Yaaargh

Back-ups. You know you should do them but you never do. Or perhaps you once did but since nothing untoward happened for months or years, you became complacent.

And, of course, that’s when A Serious Problem rears its head and bites you in the ass.

Well, A Serious Problem reared its head today when I attempted to update the Tripod mirror of my blog with Blog. I had trouble publishing to my site because BitTornado was sucking up my bandwidth so I decided to try again later and aborted the Blog publishing attempt by hitting the Close icon on the Blog window.

It turns out this was a vewwy, vewwy bad idea.

Thanks to a rare bug, Blog deleted all my blog data. It has no record whatsoever of my 1600-plus entries or the templates I use to create the site.

Fortunately, I had back-ups up to October.

Unfortunately, it’s October 2003.

That’s over 900 entries ago.

So now you know why I have A Serious Problem-sized chunk of my ass missing.

The problem isn’t as bad as it might seem. For one thing, the site itself is fine. The only problem is Blog itself has no record of the site. It would be simple enough to fix this if Blog had a way of importing HTML files on the site into its record database but alas and alack, it doesn’t.

I have no intention whatsoever of manually copying, pasting and reediting 1600-plus entries in Blog but I think there might be an inelegant workaround. I’m not sure if I can actually pull it off but regardless, there might not be any updates on the Tripod site for awhile.

Posted in Blogging.

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By Gobi – Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Chaos reigns

I got Warcraft III Battle Chest a few weeks ago and it’s been occupying most of my gaming time.

I got the compilation mainly for the strategy guides but I was disappointed with their quality. The binding on the guides is awful and several pages have already come loose. The content is similarly unimpressive. The guides devote most of their pages to the campaigns and I found the numerous FAQs on GameFAQs much more useful for gleaning general strategy.

As for the game itself, I’m very impressed with Blizzard’s fantastic post-release support. Bugfixes are being released more than three years after the original game was first released and on top of that, Blizzard has also continued to release additional content in the form of bonus maps. This is all the more impressive considering the situation with the competition.

I’m concentrating on skirmish games against a computer opponent right now. Games on a small skirmish map typically take about 20 to 30 minutes to run their course and at the moment, the typical outcome is my defeat.

My opening moves seem okay but everything quickly goes to hell during the first battle. The computer opponent almost always comes out on top in the first encounter and goes on to win the game. Impressively, this is accomplished without cheating. The computer opponent is just very efficient economically and sound tactically. I fared no better against a human opponent; I’ve tried two 1v1 games online and managed to lose on both occasions.

The key to winning in Warcraft III lies in micromanaging units during the heat of battle and I’m not very good at the tactical decision-making aspect of the game right now. Fortunately, Blizzard has included the ability to save and watch replays of games so players can discover where, when and how they erred.

(The downside of replays is I have a sneaking suspicion replays of my online battles are being used as comedy relief somewhere.)

It’s been awhile since I’ve had to work this hard at improving at a game but I am enjoying the challenge.

Posted in Games.