I started Skyward Sword sometime around Christmas, and I had my doubts about it when I started. It was a different Zelda, not the quintessential formulaic adventure I had come to expect of the franchise. However, I believe I am at a point late in the game and have seen sufficiently enough to judge the game on what it brings to the table. The Ocarina of Time is still one of my favorites, but Skyward Sword is growing on me tremendously.
Since Microsoft was offering a Windows 8 upgrade for $39.99 until the end of the month, I decided to bite and upgrade while the cost was still low. I ran the install process late last night and woke up to a completely different operating system interface. It was pretty clear from the start that Microsoft is trying to take some of the tablet market. However, in doing so they appear to have failed the desktop market.
In high school, I had this really awesome, yet strangely funny math teacher who taught us pre-calculus and calculus my junior and senior years respectively. During senior year (the class body was the same both years), someone asked me if I would secretly record wacky quotes our math teacher said in class. The plan was to put together a going-away present / yearbook for him since he had already retired but stayed one more year to finish up our senior year class. The following are all quotes he said in class. Some of them are out of context, some of them are very strange, but they are all very memorable.
Earlier this year, I ran the Warrior Dash in New York to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It was definitely a ton of fun, and I’m glad I did it. I wrote a summary of it for the Physical Fitness Community Blog, one of the many community blogs part of the Stack Exchange network.
You can read all about my Warrior Dash adventure by visiting the link below:
I bought an automatic feeder for my fish recently for an upcoming vacation. I tested it out for a few days, and I think it probably isn’t a good choice for my fish or my tank. The feeder I bought rotates a drum that dispenses a preset amount of food either every 12 hours or 24 hours. Controlling the amount of food dispensed is done by flipping a lever that controls how wide the food repository opening is. The mechanism is very simple and runs on batteries, but what doesn’t quite work out for me is the fish’s reaction to it.
I think mobile payments would be very cool to have, but I’m not blown away by the current solutions right now (at least in the US market). LevelUp seems to be gaining a lot of momentum right now around me (since they do have a large Boston-area presence). I had heard of them some while ago, and now I’m seeing a lot of their mobile station things at various in-store retailers and restaurants. They appeared recently within the past few weeks at my office complex’s cafeteria, and yesterday representatives were there to promote LevelUp.
I attended my first PAX East last weekend and picked up a few gems of quotes from one panel titled “The Good. The Bad, The Community Manager/PR Rep. AKA How Keeping it Real Can Go So Wrong.” While I still have yet to recount my whole experience of PAX East, I really enjoyed the panel about community management. One of the panelists, for the sake of time (even when the awesome enforcers let us stay longer), turned the Q&A portion into a lightning-round of questions. Some of these quotes are from that Q&A. Others are from the regular session.
because people are not finite state machines
– R.B. Boyer
Person 1: Hey, he’s breaking the code again!
Me: Wait, what? Who’s breaking it? You mean Person 2 or a customer?
Person 1: Person 2.
Me: Oh, okay… whatever.
Person 2: What do you mean, “whatever”!?
Yesterday I tried learning some CSS3 on my own in order to convert my kung fu school’s website to be more “modern” in terms of technology. I’ve been using a modified Ocean Mist 2.0 theme and hacked up the CSS a bit to fit what I wanted. In doing so, I noticed that there is lots of CSS rules to create shadows and rounded corners. These were easily the most visible visual elements that I knew CSS3 addresses. I experimented with box-shadow and border-radius on a test site, and the results are positive so far.
Here is the original version which uses its own with a background image:
and this is the version using CSS3:
The visual difference is minimal, and it’s a heck of a lot easier to change a few values in CSS instead multiple properties (and potentially an image file). The CSS3 tags basically eliminates the extra background image inside a div tag and its associated CSS to display the image sprite (I originally used SpriteMe.org to cut down some bytes). I haven’t cleaned up the CSS or image files yet, but I imagine that this will cut down a lot of extra bytes in the whole theme.
What I’m not thrilled about though is maintaining backward compatibility for older browsers. It’s nice that I get to define a single CSS property so I don’t have to use or wrangle a massive CSS file. I don’t like the idea of sticking in vendor prefixes let alone trying to be compliant with a whole gamut of browsers and include some fallback code/mechanisms. That’s partly the reason why I haven’t switched to using CSS3 (aside from my lack of time). Even so, I’m not too, too worried about browser compatibility being a huge problem since the website’s reach is very localized.
This is just an exploration really since there isn’t a huge need for me to do it. What’s in place right now works just fine and across many browsers. There aren’t any issues with that.