Monthly Archives: November 2004

24 (Almost…)

★ Posted on at 01:16 am ★

Heh, you know its bad that when even your hands feel like jelly when you’re typing a blog entry.

This is a record, even by my own standards. I’ve been up for 22 hours continuously without even catching a wink of sleep in between. Never before (not that I can recall) in my entire youth have I stayed up for such a long time. I recall friends who partied all night and slept only 45 minutes before we had to leave from Cameron Highlands during a primary school field trip. I’ve never had the energy or have been insane enough to stay up that long.

My personal entry into my Guinness Book of Records was because I had to work an 11 hour shift today. It started in the wee hours of 6am when I got up and arrived at work at 7am. Working in the early hours, time passes more quickly, as there is plenty to do (like setting up the display windows) and I didn’t notice the time until around 11am. When customers started flooding in, business was as usual, and the constant running up and down either fulfilling customer orders or refilling the empty displays of seafood kept me on my feet. Of the 11 hours, I only managed to sit for 15 minutes during the 30 minute break I had. Usually, I’m not too keen to take breaks, but in this situation, any chance to rest a bit is good. Legs were jelly even before I left work at around 6pm.

Call me a fanatic, but Maple Story was beckoning to me. I’ve been obsessed with levelling up, so I can go hunt new monsters, get better item drops and end up as a millionaire on the game, where the money will be spent on getting more uber items of higher level stats (I’m currently a level 37 archer/hunter who has level 50 equipment waiting for me to put on). With something to look forward to, how can you stop playing right now? So it was after dinner from 7pm to roughly 3am I gamed and I gamed and I gamed. Time flies when you’re having fun. Pressing the Ctrl button on the keyboard to hit monsters while using the direction keys to navigate all around is labour intensive. Hands and fingers were jelly before I left my friend’s place at 3am.

Yes, I am mad.

No, today I don’t feel like waiting for the morning sun to greet me.

The Many Thought Processes

★ Posted on at 08:50 pm ★

It’s a Friday night, and so I keep reminding myself. There are no more school days, no distinction between weekdays and weekends, I’d still have to work. Getting disoriented as I have to rework the associations that weekend does not equate to play day.

Was walking along the city streets with friends after dinner. It was a city bustling with life and activity. I can’t really tell the difference between the student population and the working class anymore. Probably the higher rates of students coming over and staying back after their studies is making Melbourne a little more integrated. Everyone seems to have been here long enough to just look like they’ve been here all their life. Perhaps my attention span is tiring, I don’t feel so keen on noticing the surroundings much lately. I’m feeling detached from the environment, to the point that I feel I don’t belong here.

The week was a busy one, working quite a bit while juggling the redesign of this site. Heh, I feel I’m the only one who sees the background as a bright blood red instead of dark purplish red. The monitor on my other comp shows the latter colour, but I didn’t turn it on for the duration that I was redesigning the site. I’m glad that people like the new look, heh, although there hasn’t been much feedback. If you do know people who can spare a moment, ask them to give a brief critique, I’d appreciate it.

Also still hooked on that stupid game I’ve been playing since the beginning of this month. Heh, was tiring a bit of it before this, partly because you have people who use hacking programs, and it totally spoils the whole premise of the game. If this was a single player game, cheat all you want, but by cheating online, you’re just annoying other people and making the game lose its appeal. The only reason why I’ve got back into it is because of the fancy items that monsters drop. The stats from the equipment make them appeal, not to mention that they look pretty cool on your character, when you do reach the required level to put it on. Higher level players pick these up and sell them to the highest bidder, while sometimes you can get good stuff real cheap from people who aren’t keen on the bidding process and just sell it in a private sale. In reality, this game is an entire community and has its good points as well as its share of rotten apples. I’d like to continue playing it for a while, and see where it goes, just for the fun of it.

Still so many things to do on my list, and so little time. I feel that life is imbalanced at times. I’m sure everyone’s been through it before, having too much time and being bored to death but too lazy to organize oneself to get things done. And then there are the times where no matter how you try, you just can’t fit everything you want to do in. Now is one of those times, but even if its tiring, it feels amazingly good to be useful and having purpose in life.

Version 1.5

★ Posted on at 07:14 am ★

Yes, finally got the new design up! Well, I’d hardly call it a redesign, since I’ve retained the basic layout and haven’t added many new ‘features’ to it, hence the version number of 1.5. There are still some hiccups to certain sections of the website, like broken links, weird layout issues or things that will crash your browser and wipe out your entire hard disk (kidding… heh) that I will fix within the next few days.

This site is now running experimental software, as I’ve upgraded to an alpha version of WordPress, the blogging software I use for this site. It ran fine on my home server but needed a little tweaking before it would stop displaying ugly error messages on the site. Something to do with Apache permissions, but, being me, heh, I managed to find a temporary workaround (am still waiting for the day when I can have a static IP so I can just run this site off my own computer at home. That would solve a lot of problems, while allowing me access to new possibilities and also introducing a whole slew of problems.) .

On to the redesign of the site.

There are three important points when I do a design for this site.

  1. There must be a pretty gal gracing the top header.
  2. The colour scheme should include red.
  3. Did I mention that there must be a pretty gal gracing the top header?

The previous design was built around the top header, where the colours and design were selected based on that. This time around, the layout and colours were selected first and the logo was really an afterthought. I’ve decided to go for less glaring colours that complement each other and blend in, so hopefully it’s easier on the eyes now.

The layout is heavily influenced by the Kubrick design (a popular WordPress template) and I borrowed quite a bit of layout logic from it as well. I didn’t look at the CSS code though, but used code I was already familiar with that has been tried and tested by me countless times.

On the programming side of things, I think it was less problematic this time around. Internet Explorer was less a pain to work with as anytime a problem arose, Google provided the solution pretty quickly. Would say that work flow was pretty efficient, without the need to pull my hair for several hours to fix ONE browser rendering problem. Saying that, this site should display more consistently across browsers now (am yet to check it against Opera and IE 5.x, but who uses these browsers anyway when you can get a much better browser in Firefox for free?).

I’ve also fixed the nagging sidebar issue in the previous design when if my blog post was shorter than the sidebar, the sidebar would protrude in a most ugly fashion (only noticeable when reading single posts). This was one of the main reasons why I wanted to redesign in the first place.

I’ve also added a small field for what I’m listening to (heh, people ask me what music I listen to, and I really don’t know how to describe it sometimes, so maybe this will give you a general idea). Well, could basically add anything to that field, random quotes, thoughts and even shutter, aperture and exposure settings (might contemplate it for my photoblog later on).

Hope I didn’t miss anything out. Please feel free to comment and inform me of bugs if you find any (hope the commenting system works though!).

Heh, think I’ll stick with this design for another 6 months before I get bored of it and get itchified to make another one.