Ralph Schaafsma

So as you might know my aspire 5920 died a while ago and I was still looking for the problem. Some time ago I handed it to my dad, he took it to his work where real military technicians took a look at it. Totally ignoring the note I gave with the laptop(because they’re used to complete retards) they concluded/guessed the graphics card was broken.

To test it I asked my good ol’ buddy Mike to lend me the graphics card from his 5920 and the crazy man that Mike is he allowed me to do so. After placing in the working graphics card, which is suprisingly easy, we powered it on.

Low and behold there was my laptop working again! Finally we knew what the hell was wrong with it. The next step is to find a replacement, either trying to get one from Nvidia via warranty or buying a second hand one. Too bad there isn’t a 8600M GT available in the Netherlands as far as I know only a GS version. Still if I want to go through with the mobile laptop and workhorse desktop thing I shouldn’t really care. $150 is a lot better than over $600 for a new (and slower) laptop.

So last Friday we launced the MJUKS site and man did it suck. First after we finished the design and workings of the site we put it online in a ’secret’ folder so it didn’t show up immediately unknowingly we didn’t realise that that would totally mess up the database structure if were to move it up a folder. So when we were able to launch it on the main directory we got a lot of nice database errors. So currently we are using a redirect untill we reinstall wordpress in the main folder or use create a htaccess redirect. Also what bites my ass right now is that the redirect is way too slow,  school has put it some kind of nifty delay on how fast you can go through webspace so there is like a 3 second delay.

However, it is working. A few days ago we installed google analytics, a spam filter, and removed the bugged RSS button. So now we can see where all those hits are coming from.

Still the website is far from its full potential. It just basically shows the videos, you can vote and comment and that’s it. We’re going to put a lot more user input into the site. Polls, behind the scenes, suggestions, forums, etc to make it more a community.

Soon the old MJUKS content will be online as well. Something that some groups failed to realise is that MJUKS is a whole and all the items should be on one webpage no matter which group made it.

Check it at mjuks.nl!

So yesterday my desktop also decided to pretty much die, it keeps freezing on me. So the need for a replacement laptop/desktop is getting higher.

What to do, what to do. Buying a cheap-ish laptop is harder than one might think. I want one that can only just run adobe master collection, so I can do whatever I want on the go. But for gaming I wish to use my future desktop. But buying a laptop that fits my needs is kind of hard. I quickly go from well I don’t really need a dual core from oh why not which results in a laptop atleast 800 bucks. Personally I’m thinking somewhere down the 600 bucks road, but finding a laptop from a realiable company in that range is pretty hard. It’s pretty much controlled by Acer which, as I know from first hand experience, has pretty shitty customer service. Another company that sells midrange laptops is Toshiba which, as far as I know, is pretty awesome. One thing bothers me though, they usually come with only 1 or 2 years of warranty, which as my dead laptop shows might be too short. Also something I’d like is it running Mac x86. Which is also extremely hard on that range. Dell usually has that support but that is usually more expensive.

So the last couple of days I’ve been hella busy working on the MJUKS website. It’s currently ready for first release.

**I said as I positioned myself comfortably after which I bumped over my cup of coffee spilling it all over the table**

Currently it it’s functioning like a normal wordpress blog, you create a post which is shown in the sidebar on the front page and then it’s also listed within one of two category pages, either Items or Episodes.

In the future we will work towards a more dynamic approach so the sidebars acts more like a playlist.

Today we had some problems getting the site to run online, we weren’t able to create a new wordpress database as we do not have the rights to. An email to the guy in charge got quickly responded to and we are waiting for our database to be ready to receive them datas.

Hopefully tomorrow, the deadline, things will work properly and we can upload our items. If not, then I’ll host it on my own darn webspace.

So as you might know my laptop(acer aspire 5920) died a few weeks ago, it being a total bitch it won’t boot up anymore past a black screen and a few HDD-led flashes. After a long investigation wif mah buddy Kuno we were still not able to find the source of this problem. So I’m kinda giving up hope and probably gonna sell it in parts.

So a new laptop is pretty much in order right now, thinking of getting a small one, like a netbook or something. Dell mini10 comes to mind. Just a small little laptop with which I can do my internetting, chatting, web designin’, etc on. And maybe, just maybe some adobe programs. And next to that just buy a good desktop computer for the hard work and games. Personally, I can do all the heavy duty shit like editing on machines at school here, which is kind of mandatory even. So I don’t really care, time for a small, reliable(!), kinda cheap machine! It’s so darn cute!

Today I’ve been busy working on the MJUKS wordpress port. It’s getting along pretty well. XHTML strict is a thing of the future, right now I just want this thing to do what it’s supposed to. Some time in the future we can work on estethics. Currently the front-page is pretty much done next to a few styling issues. Tomorrow will be about making the single pages and category pages function. After that we’ll need to see how we can load movies in dynamically instead of going to a seperate post which is the case now. Although that’s not necessary for the inital MJUKS-WP release.

A few features that the site currently has are:

1. 1-5 Star rating per post
2. Easily added flash movies
3. Randomized headers
4. RSS feed

More about that when the times comes.

So on Friday last week we finished editing our Parcour item, it was quite a bitch to make seeing that we had not enough good footage and filler shots. We had to make a lot of comprimises, like leaving out an entire interview, but the results are good enough for a first item. I pretty much understand Final Cut now to the point where I can edit stuff pretty quick, it’s a nice enough program once you get used to it, however it was somewhat difficult because I’ve never fully used a mac before. Basically I could do the editing I did for this item within a day instead of the week or whatever that we ‘needed’ now.

I was glad to hear that the audio I recorded on the scene as ‘the audio-guy’  was pretty good. Next to an occasional windgust or scream in the background (which was actually me) the audio was fine.

The only thing that busts my balls in Final Cut is that it seems that the audio can only be moved by frames so it’s impossible to line up music. Now I’m pretty sure there’s an option somewhere to do it more precisely but still it was quite a bitch.

So today we made some good progress by getting some proper music for the Le Parcour item we’re making for Mjuks. No Brakes by The Offspring is what we’re going for right now.

The rest of the day I pretty much spent grabbing more good shots from the raw footage. Too bad a lot of the footage was just plain garbage and we could’ve used a lot more insert shots. Oh well, that’s the way you learn. Now we’ll have to make this into a proper item with the resources we’ve got.

Tomorrow I’ll be focussing on the website of Mjuks, kicking the shit out of Wordpress to get it to do what I want to. Today with the help of Steevee we got the hardcoded catergory filter to work. So it’s down-hill from here.

This will be used as a personal blog as well as my crossmedia blog.