So long FTP

I got an email from Blogger the other week. When I read it, I thought, "Oh man! I'm that 0.5%!" Looks like my furniture blog will be shifting over to Google branded web space.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau

Blogger Product Manager

Google

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

I BEAT DOOM 3

That's right! I beat Doom 3!!!!

It only took 4.68 years by my count. I own Doom 3. Doom 3 no longer owns me.

Sure, I haven't been playing it continuously. But I played every inch of the game. Got every weapon, opened every locker, took out (almost) every monster.

Over the course of 1,707 days, three Xboxes, and countless hours of joyful/terrified game-play I have finally triumphed!

And now for a list of games I beat between starting and finishing Doom 3:

Call of Duty 3
Darkwatch
Dawn of War II
Eat Lead
Far Cry 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Halo
Halo 2
Halo 3
Hit Man 2
MechAssault
Medal of Honor Rising Sun
Portal
Tiger Woods 2005

Media Portal

For a few years I've been running Media Portal on a home theater pc. I make occasional changes and tweaks, but it's been pretty stable for the past 6-8 months. The most recent addition is pretty interesting and really easy. I started running Comskip.

What Comskip does is runs in the background after a TV program is completely recorded. Comskip analyzes the program and automatically edits out ads on playback. It just worked, pretty exciting!

First Post

Hello World!

I'm going to use this page as a landing site for all of my websites and interests.