A Series of Tubes

Well, today has had a few advances on the good front. Here’s what happened that was good, in chronological order:

• I got on High Honors in school. This means all of my grades this term were in the A range (A-, A, or A+), and that my effort and behavior grades were 1’s (4 is the worst, 1 is the best).
• A month ago, I took part in the National French Exam, a French comprehension test taken all over the country. Well today I got my score back, and I ranked 8th. In the country. I AM #8 IN THE WHOLE FRICKEN COUNTRY!
• My friend TikiMatt got his name and a link on the front page of Docking Bay 101, one of the best Star Wars fan sites on the internet. Woot!

So yeah, great day. 😀

In today’s This Day in History section in the Globe:

Sadly, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was afflicted, as you probably know, with polio) died exactly 10 years before the cure for polio was announced.

Ok I’m fed up with having only 40gb of storage space on my computer. I am constantly in a struggle to get space, and a “victory” is if I get 6gb. I haven’t seen 10gb of nothing on this computer for months. So now I’m going to install a new hard drive.

I have a drive lying around from my first server, Tomato 1. I got an extra IDE cable to put it in the computer. I’m all set to go, except for one thing that keeps bothering me. The Ubuntu and Uru server installed on that hard drive. I’m worried that it will do something to my hard drive already installed here, and that I won’t have my precious data anymore. 🙁

So here’s what I’m doing. I’m first backing up everything important (My Documents. :P) on a DVD. Then I’m gonna install the drive and pray. Wish me luck!

I just had the idea to check out this page in IE (6), and I must say…it looks like crap. For one thing, the .png files don’t work. They aren’t transparent. For another thing, where’s my sidebar?! Oh yeah, that’s right. Down at the bottom where I wanted it. Wait- Oh that’s right, it’s not supposed to be at the bottom. IT’S A FRIGGEN SIDEBAR.
The Internet Explorer Homepage.
The way that banner should look.

Update: While the page looks better in IE 7, most of the sidebar is still at the bottom. Congratulations on getting png transparency working, Microsoft! Also, the Opera-style page zoom is cool, but you can’t remove the menu bar from a Windows app. It’s a tradition that doesn’t need to be broken.

Bush was right? Yeah, not so much. The Right Band was wrong.

Ok I know I’m usually “GO FIREFOX” and the like, but lately I just don’t know. Firefox has been going downhill for me since 1.5 was officially released. Since then, I’ve had to create 3 new accounts on account of the current one failing. First, Firefox simply wouldn’t open, and when it did it refused to load pages, and menus were entirely black, no text.

So I started a new account. That account worked fine until it started problems with updates. When I clicked a link from any app. other than Firefox, it would load a blank page with the green update logo up in the corner. When I clicked this, it said that there were no updates and returned me to the blank page with the update logo. By manually opening Firefox, it ran the updater and reported that there were no updates, then dropped me at the ‘Firefox is updated, don’t worry cuz u’ll never see this page again’ page, which is obviously bull since I saw that page every time I opened Firefox. So I tried disabling updates, which only made it worse because then I would always get a blank page with the update logo, but when I clicked it it said “updates have been disabled” and the menus wouldn’t work.

So I started a new account. This one has been working well until today. I load up firefox, and lo and behold: my theme and extensions are not there. I opened the menus to check, and they were still there; but none of them were actually doing anything. I’m typing this on a default Firefox. No extensions, no theme.

I must say, Firefox has let me down too many times, and I’m actually considering switching browsers. Does anyone know how to fix the problem I’m currently having in Firefox, or does any one have a suggestion for another browser? I have Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, AOL *shudder* (which I can’t use anyway), and the evil blue e. Don’t worry, I’m not switching to IE. I don’t like Firefox but I don’t intend on killing my computer. And don’t tell me about IE 7, because its worse than 6. No menu bar. No thanks.
</rant>

Update: I followed Kevin’s advice, and now Firefox works perfectly! Thanks, Kevin! 🙂

The ELC Anemone (which is also my trademark symbol) has gone through many stages.

First, it was a simple 3DS render:

(Click the images to enlarge)
No effects, no ray tracing.

Next came the simplistic render that was my header for so long:

I faded the edges with The Gimp to make it blend well with my blog, and I guess there’s some basic material on it.

Then there was the faux cell-shaded anemone:

I liked this one, but the varying line width annoyed me, plus I wanted something that looked a bit more professional.

I got that with the next variation, which has been my logo in many places.

This, of course, is the official ELC Anemone. It is the current logo for ELC, and is also my avatar in many places. It was only used in the header here briefly, because its size made it off-center.

The ELC Anemone was replaced by the newest anemone, the CLC Anemone:

This baby took a while to make, and it uses ray tracing and radosity. It’s inside a large sphere with red and orange splotches inside to create the explosion thing behind it. I really love the way it came out. It’s the logo for Completely Leet Chat, the next version of ELC.

Now, I leave you with the current image being used as the header here. It has an alpha channel, which makes the bg slightly transparent. Cool!

If you want to help Cyan bring back Uru Live then please post this on your blogs, as your friends and family to post it on their blogs…even if they have no intention of playing or even like the game, because through them it could spread to someone who does want to play.

Remember to have the advert link to http://plasma.cyanworlds.com/

This is a way to spread the word about one of the best games in existence, a game that was shut down before it was given a chance to grow. A grass roots advertising effort to get the word out about Uru Live.

At my school, there is a beacon. We call it The Beacon of Hope. It consists of 3 traffic cones (2 orange, 1 black) in a sandwich formation, placed on the highest point on the jungle gym. I am a keeper of the beacon, along with a few of my friends. It is our solemn duty to tend to the Beacon, and ensure it is always in its proper place.

You will obey the Beacon.

ROFL! Typing ‘gofirefox’ (no quotes) into Firefox brings you to the closest match- an Opera Browser community member’s page called gofirefox. That’s funny. 😛