Category: Robert’s Blog

Drupal Update

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Well, I just updated the core version of the Drupal CMS on the Pages of Fun from 6.12 to 6.13 and it went pretty smoothly. One thing that I did discover is that it pays to update all your modules before doing the core update. I had earlier tried to update and the system completely failed on install because of a problem with the out-of-date Admin Menu module. Only a complete reversion to the backed up files saved me. Backing up is ever so very important in this whole process. Anyhow, I am really loving Drupal and I hope to build more sites with it in the future.

My Media Consumption Journal

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2007

Music List 2007

  • My God is Alive! Sorry About Yours. by The Knights of the New Crusade
  • The Austerity Program…?
  • A Challenge to the Cowards of Christendom by The Knights of the New Crusade
  • On a Tight Budget by Budget Girls
  • The Giallos Flame by The Giallos Flame
    • Rating: 7/10
  • L’Uccello Dalle Piume di Cristallo by Ennio Morricone
    • Rating: 10/10

Game List 2007

  • The Last Battle
    • Rating 3/10
    • Impossible platform brawler for the Sega Genesis.
  • The Orange Box
  • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    • Rating: 7/10
    • The jumping puzzles are more fun than the combat.
  • Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
    • Rating: 9/10
    • Wonderfully done video game. Simple mechanics and a good story.
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
    • Rating: 8/10
    • Nothing new here. Just a great mario game.
  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein
    • Rating: 5/10
    • Took me forever to finish because it’s pretty boring. Tries to tell a story and fails.

2006

Game List 2006

  • Half-Life 2
    • Rating: 9/10
    • Very good, but starts to drag in the 3rd act
  • Heretic II
    • Rating: 6/10
    • Bad voice acting, decent gameplay, but suffers from early FPS monotony.
  • Day of Defeat: Source
    • Rating 10/10
    • Great multiplayer FPS

Music List 2006

  • Hello Young Lovers by Sparks
    • Rating: 10/10
    • A masterpiece of epic, symphonic goofiness and left-of-center pop structuring. Sparks best since Kimono my House.
  • Fear Box Set by Ennio Morricone
    • Rating: 10/10

2005

Game List 2005

  • Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
    • Rating: 10/10
    • Excellent plot, really fun game play, and excellent voice acting. Who cares if it was a bit short. This is a perfect video game is ever there was one.
  • Neverwinter Nights
    • Rating: 6/10
    • Great graphics and enjoyable story, but the gameplay is monotonous and lacks and sort of serious skill or strategy element.
  • Serious Sam the Second Encounter
    • Rating: 6/10
  • Farcry
    • Rating: 8/10

An Art-Related Quote for You…

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“For decades, the liberals have pretended that they can be anti-big-business, anti-commerce, and anti-marketing — while still being staunch defenders of free speech. But in a free society — where art and literature are not monopolies of the state — the private sale and marketing of books, movies, music, etc., is the indispensable means by which artists and intellectuals express their ideas. The phrase ‘a free marketplace of ideas’ is not just a figure of speech — and it’s no coincidence that the Federal Trade Commission, created to impose sweeping controls on business, is now being used to spearhead controls on art.”

“As a last ditch attempt to hide the truth from the public (and, I suspect, from themselves), the censors have claimed that they prefer to have the industry accept new ‘voluntary’ guidelines — backed up by the threat that if filmmakers don’t ‘volunteer’ to muzzle themselves within six months, the tanks will start rolling in.”

“It is the job of our intellectual leaders to expose these smokescreens and sound the alarms against would-be censors. They haven’t been doing their job, so we have to do it ourselves. “

from The Censorship Smokescreen By Robert Tracinski

Art Friends (retired)

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One of things that the web is useful for is tracking down former acquaintances. I find myself going to a search service like Google and typing in the names of people I used to know in hopes of finding out more about what has happened to them since we last saw each other (a Google hint: type the name in quotes for more accurate results). I do this half out of curiosity and half out of jealousy over those who went on to bigger and better things. I would think that these folks, creative as they all are, became as interested in the web as myself and would have decided to make their own self-indulgent web pages like I did.

Unfortunately, most of my peers seem to have not gotten involved in making web pages. This page is my attempt at adding some of these names into the great web-indices in hopes that other folks wanting to find out more about their friends, colleagues and former classmates might hookup once again. Think of this as a mini alumni report.

If you see your name on this like and want to say hello, if I forgot to put your name on this list, or want me to link to your web site, by all means drop me a line! I will warn you that lately I have been pretty bad at getting back to people. Just keep bugging me and I will eventually remember to change the site or at least write you back. If I were smarter I would make this a fully automatic web database that each individual could update on their own. Anyhow, let the name dropping begin:

UPDATE: I am no longer maintaining this list. If you found this page, good for you, but I just keep it around for historical reasons.

University of Wisconsin

University of Illinois

New Website Launched!

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Well, it’s official. Robert Wm. Gomez’s Pages of Fun have moved to a new, personalized domain name: www.robertgomez.org! I was surprised I was able to get the .ORG domain (robertgomez.com has been taken for as long as I have been checking).

In addition to this new address, The Pages of Fun have been completely rebuilt from the ground up using a fancy content management system called Drupal. I’ve tried to keep the look and feel of the site as close to the previous version as possible. The most noticeable change is that the layout has gotten wider to accommodate for all of the content management tools and navigation elements of Drupal. You may also notice you favorite page is gone. I tried to move everything over, but a couple things got lost in the move. But don’t fret. Now the site is searchable!

Design tweaks aside, the new system will make updating my site so much easier for me. That MAY mean more frequent updates, and, after a decade of resisting, this site might officially become a blog! Like other bloggy sites, I now have opened areas for visitor’s comments—that could be a mixed blessing. We’ll see how many spazzes feel the need to chime in.

One more thing. I now have a proper rss feed. I will be glad to never have to hand-code XML again. Please go to rss.xml and subscribe to stay on top of the latest additions to the site.

Pages o’ Fun Version 5.5 – 2011-2015

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This is yet another iteration of the previous design. By 2011 I had a much better understanding of how templating worked in Drupal and made a somewhat slicker template that adhered to 960 grid-style layout. Sometime during this period I did an upgrade to Drupal 7 and had to reworked the layout to be compatible with 7. In the process I made the site mobile-friendly with a responsive design.