Yeah. Right now the site looks like ASS. When I did the Hardfought site overhaul, I used a portal script called OnePress to merge WordPress and the phpBB3 forums together. Worked pretty well, but just recently OnePress announced that they are seriously considering dropping support for phpBB3 – their latest update does not include support for the latest update to phpBB3 with the latest update to WordPress, both of which have important security and function upgrades. Luckily, another WP/phpBB3 portal called WP-United (which is what I use with mine and my wife’s personal website) has been revitalized and is alive and kicking with full support of both of the latest updates to WordPress and phpBB3. I just finished removing the OnePress content, updated phpBB3 and WordPress (as well as the photo gallery for the msgboard) and have just finished installing WP-United. It works, but as you can see there’s a shit ton of work to do… again.

The forums and everything associated with it still function fine, just please bear with the look n’ feel until I can make the necessary updates. Enjoy.

Comment on this post in our forums

Over the years, Hardfought has always been about our gaming community and the servers and LAN parties we’ve hosted, but sometimes it also serves as my own personal blog. Today’s post is one of those times. At midnight tonight HST (about 2½ hours from this posting), I will officially be through with my active duty military career. Six and a half years in the United States Army as an Infantry Soldier… hard to imagine doing anything else right now. To be honest though, 28 months between two deployments to Iraq is enough. My first trip there back in 2004-2005 was rough, and we saw a fair amount of action, but the level of stupid shit was tolerable, and the men I served with were like family. Same is true for the men I served with on my last go-around that I just recently returned from, but the difference was a lot less action (which is good of course, but can also be bad if your entire function revolves around just that) and a LOT more bullshit from higher. I swear to God I could write volumes about all of the completely insane and outrageous ideas and orders put forth from higher. It’s truly amazing anything was ever accomplished… seriously folks, NCO’s and Soldiers make it happen. Always have, always will.

Looking back though, there were plenty of good times to go along with the bad. And it’s the men you serve with that make it the most enjoyable – it’s why so many of us keep signing back up. Yeah, there’s a lot of shit you have to suffer through sometimes, but knowing that your buddies are right there with ya going through the same shit makes it bearable. It’s true what they say – the friends you make while serving are like no other, and they’ll always be a part of your life, like family. I personally wouldn’t change a single thing about my time and experiences in the Army. I wouldn’t be the man I am today without having served… my take on things is different than it was 6-7 years ago, and I know I have learned a lot more than I had ever bargained for. And I wouldn’t have met Jennifer either, and for that I am truly thankful.

Sooo… time to be a civilian again. For those of ya not in the know, I’ll be flying from Hawai’i to Los Angeles this Friday. Gonna link up with some family I have in the area, pick up my wife’s car (it just made it to Long Beach today) and start my cross-country drive from Cali to Vermont, making a few stops along the way to see family. Should hit Vermont sometime in the end of June (Jenn will already be in VT a couple weeks before me). I’ll chill for a bit, then I start school in August – first time back to college in almost twenty years. Heh. That should be interesting to say the least, but I am really excited about it. Jenn already has a great job lined up working in one of the top physical therapy clinics in the state. We have our two acres of land, but we’re holding off on the new home build until we start bringing in a bit more cash… collectively we’re taking a pretty big pay cut with me going to school full-time, but it’s more than worth it.

I can’t resist, I gotta throw in something HF-related – yes, if it’s at all possible, I will see about bringing back up a game server in that area. Think TF2 and CoD: MW2.

That’s all for now gang. I’ll be offline for a bit starting tomorrow, but I’ll pop in when I can. Here’s to closing one chapter of my life, but also to starting a new and exciting one. See ya folks.

Hiya gang. Just a heads up about Hardfought’s participation with the Folding@Home project. Jenn and I both have upped our work unit output considerably since we started using the GPU client as well as running the normal CPU in conjunction with it. Nad has joined the team as well as a couple others… our ranking has climbed about 60 points over the last couple weeks and continues to rise. You can see our team stats to the bottom right of the news posts – we could break back into the top 1000 if we could garner some more participation.

Soooo… for those of ya that have never folded with us before, or have but stopped for whatever reason, join our team and start folding with us. Our team number is 46304 and it’s simple to join. It’s for a great cause, helping scientists figure out all of the different ways various proteins ‘fold’ so that we can better understand how they interact with other proteins, help find cures for all sorts of diseases. So join up! Put those idle hours your computer sits and does nothing to some good use.

Other news – I have 30 days from this post until I am officially done with active duty in the Army. Muhahah ;-) Almost all the pics I took while in Iraq my second time around have been posted in the gallery, so have a look if you’re interested. Also, go see the new Star Trek movie… it fuckin’ rocks. Cya.

Yeah boy! Hahah… finally. If you’re reading this, you’re seeing Hardfought with a brand new style. Same theme, but with a totally new layout, from what you can see to the way things work on the back-end. I still have a lot of work to do to get the site exactly the way I want it, but the major hurdles have been um… hurdled ;) So enjoy the site! Let me know what ya think, good or bad. I realize that certain lil things may be missing… I just noticed that ‘previous topic/next topic’ is not present on phpBB3. There are also plug-ins and scripts that I had incorporated into the old msgboard that haven’t made their way to the new board, but will. Like the photo album galleries; that’s the big one I will start work on ASAP. Quick reply, that’ll show it’s face as well. So on and so forth.

Alright. Back to work ;-)

On more than one occasion in the past I’ve said I was going to do an overhaul to the website. Those overhauls either never happened, or it turned into something more like a slight modification. Some were more significant than others, but overall the site has looked the same since day one.

It’s finally time to bring Hardfought into the 21st century :-P

I started work on a new look and feel earlier today. I’m using a portal script called OnePress that integrates Wordpress and phpBB3. The benefits are a seamless transition between the two, integrated functionality (example: recent posts from phpBB into a wordpress front page widget), and an excuse for me to upgrade the msgboard to phpBB3. Luckily for us, the conversion from phpBB2 to 3 is very easy and virtually painless. All forums, posts, users, groups, permissions, avatars, attachments, etc carry over.

Wanna see what’s in place so far? Go to http://test.hardfought.org – right now its just proof of concept and testing out functionality. All news posts minus this one and the one before it are present, and all forum posts from around noon my time today and before are present. You should be able to login and browse around, but for right now posting ability is disabled. If for some reason you CAN post, please lemme know, cuz ya shouldn’t ;-)

I have a lot of work to do still. If you have any suggestions, I am open to any that ya may have. I do want to preserve some of the look n’ feel, but certainly not all of it, or even most of it. And this move also puts the website into Web 2.0 territory. My goal is to be able to pass the W3C Markup Validation Service to as close to 100% as possible. Anyways… I just started my 30 day block leave, so I have all sorts of time to hash it out.

Lemme know whatcha think ;-)

Hi all. Finally made it back home from Iraq. No more deployments, no more runnin’ off to third-world countries to protect corporate oil interests protect our freedom. Thanks to everyone who welcomed me back on the thread that Jenn started on the msgboard.

So… what’s in store now that I’m back? Not too much as of now… I have updated a few things, such as the news posting backend script, and OMG yes there’s a new voting poll as well. There are a couple bugs and updates I need to do with the msgboard as well, but luckily nothing major. Eventually I want to revamp the entire site, and write a new page from scratch. That should be plenty to knock the rust of these old coding skills, and give HF a much-needed face lift. Time to join the rest of the 21st century and journey into the realm of Web 2.0 ;-)

Will Hardfought ever host a gaming server again? I just dunno. I have the servers back from Boomhauer, and I’ll be moving stateside to Vermont here this summer (I get out of the Army on June 10th). I actually found myself trolling online for dedicated hosting sites in VT, gah! Bottom line is this though – if I can’t host for free, it’s not gonna happen. Jenn and I are building a new house, I am starting school full-time in the fall, and the subsequent pay cut I’m taking along with every spare penny going towards the new home… it’s either free hosting or no hosting. I know some of ya are gonna ask, so there’s your answer ;-)

It’s good to be home. See you guys online.

Yup. Hardfought turned eight today. Not a whole lot going on in HF-land for the last several months since the game servers came down again. We’ll be coasting along for awhile still this way. That’s ok though. Forums are still active, a lot of the original gang still drop by now and then to say hello or voice their opinion on some interesting topic, or ask advice on their new computer build.

So, happy birthday Hardfought, and we’ll celebrate again this time next year.

Hi gang. Long time no post, yeah? Figured I’d chime in and let everyone know how I was doin’, and what’s been going on here.

My unit (1-14th) is setup outside of Camp Taji, which is just a few miles north of Baghdad. The first few months were kinda crazy – mission after mission after mission, without any kind of battle rhythm; no one knew when our next refit or maintenence day would be, or even what the next mission would be more than a couple days out. It was common to go for weeks straight without any kind of day off or time to service the Strykers. Then in April, all of the Battalions pushed out their company-level assets off-base to set up smaller patrol bases in our area of operation, usually co-existing with a platoon or company-sized element of Iraqi Army. Still maintained a hectic schedule – never really knew how long we’d stay out in the sticks, or when or what kind of supplies would come in, if any, etc. Then finally, about a month ago, the patrol base my company has been occupying finally started to get built up into a decent base in its own right. it’s still a work in progress as of this post, but we now have electricity, internet/phones, a movie room, a small gym, a cook with a small dining area, porta-shitters (we were burning our own shit for a long while), AC, and here soon some actual showers. Power doesnt stay on 24/7, but a group of engineers are out here now fixing all that. Not too bad now… actaully don’t mind staying out here anymore :-P Good thing though, is that my company’s AO is relatively calm – we’ve only had two IED’s go off on us, and zero ambushes/small arms fire. The younger first-time-to-deploy Soldiers wish things were more ‘exciting’ around here, but I tell ‘em they wont be thinking that if things ever did heat up. Typical – I felt the same way my first deployment, and then after being shelled/blown up/ambushed X number of times, I was ready to give it a rest. Hopefully they never get a chance to learn that the hard way.

Anyways… yeah. Things are ‘good’ here I suppose. Boring, but I’ll take boring over the alternative. Some of our sister companies have seen a lil more action/IED’s, as have certain other elements within our Brigade, but overall the violence is low compared to my last time here.

I’m slotted to come back to the states for R&R around the end of August. Gonna be in Vermont the entire time… gonna meet my wife Jenn up there with her family. Her sister is getting married August 30th, and we’re also going to spend a lil time looking for lots of land to build our ‘dream’ house near Burlington. I’m also gonna spend a half-day talking to admissions at UVM – with the newly revised GI Bill in place, I’m going to go back to school full-time after I redeploy (my Army career ends June 2009), wrap up a degree (finally), and let Uncle Sam not only pay for it all, but pay ME to get a degree at the same time. Too good an offer to pass up.

So yeah, that’s about it. I got a few pics here and there, but haven’t posted anything yet, as I havent really taken any pics of anything exciting. And I don’t see the remainder of the deployment being any different from how it is now. I’m doing fine… just miss my wife, and I’m ready to come home.

Hope the rest of ya are doing well, and are enjoying your summer. Take it easy, and I’ll see ya around maybe ;-)

Hi folks. Long time no news post, yeah? Well, I definitely have a news-worthy post to make. Both of our game server went offline this morning, and more than likely it’s gonna be permanent, if not for quite a long while. Boomhauer, one of Hardfought’s long-standing members, had graciously let me host both of my servers at his place of work back in August of 2006. I got a head’s up from him indirectly a few weeks ago that the place he was working for was about to close shop. I knew this was coming, I just didn’t know when exactly. I guess today was the day.

Soooo… yet again, Hardfought is without a game server. At this point, I don’t know if I will bring them back up or not. I had a sweet deal through Boomhauer, as I didn’t have to pay anything to have the servers hosted, and I really have no desire to pay for game hosting ever again. As I am still in this shithole known as Iraq, and will be here for another full 12 months at least, my options, as you can imagine, are very limited. In any event, it was another good run while it lasted. Team Fortress 2 was a helluva lot of fun to play, and when Call of Duty 4 came onto the scene, it was an instant hit. Crysis had so much potential, but from what I understand, the makers of that game finally ‘finished’ the game just a week or so ago with their 1.2 patch release. Oh well.

To all of ya that played on our servers and called Hardfought home – thank you. As usual, the website and forums are unaffected, and will always be up and running, so feel free to keep the discussions goin’ if you so choose. Who knows what the future will bring? We may decide to host another guild for another MMO, like Warhammer Online, or some other title. Time will tell.

Well, I have yet another mission to go on, which is typical on the ‘day off’ that we rarely see around here, heh. So, see ya around, or maybe not. Until then…

Happy Thanksgiving folks. Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is this: to eat as much food as you possibly can, drink massive amounts of beer, spend quality time with your family and other loved ones, and then pass out during the football game. Heh :P

Hope you all have a great Turkey Day weekend. I know I am… going over to friends house for dinner and drinking, plan on working on ‘The Beast’ the next morning with a buddy of mine, and then celebrating xmas early with Jenn since I’m outta here real soon. Soooo… have a fun and safe weekend, and maybe I’ll see ya on one of the servers. See ya!