No, I didn't really neglect the site - Eryxma Networks, where this site is hosted, ran into many problems, ranging from hardware failures to being unplugged by the datacenter service o.O Glad I'm back up, and without any lost data ^^;

From what I understand of the problems (if you're really interested, you can read these two threads on their News and Announcements forum: "What's Going On?" and "Migration Initiated - Status from Start to Finish"), what happened was, I started on the Chicago datacenter, which, along with the San Francisco datacenter, was exhibiting massive problems, and thus, have all been migrated over to a new, better, faster Atlanta datacenter. Indeed, the site seems faster, from just doing this posting - the news script actually loaded in less than 10 seconds, including time to type in my login/pass o.O

Anyways, things have been pretty much uninteresting while I've been down. I'm almost up to level 100 in Kingdom Hearts, I can now easily dispatch Sephiroth without using any weapon skills (no more Strike Raid!), and I've completed almost every mini-game in existance. I even completed all the Pooh minigames, and got the Cheer ability (yeesh... was expecting something better for all that effort) ^^;

Today I picked up some 8 hour tapes to tape the DDR exhibition on the CBS Early Show - which I just now found out has been postponed to Nov. 4th due to weather. Just a minor change in the programming schedules will fix that really quick. ^^; Also picked up Marmalade Boy Manga 4 (and no, I haven't even started reading the series, since I don't have Manga 1 yet ^^;), Fruits Basket DVD1, Kurogane Communication DVD3, and an interesting pick (and which has been occupying all of my time tonight), Phantom of Inferno. This has been sitting, out of place, in our anime section for quite some time, and I decided, after it got a recommendation from Greg (the new 3rd keyholder), to finally try it out. It plays like a slowly paced Choose Your Own Adventure book, depicted with voice acting and picture stills, and some occational animations. The look of the game is very low-tech (all stills - which could have easily been done in real-time on a PSOne) but the story is quite gripping... the cover advertises over 20 hours of play, so this might take a while ^^;

And my car troubles are kinda over - we found out that, for the past few months, there has been a severe leak in a few key engine components, which caused all the oil to drain out. Almost all the problems stemmed from the lack of engine oil ^^; That was fixed, and the car is pretty much running the way it should now. The audio system is still completely screwed up, though -_- Tomorrow, I'm probably going with my mom to pick up the Lincoln from the mechanic, so I need to get an early rest so I can be awake in time for that...

And my modchip actually arrived a while back. The thing is smaller than a typical PSX memory card. o.O I need to look into options for actually getting it installed ^^;

Also, recently, I've won this eBay auction for "New Para Para Controller w/ Used Para Game". My final sniped bid (within 15 seconds of the auction ending!) was $103.50, and the seller has given me a tentative shipping cost of $25 over that (he says he'll refund me the difference between that and the actual shipping cost, since he doesn't know what that is yet). Need to hurry up and get the PS2 modded before that arrives ^^;

And, yeah, I also broke down and bought one of RedOctane's special bundles for DDRMAX USA's release - picked up DDRMAX + Ignition 2.0 pad for $99 - this is basically buying an Ignition 2.0 pad and getting DDRMAX for free o.O The problem with this is that I get the game a bit later than if I just go to a retail store and pick it up, but this way, I'll actually have a usable pad to play the game with when it arrives ^^; My Konami is long past dead, and I can't play well on that old standard RedOctane (made well before the Ignition was introduced). We'll see how this Ignition 2.0 pad does.

I've also taken a couple trips down to Springfield Mall (VA)... they have MAX2, and I finally made one of my loftiest personal goals of recent history - I have gotten to MaxX Unlimited EX double ^^; Finally AA'd Can't Stop Fallin' In Love -Speed Mix- heavy double, no mods - 39 greats, 1 miss, the rest perfects ^^; I then proceeded to, uhh, fail MaxX Unlimited in about 5 seconds ^^; (Hey, I got ONE perfect... nevermind the 18 misses... =P)

And... uhh, I guess things really did happen while this site was down o.O Mostly me spending a lot of money ^^;;; Well, I think I've written enough for one day, so I'll write again later~ ^^;

(Woo! My avatars are back! Bask in the Misha-kawaiiness!)