Official Ginko Blog

Last night, I walked back to my office to find (as the title and this photo suggest) that my two dogs Nick and Ned had eaten apart my leather wallet, which was sitting on the desk next to my workstation.  Luckily, my driver’s license and social security card survived the attack with only minor damage, and I’ve been able to order replacements for my credit cards, which I was advised should all arrive sometime before the end of 2008, shortly after the cards expire.

The wallet, however, did not survive the battle.

In other news, my mother having just recently moved to a new apartment, has finally gotten her computer hooked back up and online.  The entire process took about 3 hours on the telephone, with statements such as “No, the OTHER black cable”, “It only plugs in one way” and “No, into the ROUND HOLE!”.  There was also a trip from the cable company to re-connect her cable lines (after they insisted they were still connected when she first called them).   Hopefully, she’ll begin writing in her blog again.

Thinking about it now, I would do anything to have my old cable internet company back.  Anyone but these idiots. It took them 2 weeks and 5 service calls to move my business line from the house to my office, which are across the driveway from eachother. During the entire process I was without DSL and had intermittant telephone service, despite being told by several different service reps that it was a simple next-day process and my service would remain uninterrupted.  On top of that, they had the audacity to bill me for the move, the second service call (for when they had to fix where the guy connected my building to the neighbor’s phone line by mistake), and an early termination fee (which turned out to be a computer error).

It took another 4 days of calling supervisors and “Billing Specialists” (what the heck is a “Billing Specialist”, anyway?  There is nothing about billing that requires anything more than a calculator and some old FORTRAN code, let alone a “Specialist”) to get the charges removed, and they still won’t remove (or even discount) the “Line Move Fee”, claiming that most of the money goes to FCC taxes and whatnot and (even though the process took “longer than average”) they did get it moved.

-Hinoserm

Some random history:

Back when I first started GinkoSoft — originally intended to be the name through which I would provide internet services and application development — in 1998, it was a hobby.  I was living with family, didn’t need to worry about paying bills, and I had ample supplies of (albeit antiquated, but free) computer parts; my cousin worked as a private consultant dealing with computer technologies for several companies in the Boston area, and would often give me the components those companies would discard, or components that had failed in operation that I could easily repair, or even just the computers he didn’t need/want anymore or wasn’t using at the time.  It is him that I thank — and simultaneously blame — for my interest in technology.

I used a local free dial-up provider (eventually my mother got me cable internet, because I was tying up the only phone line) and the equipment I cobbled together to host text games and websites for friends met through the text gaming community.  I would hot things for free or hardware donations, since at the time I had no way to accept or spend money (I didn’t know about PayPal back then, nor was I old enough to use it or a checking account).  I was also engaged in a few open-source text game development projects — and am still a developer for ProtoMUCK, even though I haven’t submitted anything in a couple of years.

I recall having spent some time looking into some of SecondLife’s very early tests, but it wasn’t until I rediscovered it (by accident, through a webcomic’s links page) in mid-2004 that it held my attention.  I spent alot of time during my first year in SecondLife just playing around — building things, scripting things, scripting other things to build things, and then blowing them up.  I remember my second or third day, me and my other online friends (who I immediately recruited into this interesting new virtual world) stopped over a random parcel and started a crude attempt at building an airplane.  We didn’t understand land ownership back then, and it turned out we were building on the land of a small club — Blue Hair something — but the owners didn’t mind, and seemed to enjoy watching us maim what used to be perfectly good cubes (it took us several days to learn we could build other shapes, and several weeks to learn I could move prims without having to type the numbers in directly each and every time).

With the help of my friends (and some passers-by, who donated some L$ to pay the L$100 group starting fee), we created a group.  The group was named GinkoTech Engineering, and it became the group for me and all of the friends I had recruited into SecondLife from the text games I was a part of.  Eventually, we decided to buy some land of our own (by now, I had gotten a PayPal account and my PayPal debit card), pooled our money together, and purchased a 512sqm parcel in Riiki.  We considered it our a personal sandbox, and did whatever we cared to at the time.  Eventually, we decided we should build some type of “face” for our “company” (group) in SecondLife, and a large tower was erected on our land in Riiki (we had already expanded the land considerably, I believe up to it’s final size of about 2400 square meters).

This is about when I met Nicholas.  I was sitting around building some (very ugly) chairs for my office in the tower, when he flew by to see what was going on.  SecondLife was a bit friendlier of a place back then; there were very few regions compared to today, and it was fairly easy to check and see what all was going on across the grid on any particular day.  I don’t recall exactly what we talked about, but it ended up with me asking him to make me a business suit (since I couldn’t ever find one), which he did, and eventually he “rented” a small section of land from us to build a shop on.  I don’t believe he ever actually paid his rent, which was fine by us at the time.  He built and sold furniture from an interesting-looking modern building, and then at some point vanished for what seemed like forever.  Later, I learned it was his computer had broken down — and at the time it wasn’t that important of a thing for him to fix it.

It wasn’t until I had long since sold our land in Riiki — and moved on through several stages of personal development — that Nicholas and I met again.  My group and I had purchased some land in Arena (a new sim at the time, with alot of wide open space to offer), when Nicholas came back to SecondLife.  He had asked if he could use some of our spare land (which we had quite alot of) to start a Texas Hold’em group (which eventually expanded to include chess), and everyone agreed.

At some point in early 2005, Nicholas had an idea to start a virtual bank — which we all promptly laughed at.  Thinking nothing of it and fully expecting the idea to flop, I let him use some land and the Ginko name, to start what was then known as GinkoTec Financial (the Tec was later dropped).  He hired someone to build a basic off-world ATM/Server system, which promptly broke down with no word back from it’s author about repairs.

It was January 22nd 2005 when I officially started working with Nicholas on Ginko Financial.  I remember the date clearly, because I was at a convention when he messaged me saying that the old ATM system had completely broken down, and he needed help.  He had about 50 people, with a little over L$28,000 in the bank, and I agreed to repair the damaged code and move it to my server in co-location with Wolfpaw.net in Canada.  At this point, I still considered SecondLife nothing more than a game and a hobby, and still refused to use an L$ exchange (Gaming Open Market and IGE at the time) — L$ was play money, my family took care of the bills, and donations from my text game friends and money from eBay auctions paid for my server in co-location (which at the time was only US$36 a month).

The work I did for Nicholas I did for free, as what I considered a hobby and to help out someone I considered a friend.  It wasn’t until April 2005 that Nicholas became more demanding about expanding on the Ginko Financial system, and we discussed a method of payment for my time.  He had decided on a profit-based payment; every week I would receive a specific percentage of whatever profits he made, credited to my Ginko Financial account balance.  I didn’t care about the specifics, and the number only came out to few thousand L$ a week, but it was enough to help the group pay land tier (it was at this point I started selling L$ on the Gaming Open Market).

As Ginko Financial grew, so did customer (and system) demands.  Nicholas decided he wanted to purchase the ginkofinancial.com domain, and I suggested to create GF Ambassador — as a shared account — to take the place of Nicholas’s personal avatar for banking activities.  I registered both of these, since at the time Nicholas no longer had access to a credit card, and I wasn’t concerned with legalities or policies– I remember thinking to myself, “So what?  It’s just a game.  If it goes horribly wrong, they’ll cancel my account, and I’ll go back to my carefree bill-less open-source lifestyle.”

[to be continued at a later date]

BLUE HAIR! I have bright blue hair! NYAH! Also, it’s warming up down here. My mom is in the hospital again, but this time it’s preventative, so she will hopefully be out very soon. There’s really nothing much else worth commenting about. I’ve been having strange visions of horrable modifications to do to computer cases. Make them shoot sparks out the sides, rocket boosters, ect ect. I may try to make some of them work. Untill next time..

Hino is down and I hope is doing well. We went and got some kites yesterday or so and flew them today. He got a box kite that seemed to do fairly well, aside from being maddly in love with the big elm tree in my yard. Hey, it only got stuck in it twice.. but he kept managing to get it back free again. My kite looked like a fighter jet, but flew like a pointy rock. Just when I thought I was doing well ZOOM-KAWHUMP! No-first into the dirt. It was great.. The neighbors just sort of stared at us the whole time. I think they were jealouse.

Also, miniature golf should be added as a olympic event. We went and played and immediattly decided that Tuesdays will be mini-golf day from now one. Unlimited mini-golf for 10 bucks. Last time we played, we played three games. I’m pretty sure Hino won the first one, but I deffinantly won the second two because we acctually kept score on them. We’ve also decided on taking our own golfballs. We got some white ones and some chroms paint, so we’re gonna take cheom plated golf balls to the puff puff Tuesday and see what people say. It’ll be durying the day too, so with any luck someone will get blinded. I really need to remember to start taking my digital camera with us when we go places because something funny allmost allways happens.

WALMART! We got evacuated from the Wal Mart! We were standing there, checking out and all of the sudden people started running in circles. Well, we firured, hey, shift change. So we stood there for a moment as EVERYONE ran around us.. then the guy finally came over the speakers saying “Please evacuate the building in a calm orderly fashion.” Well, I’ll let you guess how that turned out. Hino and I are both slow and fat.. but the panicing people behind us were not. So, aside from having the cashier lady run off and leave us standing there confused, she never mentioned the BOMB THREAT OR EVACUATION! And being ran down by all the other paniced shoppers.. it was fun.

We hate New Jersy. Nothing more needs be said about it.

My grandmother was in the hospital on Christmas day, so it got delayed untill the 3rd of Febuary. She’s doing ok, but has lost a lot of weight. Still, she looked healthy. Anyway.. we were all standing around and I noticed my Uncle feeding my grandmothers little fuzzy dog named Lucky. Well, this caused Grandma to get onto him.. and I looked at the dog and then up and mentioned that I still thought it was better than a schnouzer. I don’t like schnouzers. They are dumb and noisy and ugly. Well, my aunt LOVES schnouzers.. so she looked up and yelled “HE IS NOT BETTER THAN A SCHNOUZER!” Well.. my grandmother overheard her.. as did most of the neighbors. To which Grandma was like “Is so!” and just laughed. It was really funny..

In other news… I’m fat and have nearly crushed my poor computer chair. I should order a new one, but I don’t wanna. I think maybe I’ll try to build a custom chair out of high strength tube steel and foam padding. It’ll weigh like 8000 pounds, but it’ll hold up a car. Also, I got my fish tank up and running again. Only had to take the filter and lights apart a few times to fix them up, but it’s running real nice now. I could prolly shut one of the filters off just for the sake of saving power. It doesn’t need them both.. poor fish live in a swirling vortex of crystal clear water.

Remember the model I was building a while back? Yeah.. it went into the trash can yesterday. I knocked it off in the floor and stepped on it.. poor little car was flat as it could be. Oh, and my other uncle had a show cow die. It was cruel irony.. They had just given it a bath and were getting ready to put it on the trailor to take it to the Fort Worth stock show. Well, apparently giving a steer a bath is hungry work because they all left to get a hamburger before loading it. Well, when they got back, it had fallen over and strangled it’s self to death on the roap they used to tie it up. Still, it’s one less cow in the world, so I can’t complain. Other than complaining that they drug it into my yard where it sat for 4 days before the dead animal people came to pick it up.

I’m not sick anymore.

An official date of Feburary 20th has been set for my move to Texas.  I have still yet to tell my mother or anyone else about it, though my aunt knows now.

On a related note…

(Potentially angry content below.  This is where I warn you to put on your anti-emo eye protection before proceeding.  Contact your doctor immediately if prolonged exposure occurs.  Batteries not included.)
(Read more)

I’m sick.  It’s either a cold, or the flu, or maybe some type of heart attack, or a brain tumor, or a dislodged banana… truth of the matter is I really don’t care what’s making me feel horrible, so long as I can take something to get rid of it — and so far nothing has.  I also get the feeling my constant whining about being sick annoys people, but I really don’t care.

In other news… (Read more)

My mother keeps asking what I want for Christmas.  Well, I always need more of these harddrives. Like, 20 of them.  If anyone asks what I want, give them one of these to get; they’re the cheapest thing that I always always need.  (Don’t get them in stores — they’re twice the price and half the quality.)  And I want another RAID card.

Also, I really really need to build a new server very soon (these too: RAM, CPU, and 4 of those hard drives).

You can view my entire Newegg wishlist here, which is everything I plan to buy or need to buy for the new year (updated constantly).

 -Hinoserm

Earlier, back in March or so, I decided to try the Internet Explorer 7 beta/preview/whatever, and it sucked.  So today, I loaded up Windows Update to find one of the suggested critical updates to be none other than IE7.

Being one to keep my computer up-to-date, I installed it, thinking “Hey, if they’re releasing it to a few million people, they must have made it suck alot less, right?”  I was wrong.  Very wrong.

Immediately after loading it, I have to think: What is wrong with people?!  The address bar looks like something akin to a Playskool Toy, the toolbar buttons are worthless, and best of all; you can’t change any of it.  It took me 10 minutes and a registry hack just to get the menu bar back to the top of the screen, and user forbid you ever wanting to move any of the toolbar buttons.

Now, I’ve been a strong fan of Internet Explorer since I can remember; It comes with the OS, it’s pratically the measure of standards, and up until now the interface was simple and intuitive, but, if this is what we’re to expect in Vista, I’m going to find myself using a third-party browser.

IE7 is going to get uninstalled, and if this is a glimpse of what our future is going to look like, I’ll gladly stay in the past.

-Hinoserm