Not that I'm really finished with it all yet.
I still haven't managed to take the laptop in to have it fixed. Or replaced. Or whatever. The more I think about it, the more I assume it'll end up getting replaced. The DVRom doesn't work much at all; I had to try four times to reinstal the OS after I reformatted the thing, just in case it was only a driver conflict or something. And the processor keeps overheating and shutting the computer down; and then it won't restart for a few minutes. When both the CPU and the DVRom are physically dicked, it's usually simpler and cheaper to give up and replace the laptop.
Which leads to new concerns, since Sony have kinda stopped using AMD processors again. Intel suck. A lot. And the only thing Sony laptops are produced with these days are Intel 8886s. Ick.
More ick: they also come with WindozeXP. So that sucks. I could theoretically blank the thing and instal XPPro, but that tends to remove all the preinstalled stuff which makes Sonys better than the other systems. I went through all that with the last laptop when WindozeAluminium came out and was better than WindozeAntiGreat.
Of course, the big issue at the time was the FireWire software; the 1998 Vaios weren't really set up right to work with anything but DVGate. I never use that on this machine; I just rip all the video from the DVC through Windoze Media Encoder at LAN rates, which works out to a better picture quality than you can use on the 'net anyway. Then I have to smash it down to something a cablemodem can download at realtime.
So replacing XP with NT2001 shouldn't cause too many problems. Again: this assumes that CircuitCity concur that fixing everything wrong here is more of a hassle than replacing it with a P4 1.6GHz machine which might not break again for a year or so.
Since that would be a sign of intelligence, I'm not really counting on it yet.
In other news: I finally got the new show uploaded to radio.free.duhmerica.com. It took a while, since this thing kept overheating and shutting down. But I eventually got it all transferred over to Hunter's new AMD 1.6GHz machine [Wolfeman_Psycho builds workstation-grade decks for fun and profit] and put the last of it together.
I also changed the site a bit. I'm still kinda working on that. I'll get it all done someday. Especially if my computer doesn't burn out every time I really start working on things.
The chatroom, while still in betaphase, is officially open to the public now. We're still adding features to it, but it works most of the time with or without them. Future features are likely to include VoiceChat, Private Messages, AI [a simplistic 'bot designed to talk to people at random, which gives the chatroom a purpose when you're the only one in it], and so on. And, my favourite: an administrative function to ban trolls at realtime, without having to crack in and ban them from the server. Just in case morons like cockafella_30@yahoo.com, YADT, and so on [if you don't know, you're better off] ever develop the courage to go in there; for the moment, cockafella_30, aside from claiming to have dismantled various fusion reactors [yes: fusion] and threatening to kill me to death with an icepick, has decided that any hypertext file at gremlin.net is a virus written to affect only him...which is a neat idea, but sadly impossible to implement.
In any case: go try out the chatroom. And feel free to EMail me with bug reports, feature suggestions, and whatever.
Oh yeah: I picked up ThisWebsiteDoesNotExist.com a few days ago. No real reason except that it was amusing, and it kept getting spammed in chatrooms anyway. It currently points to gremlin.net.
Which leads to the new index.html. I've been wanting to rip that image off the DVD of Gremlins2 and put it at gremlin.net since 15th June 1990...even though websites didn't really exist until 1994, DVDs didn't really exist until 1998, and Gremlins2 wasn't released digitally until the end of August. Still: that's what I wanted. So I've got it now. Just in time for ThisWebsiteDoesNotExist.com to reach it. It makes a weird sort of sense, to me.
Other than that, a few people have correctly guessed that I have larger plans for it where grem.tv is concerned. I actually have a number of larger plans for grem.tv; the current delays are over free time and bandwidth. The plan--and I've got a number of people backing me on this one--is to turn grem.tv into a webbased television station of sorts. The kind of thing you'd see on regular television if no one had illegally appointed the FCC to protect us from ourselves.
The evolution should be entertaining on its own. grem.tv will probably look like NBC in the fifties at first, with nothing but a [hint hint] testpattern interrupted by sporadic programming. As more stuff gets done, we'll move as quickly as possible to broadcasting twenty-four hours a day.
There again: I just need enough time and people to set all that up, and see what the math looks like on bandwidth. Still: there's a lot of potential there. Particularly with Corey involved.
I'll see what I can get done on that tonight. Maybe there will be something worth watching by the time you click on the link....
Then it'll be about time to give up, re-reformat the laptop, and take it in to have it fixed or replaced or whatever.
More later....
--Gremlin