Virtual Adept

Installed a new version of the blogging software and it made some of my old posts look dorkity. I doubt I will have time to go fix them. So, ignore them I guess or don’t. Haha!

Google has put out some pretty incredible free software tools lately. The one I want to talk about today is Google Reader. Reader is a web based RSS reader, much like my old reader of choice, Bloglines. Reader has a bit slicker interface, however, and most importantly it has some very nice article sharing features. While reading my feeds, I can click a button to “share” that article, and that article will then appear on my shared news items page. Even better, Google has a little javascript thingy I can add to my blog which will put the articles from my shared news item page directly onto my blog page — see the “News Bits” over there in the right column. Google even creates an RSS feed just for my shared items, so if you want to subscribe to a feed that shows the articles I think are worth reading, then subscribe to this feed here.

If all of this RSS mumbo-jumbo is confusing to you, do yourself a favor and go try Google Reader right now. The web will never be the same for you. It’s frickin’ awesome. And be sure and add my blog to your feeds. Check the RSS feeds links to the right. And hey, if you do start using Google Reader, like you should, then once you get some feeds and read some interesting stuff, be sure and use the sharing feature and come back to tell me the link to it so I can find out the articles you think are worth reading.

Haven’t posted since Nov 30. Ok, well the reason I didn’t is that during December I was really busy with family stuff and holday preparations, and then I just kind of lost interest in video gaming apart from playing World of Warcraft so I really had nothing to write about. Also I have picked up a new hobby, actually an old one rekindled, which is comic book collecting and reading. And a lot of my free time is going into that. So I may start making more non-gaming posts rather than not post at all. Hopefully those of you reading will be interested in reading about my other hobbies.

I started getting a kazillion emails requesting comment approval from a bunch of spam comments. You see, the way I have it set up, certain things you put in your comments can trigger the system to hold your comment for approval before it posts it. But I get an email about it showing me the comment and asking approval. I was getting a few hundred per day from spam bots. I found a WP plugin that should eliminate that and so far it seems to be working. It should be completely transparent to real people, but if for some reason comments functionality is not working for you, please email me.

And now the move of the blog from blogspot is complete. If you are visiting from Knight Games (http://knightgames.blogspot.com) thank you for switching to the new location. Eventually CasualGamer.Net will have a lot more on it besides this blog, but I’m going to continue with the blog here. Also you will note a name change. I’m switching from Knight37 to VirtuAdept in part because that is my Xbox 360 GamerTag. So, welcome to the new diggs, and hopefully I’ll have some actual content here soon! Also, enjoy the new “categories” tags, that was a bitch to go back and re-tag all the old posts but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

To get the full-text RSS feeds for this site, check the Meta links on the right hand side, there are two links for RSS, one is for the blog entries, and the other is an RSS feed for the comments.

I haven’t posted in a long while. I’m going to try to make an effort to post more often. I will just post shorter blurbs that are more snackable and easily digested.

Decided to get rid of the University of Texas colors and go with a blue theme. Let me know if something looks goofy.

Greetings, my handle on the internet is Knight37, I’ve been using that handle since 1996 or so. I have been a participant on the net for quite a while (since 1992 or so). Before that, I was a BBS operator, who ran an RPG & Programming themed BBS in College Station, Texas and later in Dallas, Texas called “The Wyrm’s Byte” which started in 1988 and closed down in 1992. Back then I used the name “Berek Halfhand” (from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series).

The knight37 handle came along because I had an ISP that made me use an 8-letter name for my ID. The name actually has a meaning, and no, 37 is not my age. Can you guess what it means?

I have been a participant on the USENET discussion forums for a long while also. You can find me there in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg most often, that’s my main hang out.

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my thoughts and feelings about the games that I play. I play a lot of games, and usually I discuss them on Usenet, but I decided I would also like to have a more personal space to publish my ideas so I’m starting up this blog now.