all things me

I got a new computer!!! I’m not on it yet, because Dad took the flat display for a test drive I haven’t had time to hook it up yet anyway (then it’ll take me days and days to get the important files moved — and save games). Simon Jr. is just the “baby name”, I haven’t thought of a name for it yet.

It’s Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo T with Pentium 4 (3,2 Ghz), 1024 Mb or DDR RAM, 200Gb disk, GeForce6600 with 256Mb in PCI Express port. And then some. Oh oh oh, and flat 19″ display.

*does a happy nerd dance*

Via Jafer:
What does your birth date mean?

Your birth on the 16th day of the month gives a sense of loneliness and generally the desire to work alone.
You are relatively inflexible, and insist on your being independent.
You need a good deal of time to rest and to meditate.
You are introspective and a little stubborn.
Because of this, it may not be easy for you to maintain permanent relationships, but you probably will as you are very much into home and family.
This birth day inclines to interests in the technical, the scientific, and to the religious or the unknown realm of spiritual explorations.
The date gives you a tendency to seek unusual approaches and makes your style seem a little different and unique to those around you.
Your intuition is aided by the day of your birth, but most of your actions are bedded in logic, responsibility, and the rational approach.
You may be emotional, but have a hard time expressing these emotions.
Because of this, there may be some difficulty in giving or receiving affection.

Last week Second Sight arrived from a game club but, alas, it was missing the key code sticker. Before returning the game to get a new one I emailed the club with the game key doubting that would help. Lucky thing I did, because they were able to give me the code which I really really hope works… then I’ll get to throw mental hospital guards around with my PSI powers — can’t wait!

I still haven’t finished with Vampire the Masquerade, hardly started Farcry, haven’t even touched True Crime or Deus Ex 2 for that matter. I’m afraid DE2 won’t work on my computer, I’m in the process of getting a new one — I’m trying to find a machine good enough to my requirements. The problem is, I’ve only found computers that have a lot of Ghz, but not enough Gb, or vice versa. Hmph. Too bad Alienware is not available in Finland. I’d like one of those fancy laptops. Maybe I’ll have to travel to England for a little computer shopping; I wonder what the customs would think about that. Oy the taxes…

Now I must get back to the Quest of the Mysterious NullPointerException. I just want to go home because I’m so tired! I read Dark Tower VII all weekend (only 168 pages to go!) and noticed that reading is tiring. Perhaps because it’s a dream-like state without the refreshing qualities? No idea.

Blimey. My current best in No Brainer

is the best score all month

There’s this hilarious and addictive game, No Brainer. You answer really simple questions as fast as you can and try to grow the brain bigger and bigger. Here’s my result for Game 1 (there are three versions):
Updated Tue, July 19th

I challenge you.
(I’m not saying I have a good result, it’s just my current personal best.)

This is ridiculous. This is from HeliAttack 3 at MiniClip — an online Flash game:

Slow computer is something less than 2 Ghz? Simon, my computer, is 1,4. I know, it is quite old, but I’m going to buy a new computer pretty soon. Maybe I’ll name it Simon Jr. because I like the name too much…

From a conversation with Mac I got a bad itch to play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We used to have it on a diskette but at least I didn’t find it anymore (Dad had an old disk formatting frenzy a while ago) so I pouted a little and started looking for it. Luckily I did find it, and in the process I found a lovely site for abandoned games (and old games in general), Abandonia. I downloaded the DosBox that helps running old games on modern machines and also a couple of games I haven’t really tried properly yet.

But I did play Indiana today. I’ve never played it from beginning to finish because we didn’t have the manual and I never got the hang of fighting. (Instead, I played a little of the beginning and then loaded a save game at the temple in Iskenderun.) After talking to Mac, I found out that one does not have to fight the guards when fleeing Iskenderun. So of course I wanted to try it that way! When I was at the castle, I first tried to be very clever and gave Donovan Indy’s “Grail Diary” instead of Henry’s (Indy’s dad), but then Henry didn’t want to go to Berlin which was a must if I wanted to avoid getting caught at guard posts. Finally I met the Führer and got my easy travelling. I even managed to fly the biplane this time! But I’ll probably play it a second time because I want to fly in the zeppelin, too.

As if I didn’t have enough games to play, I downloaded some old games from Abandonia. But I think Vampire is my #1 priority. (I got past a couple of difficult fights again on Wednesday/Thursday — all I can say is, Katana is great!! Slash slash slash and enemies go down like… hay!)

• Login
• Form checks with JS
• Confirm before delete
• Checks for no rows in query results
• Prevent default category from being deleted (change default to ‘1’)

After this time consumer (20+ hours during the weekend, ok, that’s not really a lot is it, but I didn’t do much else!) is over and done with I’m going to play Bloodlines until I turn into a vampire! … when I’m not working or studying for my summer exams, that is…

Don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but I’m making a blog application in the database application project course. Today (Sat-Sun) I’ve been doing coding for about 11 hours. First I fought — for 6-ish hours — with Oracle trying to get things out of other tables than the users table. No luck. Then it took a while to get the MySQL base up and running (we have to install it to our home directory and start the server when we need it) with the correct socket specified somewhere.

Then, I got properly into business, aka The Fun Stuff: First I coded pages on the public side, that is, archive pages and things. Then I ventured into updating the database (ahhh, hazard zone — not really) and I got as far as finishing the code for articles. I made the form ready for adding topics, but I’m too tired to keep going. I’m going to continue “tomorrow”, happy knowing that I don’t have to fight for 6-ish hours with the stupid Oracle database.

I’m very proud of the “portability” of it. I’m making an effort to do all the database stuff in one file so I can define the settings (user, password, etc.) in one place. I’m sure there’d be lots of cool things to “rip” from WP, but I’m going to dabble this on my own. Of course, I’ve been influenced by the way WP works, a little.

Ahh, a potentially heated discussion at the WP forums — again (it’s like should you or shouldn’t you target external links to _blank). Table layouts and the importance of CSS.

Well, you know I think people who can’t write HTML by hand are not supposed to make homepages either, but they do (I don’t know about electronics so I don’t go fixing my TV! I know borking your code doesn’t kill you, though). They get into something like WP which, to satisfy their grandiose ideas, requires some knowledge of PHP, CSS, and HTML. If they don’t know about those and are scared to get elbow-deep in them (I think I hadn’t seen any PHP before WP, but because I know a few programming languages, the syntax came naturally), they flock the forums with lots of things they want to achieve and need help to achieve them (“Help!!!!1 this is very important! I need it done today!”).

But I do understand people who are just starting in the wonderful world of web design, who maybe know the basics but not the more “advanced” stuff like CSS. It maybe be too much to them to get an all-CSS layout, especially if it needs to be a bit on the complex side. Layouts with tables are easy! You aren’t supposed to make them, but boy do they scale nicely and you can do all kinds of cool images for the layout and just slice them up and whack ’em in a table. I know I’m maybe just trying to justify my own table layouts which I have been too lazy to change, but CSS gets frustrating at times. Maybe I should just get a few recipes up my 3/4-length sleeve that I can happily type around without going through the trial and error from scratch every time.