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I while back ago, Angel, Dana, and myself were invited to become “Ambassadors” for the online virtual world of Entropia Universe. This entails us working in their booth during CES - the Consumer Electronics Show in our home town of Las Vegas, Nevada.

We met the likes of Skalman, Neomaven, Jenna Star Mercury, Buzz Erik Lightyear, Neverdie, Robroy, Myhn Ah Byrd, Casay, Linden the Chosen Avery, Zephram ZC Chochrane and more. 

Throughout the convention I took a lot of pictures.  Check them out:

Entropia Universe at CES 2008

Pictures from CES 2008 with the Entropia Universe booth and party with NEVERDIE.

433 Photos

Some of the pictures in the album were from NEVERDIE’s party at the Crib Suite at the palms.  (Warning: Some of the pics are r-rated)

All and all it was a good time and a lot of work.  We met some new friends and are excited again to move forward for plans within Entropia.

If you are a interested in playing or checking it out, go to www.Entropia-Universe.com and if you are looking for a good society to join and have some help learning the mechanics of the virtual world, check out our society at www.ZOKU.eu and say hey to me Zentro “Zen” Zatsu.

Press Blurb:

Entropia Universe is the only virtual world with a real cash economy.  With over 670,000 registered accounts from more than 200 countries, its business model is entirely unique with free client software and no monthly subscription fee.  Entropia allows players to explore animal-filled wildernesses and large expanding cities that offer a variety of entertainment and social interaction for its participants while earning cash without having to deposit money.  Entropia will be the first virtual world to go public on a major international stock exchange.  The IPO will be filed by Credit Suisse by the thrid quarter of 2008.

I thought I’d add that up there since I had to say something similar to that about a thousand times….  LOL

We had a good time and would gladly do it again.  See you in Entropia!

For a long time now, I have wanted to run an Internet radio station.  Since I have been back in Entropia Universe, I have been hanging out on Club Neverdie a lot.  They have a live music stream that goes into the virtual world.  

Recently, they opened their stream for rental.  This interested me, so I am going to rent the stream during an event I will be hosting on Club Neverdie.  I found out they use SAM Broadcaster and Windows Media Services for their stream.  I’ve been a user SAM Broadcaster for a bit, but it was always one of those things that got pushed aside for other projects. I decided to take another look and set up some stuff with my servers.

First off, I set up one of my servers in my Data-center as a streaming audio server.  For this, I used the Icecast2 server for Linux.  Fairly straight forward set-up.  I installed Centos 5, then did an install of Icecast and edited the config files to the settings I liked.

I then installed SAM Broadcaster on one of my laptops and plugged in one of my portable HD’s with a copy of my MP3 collection and had SAM catalog it.  This too was fairly straightforward.  After the install and cataloging of my mp3’s, I set up a stream to my Icecast2 server and I was broadcasting on the Internet.  Good stuff.

This config is all fine and dandy for most people that just want to broadcast occaisionally.  For people that require constant or continuous 24/7 streams, I saw a slight flaw, your internet connection would be constantly used in sending the broadcast out to the server.  So, I came up with a plan.  Read on…

Read the complete Post.

For some time now, I had been migrating data and stuff off of our large server at the data-center.  It had a couple failing drives and I was going to have the company re-do the machine.  To prepare for this, several months ago, we moved most of the sites off that box.  One of these was the Order of Z guild website.  (a guild I run that covers several games and is many years old)

In the migration process (a few months back)  I had issues with the database transfer, so I kept the pointer and old database running to the old box.  Now, normally I am very careful about taking notes and notating what I have done with what.  For some reason, I did not flag this in my server configuration notes that I keep.

Fast forward to present day,  a couple weeks ago, I started disabling services on the box to be re-done.  I double checked everything.  This machine had several virtual machines running on it, and I turned each down one at a time and waited a day before proceeding. (to ensure no customer/client services were not interrupted) I did do the double check on the host server (which was also the main DB server).  I saw the OZ database and just assumed that it was the old one. (part of the reason for this was that I had created the new DB on the new box, when I was attempting transfer, it had data so I assumed it was being used)

So, I flag the support team and let them know that that box is ready for re-doing.  They confirm with me that it will loose all it’s data.  I say “Yep! Go for it!”.

About four hours later.  I go to the Order of Z site, I get this error message.  Long story short, I figure we got hacked.  NOPE,  I had them wipe the database remember!  DOH! 

Anyways, I do have a few back ups, I will be looking through them to see which is the most recent.  I will get the site back up and running.   I will probably take the time this time to do some of the upgrades I wanted to do.

 In the mean time, the teamspeak server is still up.  I am still working on my new guild in Entropia Universe, www.zoku.euyou guys are all welcome to come join us. (Janu and Thor have been in-game)  We have some interesting people, you guys are also welcome to join the forum if you miss shooting the shit.

If you’re an Order of Z member and have any thoughts on the matter, please comment.

As some of you know, I have been the long standing leader of the gaming guild “Order of Z” ( www.orderofz.com ).  We tried to form a chapter in the MMO/Virtual World Entropia Universe ( www.entropiauniverse.com ) several years ago and it was just not for most of our players.  Since I went back to Entropia, Order of Z was pretty much dead.  So, I decided to leave and find a society that I could be a part of.  I had no real desire to lead up a new society. 

I found Entropia Asia, and met several good players and new friends during my stay in that society.  For several reasons, it was not a solid “fit” and I decided to break off.  After a few days of thought, I decided what the hell and I formed my own society ZOKU ( www.zoku.eu ).  Some of the members of Entropia Asia have come over to help me get it going.

I’ve been working hard on our website and setting some of the policies I feel are needed to run a society well within Entropia Universe.  Things are going smooth and we’re getting things going.

So, if you want to find us, we’re in Entropia Universe when the real world does not get in the way.  At least Angel and I are.  Dana has an avatar, but she’s been going well in Everquest II and she’s happy in there for now.  My character name is Zentro Zen Zatsu and Angel is Angel AngelGirl Zatsu.

We can be contacted through the www.zoku.eu site.