November 2004 in the Life of Ben (Blog)

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  9. September
  10. October
  11. November
  12. December

Girlfriend (27th November 2004)

Whilst on the two-week training course (2004-11-16, which was a Tuesday) I started going out with Emma who is 21 and from Basingstoke. Reason that I mention this here is that I have started going over to her house for a few days at a time, during which I hardly do any computery stuff.

Gouranga! I’m a Moderator! (27th November 2004)

On 2004-11-27 I was moved into the Moderators member group of the G! Forums after being invited onto the staff a couple of days before. I am hoping to change the way the place is run so that the policy the staff use is much more public and much more open for debate by Spring 2005. I am also hoping that the policy can be drastically reduced to allow members greater freedom.

Full Site Update (22nd November 2004)

I went through the site on the old PC to update everything, refined the code indentation, changed the name of the site map and released a couple of programs for GTA into the Apps section.

Banned From GTAForums (Again) (22nd November 2004)

Azkoyen banned me from GTAForums.com as a joke. It is not going to be for long because the post where Azkoyen bans me is too sarcastic to be the considered reaction of a responsible administrator of a 50,000-member community. The subsequent replies from other staff members put it beyond doubt that the decision was not made seriously.

This silly prank has seriously disrupted my testing of handling and other vehicle configuration settings in GTA San Andreas via people with the PS-Two hard disk. The work was being undertaken in the topic I made about GTASA handling.cfg Experiments. Without being able to work on this people will find it really difficult to get new cars working as the complicated settings of original GTA San Andreas cars will interfeering with the new model. Unless I can conduct these tests, my GTASA Handling Definition will be incomplete.

In addition to this, I will not be able to work on FunWorld, Myriad Islands, VC-One, Curveshire, my topics in Debates and Discussions nor continue to assist dozens of other modifiers of all skill levels. I will not be able to maintain the five areas I am a leader of either. None of the people I work with and help out will be able to communicate with me any more because the PM system is disabled for banned accounts.

However, I pointed it out to Illspirit and I expect he will now see how reckless all the staff have become.

Helping Other Websites (22nd November 2004)

I have been assisting Tom Creer with his website by re-coding it to use CSS more efficiently and by altering the cell structure to be more flexible. The result is a website which is more inter-operable than before, fits the user’s choice of browser size and gives the user a little more control over how the page is displayed.

Some of the people I met on my employment training course run their own websites and have expressed an interest in me helping them with technical stuff. Getting their pages to validate fully and making the layouts more flexible.

Predicted Absence (5th November 2004)

I am going on a training course for two weeks starting on the 8th of November this year. During this time I will not be online much and might not be online at all. I will still be able to use the downstairs computer so I can continue to develop stuff for the website.

FlagStudio2 (5th November 2004)

I completely rebuilt my FlagStudio program so that it is now fully resizable and a lot more dynamic. It caters for the flag setting in the handling.cfg file for GTA 3 and GTA Vice City, as well as the two flag settings in that file for GTA San Andreas. All flags are given descriptions where their function is actually known.