Hey there - tech guy here. Please be patient as I move the news page and some other stuff to the new weblog software. It may look a little funky for an hour or so!

Hi gang! It's Kimi using Daddy's machine. Wanted to let you all know that I'm heading out here soon. We are going into the city to start our Thanksgiving. Tat will be at home and on cam until tomorrow afternoon when she comes in to meet us. Hope you have a great holiday. Kimi

Hey all! I could use your help. We are working on enhancing the site but we need to be able to reliably detect some aspects of your browser so that we don't confuse your system with cool stuff. Could you head over to the test page and make sure it does the right thing? Let me know if it doesn't.

Especially those of you with odd browsers! (you know who you are!) Thanks!

Well, take a good look at Nimda, the newest virus in town. Generally speaking, you should make sure that you have told your system not to hide extensions and that you are running agood anti-virus program. But most importantly, DON'T RUN ATTACHMENTS YOU DON'T TRUST.

You can read more about it at the Metafilter and Slashdot if you're interested. Symantec has a good page to help keep you informed of this stuff.

OK, obviously there is a lot of world news. While this news isn't Girl2 specific I wanted to post it here. The Trade Center towers in NYC are just gone. You can also see some information here. I suggest you watch the news as this is developing too fast for the text sources to keep up.

Update: it looks like many sites are swamped, but MSNBC is recovering some and has decent coverage. Also, there is this story at the Chicago Tribune.

Update #2 11:24:00: The girls will obviously post here to keep you informed about this and how it is effecting them so stay tuned. I will be posting my views over on my site if anyone wants to keep track.

In case no one noticed, the front page of this site got a nice little update and it looks really good. Congrats to Tatsumi on the design and to both of them for looking so damn cute!

Hey there. OK... it seems to be working again :) We had a slight hiccup in the database stuff but it's all cool now. I had it running at 3:05 or so, but I didn't get arounf to posting this till now so don't be mad at me! As always enjoy!

Hey all, the girls are asleep. Tatsumi has an interview at 3 p.m. so she will be scarce till the evening and Kimiko should be here till I drag her to the dojo. Enjoy!

Hey all! Tech guy Daddy here. I just wanted to let you know that we came through the upgrade just fine. Yeah, it took a little longer than I would have liked, but that can't be helped. Anyway, thanks for your patience and hopefully we are all nice and up to date for a while!

The girls are in the air and so far it looks like they will land at 11:14pm. I am going to pick them up then we will head to Tatsumi's. I am sure they will put rest of the cams on when we get there.

Just a fast update... the girls are tired as hell and ready to come home but they are totally jazzed. They got to meet a bunch of fans and other webcam people out there Sunday and had a great time. Also, I have the 'floating' camera in Tatsumi's place watching the living room just to keep an eye on the cats and the apartment. If you see that image and there is a bug-eyed monster please let us know!

On my way to check out the cam and make sure it was working I came across the members journal page, I hadn't been there in a while so I red it all. Pretty cool stuff :) In an odd way you all know more about the girls day to day than I do!

Oh yeah, they took lots of pictures and video!

Night!

Well, they did it - they went to the awards and survived! They said it was a great time for tme and they got to see everything really well. Kimiko managed to spend > $700 on her outfit.. I am not sure how but the say it looks great :)

They are meeting some of you tomorrow (Sunday, today?) so they will be happy to say hello and to everyone else thet told me to say they have tons of pictures so it will be really cool for you too!

Later!

Just to keep you all update - I heard from the girls and they are safe and sound in L.A. and having a great time. They haven't set up the laptop yet so they won't have a chance to update the blog for a while but they do have a laptop and a camera with them so we should be seeing something from them over the weekend!

I'll keep you posted :)

A quick note for everyone - the "past news" archive link works now. You can see all the old Girl2 news. Some of the archives themselves might not display for technical reasons having to do with XML... if you find an archive that doesn't show up (it looks empty) then please let me know.

Thanks!

Just a fast note about life. Tatsumi is out at a family funeral and Kimiko and I are down at her place tonight keeping her cats company. You can find Kimiko passed out on the sofa or in Tatsumi's bed. Hopefully she will be able to post a note herself.

A fast technical note... we are now living on the new server entirely. Things seem way cool and stable. As a bonus, we are now running under the new version of ASP. We have some exciting features planned for this so stay sharp and watch this space!

Ok. Here we are.

This is the new face of Girl2. Running under Windows2000, powered by ASP.NET. That is why youw ill notice the funny ".aspx" URL's. Don;t let it worry you. In a few days the DNS will be pointed here and all will be well.

For now, all www.girl2.com URL's will take you to this page.
This includes webcam URL's.
You can find the new ones in the various remotes in the usual way.

You are welcome to bookmark here, but you might want to wait a day or so for the URL's to settle down. Please let us know what you think and any problems you find.

Thanks!

Just a fast note: Both of the girls fell asleep and I don't think they are getting back up tonight - so they will see you in the morning!

On a another topic the new Girl2 website is moving along at high speed and we will be lauching it by the end of this month so hold on to your seats!

Technical News! This site is due to cut to the new server by the end of the week. The new design is already up over there and it looks awesome! We only have to make some small tweaks to the webcam systems to make sure you get to see it all. There should be no problem with the transition - and I know you will like the changes.

We have disabled new signups for a day or so, but all the current accounts have already been moved to the new system and the membership software is working perfectly.

Stay tuned, it's gonna be great!

Hiya all! Just a fast note from me ('da Daddy)!

Kimiko is even now in some hell of little bits of celery (bork bork bork!) and with any luck she hasn't cut her fingers off. I am sure Tatsumi is busy as well and I am playing driver for the most neurotic would-be vampire I know.

Enjoy!

Just a fast note from the tech guy. The move to the new server looks like it will be happening soon but on the bright side we get all new cool toys to play with!

Everyone here has a cold/flu thing I think. Sore throats abound and let's not talk about fever! So if the girls are a little extra flaky over the next few days cut them a little extra slack OK?

Thanks :)

Hiya all! Just a fast note to mention that we will have the Java based chat page back up this week - and we have some more cool things planned for the near future. I hope the members are enjoying the three new cameras that show on the floater these days. I think they have a distinctly "security camera" feel to them - sometimes I like that :)

Tats here... I'm working from Soul's machine while Soul and Kimi are at their Dojo. Kimi is sitting out for tonight's class but at least she went! They got home from the ER around 5 am last night. Kimi pretty much went straight to sleep thanks to the wonders of Demerol. We're planning to spend the night at my place tonight so Kimi can unwind and relax away from Soul's parental units. I'll try to jump into the chat room a bit later when I'm done with my work for tonight. See ya then!

Some news from the front lines - since a lot of people were concerned, I just wanted to say that Kimiko is doing better today. She is asleep right now and pretty much went right to sleep after we got home from the Dojo. She still has a migraine but says it is down to a 4 out of 10 :) Fortunately, she has a neurologist appointment tomorrow morning, so hopefully he can help her out.

In other news, CCbill now officially supports ASP/IIS for their billing scripts, so we won't have any downtime to speak of in getting the signup stuff installed on the new server - this is a big load off of me as otherwise I would have had to write all new code to handle membership stuff.

Another update - for those of you who have been following along, Kimiko is in the middle of a fairly serious series of cluster headaches. Her regular doctor is being a real pain in the ass about it - not returning calls and generally sticking his head in the sand. She has an appointment with a neurologist on Friday so we are just trying to get her through till then.

We wound up at the emergency room tonight - it took about 4 hours but we finally got her some Demerol and she is currently sleeping deeply. Hopefully in the morning the cycle will be broken - if not we have Imitrex and we can always go back for more Demerol :(

Anyway, thanks to all of you for being so good to the girls - I know Kimiko was happy knowing you were all wishing her the best and I know int he past that has been a good thing for Tatsumi as well.

Some technical news - and it's all good! Some of you have noticed that the cams have been running much more reliably for the last few weeks. We have been moving more of our processing to our server so that the wierdness in the girls cable modems is eliminated. To this end we have brought a brand new server online at Rackspace and we will be migrating to it later this week. This should allow us to do a lot of the cool things we have been looking forward to for more than a year now.

We will ask your patience during any downtime we might have, though we will certainly try and keep it to an absolute minimum. When we are done we will be able to provide you with some incredible features including live video broadcasts with synchronized audio and more reliable audio streams. We will also be moving the chat server software to the Rackspace box so the chat rooms will become much more reachable.

If we do go with the streaming technology we have in mind we will be running Windows Media format streams. While this may make it somewhat difficult for our non-windows users to see the streaming video we gain a lot by doing it. On the other hand, we can continue to use the TeVo or Ultravid solutions... any thoughts? Email me!

Daddy: Well, that has been somewhat productive :) We have a box here at Tatsumi's place for Kimiko to use now so I suspect you will be seeing us over here more - and that means the girls will be in one place more often! With any luck we will get the audio stream from Tatsumi's up again in a day or two and the things will really get going. Also, we put in another small UPS over here so that will keep tatsumi online in the event of a power failure.
The big news is that we moved some important parts of our technology off of the cable modem at Kimiko's place and onto our dedicated server. No, not web stuff but some backend functions that were important to the camera's. That means that you should see the cams be much, much more stable now. Night!

Hey everyone! 'Daddy' here. I just wanted to take a second and thank the girls publically for what they have been doing over the last days/weeks to help out. Tatsumi has been doing an incredible job at our client site as well as here. She has been a developer, graphic designer & business manager and it has really made it possible for us to work with this client so well. Kimiko has been holding down the fort here at the dotPub offices and been super patient with how much time she has had to spend along, not to mention pitching in when we need her.

Thanks girls!

Ok - Kimiko's cam is back up as well, so you can watch cats in TWO places :)

Hello all - the girls are getting dressed so I am filling in. We are on our way out to Hellfire tonight, so you won't see anyone on cam till late tonight (3am EST?) but your welcome to keep an eye on Tatsumi's cats. Unfortunately, the floater laptop crashed and none of us are there to reboot it so the only active cam @ the moment is the Tatsumi living room cam. Tats will be here with us tonight @ Kimi's so we will be able to put up a news item and hop in the chat room when we get back and in the morning.

Saturday is a holiday party at Tatsumi's place, we will have the cams on and probably audio as well so if your lookign for a vicarious thrill we should be able to help provide!

Tech guy here - We did some fairly extensive work to the members and visitors webcam remote panels. So if you see anything amiss please let us know so that we can get to work on it right away. I apologize if there is any problem, but the updates had to happen.

The tech guy says - OK, we fixed the join page - so if you've had trouble in the last few days with signing up, please try it again. Enjoy!

Hey all, random post to fill you guys in on the state of the world.

>> Tatsumi is off with her family and will probably not get to get online in any meaningful way until Friday evening... she is having a good time and she seems to be well fed on all manner of good Italian stuff. Maybe I'll get some left-overs.

>> Kimiko is sleeping now, and has been since about 6:00pm. She is pretty sick with some sort of infection of the chest. We got in touch with the doctor and he perscribes some pretty serious cough medicine that is letting her sleep and some heavy anti-biotics that hopefully will kill the bugs over the next five days. I Strongly suspect you will see her up and around for some of tomorrow.

>> If Kimiko is feeling better we will be at Flagg's tomorrow night, so you might get a glimpse of us on Sierra's webcam.

>> Don't forget Junkyard Wars is having a marathon today on the Learning Channel starting at 12:00 noon EST.

A note from 'that guy': I see from the news here that we didn't get a chance to update you on the latest happenings so let me fill you in a little. After Tatsumi & KImiko got home we went out and had some dinner then went off to the infamous NYC Hellfire club. All in all we had a great evening and got to spend some time with our friends in a nicely relaxed atmosphere... it's all good :) If your curious about this side fo our lives feel free to check out the F.A.Q.

We got home around 3 am. and the girls pretty much slipped into an immediate coma - Tatsumi is just behind me asleep but she is planning on heading home fairly soon so you should be able to see her on her camera any time now. I'm sure you'll see more of them later on today!

Tech note: I am hoping to get the Java chat page online today so feel free to check back soon if you've been waiting for this!

'Daddy Desk' - heya all. Tatsumi's day went OK, I am sure she will tell you all about it soon... but for the moment her cable modem is cutting in & out on her so she will be online sporadically tonight and she needs to get some sleep as well! Kimiko is off to the Dojo as am I and she will be at least stopping by later.

We'll we're back! We didn't get in to Hellfire itself but I am sure Kimiko or Tatsumi will fill you in, they are both asleep for the moment :)

On another note, a kind person who had access to the system until minutes ago did take the opportunity to tell us that something was amiss with our password database as well as taking great pains to detail everything this person thought was wrong with Kimiko's existence and lifestyle, not to mention my posterior. If you would like to see what I had to say about all this, go ahead and read all about it, the full text of this gem of a letter is included. I am sure Kimiko will have more to say on that topic as well :)

In any case, I am mentioning this because if you had signed up with us via DMR, you will find that your account is no longer active. Since it's demise, DMR has now not billed users for longer than the maximum membership we sold through them. Until this point we had not purged DMR users to make sure that anyone who signed up with them got their full time and to be honest, with the server move I forgot all about it.

That purge is now complete, if you have any questions please feel free to contact Kimiko or Tatsumi or myself.

By the way...

This is pretty cool :) I really like watching webcams in general, but this nightshot thing in Tatsumi's apartment pretty much rocks. I watch her all night these days and it is really a lot of fun.

Obviously, we need more cameras... many more cameras.

Anyway, I just watched her roll over and slap the hell out of her snooze button - so I am gonna slink off to be before she see's I am awake and yells at me.

Heya all, a note from the tech troll :) We have been having some serious problems with the cable modem connection this evening so the chat room has been a little flaky, and some of the cams stalled earlier on (around 4am). Sorry about that!

Hey it's Kimi using Daddy's machine. We reloaded my box so I'm in the middle of putting software back on and trying to remember passwords to millions of things. :) Going to bed now. Send me some stamina for my workout today...:hugs: K

A quick update from that guy on the camera! Kimiko is sick, Tatsumi is sleeping and I am working. The computer room is pretty dark but you can see Kimiko under that black & white blanket, and members can see Tatsumi in infra-red on the floater, so there is life here - it's just all asleep.

Oh, membership sign up should be working again this week :)

A note from Daddy... - Some news about the technical/news side of girl2 that you might be interested in.

* The membership software will be back on in full force by the middle of the week, so anyone waiting to join will be able to do so real soon now!

* We are hoping to have the floating camera in Tatsumi's apartment this comming week as well, so you should be able to help me keep an eye on our wandering teamgirl with nightshot again... and since I won't be there we won't have to keep the camera pointed mostly away fom the bed!

* The Girl2 CD's are back in development now that our systems are all settled - actually we are just in a testing phase. If we owe you a CD then rest assured it is going to ship this month

* Girl2 will be offering merchandise again soon, including new t-shirts and cool other stuff, we will be using PayPal to help us with all that and we are pretty happy about it

* Expect the 'official' chat room to come home in a week or so, powered by some incredible new software

* Ultracam should be up by the end of November

* We have lots of great new photography planned, and a lot more media in general more often. Look for short MPEG & MP3 clips to show up as the site changes.

* We will continue running both audio streams under Live365 for now

The big news - under current circumstances we are not going to be able to install our T-1 line into the current location so we are goign to continue for now to host our sites (including Girl2) on the servers at rackspace.com. This is actually a good thing for now for a number of reasons:

1) The current girl2 server is sitting in a battery backed, earthquake-proof data center

2) The server is totally dedicated to us, so I can continue to hack on it as if it was in this room

3) The tech support at rackspace is amazing, so even if I am busy the girls can get anything fixed/altered they need too

4) The server is monitored 24 / 7 / 365

5) Any hardware that goes down will be replaced asap

6) The data pipe that server is on is actually much larger than the dual t-1's we had it on here. It sits on a bus served by multiple T-3's

So, the sites will run fast and happy there for the next few months until I can build them a nice safe home to come back to :)

I would like to personally thank you all for being so patient while we get all this settled.

Ken
(Daddy)

Hiya everyone!

Since the girls went to sleep I thought I'd pop in and let you know that they are catching some serious zzz's. As you can see, things are getting back in order here and you will be really happy with what will be happening over the next few weeks... but there is no need to wait tha tlong for all of it, expect the webcam remote back by the end of the weekend!

Ok!

We're all here now as I type - the girls are too wiped to type on their own so I have to do it. This house is a ghost town :) More cam stuff tomorrow. Also we will keep you appraised on what is going on with the servers.

WATCH THIS SPACE for news :)

Ok.. that's all for now. We will be in and out but the girls should be able to pop into chat at some point.

Night!

Another report...

Well, all the big stuff is out and most of the little stuff too. The place looks pretty empty for now. The office cam is on, as is the floater though sadly ultra had to come down fairly early.

Tatsumi & Kimiko are off at Tatsumi's apartment setting up over there... I will probably be going over Friday night to set up her computer and an audio feed and a webcam. The odds are we will wind up with two audio feeds now... but that isn't such a bad thing. Her cable modem will be up by then so you will not see a slowdown in how her cam comes across.

Server news: We have contracted with rackspace.com and they guaranteed us a 24 hour turn-around. So the sites will continue without interruption on the new system. Something I am sure you are all happy about! They will continue to host and manage us for the next month I think - that will give us time to get our T-1's installed and consolidate the network.

Girl2 is going high tech! We are consolidating our system from 4 linux boxes into 3 Windows2000 Advanced server systems and we will be putting the new abilities to work. We are also seriously considering expanding our use of Flash on the site, if you want to give us some feedback on that that would be great!

Well, that's all for now... the floater will be on this evening and the girls and I are definately going to sleep early tonight! We took lots of images of the move and so you guys can see a before and after. Anyone who wants to see what the place Kimiko will be at looks like can find it in the old, old old Kimiko Dreams archives but you will see it live on Girl2 soon enough.

Moving day!

Ok, the house is being moved... but the ultracam will be on for members for as long as possible. Tatsumi's camera will be going down fairly early - and sadly the audio will go with it. Sorry. We are trying to keep the floater up and Kimiko's camera as much as possible.

So far, it looks like we will be renting hosting space on rackspace.com amd moving the websites tonight to there till the T-1 gets put in in a few weeks. We are doing this to make sure they sites stay up!

EVEN IF WE GO DOWN FOR AN HOUR OR TWO OR EVEN 6 or 7 DO NOT PANIC! We will be up a.s.a.p and girl2 is here to stay!

Tatsumi's camera should be up live from Tatsumi's apartment on Friday night or Saturday afternoon.

Soulhuntre
"Daddy"

Hiya :) Just a fast note to let you know that the "floater" camera is back in action.

Ok .. so I am a little late with this one :) The girls are out and about for a bit to see Kimiko's doctor but I expect them home before too long then you'll see them again. While we're talking - have you noticed how cute they look lately? OK we all know they are just damn cute anyway but the last few days have been particularly nice for me, and I guess for you too. There has been a little bit of a makup fetish going on over here and I can't tell you how much fun it is to see freshly applied lipstick every time I turn around! It might not last forever (though I hope it does) but we'll always have archives...