Dec 1902: Marqville Awakens!

Hello. If you’re wondering, I, Marq Edward Gould of Cole Harbour, a suburb of Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, murdered the body of PDR, of the nation Patrick D Ryall, then proceeded to eat his soul and take over his website. Events may not have happened in exactly that order. The idea that he is travelling in New York is a ruse, and you all have been duped.[1] Also, condiments for souls are not an easy thing to find.

Yeah, right. As if I would admit that on the Internet. No one can prove a damn thing!

In coming up with ideas for Website Takeover 2.0, I had a pretty good list of things I wanted to talk about that fell into two categories: the technological ones, and the pretty banal ones. Although I thought of flipping between the two for the week I own this site, I’m going to do another technologeek one today. I just wanted to make sure I got in everything I wanted to talk about before I had to hand this sucker back.

Yesterday I mentioned that I’m surrounded by the slowly aging corpses of computers, cameras, and personal information managers (LifeDrive, yo!). My desktop has been so ridiculously slow this past year, it takes multiple hours just to do things in any program more complex than Notepad. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but when multiple programs are running at the same time, it’s a friggin’ disaster. So much time wasted.

This past year I’ve also been trying to update Pat’s website, both behind the scenes with a much-needed WordPress update, and a brand-spankin’-new updated design. Between working nights, trying to keep this apartment clean, that darn cat, and the aforementioned entropy, it’s been taking ages. Like, a year. Or more. Egads.

However, progress of late has taken a turn for the better, with one of the major hurdles finally being achieved (that being, the transfer of all of this website’s content from one database to another so that WordPress can do its thang), and now progress on a new design is coming along (here’s the current snapshot). With old technology slowing me down, though, I needed a solution to speed things up for me, so I fired up an old USB drive I had (half a gig bought in 2005 for $50, price reduced–isn’t irony sweet?) and loaded it with portable applications, a few from here and a few from here. With a few essential programs that I figure I would need wherever I may be (DOSBox was installed for educational purposes only!), I now have a portable workstation at my disposal.

Now I can tap into my wife’s laptop’s computational power without having to install anything, and off I go programming. My desktop coupled with cordless headphones becomes a viable solution for listening to music while working (if it’s the only thing running, WinAmp does a fine job). I’ve even taken my portable workstation into work and plugged into the computers there, but it’s a bit risky. I don’t use anything that requires passwords, for one. I may not leave any files behind, but I’d be delusional to think that I’m completely invisible. (For the record, the stuff I drew at work is still on that one computer. If anybody knows I mess around with them, they’re certainly not letting on.) I have actually managed to solve a couple of programming problems while at work, so the benefits are certainly outweighing any concerns I may have.

I think… I think that’s all I got to say about that. These posts are taking a ridiculously long amount of time to make. I hope they’re worth it.

¡Buenos Día de los Muertos a usted!
–me.

[1] “you all have been” gets 83.4 million hits on Google, while “you have all been” gets 34.8 million hits. “This is the [thing] you have all been waiting for” sounds better to me than the other way around (probably because “you have” is usually contracted as “you’ve”), yet it seems people are using “This is the [thing] you all have been waiting for” with equal aplomb. Call me baffled.

P.S., today is my wife’s birthday. I DID NOT FORGET! Time to bake a cake.

  1. now progress on a new design is coming along

    Man, I miss websites from like the late 90s/early 2000s. Remember all those multi-coloured geocities sites? Ooooh yeah, those were the days.

  2. If I could bring back Kip’s old, dead Geocities site (or my own, for that matter)… uh, I don’t know where I was going with that. It’d be… cool? And I would feel terrible looking at the HTML because I know how horrible it used to be.

  3. Is Cole Harbour really a suburb of the HRM? I thought it was part of the HRM? Doesn’t a suburb exist outside the main thing? I don’t even know. I don’t even know.

  4. I guess I was making reference to the lower population density/non-inner-city-ness of Cole Harbour. Wikipedia even says that the term is confusing a lot of times.

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