Not Homeless
09/11/03 at 20:38 EST

Managed to make it to my apartment on time, so I'm not sleeping in my car tonight. Just a sans-furniture penthouse apartment floor. But I can't complain, since I made it here without anything terrible happening, and someone in this building is courteous enough to leave his or her wireless network unsecured.
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Tagged under: Life
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A bit preoccupied
09/11/03 at 13:36 EST

I'm in an interview giving a demo right now. It's a good excuse to make use of the 'work' tab.
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Tagged under: Life, Work
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Refactory Warranty
09/10/31 at 16:54 EST

Just finished doing some code refactoring to make things a little more readable and coherent. I still have some redundant functions, but they're kind of nice to have around. One of them, anyhow. I should be removing the other some time soon. So what does this code refactoring mean for you, the reader? Nothing, you selfish brat!

Actually, that's not true. I made a small update to the navbar/update file so you no longer have to click "Back" followed by "Refresh/Reload" yourself when changing your preferences; I am no longer too lazy to do that for you and I now do that for you. Lucky you!

Well, I just got my hands on my brother's Dilbert DVDs. This is wonderful.
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Tagged under: Site
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Captured Memory
09/10/30 at 16:55 EST

Earlier today I was struck with a recollection; a reminder of things still to be done. Though it has not yet become a problem, I've been meaning to add a CAPTCHA system to the comments page to discourage bots from flooding my comment approval queue. The system in place is presently very basic and makes no effort to fool OCRs. I don't know if I'll add defense against OCRs in the future or not, and the reason is twofold: one, I can't reliably test it right now, and two, it's going to be moot anyway: I'll eventually be adding support to prevent humans from spamming up the Comments box (not that it's necessary, I re-iterate) and at that point anyone who makes a spam-bot compatible with this site can let it spam as much as a human, because that will be limited as well.

For everyone who hates captchas, don't worry, I'm planning on keeping track of known human users in the future, so after you enter your first captcha, you won't see any. Again, this is in the future. You're stuck with it for now

EDIT: seems I've made a mistake in one of my parsers. Whoops, fixed.
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Tagged under: Site
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Uneventful Days
09/10/28 at 10:50 EST

I've been meaning to write something as soon as something interesting has happened, but if I really wait that long I imagine some people would just assume my death is what resulted in this site's inactivity.

The bill for my car was a tad staggering given the mistake I had made; it was certainly money I would have rather spent elsewhere, but the fortunate thing was that the fellow I had purchased the car from was able to get the car up and running the next day, so I was able to make a second attempt to voyage to Mississauga before my parents left town for good.

Improvisation has always been an asset to me - which is good, because geography has not. Luckily I was able to travel most of the way here without making a directional mistake, and when I did, I was able to scramble about and wind up in a plaza in Mississauga barely a few blocks away from my brothers house. When I asked him to meet me there (something that wouldn't be necessary if I only had a map) he arrived on foot, which was a rather welcome sight.

So here I am, in an apartment building in Mississauga, sleeping on the charity that is my brother's futon - but he doesn't seem bothered at all; bad timing or not there's a cynical pleasure in knowing that he is currently the only member of my immediate family that has a job or a permanent address.

When I first arrived, the part of town where my brother lives was hit particularly hard with an infestation of Asian Ladybird Beetles ("ladybugs" to the common folk) and due to sloppy engineering, they're able to get inside the apartment through gaps and channels in the patio doors. I would have taken some impressive photos of the sheer volume of Asian Ladybird Beetles that I'm talking about, but my camera was packed away on Day 1 and there hasn't been a warm day since. Their numbers are notably fewer as the temperature drops, just like their numbers are notably fewer when they manage to enter the apartment to face an untimely demise. The exact numbers are unknown, but our kill count currently exceeds 300, by a considerable margin.

I'd like to resume development on this website, but apart from getting IE to co-operate with CSS, I'm a bit at a loss of where to go next. As a result, I've been playing around with C# again, and I'm kind of enjoying it. Took a look at a program I started writing (more as a proof of concept than anything else) and began refactoring the offensively sloppy code. If I can get it to work the way I see it working, I'll be having lots of fun with it - and maybe you will, too.
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Tagged under: Life
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Stepping Out
09/10/19 at 00:09 EST

I've mentioned before that things have not had a tendency to go according to plan lately. Today would be another one of those days; I've managed to meet with unfortunate circumstances that have resulted in both a $200 towing bill and an inability to arrive at my intended destination. It seems I've done something erroneous to my car's fuel tank, and the bill to repair it (as if the tow wasn't expensive enough) should be arriving soon. I just love rising in sync with the sun.

Oh, and don't mind the "Site" tag - I guess I'll just mention now that I fixed a minor formatting issue and improved the search engine slightly - because we all know how "in" re-inventing the wheel is.
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Tagged under: Site, Auto
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Tying Loose Ends (Complete: 100%)
09/10/17 at 01:18 EST

I found myself the time needed to create the Media Review page tonight, and decided to induct it with a review of KHDS. Really, I think the review might have taken me longer to write - I'll try to be more concise in the future. That Gameplay section, really, is a bit too long.

I've also done my first bit of investigation into browser cross-compatibility, by starting with an easy task: disabling IE. It is not my intention to prevent IE users from viewing this website out of intolerance; nay, Internet Explorer and CSS just don't seem to get along with each other very well. I'll save further investigations for later.

Starting tomorrow, things should start becoming volatile, but by this time next week I expect to have some sort of brief stability in my living situation before equilibrium is delivered another jarring offset.

Also: though I may be damned, I finally scored 100% completion in KHDS. 51 in-game hours + a couple more well-spent? I think so.
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Tagged under: Site
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Still Going (Complete: 73%)
09/10/15 at 19:45 EST

Been doing a little bit of work lately, and a lot these past couple hours.

For the past few days I've been developing a little photo gallery for a friend of mine; while it's more or less complete I don't feel content linking to it yet, as the images for the gallery haven't been completely compiled/formatted/uploaded. That has had me occupied since Monday.

But more recently, I decided to attempt an RSS feed. It was a hell of a lot easier to figure out than I had expected; once I found the "hello world" of XML pages for RSS use, it was at best ten minutes before I had it all finished. It has since been added to the Navigation Bar.

Speaking of which, that ol' navbar's been growing and growing to the point where it just no longer fits on many screens, including my PSP - in fact, it hasn't fit on my PSP since I added a visual element to it. To compensate for that, the navbar can now be adjusted to either stay fixed (default behaviour) or to remain at the top of the page, so you can scroll past it, so that browsers/systems that are not vertical-pixel-gifted may still utilize it to its full extent. Once I did that, I came to the realization that a restructure of the layout was in order. Once that was done, I came to the conclusion that my code is starting to get ugly - I have tested it on Firefox and on my PSP, but have no idea how it functions on any other browser/embedded platform. I'll get an iPhone/touch user to take it for a spin to see if it works there, and maybe I'll just download another browser or two and test it out there while I'm living on my brother's futon.

I seem to be having some success with my time management lately vis a vis my recent bundle of portable RPGs. Yet I fear the worst; I may try to score 100% completion in KH:DS's Challenges after all.
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Tagged under: Site
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Boxing Days (Complete: 61%)
09/10/12 at 20:24 EST

Well, it has certainly been busy around here, lately. Unfortunately, there isn't much to talk about. I haven't done any development on the website lately, so maybe in the coming days when I'll be left to my own devices, I can add something new. I've gotten a couple feature requests - whether or not I develop them before I make my Reviews page will be up to my preference at the time I decide to do something constructive. At the very least, I shouldn't have to worry about doing much more packing any time soon, since we would no longer have anywhere to put it:



Also contributing to the rising probability that I'll get something done is the fact that KH:DS is more or less wearing down on me; with all standard missions at 100%, all that remains for me as far as completion goes is the Challenges, and some of them are so intolerably vicious that I may even give that goal a miss entirely.

On the other hand, I've been putting more time into Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days, and that's never a good sign when there's work to be done. Those games are a dangerous time-sink, and I haven't yet mastered Disgaea 2, either. Assuming it is in the midpoint between Disgaea 1 and Disgaea 3 in terms of post-game content, we're looking at roughly 80 to 100 hours of game-play to be had. I'm looking forward to it.
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Tagged under: Life, Gaming
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Frozen In Time (End of Days)
09/10/08 at 21:51 EST

The basic layout of the Photo Gallery has been completed. All that remains to be done is a more elegant photo viewer; a "viewphoto.php" or something of the sort. A bit of extra work, but nothing too severe. Thanks to PHP's delightful substr function design, it was very easy to get the page to do what I wanted it to do. Negative offsets are a beautiful thing.

I cleared Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days earlier tonight at roughly 32 game hours. It was a good length for a game, and perhaps the longest Kingdom Hearts game to date - my original clear time in KH2 was 40 hours, but a lot of that can be attributed to non-linear exploration/going the wrong way/leaving the game on pause. While I've been able to whittle my KH2 clear time down to 16 hours or so, KH:DS is very linear, very straightforward, and essentially improbable to get lost in, so most game time would be saved simply via skipping cut-scenes and not playing Challenges.

So upon completion, I decided to begin tackling the Missions portion of the game. There are at least 18 playable characters in Mission mode (I'm not sure if I have them all, but it looks that way), and while they all have their strengths and weaknesses, I've found my match in Lexaeus. If you're looking to get the job done quickly, use Lexaeus. Make sure you have the Brick Wall ability as well; not that he can't manage without it, but because it's so fitting for a Goliath like himself, and that it makes things easier. Bosses that took me several minutes with anyone else goes down in just a couple combos with this behemoth of a fighter. On enemies with low enough defense, he can damage enemies faster than the game can animate HP drain. I can "Defeat the Neoshadow!" before the "Defeat the Neoshadow" information window vanishes - no need for spell-casting here!

At any rate, I'll try to avoid discussing KH:DS at length any more than I already have; I plan to have a media review page joining the website some time and I'll address it then.
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Tagged under: Site, Gaming
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