travstatesmen

"Psychology is the study of how people think and act. Psychologists observe people in [...] social environments in order to understand why people act the way they do. Psychologists use experiments and questionnaires to investigate people. We study how genes, age, background and environment influence the way people behave and how they assign meaning to what they perceive and experience." 1 I have been doing a bit of self-paced, self-directed online learning for a while now, in the fascinating field of "cyberpsychology", or psychology as it relates to the online, Internet-connected environment. I am making use of a website called The Psychology of Cyberspace by John Suler, Ph.D. of the Department of Psychology at Rider University in New Jersey. The material provided by Dr Suler is very interesting and looks at a wide variety of aspects of cyberpsychology, including such topics as... How to resolve conflict online The psychology of avatars and graphical space Avatar Psychotherapy Addiction to computers and cyberspace Cyberspace romances ...and a whole lot of other interesting topics. Ever wondered what is behind an avatar? Why did somebody choose a particular avatar to represent themselves online? Or why is it that some people who in real life are the nicest, sweetest people you could ever meet, but when they get online they become forum trolls, spammers, etc? These are all the type of things that I have been delving into in my studies in cyberpsychology. During 2007 I was a moderator on a very popular teen forum, and I observed a lot while I was there. I watch and take in a lot more than I actually participate in, and I guess I could sometimes be considered to be a lurker, as I often read threads without responding to them. I am interested in how an online discussion starts, progresses and ends, and the interjections along the way, the moderators who try to keep the discussion on-topic, the trolls who try to bait people, etc. Studying the interactions between people online is quite interesting. does anybody else here on Xisto share my interest in cyberpsychology? Perhaps we could share notes and observations of activities on the Xisto forums, applying principles of cyberpsychology to what we have observed. Before I can delve too deeply into attempting to psychoanalyze the denizens of the Xisto forums I need to get to know people more, identify who the key players are, and understand more of the context and history of the Xisto forums, so I still have a lot of reading of the forums to do yet! Remember, this is self-paced, self-directed study for me and I am not a psychologist in any form of the term. I just enjoy studying people online, their actions, and their interactions. Care to join me? There are some interesting threads already on the Xisto forums that are relevant to this field of study, such as... How Moderators Behave Rate The Sig Above You Online Date Scams, people living fake lives... Loving Someone On The Internet? Long Distance Cyber Relationship, Long distance relationships and online relationship That's just a start! There's plenty of material here on the forums for us to consider and weigh against what Dr Suler or other acknowledged Cyberpsychologists have to say. I'd like to form a little study group right here on the Xisto forums, if anyone else is interested. Maybe if this takes off they will give us our own subforum! [hr=noshade] 1Source: What is Psychology? Fuller, R. [ONLINE] 2007, accessed 3-Sept-2008 from http://www.iadt.ie/ [/hr]

G'day neighbour! So, you're from the West Island of New Zealand huh? Nice to meet ya. I haven't been on Xisto for all that long yet, and I am still setting up my hosted site. I particularly like how Xisto allows for up to 99 mySQL databases. My last free web host only allowed members to use up to three mySQL databases. You're right about the features offered by Xisto, they seem to have a really good offer going here. Looking forward to seeing what you make of your hosting space.

I have been using Photobucket for quite a while now for images that I want to refer to over and over again. If I just want to post a single instance image, such as an image to go with a single post on a forum, then I use tinypic to host the file. One useful tip is using an image hosting site to avoid problems with hot linking. If I find on the Internet an image that I want to use that is public domain, released under Creative Commons license, or that I can claim fair use of, then I will upload it to an image hosting site rather than hot linking to the image where I found it. This avoids stealing someone else's bandwidth, and also means that you are not at their mercy should they decide to move or remove the image. You can achieve this quite easily by copying the image URL to your clipboard, then going to the upload form of your image hosting site, click to upload the file, and browse your local computer for it. When the dialog box opens to search your local computer, simply paste the image URL into the filename field and click OK. Then continue as if the file were coming from your local computer. Using this technique with a single-use hosting site like tinypic is very quick and convenient, I find. You don't need to sign up for an account or to log in to tinypic. You just upload the file and it generates a randomized URL for your file that you can link to. Very quick and very convenient. I visited ImageFilez for the first time just now, and saw this message at the top of the page...

T?n? koutou, t?n? koutou, t?n? koutou katoa! My wife and I are from New Zealand, and we live in Auckland also, death.mage. We both love our country just as much as prodigy seems to. While I'm from West Auckland, I have been to the South Island, and I particularly love Kaikoura. That is a place unlike any other I have seen before. There is this coastal highway that just has to be seen to be believed! On one side of the highway there is a massive mountain range, covered in snow. On the other side of the highway is the ocean, where often whales can be seen, even from the shoreline. It is totally spectacular! They say that a picture speaks a thousand words, but even this picture doesn't do justice to the beauty of the place! I also love the pebble-strewn riverbeds in the South Island, where the rivers meander lazily through their much wider thoroughfares, snaking their way back and forth across the smooth pebbles that form beaches on one side or the other of the river, and even little islands in the middle where the river splits in two, to join up again further down. Looking down on a river valley like the one below from a high vantage point is just breathtaking. I think that the South Island is much more beautiful than the North Island. I have not yet been to any of the other popular tourist spots though, like Queenstown or the Milford Sound or the Routeburn or Heaphy tracks, or even a high country station. There is plenty to see and do here, and I still haven't seen it all yet. As the saying goes, "don't leave town till you've seen the country". I plan to see a lot more of my own country before I go overseas. So many foreign tourists are making New Zealand a highly regarded destination. I think I'll follow their example and take a look at what we have here, right in my own back yard!

I have both a 2GB and a 1GB SanDisk miniSD card that I use via a USB card reader as a thumb drive. Not exactly what some might expect as a convenient data store, but I make a lot of use of my HTC Apache smartphone, and the miniSD cards in it come in handy for all sorts of things. I use the 1GB card mostly for music storage, and the 2GB card for everything else. I keep my encrypted password database on my miniSD card, and using the KeePassword Safe application for either PC or PPC I can read the passwords both on a regular PC using the USB card reader or directly on the PocketPC. I have a copy of the executable for both versions sitting on the miniSD card for convenience. I'm eager to get my hands on a 4GB or larger capacity miniSD card one day. I also keep my Internet favorites/bookmarks on my miniSD card so that they are portable.I've recently bought my wifey an Imation 1GB USB thumb drive, which comes with the ImationLOCK software to create a secure, encrypted partition on the thumb drive. Her own KeePass database is on it, along with her Internet favorites/bookmarks as well. I'm quite happy with her new toy, and I think she is too, but I still prefer the miniSD cards, as I can view the contents directly on my smartphone. Imagine having a USB thumb drive with a mini screen on it to view the contents when its not connected to a computer. Well, that's kind of what I've got!

[ RCA Studio III: Well, for me it started with the RCA Studio III, similar to the one pictured above left. Yeah, we used to play tennis and golf on it, in black and white chunky graphics. We had analog paddles to move the stick figures up and down the screen, batting the square "ball" from side to side across the screen. Atari 2600: The RCA Studio III was soon replaced with an Atari 2600, like the picture above middle, with 128 colors and a cartridge slot to take new games, instead of being limited to the in-built games of the RCA Studio III (for which buying the cartridges was way too expensive!) My favorite game in those days was PacMan (of course, what else?!) but I also enjoyed Frogger and Galaxian. Atari 600XL: But later I got my own system, as the other two were owned by my family. My first gaming platform of my own was the Atari 600XL, with a couple of joysticks, a couple of paddles, and a cassette drive. I typed in many computer games from the computer magazines "Antic" and "Analog", learning Atari BASIC and 6502 machine code in the process. Atari 800XL: Keeping the peripherals, I replaced the main system itself with my pride and joy, an Atari 800XL, like the picture on the right, but with two external 5.25" floppy disk drives. I also added some more peripherals, including a graphics plotter, a dot-matrix printer, and a touch-tablet. But I think the best thing I ever added to it was two more old joysticks. By this stage I had learned about accessing memory locations directly. These last two joysticks I liberated from their cables and chucked them in a box somewhere. It was the cables that I was after! These were soon masterfully soldered onto a veroboard, along with a selection of diodes, resisters, and 240v relays. Using the memory access techniques I had learned, including how to turn the joystick inputs into outputs, I was able to craft a 240v controller system out of my Atari 800XL computer, and I wrote a timer program in Atari BASIC to control mains voltage devices using the computer, including the heater, electric kettle, toaster, etc. All this was run from my Atari 800XL through the veroboard joystick interface I had fashioned. I did use the Atari 800XL to play games as well, and my favorites in those days were Dandy, M.U.L.E., and Alternate Reality. EDIT: Actually, come to think of it, the picture on the left doesn't really look anything like the RCA Studio III at all. But it was the only picture that I could find with that name listed in Google that looked anything like a gaming console.

Hi there -Sky-! I am a relatively new member of Xisto, and as you can see in this forum it wasn't that long ago that I opened my introductory thread for my wife and I. I don't know who your friend IceAge is yet, as I'm still getting to meet everybody here. So far mostly I have met the mods and some of the regular posters. I'm quite enjoying the atmosphere here on the Xisto forums, and I hope you enjoy yourself here too. I visited your Xisto site and was met with your "Under Construction page", which, with a friendly tone, invited me to direct myself to your forum while I wait patiently for your site to be developed. However, when I got to your forum, I got this, rather less-than-friendly message... yeeoww! That's a scary message! I guess it is a default for whatever forum software you are running. Might pay to tone it down a bit, perhaps.

Thanks for adding that part about NTFS permissions and encryption, CyrusX. I was going to do so myself, but you have done the subject justice. I would also add that having a USB thumb drive or similar removable storage device is also a good way to protect valuable data. That way you don't keep your information on the local computer anyway, so it is away from prying eyes. This method is also useful for when using publicly accessible computers, such as at a library, internet cafe, etc. Just make sure that when you connect the device, it is not automatically shared, otherwise some unscrupulous admin on the network can access and copy your files while the device is connected. I personally use my 2GB miniSD card from my smartphone to store any critical, sensitive files, and can connect to it using an inexpensive USB card reader that I plug into the USB port when I go to an internet cafe. This also contains an encrypted copy of my password database, so no matter where I am, I have access to all my passwords. Also, I keep my Internet favorites/Bookmarks on it so they are portable too. Kinda handy when you're away from your home computer a lot.

Some interesting comments and perspectives, as always, Saint_Michael and rvalkass. I can see that I am going to enjoy getting into debates with you two later. My wife tends to enjoy discussion and chat more, but I quite enjoy an intellectual challenge, having to back up my comments with facts and such. I'll meet you both at some time in the Life Talk > Debates forum no doubt. I haven't had time to get there yet, but I look forward to sparring with you both. I found an interesting little tool on the Internet a while ago which I thought I'd share here. It is an Online Password Calculator by Last Bit Software. It will take as inputs the length of the password (to a maximum of 20 characters), the number of passwords per second that are being processed by a brute force attack, and the ASCII character groupings (upper case, lower case, digits, punctuation, etc) and will calculate how long it would take for a brute force attack against such a password to be completed. It basically does what rvalkass did above, but I am not a mathematician so I rely on such tools. As they say, there are three types of mathematicians in the world: those that can count and those that can't. According to the Online Password Calculator, it would take only 10 days to crack the password example g"1R%v that was given by rvalkass, at 200,000 passwords per second. Whereas, the longer example, a line from my theme song "White and Nerdy" by Weird Al Yakovic (good choice rvalkass!) can not even be evaluated by the Online Password Calculator as its 67 character length exceeds the limit of this online tool. But at the maximum limit of the tool, 20 characters, this online tool says that it would take 2.1367476784093944x1023 years to crack the password for a single computer crunching 200,000 passwords per second. That would be something similar to the Deep Thought computer, the second largest computer ever made (according to fiction author Douglas Adams), wherein the makers of the computer that ran the program had to leave it to their ancestors to finally read the results. In the meantime the ancestors had formed a whole religion out of the computer and its program, while waiting for the answer. Speaking of mathematicians who can't count, I'm pretty sure that your example from a line of "White and Nerdy" is actually 67 characters in length, rvalkass, and not 66 as you stated. However, the passphrase idea is a good one, as long as, as you say, it includes punctuation and numbers. I agree, keeping all your treasure in a safe where the lock is broken and the door is held closed with a bit of chewed up bubblegum probably isn't going to be adequate protection. The encryption systems that KeePass Password Safe uses are the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES, Rijndael) and the Twofish algorithms to encrypt its password databases. There is a detailed discourse about the security measures implemented in Keepass Password Safe which, being that I have already acknowledged my own inadequacies as being mathematically challenged, I will leave it up to you to interpret.

The Xisto forums have a whole subforum devoted to those amongst use who have failed to remember their passwords, and have locked themselves out of their free web hosting account. If you forget your password, you can go to Free Web Hosting, No Ads > FREE WEB HOSTING > FREE WEB HOSTING REQUESTS > Free Web Hosting : Password Reset and ask the friendly admins there to reset your password for you. Remember the days when your password on the Internet could be something like andrew18? And you could use that same password on all three websites that you visited regularly? Well those days are long gone, and we need to not only create and remember much more complex passwords, but for security reasons we are advised to use different complex passwords for each site we visit, and also we are expected to change those complex passwords regularly. So, here is an example that you can do for yourself. Try memorizing this.... Xisto forums password: c?.3\FeO/q),%:!Sg%Uv cPanel Login: 3J'hP6#eg&!(%>QS8AwJ FTP access password: C%l3`V:?h*F!1myt^!kl Login for your Blog: P3lq!5mLtGio;8i*F3%K Login for your MySpace or other network profile: WNvd;IiB2jORSY'%?6FF As you see, that is only five example passwords. Most people that I know use many more than five passwords. So, imagine having to memorize 20 or so passwords similar to the ones above. Each of the examples is only 125 bits, 20 characters long, including upper and lower case characters, numerals, and special characters. They are good, complex passwords that would be considered complex enough for most users. But how do you remember them? And, most importantly, how to you learn and remember new ones, perhaps once a month, as you dutifully change your passwords regularly? Surely this is enough to fry the brain of anybody who doesn't have a photographic memory!? How the heck are we supposed to memorize all these complex passwords, without keeping the admins employed in resetting our forgotten passwords all the time? One suggestion that I have seen on the internet is to develop an interleaved password system, which uses two less complex passwords weaved into each other to create a much more complex password. For example, here are two relatively low-security passwords... rubyonrails (11 characters, 48 bits) ANDREW18 (8 characters, 42 bits) Now, let's try interleaving them, as follows.... rAuNbDyRoEnWr1a8ils which makes a great password of 19 characters, and 108 bits. rAuNbDyRoEnWr1a8ils This can be done fairly easily with any two passwords, and can give some really complex results. Try adding some punctuation too! Another good idea is to use a password manager. There are plenty of good password managers out there these days, such as the examples above. Many of these packages have the facility to not only store and retrieve your passwords, but also to generate complex random passwords for you on the fly, and even to autofil online forms with your username and password details from their database! Now you will never need to remember another password again! Well, not quite. They will most likely have a single sign-on password that you will need to remember. Your passwords should be stored in such password management programs in an encrypted form, and will need to be decrypted with a key, which you will need to remember! One of the failings with all of the systems above is that they need to be installed on your local computer. They are not really all that portable. You may need to start thinking about ways to synchronize the password management database, such as emailing the database file between your work computer and your home computer, or making use of a USB thumb drive. But what happens in a situation, such as I have at work, where you are forbidden from attaching anything to your work computer, and plugging in a USB thumb drive could mean that you violate your company's IT policy, and you could get fired! And, whats more, installing a password manager package, even a freeware one, is impossible due to the software distribution policies enforced on the company network. Even if you could access the data on the USB thumb drive you couldn't decrypt it without the password manager application being installed also. So, here is how I overcome this situation. I use a program called KeePass Password Safe, which not only does not need to be installed, and can run directly from a USB thumb drive, but also they have a PocketPC version which can read the same database as the desktop PC version! What I do is I keep my password database on the miniSD memory card of my smartphone, and either access it though a card-reader on my desktop PC or laptop, or I access the passwords directly on the touch-screen of my smartphone. This means that in situations where you cannot get access to your passwords in any other way on the desktop PC, at least you can still view them and type them in manually from the smartphone. Total portability! The only thing that I can think of that would be better than this is an enterprise grade password management token, such as MandyLion, starting at $US269 for a 5 User Workgroup. One of the best things about KeePass Password Safe is that it is free! So, there you have it, my solution to the problem of how to remember all those complex passwords. In short, don't! You only need to remember one complex password, which you could create using the interleaved password system outlined above. This password then gives you access to the rest of your passwords, that are stored in a password manager, which can create complex passwords for you, can remember and retrieve them for you, and can create new ones regularly, (even backing up the old ones when it does). This meets most of the expectations of a secure password system. And doing this will take the workload off the Xisto administrators, so that they don't have to keep on resetting your password for you because you forgot it again! So, download KeePass Password Safe today. Go on, what are you waiting for?

Hmm, lets give this thread a bit of a shove and see if we can get it going again. Bring out the defibrillator! I think it has gone into cardiac arrest and needs restarting! Lets face it, what can I say about the sig above mine? hinata-chan, your sig sux! (Just in case things change after I post this, hinata-chan did not have a sig at all at the time of this posting, so I'm not being rude really). But looking back over some of the other sigs in this thread, there are some really cool ones.

I normally try to separate my many difference existences on the Internet, keeping one well away from the other. Each year I start a whole new existence, a new online identity, a new persona. I just like my privacy I guess. But I'm going to break my own rules here and show off one of my previous sig files that I created for a different online identity of mine. This is from 2007, when I was a moderator on the Meez website. The image was created using Adobe Fireworks. The background is from a montage of Meez images that I created of myself, with all sorts of different looks. Then the main image to the left is one of my common Meez images. I won't mention the name, but if anyone recognizes the image, feel free to say "hi".

Here is a bit of a dilemma. I note that OpaQue mentions that "DATABASE SERVER is the location and it will always be LOCALHOST". But, tell me, what happens in the situation where I am accessing the SQL server on Xisto using a client that has its own localhost SQL server, such as an installation of XAMPP on it? Does the information above only apply to connections between the Xisto web host and the Xisto SQL server, thus making it local to that connection? Or does this convention apply to connections between the web client computer and the Xisto SQL server? If it is the latter then using the setting DATABASE SERVER: localhost would only confuse matters, wouldn't it? Because the client would be seeking the SQL server called localhost, and would find its own XAMPP installation instead of the Xisto SQL server. Am I correct, or am I way off beam? I cannot seem to connect to the Xisto SQL server for my account, and I wonder if this is the reason why. Every time I try to connect I get a "403 Not Authorized" error. Once again, please be patient with me as I freely admit to being a n00b. Thanks. EDIT: Disregard this please. I found out what the problem was, with a bit of help from shadowx. It seems that my CHMOD settings were not being automatically inherited by subfolders, so I am now using using FileZilla FTP Client instead of CoreFTP. All better now, and my Lanius CMS package is installed and working nicely on the SQL server on my Xisto hosting account. Yay!!

Thanks Saint_Michael, I will try downloading my Xisto database for my CMS later, (once I have everything installed and some content uploaded), then I'll see if it works on the locahost mySQL database. I'll post my results back here, and if I can perfect this I might even write a tute about it, if no-one has done so already. Currently I am uploading my files from the Upload directory on my hard drive up to my Xisto public_html folder in preparation to start running the installation routines. Then I will create the mySQL databases on my Xisto account using cPanel, and then run the installation routines for each package that will be on my site, including Lanius CMS v0.5.0, phpBB v3.0.2, phpwiki v1.3.14, and Truppentool v3.1.2. Once everything is installed, I'll start looking at setting up my external hosting sites, such as a Photobucket account for hosting my site's images, a Box.net account for hosting my FTP download files, etc. Once that is all set up, I can start putting my content into the CMS package, and then try this backup idea, copying the remote database information back to my localhost. Any advice that people can give me on any of these subjects I would appreciate it.

Thanks Saint_Michael, rvalkass, and nitish, there's a lot of great advice there for me to read through. From what I have read so far, I have got the idea that, while I can use the localhost files as the source files for my FTP uploads to my Xisto hosting account, the necessary changes to the configuration file(s) would probably make it more straightforward if I kept the localhost files just for testing purposes. What I will do therefore is have three copies of my files. The first copy will be the extracted source files for my packages, such as Lanius, Truppentool, phpBB3, etc. I'll burn them all to a CD-R or a DVD (depending on the resulting size) and keep them handy. The second copy will be a direct copy of those source files, which I will use as my FTP upload source files for the Xisto web hosted site. The third copy will be made from the second copy, and will go into my XAMPP folders under htdocs. I'll set up a batch file to copy everything from the second set to the third set, for when I stuff up the localhost copy during testing. I won't copy anything out of the XAMPP copy, but will use it as a test bed, and will duplicate the effort expended (on the XAMPP copy of the files) onto the FTP source files if I want to preserve anything from the XAMPP testing of my local website. This way I can keep my XAMPP files as an isolated testing area, which seems to be what Saint_Michael says here... Another idea that I had was relating to the content. It was mentioned in this thread about not copying the content from the localhost database to the Xisto hosted site. I understand that, thanks for the tip. What I would like to know though is the feasibility of going back the other way: copying the content from the Xisto hosted database to my localhost database?! Is this do-able? This would enhance my testing experience on the localhost installation, as it gives me some real data to play with. Any ideas or comments?

How silly of me! You are so right, rvalkass. I have amended this now in my KeePass and also in my Core FTP client software, and I can now connect quite happily. Thanks for the prompt response! I will go back to setting up my account now. There is so much to do! I have just created my Mail accounts, set up my Microsoft Outlook client for POP3 access to my Xisto email accounts, then set up ActiveSync to synchronize them with my smartphone, so that I can read and reply to my Xisto email on the go. I will wait to upload my website files until the weekend, when I have more time to concentrate on it, but I'm getting everything in place before that first.

I have a bit of a strange problem that someone here may be able to help with. I am preparing my new Xisto account for my new site, and am setting up FTP access. I can login quite fine by using the default login details, using my cPanel username and password as my FTP login credentials. However, I have created a new FTP account using cPanel, giving access directly to the /public_html/ folder, with a username of webmaster. Below is the result of a Core FTP session, which shows that my password is not being accepted... Resolving ftp.travstatesmen.trap17.com... Connect socket #696 to 208.87.243.146, port 21...220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [TLS] ---------- 220-You are user number 2 of 50 allowed. 220-Local time is now 02:48. Server port: 21. 220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server. 220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [TLS] ---------- USER webmaster 331 User webmaster OK. Password requiredPASS ********** 530 Login authentication failedAs you see, my username is accepted, but my password is not. Now, please don't think that I have just forgotten my password or typed it in incorrectly, or I have my capslock on or something stupid like that. I use a password manager called KeePass Password Manager, and as I have already mentioned, I am able to login successfully using the default cPanel credentials, which I also put into my Core FTP client from KeePass. I have tried "dumbing down" my password for the webmaster account, using less complexity and less characters, but it still doesn't work. Any ideas?

Other than my aborted attempt at setting up a site on my previous free web host, this will be the first time that I have set up a dynamic website with an SQL back end. I came from the Internet stone-age of static sites with lots of graphics and text, but little or no interactivity. I would really appreciate some advice on how best to do this. I have selected the free Content Management System called Lanius CMS, which is made by the makers of the more well-known package called Drake CMS. Also, at the advice of many of the denizens of the Xisto forums, I have downloaded and installed XAMPP as a localhost for testing purposes. What I would like to know is this: should I upload my HTML and php documents directly from my localhost to my Xisto hosting account? It seems to me that, with a website controlled by a CMS, the htdocs files are only the structure and skeleton of the website, and the actual content is stored in the database. Am I right? Therefore I can use the htdocs files from my localhost as the source for my FTP upload sessions when I am uploading the Lanius CMS files to my new site, right? Also, I have installed several copies of Truppentool, the SQL-powered troop statistics tool for Travian players, on my localhost. Should I also use these files as the source of my uploads of Truppentool to my Xisto account? Alternatively, should I keep everything separate, and have two copies of everything on my local hard disk, one copy that I am playing with in my XAMPP localhost, and one copy that I use as source files for the upload to my Xisto account? Either way, I know that I will need to set up the SQL databases independently. Any advice?

These are our babies, they are Zina and Thomas, a tortishell female cat, and a ginger tom cat. They are mother and son, and we at one stage had all four of Zina's kittens in the house, including another tortishell female (Zsara), a tortishell/tabby female (Tabitha), and a white/tabby boy (Spot). We love our cats, and treat them as part of the family. I am sure that my darling wife will write more about them here on the forums at some time, but I wanted to get in first with a picture of them. Emerger, your cat Meisha looks lovely, with a face almost like a white lion cub, but with bright blue eyes! We go to cat shows quite often, well, at least once a year, just to see all the cats on display. We don't show our own cats, but we enjoy seeing others on show. Our favorite show is the cat show at the Royal Easter Show in Auckland every year. What breed is your cat, Emerger? KainRacure, I share your originality in naming pets! Your plecostomus named Pelco sounds very much like our ginger tom named Thomas, and our tabby named Tabitha!

So, what is it that you do while you're waiting the 22 hours, 39 minutes, and 30 seconds to upgrade your Level 19 Palace to Level 20, when you only have a Level 10 Main Building? Being able to answer questions like this is a sure sign that you are a Travian player, like me. Do you have a selection of villages, or farms, on the other side of the game world to your village, a list of them sorted by distance, which you can select from to send your army to when you're going AFK for a while? "I need to go to the supermarket, it will take me 2.5 hours return trip, so I need to send my army to TinyFarm's village at (-125|62), and the round trip for my army will ensure that they get back to my village by the time that I get home from the shops" Does this type of thing ever cross your mind? Then you've got it bad! You're addicted to Travian. This is a very popular and very addictive game. I'm hooked, but I don't think I'm as bad as some people (if my wife ever sees this thread, I'm sure she will disagree, and say that I need serious psychological help for my latest internet gaming addiction). I'm keen to meet other Travian players on the Xisto forums. Perhaps we can share experiences, form a self-help clinic, participate in some form of twelve-step program, or better yet, get some ideas from each other about how to improve our game! So, if you're addicted to Travian like I am, and you know the outcome of a battle between a Teuton army comprising of 1000 0 0 0 500 500 10 0 0 0 against a village of Gauls with 500 0 0 0 1000 500 0 0 0 0 then let's hear from you! I am forming a new clan, an Alliance of Alliances, that is going to be a multi-server, multi-meta monstrosity. Interested?

It is nice to see so many others from "downunder" here on the Xisto forums, such as X3r0X (Australia), qingtian (although you don't specify that you're actually from Aussie), campainer (Middle Earth / New Zealand), eiteljoh (an expat American living in Australia), terminal2k (Australia), dementeddemon (Sydney, Australia), antwill (Australia), Panzer (New Zealand), arnz (Australia), -Nero- (do you actually live in Aussie, or do you just like it there?), scan06disk (oi! oi! oi! somebody had to do it!), Carson (third person from New Zealand), jack_flamer (while Hawaii is technically part of the USA, it is also part of "downunder", in the South Pacific), the need for speed (Fiji), A200 (Brisbane, Australia), and now also my wife and I, travstatesmen and radiochick, as we live in Auckland, New Zealand. So often we from "downunder" are marginalized on the Internet, as you Northern Hemisphere people seem to dominate a lot to the most popular sites, including the USA, the UK, Europe, and Asia. At least, that's my view anyway. So it is nice to see so many of my fellow Southern Hemispherites on the Xisto forums. I would actually disagree with you on this, Carson, as there are two shameful statistics that New Zealand does lead the world in, (or are high on the list, anyway). That is in both teen suicide, and infanticide. There are so many babies in NZ that are dying. See, for instance, this report by UNICEF from 2006, entitled New Zealand is shamed by our child abuse record says UNICEF NZ as UN Global Study on Violence Against Children is released, or this selection of comments left by readers of the online New Zealand Herald article entitled More debate on child abuse from 2007, or, more recently, this article by Christine Rankin, the Chief Executive Officer of For the Sake of Our Children Trust", from January 2008, entitled 'Another one bites the dust'... Another baby is dead. While I am extremely proud of my country, and all the positive things that others have said about the scenery, the lack of pollution, the scenery, the friendly people, the scenery, and.... the scenery, I am less than proud of these horrifying statistics. While overall I would rate New Zealand a high 9.5 out of 10 as being the best place in the world to live, I can only realistically give it a mediocre 6 out of 10 because of this, because we are a nation of child abusers!

Thanks for the reply, shadowx. I will also be checking out the manufacturer's website, but I was hoping that I might find somebody else here who uses a Sprint PPC6700 smartphone with an Ericsson headset who could tell me quickly from experience, as the manufacturer's website will most likely only discuss issues relating to their own technology. This is an issue relating to two different manufacturer's hardware, plus a firmware upgrade. That often creates a "gray area" where each manufacturer will point the finger at the other and say "ask them, it's their fault", and nothing gets resolved. While looking into this, I see that there are newer firmware upgrades available now, including ALU 3.3 and a yet-to-be-released ALU 3.5, so I am hoping that one of those may even resolve this problem. I'll post back here with the outcome to this annoying little problem.

Hmm, I don't know where you got the idea that I am setting up a gaming server, Saint_Michael. I am actually setting up an online gaming clan, and we play on several gaming servers elsewhere. This is more like a fan site about a game, rather than a game itself. We are a community of online gamers, and will not be setting up the game itself on Xisto. The data that we are intending to gather, store, and query on my Xisto hosting account is data generated by an online game. We then manipulate the data offline (as far as the game is concerned). I'm definitely NOT setting up a gaming server! But thank you for all your advice and suggestions, and also to shadowx as well. I will certainly be going through the coding suggestion you've made. As I said in my application for a web hosting account here on Xisto, I am a copy/paste/tweak programmer, and am not really proficient at this type of thing, but I know how to make use of the many automated code generators that are available on the web. I will really appreciate any help that anybody here on the Xisto forums offers.

I have a problem that you people may be able to help me with. I have a Sprint PPC6700 smartphone, like the one above. I have been using it quite fine with my Ericsson HBH-60 bluetooth headset, as pictured above. I used to use it to listen to music sometimes, and I could divert the audio output to the headset just by pressing the activate button on the headset. This all worked fine for some time, but now it doesn't. What changed is that I installed the ALU 2.2 update on the cellphone, which is a ROM flash upgrade. This upgrade has been really great, and has opened up a lot of new functionality on the smartphone. One thing that it has enabled that wasn't there before is the voice commands, and voice dialing. To start using a voice command or using voice dialing, I have to press the activate button on the headset, just as I did to divert audio output prior to the ALU 2.2 upgrade. Doing this now not only diverts the audio output to the bluetooth headset, but now also starts the voice commands program expecting a voice command through the headset and outputting error messages through the headset. I can no longer just get the audio output to divert to the headset without the voice commands getting in the way. I want to still be able to make use of voice commands, but I also want to be able to listen to my MP3 collection through the headset occasionally. Does anybody have any advice for me? I am intending to buy a stereo headset at some time, to enhance my music listening experience, but I don't want to do so if I will just run into the same problem, so I'd like to get it working properly on the HBH-60 before I get the stereo bluetooth headset.