danger smells like clean socks

A message to all NPForums and Jaymee.org visitors:

I've had to temporarily shut down both forums to save up on CPU usage on the primary server; I *am* in the process of purchasing a new server and moving sites off of the overloaded server, but it's going to take time. The server company I'm with is currently in the process of opening up a new data center so they don't have new servers for sale...

Until then, please be patient with me ... I hope to reenable both forums by this weekend.

Edit: Tuvix asked this, but yes, once I move everything from Tabulas over to a separate server, I *will* reopen applications =).

I was called in to teach today ... I'm incredibly excited. The lessons are pretty easy, but they will be a good warm-up for next week. I'm totally psyched right now...

My teaching schedule for the upcoming weeks is starting to get sorted out, and it looks like I'll be teaching the stuff I want to teach, so I'm pretty happy. I was thinking last night it would be pretty cool to print out a "sylalbus" to give to my "students." Ha ha.

In any case, I've been dealing with a lot of issues lately: the lost luggage, having to buy a bunch of clothes, figuring the bus systems to get to my school, moving from studio to studio (finding a place to stay), catching up with my relatives, resolvng money issues, and having a shaky internet connection.

I open my email box to plenty of pleasant replies from my friends (thank you!), then I get to read something as retarded as this reply.

You know, when I was like 15 years old I would care if somebody ripped off a "design" I did, but I'm pretty much past that stage now. It's ridiculous because in face of my current problems, someone has the audacity to whine and bitch like an 9-year old that I'm not helping them with a trivial problem like website design theft.

In no way and I condoning what this person has done, but there are "effective" ways to get me to do something when I'm overseas, but this person manages to not even fill one way.

Of course, it does deserve mention that she *did* message me before (scroll down that same page) in a polite manner. But jeez, sorry that I was busy GOING TO KOREA and resolving issues that are a bit more important than "design theft."

And I just love the pseudo-legal threats. You think that I'm going to be stupid enough to do something for you if you wave around a legal flag that you have no right waving around? Assuming I'm even *at* fault, her page says she lives in canada. You know what the success rate is in resolving disputes like this across borders over something I'm not making any financial gains off of?

Oh yeah. Zip. Haha.

Whatever, I posted a nice response to the person who sent in those requests. I'll be interested in hearing her response...

And whatever happened to resolving your own problems? Are we to hold ISPs and community service providers responsible for the actions of their members? Do we hold a mall responsible if something bad happens by one of the shoppers?

Bleh. Maybe I'm just being cynical cause I have an arseload of things to deal with and this girl manages to start griping about design theft like it's the end of the world.

I had no idea random people read my Tabulas so often.

Here are my general umbrella responses to various arguments made for keeping HTML templating.

1.) "Just let us have one"
The point is missed for you guys. The point here is that I think people really like that option, so giving them one free template will not do anything in the long run in terms of paid accounts. So giving you one free HTML template ... would be absolutely not be different than what the quota is set at now.

2.) "I love Tabulas, but free templating is the only thing keeping me here."
Then leave. I'm not holding a puppy hostage, threatening to kill it if you don't stay with Tabulas. You staying with Tabulas costs me money. So please, if the "no free templating" thing will make you move to Xanga (no free templating), Blogspot (no free templating), or Livejournal (no free templating), please go ahead.

3.) "The existing templates are all butt-ugly, and I need to be allowed to be creative."
This is the argument I can sympathize with the most. You are correct. I hate to see the same templates over and over again. But note that
there are new templates in development; my goal is to have at least 6-7 SOLID templates to use for ALL FREE USERS ... and note that you will still have access to the 'styling' sections of your control panel (the ones that control your site's color/font). So your journal will still NOT look like everyone else's journal ...

4.) "I can't pay you, but I would."
Right. For those of you in the US, I find it hard to believe that you cannot scrounge up $8 for a 3-month account. You can send money via snailmail (either by money order or check), and I find it very hard to believe that some people cannot obtain $8 (except those really really young kids, but you guys are disadvantaged on the web already).

Look, the argument boils down to this: "It is costing me far more to run this site than if I hadn't even created it. I need the money, and some of you need a little budge in the right direction to rightfully pay for a service you're having fun using." And since I am the creator of this site, I have the right to do the changes I see fit to help this site in the long run. I want your feedback, and it does mean a lot to me ... and in the ideal world, yes, I would offer all the features for free. But I would like to take this hobby and maybe one day make it a bit more. And to do that, I need to address financial concerns.

The new Tabulas 2.0 display/control panel is a lot better, so the whole pricing on the paid accounts makes it a steal compared to other sites like TypePad.


If any of you have a good legitimate suggestions on what I can do that would benefit most of us, feel free to comment below. Feel free to link this post to your friends if you feel the need to get more people involved in the discussion. I always love to hear back from the users.

Some clarifications:

1.) I am not in desperate need for money. As PM5K pointed out, I am not doing horribly with money since I have a temporary job here in Korea teaching SAT; right now these efforts are being made for the future... I need to get the ball rolling on starting to convert my users to paid, so I can reinvest that money into more servers ... and then in the long-run become a more 'professional' site.

2.) I do know the age distribution of Tabulas (this was posted a long time ago, but it comes down that most everyone is in high school and college). But I don't believe that the idea that "$10 is their next pizza or CD, so they won't purchase a Tabulas account." I do think that people, given the money, will pay ... even if they are broke. Most people who have paid accounts right now are within my age group ...

3.) Marvin makes a about finding what my target audience is. He makes a valid point that many people do write... but that is the older crowd. I would reckon people 20+ years of age use Tabulas to write, but people under 20 years of age mostly do it because it's "cool." Realizing that for some it's only a fad, those people _will_ make "impulsive" purchases ... and hopefully that will be a Tabulas account, instead of Britney Spears' latest CD.

Furthermore, those people who are capable of doing HTML have enough HTML knowledge that they may be aware that they have to pay for hosting to do their normal website; Tabulas is meant to supplant the whole "individual" hosting and to offer the tools that people use to make websites (journal, gallery, links page, hit logging).

So the idea behind making people pay for templates would not entice users who are doing this to write to switch to paid, but there are other great incentives for people who are simply doing this for writing in getting a paid account: categories, hit logging, (future) better syndication support, searching, (future) advanced community management.

4.) Google Adsense advertisements might be placed on free user's websites as well, but none of this will affect paid users. The advertisements will only be placed on specific free users' pages... if we feel the free user is using more resources than we feel is proper, we will start advertisement placing. Most likely it will be some sort of small equation (I feel weird using the word algorithm there) that will factor in when you joined, how often you log-in, and how often you post to determine whether you have passed the "threshold" or not. But this isn't totally set in stone; I may run a small beta test to see if the Adsense ads pay off at all before attempting to implement it on a wide scale across the Tabulas network.

However, I do feel that it would be a lot better to run the Pud-run MarketBanker on the control panel portion rather than pushing advertisements on the Tabulas journals themselves. I'm thinking something along the lines of "force people to go through an advertisement page everytime they post, or it won't post publicly" type of thing. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, and it might go over a lot better (then the burden is again on the writer and owner of the journal instead of the reader).

Disclaimer: Most of you know this, but since some of you are somewhat new ... I will never ever resort to any type of pop-up advertisements, graphical advertisements, or any selling of e-mail addresses to get money. Your privacy is incredibly important (well, since it's my privacy too!)

The server crashing every day has become a daily occurence. It's frustrating to you, I know. I'm sorry. It's more frustrating for me. (But as a side note, I'm incredibly amazed at how well one 1.3Ghz Celeron with 512 mb of ram is handling all this traffic!)

It's been one of those weeks, when things have been piling on and on ... I feel like I'm bottling up too much anger ... sometimes I just get this urge to go out and get completely plastered at some bar. It's a tough feeling.

I've been struggling with a lot of issues regarding my own life; in terms of the direction I want to take my life and what I want to be doing a year from now. I've also generally been disillusioned with this whole teaching experience (I'll write more about this once I get back, as it's really not appropriate to write when I'm hot-headed about the issue) ...

People have always told me I'm hard working, but I've never really felt that way about myself. I've always had these expectations of myself to be able to do everything my mind expects of me. But in those moments when I need to be working, I'll get lazy and do something inane. For example, thi whole Tabulas thing. Had I pushed for the control panel to be finished ... a lot of these server issues would be irrelevant.

I haven't accomplished much, if at all, of anything important on my "to-do" list. The problem is that I find myself (once again) spread far too thin. This job takes up 13+ hours every day (I leave at 8am and get back around 930pm) ... for which I only get paid 6 real hours. This has left me very little time to go out, meet friends and relatives, and to work on my own stuff.

Soon I go back and have a whole another life to deal with.

And I'm at such an important crossroads in my life. Once I get back, I have to decide whether to commit my money all the way to Tabulas; I will be investing upwards of $500/month (realize I don't have a job once I get back) to servers on Tabulas.

It's such a huge mental burden and it's honestly been stressing me out ... not letting me sleep at night too much.

Of course, it's totally not encouraging to read the responses I get from various people (the rational part of me tells me to ignore these people) who whine about server outages and features being stripped away.

I sometimes wonder if they can stick their heads out of their own asses and look at the reverse side of the equation and see me. The struggling kid, just trying to do what he loves, but finding it's not financially viable yet.

So he busts his ass building a completely new system, only to find it's way over his head ... so he's constantly discouraged and finds progress way too slow. (I think as a loner, it's important that I be able to see goals being reached to encourage myself, but too often I don't see it happening)

And this time, it's all a learning experience. This boy took no formal CS training, so he has no idea what he's doing half the time; the CP has been rewritten almost 3 times since I first started working on 2.0 as I find out various optimization tricks and mess around with the site architecture. I continue to do a lot of reading on optimziations, and just find myself totally overwhelemed with all the necessary components in making an awesome website that's well optimized (I've been reading on basic optimization of hardware, hard drives, OS, Apache, PHP, and mySQL; learning how to do advanced optimization in each is a friggin' task in itself).

The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. Even about the things I know best ... I barely know enough to get back. I'm afraid I have no skills. And it's so depressing because there's so much to know in order to be the best. Sometimes it's just so much you want to quit ...

The pressures have been enough sometimes where I just seriously just sit on my bed and contemplate just pulling the plug on the whole thing.

For those of you who know me personally, I think you realize how much a crucial part of my life these projects have played; they've given me great joy and sorrow, while helping me define who I am ... and they continue to my hope for the future. It's the fact that I've been contemplating just giving up the whole thing worries me. If I'm going to commit, it has to be 100% on my end. I cannot have any doubts in what I am doing.

I see my friends coming back to college to get more schooling, and I wonder if I should just say "fuck it" and put my efforts into studying MCATs so I can apply to med school. But my grades are shit. What can I do?

On girls: I'll get serious for a second. I know I don't have time for a girlfriend, but it would be so nice just to have someone to talk to ... to confide in these feelings. These feelings I've pent up for weeks now; I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this entry about it now .. this was supposed to be a post just about the downtime. Maybe it's that damn Elliot Smith pushing me to vent these feelings.

But yeah, I really enjoyed the company of Judy while I dated her. It was the perfect relationship for me at the perfect time; I grew up so much in that relationship and learned so much about people ... not really sure if I ever thanked her for it. The split was quite amicable ... and we still catch up occasionally (although we rarely do since I'm horrible at keeping up with people).

Is there a girl out there? Some girl for me?

To touch her. To hold her. To talk to her. Making those small little jokes that make the small moments so special. Where is the girl? Something to break the fucking monotony of getting up at 9am, teaching until 9pm, coming to the PC bang and working on websites until I fuckin' fall asleep ... then starting that all over again. You know, to talk to someone about something deep or personal ... damn I miss it a lot.

It's killer here. This trip was an experiment to see how well I could survive on my own and push myself to reach new limits on a personal level ... but it's just been a summer of selling my soul to the hakwon while being dissappointed in myself.

It's so fucking hard. So fucking hard. But I have to push on.

(not really relevant lyrics, but what the hell)

Thanks for all the kind words. It's been such a blessing to have you guys all here with your support. It really helps me through the day ... I started to reply to all the comments, but it just got very uncomfortable for me to respond, so I decided not to (for now).

I'm still currently trying to figure everything out in my life ... and so posting will be light until I get out of this funk.

I was going to go out on a hiatus, but I figured it wouldn't be so nice to leave with just that negative post, so here is a slightly more upbeat post.

I have discovered the best notebook ever. Ever.


I've always been a note jotter; I love to buy little notepads and jot random notes as I go. Usually I throw these notepads away, as they're usually filled with drivel ... but I've never found a good "notebook" to write in.

Until today. While at CoEX mall, I discovered these notebooks that supposedly have a long hitory called "Moleskins."

They are amazing notebooks. The ones I bought are hardcover (made of leather) with really high-quality paper ... but the thing about these moleskin notebooks is that they are perfect for travelling. The whole style and feel of the notebook is quite elegant, yet stylish. The notebook comes with a handy elastic band that keeps it closed, and comes with a built-in cloth bookmark. The back portion of my pocket notebook also comes with a small compartment for storing small scraps of paper ...

I can't really find an image online that does these notebooks justice, so I'll take some pictures and upload them in a few days.

Just having them makes me WANT to write.

I saw a Korean movie today that I found to be absolutely entertaining. The actress in it is _my_ type of girl. I've always had odd taste in girls (as I've been told countless times), which I guess is great for my guy friends (less chance of conflict).

But in any case, I am totally obsessed with this girl (Lee Cheong Ah [이청아]:

[img:351987]
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Just my type of girl. I'm not down with that whole skanky-hot look that's been popularized by Britney. Give me a down-to-earth wholesome-looking girl any day of the week (of course, whether she *is* a whole another ballpark).

So officially, I have given up on Kate Beckinsale. I'm not sure how she expects to have a relationship with me when she won't return my calls, e-mails, or IMs. And that whole "marriage" thing with Len Wiseman ... I mean, come on. Give me a break. But I can't wait anymore, Kate. I just can't. If you're reading this, I'm sorry ... I must move on. And Lee Cheong Ah is the new lady in my life.

Lee Cheong Ah, if you're reading this, please contact me somehow. I'm waiting for you ;)

So until I return, I hope all of you guys do well. I shall return (not too long, hopefully) when I find some answers :)

- r

Edit: Wow, the discussion on the article have been AWESOME. Thanks guys for participating... PLEASE if you have something to say, post below! I love it when opposing viewpoints can come together for some discussion. I'm especially interested in hearing some viewpoints from some of my foreign readers ... if you want to speak up, do it now :)

Lately I've been very introspective regarding the presidential campaign.

I posted a political message in my AIM profile, and I thought I'd share it with you:

I don't understand all the hatred towards W. People make these generalizations about how he screwed up: no foreign policy.. screwed up our economy...

Must we forget that Iraq was a constant issue during Clinton's administration? The problem certainly did not solve itself. What about our economy? The economy was already sliding ... and I don't hear anybody speaking too poorly about govt overspending during the New Deal ... and we can all agree that the foreign policy is dictated by Bush's cabinet rather than W himself. And does it not mean a thing that there have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11?

I can understand if you disagree with his policies, but honestly I don't understand the outright animosity towards W and the blind acceptance of Kerry.

This has led to a few interesting discussions with people online. There are a few moderate liberals out there who haven't fully succumbed to the 'OMG BUSH IS AN IDIOT I HATE HIM' mentality that I so detest. But the more I talk to these people, the more affirmation I get in Bush's plan and what he's done so far in office.

I just finished reading up American Soldier, written by Tommy Franks who led CENTCOM ... he was largely responsible for the quick successes in Afghanistan as well as the smashing military victory in Iraq. It gives a lot of insight to the personalities of all the people within the Administration ... and there was just a lot of interesting information in there.

After reading this book, I am fully convinced that a lot of my fringe worries (did Bush rush into Iraq? What were the main reasons touted inside the Cabinet? What type of mentality did Bush have towards the whole ordeal?) were baseless. Bush is painted in this book as being a real compassionate who really does believe in what he's doing. There were tons of plans for the reconstruction of Iraq, but they fell through primarily because of unforeseen consequences ...

Let me make one thing clear: I am fully disgusted at the current obsession with "military service." I'm not sure why candidates think this matters, but I could give a rats ass about whether you served in the military. I could also gives a rats ass if you got Purple Hearts, or if you lied to get them. It simply doesn't matter. Bush's holes in his service records also do not bother me; we are all young and we make mistakes. I'm making mistakes in my life now ... and I sure would hate for all my life mistakes to be held against me in the future. It's what you learn from those mistakes that matter.

I am fully commited to the Bush cause; I see his plans and his vision for the future fully coinciding with mine. As I've stated before, I really don't like the domestic direction that he's taking the country, but I feel his foreign policy and his character are enough to offset his domestic policy. After all, isn't all politics about compromise?

Bush for '04.

This is going to be an oft-updated post, so I'll break it. Basically the gist of the whole entry: I have the new control panel at a not-so-presentable beta stage, and I want people to start trying it out and giving me feedback.

Image stolen from exodus

(Continue onwards)

I'm "jumping on the bandwagon" so to speak. I've seen this type of post before, so I'll just give it a try.

Ask me any question. Serious or flippant, I don't care. Curious about my useless thoughts on a particular subject? Care to know who I think is hot? Curious how I got the aliases 'honging' and 'caletucker?' Ask away. I'll try to answer all questions truthfully. If you're too embarassed to use your username, feel free to post anonymously.

What are some shortcomings of Tabulas?

What are some features you'd like to see?

Please try to be as specific as possible. Don't worry about relevancy; even if you think your idea is "far-out," post it below.

I'm currently starting to spec out the next iteration of Tabulas. The document I've written is quite long, but there's always room for more!

Remember, Tabulas was built around user-input and user-requested features. It only gets better if you make the effort to give criticism! Feel free to send this link to your friends and see if they have any ideas on how to improve the service.

But please, no "give us more free _____." That just won't fly here.

Edit: I've been banging out a brain dump of possible future feature developments for Tabulas. It's kinda lengthy, but if you're interested to see what features might be developed for Tabulas, check it out. I've been sharing a few of the interesting thoughts that have been posted below already...

Please take the time to hit the little 'comment' link and add a comment to this entry. If you're just a stalker, feel free to post anonymously... I just want some feedback because I'm curious.

How many of you keep a daily to-do list? Do you write it down physically or do you keep it online? Do you have an 'extended' to-do list (more like week-long goals and such)? Do you use any software for this?

Thanks a bunch!