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Just checking in and How to Download Videos from Youtube.com

Just checking in and How to Download Videos from Youtube.com

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Good morning everyone!

My poor blog was getting the cold shoulder for a little bit, sorry about that. For God knows what reason, my allergies have been kicking up VERY bad since the beginning of August and no amount of allergy medications seems to be stopping it. So, I’m having a bit of a hard time concentrating on anything as I sneeze and blow my nose every 30 seconds or so. I’m actually trying to get through to a doctor to schedule an appointment and get a referral to a specialist so I can get this under control again, but of course, the wonderful Canadian health system makes this task pretty much next to impossible. I’m doing my best to keep the tutorials and content rolling in, but I’m definitely not doing as much as I normally do in terms of writing tutorials and such, so please bear with me.

Aside from that, I’ve just approved a bit list of tutorials to get caught up and I’ll be doing another batch tonight to bring myself to 6 or 7 days of queued tutorials. Right now I’m at 8 or 9, which is too much for my taste. I’m also working on catching up a bit on emails and all that fun stuff.

How have you all been? Hope you guys are doing well and all is good with the world.

We actually had some pretty dramatic events recently… some psycho idiot walked into a local college here in Montreal and shot 20 people, killing 1 girl last week. You may have heard about it, it was on Foxnews and CNN all over the states, as well as on CBC here in Canada. My prayers and thoughts go out to all the Dawson students and families affected by this tragedy, especially the family of Anastasia DeSousa, who was killed by the gunman. The shit bag that did this was shot and killed by police (last I heard, police shot him in the hand, then he killed himself actually) and I hope he enjoys rotting in hell.

On a lighter, I had a few people on a forum I hang out on ask if anyone knew how to download videos that are featured on Youtube.com. Well low and behold, there is a way! Check out the handy video downloader at javimoya.com.

I’m also debating putting up for auction the original v3 layout… maybe put it on eBay and see if anyone would buy it. I’ve actually had a few people ask if they could have it, so even if I get a couple of bucks for it, it’s better than nothing. If you would like to grab this layout, keep your eye on the news for an announcement later this week unless someone convinces me otherwise.

That’s about it for now, time to go pick up my daughter from school. Take care everyone!

Dan

v3, Bowling, Rumors, Stress and Lessons Learned

v3, Bowling, Rumors, Stress and Lessons Learned

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Man, where do I start?

It has been a VERY stressing week since the last time I posted, and it really hasn’t died down very much. I’ve been REALLY bothered by the negative feedback I’ve received on the new layout at Pixel2life, but those with some experience with large sites getting revamped have told me it’s completely natural and something akin to growing pains. I’ve obviously received more positive feedback than negative, but I can’t help but agree that I’m slowly losing my fondness for the new layout. This was a design that was heavily influenced from beyond my personal tastes, and I think I regret it. NG is now working on creating an updated version of the old version 2 layout to suit the new features found within v3, and we’ll be releasing sometime before the end of the weekend if all goes well. I know this is a pain in the ass for everyone, but that and the fact that ad conversion is HORRIBLE on this new version forces the decision.

Either way, I’m sure people will like this layout and will get used to it very quickly. We’ve wasted a lot of time with this layout juggling, but hopefully this will be the last of it for the next couple of years. I seriously think I will hand any future version design and implementation to a design company if I can afford it… I’m just not equipped for all this stress lol!

Anyhow, I’ve been really kind of focused and obsessed on all this lately and it’s been taking over my life in the last couple of weeks… I haven’t been sleeping well, my daughter was mad at me etc… so it was time to get things back into perspective and start enjoying myself a bit again. So, today I took my little girl out for her first try at bowling! I wasn’t so sure she was strong enough yet, but low and behold, she manages to get the ball pushed down the lane hard enough to knock over at least a few pins at the front. The shrieks of delight when those 2 or 3 pins fell over made it all worth it… she was having the time of her life and would come running over for a hug each time she threw the ball down the lane (I taught her the granny style shot).

Here’s a pic of the two pro bowlers after 3 sets of frames:

Bowling Champs!

It was just great to go out and get my mind off of things.

In other news, it’s really sad to see people circulating rumors and completely ridiculous stories about the old programmer and my friend Jay from P2L who now runs my-tuts. Today I spoke to someone that had so many strange ideas, I’m surprised he didn’t reveal that I eat babies or something. Guys, if you’re going to build up this opinion of myself or Jay before you’ve even so much as had a single conversation with us, confirm your stories and facts with us before you start shit throwing in the community. It’s EXTREMELY obvious that a few people have this stupid need to try and fuel a non-existent feud between Jay and I, and it’s too bad because despite Jay and I moving on with our respective projects, these drama whores just can’t. Get over it for God’s sakes. Jay and I do send each other emails and will probably always stay in touch to a certain degree… I know that sucks for the schoolyard kids that wanted a fight in the alley, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Anyhow, it’s 2AM and I need some sleep… I’ve been alone with Corina for a few days so it’s been long nights working on P2L and early mornings being with my daughter. I’ve actually become quite proficient in snoozing on the couch while she sits next to me holding my hand and watching Barney or Caillou.

Good night and talk to you all soon!

Dan

Pixel2life Upgrade (aka Hammertime) was bumpy, but a huge hit!

Pixel2life Upgrade (aka Hammertime) was bumpy, but a huge hit!

Comments 6 comments

Well, things are just starting to settle down now in terms of the insane amount of emails, PMs and IMs I’ve received from people all over the world offering their congratulations, comments and well wishes. Sprinkle in the always-expected hate mail, and it was a blast!

Last night was just nuts, and to top it off, just as we’re about to launch, NG and I both lose power (we both live in the same city)! Mine was just a flicker that shut me down for a second, but NG stayed gone. We waited a bit and eventually decided to launch at 10PM. NG joined us JUST as we opened up the site and within 2 minutes, the flood of 1800 people at once killed the machine and crashed the whole thing lol! So we eventually regained control and locked things down to figure out what was happening… Serverseed hopped on and we tweaked things until we got a handle on the situation, and we’re continuing to tweak the caching system for optimum performance.

We’re also going to start going through the bug reports, suggestions and just the massive work list we all have to plow through and get done. There’s lots to do, but so far it’s turned out quite well all things considered and I’m pretty happy about it.

So thanks again to everyone for your encouragement and I’m really happy that so many people dig the new site. Now I have to get my ass back to work!

Dan

MSN Cleanup!

MSN Cleanup!

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Just a quick note that due to the CRAZY amount of IMs I get on MSN no matter what my status or personal message is, I’m restricting it to P2L Staff and business related contacts only. I try to tell people that when I’m at my PC, it’s because I’m working in one form or another and don’t really have 2 hours a night to shoot the breeze on MSN when I log on. So, I’ve cleaned up, so don’t be offended if you’ve been removed… you can still contact me via email or PM on P2L (My profile) and you’ll at least know that when I respond, you’ll have my full attention instead of me doing 20 things at once while trying to look at why your HTML layout stretches weird!

Thanks in advance for your understanding!
Dan

Google Update, Fishing and Hammertime Sneak Peek!

Google Update, Fishing and Hammertime Sneak Peek!

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My deepest apologies for the complete lack of updates on my blog folks, but the hammertime development has simply stolen ALL my free time and I am working non-stop on this with Chaos and NG on a daily and nightly basis. In fact, I am just taking a break now from hammertime to post this update, then I’m back at it for a couple more hours tonight before bed.

First up in tonight’s post is a very happy but somewhat confused update on the Google incident (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3). We seem to be back in action! Last Tuesday I did my usual daily checks of the Google system, and suddenly our info and cache pages are working AND we are now coming back up in search results with terms we normally placed quite high on. So I’m very pleased with this recent turn of events, but at this point, I have no idea why were were removed in the first place, nor do I know how we were re-included in the index. I’m always one to say it’s the end result that matters, but this little lesson in search engine drama has me more than a little nervous because I didn’t learn anything from it other than perhaps Google is a tad twitchy. I’ll continue to search into why this happened, but as it stands, things seem to be returning to normal.

Next up, I recently had the pleasure of dusting off my fishing tackle after a 12+ year angler absence and took my 3 year old daughter for her first fishing trip! For those that don’t know, I am a stay at home dad when not working on P2L or web business in general, so Corina and I spend LOTS of time together and I thought she’d get a kick out of fishing. There’s a spot that’s about a 10 minute walk from my house that’s perfect for kids, so it’s easy to get out there for an hour or two before lunch and see if the fish are nibbling. She loved it and we’ve been out a few times to try our luck and she’s managed to haul out a couple of decent Bass, a 7 pound Pike (I had to help out with that one) and some Sunfish. Here’s her first catch that broke the 1 pound mark:

Corina Fishing

She was damn proud of that fish! It’s been tough to find time to be with my daughter with all this hammertime dev lately, but she sure loves the fishing time we squeeze in!

The 1 week countdown for hammertime has begun as we are now 7 days away from our August 1st release date (yeah, I’m shittin kittens at this point) and I am extremely excited and nervous to finally get this out the door. We’re now tearing through it all adding the finishing touches and looking for bugs both in terms of functionality and cross browser performance, so it’s a race against the clock for us now. Chaos and NG assure me that our Aug 1st deadline isn’t a problem, so I’m just trying to stay out of the road and not sound too dumb when I make a suggestion that is about as achievable as sending a Coke can to Mars.

Hey how about a sneak peek for you guys that bother to check out my blog? It isn’t much, but here’s a little snippet of what’s coming in a week:

Hammertime Sneak Peek

Now didn’t that make visiting my blog site completely worth it? Good, I thought so too! 🙂

That’s about it… I’d better get back before the programmers realize I’m gone. Hope everyone tunes in August 1st for our big release!

Dan