, but they also seem to have a bad rep for downtime and for littering popups behind-the-scenes, in the site control panel. They did add a second server recently though, so I'll have to keep an eye on that. The last one is Xanma Free Webhosting. They have the most space of all, 1 GB! But, it's hard to find info about them; only four people have reviewed them and their "about us" page just says "Coming soon." Plus, you can tell they're not U.S. natives. When they mean to say something like "we apologize for the inconvenience", they say "Our excuses for the discomfort."

Well, that wraps things up. I hate doing the runaround like this, but you can't beat free :). At least getting a free domain name afterwards will be a piece of cake - dot.tk all the way!

The Christmas Spoils

Err... Well, perhaps "spoils" isn't the right word. I did sorta vanish for a while, but you're used to that, right? :P In any case, I got some cool stuff for Christmas, and I hope all of you had a good Christmas and New Year's. For games, I received the Oblivion Knights of the Nine expansion and Gran Turismo 4 for PS2. The expansion is awesome, but GT4 wouldn't work. We had to return it and get a new one. That's not bad compared to what happened to my little brother Jared, though. He eagerly opened his Eragon game only to find that there was no game in there! They fixed that problem at the same time that they replaced GT4, but we waited until the 30th for that.

Anyway, my biggest and best present wasn't officially for Christmas. You see, we kinda live out in the boonies, and until recently, the only way to get high-speed internet was through Comcast. Comcast isn't too bad, but it costs $60 a month! Plus, my dad said our house would need some wiring done. I dunno why, cause it's only 6 years old... Anyway, the computer lab tech. recently mentioned that he had Verizon DSL at home and that I should be able to get it. I checked online and, lo and behold, I could! Only $30 a month for 3 Mbps download, and no wiring... It only took a hour to convince my parents.

We ordered it on Tuesday, and due to an incredible stroke of luck it was all set to go by yesterday afternoon! Let me tell you, life with DSL is like... well, it's like when we first got Satellite TV: so many possibilities, so little time. We can download 30 MB files in about 1 minute flat! It used to take us an hour! I signed up for the Verizon-Yahoo package, and I'm actually listening to Internet Radio as we speak.

Well, enough rambling. The final note is that I'm making the rounds and eradicating "Mari0mega" wherever I can. I'm 16 now! Mario isn't the main thing on the radar. My new username is jordan_mega_gamer, to match my email. Now, lemme at those online games! :)