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The End of a Vacation

Dan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:09:18 +0000

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, which is the case with my vacation. School begins tomorrow, but at least now I’ll be sure to post daily, as I have nothing else to do in “web design” class. Web design is in quotes, because the class doesn’t really teach that. It’s all one big Adobe tutorial.
Another thing I have to look forward to is Regents week, which is pretty much another vacation. I suppose I have to thank NY for having these pointless wastes of paper, as long as I get time off. And so tomorrow I resume my concentration camp school schedule.
Before I forget, I also finished the comments section of the blog. Have fun with it.

Still Alive

Dan — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:57:58 +0000

I haven’t been posting too much lately, and I haven’t even been all that busy… I will attempt to make daily posts as part of my New Year’s resolution.I’ll eventually finish the other pages, so bear with me. Wish I … Continue reading →

New Year, New Design

Dan — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:40:58 +0000

The new design’s up and running smoothly. The other pages have yet to be finished… tomorrow. And so 2009 begins.
I don’t care about IE anymore, so if it works in IE, great. If it doesn’t, I really don’t care. I’m probably going to be redoing some old comics out of boredom, so they’ll be here to take up some space. Yawn, so tired now.

Happy New Year!

Dan — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 04:48:15 +0000

Happy New Year to you all. I’ve barely made it with the new layout, but I made it.

Christmas

Dan — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 03:41:19 +0000

Merry Christmas to you all, once again. Hope you all got what you wanted. I got some art supplies and Moleskines, so I’m pretty satisfied. Also, it’s the one-year anniversary of this blog. About a year ago, 2 days before Christmas, I made my very first steps into the blogosphere, with a gutted default WordPress template. After 2 CMS changes, this blog is still going strong. Here’s to another year of blogging!

Merry Christmas!

Dan — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 03:10:34 +0000

Merry Christmas to you all, whether you celebrate it or not! The blog’s a bit of a mess right now, because I converted from Chyrp to Expression Engine. Most of my older posts have been restored, but the posts I … Continue reading →

Only a Few More Days

Dan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:55:13 +0000

As of this writing, there are 5 days left until Christmas. It snowed today, but then it started raining. It’s amazing how quickly snow can turn from a picturesque decoration into a nasty, slippery mess. I’m still hoping that it will snow for Christmas, as we haven’t had that in years.

In other less interesting news, I got my report card a few days ago. It consisted of mostly 80′s and 90′s, which I’m pretty happy about. Badminton has actually become quite fun now that I’ve learned to play it. My backhand techniques still need some work, but I’m getting better and better. After the Christmas vacation, I have two weeks of school, then another week off, for Regents week.

Speaking of the design of the blog, it’s been given a mini-overhaul. I’ve gotten rid of the sidebar completely. The archives have a link in the navbar, and the search bar smoothly slides in upon clicking the “search” button. I’ve relocated the Twitter feed to the bottom once again, because I felt that putting it up at the top was cluttering up the design. The real advantage to having a wider column is that I can post pictures that are much bigger. There have been typographic changes throughout, as well as some stylistic changes. This layout is actually a lot less messed up in IE than before, so that’s sort of a plus. I’ve removed the mistletoe decorations, as I felt they were too tacky and detracted from the appearance of the blog. I’m planning on adding something else to decorate for the holidays, so check around every once in a while.

Small Update

Dan — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:04:23 +0000

Small changes have been made to the design, such as making the nav buttons a bit different. They have nice hover effects that work (gasp!) in IE and in other browsers. An “about” blurb has been added, while the twitter feed has been revived and repositioned. The

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tags have been made pretty, thanks to the magic of CSS. 3Cogs is chuggin along nicely. Hopefully it will meet the release date.

On another note, I’ve recently been messing around with a bunch of different browsers, partially out of boredom and partially to test them. Out of all the ones I tested, 32 browsers especially stood out:

Stainless

This is an even more minimalistic Chrome-based browser. I like it because it runs natively on Macs, without Crossover, and offers the same tab control system. JS performance is quite fast. It’s still in beta, but it’s stable enough to be a primary bare-bones browser. Note that there is no bookmarking nor history feature (but there is private browsing for some odd reason). All the plugins (like Flash) seem to work out of the box if you have them installed in Safari. [Mac only]
Download here →

Shiira

This is another fun browser. It uses Webkit and is based off of Safari, and has some nifty new features. One of them is the “pagedock” which shows thumbnails of the pages open. If you don’t like the pagedock, you can simply turn it off and use tabs instead. It also has an “exposÃ©” feature, where all the open web pages turn into thumbnails, just like on the Mac’s exposÃ©. It’s also pretty fast, and I recommend it. [Mac only]
Download here →

That’s pretty much all for now.

Bad News

Dan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:06:46 +0000

According to some recent rumors floating around, it seems like Microsoft will be releasing a Zune Phone. It’ll be a complete ripoff of the iPhone, but with a Sidekick-style keyboard attached to it. From what I’ve seen so far, the UI looks amazingly ugly. Of course, most teens today have been blinded by terrible MySpace layouts, so the UI probably won’t be much of a factor in sales. Hopefully MS will have terrible ads (Just like those “I’m a PC” failures) and the Zune Phone will fail into obscurity much like the Zune did. Maybe it’s only a rumor, and will never come to fruition.

Annoyances

Dan — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:00:31 +0000

You know what’s really been annoying me lately? All those dumb fads going around.

Exhibit A- Those Uggs that almost every girl these days seems to be wearing. They’re tacky, ugly, and oversized. I have no clue what everybody sees in those things. Sadly, this fad is still going strong after about two years.

Exhibit B- The T-Mobile Sidekick. I despise Sidekicks, for their lackluster performance, lack of programs, lack of features, and general uselessness. Unfortunately, this is still ongoing, with new models being released every few months. It’s annoying how people get torn away from real life in their little texting worlds. I just might write another post about Sidekick, as my hate for them needs way more room to vent out.

Exhibit C- The Blackberry fad. This one is quite annoying as well. About one year ago, Blackberries were solely for businessmen. Now it’s starting to edge out the Sidekick in market share amongst teens. Although it has way more features, I feel it is a waste of technology, as most teens will only use the Blackberries for their pointless texting and not much else. Seriously, all that those teens see in the Blackberry is texting, texting, texting, and myspace/facebook.

Exhibit D- Social whores. While I use both MySpace and Facebook, my life does not revolve around either of them. However there are people who make a reference to a picture/comment on a social site in everyday conversation, which gets really annoying.

Exhibit E- Scene kids. I hate these above all the other fads. They’re the fakest people out there. They listen to (sic) “br00t4l” music, like deathcore, only because it’s “in.” They claim their music is best, even if it sounds raucous and unskilled (see Waking the Cadaver). They usually shop at Hot Topic, wear eyeliner, hair with highlights, and t-shirts with undecipherable band logos. This leads me to my next subtopic- Emos. They moan and whine about how their lives suck and about their supposedly terrible parents. However, 90% of these are posers, with comfortable households and easy lives. Most of them listen to poser emo, which sounds nothing like real emo. Real emo music doesn’t have whining or crying, it has screaming and energy. Emo actually stands for “emotional hardcore,” not “emo-bitch-and-whine.” Even worse, because of those naÃ¯ve fools, most of the general population classifies all metalheads into the “emo” category by default. Same goes for most of those poser goths out there.

Exhibit F- Twilight fangirls/boys. They worship their books, and treat it like a religion, “converting” people to “Twilighters.” They put endless quotes from the books for their statuses on Facebook (you all know who you are). I mean, it’s nice that some people are going back to reading actual books, but they should keep their fanaticism to themselves.

There is no doubt that people will hate me for writing this list, but I simply had to vent it out.

Edit: Also, I was not intoxicated while writing this. These are my real views.