I’m trying out an offline blogging helper thingy called Zempt. So, if I ever have any time to blog when I’m not online, this may be helpful. And maybe there’ll be some really intelligent and interesting posts (*cough*) some time!
I’m a bit paranoid that they’ll get my blog login name and password because those had to be entered in this program… Anyway, testing testing.
Picture time at last!!
Yummm
Amadeus and his favourite pastime — as if his breath wasn’t bad enough
Sorry about the purple background; different theme was in use back then…
For the last 4 hours or so I’ve been drawing UML class diagrams, instance diagrams, sequence diagrams, and collaboration diagrams (well, I didn’t do that one, actually, I’m too tired and my head hurts) based on a Java code. Ugh. My mind’s spinning with lifelines and instances and call arrows. Drawing on Dia is fun-ish, but when there’s dozens of call arrows and instances, getting the image organized — let alone your thoughts — is a pain in the neck, or wrist… or eye. Or head, apparently.
And as a last drop I noticed that my site looks crappy on IE. Too bad, so sad.
I’m really really tired at the moment.
It would be so nice if on Windows XP one could choose which boxes in the task bar (with the clock and the Start button and things) get grouped together when there’s too little space.
My member page on the WordPress forums looks interesting because I’ve replied to posts that have tags in their titles. So there are lines that have a line through which annoy me more than the one line that has monospaced font.
I’ve noticed that I’m extremely allergic to the sound of a Jew’s harp (munniharppu in Finnish), someone “plays” it often around here and it just drives me up the wall. (uhhhh… speak of the devil)
I’ve been wondering what the correct plural for those little facial expression images is. Lots of people write it ‘smilies’ which would make the singular ‘smily’, right? (As -y usually changes to -ie- in plurals.) Smily has the suffix -y which often makes the word adjective (as the base word here is ‘smile’). However, ‘smily’ doesn’t seem to be a word even; ‘smiley’ is used as the adjective, too.
If the base word is smiley, it should be made plural by just adding -s at the end (compare: key–keys, not kies). There is a grammar rule “-y after consonants is changed to -ie-, but -y after vowels doesn’t change”.
QED
I added a nice External links plugin that adds a cross-browser compliant (that is, works also in IE) icon after the external links. Because of that I’m removing the target=”_blank” from all the links.
Last night I was listening to music (Escapology by Robbie W), burning a vanilla candle and cleaning up my desk (I strongly believe the candle had something to do with *that* 
) Among a stack of receipts I found a 10 euro note (I have a bad habit of stuffing the change and receipts in the same place in my wallet). Christmas came early for me 
Well, the money will be spent on gifts, but it was a nice surprise anyhow.
Talking about gifts, I’ve got that lot pretty much covered. Some I’ve bought and the rest I’ve planned. Now it’s all a question of finding.
My FireFox (1.0) went bonkers. One of the themes had some sort of a bug in it, and the browser view broke completely. Menus showed black text on black background, no styles anywhere. I wasn’t able to uninstall the theme because the Theme dialog was all white (With Uninstall, Use, Update texts at the bottom, though). I uninstalled Firefox, re-installed but the uninstall hadn’t apparently deleted the theme files (nor extensions etc., luckily). Then I realized there’s this mysterious Safe Mode below the regular FF. Ah, things in place, at last. I uninstalled most of the themes (most didn’t work anyway because I’d just updated from 1.0PR — or more like installed yet another FF. I realized I had 0.92 and 1.0PR still left, I thought the new versions install over the old ones). When I restarted FF the theme had gone back to default. Phew. Because the uninstall wouldn’t destroy all the files, I didn’t have to re-download loads of extensions (well, some, a few)… Lucky me.
I recently finished playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Boy, had it changed since its early days. I have the first PoP on Gameboy (the “black-and-white” (more like grey and green) version, even) and I’ve also played it on PC.
But the Sands of Time blew me away with its graphics — almost. Beautiful scenery, nice movie clips. But the enemies were a bit clumsy (especially the harem girls).
I love the Prince’s acrobatics. Running along walls (no, it’s not really possible in real life), jumping from flag poles… Sister got tired of the wall-to-wall jump never going the way it should be, but I didn’t have such difficulties. At first I thought that when I had found an effective way to attack, that’d work through the rest of the game. Luckily, that wasn’t the case.
Some fights started to feel hopeless and I probably would’ve given in and tried a cheat if there was one. Luckily again, there wasn’t. Usually I got stuck in a difficult fight when it was late and I’d been playing for a long time but the next day (or the next time I played), with fresh eyes, fresh mind, and better reaction time, I eventually kicked the sand creatures’ butts and felt really really good about it. So, lots of sighs of relief and cries of excitement are expected.
The Prince receives a useful set of special abilities with a dagger he finds at a palace. Rewinding time is most useful, and most used, I’d imagine. Slowing time (super-freeze?) was something I managed to get going only by accident and I never used it. There was a difficult situation where my sister had to use it; strangely, I never got stuck in that place. I tried to help my sister, but it wasn’t as easy on her computer as it was on mine.
A bit like this jump I thought was very easy in Splinter Cell but Dad, whose computer runs a “little” faster than mine, had serious trouble with it (me too, as I tried to help him). Praise the slow machine!
Then there’s the puzzles. Almost every step you take is one. There’s never a straight-forward way from point A to point B (unless you place your points a really short distance away, you cheat 
).
The music is a delight. The soundtrack is entirely Stuart Chatwood’s doing. The tracks are a mix of oriental strings, disco pop (I don’t know!), and quite heavy-ish guitar rock at times. I especially like the short introductory music that plays when you fall in the prison. That should’ve gone on for longer.
What annoys me is the way the camera works. Its course is somewhat limited and when you roll the camera “too far” it comes back to an awkward angle along with a swoosh sound. Also, the camera may change place suddenly, and because the directions are relative to the camera’s angle, you end up going back and forth if you’re not careful and take it slowly. Camera angles also make it difficult to determine which button you should press to jump to the right direction. Not a nice feature when you’re dangling from a stalagmite (dripstone) that will break apart fast.
On the second round (which is on-going) the game was easy-peasy at the beginning because I’d learnt all the tips and tricks I would learn later if it was my first round. The enemies probably didn’t even realize what hit ’em! But still, I got stuck again.
I can’t wait to get my hands on the next part, Warrior Within. I hear it’s got so amazing graphics, that it’d be worth even to just *watch* someone play it. [Pelit]
Game’s website (displays the newest, there’s a subpage for Sands of Time)