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Need to upgrade


Friday, March 4

As you can see, there is now an unsightly banner ad at the top of the page. Angelfire's free plan used to allow you to choose whether you wanted your ad to be a banner or a pop-up, but since the majority of people have a pop-up blocker now, it was only a matter of time before they switched it so all the free sites have both banners and pop-ups. There are some temporary fixes that I could implement, like make it so when the page opens, it automatically scrolls down some, but I really just need to upgrade. On an up-side..sort of, the ad code is half-way XHTML compliant. They still need to specify all those required attributes to certain tags, like alt for images and stuff. They have the br tags self closing, but for some reason, the img tags aren't. I just had to check.

Disney


Wednesday, February 23

I just got back (on Monday) from playing in Disney World in my high school's jazz band. I'd never been to Disney World before, and I don't really like amusement parks all that much, but it was pretty cool. I got some really good food in Epcot; we got free meal passes because we were playing there, so I got really expensive food for free. Most of the time was spent just wandering around talking, or going on an excursion to find a place with coffee for Drew. We got to go back behind the park where all the warehouses and broken down ride parts were, it was really cool. We played in this hamburger place, but the cool thing was, we went in through a door in the tunnels, and made a rather dramatic entrance to the resturant because the whole stage rises up to the resurant level. We started playing before we got all the way up, and kept on playing when it was going back down. Hotness. We were instructed not to take any pictures of the non-magical part of Disney World, and I think even if one tried, the snipers would have taken him down.

I've never been fond of the radio, especially all the Clear Channel zombie stations, which I avoid at all costs, but I think I found radio that I like that isn't the classical station! I found it through surfing Winamp's radio stations. Soma Fm is a set of listener supported internet radio stations with indie rock, techno, jazz, and everything in between.

Movies, Games, and Amazement


Monday, February 14


2 days ago, I rented Garden State and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, both of which I liked. Garden State is pretty much an indie movie with a budget and an awesome soundtrack. It's about this guy, Andrew, who has been on some form of mind-numbing medication since he was 9. When he goes back to his home town for the funeral of his mother, he forgets his medication, and goes through a journey of finding himself and whatnot, doing ecstacy, stuff like that. Very visually appealing with lots of wide angle lenses and stuff. The humour in the film is funny in an everyday sort of way. For example, as he is walking by sinks in a bathroom, each one turns on as he passes by.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the widely anticipated follow up to the 1995 hit anime, GitS, is made up of a fairly straightforward storyline, absolutly breathtaking visuals, and lots of rather akward philosophical quotes and discussions between the 2 main characters, Batou and Togusa. I liked it, but the pacing was a bit slow, and all the talk was interesting, but didn't really have a driving force such as Major Kusanagi's internal conflicts in the first film. My biggest gripe, without a doubt, is the strange choice of subtitling, an odd mix between conventional subtitling and closed captioning, which is quite irritating. Also, there is no dub, which I personally don't care about, but it does somewhat limit the audience.

I just beat the most recent installment of the Myst series, Myst IV: Revalation. This is, next to Riven, my favorite one so far. The graphics are awesome, though, since they're limited to 1024x768, if you have a monster monitor, it will look a bit fuzzy. It uses the same engine as Myst 3, allowing you to pan 360* views of your environment. I actually think the engine is improved, there is much less distortion at the edges of the screen when your panning. Several rather cool additions have been made, including a camera, a note taking system, a rather unhelpful help system, and the immersive depth focusing effect, which makes it so the image focuses on where your mouse is, and things that are further away or closer up, depending on what your focusing on, are blurry. A kind of neat effect, though it makes the sky look weird when your focusing on something close up. I turned it off after a while, to improve performance. Overall, the story is very engaging, the puzzles are very well constructed (though just as frusterating as ever), and it will please any Myst fan. If you've never been a fan of these games, this one is no different, however.

On a side note, Angelfire.com is finally valid! Doctype and all, they are now valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, which is simply amazing, considering I sent an e-mail to them not 3 weeks ago complaining about the fact that their page contained no doctype, and something like 200 errors, which is very bad if your a webhost. I hope the ads are next, because they are still holding me back from that strict (or even transitional) XHTML status. I suppose I could just gather up the money and get a better plan with no ads, but for right now, I'll just deal with it.

New Site Up!


Monday, January 31

Hello world! I finally got my new, completely XHTML compliant site design up! I remembered one day that I had this old account on angelfire, so I checked it out, and I was horrified by how bad the site design was, so I replaced it with this one. I left the other lorem ipsum down there so you could see the cool background image. On a side note, I do not recommend angelfire for your host unless your just starting and need to experiment, because...well, look at the source, right after the body tag. None of this shows up if you have a popup blocker and have your activeX controls set properly, but it's annoying nonetheless.

I've been looking at other free webspace providers, and this one caught my eye. If you post 50 times on their forum, and then 45 times per month afterwards, you get 35 MB of webspace, 500 MB of monthly bandwidth, and no ads. I don't know if I can keep up with the 45 posts per month, but if you're a forum junkie, then this is for you.

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