If there's one thing better than getting a Vanilla Latte with an Extra Double Shot (thanks to
Jennifer to switching me on to this genius caffeine concoction) from my
local coffee house early in the morning on my way across London to work, then it has to be getting a
Free Vanilla Latte with an Extra Double Shot, because I've finally collected the last stamp on my loyalty card. Thank you
Caffe Nero for brightening up what otherwise promised to be a very rubbish morning. I'm off to bounce around the office a little now...
Ahhhhhhh....
Blue Margarita, that's
what I was looking for. If I can stop shaking for long enough to drive to the store I need to go buy some Tequila, Amaretto & Triple Sec.... (normal service will be restored soon, as soon as we can calm Graeme down anyway -
Ed).
Update: Scrap that. I just need some vodka & pomegranate juice. Thanks to Jacqueline for firing off a link to the
Pomegranate, Blueberry & Vodka Cocktail as soon as I'd posted.
As you may have seen by now I've added a basic ratings system for games (check the rating link at the bottom of each game) which is based on your votes. I've tried to keep it simple with voting on each game restricted to 3 choices: you just say whether you love it, hate it, or if you're somewhere inbetween. The game's rating is then based on a weighted calculation from all the votes cast.
I'm hoping this is useful and "works", it's been suggested to me quite a few times in the past, and I believe I have the mechanics of it working, however whichever way I figure it in my head the ultimate success of the feature is really down to how/if people use it. So I'd be very grateful if you'd get voting, especially where you feel particularly strongly about the brilliance, or lack thereof, of a game.
Eventually (soon I hope, if enough votes are collected) I'll use the votes cast as the basis for a top 10 games feature so we can see the "ultimate Lazylaces games collection", and to this end you may like to hunt back through the archives for your favourite, older, games and get voting on them, as well as the newly posted ones. Use the search facility (in the top right of every page) to find "your game", or use the comment thread on this post to suggest games for other Lazylacers to check-out and get voting on. In the meantime I have a few suggestions of my own that spring to mind:
Happy voting everyone :)
Lazylaces regulars will remember back in June that I told the start of the Lazylaces
love story, and how I met the beautiful Jennifer (read
the story so far if you missed it). Well...
After I left Jennifer back in Washington I returned to the UK for many years (well ok... many months... alright then
two months, but being apart feels like an eternity), during which we made a million phone calls, sent a million e-mails and
Google chatted for days, before Jennifer finally flew over to the UK, fresh new passport in hand, at the begining of last month to visit me here for two weeks.
Now obviously with only two weeks together after being apart for so long, not to mention Jennifer never having been to the UK before, the schedule was somewhat packed. However I don't go under the banner
Lazylaces without good reason, so obviously the first few days I managed to schedule with nothing to do under the heading "jet lag recovery".
In fact I think I met, or even exceeded, everyone's expectations, especially Jennifer's, when I had her in an English pub drinking
T.E.A. (not the hot beverage - check
the link) within an hour of her flight arriving. Quickly followed over the next couple of days with a trip around the local area, obviously a visit to a traditional English curry house (no visit is complete without one), and a whirlwind tour of the sites of central London in the
lazylaces-mobile (you haven't
almost died lived until I've whizzed you around Piccadilly Circus). Highlight of the time, apparently (!), was seeing Bridget Jones' flat in Borough Market, but more of this soon when I get all the pictures from the trip organised.
After this we headed north to Stoke-on-Trent to see Mr & Mrs Lazylaces Senior, where we stayed in a superb hotel,
The Upper House at Barlaston, a fine ex-country house on the
Wedgwood estate. And it is here, in their finely manicured gardens, that my main news occurred, the reason for this post. Did you spot it in the picture of Jennifer (above)? She normally sparkles for me, but she is looking even sparklier than before now....
Yes that's right, in those scenic gardens, I got down on one knee and asked if Jennifer would do me the honour of marrying me. Fortunately for me she said yes, and I slipped the sparkly ring on her finger. We were, and are, both so happy it's insane. I can't say much more than that without sounding incredibly smug, because it is, quite frankly, the best thing that has ever happened to me. Plans are already afoot for the wedding next year and soon (but not soon enough) we'll be together forever.
So that's our news for now. Obviously there is more of the trip to talk about, and I have some pictures (actually quite a few pictures) to post which I'll do soon, but we wanted to share our main news with the lazylaces community without waiting for me to get those organised. Right. I need to go smile some more right now...
Apologies for the un-intentional downtime over the last few days, but
re-introducing the full site comments the other day didn't go nearly as smoothly as I had hoped, in fact it was a bit of a disaster. All the extra database accessing totally locked up the MSAccess database I was running the site off of, which in turn locked all the site pages, which then in turn caused the web server to lock up, meaning my web host and no choice other than to switch LL off as the site runs on a shared server.
Anyway after a couple of days furious coding I have now exported the whole database into MS SQL Server, and updated the site where required to use this instead. The up-side of this is that, not only is the site working again, but also everything seems to be running
so much faster which you should see in the faster load times for all the site pages and hopefully fewer/no system error messages, not to mention the fact that I have been able to re-introduce features like the 'popular posts'.
As always let me know if you encounter any problems, or if something isn't working how you think it should, but cross fingers all will be well now.
Cheers
G :o)
A while back I had to
restrict the comments on the site to 100 per post, which meant we couldn't see all the comments that had been made on longer comment threads, and new, longer, comment threads couldn't grow beyond that size.
Well I spent the long weekend furiously coding and all the comments should now be back, with paging for threads that have over 100 comments, and a comment form on each comment page, so everything should be back to normal (almost). Listening to the advice of the commentors when I mentioned this before I have left the comments in "oldest first" order. My next task when I get the time is to re-introduce the "popular posts" feature that used to live in the right hand column of the site.
Anyway let me know how you get on with the comments, if the new system is working, or if experience any problems adding or viewing comments.
Cheers,
G
I've been having a few problems on the site recently, as you've probably seen, with LL bringing my web host's server to it's knees (too popular, and too many comments!). As a result I've had to introduce some temporary measures to keep LL, and the server, running. Hopefully I'll get some proper solutions in place soon that'll keep all of us, and the server, happy. In the meantime I apologise for the inconvenience.
For now "popular posts" has taken a temporary break from the left hand column, and unfortunately I've had to limit the comments to 100 per post (larger exisiting comment threads are still there - just hidden). Limiting comments has had the greatest impact and I'll be looking at getting this back up and running with full functionality soon.
The first step will be to reverse the timeline of comment posts so that, with the 100 limit still in place, the latest comments are shown first, older ones to the bottom of the page, you'll still be able to add comments, and just the older comments will be hidden. Which, thinking about it, makes sense as the comments get more relevent as time goes on (with the exception of spam), and I might have thought of doing this anyway. I'll then add paging so you can "page back" to see the full comment history and nothing will be hidden anymore. Phew! Quite a bit of work for me to squeeze in there.
Once that is in place I'll look at getting "Popular Posts" back in place, which I already have plans for: the list will refresh daily, rather than being up to the minute, but it'll still be a nice way of easily reaching popular older content.
Right, that's all for now. I'll keep you updated as things progress.
G:o)
After recent problems on the lazylaces server, it was rebuilt yesterday, but somewhere along the line there were a few issues, the result being we're now on a new server. Woohoo! The bad news is though that everything from sometime on Monday onwards got lost, meaning I have a few things to repost, and more annoyingly all your comments from the last couple of days have gone. Sorry folks. Cross fingers all will be well from now on though.
I've been distracted from my point and click gaming over the weekend by the arrival in the post of
Tomb Raider Legend for my PSP (thank you
Jay, you are a diamond geezer). So far I've only managed one level, (I have a lady in my life much, much more important, worthy of my time, and quite frankly hotter, than Ms. Lara Croft) but it still comes highly recommended from me. There are lots of puzzles to work out, where all your p'n'c practise comes in useful, combined with some nifty acrobatics and shooting. It made me think that a Tomb Raider point and click game might be a neat thing to see. Anyway, I don't recommend the purchase of many games, but this one gets the thumbs up from me.
While I'm posting a
diary entry I should probably mention that it has not escaped my notice that this is
post #2000, which I guess means that this is a kind of
Lazylaces birthday! I'll pass around the cake later ;o) Thanks for all your support, including over 85,000
comments, on the last 2000 posts since way back in October 2002. I would never have been bothered to do it all if you hadn't come to read, play, comment, and send me emails when I get really lazy. I ask you to charge your glasses and/or coffee cups, and say a toast to yourselves, and to the next 2000 posts. Thank you. Right, now I better post some point and click games, before we all get withdrawal symptoms...
I do love a good gadget so it's a red letter day in the Lazylaces office today as a courier should be arriving with my
shiny new phone. Point and click game aficionados will be pleased to see that all those games Smasung sponsored didn't go to waste as I'm getting their new
E900. If only it came with something like
Samorost or
Crimson Room preloaded, I would be in heaven today. As it is I shall have to irritate everyone by playing with ringtones and the camera instead. *nice*
A while back you may remember
I went to DC and when I got back I said I'd post some pictures from my visit. Well here are
those photos, there aren't that many I'm afraid as my mind was on more important things, as you'll probably see from the pictures. Hmmm... it would probably help if I went into the story of how I found myself to be in DC....
The full story of my trip to DC actually starts way back in April (Thursday April 20th to be exact), when out of the blue I got an e-mail from regular Lazylaces visitor and commentor Kaya (or Jennifer irl as I found out). Jennifer wished me a belated happy birthday, told me how much she liked Lazylaces, and, perhaps most surprisingly, how she thought I was "too cute". Well you have to understand that that sort of thing doesn't happen to me everyday so I had to respond, especially as she seemed too cute herself. Well one e-mail lead to another, and then instant messaging (God bless Google Chat), and soon enough we were talking on the phone. We just sort of clicked. Before we knew it the weekend had gone and on the Tuesday I booked my flights to DC!
There then followed a whole frustrating month of phone calls as we waited for the date of my flight out to arrive, but as we talked more and more, we fell more and more in love. There was nothing we couldn't talk about, and by the time I was due to fly to Washington we knew all would go well. However it was still a relief for both of us when I finally got through immigration at Dulles airport and we jumped on each other and we both just knew it was right.
Being in Washington was fun, I had never been to The Sates before, but of course the best thing for both of us was just being together. We had the best time seeing her friends and family, and travelling around to Baltimore, DC and Annapolis, but the main thing was to spend as much time together as possible. We found that we were, and even though I'm back in the UK now we still are, insanely happy. Getting on that flight home was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life.
We're now back to a world of phone calls since we are apart, but we're already looking forward to Jennifer visiting here in August (only the flights left to book), and we already have my trip back out to DC organised for Christmas.
So that's pretty much the story of my trip to DC. It most definitely will not be my last, and in the meantime Jennifer and I are hogging the international phone lines between the UK and the US. Apologies if you've been trying to make an international call yourself and all the lines have been busy, but I can reassure you that our call was more important.
I'll keep you updated with Jennifer and I's news in the
diary section of Lazylaces, but in the meantime, back to some
games...
Well sorry for being quiet. I've really been suffering from bad jet lag. I'm not sure if it normally lasts this long, but I've been totally messed up for the last few days and I only just got my first proper night's sleep last night (well even that was fairly weird, but it was close enough). I even started wondering if it couldn't be something else. However I'm feeling relatively normal today so I'm going to try some posting.
Before I start though I was pondering on what jet lag feels like and I came up with something that accurately describes it and also let's me mis-quote one of my favourite bits from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (well the g33k genes have kicked back in then):
Ford: "Jet Lag is unpleasantly like being drunk"
Dent: "What's wrong with being drunk?"
Ford: "Ask a glass of water"
