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 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 “exposé” feature, where all the open web pages turn into thumbnails, just like on the Mac’s exposé. It’s also pretty fast, and I recommend it. [Mac only]
Download here →

That’s pretty much all for now. 

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. 

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 naïve 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. 

Ever spent hours upon hours crafting that perfect navbar only to find that [browser name] moves/expands the nav links by 1-2px? Well you can’t really do much about browser rendering differences, but you can hide those imperfections and make everything look the same across all browsers. A highly underrated CSS property called overflow does the trick here. When you give a div a specific height and/or width (such as for a navbar), you can control whether content spills out of it, or stays hidden.

<span style="color:#000000;font-weight:bold;">overflow</span><span style="color:#66cc66;">:</span> <span style="color:#993333;">hidden</span><span style="color:#66cc66;">;</span>

It’s rather amazing how one little CSS bit can make your site look much more professional. 

You know how most fast-food places and bars add loads of ice to all the drinks? Well I’ve figured out why they really do that. The ice displaces volume that could be used for the actual drink, therefore less of the drink can be poured in, but the glass still looks and feels full due to the ice. Ice is dirt cheap compared to the price of the concentrate. They save money by making the concentrate last longer, and most people don’t even notice. In conclusion, if you want to get more for your money, order your drinks without ice.


Work yesterday was mostly good, and it actually started snowing at around 11:00pm. The snow stuck for a while, getting 2 inches in some places, but it melted by the next day. Of course while the snow was there I didn’t pass up the opportunity to advertise myself…