[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 9 most recent journal entries recorded in
jemjabella.co.uk's InsaneJournal:
| Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | |
| 9:05 pm | Desktop TD Game I’m hooked on the tower defence flash game this evening. Completed easy; can’t get past level 16 on medium (high score: 461) |
| Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | |
| 6:30 pm | What up, my homies! (Or Something…) Hi-dee-ho! No thanks to the 150 or so spam messages in my inbox, here I am, online at last. Apparently I pissed someone off enough for them to want to sign my e-mail address up to 100+ newsletters. I’m guessing they didn’t count on the fact that in 3 clicks, I could run a filter on my inbox to delete them all. It’s then easy to set SpamAssassin to reject any future mails with “newsletter” in the body (yes, I care that little about false positives.) In fact, it probably took longer for them to sign up than it did for me to get rid of the mails. Aw, please try harder next time, n00bs. Incidentally, this does make me wonder how mailing lists are regulated across the world. At work, we’re required to double opt-in users, with a single opt-out. This means that fake sign-ups are weeded out, which reduces bandwidth on our side, and limits the annoyance for the user (if its possible to have limited annoyance with bloody mailing lists). I’m guessing that’s not the same everywhere, as only a small fraction of those in my inbox were “Please confirm…” mails. Anyway, moving swiftly on, my short break (including time off work, woot) is now over and thus all will return to normal tomorrow. Unfortunately. Aside from visiting family, I have spent the past few days chilling out. I’ve actually played with my Wii for the first time in months, although have got stuck at a spot in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I’ve done the Forest Temple, got all the tears of light (or whatever they are) in Kakariko Village, tamed Epona, and learnt how to sumo. On heading back to Kakariko, one of the kids was stolen. I’m now on my horse chasing the baddie, with several other baddies on wild boars around me. I’ve tried chasing and ignoring the boar-riders; getting off my horse and killing the baddies that are riding the boars; running around in circles like a complete idiot… yes, I’m none the wiser. (Hints, please!) In completely unrelated news, the recent bad weather (almost constant rain) has done wonders for my runner beans and yet the said same rain is killing my cabbages. Drainage is identical, I’m wondering if it’s more likely related to the depth of the soil and the size of the plants (one would assume that bigger plants ‘drink’ more water?) It’s not going to matter sooner or later anyway, because the bloody slugs are upping their game somewhat. I’m going to have to re-start my midnight campaigns with a torch and bucket of salt. Still, I have a weird and wonderful collection of veg growing now. Turnips and radish in an old baby bath, some sort of chinese cabbage (if I recall correctly), cauliflower, my peppers and tomatoes, runner beans, courgette still going strong, lettuce, bunching onions and beetroot. Not bad for my first year of growing. (If any of you are thinking of starting a veg plot, I do have some book recommendations. Grow Your Own Vegetables by Joy Larkcom should be your very first purchase, with Grow Your Own Veg by Carol Klein a close second.) I think the best part so far is the look on people’s faces when I tell them that I’ve recycled a plastic baby bath as a make-do planter. It was one of the many items of crap left in our garage when the previous tenant moved out. Unfortunately, going back to my mention of drainage earlier, it only has the one hole. I’m thinking of investing in some fold up planters (they have proper holes) for next year though, even if they are too conventional. I bought a new pair of boots this month, to protect my little toesies from the rain when I’m walking to work. Regressing to my childhood somewhat, I decided a pair of Dr Martens would be most appropriate (I lived in a pair of worn out classic black Docs as a kid). I wanted their proper padded-ankle walking style boots but those were unavailable, so I decided on these boots in “TAUPE + PERGAMERIA IRIDE”. They’re probably the most feminine thing I own. Unfortunately, the backs of the heels are a bit stiff — as demonstrated by the large blisters on each foot — but it shouldn’t take too long to break them in. So I think that’s about it for me? You’d have to hope so, with the amount I’ve waffled about… |
| Friday, August 15th, 2008 | |
| 5:30 pm | Away with Family I’ll be preoccupied with visiting family for the next 3-4 days, so don’t expect any new entries until approximately the middle of next week. Don’t miss me too much you guys |
| Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 | |
| 7:09 pm | Age Is a Bullshit Excuse I’m sure I’ve covered this before, but screw it… I’m going to cover it again. Using your age as an excuse for being incapable of something is bullshit. Unless you’re coding at the age of 3, I don’t want to hear it. I cannot repeat enough: children today have access to the Internet at a far earlier age than we did 5-10 years ago. If 9 year olds — and yes, I’ve seen it with my own two eyes — can code semantically correct syntax after having used the Internet for little more than 6 months, then there is no reason why someone who’s been doing it for a few years can’t have developed a similar grasp. IF YOU HAVEN’T GRASPED THE BASICS, YOU SHOULDN’T BE WRITING TUTORIALS. I’m hoping the caps will emphasise the seriousness of that point. I don’t care how shit your personal website is… they are after all there for experimentation and fun. Cover it in Britney Spears and your appalling grammar for all I care. However, the second you enter the realm of labelling yourself a web designer/developer and start charging people for your “services”, you are entering my world. There isn’t a morally superior, “I’m on my high horse” visitor to my site — loyally regular or otherwise — that is going to tell me I am not entitled to criticise people who think they’re capable of playing with the big boys. If we cannot accept that there are things we do not know, then we will never advance or improve (personally, or professionally). Shit, I wish I had more people to bounce my code off and to tell me where I’m going wrong, because I get stuck in a rut and find it incredibly frustrating. Anyway, that rant wasn’t the purpose of this entry. Indeed, it seems to have overwhelmed it somewhat (I do get carried away sometimes). In fact, I wanted to highlight exactly why being 13 is a poor excuse by showing you some great websites by people who are exactly that… 13 (or thereabouts). “last full show”
This is Ellie’s site. She’s not updated in over a year, but she was 13 when she created the site. The layout is simple, attractive, and she’s successfully implemented it as a WordPress theme. Her blog entries are well written (grammatically) and I didn’t see the word “MySpace” anywhere, which made my evening. Auberginer.org
Lisa’s site is not particularly superbly coded, but it’s cute, it works in Firefox and a quick glance seems to show that everything is spelt correctly and appropriately punctuated. “Could’ve” instead of “could of” made me a happy bunny. (You have no idea how quickly “could of” and “should of” annoys me.) Lisa is also 13, according to her “Facts” page. “bat ears”
Justine was 12 years old when she created this site (another that has not been updated since last year, unfortunately). Her website is cute, and although the coding is not up to my standards by any stretch of the imagination, her spelling and grammar are again perfectly adequate. Her text is a good size and her artwork surpasses my shitty attempts at pixeling. sodevious.net
Nicole is 14. I don’t think I need to tell you what’s done well on her site, it’s pretty obvious if you ask me. Nicole was featured in the New York Times in February this year. – So yes, you can sit there and tell me that 12/13/14 year old girls should be given a free ride, but when you’ve got children and teens demonstrating skills that I didn’t pick up until I was 17 or 18 (yes, I had people tell me I was shit too) I’m not going to care enough to listen. Spend less time bitching about how unfair and unjust life is because someone doesn’t like your site, and you might actually get somewhere… no? |
| Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 | |
| 10:03 pm | Retro Gaming - Transport Tycoon Karl mentioned to me that Transport Tycoon Deluxe was available to download on Abandonia, so I hooked myself up with the download and expanded it with the free, open source OpenTTD (a fantastic project). Transport Tycoon is one of those games that I’ve heard a lot about but never actually played before. However, given my love for RollerCoaster Tycoon (particularly RCT2), by the same guy, I figured that it’d be an instant hit and I would start raking in the dosh, building the biggest and best railways etc. (It’s not as boring as it sounds, honestly.) Unfortunately my logic doesn’t quite ring true. I am absolutely shite at Transport Tycoon. In fact, not since Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter — the ultimate keypad mashing games — have I failed on such an epic level. I have had to customise the difficulty level so that there’s no competitors and that everything works in my favour to even begin to make a profit each year. Still, I keep trying. It’s oddly addictive… either that or I’m turning into a boring old fart. |
| Monday, August 11th, 2008 | |
| 10:04 pm | Only I’m Allowed To Direct-Link, Foo’ When you’re ordering people to follow these badly written rules:
(emphasis my own) …the least you can bloody do is not direct-link my stuff. Hell, I distribute this shit under the GPL so you guys can do what you like with it and yet there’s still always one that has to take advantage. PS. Your tutorials suck. |
| Sunday, August 10th, 2008 | |
| 2:56 pm | Na-na-na naaaa! Super Cat! …or maybe later.
|
| Friday, August 8th, 2008 | |
| 10:20 pm | Google Analytics Plugin If any of you out there are running the ‘Google Analytics for WordPress’ plugin, and have upgraded to WordPress 2.6, make sure you also upgrade the plugin. Although it doesn’t ask to be upgraded and the upgrade version is the same as the previous, it is changed. For the updated plugin to work, make sure you have I only know of this because I’ve just discovered my GA hasn’t been logging for days. |
| Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | |
| 9:03 pm | |
#6 for my plugin pet peeve list: plugin authors who don’t update the download in the plugin repository.