2008 has been a pretty good and eventful year for me. Amongst other things: I visited the extended family in the Philippines, I've moved into my own place, I attended the weddings of 3 dear friends (one of which required I fly to Australia to attend), and I've befriended a good bunch of (former-)workmates who invite me to a whole host of events, and of that group one of them is this wonderful girl who bakes the most amazing food. In light of everything good that has made my year, I decided to get some sort of Christmas present for the people who have made it so.
Very little of my shopping was actually done at physical retail stores; much of what I got for others had to be shipped from around the country or from overseas. And you know what having things shipped means? Lots of packaging material, especially bubble wrap. Everybody loves bubble wrap.
Bubble wrap
I was out last night delivering Christmas presents to the flat of (former-)workmates, when amazing-baking-girl started watching WALL-E. Wanting to avoid the chores that awaited me back at my place, I stayed and watched WALL-E. WALL-E's story is told primarily through sounds and body language, and so lots of universally-understood devices or references are used so viewers know what's going on. At one point, WALL-E is showing EVE some of the stuff he has, including this sheet of bubble wrap. He demonstrates popping it, to which EVE follows by manically popping as much of the sheet as fast as she can. Everybody loves popping bubble wrap.
This dog likes popping bubble wrap too
This scene reminded me of all the bubble wrap I had accumulated from the presents I had shipped-in, and how when I first received an order which had one of those huge bubbles, I spent several minutes popping the thing before getting to the actual work of wrapping the present. And you know what I did after that? I popped more bubble wrap.
So right up there with the universal language of smiles and laughs, we have bubble wrap. I think I'll try to include a small patch of the stuff with my Christmas cards next year :P
Unlike last year, this time I'm ready for the coming of Blue Beanie Day 2008. OK, so it's not as if I marked it on my calendar and looked forward to it all year like a child waiting for Christmas, but now that I've joined the Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook it's become somebody else's responsibility to inform me of said event. So when I got the message/call-to-arms a couple days ago, I almost mistook today for Blue Beanie Day; I even took my navy-blue NY baseball cap into work instead of my usual orange and black SF Giants one. Yes, you read that right; I actually don't have a blue beanie. Thankfully this extra week gives me time to prepare, properly.
One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time.
Oh how wrong I was.
When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things.
Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be.
Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate.
Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.
Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking.
Yes, cooking.
Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some.
The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers.
The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.
Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.
I was a bit over-excited the other day when I received the first piece of mail addressed specifically to me.
For the past couple of weeks it's been letters for at least 4 different people, and whether they be the owner or previous tennants, I haven't been able to tell.
So when I got it, I was all "Hey, it's addressed to me! Oh wait, it's from [my electricity company]. Dammit, it's probably a bill."
And it was.
Even when all the correspondence I make with friends abroad is done via e-mail, a good old letter still grabs my attention.
An e-mail nowadays is a couple of sentences and a lol here or there.
A letter is a page-turning short story.
An e-greeting card is like a 5-mouse-click Christmas fruit cake; it doesn't take a lot of effort, and you don't feel that great about receiving one.
An actual card requires a visit to the store, forking over some money, writing something in it, then dropping it into a post box.
With the saying "it's the thought that counts", I think they need to add that effort is a pretty big player too, and then maybe from that you can extrapolate a 'value of the gift is proportional to the amount of thought and effort put into it' equation.
Although there are some things that should stay as e-mails.
I don't imagine that a letter version of a Facebook notification that someone has responded with "gaaaay!" to my status, could be made any better.
So yay for the letter, but meh for the anti-climactic discovery that it's just a bill.
I'll probably end-up choosing to receive my bills online from now on so I don't face such disappointments in future.
Thus, freeing-up the mailbox for general junk mail and niche items to people who don't live here anymore, like a Christian version of Guitar Hero.
I wasn't really going to write anything about this, but then I got an e-mail from someone wondering if my RSS feed was broken because I hadn't reported on it. So what happened to me? I moved into my own place in the city, and celebrated my birthday with friends (in that order too).
Over the past couple of months I'd been looking at places to live in the city as pretty much everything going-on with me right now is there: work, friends, your mum, etc. I used to live out in the suburbs and rely on the trains to take me between these places. I remember when my train buddy (a friend of mine who by sheer coincidence ended-up taking most of the same trains I did for all of our years at university) started talking about how much she hated the trains. After having taken the train for more years than I have fingers, she just got fed-up with them. I didn't understand her then, and soon afterwards she and her husband-to-be moved to Australia.
Earlier this year, I think I finally understood where she was coming from.
Somewhere between the beginning of this year and the date of this post, I got tired of having my life revolve around the public transport system's schedule. Running after trains, waiting at the station, leaving parties early just so I could catch the last train home... small frustrations that just started adding-up. I thought it was about time to do something about it, and so here I am, recently-relocated into an apartment in the city, when I had my birthday.
So my birthday isn't usually something I post about, but it has been a long time since I actually celebrated one of mine with friends. This year's one was a simple affair; dinner at my favourite Italian tratorria (a place I had been going to for every one of my birthdays since turning 21), talking about matters close to our hearts: AIDS monkeys, ginger kids, your mum, etc. I got presents too!
The most notable would have to be the flying alarm clock. And yes, it works as well as the web page suggests: the clock does have a loud shrieking alarm, it does have a propeller that flies off to some dark corner of your room, and it does require you to retrieve the propeller and return it to the clock otherwise THE DAMN THING DOESN'T SHUT UP!
I haven't been late to work ever since.
I've also been a lot grumpier than normal.
Go figure.
Ego surfing; it's something we've all done before. Whether or not the results work in your favour, well, that's a different story.
A combined first and last name isn't as rare as it used to be. You'll likely meet someone during your school years with your first name. (I don't know what assumed statistic to throw at you for meeting something outside your family with your last name.) And as for finding someone with both? That's where the Internet can help fill-in the gaps; it's only a matter of time before Google spiders find your name-based doppelganger and make the results available to all.
So with a little spare time at work and a lot of curiousity, I started throwing, not only my name, but the names of several others into Google, and taking a look at what it gave me in return. Old friends, new friends, Facebook friends... everybody was fair game.
I'm still the only Emanuel Rabina on the Internet with Google giving me up to 2 pages of results on myself before going awry. Only a few others were just as unique, providing up to a page of accurate results before going on first-name/last-name tangents. As for the rest though, that's when the lols started.
Those with 2 first names gave the greatest variety of results, but a few honestly surprised me. For example, I found-out I have friends who share names with: a hand-crafted furniture maker, a canoeist, a doctor of medicine, a wrestler, a dentist, an illustrator, an actress, a singer/songwriter, a professional trainer, a scientologist, and a porn star.
And on the back of the last post, I have extended the RSS capabilities to the artwork page as well. Not only that, but I've incorporated Media RSS into so that it can be used with flashy apps like the Firefox plugin CoolIris.
With CoolIris, you can now browse my gallery in sweet 3D:
After the last site entry, I was trying to see if there was a way to integrate these posts into my Facebook profile so that friends and passers-by could read about my rants and thoughts straight from Facebook.
A quick look through available Facebook apps gave me the usual Wordpress and LiveJournal ones, but those require accounts and blogs at their respective sites.
Further down the page of results was a standalone feed reader/aggregator that I could add to my profile, but it required some sort of feed from my site, whether it be RSS or Atom.
So, looks like it was about time I added a feed to my site.
With the current design of the MooCow engine, it was really easy to program a new RSS component into it.
Everything is already in XML which really helped, and there are tonnes of examples of RSS in use throughout the Internet.
One example I kept coming back to was the one run by my friends' own site (although I suspect that the SilverStripe CMS is behind much of the magic of that site to begin with).
I know I'm not the fastest programmer in the world, but the code changes required to add RSS only took 2 days of my spare time!
That's really fast by my standards.
This was only for getting the Home/blog section up and running with RSS.
I'm really not yet sure if I want to RSS-ify the other sections of my site (and even if I do, it'll only be for the Artwork and Writing sections), but if I head down that path that should only take me an additional day.
Now, time to get this post showing-up on my Facebook profile...
I followed an interesting tangent of related topics in the gaps between work today. It started last night as I was at home trawling through some Devil May Cry 3 and 4 skill/combo videos. These videos are always played to some kind of metal; one of them was covered by 2 Rhapsody of Fire songs, and several others I couldn't name. It was then I discovered another power metal band, Kamelot.
Kamelot's When the Lights Are Down was the song being used, so I found which album it was on, did a bit of reading about the album, and it turns-out the album is a sequel to an earlier concept album, loosely based on the story of Goethe's Faust. It was this part caught my attention because my brother (film/theatre student) has been involved in several productions of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Intrigued by the naming coincedence, I continued my reading and learned that both Goethe and Marlowe wrote their stories based on a German legend about a man (Faust) who makes a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge.
I knew how the Marlowe version went from my brother, so I focused on learning about Goethe's version and about Goethe himself, and somewhere along the way I realized, "Holy crap, I've stumbled upon a literary heavyweight!"
Last week one of my workmates sent me a message, telling me to visit my own site.
Strange request, but I did, and when I did, it wasn't what I expected.
Instead of the usual splash page, I got this.
Barring the intentionally smudged-out parts (none of those things were accessible from the Internet, so I guess they won't be too happy with me sharing it), what you see is the big fat company site blocker in action, telling me I can't visit my own site.
Luckily for me I can get around this particular case, but damn if this isn't annoying!
And what's worse, the small print listed my site as Adult Content.
Sure I might use a swear word here or there, but when one sees Adult Content, they think pr0n!
Which my site doesn't have!
So when I get the time, I'm gonna see if I can't get my site unblocked.
Failing that, maybe I should aim for a re-classification, like Drugs and Alcohol, or Cults (yes, they have a cults classification).
A few posts ago I said I was gonna try create a new theme for the site to test how flexible the new HTML code was.
After almost a month, the new theme is finally done!
Note, that the theme is still experimental, and currently only works for a small subset of people: those with the latest browsers and a screen resolution with roughly 800 pixels vertically within the browser's viewing area.
Cookies are also required to have the theme 'stick' after the initial switch.
So if despite that disclaimer you wish to forge ahead, clicky clicky: Click!
To switch back to the original theme, you can click here, or clear out the cookies from this site.
I have the theme-switching mechanism available on the About page (until I find a place where I think it's better suited), where I'll be listing all (2) available themes and a small blurb about them.
If you've clicked the theme-switching link and don't know what's going on, what happened is that I've changed the stylesheet file that your browser requests when it views the site, but the rest of the HTML code stays exactly the same.
This is similar to the sort of thing you'll find at the CSS Zen Garden.
I've cheated a little here, in that each theme can also have an accompanying custom script.
This is so that I can sneak in some Ajax stuff into the site, which if you didn't know is one of the technologies responsible for making many of your favourite Web 2.0 sites feel more responsive and dynamic.
I want to add some Ajax to the display pages so that an entirely new layout doesn't have to be loaded when you click to view one of my pictures or writings, thus creating a more seamless transition.
While I was re-tagging my news posts, I noticed that I've never actually posted anything about the goings-on with the Writing section. The main reason for that being that it's mostly stories I've written to friends which require some level of inside knowledge, and thus it wouldn't go down too well with others. Although recently (a couple of months ago) I did write something which I think anyone can appreciate.
After being told something strange about a McDonalds burger, I decided to run a semi-scientific investigation and review of the burger. My findings and final write-up (complete with pictures) can be found in the link below:
[EDIT]: Arg, just found out something else while checking that the recent CSS-crusade didn't break anything: many of the Writing pages look messed-up in Internet Explorer 6. Seems I still have some work to do. Or, you IE6 folk could upgrade to IE7, or go get another browser :P
In the past week I've finally decided to go all CSS Zen Garden on my site and remove the last vestiges of layout information from the XHTML code, thus shifting it all presentation information to the stylesheet (the CSS file). For the most part, the site should look and act exactly the same as it did before. Minor non-CSS/XHTML changes include the movement of the About page to it's own section and the update of that page's content, and the re-tagging of news posts.
If you don't know what the CSS Zen Garden is, check out that link above. My take on it is that it's a site aimed to promote CSS-based page design and the separation of presentation info from the page code. This puts all of the design information of a page exclusively into CSS files, and with that you can let web designers go wild. Take a look at some of the 200+ user-submitted designs for the CSS Zen Garden. If you look closely (or just read what the page says), you'll see that the HTML code stays exactly the same from design to design; all that changes is the stylesheet file (and images) applied to the page. Pretty cool eh? What, no? Damn, I thought it was.
I'm not gonna go and start creating multiple stylesheets for my site, but I am aiming to make at least one, just to make sure that I did the whole thing properly. And if I like what I created, I'll make that stylesheet available as an option... somewhere.
Just when I thought I was getting too old for presents, I bought a new scanner and suddenly it feels like Christmas has come early! :D OK, so technically it's not a present as I bought and chose it myself, for myself, but the result is the same: I have a new scanner!
If you must know the exact model, it's a Canon CanoScan LiDE 600F. It's a huge step up from the old one, which was also a Canon, but was a relic from the pre-Internet era: a parallel port scanner. Actually, I'd probably still be using that old scanner if it wasn't for the fact that I no longer have access to a computer with a parallel port, and that it doesn't play well with a USB-to-parallel adapter.
So what made me buy it? Well, I've been drawing again in an effort to re-train myself for a big drawing project I'm aiming to do, and I had just finished a sketch that I was relatively proud of. My first thoughts were along the lines of "Ooo, gotta scan and store this one", which after some more thinking soon became "Crap, I can't use the scanner anymore".
Always amazing what necessity makes us do :)
So I went on a bit of a scanning spree and scanned several drawings new and old.
Alrighty, so my current issues with this project are all related to how I'm getting the engine to tell it to play a C&C-type game, without C&C-type code/stuff being a part of that engine (I'd really like to re-use that engine for other things in future).
So what I'm going to do is put the Red Horizon game part on a temporary hold while I focus on making something much much simpler (like Space Invaders or something arcade-y).
During this time I hope to improve the engine in such a way that I can re-use it, and then just shove those improvements back into Red Horizon.
The utilities part of the project has just been updated to version 0.28, and details can be found in this post.
To the mystery person who contacted me via ICQ wanting to ask questions about the utilities program: I sent an offline IM to you, but Trillian has been acting funny and even once told me that my ICQ contact list was gone (even though it still looks intact?!?!).
If you still want to ask something, you can register at the forums where I made the above post, or e-mail me:
LightninUltraq [AT] Netscape [DOT] net
So I was walking home with one of my neighbours last night, and quickly learned that work has turned me into one helluva boring person. Maybe my line of work (IT / computer programming) has something to do with that; I don't imagine my spiel about web services and the politics behind each company's interpretation of the spec would be classified as scintillating dinner conversation. And maybe all of my other high school / university / pre-full-time-work friends are getting that too.
With all the differences between our jobs, talking work lingo to one another would be like talking different languages. I can still talk computers and stuff to some of my pre-full-time-work friends, but we've all scattered to the four winds and found ourselves in different companies, different states of mind, different dimensions, or Germany.
So, outside of work, I look for the common ground in conversations. That neighbour I mentioned? I talked to him about the new pants I bought that day. That's right; pants.
Although there was that one time at a birthday party, where I didn't know anybody besides the birthday girl, I was talking with somebody else who works as a programmer. Once we both learned that fact about the other, it was pretty easy for us to let the geek subjects flow. But then we discovered we were on opposite sides in the ongoing civil war that is Java vs .NET, and we were practically at each other's throats after that.
So maybe it is just my line of work. Maybe why us programmers have so few people to talk with is because fanboy-ism causes us to murder one another.
Just a minor website update to the Red Horizon section where I've just removed a whole bunch of stuff and added links to any forum threads I've made in relation to the project.
Those threads will be better indicators for how things are going.
So it was a bit of a slow day at work: I had read and responded to all the e-mails specifically addressed to me, and I had finished all my assigned tasks. Then I looked at the clock and saw it was 9:30am :(
So what does a bored office-worker trying to kill time do? Hit the Internet.
No, I wasn't looking for anything like Hold The Button, but in my search for nothing in particular, I found my way back at the blog of John C. Wright. I've mentioned him before - something to do with one of his books about some guy named Phaethon and a wallpaper I made, and I liked his critique of Jumper - and after reading some of his posts, you start to get a distinct impression about him which I will just describe as 'weird' because adjectives fail me and I can't seem to get to thesaurus.com right now. I started to wonder if his style of blogging (which happens to be similar to what I've read on other writers' blogs/sites) is something indicative of a writer, some sort of writer's disease, or is some prerequisite to becoming a writer. Lo and behold, Mr Wright himself provided the link to answer my questions:
I was walking home with my dad one day, and he told me about how he tried the new McDonalds Seared Chicken Burger for lunch. Although with his 99%-complete English, the word 'seared' came out as 'shared'.
So it went like that for about 2 minutes before I finally resolved the dispute with my mind-reading powers.
Anyway, one of his claims was that the burger had a strong odour, not a bad one, but one similar to perfume. He said that the smell was strong enough that it actually distracted him as he ate it. That's a pretty strong claim. I mean, McDonalds smells like McDonalds, right? So at work the next week, I freed-up my lunch time, dialed my nose up to 11, and went over to McDonalds to see/smell for myself.
McDonald's Seared Chicken Burger
Fast food burger, $8.70 NZD ($6.50 NZD for the burger only), available from participating McDonalds restaurants http://www.mcdonalds.co.nz/
Service and ambiance
McDonalds doesn't really change over the years - it's a constant of city living; a rock against the tides of metropolitan change. So if you've been to McDonalds within the last decade, then you'll know what McDonalds looks like now. And it'll look like that in other countries too; even though it's all managed locally, regional management does a good job of following most of the same steps and guidelines as their foreign overlords. The only thing that really differs between here and the US is that the ads make subtle jokes about Australians, and the posters spell colour with a 'u'.
On this particular day, the staff were pulling out all the tricks to ensure that those waiting in line didn't have to wait too long, eg: someone was taking orders in advance, most of the tills were manned, and several other subtle things.
This initiative during the peak lunch hours would normally be applauded, but with all of the staff concentrating on this duty, they neglected to maintain the cleanliness of the eating area. Bins were piling-up with so much rubbish that patrons would just leave their trays around them, and my photographer had to exchange her seat for one that didn't have the previous occupant's drink spilled all over it. Even after doing so she had to put-up with what remained in the form of a sticky floor beneath her feet.
Anything else worth mentioning were factors purely beyond their control: crying babies, other patrons giving me evil looks because my kind took their jobs and brought disease, and a passing delivery truck whose sound system is trying to convert those nearby to the world of hip-hop and crunk music by repeatedly preaching the words "get out the way ho".
The product
The seared chicken burger is just 1 of 4 new chicken burgers from McDonalds; the other 3 being a version with bacon (add $1), and then crispy chicken variants of these 2. I opted for the non-bacon seared chicken burger under the advice that the bacon smell might mask or destroy the original fabled perfume smell of the burger.
The box it comes in, a tad larger than the quarter pounder box, looks quite inviting, and falls in-line with McDonalds' latest effort to improve their image as a fresh/quality ingredient user. Opening the box however reveals a hastily assembled burger with as many ingredients outside the buns as there are between them.
So what is supposed to be between its 2 wheat-germ-topped buns are a marinated seared chicken breast fillet, a slice of cheese, lettuce both green and purple, tomatoes, carrots, and a sauce that I'm just going to call mayonnaise to keep things simple. In comparison to the beef burgers, it's a much healthier choice in terms of standard and saturated fats. You can read the official nutritional data here, although any health benefits are somewhat displaced by the fact that the combo still comes standard with deep-fried salted potato and sweet brown carbonated water.
Well, I didn't come here just to stare at the burger, so I started to test the myths about its smell. A basic wafting test didn't reveal anything major, nor did putting my nose within nanometres of the burger. There was maybe the faint smell of the marinade used, and my photographer detected possible mayonnaise, but neither or us were hit with the life-altering olfactory epiphany that my dad had experienced whilst eating the burger. Maybe that was the problem; maybe I had to eat the burger. So eat I did.
In line with the smells that were detected, the marinade is definitely the most noticeable ingredient when you take a bite into the it, followed closely by the chicken and the mayonnaise. This combination formed some sort of strange yet pleasant taste that wanted to invade my sense of smell. Perhaps this was what my dad was talking about? It did strike me as odd that a large portion of taste from the burger was being picked-up by my nose trying to break through the roof of my mouth.
And then it occured to me: maybe I was doing the smell test all wrong. Maybe something that supposedly smells like perfume requires a perfume test? (See what I did there? Logic.)
The perfume test
So what does a perfume test entail? Being a total perfume-testing n00b, all I have to go on is what I've been taught in movies, television, and whatever top-10 results Google will send my way. And from what I have gathered, it involves skin contact, noses, and some well-placed rubbing... oh yeah, and perfume (a list that's only a midget and video camera away from an R-rating).
I believe the following order is also how it's done:
expose your upturned wrist
apply a sample to the wrist area
sniff the application
ponder thoughtfully
And so that's what I did, although exchange 'apply a sample' with 'rub arduously'.
The result? Nothing. No Chanel No. 5, no Calvin Klein, but just the vinegar of the marinade and whatever composed that mayonnaise to create something you'd more likely find in a fridge-freezer than the perfume stands at Farmers. I wasn't even able to test that last metaphor because the smell was so faint that I didn't think it would survive a trip to said Farmers store.
I'd been had.
The Verdict
Overall, good enough for the working-class crowd, and a nice addition to the McDonalds menu. A tad expensive considering what you get, but the extra cents go towards putting you on the slower path to a coronary. Don't believe the hype, don't expect perfumed food, and you might be pleasantly surprised.
I've expanded the XML format of the units/structures just recently to try make allowances for several types of animation combos, like the one found in the original Red Alert war factory.
Modders would have noticed that the war factory consists of 2 animations: the base, and the opening/closing door to let the unit roll out.
Previously, I only allowed 1 animation, and that made it so that the war factory only had the base showing.
Now, I've got both the base and door showing as expected.
By allowing the definition of multiple animations for any unit/structure, Red Horizon can now cope with the simple case of the war factory, and some more radical cases like multiple-turret units/structures
Yes, I've opened it up so that you can have multiple turrets placed on a single unit/structure.
With every new option like this, it does make the coding take a little longer, but this is one of the goals of the project: to open-up the modding possibilities of the old C&Cs.
Admittedly, I kinda like what I'm getting myself into.
As a belated Christmas present, my brother got me Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Game Of The Year Edition, which includes both the original game (The Longest Journey) and the more recent sequel Dreamfall, as well as the soundtrack to Dreamfall.
I'm now onto Dreamfall, and the more modern game is a welcome sequel and step-up from it's predecessor.
However, I can't seem to get passed how stiff the character models are during some of the talking scenes.
I mean, for an Xbox 360 and PC game released in 2006, I was kinda hoping for more natural movements.
Didn't all those developers get that right after the Half-Life 2 / Doom 3 era?
Oh well, just a small blemish in an otherwise enjoyable adventure thus far.
