Orange on orbit

   

mahercubed has been launched in the night of 30th August, few hours before the merdeka countdown. Mahercubed
is supposedly a forum dedicated to maherians, but others are welcomed nontheless. Cubed is the effort of three form 4 students who noticed the
need of a certain medium to express thoughts among maherians on the
net. Arman has made a custom
design for the forum with a little bit of tweaking of the available
template. Quite statisfied with the design eventhough didn’t make too
much of a change. Loyal readers of d3ly.com please spare your time and visit us, help us make a great community.

w00t! After staying up late last night, burning the so-called ‘midnight oil’, I finally got my wordpress template working. I’ve analysed the <?php inside the ’simpla’ template and pretty much figured out some of their functions. Still dunno how to do the comments.php though, it looks pretty darned complicated, but things are looking up - most likely would learn it during the upcoming holidays. Just for the record the design is called ‘green’ meant for armangrafie.com, a very simplistic design, too simple probably. If I were to make it into a real template, I would need to add a sidebar.

   

Asked a web consultant in Lowyat.net for recommendations of webhosting providers, among the suggested providers, I chose easy-interactive.com which offers both local and US servers (atleast what he said). Since my site is targeting on international audience, I plan on getting a server in the US. The whole price for webhosting + domain is RM168 a year, pretty reasonable. The plan offers 150MB disk storage and 10GB monthly bandwidth along with the usual stuff, Apache, PHP, MySQL. And yea, my dad agreed with it too, w00ts. So I’ll get it up atleast at the end of the year, giving me enough time to learn more on server-side coding and Wordpress, not to mention more CSS. Trying to ensure that my blog goes up before my big trip to Japan and blog all the experiences

For the domain, I initially planned for simply arman.com which was obviously taken. No luck also with armand nor armann. So came up with a slightly longer name, armangrafie.com. Just made this nonsense composite word with my name and photography, or, as in dutch/german called fotografie. Made some mockup design for it too:

 

I’ve decided to take photography as my new hobby and passion. I don’t mean those crappy compact digital cameras, I’m talking about the serious stuff, digital SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras. Ofcourse, it’ll have to wait until I get a job, which is atleast another decade or so :(. I guess it’s kind of natural for web/graphic designer to have passion for photography. Obviously because their work pretty much invloved in manipulation of images and visual elements, what’s better than editing your own image right? I’d really like to use one of these to capture the urban beauties of Tokyo - especially akihabara and shibuya. Also the beauty of people who live there, there should be plenty of moe cosplay in the streets of akiba.

 

   

Anyway, the camera I’m planning to get is either Canon EOS 30D or Canon EOS 350D/Kiss Digital N. Both are well over RM3000. For a form 4 student that costs an arm, a leg and a kidney. The 30D features: 8.2 megapixel, 2.5" LCD display, simultanous RAW and JPEG recording, 5 fps and 30 large JPEG frame burst, etc etc. I also might consider getting additional lenses and a tripod. Daydreaming?

   

The otaku culture seems to be blooming around in the entertainment industry with shows like genshiken, densha otoko, etc. NHK ni youkoso! on the other hand, focuses more on NEETs, particularly hikikomori. It is an adaptation from the manga of the same title, forgot the author. The main character is not much of an anime otaku but is a hikikomori. Satou, corrupted by his imaginations, believed that a conspiracy called NHK (should be tat TV station) is responsible for making him a NEET. By chance, he met a young girl who claimed that she can cure his hikikomori. That’s where the story starts.

I do have some pride being an otaku (omg self proclaimed), but I certainly don’t want to be a NEET. However, from time to time I do live this NEET lifestyle especially when my parents are away or during holidays. I could really feel the days wasted as I indulge myself.

Have been busy these last couple of months with my involvement in webdesigns, not to mention the exams I’m having right now. So far I’ve learnt all those basics stuff, I can pretty much handle Cascading Style Sheets, but not to the fullest extent. My knowledge of CSS is still quite limited and it naturally still limits my imaginations of webdesigns. I just need to finish up the ‘CSS for designers’ and then pick up with online tutorials as I learn more.

My auditorical site demonstrates a bit of what I’ve learnt. The CSS is acceptable but the design still lacks something. And that particular something definitely degraded the site’s overall attractiveness. The site’s still filled with trash but I’ll try to add some more stuff as time goes by.

I also decided to design the school’s website as I get an instant shock when I see the current one. To the developer’s point of view, it is complete chaos. The xhtml code runs down almost 1000 line with inappropriate use of CSS which is embedded to the html. I won’t criticize further as myself am still an insignificant figure compared to those in the business. So I’ve discussed this matter with the webmaster and I’m waiting for some raw images to be edited for banners and other visual elements.

I recently got wordpress installed on my localhost WAMP. Just when I thought I could already design a blog template, I glanced at the templates and see fragments of odd characters, set of codes - foreign to me as I was spellbound with this figure before me. In short, blog templates have PHP codes in them. Unlike html or css, PHP is much more difficult to digest. Kinda stuck here with apache, mysql and php thing but hope that I get through this eventually.

is this loli?

   

Dunno why, I am no longer very active in the music scene, be it english or japanese. Somehow I just lost interest to look for fresh music. Quite a while since I last updated the music library, and for the past month or so, I just listened to the same ol’ crap over and over again - Till certain extent whereby I’ve the urge to shoot a lead into my brain. Wonder what ppl listen to these days…

Other than Star Wars OSTs (lolwtf?), repeatedly listening to utada hikaru and remioromen.  Actually, it’s not tat I have too little of a collection to leave me bored, there are gigs of shite in my collection tat I never listened mostly due to randomly leeching anything on sight (especially true for japanese music) or there is only one song I listen to in a certain album. Storage is getting scarce, I guess I hav to clear them out soon.

Oh yeah, pls support the musiek industry, buy ori, kthnxbb.

Big Huge games has released the second installment for the Rise of Nation series. This time however, the developer ventured to the sci-fi world and brings Rise of Legends. Apparently, their risky attempt turned out great. Heck, I gotta admit that I sometimes get tired of the generic themes.

There are three distinctive civilizations that you could choose, each of course, having their own pros and cons. The Vinci rely on industry and inventions (something liek 19th century inventions) and carry on usual human stuff like trades. The Cuotl is associated with worship and high technology; more like a lost technology, they got egypt-like buildings but has lasers and stuff, similar to Protos in Star Wars. The last one I forgot the name but they have something to do with magics and summonings.

   

   

Rise of Legends also introduces some great innovations. Districts now replace the need of temples, markets, etc. To raise population cap, build military district; Gold income and resource cap, build economy district so on and so forth. Districts are only built connecting to the city, so it actually enhance realism and gives a better sense of big cities. There are also individual buildings like defensive towers, barracks and other specific ones. Some might say that there is lack of diversity on the units and structures compared to the prequel. But I’d say it is reasonable, coz it reduces the complications during micro-managing your army in battle. Not to mention the superb detail of each units - well maybe not that superb anyway.

Graphics are quite demanding, but should be smooth enough on most systems. I could play on the highest settings but due to lack of memory, had some spiky lags. Just for the record, I should mention that my GPU is fully capable of rendering the highest All and all the game is awesome and highly recommended for those RTS fans. 9/10

Why do ppl want to be teacher? This particular question always lurks in the depths of my mind, the curiosity is just significant enough for me to write about it in my blog. In my book, teachers are those who failed to have superior jobs like engineer or doctor. So I take it that being teacher is a last resort for these incompetent rejects. I don’t mean to be disrespectful and all. True, I still need their guidance and teachings to survive the rather harsh path of life.

I get pissed off when these teachers start to brag about their achievements when they were once a student. Boarding schools, high grades, best student, awards, active in both academics and co-curicullum yadayada, you name it. If they are so damn good then why the fuck didn’t they become distinguished ppl who earns 23456789 bux a year. Eventually they become a teacher, intentional or not, they still fail. So I really don’t like these inferior beings telling me what I should do with my life.

They worked hard in school, aiming for prestigious institutions and graduate, just to have them back in school again? Now this doesn’t make sense to me. Most of us would want to escape the crappy environment of school, and after spending the entire childhood and adolescence in school, the last place I would want to spend my adulthood is school. Don’t get me wrong here, I love school life; but life as a student, not as an englightened adult.

*more to write, sleepy already