I just updated the site to use the latest version of WordPress v2.3.2,  I also updated several of the plugins.

I have been playing the MMORPG called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes since beta. But a few months ago I canceled my subscription and stopped playing. On Dec. 18th, 2007 SOE decided to reactivate everyone’s account for a free month if you were inactive since Oct 1, 2007. I am glad I came back to the game, SOE has made great changes (Mostly Fixes) to the game. There are a lot more people playing now and they are have a Christmas event in the game so it is all decorated and you get free presents. The city of Khal has also go a makeover and the performance is much better now. The performance in general for the entire game is much better, they have fixed a ton of memory leaks and bugs. At launch the game would use 95% of my 2 Gigs of ram but now usually uses around 70% and run a lot smoother. I crash a lot less often and I am able to run with the graphics turned up on max and still get a decent framerate on my single Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX. The game still looks great and now performs great. My Guild is more active again and SOE is giving everyone a 50% XP bonus and free flying Reindeer for the Holidays. I have been able to go from level 23 to level 29 in about a week. Things are looking much better for Vanguard. If you have not checked it out recently then you should give it a try or retry if you left.

This recipe takes about 10 minutes to prepare and 40 minutes to cook. Serves 3 – 4.

Ingredients:

1/2	Medium Yellow Pepper
1/2	Medium Green Pepper
1 cup	Instant Rice
1 cup	Water
3/4 cup	Apple Juice
	Shake ‘n Bake Pork – Crispy
1 kg	Pork Loin Chops

Pre-Heat the Oven to 400°F

Add 1 cup water, 3/4 cup Apple Juice and 1 cup Instant Rice to 8″ x 11″ 2 L (Or similar size) baking dish. Cut 1/2 of a Yellow Pepper and 1/2 of a Green Pepper into 1″ pieces and distribute evenly through the mixture.

Remove the bones from the Pork Chops, I use scissors to make this easier. Coat the Pork Chops with Shake ‘n Bake – Pork flavor – Crispy. I don’t use the plastic bags that come with the Shake ‘n Bake as I find it a waste to use a whole package and it makes a mess. Instead I pour some Shake ‘n Bake onto a plate and one by one press each side of the Pork Chop into it to coat both sides and the edges. Add more Shake ‘n Bake to the plate as needed. Place the Port Chops on top of the rice and peppers mixture as you coat them. You should have covered the entire rice mixture when you are done. You will most likely have to overlap the Pork Chops a little.

Bake for 40 Minutes at 400°F.

I have decided to share with you some pictures that I have taken during my travels.  You can click on the on the Photography link above or click here.  I hope you enjoy them.

Today I had an interesting afternoon thanks to GoDaddy and WordPress. I have been working with my blog a lot over the past few days and I noticed that I was getting a lot of “Error 500 – Internal server error” messages. I was getting this error about 50% of the time. I went to my Control Panel on the GoDaddy site and turned on Error Logging. The only thing the Error Log was showing was a few lines that said ‘mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error. Use ‘RewriteOptions MaxRedirects’ to increase the limit if necessary.’

From this error messages I assumed the problem was being caused by mod_rewrite but after several hours of playing with it and spending 1/2 hour on the phone with GoDaddy Tech Support, I discovered that it was not to culprit.

After doing much searching on the Internet I stumbled upon a forum post talking about the same problem. I discovered that the problem was not with mod_rewrite but was instead with the WP-Cache plugin that I had installed in WordPress. There seams to be some kind of compatibility problem with GoDaddy and WordPress with the WP-Cache plugin enabled. Disabling the plugin got rid of the 500 Internal server error messages.

I did not want to get rid of the WP-Cache plugin because it did speed up my site so I decided to see if anyone had a work around and I found a great blog post that told me how to fix it. The post is at Using WP-Cache on GoDaddy (500 Error).

I found thinkdj’s post over at Blogulate that has a GZIP version of WP-Cache that will work with GZIP enabled so I started with that version and added the GoDaddy fix. I took it a little further and found some optimization for WP-Cache as well. I have it fully working on GoDaddy now with no more 500 Internal Server Error messages. To save you all a lot of work I have created a .zip file containing the fixes and optimization to WP-Cache. Just download wp-cache.zip and unzip it into your wp-content/plugins directory. Your site should be faster and error free. I have only tested it on GoDaddy so I don’t know if it will work on other hosts.

Recommendation:  Remove WP-Cache and Install WP-SuperCache.  It works much better, you don’t need to edit it, it is updated regularly and does not cause any problems with GoDaddy.

Refrences:
Original GoDaddy Fix site
Original GZIP Version of WP-Cache
Original Speed Optimization site

This is a recipe I make alot. It is easy to make and only takes about 15 minutes and serves 2.

Ingredients:

Cooking Tip: Keep a pair of scissors in the kitchen to cut up food. It requires less counter space and makes it a lot easier and faster for smaller jobs.

In a large frying pan or wok, add 1 tsp cooking oil and set to med heat.
Take 1 Medium Size Red Pepper and cut it into small pieces about 1″ long (2.5cm) by 1/8″ thick (3mm).
Cut 2 Boneless / Skinless Chicken Breasts into small pieces about 3/4″ (2 cm) pieces. Add to frying pan along with Red Peppers. Cook for about 5 minutes or until you cannot see any pink from the chicken, stirring occasionally.
Cut 6 Medium Size White Mushroom into slices about 1/4″ (5mm) slices (I do this while waiting for chicken to cook) and add to Chicken and Red Peppers. Cook for an additional 10 minutes or until the water is almost all gone from the pan.
Add 1 tbsp of Classico Basil Pesto sauce to mixture and stir until it is evenly coated. Add 1/3 cup Classico Four Cheese Alfredo to mixture and still until evenly coated. Simmer for one minute more and server over white rice.

Enjoy.

Usually Thursday night is a good TV Night for me. I watch Smallville, Supernatural, Survivor, CSI. Last night this was not the case. The first thing I noticed was that Supernatural was not even in the listings, then I noticed that Smallville was a re-run. That left me with two out of my four shows to watch. Wrong!, When Survivor came on it was one of those, let show you some old footage of stuff that has already happened. I hate those, If the scenes were not good enough to show me when they first happened what makes you think I want to see them now. There were some interesting scenes but I just wanted to see some new challenges and see what Jeff Prost was talking about last week when he said “We have more business to attend to”. But now I have to wait until next week. For me is was almost the same as a re-run. After that I thought to myself at least I can still watch CSI. But when that came on I was let down as well. All the CSI’s were sitting around the lab bored and playing a who done it murder mystery “Thought experiment” with Hodges. Just what I need watching bored people trying not to be bored while I am bored. Not a winning combination. So last night was a crappy TV Night. Hopefully tonight will be better.

A friend of mine told me about two great sites recently that allow you to get free software and games. And it is totally legal and ad-ware / spy-ware free. This is great for me because I always like to have new things to do and have new things to play with. The first site is called Giveaway of the Day and the other site which I like even more is Game Giveaway of the Day. They change the software or game that you can download each day. They provide you with legal registration information or activation program. The catch is that you have to download and install it that day in order for it to work. They show the previous software and games so if you missed the program or game you want then you will have to pay to get it or wait and hope that it comes around again. Check them out and I hope you like them as much as I do.

I have always wanted to have my own Blog, but never knew what I would say on it. Today it occurred to me! I have way too much free time on my hand and have a problem keeping myself busy. I also have Adult ADD so that make it even harder to sick to a project. So I thought… since I am always trying to find stuff to do, why not share my exploits and discoveries with everyone. It might give you some ideas or at least give you an insight into my unusual lifestyle.

I was asked recently to help a friend to set up a blog (www.daboy.com), during the process I had to investigate blogging software and determined that WordPress was the best choice so I installed WordPress v2.3.1. I have installed WordPress before but never really played with it because I did not have a project that required it. To my surprise it can do a lot more than I thought it could do. This time around I discovered the WordPress plugins and a whole new world opened up to me. I finished the site for my friend and decided to give it a try for myself and here we are.

I will be talking about all the things I do to try and keep myself busy. Some examples of this would be writing computer programs for friends, designing websites, learning all kinds of new things, listening to Audibooks, watching TV, Movies and there is a lot more. I will go into more detail about that stuff when I am doing it. For the past several days I have been playing with WordPress, trying out plugins, playing with the template, etc. Today I decided to actually write some content. This should keep me interested for a few more days before the ADD kicks in and something else catches my eye. lol. I will keep updating the Blog but you can be sure that the topics will change often.

Last week I started to read a book on Learning C# (Visual C Sharp 2005 – How To Program). I got up to page 144 out of 1556 before the WordPress project came along and distracted me. I hope to get back to it as I have always wanted to learn to program in C, and C# is the new C.