Kythin's Rants

I think that webmasters have some of the most varied work days, or hours, of almost any professional industry on the planet. Maybe it’s just my work style, but I seem to travel almost instantly between stressed out of my mind and boredom, and sometimes both at the same time. What other job can you have where you are simultaneously stressed AND bored?

Let me explain. The critical issue I’m dealing with is bigger than most issues I’ve dealt with here before. It’s my first experience dealing with a hosting server that has been blacklisted due to no fault of my own or anyone else in the company, but due to it being blacklisted we’re having all sorts of traffic and email issues coming and going to that server. Add to that fact that we’re currently migrating our sites to a new CMS, which in itself is stressful because like any good website there’s hundreds of extra little files and links that have organically grown on the site over the last year or two, and each one has to be correctly linked to avoid 404′s or even worse wasted pagerank from google. I also have my usual daily task list backing up while I deal with this issue, so all of this is adding to my stress level and forcing me to multitask even better than usual. It’s not as bad as it could have been though, thanks to my bright idea of separating our hosting packages. Go go gadget foresight!

This is the stress of being a webmaster, and depending on your reaction to it can make or break your career. I’m lucky in that I actually enjoy this kind of chaos, but that doesn’t stop me bitching about it when it’s over. It’s times like this though that give me a bit of a self confidence boost because I don’t have time to think as much as I usually do and am forced to trust my gut, which experience tells me is fairly good at quick decisions.

The boredom factor comes and goes, sometimes running parallel with the stress. It’s not every day that you come across a webcomic-browsing ball of pent up stress, and I can’t think of another industry where this might be true. I’m stressed because unlike most problems, I can’t just log in to a control panel, click some buttons, and hey presto it’s fixed. With issues like this I have to rely on two things which all webmasters loathe: dns propagation times and hosting tech support.

Now to be fair, my hosts are among the best I’ve dealt with in terms of support (it’s why I’m with them), but even waiting five minutes for a reply about this problem I’m facing right now is torture; because I can’t do anything about it. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world for me, knowing what a problem is but being unable to solve it fast or having to wait on other people to do it for me. This is where the stress and boredom collide – I’m stressed because there’s a problem I can’t deal with directly, but I’m bored because until it’s fixed I can’t do much around here. I’m checking my email every 20 seconds and casually chatting to the office folk, but inside I’m worried as hell that emails arent getting to the people who need them in the company. Sure I’ve got a backup email server going that’s catching them all, but I won’t be able to push the emails until the problem is resolved, and I can’t fix it right now!

So I guess the point of this is to just give you a bit of insight into a problem that all webmasters will face at least once or twice in their careers, especially during site migrations.

Game: Portal
Publisher: Valve
Kythin’s Rating: 5/5

I just finished playing one of the most entertaining and innovative games I have played in a long time, possibly since Ocarina of Time. The whole game only takes about three hours to complete, but it plays out like an extremely well put together comedy/sci-fi movie. The sometimes black humor scattered throughout, mostly given as voice prompts by the governing computer system in the facility, add a light hearted aspect to the feeling of being isolated and alone in a weird testing environment.

The new game mechanic that is the whole point of the game, i.e. the portal gun, is one of those “It’s so simple, why hasn’t this been done before” ideas that just… well it just works, and it works really well. Basically you shoot a wall with the left mouse button, then you shoot another wall with the right mouse button, and you can run between the portals you’ve created. You can even use it for scouting out high or low places, or looking around corners, because you can see through the portals like they’re streaming video from the other end.

It’s also incredibly fun to make portals that make you perpetually fall, or better yet watch inanimate objects fall (like your weighted companion cube <3 ).

The portals you create are so smoothly programmed that you can tear the universe new space holes while falling or flying through the air. You can’t actually fly though, because that would be silly. You can however fall into one side of a portal and come flying out the other – persistent momentum through portals – or in layman terms: speedy thing go in, speedy thing come out.

The game travels along at your own pace, limited only by your own ability to solve the puzzles presented to you. Surprise surprise, most of the puzzles require you to figure out where to put a portal in order to get to a platform, or hit a switch, or direct a rocket, etc. Sometimes the puzzles in the room force you to think quickly as well, but most of the time you have all the time you want to sort it out – as long as you don’t get hit by machine gun fire, or fall in a pit of sewage.

All in all the gameplay is polished and smooth and extremely entertaining. The portal gun is a great new mechanic that I’m sure will be used again in the near future. The somewhat dark humour included made the whole game fun and lighthearted even when staring down the barrel of a rocket launching floating eyeball… thing.

Get it and have a go, it’s worth it: The Orange Box and Portal

- Kythin

Moved servers. Big mess. Lost everything. Nuts.

I’ve got the site back online but anyone who cared enough to register and comment will need to re-register. Stay tuned for some interesting articles, I’m going to be putting more time into this blog than I used to!