Elpea has finished finding all the tech ids.   I’ve also found some pretty interesting new techs as well.   Maps are coming!

        Okay I’ve just gotten the game today, and it looks somewhat promising.   A few noticable problems come up pretty quick though.   Quicksearch at the moment doesn’t work well - every game goes out of sync.   Another problem is somehow most custom maps have gone crazy so that’s going to take some looking into.   I’ll have to try playing again later.

        Got a message/button on my Yahoo Toolbar that now says “Get IE7 now!” So I went and got it.   The install took nearly half an hour to complete on my 3.2 GHz P4 and 2GB RAM PC :-/.   Well it must be worth it if it took that long to install.

        I opened it up, and it went pretty smooth.   The whole layout has changed and my Home page set to Yahoo and News. <_< Next thing I notice is that it still says “Get IE7 now!” Well I got it now go away! >_< Also it looks like the designers went for too high a resolution.   The text appears very faded and stretched on 1024×768 but looks nice and sharp on higher resolutions - BUT THEN IT’S TOO SMALL!

        Another thing is the Zoom.   It’s somewhat pointless in my opinion.   Ctrl+Scroll now changes the zoom instead of text size.   What it does is basically collapse the entire page and force it into a smaller/large box.   This ruins the page’s layout and doesn’t necessarily scale right at all.   It also doesn’t center on the page and you end up looking toward the corner of the browser.

        I think I’ve mentioned this above but the layout really changed.   The Home button is now a tiny little icon in the corner and the Favorites are under another button on the other corner.   The Home icon I can get used to I guess, but the Favorites is kind of slow and annoying - you can’t just click, point point and click.   It goes click, wait, click, wait, click.

        The old Menu Toolbar is gone (File - Edit - View - Favorites - Tools - Help).   However, it looks the Alt command got left in.   Just hit Alt on your keyboard and it should show up under the address bar - pretty ugly now but it works.   You can set it to stay permanent by going to View > Toolbars and selecting Menu Toolbar.

        Finally FTP no longer works for IE.   I guess they  forgot about it or something.   However, this isn’t too bad as you can simply open  up Windows Explorer (open up a folder on your computer) and type the ftp address directly into the addressbar there.  

        The good thing is though - it’ll be alot easier to design the site It supports alot more codes now and isn’t as buggy (at least website-wise).

        Just came up with the awesome idea today for a map in Age of Empires III.   One less noted feature of the game is the fact that units slow down when being attacked.   It might be interesting therefore to have a racing game between players.   The strat would be to attack the enemy in order to slow them down, but risk stopping in order to attack, supposing you are using a ranged unit.   There would be walls along the path to allow opponents to catch up as you are attempting to bust through it.   Simultaneously, there would be bonus units you can kill (and waste time on) that would grant you XP.   Reaching certain levels of XP shall upgrade your unit.

        My idea is that you would start at a melee unit, go to a ranged unit, then to an area-damage melee unit, and finally an area-damage ranged unit.

        Of course all units would have the same speed.

        The map sounds fairly simple and I hope I get a chance to work on it later this week!

        I just saw The Grudge 2  today.   It was okay - I didn’t really find it scary.   You could always predict what’s going to happen and the characters all did basically everything people would never do.   Several times they split up (okay they said “Wait here, I’ll check it out!” but same thing ) and many times they wandered far off into the middle of nowhere alone.

        I did get some pretty neat ideas for spoof though .     If time permits, I might create a short skit “The Grudge: Santa Claus”.   The idea would be Santa delivering presents one Christmas Eve and happening upon that Haunted House.   He’d enter the chimney, gain the curse, and return to the North Pole with it.   What would happen then??? :O   I’m not sure what game engine to use, and indeed I am pretty busy.   I hope I do have time to make it though.   For sure, it’d be hilarious

Proving 1=0, 2=1, and so on…
  Here is a pretty tricky proof that I’ve come across several times. It basically proves that a+b=a, which would mean that 1+0=0, 1=0, 2=1, and so on.

  I know very well how to prove this wrong, but do you?
a = b
ab = b²
ab…[More]

        So… what other screennames do I go by?

pftq

        Just pftq.   If you see pftq anywhere, it is probably me.   Although I hear rumors that there is a pftq on Age of Kings, which I don’t have; but otherwise it’s safe to assume it’s me.

        Pfffffffffff…. I’m pissed.   Everything seemed to be going along nicely until just yesterday.   I had gotten so used to my right hand out of the cast, that somehow, when leaning back and getting up, I completely forgot about it being in recovery, and put my hand out, again, to support myself.   Needless to say, my right hand did not support me at all.   The second I put my weight onto my hand, my entire arm went numb and  hurt like hell.   The sharp, numbing pain I felt when I first broke my wrist shot right through my arm, most of it focused where the break in my wrist was.

        At first it was just my wrist feeling all paralyzed, but it later spread to my elbow as well.   Apparently my right arm had gotten so weak from being in a cast for 2-3 months (and no pressuring work after) that I ended up twisting my elbow and spraining it.

        The doctor says it didn’t look like I broke anything, but I’m in a sling yet again, to avoid moving any of the joints… I forget how much it sucks being one-handed.   >_<

         Lately, there have been a number of people, including me, that have had problems joining a table once in a room at  Yahoo Games.    Basically, you join the room just fine.   It says connected and everything.   But the problem comes when you try to join a table or create one.   It displays a message that the table is “attempting to pop up” but never does.   The table simply won’t pop up.

       Have you disabled your pop up blocker? Please try that  first to see if that is the problem.   If it is, set it to allow from games.yahoo.com and you should be able to re-enable your pop up blocker again.

      However, that is what I did the first time as well - and it didn’t work for me.

        The next step is to check your Norton Internet Security if you have one.   Even if you disabled the pop up blocker on that, it’ll block the table in the Ad blocker.   Yep, it thinks the Yahoo Games table is an ad.   Go to Norton Antispam.   Then go into the settings for your Pop Up blocker.   To fix this, go to Advanced and remove urls that have “yahoo” in them.   Hope that helps!

        That seemed to be the problem for alot of people.

        I lend a number of people subdomains on my website.   One of them is owner to a Hoisanese Sanctuary, which claimed to have a dictionary.   It went through quite a while however with nothing but a few broken links.

        At long last he finally updated it earlier today.   The dictionary has but a few entries but is at least functional.   Also notable is that it is using my first fully mySQL-powered script.

        Go on ahead and visit his Hoisanese Sanctuary. (No I am not Hoisanese, nor do I have anything to do with the site in any way.   I only provide the space for it.)

        Back when I was in 6th grade, the lunch was free at my school and it wasn’t bad at all.   There was lasagna, raviolies, chocolate cupcakes, and other good stuff.   And it was free.

        Now,  this high school I’m in actually charges for lunch, and it isn’t half as good.   The best you get is probably a chicken sandwich or enchilada (rarely).   Yet, even that is not bad compared to what it is now.   First they took away plastic straws and replaced it with this strange powdery one, which seems more like left over housing material cut up to form straws.   Then they started replacing the “teriyaki chiken bowl,” which already had no sauce or anything, with left over popcorn chicken instead of real chicken.   Just recently, they stopped using real napkins and instead had these very stiff and thin ones that seemed more like cheap toilet paper material.

        I once joked that they might even replace chicken sandwiches with popcorn chicken or something.   Well guess what? Now they just grab a couple left over chicken strips (nasty ones too) and put them in a burger bun.   Here’s your chicken sandwich.

        I imagine a few years from now, they might even start offering water instead of milk. -_-

      Ok so it goes that one of my friends thought the assignment due today wasn’t due until like next week.   Neither of us did it the night before.   Later today, one class before it was due, he was told by a friend that it was due.   Well we were both empty handed.

        I decided just to jot a few things down - it’s better than nothing.   My friend thought it wouldn’t be accepted.   One of my other classmates, who stayed up till 2AM  working on it,  had close to two pages done.   I had a mere 5 lines done, jotted down 5 minutes before class started.   Teacher started checking the homework. My friend got a zero for not having anything.   The classmate who had two pages got full credit.   Then came my crappy little paper - that wasn’t even half a page.

        Well guess what? I got full credit! :p rofl my friend and the classmate who spent all night on the 2 pages sure got pissed… lol Guess that goes to show that even a lil bit done helps.

Cyclist Breaks Finger Punching Bus

        According to the article, there’s this guy who got so angry from not winning the cyclist competition called Tour of Spain, he punched his team bus and broke a bone in his right hand…

        Eh… ok… yeah I know people hit things and cause unbelievable amounts of destruction when they’re angry… but break your own fingers? Just what - how can you not - ah I don’t know what to call it.

        My sympathies for the guy and hope he learns to err… not kill himself with his anger. :p  

      Just browsing around today and I found a few sites pointing to a Google Image Labeler.   Basically it helps Google decide what keywords find what kind of images, by having you tell it what each image it throws at you would be called.

      Here’s the fun part: Whoever else is online at the same time becomes your partner and you work as a team to try and call the image the same name! :O Each image the two of you pass, you will earn points.   There’s even a highscore table! lol

        Weird things all over the place these days…

        Ah finally got myself a new pair of earphones after my old ones… broke….. cause of an …accident …. involving a family member dipping them in a cup of juice… Well I decided to might as well go for the later model in the same brand while I’m at it.   The later version, Etymotic ER4P,was currently “80% off” according to the seller - sounded like a good deal.

        Very surprised I managed to find them so cheap These were way better than what I had (and I thought those were as good as it gets!).   I see a few screenshots with some rather weird blue and red colors - but  mine fortunately came  in  black (wouldn’t want to be caught wearing blue and red earphones lol).   Comes in a fancy box with about 10 replacement flanges (part of the earphone that goes in your ear), 4 replacement filters (for if the earphones become… clogged),  rotatable clip for the wire, free case, and converter from the mini-jack to a regular.   Sound is great - although bass is a little low (but then you don’t want something in your ears/head to be booming anyways ), but the noise-blocking is awesome.   You seriously cannot hear much besides what’s coming from the earphones.   I couldn’t hear the guy talking right in front of me, right to me, while I had them on.   The build is also pretty strong - wire is thicker and stronger than what I usually see - looks more like a powercord - but it’s not heavy at all, light as usual (how can you wear earphones that drag you down anyways?).   Very impressed - can’t believe I got them so cheap.   I imagine they must be usually around $100 when not onsale.