all things me

I just updated my anti-virus program (cause the greedy ISP people require one license per computer in the same household, so when I installed the new one to my sister’s comp (she needs it more than I do, 6 viruses were found), mine stopped working. I fetched mine from University instead) and finally, service pack 2.

Boy was it a draaaaaag. (hmm, when have I said that before… oh yeah).

The start up took a long time, and when I finally got the blue screen of hopefullness, it looked — well — pretty exotic to say the least:

This has happened before. Windows using interesting choices of fonts, and I know it’s because I have sooooo many of them installed. I should get one of those programs that allow you to browse your uninstalled fonts and then temporarily load the ones you want to use.

Tom commented that he doesn’t like captcha images. Well, neither do I, but I hate spam more. Encouraged by the small amounts of spam going to Hades, I decided to remove the plugin. For the time being. Also, with the help of Paged Comment Editing and a little spam leftovers hack, spam management is much easier.

I tested out the Image Headlines plugin but it created such insane amounts of png files that I returned back to the trusty old TitleImages². It may not have the ability to wrap too long lines (and I shouldn’t even write that long titles), but it’s simple and effective.

(Oh yes, the title is a reference to the oldie and goodie Take That song Everything Changes. I’m a fan forever, and not afraid to tell.)

Via: Jafer (there under a slightly different name; my life’s so boring I don’t want to sound confident that no one has done any of these )

1. Played a $100 000 grand piano in a church
2. Asked the teacher for permission to be excused from a Spanish lesson to go to McDonald’s for a friend’s birthday
3. Studied Farsi/Persian (and Finnish…! )
4. Had an article published in a magazine (soon, and soon two)
5. Ordered 20 000 Swiss francs’ worth of gold and silver wire from Switzerland (or something like that, but it was a lot of money)
6. Sang at the opening of a health centre
7. Had a nose piercing
8. Liked cod-liver oil more than pancakes as a kid (that stuff is for Finns what Vegemite is for Aussies)
9. Was voted weirdest girl in senior high
10. Sat writing and troubleshooting MySQL queries and PHP for a web portfolio at 1:45 am
    (ok, so I ran out of ideas…)

Here’s some extra cause people have done some of those:

11. Had an electric shock while swimming in the lake during a thunder storm

On Thursday, after staying up until 3am the previous night, I decided to stay home and do Uni stuff: checking texts for grammar and things, and my beloved web portfolio of which there’s been a little tasting earlier.

Here are some new pictures of the layout. I can’t give out the site link because there’s an open insert/update form to the database, so you’ll have to settle for hand-picked favourites of mine:
This is the view on a post editing page when no post has been selected yet. I made those fancy “drop down” post numbers. They’re post IDs wrapped in span tags floated left.

Here’s my WP style quicktag pane:
And last but not least, a snippet off of the documentation page including the right side of my horizontal menu (the main links are on the left hand side) and the header with fancy underlining.
I could rant on and on about the (cool?) things I’ve done on the site-slash-blog-application but I’ve just done that, all day long. Writing the documentation and tons of comments. Maybe I will rant some day.

Oh yeah, I just realized. When next week’s craziness is over (exam and perhaps I should find some time to study for it too, an essay, loads of papers to check for grammar etc, new course, finishing touches to the portfolio — and work), I can start modifying the portfolio layout to fit my WP blog!! Can’t wait!! Today (= yesterday) I installed XAMPP and put up a local WP where I can test out my themes — and write some very secret things that no one else is allowed to read! Now… how could I get such secret things to write about…
(XAMPP is an Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. And then some.)

[Edit: March 14th @ 23:00] Now I sent in my portfolio (or the url, actually) so now I can only sit, be scared, and wait for the judgment day. I actually noticed some whoopsies after sending the url and quickly corrected them (a non-validating documentation and a form handler that didn’t display a “don’t use this page directly” notice). Now they work. Now ALL of it works I hope. Ugh, I hate this sort of uncertainty. [/edit]

I had the digital media techniques exam today (it went well, I think, by the way) and I almost didn’t make it. First of all, the bus was either 8 or 13 minutes late: there was supposed to be one at 14:45 and another at 14:50, one came at 14:58. Of course, 2 buses came to the stop at the same time. I thought as the other one drove past us, people would get on it and we could drive quickly by. But no, some people chose this bus even though they were going the exact same route to the exact same place.

The bus driver seemed to be driving slower than usual.

When I finally got to the centre, I ran to the tram stop and luckily there was one coming at 15:30 (instead of :34 like I remembered). But… trams are slow, they stop almost every 100 metres. AND adding to that, the car broke (tram car, you know) leaving us just one stop too early (and of course, this stop isn’t with the 100 metre interval…). I started running/hurrying towards the campus, it was 5 minutes to, and I still had a nice hill to climb.

Luckily, everyone was standing outside the auditorium when I got there, so the computer people were a tad late, as usual. My heart was pounding out of my chest, partly from the hurrying, mostly from the panic I’d had since I was waiting at the bus stop.

I finished the exam in roughly 1 and a half hours, I re-re-checked my papers and went through my mental slide show as I was waiting for the guy at the end of the row to leave. I think I did alright. Oh yeah, I have a course evaluation to fill in. That’ll have to wait, I have a little more urgent issues at hand.

Why can’t the spammers even write correctly!?! I’m invited to check out some very “interesdting” stuff.

None of the spam gets through, so there’s really no point, now is there? What annoys me the most is that the comment IDs get so big! Last legitimate comment was number 2888 — now the number is definitely over 2900 — when in fact there are only 80 comments (wow, eighty) showing on the posts! Do the math.

I miss captcha soooo much. People, not Tom, did you have trouble having to write that short code before posting? Would you mind if I brought it back? I’m honestly ripping my hair here… Even that blacklisting thing won’t delete the posts anymore! They’re stored…! I don’t want them cluttering up my database because Spam Karma can already handle them without any need to compare to past comments. Sheesh.

I hate this essay!

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people, after me telling that I have loads to do (papers, assignments etc.), say “hope you get them done in time”. I don’t do “not on time”. I once had to turn in a paper one day after the deadline (and it was a loose dl) because I hadn’t finished it at 3 am on a day when I was just starting full-time work and waking up at 7 am.

In high school (senior high), I wrote a big geography assignment till 6 am and my alarm was set to go off at 6:15. I wrote the paper. On time. Just this week, I stayed up till 3 am (a magic hour, it seems) writing that stupid essay, but I got it done, it ended up being alright, and woke up at 7:45 to go to lectures.

It’s not about “hopefully getting things done”, it’s about how much (or little, to be precise) I get to sleep on the day before — or actually the day of — the deadline.
I’m a close-call adrenaline addict: I don’t get things done until the deadline looms close ahead. I know it’s bad for me, but it’s how I work.

I couldn’t help myself! I had to buy Prince of Persia: Warrior Within even though it was pretty expensive (and we usually either wait for a game to come from a game club or buy them used). I couldn’t wait that long and in such uncertainty!! In 10 days I’m going to buy Splinter Cell 3 so maybe this wasn’t such a good idea but who cares. It’s only money. Hard-earned money.

I desperately needed a fix.

While we were having lunch, a gentleman in the next table asked which department we were in. He was conducting a little lunchtime experiment. We told we were from the general linguistics department, and apparently he then told us what he first thought we were, but none of us heard it. I just heard him say “oh, that’s what linguists look like” and tell where he’s from etc etc. I thought to myself that maybe we’re not very good stereotypes for linguists. I for one would probably pass for a philosopher with my black attire (bear in mind that the choices were teachers (and “related”), linguists, and philosophers).

Grandma has told me once that I look like a humanist (student in the Faculty of Arts, or Faculty of Humanities as it is for us), so that’s good. But do I look like a linguist? Think not, at least I’m not a linguist at heart, unless liking languages means ‘being a linguist’. I could be a computer person, but what do they look like? I already have glasses so I think that’s going for me… but everybody has glasses nowadays — or so it seems.

Hopefully I’m not stereotypical anything.

Lookie what I found! I was trying to figure out if ‘out’ is a preposition or an adverb (still couldn’t decide), and just happened to run into that. Good dictionary, I have to say.