all things me

This is why I dislike 3-column layouts

Hmm… why atheism starts with a small letter but Paganism with capital…

‘You scored as atheism. You are… an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul.

Instead of simply being “nonreligious,” atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God.’

Which religion is the right one for you?
created with QuizFarm.com

[Via: Podz]

After finishing the first PoP, Sands of Time, I knew I wanted to get the sequel too. The first one was a bright coloured game where the prince looked like a sweet young boy. In Warrior Within, the Prince had apparently found the warrior within and become a harsh looking guy. The game is also gloomier with hard rock type of music and dark colours. I don’t complain about that at all — the music is very good. The ladies in the game show even more skin than in the 1st part, which I didn’t think was possible…

The camera annoyance I complained about in the first game has mostly been corrected. There are times when you can’t see properly because the camera gets stuck in something. Knowing which way to jump, especially from poles and especially when you don’t have much time to think, is still a puzzle and eats a lot of rewinds.

The fighting is more sophisticated in this sequel. I used to handle most of the enemies in the 1st part by vault-over-and-slice (some you didn’t vault over though without getting thrown on the ground). Now there are more moves and there’s a possibility to use double weapon attacks which are very nifty. Then again, grabbing a poor soul and slicing it in two is a lot of fun — that you can’t do with both hands taken.

Most of the enemies are nice to fight against, but I can’t stand the ninjas that hop over you in silly splits and slit your throat. Uh. They are ok one-on-one but whenever there are several against me, they drive me nuts!

The areas aren’t as straightforward as in Sands of Time. I spent a lot of time wandering around — until I realized the map can help somewhat. It’s also a bit annoying that once you think you’ve got rid of an enemy in one place, if you go back, they’re revived.

There is a nice twist towards the end and it’s enjoyable to see (well, play) the story unfold.

The font used in subtitles is a copperplate type of font (all letters look like capital letters). It’s a poor choice, because not only is it ugly (and huge), it’s also harder to read than a regular font.

The game has a big replay value because at least I didn’t get all the life upgrades or artwork chests on the first try — and it’s always nice to play the game from the beginning because you know all the neat tricks that you learned as you went on the 1st round. This time I’m following a walkthrough to ensure I don’t miss anything. It pays to get the life upgrades because they open an alternative ending AND you get illustrations in the Extras. In Sands of Time there were “secrets” where you got longer health bar but in my opinion they were more obvious than in Warrior Within. Although, I may have played in a too light-up room to miss some suspicious cracked walls or whatever.

I don’t know if that’s all I was going to write about, I tried to make mental notes while playing. I’ll have to add to this if I remember something while playing it through again.

Trivia: Monica Bellucci does the voice of Kaileena. She played Persephone in Matrix movies. (Not my favourite character in Matrix, didn’t like the accent.)

Game’s website

So, my article on cascading stylesheets came out on 31st. It was nice seeing my own handiwork in an actual magazine — along with pretty pictures by my namesake. Not that I’ve been dreaming of journalism since I was a kid (my friend and I made a magazine for our class, though, in early grades) but what can I say, it was a lot of fun to write for fun for a change. Oh, what am I talking about, I write here all the time! Anyway, you know what I mean.

I had told my father before (response: “uh-huh…”) and when the magazine came out, I showed Mum (response: “what am I supposed to be looking at” and then “oh, that’s what you’ve been up to! Getting all those mysterious envelopes”). Luckily the people at work were a bit more enthusiastic, otherwise I would’ve jumped on some table and shouted I got published in a magazine, dammit! Oh, Grandma asked me questions about it when I told her beforehand, so at least I got to tell the whole story to someone

Today I got my extra copies of the magazine. I sent one to my grandparents, Dad took one (on the excuse of paying most of the tool that was used to write the article… it’s his fault, he never took the money from me), and I’m keeping one wrapped — I also have the one that came in the mail on the day it was published.

So, the story: the editor had read my blog which he’d found via a blog list. Mum always asks why I bother with my homepage. Now I can tell her, and other heretics, that you can get a job (or at least freelance assignments) by bothering with homepages.

I couldn’t help myself! I had to buy Prince of Persia: Warrior Within even though it was pretty expensive (and we usually either wait for a game to come from a game club or buy them used). I couldn’t wait that long and in such uncertainty!! In 10 days I’m going to buy Splinter Cell 3 so maybe this wasn’t such a good idea but who cares. It’s only money. Hard-earned money.

I desperately needed a fix.

On Thursday, after staying up until 3am the previous night, I decided to stay home and do Uni stuff: checking texts for grammar and things, and my beloved web portfolio of which there’s been a little tasting earlier.

Here are some new pictures of the layout. I can’t give out the site link because there’s an open insert/update form to the database, so you’ll have to settle for hand-picked favourites of mine:
This is the view on a post editing page when no post has been selected yet. I made those fancy “drop down” post numbers. They’re post IDs wrapped in span tags floated left.

Here’s my WP style quicktag pane:
And last but not least, a snippet off of the documentation page including the right side of my horizontal menu (the main links are on the left hand side) and the header with fancy underlining.
I could rant on and on about the (cool?) things I’ve done on the site-slash-blog-application but I’ve just done that, all day long. Writing the documentation and tons of comments. Maybe I will rant some day.

Oh yeah, I just realized. When next week’s craziness is over (exam and perhaps I should find some time to study for it too, an essay, loads of papers to check for grammar etc, new course, finishing touches to the portfolio — and work), I can start modifying the portfolio layout to fit my WP blog!! Can’t wait!! Today (= yesterday) I installed XAMPP and put up a local WP where I can test out my themes — and write some very secret things that no one else is allowed to read! Now… how could I get such secret things to write about…
(XAMPP is an Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. And then some.)

[Edit: March 14th @ 23:00] Now I sent in my portfolio (or the url, actually) so now I can only sit, be scared, and wait for the judgment day. I actually noticed some whoopsies after sending the url and quickly corrected them (a non-validating documentation and a form handler that didn’t display a “don’t use this page directly” notice). Now they work. Now ALL of it works I hope. Ugh, I hate this sort of uncertainty. [/edit]

Via: Jafer (there under a slightly different name; my life’s so boring I don’t want to sound confident that no one has done any of these )

1. Played a $100 000 grand piano in a church
2. Asked the teacher for permission to be excused from a Spanish lesson to go to McDonald’s for a friend’s birthday
3. Studied Farsi/Persian (and Finnish…! )
4. Had an article published in a magazine (soon, and soon two)
5. Ordered 20 000 Swiss francs’ worth of gold and silver wire from Switzerland (or something like that, but it was a lot of money)
6. Sang at the opening of a health centre
7. Had a nose piercing
8. Liked cod-liver oil more than pancakes as a kid (that stuff is for Finns what Vegemite is for Aussies)
9. Was voted weirdest girl in senior high
10. Sat writing and troubleshooting MySQL queries and PHP for a web portfolio at 1:45 am
    (ok, so I ran out of ideas…)

Here’s some extra cause people have done some of those:

11. Had an electric shock while swimming in the lake during a thunder storm

I just updated my anti-virus program (cause the greedy ISP people require one license per computer in the same household, so when I installed the new one to my sister’s comp (she needs it more than I do, 6 viruses were found), mine stopped working. I fetched mine from University instead) and finally, service pack 2.

Boy was it a draaaaaag. (hmm, when have I said that before… oh yeah).

The start up took a long time, and when I finally got the blue screen of hopefullness, it looked — well — pretty exotic to say the least:

This has happened before. Windows using interesting choices of fonts, and I know it’s because I have sooooo many of them installed. I should get one of those programs that allow you to browse your uninstalled fonts and then temporarily load the ones you want to use.

Mum (or any other relative), STOP READING! I’ll tell you in time
Here’s the secret I’ve been keeping for quite a while now. I can’t take it anymore!
Continues »

A lot of the time when people post their site links for others to see at “Strut your own stuff” (I’m talking about WP forums), pretty soon someone will write “that’s cool/beautiful/nice/awesome/the best layout I’ve ever seen!! Do you have it for download?/Please make it available ASAP!!!1”

What if the person has worked their butt off to get a beautiful, ORIGINAL, DISTINCTIVE layout? What if they don’t want to stumble across a clone everywhere they turn? Some people have miles and miles of themes in their theme switcher (right next to the miles and miles of blogs they apparently read), and they add to the list practically every theme they can get their hands on.

I know I’m being too hard on people who don’t have the knowledge/patience/interest to do their own themes but that is my opinion and this is my blog!

Disclaimer: This writing is by no means affected by the fact that I’ve been doing my portfolio layout for hours and hours (loving it though, but the theme pleads — in a wrong place — are a pet peeve). I might modify the layout to fit here, too It could be an invigorating change.