Who doesn't hate going to the slow online lobby thing to play an online game? If I know whom I want to play with and I don't care about the score being kept on some global ranking I want Direct IP connect. The original C&C had it and even though the Westwood Online is now dead you can still play it without any trouble. Will you still be able to play Red Alert 2 or Battle for Middle Earth once EA decided to kill the lobby servers? I think not. This also makes Quake 3 much more pleasant to play online than Joint Operations or Battlefield 2, although it should be said that the slow online lobby isn't so slow in Quake 3 compared to them as well. Just blowing off steam from some yesterday frustrations.
Wether you like Clawfinger or not, I doubt you'd deny that they have this incredible sound, so pay attention if you think your own band doesn't sound fat enough yet. ;) Jocke composed a gearlist. Well, we've always got questions about what gear we're using, so once and for all....here it is. This is the live setup, since the studiolist is way too long. Let's say, it's basically the same ;) Bård uses Gibson Les Paul Studios in drop D or drop C tuning, and Epiphone Barytone for the drop A tuning. As a backup, he uses an old Schecter 5-string Alt-guitar in drop A or GGGDG tuning (own invention :D ). The Guitar is plugged in a PODxt Live (the floorboard version) that's been updated with the Model packs from Line6.com. That sucker is either plugged straight in the desk, or amplified with a monitor amplifier into a Line6 4x12" Speaker. Jocke (That's me) uses a laptop computer (Pentium Mobile 1.73ghz/1.2GB RAM) with an EMU 16/16m soundcard for the samples, and whatever piece of shit midikeyboard to send the midi data ;) It's a M-Audio Keystation at the moment, but that can change in an instant. When I'm playing the guitar, I use an OLP MM5, modified with a Gibson 490T pickup in a drop A tuning. As a backup, I use another old Schecter 5-string with the same tuning. I run the guitar through a PODxt Pro, with all Model packs from Line6.com, and routed just like Bårds guitar. André uses Epiphone Thunderbird Goth basses through an uppdated PODxt straight in the desk. Henka uses DW drums with Meinl cymbals, DW hardware and Promark drumsticks. His drumkit is more expensive than everybody else's gear combined, but it sounds fucking unbelievable too. :mrgreen: Zak uses whatever microphone available. Most often a Shure SM58, wireless or not.
I'm not sure if it's possible that some kind of thing figured out that I have a Paypal account and what e-mail address I use to access it, but on my Hotmail account, the only spam I receive are fake mails which try to make you believe they're from Paypal. Today one managed to get through Hotmails junkmail filter (until now all mails doing like they're from Paypal landed in junk). I suppose that by marking it junk I have helped quite a number of other Hotmail users. The content was as follows: From : PayPal Inc. <SERVICE@PAYPAL.C0M> Sent : Friday, January 6, 2006 6:31 PM To : ...@hotmail.com Subject : Unauthorized Access: (Routing Code: Q521-K001-Q-P090) You have added buy517car7@aol.com as a new email address for your PayPal account. If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your account, please contact PayPal customer service at: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run Thank you for using PayPal!The PayPal Team Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot beanswered. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and choose the"Help" link in the header of any page. ---------------------------------------------------------------- PROTECT YOUR PASSWORD NEVER give your password to anyone and ONLY log in athttps://www.paypal.com/.Protect yourself against fraudulent websites by opening a new web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape) and typingin the PayPal URL every time you log in to your account. ---------------------------------------------------------------- PayPal Email ID PP00510 It's sort of funny, a scam acting like you've already been the victim of a scam. Each of the links actually lead to http://ool-4350c367.dyn.optonline.net:82/webscr/index.php, which, as you can see, looks exactly like the homepage of Paypal. And I received the same scam again, only now it has a different code attached.
Yesterday, around 20:30. "Well mom, I've arrived at my mailbox, so I'm gonna hang up." "Okay, we'll talk again tomorrow!" I get my keys out of my pocket to open my mailbox. Two weeks of mail. A bunch of advertisements, a pre-filled transfer form of the health insurance and a specification explaining why the rent is up almost ten Euros. I could as well have left it all in there. And then the € 25 fine for driving without lights on in late November hasn't even arrived yet. I open the door, and continue directly with all of my packaging to my room. With my rucksack on my back, sportsbag over the left shoulder and mail in my left hand, I use my right hand to insert the key into the door of my room and open it. While carrying my luggage inside, I switch on the light, grab the remote and turn on the radio. My journey's done, I stretch and jawn. Then I feel something against my leg. I watch down right away. It's the rabbits. They must be hungry, otherwise they wouldn't be like this. The girl who'd feed them during the holidays probably last came here two or three days ago. So I walk to the shed, turn on the light, reset the flatserver (which had crashed halfway during the holidays) and grab the food. I turn around just in time to see the rabbits moving in at high speed, hiding behind the washing machine. Shaking the bucket so the seeds inside make noise against it I slowly walk out, expecting to be able to lure them with me. After all this is the sound they associate with food. Flokkie, the white rabbit, follows. JW, the brownish one, does not. So I offer Flokkie some food from my hand. The voracious reaction shocks me a little. I drop a few extra hands of food in front of him and go to the shed again to take care of JW. Luckily he had already left. Shaking the bucket, he comes towards me, anxious. I offer him food from my hand, he takes a quick bite and turns around. I quickly walk backwards while offering him food. He finally comes to eat, I drop a little more and close the door of the shed. I drop plenty of food in their own little home and go to my room and turn on my laptop. Five minutes later Thomas arrives. After a customary handshake and backknock he takes me into some kind of strangling grasp you'd expect a boa constrictor to perform on his prey. "I needed that," he explains while releasing me. Later we'll drink a bit in the kitchen, but first we each go to our room to perform some MSN-ing. The normal flow of life begins again. Or well, almost. I have yet to catch on.
Geek Philosopher is a resource for royalty-free imagery. As you can see I brought a bit of life into the header by cutting pieces an image from the Outdoor Photos and Backgrounds category. Grass by Sidewalk is the full image for those interested. I took a look around the various categories and most of them are pretty good pictures. I am not sure about the exact copyrights on any of them, as I couldn't find any pictures labeled with any of the descriptions which are on the about page of the site. I suppose I'll take a new fresh look tomorrow at that aspect of the site tomorrow after a good night's sleep. Luckily as far as the design is concerned I haven't yet managed to break anything in IE (although the gravatars are a pixel off). I might go with alpha-transparant PNG's though for some of the transparancy effects, as that would certainly make a much smaller image load and it would make things look somewhat less prettier in IE. After all, I do want people to switch to Firefox, Opera, Safari or whatever else isn't so annoying to anyone who wants to do a little bit more with CSS. If you take a look around in my CSS file you'll notice that I'm trying something new. Over the past half year I switched from full CSS to very compact CSS, but that's not really a difference. The thing I'm experimenting with here is to indent those properties which are basically a sort of subproperties of a certain thing to increase readability. I must say it's already working out quite well. So drop your suggestions now, as this is the layout I plan to extend on in the close future.
He has been back for a couple of weeks already, but until today I had not freed the time to read his recent log entries. If you followed my old log, then you are probably aware that my customized Opera browser relies heavily upon his work. If you use one or more of his customized ini-files, then you should head over to Moose's new site and download the latest editions. If you have never used them before, then you should go to the site and discover all aspects of it. It will take a while, but it is worth it. From the old CSS experiments to the thoughts behind the keyboard- and menu-setup. Try out the keyboard setup. To say that it is unconventional is an understatement. But give it some time. It might grow on you. Opera's browsing speed combined with those keyboard shortcuts make my browsing an experience where almost no futile time is lost on controlling my browser. Last, but not least, looking at the beautiful layout of the site, the lean markup and well-written CSS is a 100% convincing argument to drop support for IE. A must-visit for everyone who is interested in Opera customization.
I never quite followed Friends while it was still on. Over the past two months or so I have been watching all of the Friends episodes (mainly because I liked the show Joey which is a spin-off of Friends) and yesterday I watched the final double episode. In the end I realised that all I had already seen quite a few episodes from the last season, because a friend of me was a big fan. The strange part is more how you can grow so easily accustomed to things, especially if you have them so straight-forward available to you. While having no new Lost episodes for another 2 weeks is a little bit annoying, it's not like I really miss it a lot. That is more because I find season 2 incredibly less interesting than season 1, I would have missed season 1 a lot. Anyway, on average, I watched like 2-3 episodes of Friends every day. So all in all that was two months without any shortage. But now it's gone all gone. It feels like such a huge gap. I could start watching it from the top again. :P I simply didn't realise in the past that so many people liked Friends because it describes real life so well (disregarding too expensive apartments and clothes). Probably it didn't do so because I didn't live on myself back then...
Until now, I wasn't aware of the fact that regions will still exist on Blu-Ray discs. I have to say no more then that the following quote of the article fully represents my opinion. Of course, the pirates who engage in video swashbuckling are quite capable of removing this region encoding, meaning that the black market goods are user friendly, while the white market goods are a pain to deal with, and limit consumer choice. As far as I could discover in a quick Google-search, HD-DVD does not carry this heavy burden on its back. Why shoot yourself in the foot like this, Sony?
Actually the release of Wordpress 2.0 and this new weblog have no connection at all, it just so happened that Ethan gave me this as a Christmas present at the same time Wordpress 2.0 was released. I knew for sure that I wanted to try something other than Wordpress 1.5 and what can be better for that than Wordpress 2.0, the tool which already served me well for almost six months? So far I only set up a few basic things. It should be noted that a few setting related things, most particularly the permalinks, are even smoother than they already were. The usage of AJAX in the entry management is nice (it makes deleting so much smoother), but that doesn't make me hate the (in my view) abuse of the name of Ajax any less. Also it still displays replies related to a post after deleting it, which isn't bad, but it did cause me to click delete and get a "this reply doesn't exist" message, which certainly could confuse new users. The rich text editor is nice and can easily be disabled, but sadly a few tiny things like inserting links don't work on Opera. That's more likely the fault of the incomplete Rich Text implementation on the Opera Technical Preview I use than of Wordpress. Before the end of the year, I will finally put the Calendar back online, as I've had many mails requesting it. Further I doubt I will post much here during the rest of the holidays. For the record, the two posts previous to this one were a test of the importing mechanism and do not indicate the age of this spot on the web. This post does.
For this entry we'll have to go back in time. It was last year, September 2004, the second week of my first year in university. I was in Amsterdam switching trains. A blond pretty girl sat down next to me. She was 20 years old and happened to study psychology at the same university. You could say she was a bit of a movie-style stereotype college-girl. It was around 18:00, so after the conversation where I discovered what I just told you, I took out my lunch package, which I had prepared at my parents place earlier that day. She did the same. It was not a lunch package however. It was half a bread, a knife and a can of peanut butter. She then took a book out of her bag and put it on her bosom. As you can probably imagine she put a slice of bread on it and started to put peanut butter on the slice. Intrigued I inquired further about this behaviour. Her reply was simple and effective. "I am a student, students do that. For example see that guy at the other side of the train eating pickles from that jar of pickles? He's a student." "Interesting, how can you be so sure?" "I know him, he's in my year." I don't think ever I saw her after that trip, or else I didn't recognise her. I don't think I ever thought back at this until yesterday. Last Thursday we went out and came home around 5. I didn't get to sleep until something like 6. So when I got up around 11:30 I didn't do much except being lazy and tired. So when I wanted to catch the bus around 13:00, without thinking about it, I put half a bread, liver sausage, a knife and half a carton of grapefruit juice in my bag. When I got a book out of my bag, put a slice of bread on it and started to use my knife to cut pieces of the liver sausage, suddenly all of this entered my head and I thought: "Aha, I am a student".
Melantrys passed some meme to me, and, in lack of a different weblog, I decided to post this here for now and not in a comment. Else this place [the MyOpera blog] looks so deserted… oh wait, it already did? I can only say one thing to that: bluh. Seven Things I Plan To Do Spend some more actual time on my studies. Let that result in getting ECs. Get my hair cut. See every episode of Lost and keep up with the US (Mel already said that, but it applies to me as well. In fact, I'm her Lost-source, or whatever that should be called; Lost-source sounds really weird). Winter sports (skiing and snowboarding) sometime before I'm 80 and am not flexible enough anymore. Visit the US, Canada, Italia and… well, just more of the world. Own a huge library of books to read in peace and quiet. Seven things I can do Say very strange things semi-random such as My moon-name is Oela-Bikila! and make people laugh by that. Write amusing stories. Blow up a clap-switch by turning the voltage too high and clapping. Get two girls in my bedSurvive Italian pillows. Completely ignore the apocalypse while reading a good book or playing a good game. Notice the apocalypse three hours later when my laptop dies from lack of energy. Meanwhile I wouldn't notice the lights going out, of course. Automatically filter out advertisements and religious crap with my brain so that I don't remember what people told me if it had something to do with religion. Seven Things I Can't Do Concentrate on things I have to concentrate on. Watch Lost before it's broadcast in the US. Murder Bill Gates, put on some stupid glasses and pretend to be him. Stop considering Opera superior to all other browsers. Watch a big mess in the living room and not clean it up (well, usually). Keep track of time while playing Rome Total War or reading a good book. Consider Balkenende a great leader. Seven things I say most often "Hmm". Can mean anything from "what?" to "yes" to "no" or "not funny" to "crap, no inspiration to make one of my usual senseless comments". "Bluh". Braby gave me this word which I now always use for "whatever". "lol". Often in the Dutch sense, the consequence of which is that it results in the laughing out loud sense if foreigners don't understand that. "Skol". The word I use most often for "cheers". Other favourites include "proost", "prosit" and "santé". "Godverdomme". It sounds really good, it reliefs when you hurt something and it can possibly offend Christians. What more do you want? "Ja". Isn't yes possibly the most used word in any language (as long as "hmm" isn't used as global replacement)? "Girl, girl, girl". The start of the lyrics of Anouk's song "Girl" which is pretty much our flat anthem.
