Well, here's a quick post to prove I'm still alive and to share with you what I have been investing a lot of time into lately. I have been busy readying my CMS Odeebo (after yet another structural redesign) for my latest project. A resource for learning Japanese I have named Tasty Miso. It's essentially a blog but will provide lessons, reviews and so on. I'm in the process of adding some nice features to the site such as image commenting so I have plenty to keep me busy.
I did consider posting more Japanese related posts here on this blog but I didn't really want to overrun the blog with Japanese related stuff but have finally realised a separate blog just for that works out well.
MafiaScene.com is currently seeing some downtime due to high server loads that were causing our VPS to fall over. Because of this the site has been temporarily disabled whilst the cause is investigated.
I'm currently talking to the muppets that host the site and trying to prod them into helping me. This normally takes quite a few correspondences to get anything useful from them. If the prodding doesn't work I'll send the MS boys round.
So, the good news it that it's coming back 
The bad news is that I'm far too busy to fix it just yet 
Some rogue code needs chasing down and optimising which can be a very big task so I ask for your patience please.
I'll keep any updates posted here, so check back from time to time if you're desperate to know how things are progressing!
Update: All updates will now be posted to the MafiaScene Twitter Feed.
A few blog posts ago I said that Slicehost's service was nothing special but what made it so good is the fact that it did as advertised which is such a rarity with hosts these days.
Well, forget what I said as I was indeed wrong. Slicehost are something special. What has impressed me recently, apart from their wiki, articles, blog and forums is an email I received informing me of server's IP having been blocked for spam by some third-party which it would seem Gmail makes use of. The problem was a simple script error but this is irrelevant, what's impressive is the fact that Slicehost actually send you this email, very helpful!
The slicehost blog button I designed was, to my surprised, featured on the Slicehost Blog. Someone at
Slicehost clearly values community input. Cheers guys 
