Shivan Jaikaran’s Blog

I prone, I dived, I got marks, I got mud all over my cheap $75 shoes! But it was all worth it! Down behind god’s back in Barackpoore, the map was a jungle setting. Four teams, with each team consisting of four people.

I hid behind the bush on the outskirts of the map. I saw Nicholas come around but he didn’t see me. I waited because I could hear his teammate nearby. Once I had line of site of his teammate, I shot Nick in the back. By this time he was in the line of fire between myself and his teammate. Paint balls whizzed past him. Some hitting him about the body while he wriggled in agonising pain. I managed to get one shot on his teammate’s shoulder. All this time I had cover from the very same bush. Talk about ah ambush!

I proned neared to the center of the map. At this point it was me against two. As I literally dived forward, I spotted them down the hill. They spotted me. The game was on! The only object that stood between them and me was a tree the size of my body. I was outnumbered but I managed to take cover behind this faithful tree. I fired blindly around the tree hoping to hit something. I missed everything. As I poked out to get a clear shot….POW, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest and straight into my shoulder! Talk about a sting! See the evidence below:

The Crew

The Prone

The Wound

I have worked on a few sites in my career and have delivered good quality work, some more recently with very nice themes. But as always I have neglected my own personal site…a site which should theoretically display the level of work that I can actually deliver.

When I first installed my site, I had a clean, somewhat professional look. Basically, it was black and white. No colour at all.

This weekend I decided to upgrade my site. Easier said than done…

When I first did the site, I used the latest stable release of Drupal at the time…version 4.5. So I tried the upgrade path directly to version 5.1.

Errors errors and more errors. I got a whole set of database errors, and blank pages. Did I mention how much I hate a blank page now? This was Friday night at 10pm. I eventually went to sleep at 4.30am that morning busting my head trying to figure out how to bring back up my site.

I eventually did a full restore of my old site. (Just as seatbelt saves lives, backup saves headaches). I then ran into some issues with the web hosting account and something needed to be done on the webserver so I had a long agonizing wait (about 7 hours) while the hosting company fixed it on their end). All this time I am freaking out because of the downtime. Finally my old site came back up….so back to square 1.

Sunday, I ravaged through Drupal forums to see if anyone had done an upgrade from 4.5 upwards. I saw a few post that mentioned that you have to upgrade to 4.6 first (which I did), then to 4.7.1 (which I did) and then I moved to 5.1….a process that normally takes roughly 2 hours…seemed like a lifetime. Ideally, you should upgrade from version 4.5 and lower to 4.6 first, and then onwards.

Ah finally, the site is now running on Drupal 5.1 with all its new amazing Drupal features that I am all excited about

The next step if I find some time tonight, is to do a custom theme. I am intermediate to advanced when it comes to custom themes in Drupal so that should take me no more than a few days to do. I hope this doesn’t take another year for me to accomplish by which time I will be looking at upgrading my site again….

Seems these days I have found my creative bone…

(Shivan Jaikaran was last seen staring at the FTP upload progress bar at 4am shouting “faster you bitch, faster!”)