it’s K-Rad y0!   Starting from scratch

As you can tell, I haven’t really been keeping this blog updated since the server crashed a while ago. This is because there is really no reason to keep a personal blog anymore. It’s just a waste of time when you have Facebook and Twitter, neither of which existed when I started this blog 5 years ago.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever be writing things here again. All of my writing is done on PC Hardware and Video Games anyway, and that is all done at my main site, HCW.

For the personal crap, I am on Twitter every day.  You can also visit my Posterous page, which I use to post day-to-day pictures of useless stuff. Anything that would have gone here will now be found there. And of course, there’s Facebook as well. I only add people I personally know, though.

So I’ll see you around… Just not on here very much

If you’re reading this, that means the server move has been successful so far. We have decided to stop running our own dedicated servers, and switch to Cloud servers instead. John is now using Amazon EC2, and I will be using Rackspace Cloud. (and yes Gary, I used your referral code – thanks for your help in discovering Rackspace Cloud!)

Rackspace’s service is extremely basic – you don’t get root access, just a web interface – but for basic hosting needs, it is fine. If all  you use is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, then it is totally fine. Just a bit of a headache dealing with archives and database importing.

Once this move goes through, I will begin moving all the other sites I have. Then I guess I’ll be selling some Dell servers, because I won’t be needing them any more!

The best part of this: Not having to worry about another hardware crash.

I decided that $200 HKD is just too much to pay to renew a domain, so I decided to let k-rad.ca expire. I still have k-rad.ca, and always will, so that’s what I’ll continue to use. I don’t mind paying $10 a year for a site that I rarely update, but $30 a year is just too much.

I just have way too much on my plate to worry about updating K-Rad regularly.

• hardCOREware.net is still my main gig, and I just launched its 4th redesign in 10 years
• Andrea and I just launched a site selling Japanese grooming & styling products
• We are also getting ready to launch a new import video game store (I took HKToyz.com down last summer, and am going to completely revamp the way I sell games)
• I launched a poker site last month that I haven’t even had the time to update in many weeks due to work on HCW
• OK that doesn’t sound like much, but believe me it’s all very time consuming

Besides, the days of the “Personal Blog” are about to go I think. These days, it’s much easier to keep up with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Instead of writing long boring rants, it’s much easier just to post a quick blurb on Twitter, or post a note, link, or picture on Facebook.

I’ll continue to update K-Rad on occassion, so keep coming back. Be sure to subscribe to my feed, so you will never have to worry about what domain I’m using

In case you’re wondering why Brock Lesnar got a championship bout after only 3 fights:

1. Boxing: Oscar De La Hoya vs. Manny Pacquiao, Dec. 6, 1,250,000 
2. UFC: Brock Lesnar vs. Randy Couture, Nov. 15, 1,010,000 
3. Wrestling: WrestleMania, Edge vs. Undertaker, March 30, 670,000 
4. UFC: Georges St. Pierre vs. Jon Fitch/Lesnar vs. Heath Herring, Aug. 9, 625,000 
5. UFC: Lesnar vs. Frank Mir, Feb. 2, 600,000 
6. UFC: Quinton Jackson vs. Forrest Griffin, July 5, 540,000 
7. UFC: St. Pierre vs. Matt Serra, April 19, 530,000 
8. Boxing: Felix Trinidad vs. Roy Jones Jr., Jan. 19, 500,000 
9. UFC: Chuck Liddell vs. Rashad Evans, Sept. 6, 480,000 
10. UFC: B.J. Penn vs. Sean Sherk/Tito Ortiz vs. Lyoto Machida, May 24, 475,000

If there’s any question that MMA has taken over Boxing as the #1 PPV sport in the US, there’s your answer. De La Hoya has the name power to draw 1 million buys, but not after that fight. He’s done (if you didn’t see the fight, he was dominated for 8 rounds by Pacquiao, and looked old and useless)

More interestingly, look whose name headlines the top 3 UFC events… There’s no question, Brock is now UFC’s biggest star, taking that position from Chuck Liddell. 

Source: Dave Meltzer, Wrestling Observer

This post is to enter a contest.. you can ignore it, or join the contest if you want. All you have to do is take a phrase from his contest page and fill in the blanks. Here’s my entry:

John Chow is holding a new contest to give away $6,000 in CASH! $5,000 would go to the charity of your choice and $1,000 will go to you to spend however you want. If I win, I would give the $5K to Child’s Play Charity/BC Children’s Hospital and I would put the $1,000 on my arm (in tattoo form of course).

The contest is being sponsored by XR.com. XR.com is a tiny url service that shortens URL length (just like TinyURL.com). Sign up for an account and check it out!

There you go, hope I win! I could use that money, and the charity could too!

When Kitty left us, we knew that we couldn’t live without another pet. We obviously didn’t intend to ‘replace’ her – nothing could replace her. But considering the joy that she brought to us – even a crabby cat like her – we knew that life without cat(s) is a sucky life indeed.

So we hit up the SPCA in Mong Kok to check out some cats that were up for adoption. Since the MK SPCA is in the ‘pet store’ area, we check out some of those as well.

You always hear about the poor conditions of pet stores, and how they are the last place you’d want to buy a pet. I didn’t know this when we got Kitty back in 1998, but I have since found out that it really isn’t the ideal way to get a cat. Some of the cats were actually very nice – this one British Shorthair in particular seemed really nice. But they were selling these shorthairs for like $3000 HKD and up! That’s over $400 for a plain ol’ domestic cat. There was this one baby kitten that I came across – he was sitting in a cage, and didn’t look older than 2 months. He probably shouldn’t have been taken away from his mother yet. When I approached him, I thought I saw him meowing at me, but I couldn’t hear him due to the noise (another crappy condition for pet stores). As I got closer though, I realized that this little baby kitten was hissing at me! A 2 month old kitten, already hissing at people! I can’t even imagine what some people must be doing to the poor thing.

Anyway, the SPCA at Mong Kok didn’t have any cats, but pointed us to the main location in Wan Chai, which had plenty to choose from. We spent 2 or 3 hours the first day, playing with cats of various ages. From 3 months to 3 years, there were cats of all types. Hyperactive kittens, curious cats that just wanted to watch from a distance, shy kitties that didn’t really want to interact with anyone. There were a few little kittens that we liked, but weren’t quite sure about it. Anyway, it would have been too late – we stayed about 30 minutes after closing, and wouldn’t have been able to adopt right away. It was a holiday that day as well, so it was really busy. You could barely get any one-on-one time with any of the cats, so it was even harder to make a decision.

We went back the next day, and while everyone else was working we got to spend a LOT of time playing with various cats. We had the whole place to ourselves for at least 3 hours. The young 3-month-old kittens are still the funnest to watch, but we weren’t sure if they were the right ones. Finally, I saw this beautiful young tabby waking up from a nap. I actually didn’t notice her at all the day before, because she was very shy and slept the whole time. This time, since it was quiet, we were able to try to coax her out. She was incredibly shy, and scared to come out and play. But as soon as we approached her with our hands, she became very affectionate and started purring immediately. Although she was still too shy to play out in the open, I knew she would be the right one for us. She is very slender, and has a pretty face with dark outlines around her eyes. She has beautiful spots on her soft furry belly as well, almost like a leopard. She arrived at the SPCA a few days earlier, after being rescued by inspectors. In other words, she was a stray cat, born in the city. She is about 5 months old.

The second cat we liked was just as shy, if not more. He was sharing a cage with another kitten, and was laying in the litter box. When we tried to approach him, he was also very welcome to petting. Once we started petting him and talking to him, he eventually came out of the litter box, and eventually out of the cage. When he finally came out, we saw that he was the blackest cat you could imagine – 100% black fur, with no white or grey hairs at all. Even his whiskers are pure black! His eyes are very small, and a dark green – almost like a camoflage colour. He is almost invisible in the dark. His reason for ending up at the SPCA? He was abandoned by his family because they “couldn’t get along” with him. Even meeting him for the first time, I thought there was no way he would be a troublesome cat… He is also about 5 months old.

So we made the decision to adopt the two most shy – but most friendly cats in the SPCA. We named them Zoe (a pretty girl’s name) and Jett (because he is ‘jet black’).

We were able to take Zoe home right away, because she wasn’t due to be spayed for another month. Jett, unfortunately, had to stay behind an extra few days to be neutered. Poor guy!

Zoe had a bit of a rough first day.. She was very scared, and it is a bit of a hike to the taxi stand from the SPCA. She ended up getting motion-sickness on the way there, and puked. She was also drooling a lot for the next few hours… I guess she was just really stressed from all the travel. She was pretty scared at first, but was very easily distracted by Kitty’s old toys. Whenever she started to look scared, we would play with her, and pet her. By the time Jett came home, she was just starting to get comfortable in her new surroundings.

Then Jett came home… We thought Jett would be just as scared, since they were both pretty scared when we first met them. But he was pretty much ready to explore the place right away! I guess the difference is that she was raised in the city, probably by her mother, and he was raised by a family who must have at least liked him at first, before getting tired of taking care of him.

They don’t really get along very well just yet. The first day was the worst – Jett would try to play with her all the time, but she would have none of it. She would growl and swat at him whenever he got close. It seems that he is too dumb to realize that this means she wants to be left alone, or at least take it slow, because he constantly runs at her! This scares her, pisses her off, and she ends up growling at him. This in turn scares him, and under the bed he goes.

They seem to be getting better by the hour though, and will actually sit together when we are around. Right now they are still ‘testing each other’. So far, no screaming or scratching, so we’ll let them sort things out. Hopefully it will be even better once Zoe gets spayed.

As far as their personalities go, we definitely picked the right cats. Zoe is a sassy girl, always vocalizing to the world, letting everyone know when she is happy or sad about something. She is extremely playful, and very smart. Her favourite toy is a string, which she uses to play tug of war. As soon as you let go of your end, she will drop it in front of you, and go “meow” which I guess means “another round!”

Jett is an absolute baby, which is why I call him Baby J. He is very affectionate, and wants nothing more than to cuddle with you. Once you pet him enough, he will get into a certain mood… he will start looking around, looking for somewhere to bury his head. Once he finds a spot, he will begin kneading it, and suckling like he was a weeks-old kitten. He does this ALL THE TIME and it is really cute. At first we thought it might be due to stress, but he seems really comfortable already, and he only does it when he is really happy. To think that his previous family said that they “couldn’t get along with him” boggles my mind. I will NEVER understand it, but I don’t mind – it’s to our benefit! We get to have him in our family, and they get to miss out on this awesome cat.

It’s really hard to take photos of Jett, since he is so dark. The camera’s autofocus can’t find him at all – even his eyes are too dark to focus on! He is also too dark to focus manually, for my skills anyway. There are no details on him to find the right sharpness. I will have to try bringing all the lamps I have into one room, and see if he’ll play in that environment. I did take several pics of Zoe, which you can find on my Facebook album right here (account not required). You’ll quickly see why we think she is so beautiful

I did snap this one photo of them sitting together. I used 3 exposures and merged them into HDR with Photoshop.. They don’t line up perfectly, so it’s a bit blurry. But at least you can see both of them pretty clearly! Not the best photo, I’ll have to take some more when it is brighter, when I am feeling better (yeah during all this time, I have had the worst sore throat of my life, including a pretty bad fever, chills, sweating, and body aches).

It seems like yesterday, when I brought Andrea home from work and surprized her with… an empty litter box. Yeah, the idea was to bring home a Kitty for her, as a 1 year anniversary gift, and to have someone to be part of our new family. There were no cats up for adoption in Richmond at the time, so I had no choice but to give half the surprise at home, after which we headed out to Coquitlam and adopted Kitty.

When we were deciding which kitten to adopt, most of them didn’t pay much mind to us. They were all either sleeping, or terrorizing each other. However, Kitty responded to us by purring and snuggling when we pet her. So we brought her home.

Just short of 10 years later, we found ourselves at the veterinarian’s office last week. Kitty had developed a massive tumor on her head, and she was starting to get really sick. She had only eaten a little bit that day, and she seemed very lethargic.

The vet told us that a biopsy would be necessary to determine if it was malignant or not. But really, it didn’t look good at all. We all want to do whatever we can to keep our pets around, but at some point you have to consider their quality of life. Those who know Kitty, know that she does NOT like being outside her home. She panics immediately, as soon as she is in an unfamiliar environment. We didn’t want to subject her to sitting in a kennel for days, getting biopsies and being force-fed only to likely find out that the tumor (which had grown at an alarming rate to double the size of her head) would not be operable.

We decided to take her home, and try to make her comfortable for her last days. We weren’t sure how long that would be, but it wasn’t looking good. Eventually she lost the ability to hold down food and water, and she could barely walk more than a few steps. It was time for Kitty to go to rest.

I can’t describe the feeling of losing a beloved pet, so soon. So I won’t bother. Instead, I would rather remember what we loved about Kitty. She is a big part of our lives together – we had her for 10 of our 11 years together. There is much to remember.

We’ll remember that her original name was actually “Poopie” because, well, she was a poopie cat. From day 1, she had some poo on her leg, and had to be bathed before we could take her home. The poo problems continued, as she pooed on our pillows on the first night. Then she pooed on the bed after that. Sometimes, she would walk up to us when we were watching TV, let off a fart, and then walk away. As it turns out, the food we were giving her was not agreeing with her; as soon as we switched brands this problem went away.

We’ll remember turning around in the middle of the night, only to have Kitty’s little butt sticking in our face.

We’ll never forget the day she decided to leap off our 3rd storey balcony, landing on concrete below. It was her first ‘heat’, and we weren’t sure what to expect. What we didn’t expect was that she would start sprinting all over the apartment, and just take a flying leap out the open window. She grabbed onto the wall with her claws, and I head Andrea scream “OH NO!” Before we could react, her grip let go, and she fell to the ground. We ran outside, and found her hiding in a corner. She was in shock, and we took her to the emergency clinic. She turned out okay – she didn’t have a concussion or any broken bones. She was just a bit scared.

I remember how she used to love sitting in my pants when I was on the toilet taking a dump. I guess it made for a comfortable hammock-like experience for her… Whatever!

I’m sure a lot of people have similar experiences – Kitty used to love getting our attention while we were trying to type. Her best method of doing so? Walk across the keyboard, smashing random keys. Somehow, she was always able to hit Enter when she was done.

We’ll forever remember her first meeting with Myrtle, the turtle we adopted from Andrea’s Mom when we moved to a new apartment. We weren’t sure what to expect, since Kitty never really had experiences with other animals. As it turned out, they got along very well. We used to let Myrtle out of his tank to walk around, and Kitty used to LOVE just following him around, watching him. You could tell that she wasn’t hunting or stalking him – she was just really curious.

Kitty was naughty sometimes, and would let us know when we were being bad. For some reason, we hadn’t cleaned her litter box for a few days. Kitty would have none of it, and one day we came home to an excruciating stench. The source of the smell was – sure enough – a giant mushy turd she left on the top of our bed. Unlike normal cat poo, it wasn’t a hard log that you could pick up and toss in the garbage. No, this was a soft one that had soaked into the blanket a bit. We didn’t even bother washing it – we just threw it in the garbage. We couldn’t be mad at Kitty though, because it was our own fault. Her plan worked though – we made sure she had a nice clean litter box at all times!

Kitty never liked scratching posts. Maybe that’s because I stepped on hers and broke it. However, she found the next best thing – an old couch. From that day on, she would never touch any scratching posts we bought for her.

We’ll remember how much she loved going outdoors when we moved to a house in 2003. When she was in her own environment, Kitty was fierce. And there was nothing we could do to placate her besides let her go out every day.

This lead to problems as, well, Kitty doesn’t really get along well with other cats. We heard her fighting in the backyard many times, and more often than not would come back with tufts of orange and white fur in her mouth. One time there was so much orange and white fur on our lawn, I thought our neighbor’s cat had exploded or something!

Kitty had hairball problems on and off, and would cough up hairballs in the weirdest places. The strangest (and most inconvenient): Inside Andrea’s Mom’s baby grand piano (sorry!). Eventually, Kitty figured out that she should cough up hairballs in a convenient place for us to clean up.

As you can guess, Kitty was a bully. Her favourite target was not another cat, or a hamster, or anything like that. It was Andrea’s brother, Aaron. When we moved in together, Kitty liked to hang out on the staircase. If you walked by her, she would just ignore you. But for some reason, she didn’t really like Aaron walking by her – I think it was the huge baggy pants he wore. Kitty would always chase Aaron up the stairs because of those pants – for years!

Kitty had full access to the whole house, except for one room – Andrea’s Mom’s. Mom kept the door closed, just to make sure Kitty didn’t ‘destroy’ anything or leave any presents on her bed. But for some reason, Kitty wanted nothing to do with any of the rooms, except that one. She would wait and wait in front of the closed door, and as soon as it was ever opened, she would try to run inside to check it out. Don’t tell anyone this, but sometimes when Andrea’s Mom wasn’t around, we would let Kitty in to roam around. She loved to just sleep in the closet. Of course, we supervised this to keep her out of trouble.

Like many cats, Kitty was confused by mirrors. Just as she wanted to see what was in Mom’s bedroom, she also wanted to see what was behind that invisible barrier that was in the bathroom. We would often find her in the bathroom, trying to find a weak spot in the mirror to get through… I guess she didn’t realize that it was her own reflection she was looking at. Ooops!

Kitty didn’t like toys very much, but there were a few things around the house she loved to play with. When we came home from the grocery store, she would quickly claim any shopping bags, and use it as a bed. The same goes for empty boxes – if she can fit inside it, she will sit in there for hours. She was also fond of cardboard tubes from paper towels… The only actual toy that she ever liked was a little mouse attached to a spring. Eventually she just kept the mouse, and it stayed with her until her last days.

We could go on and on, but I think I will stop right here. It feels a lot better to go through just a few of the happy memories we have of Kitty, which will be with us forever, even though she is gone. After all, that’s what Kitty did best – she made us feel good about our little ‘family’ and gave us something to look forward to when coming home from wherever we were.

As I had mentioned before, I used up some of my TD Visa Travel Miles to get a free flight to Japan from Hong Kong. I took the opportunity to hang out with Ed, and get my first tattoo. I mentioned how I just about missed my flight by about 5 seconds, because NWA Airlines has a strict 2-hour check-in policy. That would have been a nightmare.

What I didn’t mention is that on the way back, I was seemingly randomly upgraded to business class. I was just checking in like everyone else, and the girl at the counter just offered it to me. I guess they were looking for lone travelers, because I certainly wasn’t one of the first to check in!

That was a nice upgrade, and my first flight in that class. It almost felt ‘wasted’ because the flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong is only about 3.5 hours or so. Why can’t I ever get upgraded on a flight to Vancouver!?

When I got home, there was an email waiting for me from NWA. It was just a standard after-flight questionnaire. I usually don’t respond to these things, but I was in somewhat of a good mood. I also noticed that the email link had a tracking code, to make sure who I was. I had a sneaking suspicion that I might get some sort of incentive for doing so, even though nothing was mentioned in the email or survey.

Turns out my suspicions were warranted:

A 25,000 “Customer Relations Bonus” sweet! That brings me to about 32,000 miled, which is enough to get me anywhere in Asia in business class (on an NWA flight, which basically means “Japan”).

Pretty nice to get an unexpected bit of good news during these terrible times (our cat is very sick right now). I’ll have to start saving up for my next tattoo from Gotch, because as much as I’d like to get another right away, I just can’t afford it yet!

Since she was not around to witness it, Andrea requested that I record as much of my first tattooing experience as possible so she could see the video. Well I didn’t record a lot of it, but some of it. I put what little video I had, slapped in some photos, a cool sountrack, and left the rest up to Windows Movie Maker. Check out the video below!

Thanks again to Gotch and everyone at Harizanmai for making this such an awesome experience. It’s been a bit over a week, and I am loving my Oni so much! I can’t wait for my next one early next year

If you are reading this, then you are reaching this site at its new server. Well, not really “new” – it’s the one that had The Great Hard Drive Crash of 2008. I rebuilt it during my trip to Vancouver, with much better redundancy. I installed 2 new Western Digital RE3 drives. They are 250GB each, but incredibly light! This leads me to believe that they are single-platter drives, meaning better reliability and potentially better speed.

The specs of the system are otherwise the same. It’s a Dell PowerEdge 860, which I bought with a Celeron installed and swapped it out for a Xeon 3050. That is basically the same as a Core 2 Duo E6400. The only difference is… the name… Well the Xeon was cheaper at least

Once again I am using ISPConfig to maintain all my sites. I won’t be hosting too many sites for friends this time – that just requires too much extra work and resources. I may host the odd site here and there though… I do have the space.

Anyway, I am happy to be leaving the temporary webhost I was using… They were reasonably priced, but a headache to work with overall. I wouldn’t recommend them, but I am not going to recommend against them either, so I won’t mention who they were at all.

Time to start moving everything else over!