Category: Me

website IP, Deviant Art

Ryan1 Comment on website IP, Deviant Artdeviant art, dns, Foto

Sorry for the problem with the website. Seems my DNS Provider decided to do a rollback and the old IP was active for dopefish.de (www.dopefish.de still worked). Both DNS entries now point to the new IP again.

In my last posting I forgot to mention I set up an account over at Deviant Art where I am posting pictures of mine I actually find worthwhile looking at. Not that I find the rest of my pictures outright bad, but they are more average and sorted by events/vacations. The ones I post at Deviant Art are pictures I find are above (my) average and worth the time to have a look. Currently not too many, but the collection will hopefully grow.

Gaming & Photo

RyanFoto, Lens, PS3, Wii

Haven’t posted here for a while, so I’ll catch up on events. I got two new lenses for my camera, both Nikon. The 50mm 1.4 and the 18-200mm 3.5-5.6. Both very good lenses, and it seems that either Nikon heard the complaints about the 18-200 and fixed the design, or I am just plain lucky because mine has no creeping when used vertically. Very cool. And words can’t describe how great the 50/1.4 is in low-light situations.

New games: Street Fighter IV (PS3) and Wii Fit

I played Street Fighter IV at the Games Convention in Leipzig last year, and it was fun. I liked the good old Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES, so I went and pre-orderd the new version on Amazon. Since the British pound is so weak lately, I bought it on the Amazon UK website. Importing it from the Brits is about 15€ cheaper than buying it in Amazon DE 😉
Anyway, the game is tons of fun, and I can safely encourage anyone who like the II Version, to go out and buy it. Probably the best 2D Fighter out there. Even though you play on a 2D plane, the 3D graphics are good. The comic like shading is cool. But there are also some downsides to the game. First and foremost: it is f***ing hard. Now I know I’m not the youngest anymore, and I never was an uber-pro at this kind of game, but I kinda expected to have a slight chance at winning when I set the difficulty setting to super easy mode. Nah, it’s not hard, but you can still run into opponents that will kick your ass. Medium is … hard, I can’t say much about medium since I cant seem to get farther than 3 or 4 rounds before the computer starts whipping my ass. And don’t even get me going at the ranked online matches. Selecting “Find someone near my rank” seems to have zero affect. More often than not I’ll end up with some “hyped up teen drinking red bull” as an opponent and I feel like the match happens in fast forward and I’m just a spectator.

Wii Fit: Yeah, we finally got around to buying one. Not much to say here that hasn’t already been said a thousand timea before on the Internet. It’s fun and interesting 😉

I think I’ll add another widget here on the right with my online gaming pseudonyms so friends have an easier time keeping track of me.

Happy New Year

Ryanbike, climbing, cold, Foto, helmet, nikon, winter

My last few postings were all a bit technical, so this one is going to be  a bit more “normal”. I hope every reading this had nice Christmas and New Years celebrations.

It is a cold as heck here, but still no snow. My guess is that it won’t snow here whis winter, just cold and windy weather.

I must admit I haven’t been climbing for about a month. I really need to get back to the gym and train more. I want to shoot some nice pictures during climbing outdoors this year (not just from the bottom or top, I want to shoot pictures while in the route). And to be able to do that, I really need more finger strength to be able to keep the pace when the holds start getting crimpy.

I haven’t been on my bike the last months either, but considering how cold it is out there … I guess that can be excused.

Without going into too much detail, I’m planing on buying 2 new lenses for my Nikon. They should give me a few new possibilities (which reminds me that I really need to clean up my picture gallery). And I should have a look at my helmet camera, the last thing I shot with that was an indoor climbing session.

Gaming & Tech

RyanGaming, gta4, l4d, runes of magic, Server, steam, valve

Yeah I know,  I haven’t posted in quite a while. Have been pretty busy with all kinds of stuff lately. so here is a short update on the more technical stuff I’ve been up to in the last few weeks:

– I moved most of the services from my old server to my new server (actually to one of my vmware guests on my new server, si-ka.net is still missing, and I need to forward dopefish.de to www.dopefish.de)
– I set up a gameserver host on a separate vmware guest. While this may not be the best solution performance-wise, it is defiantly the best solution security wise since gameservers require all kinds of strange library crap. And because it is easy, I also set up a Left 4 Dead dedicated server and assigned it to the -si.ka- steam group.

I also started playing a few new games. I got talked into getting “Left 4 Dead”, which is fun in coop and multi-player (solo kind of lacks smart bots on your own team). Then I got GTA4, but haven’t had time to play it yet. And yesterday I had a look at “Runes of Magic” a free MMORPG. It is currently in open-beta, and large parts of it still require translation (in the starting areas, most of the quests are a mix of German/English, if you get in some seldom visited areas, quests and NPC are sometimes in Asian lettering).

Climbing has been coming a bit short lately, I’ll try to get back to that more regularly.