Oh yay, I’m a total geek again.
It’s been years since I’ve done any kind of legitimate coding/web design. Dro didn’t stop, and now he’s like some kind uber-nerd superhero ninja guy. I have no problem with that. But I have spent the past week doing a lot of reading and tutorials on PHP, and more specifically, creating custom Wordpress themes from scratch. After spending a few days on a custom theme, it’s starting to actually look pretty nice (screenshots or something soon). I’m still struggling with a few things; my footer is being a pain in the ass, and some of the formatting (it’s using two loops in columns for the two different types of posts) is finicky. I also need to figure out a better top menu system, even though the current one works fine. But I’m only a few days into the theme itself and understanding PHP in general, so I’m feeling pretty good about the progress that I’m making. I’m hoping to have the main page mostly working by the end of the week so I can start on the single page view and few of the other custom pages. I’d also really enjoy knowing how to add a search bar to the header without it automatically creating a new line for itself, but I have not found a fix for this either. All in due time, I suppose.
Luckily, it would appear that Dro is back. He had to move, which I guess I was aware of months in advance, but he still disappeared for a week or two, right when I was in need of his sagely advice in the areas of PHP and other things. But he’s back now so I can spend my days hounding him through IM for stuff he probably thinks are insanely simple while he curses at me for bugging him during work or whatever. Just like old times.
Don’t think that means he’s going to be posting a lot again or anything. He’s too busy being a superhero ninja guy. I, however, have very little life and a lot of free time. Right now I’m spending a lot of that time reading a book called The Terror by one of my favorite authors, Dan Simmons. The book is starting a little slow, but the concept is strong enough on its own to make me finish it even if it’s garbage, and nothing he’s ever written has wound up being garbage, so I’m pretty sure he is going to pull it off. <3, Mr. Simmons. Keep it up.
Oh! Also, I pounded out two chapters and another 4000 or so words in my book last night. I managed this because I realized it might be better for the story to pick up at a more interesting point than just progressing in chronological order (got the notion from The Terror, as it really helps to draw me into that book’s story). This allowed me to set up one of the main characters much faster, as well as go back to the first big-ish event through a flashback. This event also allowed me to write about the supposed antagonist characters, something I had not yet done as I figured them out in my head in the years between the first draft and what I am working on now. It was great finally putting them down in words and describing their more complex actions, which work out perfectly in my head, but are a (fun) challenge to describe on paper. This version of the story is already turning out approximately a million times better than what I had written years ago (and thank god for that); I’m very excited to keep working on it. Perhaps I might even get the nerve up to post bits of it on here. We’ll see. I’d like some confirmation that it’s actually halfway decent before I start really throwing it out there for all to see.
And that’s the post.
Blu Ray, it teh winnar
Okay, Google…
I know I was searching for a Grand Theft Auto-related item, but c’mon.
Passing The Time Post: Why I Miss My Internet
There are a lot of reasons for me to miss having internet at home: Being able to do schoolwork from my bed; news and forums are a click away; late night chats with friends who sleep during the day; Guitar Hero 3 online battles; torrents of everything; but the thing I miss the most is an MMO I only got a meager taste of: EVE Online.
God, I miss EVE Online so much. Basically Homeworld mixed with business economics, it combines strategic and beautiful space battles with running an interstellar business. Upgrading from a tiny scout to massive battleships, conducting raids with your other company members, all the different stats and item upgrades… building the business up to having it’s own spacestation, defending your resources from pirates… BEING one of those pirates and just cruising the solar systems causing chaos… I MISS IT. And I only played it for two weeks, so I barely had any kind of decent character. If there is one thing that has me chewing my lip, looking for a way for me to get the internet back at my home, it is this game. I want it back. So bad.
Google Knol - FFS, Google…
News started to spread this week of Google Knol, Google’s latest doodling in their mission to organize the world’s information. When I first heard about it, I thought it basically sounded a lot like Wikipedia, but with ads. Then I started to hear even more about it, and comparisons to About.com came to mind. Then I read the official news about it, took a look at the preliminary screenshot, and drew my own conclusion: This is much more like Helium with some wiki tools and visual cues from About.com
Basically, it takes the idea from Wikipedia that anybody can write an article about whatever they know about. But, where Wikipedia utilizes mostly-anonymous users making edits with official editors going around deciding what’s good enough to keep, Google isn’t going to be policing Knol; it will be left to the users to decide what is good and what isn’t (still similar to Wikipedia, since you can nominate stubs for removal, etc). If you look at the full-size screenshot, it’s pretty easy to understand how comparisons to About.com came up. Visually, it feels very similar. Users who write articles are out in the open, including credentials, and put their reputations on the line when they write. I like this because it means Knol will be less prone to idiot-edits and vandalism that runs rampant on Wikipedia and makes it generally untrustworthy.
So up until this point, I felt largely apathetic about Knol. We already have these tools, why combine About.com and Wikpedia? It seemed like Knol would just be a repository of junk information or reprints from the web. And while I supposed organizing the world’s information includes organizing all the junk as well, I just couldn’t see the point. Then I looked a little closer, and saw that the footsteps Knol was following the closest was one of my favorite sites, Helium.com
Ryan vs. Dorkman 2
This video is pretty old, but it is still badass and I’m afraid I’m sort of copping out today with a post. I has lots of homework, and new episodes of Dexter and House to watch. Sorry.
Oh my…
It bugs me that we don’t get stuff like this for commercials over here.
from: Japan Probe
At least there’s YTMND to cheer me up:
http://igotyouapresent.ytmnd.com/
The Internet Is Awesome.
The internet is a massive clusterfuck of all kinds of different people. But one thing always seems to pull them together, whether it is 4chan, a forum, Reddit, or a massive meme that stretches across all different areas of the tubes. That one thing is “pranks.” We fucking love them. Spamming a radio station with requests for Dragonforce, raiding a free online MMO with characters that block entrance to the swimming pool claiming it is “closed due to AIDS,” voting for the Spice Girls to add Baghdad to their tour list, sending thousands of free UPS shipping boxes to a guy who made it publicly known he was an asshole, etc.
The list really is endless, but there’s a new one: Greenpeace is adopting a whale, or something, and they put up an online poll so people could vote for the name of the whale. There’s a list of about 30 bullshit names like Sedna, Aiko, Moya, and Nurani. And, because it’s always fun to put something silly in an online poll, they included Mr. Splashy Pants as an option. This was posted on Reddit yesterday, with a request for everyone to vote for Mr. Splashy Pants. As is usually the case when a fun prank presents itself, the internet wasted no time:
I really do love the internet, and stuff like this just makes that love grow. The fact that the next most-voted name is “Libertad,” shows just how idiotic Greenpeace people can be. Who names their whale after a Velvet Revolver album?
Flock (mostly) Rules.
So I have switched from Firefox to Flock recently. The reason is kind of interesting and ultimately ironic. See, I use(d) Netvibes as my start page for something around two years. Customizable, integrated podcast player, and handy widgets were the main reasons. I’ve heard people dismiss Netvibes as “too busy,” but for a guy with little-to-no life, I liked the busy feel. However, Firefox has some kind of bug or something- while Netvibes is loading the 50+ feeds across five tabs, if I try to do ANYTHING during that time, Firefox would crash. This includes clicking a feed item, changing tabs, marking any feed as read (something I started to do as I had less and less time to read all the feeds that I used to watch like a hawk when I was able to sit on the internet until 5 in the morning), opening a new tab separate from Netvibes, etc. It was lame, and it got on my nerves. On top of that, the memory leak problem (or fragmentation, or whatever) slowed my poor 1.4mhz Pentium M with 512MB of RAM to a crawl, and trying to do pretty much anything else after Firefox has been open for 15 minutes was unbearable.
I had tried Flock a while back and while I liked the idea, I didn’t think it was that great. But when I heard that the 1.0 beta was coming along, I decided to give it another shot. It had some new features, was supposedly more stable, and so on. So after using it for around two months, not only am I not going back to Firefox, but I don’t even use Netvibes anymore. Flock has managed to integrate almost everything I do into its interface. Here’s how/why I became a Flock convert: Read more
Werewolf Bar Mitzvah
I have no good reason to post this, other than the fact that I think the song is hilarious.
Why Pownce Sucks.
Pownce is the latest in the micro-blogging trend that started with and still largely surrounds Twitter. It is an attempt to expand on the functions, throwing file-sharing and specific visual aspects into the mix. You can directly embed video and photos, post links, event notices, and group your friends to send messages to select people. It also doesn’t place a limit on the length of messages. It sounds like a great idea on paper, and I can understand why it was made, but there are a few things that prevent it from replacing Twitter in my mind. Read more