Motivational signs are always well… motivational- stuff you usually see lining cubicle walls or classrooms. On the other end of the spectrum, particularly if you use them in another unintended way, come the kind of signs we call de-motivational signs. Coupled with a sense of humor these signs can get rather hilarious, especially when you try to get about a serious message without trying to breaking yourself from laughing bursting uncontrollably.

Nevertheless whatever the purpose, in the game of team fortress these signs are always quite a hit, not to mention great distraction tools as well as anyone who pass by them will pop by them for a read. For this series, lets commemorate steam rolls and team stacking. To save them, just click on them for the fulled sized image, then R-click save image and import them into your game on the multiplayer options menu.

Mmmm steamed rolls

Generic steam roller spray

The teamstacking spray

You can either love or hate steamrolling, nevertheless it’s a merciless culling of the other weaker team by another more power “stacked” team. Often with rather hilarious outcomes to both teams as well usually with no offense to anybody- There was once on a public server where the losing team all simply went spy crab and yes, many endangered crabs were lost in the process as well.

Save the crabs!

Today saw a sad moment and the lost of one of the greatest pop stars in history. Jackson collapsed at a rented home in Holmby Hills in Los Angeles from an cardiac arrest, attempts at resuscitating him by his personal physician and at the UCLA Medical Center was unsuccessful.

Though speculation was already turning to what killed the 50-year-old “King of Pop” just weeks before a long-awaited series of comeback concerts around the world. A family attorney said on Friday he had been concerned that Jackson’s use of prescription drugs for dancing-related injuries would eventually prove fatal and that the entertainer’s inner circle had ignored his warnings. There is still no word on insurance coverage for the cancellation of concerts which sold-out 750,000 tickets within hours. While the internet flooded large-scale outpouring of grief among fans. We must not forget what made Jackson one of the most iconic pop star who brought us not only chart-breaking great songs and the moonwalk, but a whole new revolution for the evolution of music.

Jackson dominated the charts in the 1980s and was one of the most successful entertainers of all time, with a lifetime sales tally estimated at 750 million records, 13 Grammy Awards and several seminal music videos. His album, “Thriller”, was the best-selling album of all time, and on the record books as well, with more than 100 million sales

“Michael was and will remain one of the greatest entertainers that ever lived,” said Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, Jackson’s first label boss. “He was exceptional, artistic and original. He gave the world his heart and soul through his music.”

Jackson’s reputation as a singer and dancer was overshadowed in recent years by his increasingly abnormal appearance and bizarre lifestyle, which included his friendship with a chimp, a preference for the company of children and the acquittal of child molestation charges. Through the good, bad and ugly, nothing can ever change what Jackson had done and accomplised as a talented musician himself.

I had always admired Jackson as a genuine and talented musician- one of the few of actually write and choreograph his own songs. But never considered myself to be a hard-core fan. However, people often underestimate the power of music, and the effect that it has on us. We sometimes forget how a great song with a feel-good message lifts us up, and makes us smile and remember the place we had the most fun dancing to it and with whom. Just as we endured the death of Elvis, the breakup of oldies and legends such as the Beatles, Abba or the Beegees- songs my parents grew up listening, but something I never learned to appreciate and connect as much as what Michael Jackson does with his songs.

I guess I will come to understand that as with anybody who comes by and made that place in you, what will determine the fate of anybody is ultimately the test of time itself.

May you rest in peace, Michael Jackson, you are indeed a thriller.

Well the site had been fully upgraded with all the basic necessities up. The tough part is of course converting all the current articles and tutorials into wordpress itself. What’s more the site is xhtml validated now, so that will put some standardization into the site itself. Strangely, xhtml seems to be like a milestone or sort, just like ISO ratings a company can have- Nice to have and shows that you are really into your stuff, but not a necessity but rather more of bragging rights.

As with ISO standards itself comes with it the similar flaw as as well, as the validation is only true for a sector and not the whole company, the same can be said for one page, which in this case is the root of this site. However, the same can’t be said for other pages on the site as well- code such as embedded youtube video and third party wordpress plug-ins always include non-compliant code, it just mess up everything. The site is still undergoing testing so do feel free to report any bugs when you encounter them. I thank those visitors who sent their feedback and problems they encountered on the site previously and I say, those really helped alot in the troubleshooting of this revised design.

What’s left now is to create different CSS stylesheets for different occasions of the site, where the site can call them up automatically when the date falls on a certain day, like day Christmas or even the upcoming Singapore national day. Something I’ve always wanted to do to inject some form of surprise for my visitors. Till then, it’s about 3 more months till my uni term starts and my college director of studies had already been in contact with regards to revision already, oh well let get workin’.

Following the upgrade of the site, I’ve successfully integrated gallery2 with wordpress 2.8, able to call wordpress functions within gallery itself and maintain your wordpress sidebar. This was not previously achievable with gallery1 considering that some wordpress and gallery share some variables which needs to be redefined to avoid conflict, with this new setup I am glad to say that problem do not exist now.

True there are other plugins for wordpress such as WPG2. WPG2 looked promising, as it allows you to call and display photos in your posts as well, but it’s too evasive for just the simple need to integrate gallery into your wordpress theme. What’s more WPG2 requires users to disable URL rewrite which messed up my permalinks and my old gallery URL structure, too much of a hassle.

All what needs to be done is just the ability to call any wordpress function within gallery and maintain the same layout as your blog through all gallery’s pages. Though this is a simple mod, surprisingly, there had not been any well documentation on the internet integrating them together, so I will just write one here for anyone looking to do the same.

Step 1- Including the wordpress header
For starters, we need to include the wordpress header in all of gallery’s pages, we do so by including it in main.php found in your gallery’s root folder. You can include it anywhere by lets do it at the top of the file.

In main.php find:

Then add at the bottom add the path to your blog header file, you can omit “wordpress/” or otherwise in the require path if your blog is on your site’s root:

Step 2- Including your wordpress template
Next with your chosen gallery template to modify, (I will recommend one which you can choose from the gallery’s website which reassembles closely your current theme, then you might only need minimal tweaks to suit the stylesheet your site’s layout) open the theme.tpl file and you will notice that the file follows the typical layout of a html file with html, body and their respective closing tags as well.

Heads up for the new clean design I’ve been working on over the past months. The site is running on WP 2.8 and I will be upgrading the photo gallery soon as well. Part of the update which took so much time was to update the various textual content around the site such as the about and new portfolio sections, not to mention taking away some outdated or irrelevant ones as well, very much like spring cleaning. The site had been tested on Firefox 2-3, IE6-8 and Safari 3.

I wrote some new custom wordpress plugins like the amazon wishlist and the running events widget which shows the next 5 upcoming events on the sidebar and a full list for the year on the main page. yes, though you might find similar plugins released before, but sometimes, not all plugins satisfies your needs or are just simply unavailable on the WP plugin site, so what else to do but to write your own? If I have time, I might clean the code up alittle and put it up available for public download.

Initially, the new design were consistent among all the browsers except IE6, which can’t handle PNG transparencies and really messes up all the divs and had to be repositioned in a separate “quick fix” css file. Makes me wonder why did MS release a browser which can’t even render webpages correctly. Oh but got that settled anyway, so if you are an IE6 user, you won’t be left out. Oh yes, did I mention the site’s new core layout is table-less and purely CSS driven as well? You can even hide the menus on the left and drag/rearrange those on the right as well. Whee a new milestone!

The site loads much faster now, but there are still much CSS tweaking and content around the site to clean up and code, so please mind the sawdust while I renovate. In the meantime, do feel free to report any bugs you see on the site as well.

Well it really had been sometime since I’ve posted an entry here. Haha to the extent of some of my regular readers contacting me about my absence. Haha yes of course I am still around, my apologies.

So what had been keeping me busy? well much, it’s only 4 months before my school term starts in October. And there is still a HECK lot to do, but most of them won’t come in the full force until August. Where things like visa, medical checkups, chest X-rays, etc can only be settled. My college had sent me a set of prep stuff, such as things to read up on currently what I see installed are stuff on Further maths, which really got the gears in my head creaking again. Other than that, there’s other niffy stuff such as C++ and engineering drawing, yay! The bad is that I might be tested on this by my director of studies once I arrive on campus… JANG JANG JANG! Crap, I should have attended those advanced math prep courses my lecturer recommended me in SP. Time to load my cart on Amazon for those programming and math textbooks/bibles pretty soon.

Whats more, I’ve busted my leg, so you won’t see me running wayyy so often now, as instructed by my doctor as well (yes alot had happened right). To make matters worst, I have reservist to do this month as well. Just- yayyy! It’s my first but it’s an ultra low key one, just great. And when I though that’s over, crap I have Manning to do few months down the road over the NDP period as well, oh bummer. In a nutshell, it is come back to Singapore for chores and serve, then head back overseas again.

Oh well, at least when the country is happily enjoying the NDP you know that you all will be safe not only from terrorists but long range ballistic nuclear missiles, flu viruses, crooked bridges, curry bashings or raining cows as well, as I will be DA PROTECTORZ of de mutherland! (no offense) wahahaha, waa-hahahaha! *lightning strikes in background*.

For this period as well, I won’t be accepting any more new freelance projects, not only I do not have time for them, but as I still have a waiting list from my returning customers to clear for now (dang it’s just hard to turn down returning customers). So sorry if I do not reply in timely fashion your enquires about this or that.

Saving the best for last, one of the other reasons why I am away (which I guess you all will like) is that I’ve been working on the revised version of the site. The reason why I am taking so long are the various testing I had to do on localhost over various browsers before I port the new design online, so as to minimize downtime on the site as well. Much of the content around the site such as the about section will be updated as well, as they are quite irrelevant now. The code is more of less finalized and I am just wrapping up the codes for my custom plugins on wordpress.

This is a very interesting video on open/closed mindedness. So if you always go around telling people they are closed minded or telling people to be more open minded, you should watch this.

As part of the series of “Meet the cast” in the uber cool game, Team Fortress, which sadly had saw me playing for a good ol’ 10 years since 1999 with team fortress classic and now it’s sequel, team fortress 2. This latest installment is an early leaked version not released by VALVe yet, but it’s still cool as hell (no pun intended). As with this video, a keen eye may be needed to get a foothold or what to expect on future item updates for the game- other new in-game items can be seen in this video as well, such as the new “Saxton Hale’s croc-toothbelt” sniper hat and the heavy’s football helmet in the intel room which are new headgear entries for the respectively classes. Anything related to the scout’s mom, well that’s dealt in pure James Bond style.

With the game’s mature theme, expect gore to go with the video haha.

Ahem, now gentlemen, the video at the click: