Girl Meets Geekdom

As you can see, my website is back! (Almost) fully restored to it’s original goodness. So what’s changed between now and the previous post where I gave up this whole site restoration business?

The first part of my frustration was that I had a Wordpress database backup that was not compatible with any of the version of Wordpress I tried to install on my new site. The other obnoxious quirk was that no matter what I did with my .htaccess file, I could not run Wordpress using the temp URL provided by my new host.

I still had some hope that my old host will reboot their servers at some point. Since their nameservers were as dead as their host servers, I kept the primary DNS pointed to them and just let the secondaries point me to my new host. Yesterday, I gave up and finally switched it so my new host was primary.

Now here’s the part where someone smarter than me can tell me exactly what happened…

About an hour ago, I managed to find myself in a state where my OSX laptop gets a different DNS than my Vista desktop. Yes, the old peeps decided to restore their servers, and now that old website is fully functioning on ONE of my computers. I immediately went and upgraded Wordpress so I could download an xml export of my site, then used my other computer to restore my website on my new host.

I don’t even know how that works ‘cause these computers are on the same local network, and the internet provider is the same one that services all of Ithaca, but hey, no complaints from me. I’m just happy to have most of my site back. (The gallery has been sacrificed…but Wordpress 2.5 has gallery functionality built in. Goodbye Gallery2.0)

Recently…my website died…

I found it non-responsive one day, something which was happening rather frequently over the past few months. I went to check the server status at my old web host http://www.serverway.net only to find a blank page with short note telling their domain registrants to where to go to reclaim their domains. A Google search revealed that apparently these guys have been out of business since last July…which is funny seeing that I paid for a full year subscription in September. Their numbers are disconnected, they are non-responsive towards their emails.

The MOST appalling part of all this, they never even informed any of their customers. So here I am with a new host…and not much of a site.

Unfortunately, having created this site with wordpress, I have to reconstruct the database with all its data in order to restore my site, which turned out to be not so pleasant with WordPress version mismatches, and a really bad backup file. I’ve pretty much decided to give up on restoring my website in full. At some point I’ll manually restore some older posts, for now…the site will just be rather empty.

On the plus side…WordPress 2.5 rocks! The new UI is way better than the previous version, and the “Add media” function is incredibly convenient.

Photo courtesy of Jason Kim

Last week, I spoke at the Game Developers Conference IGDA Education Summit on a panel regarding first year experiences in the game industry. We talked a lot about breaking in, what we found to be most valuable, what resources we wish we had, and even why I’m back at school now. For details, check out the Game Career Guide coverage of the talk: Stories From the Intern-to-Hire Frontline

And how do I know? Because I’m back in Ithaca!

That’s right, I’ve returned to Cornell for the Spring 2008 semester to finish my MEng in Computer Science.

“But wait!” You say, “Weren’t you happily employed at EA as a technical artist for the Sims Division?!” Well, after a good year and a half, it seemed like a good opportunity to leave EA and finish that MEng degree that was put on hold for quite some time.

“So you give up this:

for this!?”

Uhhh…yeah…it seemed like a much better decision at the time…

Am I crazy? Is this just me dealing with my quarter life crisis? Whyyyyy would I do something like this?

I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t left school to really understand. The short answer: to me, this is about life goals and accomplishing what you set out to accomplish. The long answer? Ask me in person. It’s really a longer schpeel about personal goals, doing the things you can do at school and nowhere else, timing, risks, and maybe something about wanting to be a designer. (Even though I’ll be the first to admit, after a year and a half, tech art might actually be my true calling…but one would never know for sure)

Yes, it’s a gutsy move. But, as my lead and mentor at work once said, “Down the road, you’ll come to realize that right now, no decision you make can be the wrong decision.”

Every once in a while I get a notion to start blogging again. I constantly think about the things I would write. Every once in a while I’ll even open up a word processor, pick out one of the longer, more thought provoking topics, and write a few sentences. Somehow, it never really pans out.

Once, at a job interview, the interviewer looked at the wide variety of projects I included on my resume and asked me how I managed to do it all. I replied, “at some point you just have to stop thinking about what you are going to do and do it.”

I’ve been pretty bad about that for a while now…but here’s a first step.