I’m Addicted
I’m addicted to buying music online. My friend introduced me to All of MP3 and now I’ve already spent over $10 on the songs there. And $10 is a lot on that website. Unlike iTunes, All of MP3 (AoM) doesn’t over charge for songs or have ownership protection for any of them. Each MB of download is around $0.02. Literally. So think twice before you give out your two cents next time — it’s a song you can download on AoM.
Payment methods include credit cards and debit cards, Paypal, and XROST (just a gift card service powered by Paypal). Before I knew it, I already downloaded 8 full albums of songs with $10. I LOVE THE INTERNET.
Lifecycle of Bloggers
The sad truth about all bloggers.
This is somewhat true to a certain extent. I’m currently at stage #3. Soon enough, the prophecy will suffice.
UBC Virtual Welcome Session
Because I am lazy and didn’t go to the real welcome session, I’m now in the virtual welcome session. This interaction is better than I expected. I sort of expected two things — Macromedia Breeze or the old plain text messaging (like on IRC).
But the interactive interface is based on Elluminate. It uses a Java program with the capability of text messaging, voice messaging, and whiteboard applications (only available to the moderators, the ones who are presenting).
I didn’t get too much out of the presentation though — busy playing around with all the neat things there. The good thing is, for some time in history, Java did not crash my computer.
Longhorn Transformation Pack
Windows Longhorn, the next version of Windows, seems to be on a roll. Even graphics developers have pitched in to make themes from the Longhorn builds for Windows XP.
Windows X has made a series of themes for Windows XP so that your desktop looks like Longhorn. Download Now.
Visual
After you’ve installed the package, there will be in total 16 themes to choose from, which can be found under Display Properties (right click on desktop -> Properties) -> Appearance.
- Areo Concepts
- Areo Style
- Areo Style (Glass)
Firefox 1.1 Alpha 1 Released
Firefox 1.1 — Deer Park — looks really amazing. I suggest you upgrade your Firefox to this version. It’s got some new functions and a semi brand new look (including logos and interface).
But for some reason, the features of Firefox are becoming more like Opera. It just seems to me Firefox idolizes Opera as the browser God, and tries to imitate all the kool widgets Opera has. For example, the search bar (on the right of the address bar) was originally from Opera. The way you customize the buttons/look in Firefox is also similar to Opera. Now in Deer Park, beside the tabs, there is a button to add a new tab. Opera had this a long time ago, but now Firefox just added it.
And then comes Microsoft with IE7 with all this jazz..
WWW’s Are Deprecated
This isn’t a new idea — http://no-www.org/. In brief, www.somedomain.com would be considered a subdomain, rather than the root. It looks too long (4 more characters) and it looks ugly. Who the hell wants three W’s and a dot sitting in front of their domain name?
The cure
PHP
This will work well if it’s included in every page of your site — use a global header file that’s included on every page.
<?php
if ("mtsix.com" != $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) {
header('HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://mtsix.com'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
?>
.htaccess mod_rewrite
This is probably the more preferable method, although only Apache supports it. Create a file called .htaccess with the following code.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mtsix.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mtsix.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
These two
great tricks are taken from Mathias.
Music Batons Suck.
These blog pass-the-baton games are infecting the lives of every blogger and blog-reader. Soon, they will develop their self-awareness and take over our blogs. I wait.
Nonetheless, I’m honoured to receive the baton from Mathias. I love these things.
Total volume of music files on my computer
According to iTunes, my current playlist consists of 5.40 GB of songs and music videos.
The last CD I bought
Daft Punk — Human After All, recommanded by [Uber].
Song playing right now
Daft Punk — Teknologik
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me
* Sweatshop Union — Broken Record
* K-Os — Crabbuckit
* Trick Daddy — Sugar
* Gwen Stefani — Hollaback Girl
* In Essence — I.E.
Six people to whom I’m passing the baton
* Ivy
* Gnu-
* Angelina
* Satoshi
* Becca
* [Uber]
On a side note, if you are interested — the PHP Counter stats and Shortstat (have to copy & paste the url into a new window) of the site.
Adobe Sucks, the follow-up.
I won’t even bring out the usual speech about Acrobat Reader and its loading times. I’ll directly go to the point.
I downloaded Photoshop CS2 (trial) and it seemed pretty nice (the interface). Okay, so it hogs up 130mb of my virtual memory and loads more slowly than Photoshop 7, big deal — it seemed new and nice. I started to make a pretty graphics intense layout. After a week, KABOOOOOM:
Could not complete your request because the layer is not a valid text layer.
…
And nothing opens. Seriously, if you are going to make a product, make it work. Maybe that’s some internal error or mess-up within my layout. But for the version 9 of a well-known product, at least make sure this kind of things don’t happen all the time?
Luckily for me I sent a copy of the .psd to a friend mid-way through. Now I only have to work 5 more hours to get my old work back. And this time I’ll use Fireworks, instead of one crappy application that won’t run without sucking in a kilogram of gold per minute.
In addition, I also found that you can’t open Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS2 at the same time. Guess why? The memory hog would be so big that your computer would inhale itself and explode right in front of your face. I guess Adobe isn’t that dumb to realize this happening would be bad for its company reputation.
I Love Rain
It’s been raining since 3pm. 6 hours of non-stop dripping just puts me into a mood of anything that I want to do. For some reason, the sound of thunders and water tapping the window seems like a sign of joy. I never took rain for granted. When I go swimming, I pay for admission fee. When I buy a bottle of water or pop, I never give the rest of it to anyone unless they pay me.
I don’t mind getting wet in rain. It seems natural. Humans need water — I acquire it naturally. But I’m not selfish. I give at least a litre of it back everyday, to the toilet/urinal, or whoever needs it.
The rain drops smashing the windshield of my car sounds like fun. If I were a drop of water, I’d choose to be falling out of the sky and hitting cars all day. Just like I do with rocks now.
Dark clouds always hang around rain. Whenever there is going to be liquid coming out of the sky, moist and dark foamy things have to form first, right above your head. And as soon you see that sign, you try to find a hideout where, hopefully, the rain will not be poured onto you. But somebody has to be hit by the rain. Those homeless people, bums, and stupid people have to receive the water like they need it, even though they don’t. Water is free everywhere you go in Canada. Unless it’s that bottled “original” water that cost $5/bottle in vending machines, the Canadian government doesn’t give a piece of crap if you take away the water in the Great Lakes or within the borders of Canada. I mean who needs large bodies water if you have no navy or ship?
I go swimming at least once a week. I enjoy it because it’s great exercise. It increases your lung capacity so maybe when you are stuck between two farting pigs you might survive.
Never Seen This Before
Look at the scores! It’s pretty amazing — after 4 rounds, it’s like some invisible guy shot the moon. I guess I suck at that game as much as they do.
Our school won the Provincial Pascal Math Contest!
Thanks to me and two other dudes, we got the highest score in British Columbia. Wooticles! No cash award or anything though.