TGIF, outlook good

Haven't had any increase in traffic from buying those words yesterday. Oh well! Still cute.

Stargate tonight! Can't wait to see more of our favorite Scottish doctor. Getting sad that there are only two episodes left! The wait until next season is going to be torture.

A new promotion goes up on Stargate on Monday, and another promotion will be announced which starts later in the week. That will mean we have 3 running at the same time (Unlock the Gate runs for two more weeks until end of season). Since my work has been partially on hold, awaiting the new server setup, and design to come through, I personally stuffed the 100 envelopes for the promotion starting on Monday. Don't want to "scoop" the site, so will post more about it on Monday once it's announced.

I really need to start getting ready to move. Once we get our tax returns we plan to find a new place over here on the west side, or in the valley close to the 405. The drive to and from work has been doing my head in. I get overly frustrated by the tiniest thing on the road, and know the longer I drive so much, the better chance of getting into an accident. At the speeds I travel at on the freeway, most likely I'd scratch the bumper, but I just don't want to get into an accident at all! I've started to dread leaving work in the evening.. knowing I have an hour and a half ahead of me sitting in my car, letting the brake off every so often to roll a foot further forward.

A video editor here working on American Gladiators showed us a most hilarious music video he was in back in the early 90's. It's just a priceless slice of life in Los Angeles in the early 90's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IgXgmLqn5o
Our work mate is driving the car in the video, and playing basketball, wearing white shorts. It gave us all something to chuckle about today!

How about something Stargate flavored.. some photo's!



Guess who McKay just spotted in the above pic?



BFN

The sun did rise today!

I chatted with my father yesterday, and as he assured me then, the sun did rise today. His advice was similar to most of your comments, document, document, document (for when everything all goes pear shaped).

One of our team mates (Deb) took us out for coffee this morning as a nicer way to start the day. The coffee was great! Seeing Val Kilmer sitting near us outside the Starbucks was pretty special too. He's very attractive in person. Some people don't look as good off screen as on, but he does.

My boss pointed out a very interesting article in Wired magazine this month.
Dear Hollywood Studios talks about problems with selling movies and TV online, and how it relates to the way Studio's handle it all.

I procured a couple words on The Big Word Project. Jenny and Gate. They both point to jeninason.com, then I put in a referrer check at jeninason.com which sends them onto (for now) my blog. Just wanted to be sure I pointed them to a URL I'd own in the future.. since I don't think my blog will be here forever. Here is the quickie code for my own future reference!

$pos = strrpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "thebigwordproject");
if ($pos === false) {
// not found... stay here
} else {
header("location:http://jeninason.blogspot.com");
}

I had a very strange thing happen yesterday at lunchtime when I was at the mall across the street from work with my friend Deb. I didn't mention it in my blog yesterday.. because my day was just so fubar I couldn't process what a strange thing it was. We walked into the Macy's, and went to the section where we usually get (or try to get in our sizes) the jeans we like. They weren't there! As usual Macy's had rearranged everything, and we turned to go look in other parts of the store, when I stopped and looked right, then looked back to my left where Deb had been walking, and there was a woman standing next to me. She turned to me and started screaming at me. It was the most bizarre thing. She was yelling about me "loitering" in Macy's, about me stopping too close to her, standing in her way, and generally being a very nasty person. The oddest part of it was she had a cat on her shoulder! A live cat.. on a lease, but perched on her shoulder like a parrot. Having no idea how to react, I just started laughing at her. I had to assume she was joking for some reason, as I'd never seen her before in my life. The sales associates just stood there and stared. Deb and I started to walk away, with the woman screaming after me, ranting about something or other. We left the store and came back to work. The only thing about the incident that bothered me was that the staff didn't do anything at all. They should have at least called security, or come and asked if there was a problem. I emailed the Macy's feedback address and explained what happened. They have offered me a gift card, but I sure as hell won't be going back to that store in a hurry! Besides the fact that I don't think they sell the jeans I was looking for anymore.

Sorry about the ramble today! Lots of topics, but none Stargate related I'm afraid!

BFN

Shiny big pics, to clear the clouds away

Not literal clouds today, but just not a fun day. Here are some pretty pictures to make me forget.





BFN

The kindred

Just a quick note.. after watching tonight's episode.. um.. ARGH! Seriously.. last week's promo for this week gave away NOT the last 5 minutes.. the last 5 seconds!

What the hell.. so bloody lame.

Sorry for my language.. Teyla looks awesome in her maternity outfit, really beautiful! Rest of the story was just "work out what happens until we know what happens from last week's promo". I muted the next weeks promo, just so they wouldn't spoil it for me!

Argh!

BFN

Migration plans.. no code :(

As I was starting to write the code which will run the administration site for the new mgm.com, I realised there was a problem. I've been waiting to get an additional server, at our host, with everything setup like our current live servers, the exception being with the latest version of PHP. This way I can load all the current sites onto said server, and work to iron out any bugs. Still no server (I made the case for it last year). Now the question is do I write the whole new site in the old version? Or wait for a new one.

I met with my boss about it, and we went over the pros and cons (hi there boss reading this!), and so now I'm stalled until we can get the new server.

Fixed a couple bugs on Stargate.. and on the web server setups to handle errors. Apparently our new CDN doesn't work with our virtual hosts file in the same way as it did on the old one. None of my fancy "auto search" for mgm.com was working, and none of the error pages (for stargate, mgm, or mgmhd) either. The auto search feature is sorta cool, but only the members of my team know about it. Basically you browse to mgm.com, then add a /search words and it will try and find what's after the slash. For example, 'www.mgm.com/rescue dawn' will take you to that movie, as there is only one search result. Another example 'www.mgm.com/species' will take you to search results for species, as there is more than one result.
I was quite proud of this fancy lil code (actually it's kinda simple) but alas no way to tell people that it's there.

Wish there had been some documentation from our new CDN that would have alerted me to the fact before we switched, so I didn't just "happen" across the bug one day.

I'm definitely looking forward to tonights episode! After this short (but long feeling) week, I might buy myself some juice on the way home to go with the vodka in my freezer.. Is it wrong to drink alone? I'll be with my TV?!

Never mind!

BFN

Quick half day, farewell freelancers

Today is a half day, because Monday is a holiday. Yep.. we get a half day off before a public holiday. Nice! I get to go home, clean up for girl's poker night.
Tomorrow is taxes and hair. Sunday is helping Steger move. Monday Loui and I are going back to the "Star Trek Tour" as I won those free tickets.
My boss and I went over the DB design for the new CM, and looks like it's done! That means next week I'll be writing the admin site. Had some minor snafu's on MGM HD that got resolved today.. something to do with css that Steger took care of, and my mistake (meant > not >=).

Was reminded today of the fibonacci sequence, and the golden ratio. This was all in a discussion about Reese's peanut butter cups. How they are like the golden ratio. Problems occur when they upset this ratio by changing the shapes (like the heart shaped ones for Valentine's Day), or by making them smaller. Fascinating stuff! Will try and represent that in a mathematical way over the weekend.

Pushed live the new weekly "game" on the Stargate site. I hate the game.. I usually have to test the darn thing, and always before I've seen the episode.. spoiled again. Luckily today's wasn't so, as I've already seen Midway!

Hopefully in the coming weeks our theatrical slate will bulk up. It's looking very anemic since the Writer's Strike. At the moment we've got nothing until Valkyrie in the fall. Some fabulous titles such as "cutting edge 3", and "species 4" however will be appearing on a tv screen sometime soon.

Up until today we had two freelancers working with our team as we have been short staffed. Today was their last day, so we all went across the street and had some gelato to mark the occasion (bought by our boss, sweet huh?). Our team will be down to 6 including email marketing manager, and our boss. Yikes.

Ah look at the time, it's 1.15pm, I should go home!

BFN

Wedding Daze and such stuff

Today was mostly taken with following what was going on with the Wedding Daze sweeps. We're not sure if it's been a resounding success, or if the "special code" has just made it's way onto all the "sweeps" sites out there. Hopefully some people are buying the movie on PPV, and watching it there, but who knows?!
Trying to work out a method so in the future we can better ascertain where people get the code to enter the contest.

Went over the new mgm.com content management schema with Matt today. I think it's pretty much nailed down, and since I've only got a couple weeks to finish the administration tools, It's time for me to start writing some of that code!

All quiet on the Stargate front today. We had a meeting with my boss's boss today, and I dropped the "none too subtle hint" that if I found myself in Vancouver somehow.. would I make it to see a day of filming? We'll see! If I keep dropping hints perhaps they will just let me go to shut me up. ;)

Dan Clark was very amusing this morning, and he spent the whole day with the video editors going over clips. I stopped by a couple times to chat, as I kept finding excuses to go make another cup of tea. :D

I'm looking forward to everyone getting to see the David Hewlett Extra! clip. I see it is set to turn on on the 21st Feb, sadly Joe's doesn't turn on until the 6th March.





BFN!

Data move has begun!

Yesterday afternoon I finally finished the transfer tool. This morning I showed Nancy how to use it, so in theory.. in a couple weeks.. all of the data should be in the new database!
Now onto more exciting projects, such as writing a new administration site to manage all that data. Woot. Another tool will have to be written to handle any/all mistakes that happen in the original transfer. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Nothing else too interesting this week, because we don't want to be going live with any great code changes before our long weekend. We get off at 1pm on Friday, and won't be back until Tuesday.

I love all the poll suggestions, and have passed them onto Nancy. That should keep it going at least until end of season! Sadly all things Stargate will go quiet for us after end of season until the Summer. That is both good and bad, as we have so many other projects it will give us time to play catch up. American Gladiators is still a big focus, but I just can't care about it so much...

Beaniesheppard mentioned a problem with the DVD sleeves and a promotion on the UK site last week, and I was able to pass on the issue to the right person! It should be working now for anyone who's had trouble using the site up until now. Thanks to Beanniesheppard for letting me know about it!

Midway early, Oracle is playing nice

I got so caught up coding yesterday afternoon, I completely forgot to blog! The method described in "Life after Coffee" worked.. eventually. I was having trouble referencing the id in the array returned from the database. No idea why.. so I looped out all vars, and there was the ID! Woot! I was so excited I ploughed ahead until someone said "Why are you still at work? It's almost 6.30pm".
Finishing up that tool today, I see light at the end of the tunnel, I think we might just be able to complete it all before April! OK.. maybe that's going too far as I can't speak for design or front-end. :D
For my own future reference about getting back the ID:

if($db->query("select DBname.SequenceName.currval from dual")){
if ($got_id=$db->fetch()) {
//I know this next part is stupid long,
// but for some reason when I do "as the_id"
// $got_id['the_id'] doesn't work
//It also doesn't work with $got_id[0].. No idea why..
foreach ($got_id as $contents) {
$title_id=$contents;
// echo "The ID: $contents?\n";
}
}
}

Hopefully I can look up this post when I forget how to do this again. Sadly my blog has in the past been useful for this ;)

Onto things Stargate (and part of the reason I worked late) My boss got a call in the morning saying that for some reason Midway was on iTunes. That isn't something our team takes care of anymore, so he passed on the message to the proper people, but knowing that I'd be mighty unimpressed if he didn't tell me.. told me. YAY! I rushed into iTunes, nabbed me a copy before it got taken down. I watched it (while working) in the morning.. but wasn't as productive as I should have been. Ooops.. (hence the late working). I won't say anything about Midway until next week, so I can share in the fun with everyone!

I was reading some forums later in the day, and I noticed three posts about "who's fault it was". Since I'm not directly involved, I can't say who was at fault, but I'd like to clarify the process. Far in advance of an episode being posted to iTunes and to Amazon unBox, we (or SciFi.. not sure if the files ever come here) sends the raw files to an encoding company. They produce the proper encoded versions of the episode one each for iTunes and for unBox. People here make up a spreadsheet with all the "metadata" that each require (different sets of data for each). This data includes synopsis, air date, release date, release order etc. The spreadsheet is sent onto iTunes and unBox, along with the encoded episodes. It all gets incorporated into their automated systems, and everything is set to go.
A mistake at the encoding company meant that the episodes were ordered by their production number, and not by their air number. This is how episode 4 ended up being sent in place of the first episode. The spreadsheet was not read correctly, and the wrong column was taken for air order. I'm not sure what happened this time, but I assume that the air date was set wrong in either the spreadsheet, or when it was entered into the systems at their end. Since it only happened on iTunes, I assume the spreadsheet was correct, and something happened either at the encoding company, or at apple. There has been problems in the past with things going up on the wrong dates, not just with TV Shows, but with Movies.
To sum up, I don't know who was at fault this time, but saying things like "someone should get fired for all these mistakes" is quite annoying, then speculating about a process most people know nothing about is even more annoying. Reviewing the process to try and avoid errors in the future is what's probably going to happen.

In answer to a comment:
Elyse.. I finally fixed that bug where it wasn't showing image sizes on the admin site for the content person (I'll just call her Nancy from now on) when the images weren't small and big for the stills page. Woot! Happened to find another bug further down in the same set!
There are also Extra videos each for David Hewlett, Joe Flanigan, Amanda Tapping and Jewel Staite. Should be a new one appearing each week until end of season.

Last week's poll:
Do you think Ava Dixon will be a threat in the future?
Affirmative. - 37% - 1307
Negatory. - 40% - 1412
I don't know. - 23% - 835
Total: 3554

This week I just couldn't think of anything for a poll.. I'd love some idea's about what you all think? (Sadly no ship/slash ideas.. something legal might approve only):D


Dre, Steger and I enjoying Magic Mountain on Sunday (we're at the bottom)


Wonder Woman, AKA Steger at Magic Mountain


DH might pull a muscle :S

Ooops.. my programming fails me :S

Thanks Elyse for your feedback.. It turns out my programming "around" such an error as your describe failed. Ouch.. Am going to try and fix it tomorrow. I wrote a page such as when people upload images, it should show a marker (check or x) if the thumbnail image is not smaller than the main image. I failed! In the meantime I've turned off the image altogether, as from home, I don't have access to the proper size.

Ugh my life is bugs! I feel like I squash one, and twenty more appear!

Thanks again, I appreciate it so much when you guys let me know what's broke.

BFN

ps. Kristen you really made my team's day. We receive so much negative feedback, it's such a wonderful thing to get something positive! Morjana also helps us tons, she's great like you! (and all the other fans, you all make Stargate what it is, without you we'd be lost)

Elyse, thankfully most of it doesn't have to get entered by hand, but someone has to look at every entry and determine where it should get moved to in the new schema. We only have one person looking after content on all our sites, and she's going to be horribly drained by the experience. She's the one responsible for all the new content on Stargate. She's awesome!

pps. Elyse.. I love your blog and I read it every day! Keep up the good work! Thanks for all the traffic to my lil old nerdville.!

Oracle's increment/id thingie

I think I jumped the gun yesterday complaining about Oracle and it's "last inserted id" issues. Turns out there is sort of something I can do. "Life after Coffee" has explained a way I can do it, but I'm not quite to the part where I need it yet, so have not tested it in action. His method of doing the sequence/trigger auto increment worked, so I'm fairly certain the method he explained will work. Basically you get the "current value" of the sequence.. after the trigger gets the "next value" to insert as the auto increment. Fancy!

I managed to consolidate a list of 16 ratings (some old, some new, some wrong) down to 6. It was confusing for people inserting content, as they weren't sure which to pick (difference between Unrated or Not Rated).

On Monday I should be able to get content started on actually moving the data. There are over 4000 titles in our movie and tv database, so it's going to be a long process for whoever has to eyeball every single title. A lot of data will have to be entered after the move. I've created tables to hold episodic data for TV series, which previously wasn't kept in the site database. Stargate is easy, as I can run a dump from that site database and import it straight. TV Shows like the Outer Limits, Dead like me, Poltergeist are going to be tougher, as I'm not even sure if we HAVE all the data for them. Since "owning" and having rights for in entertainment can be really hazy, I've designed the new database to have at it's core only what MGM actually owns. An additional structure will exist for all the titles MGM has rights for (for example Reno911, Chappelle's Show which we have rights for syndication).

I printed out the database design a couple weeks ago when I thought it was finalized. I've changed it so much in the past week, my printout is now too old. Even with a tiny font, it takes four pages taped together to see the whole schema. :D

All quiet on the Stargate front today. Some comments on comments:

Kristen: I emailed your comment to everyone in my team, as we mostly only hear feedback in a "negative" sense, so they opened my email with the subject "Stargate feedback" with trepidation. Only to be pleasantly surprised by your comment! We plan on printing it out and framing it. ;) (only half joking!). As far as the problems with the video, all I've been told is: It works in Quicktime 7. I mentioned you'd updated your quicktime fully, so I'm not sure, but they are looking into it further. Can you try and open the direct url to it?

watcher652: I'll pass on your ideas for more Stargate stuff to marketing. I'd love more stickers and stuff! Everything in my cube aside from the posters from Comic-Con I brought in myself. I even have a "Joe" corner, with the signed photo (that I bought off ebay..) and two of the posters from Stargate magazine.

Morjana: Blow up enterprise's! That sounds brilliant! We should make blow up stargate's.. like.. life sized.. ooooooo! I'll ask the marketing people about the Team Stargate survey.. did that go out already? I didn't see an email. Strange!

Elyse: Stargate site won't be affected at all, it's got a nice brand new system database and all I designed for it last year. MGM had an old messy, badly planned database that I didn't have time to redesign when I moved the site about a year ago. We were in such a hurry we used the same schema when we switched from Sybase to Oracle. It's FUBAR! The front end is definitely changing for MGM.com.. to something usable, with actual content *gasp*

Pedantic Bohemian: Web Dev's and fangirls unite! :D





BFN

Oracle frustrates me with no id handling

Well that's not entirely true, about the no id handling. Today was spent trying to work out how to get the "last inserted id" from oracle. It's pretty simple with mySQL.. it's .. LAST_INSERT_ID().
I think I'll have to kludge it for the transfer tools, and work out something for the new administration site.

Not sure if I'd mentioned it here yet but we're working on a complete redesign from the database up for mgm.com. It's been in the works forever, but it's not a priority for our PTB, so we only work on it when there's nothing to do on Stargate, MGM HD, American Gladiators, or any of the theatrical sites. Basically never.

Now onto the subject I know 99% of the people that read the blog are here for ;)
I finished watching "the Ark of Truth" at lunchtime. The only thing I'll say is that it's got some lovely whump in it for.. well.. just about everyone. I can't wait for it to be released, so I can sit on my couch and watch it properly (the version I was loaned was meant to be played widescreen, but I couldn't get it to "unsquish" - my technical term).

I checked out the video's that we'll be posting to stargate.mgm.com in the coming weeks from the People's Choice Awards. It's the viewer questions, and I don't remember seeing them before on the People's Choice site. Lots of fun. We're also posting the extended video's from when Extra was on the set with Genii Jerry. There's a video each for Amanda Tapping, David Hewlett, Joe Flanigan, Jewel Staite, and Jason Momoa which will be released over the next few weeks leading up until the end of the season. I watched them all, and was shocked to see I'd spoiled myself by watching two particular ones. That's probably the worst part about working on the site, and people at work knowing I'm a fan and showing me stuff that's not out yet. I constantly spoil myself ><. I checked with the content person and confirmed they weren't going to be posted on the site until after the particular spoiler content had aired.

Earlier this week I forgot to post the results of last week's poll:
Will the events in "Harmony" affect Genii relations?
As I see it, Yes. - 53% - 2399
Cannot predict right now. - 20% - 891
My reply is No. - 28% - 1259
Total votes: 4549

In response to some comments:
beaniesheppard: Actually we host that site (AtlantisDVD.co.uk) but we did not build it. It's maintained by a company in the UK, for Fox (who does MGM's DVD distribution). There is someone at that company who emails me to push files live for them, so I can certainly point your concerns in the right direction. Email me at jeniimages@gmail.com and I'll send your email on to them.
Kristen: Sorry I don't know anything about the pics specifically. We get a disc full of them, and then get told which few are approved by legal to put up on the site (like 10 out of 100). The designer then resizes them, and the content person posts them. I just happened to get a disc from early in the season and snagged some of the choice images.
Liz: I've tried to move that rss link, but I think it's a blogger thing. I can't find it anyplace in the template or settings to move it. I noticed other people with blogger blogs have the same issue.
Crystal: I love New Voyages! Great BTS pictures on your blog, very exciting!

Side note about today's pics.. nothing exciting from the show, but I'm almost out until after the end of the season (got some nice eps 20 bts shots) and after the Ark of Truth is released. These frisbee thingies were given to the cast when they were here to film the People's Choice bit in early Jan. David commented that Mars will take about 10 seconds to chew it to pieces.

This image for scale..


You sort of twist it down into a little circle and stuff it in a little pouch. Reminds me of a sun shade I used to have for my car, but much smaller.

BFN

Quick note today

Can't spend time telling everyone all about the wonderful code I wrote today, or the awesome new system I designed for mgmhd.com's admin tool to automatically detect whether images have been properly uploaded for primetime. Don't have time! Have to run.

Got to see Ark of Truth today at work. Yep.. I almost fell off my chair when someone from another department came by and said "hey do you want to watch this? give me back the disc when you're done". Yeah!! I didn't manage to get all the way through it (my lunch break wasn't long enough) but so far it's just so awesome, I kept rewinding bits and watching them over. I forgot how lovely Ben Browder's eyes are, and how twitchy Vala is.
We also got a bunch of Stargate Atlantis flyers (sort of soft frisbee's) to be incorporated into a sweepstakes or giveaway of some kind. I took some photo's with it, except of course I can't find my camera download cable.

Nevermind.. here are some fun pics anyhow.


This one is from the main site, but a larger version if you click on it!





BFN

Finally a press release is released!

What a relief that that release is finally out on SciFi. I had heard about the cast changes a couple months ago (not all the changes) in passing, and have been bursting to talk about it ever since!

I could see Amanda Tapping wanting to leave for Sanctuary, but Woolsey! I love Robert Picardo, but to me he'll always be an emergency medical hologram. His character on SG-1 was very unpleasant, and he didn't improve much coming to Atlantis at all. I read in Joe Mallozzi's blog that he points out that McKay was really unpleasant at the start too. Does this mean they will try and "makeover" Woolsey? That would be strange after all this time. Excited to see Michael Shanks, even if it's just for two episodes.

Not too much going on today, more dreary transfer tool stuff for mgm.com data. Updated home page for Stargate so that one of the sub banners rotates out with other images and links from the administration site like the old header used to do (before it was made using flash). Yesterday Amanda Tapping was moved in the header to the side, and made slightly smaller. I really don't understand all the rules and contract agreements about head size, billing order and such. The reason why Jewel had been flipped in the header was in the attempt to get them all to fit, all with the same "head" size. Yes.. That's the criteria.. same head size. *shakes head* Nothing gets marketing teams into a tizzy as much as billing.

I'd love to see your Star Trek pics Morjana! I actually just won two free tickets to go back to the Tour. Thinking about taking a day off work and going again.







BFN

Timing is everything

People on my team switched out an image on the stargate site today. The change was subtle, but it was really all about the timing. We had planned to make the change today, because of news that was supposed to be released today. Unfortunately it came out early, last Thursday I think.. so we're slow again!

See if you can spot the difference? ;)

Much discussion today about writing documentation for vendors (people who write micro sites for our movies) so they can know what platform we run, how they can login, what we expect of them. I wish this didn't always automatically fall to me, but apparently I know more than most about what vendors should know, and about the mistakes they always make. I hate writing docs.. seriously hate it!

MGM HD website changes are in the works, tomorrow TPTB meet to talk about the future of the site. Apparently they want a site that appeals to business in a way that business will think it will appeal to consumers. That's a spec? great stuff!

Sunday Loui and I went to "The Star Trek Tour" at the Queen Mary Dome in Long Beach. It was an _awesome_ day out, and we had so much fun! I was so pleased that they had not only the TNG bridge (of which I'd already posed on a version in Las Vegas) but also the TOS bridge, as well as a mock version of the TNG engineering. Another favourite spot was a hallway containing a transporter room, quarters, medical and turbo lift from TNG.
We were in trekkie heaven, and luckily I am clueless about American Football, so I'd bought the tickets for Super Bowl Sunday! We had the place to ourselves (practically).

Lots of fun, and that's where today's photo's are from! If you love Star Trek as much as me, you'll see more pictures over at my site (jeninason.com)


Loui at the controls


What does this button do?


Inertial Dampers offline?!?!

BFN

Dreams of a full team and something working on it's own

I know, I know.. pipe dreams right? On the day that I am pretty much alone (only developer here) the wheels fall off.

Starts off with an error Morjana let me know about. Something had expired a day early, and there was no default "whoops" image for the homepage, so it just picked the first one in the list, which happened to be miller's crossing. Arghhhhh...

Next was an email from our host, cheerily informing me that the cname had been setup for stargate. I use dnsstuff.com to check and find it's not there. Umm.. of course.. they wouldn't understand this sentence:

What I need is Stargate.mgm.com (not with the www, I’ll redirect them over to just Stargate.mgm.com) to have a CNAME pointing to mgmstudios.vo.llnwd.net.

They setup the cname on www.stargate.mgm.com. Arghhh... now it's showing a blank page, and some of the marketing material for stargate has that misbegotten url on it.
I call them, they promise to fix right away.. I check a couple minutes later and there is no longer a cname on the www, it's on the other one. JOY.

Two hours later I decide I should just check and make sure www.stargate.mgm.com is going to the other site (stargate.mgm.com). Nothing.. no resolve.. um. I check.. they deleted the entire zone file!! This means there is no site there at all! I storm into my boss's office and rant and rave for a while, pulling on my hair. I'd done a couple sites already this week, sites that get next to zero traffic. One of the large sites comes up for moving, and voila.. they can't understand the most simple of instructions. I call again.. please fix. Right now, 4 hours later, I still can't get to www.stargate.mgm.com, but friends in other parts of the country seem to see it ok. If anyone happens to notice it not working, please let me know, and I'll call the host in a screaming fit.

We're luckily planning to change over to manage our own DNS in the future. Although this means even more work and responsibility for me, it means that I won't have to deal with this crap. They are SLOW.. omg so slow.. and they get it wrong about 30% of the time.

Now to top it off. I get emailed a link for the "game" that's on the stargate site on Friday's. Today I get the email, do my usual code updates to put it on the live servers, and push it live. It's not there. I check the servers over and over.. but to no avail. It just won't load. If I browse to http://stargate.mgm.com/games/ it works fine, if I go to http://stargate.mgm.com/games/index.html it shows last week's game. I have tried to "expire" the page with meta tags, I've tried to change the link to it in the nav, but it won't pick up the new javascript file. This CDN stuff is great.. until you can't make it work!! Akamai was pretty easy, you just login to their interface, and specify the file you want to renew, and it does it within 10 minutes. I've poured over the Limelight interface and can't find anything like it. We have a short 8 page document from them which explains nothing.



It's 5.30pm, and I am staring at the door. I know there are 4 beers in my fridge (Coopers!!) that are calling my name. It's been an alright week.. well up until today!

I'm excited that SciFi channel ordered 13 eps of Sanctuary! Thanks to Morjana for the heads up there.. I think they sent out the press release earlier than we were expecting though. There may be changes to the Stargate site in the new future.

All these great fanfic recommendations have been running my printer dry! (Happily!)

Have a great weekend!

BFN