all things me

It’s nice to see (no use clicking that link; the site just upgraded WP and apparently the old posts aren’t coming back) that I’m not the only “girl” playing Half-Lives and Painkillers and Dooms and what not. I would’ve left a happy comment on the post but the form was closed so I’ll trackback it

I’m itching to get back to Painkiller but a) my eyes are tired so I probably wouldn’t dare push my luck, b) my sister’s still online and I don’t want to overload poor Simon who’s acting as a Master to that little slave over there.

I was going to trackback the Comment text plugin page, but I noticed the plugin author had noticed the missing quote problem and corrected it. I, however, hacked it together myself. It just needed some complexity to the code that builds the comment links:

<!-- First link, to get a custom text, around line 50 -->
echo '<a href="' . get_permalink() . '#comments' . '">' ."$text ($number)" . '</a>';
<!-- Second link, to get default text, around line 54 -->
echo '<a href="' . get_permalink() . '#comments' . '">Comments'. "($number)</a>";

Another thing, I’m making a site for Amadeus

Ehm… what was I thinking: “serene”? I’ve been playing Painkiller which is quite a hectic game. I’ve slaughtered hell’s boogers that attack me in hordes. Not even close to serene! Oh, and while I was making the header image + design for the Ami site, the computer suddenly shut down and I found out that a safety fuse had blown out. The fridge and oven in our kitchen were without electricity as well as our neighbour’s kitchen. Oh, and don’t forget our computers.

Despite the boogers (I know booger is the stuff that comes out of one’s nose, so?), or because of them, Painkiller is a very nice game. Somber. Nicely gruesome. I was a bit worried how it’d play on Simon because the minimum specs was 1,5 Ghz and I have 1,4. The game runs like a charm, however, and I didn’t even have to lower the performance settings. The graphics are amazing! A starry sky at the cemetary is very beautiful — until the skeletons attack.

The game is so hectic that I can’t play it for long without starting to feel a bit of motion sickness or something. Maybe I should lower the head bob setting.

I got 3 hours of sleep last night.

That’s right. I went happily to bed at 0:15 thinking “well, it’s going to be a short night but not too much”. Then, with Cockburn’s (pronounced ‘coburn’) triggers and goals and actors and scopes and variations swirling around in my head, I was still staring helplessly at the clock at 3:15.

At 6:15 I got up, a bit dizzy, feeling as if I’d just gotten my eyes closed. Mug of coffee, cereals and off I went to the train station.

All things considered (like the sloppy 1-2 hour studying the night before), the Introduction to Application Design exam went alright (I think so at least). I always get crazy ideas when I’m tired, at least more creative than when I’m my dull and well-rested (*cough cough*) self, so I drew use case diagrams and sequence diagrams on making coffee (and related).

After the exam I decided to run around in shops a little. I got my godson one of these from DinSko, in kids’ size, of course.

(Looked better when the theme had a purple background…)

I hope he has enough sense of humour for those — I believe he does. That’s all I could find but I re-hit the shops with a friend of mine. Couldn’t find much then either but at least I know where NOT to look.

But, NO COFFEE today. Not after breakfast. My sister ought to be proud.

Hold on, does Caffe Latte ice cream count?

The network connection on my work computer didn’t work this morning. Linux wouldn’t start because it couldn’t find my home directory. On Windows, everything worked, except the connection and the stuff I’m doing on Protege kind of needs a connection (and I can’t google offline). So, the configurations were being updated which took half an hour but still there were problems with the connection. So I went to the student area where there are 4-5 computers. Not a place of peace and quiet. Next to me sat a man who mumbled to himself all the time, and you know how a low-pitch mumble is very very audible (like a darn bass boom).

Now I’m finally back in my own room (not without a roommate, alas) and the connection works. Too bad I have to get going in half an hour. (Last terminology lecture, and last lecture ALL YEAR — there’s an exam on Application Design on Thursday, though)

I’m browsing some manuals for terms to put in the ontology. In one printer manual there read:

For optimum performance, use the printer at elevations below 2,500 m (8,200 ft.). Performance may diminish at elevations between 2,500 m (8,200 ft.) and 3,000 m (9,840 ft.). Use at elevations above 3,000 m (9,840 ft.) exceeds operability limits.

Shoot, I can’t take the 82 kg printer with me on a mountain hike.

I’m trying out — once again — Alex King’s Since Last Visit hack which should show how many new posts and comments there are since your last visit. I never got it working properly before, and the Javascript code never appeared in my source code, but now I nicked the code off another site using the hack and pasted it straight into the index page. Hopefully it’ll start working now.

@ 23:06

Ah, this is even better, a non-JavaScript version of the hack!!

I’m trying out an offline blogging helper thingy called Zempt. So, if I ever have any time to blog when I’m not online, this may be helpful. And maybe there’ll be some really intelligent and interesting posts (*cough*) some time!

I’m a bit paranoid that they’ll get my blog login name and password because those had to be entered in this program… Anyway, testing testing.

Picture time at last!!

Yummm

Amadeus and his favourite pastime — as if his breath wasn’t bad enough

Sorry about the purple background; different theme was in use back then…

For the last 4 hours or so I’ve been drawing UML class diagrams, instance diagrams, sequence diagrams, and collaboration diagrams (well, I didn’t do that one, actually, I’m too tired and my head hurts) based on a Java code. Ugh. My mind’s spinning with lifelines and instances and call arrows. Drawing on Dia is fun-ish, but when there’s dozens of call arrows and instances, getting the image organized — let alone your thoughts — is a pain in the neck, or wrist… or eye. Or head, apparently.

And as a last drop I noticed that my site looks crappy on IE. Too bad, so sad.

I’m really really tired at the moment.

It would be so nice if on Windows XP one could choose which boxes in the task bar (with the clock and the Start button and things) get grouped together when there’s too little space.