Category: Life

Wow, I did a new sig from NX whilst being inspired from listening some LOTR music. Although not under The Influence, I sure felt as hell that I was, esp. considering I ended up making something with the message “peace.seal” and a heavily modified picture of a butterfly I had as a wallpaper.

Actually no, I just shrunk it and put it to the right edge, then posted another copy in the background to fill the rest of the space. I then used the smudge tool to blend the two images together nicely. I used the font “A Drink for All Ages” I had found in a search for the graphics on
the website I was designing for my mom, and put it in the left corner. Since there was a blue blur there that mixed too well with the font’s intended colour, I smudged the background
colour over it, and then copied the wallpaper image again and placed it in the middle. I cut out everything but just the leafs, and used a gaussian blur to well, blur it and recreate that spot
I had removed from the left. After adding a black border and another internal border with a screen-multiply blending option to lighten its colours, I was nearly done. The font had no periods, so I rasterized the layer and took the top part of the L to make a dot. Then I moved the various pieces of the text to look more natural. Anyways, this was relatively easy to do (esp compared with my previous sig where I had spent 3 hours putting 1 and 0s to form what I thought were nice looking streaks). It just goes to show you how it isn’t the time you put into it as much as the original creative idea you had to begin with.

I’m sure this must have bored the hell out of you readers, so I shall just conclude with yet some more egoistical content: people liked it. Moreso than my previous efforts. Simpler was indeed
better.

First day back at uni. This upcomming semester will be easier for me, since I shall be undertaking 4 courses instead of the previous semester’s 6. Furthermore, I should be done earlier in the day, and start on average later as well. Of course, the unforseen DGDs and labs sort of dissolve this illusion, but its all good for now.

On a second note, I want to do something special with the girl I really really like. Only I can’t think up of anything :S There are no good movies out, the city is sort of desolate at this time
of year, there will be no Canal to skate on this time round…

But before the week is out I shall come up with something!

Xmas went well, but I’ve been getting these mails from Rogers indicating that my bandwidth has nearly used up. WTF! There’s enough of it to allow at least 2000 visitors, implying that they
load the webcam image 10 times [ie. they stare at me for a period of 5 minutes straight each visit]! Then there’s my 8KB site which also reached the 300MB bandwidth limit. A site with nothing more than 3 disfunctional links to my university courses of Fall 2003. If every ottawa u. student went there each day, there would still be enough bandwidth to go around. So this whole situation is crock, and unfortunately a call back from Rogers solved nothing. Barh.

These guys have issues.

1:19AM: Studying for chem exam. Will do so until chem exam. In 8 hours.

Well, I haven’t abandoned this site, but I’ve been kept busy with exams. And PC Games. KOTOR is a fine game, but CS:CZ is quite the opposite. Probably one of the worst games I have ever
[theoretically since it isn’t released yet] played. It has no story backbone, you have no rewards for completing missions, your teammates are actually NPCs doing cameos only at certain
points and can’t hit ennemies for jack during those sparse and few moments, you can’t pick up the guns of your fallen enemies, the whole thing just plops you into different locales with not
so much as an explanation as to why. And to think this is what they wanted to release onto the market. This is not to mention that I got stuck in some walls twice over, and the enemy AI is
completely AWOL (think Serious Sam but dumber), the graphics are horrible, and the gameplay a mix of Serious Sam and SOF.

I remember the original preview for this game when it was headed by Garage Games a few years back. It would seem they jettisoned the whole concept of having bots for teammies, rewarding you with equipment, and having some kind of story to fit the mini-campaigns with themselves. The original SOF is essentially the same concept as this title, but fairs better in pretty much every departments.

KOTOR on the other hand, is an excellent game. It was somewhat short, but the missions were fun, the locales interesting, the experience rewarding. This has to be one of the finest Star Wars
games ever released. Although somewhat limited in scope, your path truly seemed dynamic in this otherwise static world.