With all the noise I’ve been making, I’m sure everyone here already knows what’s happening… yup, 4 days from now [on October 15] I’m taking a rather long trip home. I haven’t been there in so many years… and I miss everyone and everything dearly. This is very dreamy….
I’m already done with 95% of the packing. The only remaining items are ones that will be using till the last minutes… This whole thing happened quite suddenly and without much of a planning, which adds quite a bit to the whole excitement factor.
4 days left… only 4…. can hardly wait…. ahhhhh……..
So, after a whole lot of searching and being as horribly picky as I usually am about my gear, I finally found me the perfect backpack to have support for my notebook, as well as the rest of my rather massive load of stuff. And to my un-surprise, it turned out to be Swiss Gear. Love it!
I’ve been playing with some new options and extensions for Verse in the past few days.. and so far it looks like I’ve came up with a couple of useful new tools that I’m pretty satisfied with.
First of all, Verse pages now have a couple of “statistics” lines at the very bottom. There’s a list of contributors, and also a number of the times a page has been loaded, and the date of last edit on the page.
The edit pages now include a toolbar… exactly like the one Wikipedia has. Took a rather ugly hack on my template among other things… but it’s neat. You can use it to add some simple wiki syntax.
The video embedding tool can now embed more than just YouTube videos. A bunch of other services including Vimeo are also supported now.
I re-did the feed reader tool too, from the scratch. Now you can display both RSS and Atom feeds on the wiki pages, including the descriptions. And the way it shows up on the page can be customized too.
And of course my favorite new tool which is not even a real extension [it’s more of a template hack], is a very small and simple syntax that allows you to hide a section of the page, and show it with a click on a link. This is specially useful since sometimes a wiki page can get very very long, and if there are a ton of videos posted to a page for instance, it’s better if the entire content of the page doesn’t show up at once. I also did consider having a “next page” option… in fact that’s what I did first. But then that was too bloggie… and I wanted all the sections of the page to be there at the first look, and just hide the content. So this looks like the best solution, and works perfectly now. =)
There’s a ton of more new features.. and you can check out Verse’s help page for a more complete list of what tools are available now. 😉
So in case there’s anybody out there who doesn’t already know, in the past week I’ve been busy knitting up a new online tool which I’m calling Verse. It’s a wiki / scrapbook / data collection tool, which in time me and fiends will hopefully fill up with interesting stuff. And if you’re interested in adding content, you can easily sign up and do so.
I’ve tinker with the code quite a bit, and there are tons of capabilities that may not be very obvious right now due to the fact that there’s not enough content to display everything, but I have added some information to the help page. Both HTML and wiki syntax are allowed in every page. If you’d like to know how a certain something is done, you can just check out the source code of the page that contains the element you’re looking for.
So…. check it out!
As I’m sure you all know by now, a mix of disappointment with first Last.fm and then to a smaller extent Blip.fm got me thinking about my own online music player… and that’s how Melange came to be. I’ve been using it to play some of my favorites from independent / creative commons / demoscene artists, and so have a number of my friends. And by the way, it’s accessible for guest via username “guest” and password “guest”. 😉 And what I totally dig about it is that my tracks do get scribbled to Last.fm through Ampache [the software for Melange].
So in the past few days I added some more music to the Melange collection, namely my entire SinQ playlist. It’s totally awesome music, and if you don’t know SinQ yet I suggest you check it out. =)
So I finally got around to uploading some photos from the past couple of weeks. They’re in this album. Also, I’m usually not much for showing off but in this case I absolutely have to. =) You may notice my very pretty shirt in few of a photos including this mandatory exit shot. Well, this was my birthday gift from an awesome friend and the print design is his own. You can check out Frank’s online shop here, he has some really fantastic designs. =)
Oh by the way…. apparently, it’s aaaallllll my fault. 😉
Well I feel completely lost about LOST now! =P This rather famous sci-fi series which 
managed to get my attention only after its mid 3rd season [due to the first seasons being rather boring in my opinion!], has now reached a place where I can’t stop wondering what in the universe is going to happen next! The series has been extremely exciting during the current season [5th], and the recent 2 hour MIND BLOWING episode has really left me hanging! I just can’t stop speculating! =D Jacob DEAD???? We finally got to see Jacob and he’s dead now? That’s just not happening! And the bomb finally went off! At this point, everything has been annihilated and I haven’t got the slightest idea how the next episode is even going to begin!
Big kudos to the producers and writers, for creating something that really gets under my skin! =)
So on Sunday I was out with my mom for the Mother’s Day, and guess what we did. We went and watched the new Star Trek movie! =) I know, probably not the most typical Mother’s Day activity. 😉 But you have to keep in mind that it’s my mom we’re talking about here, and she’s as big a sci-fi fan as myself. So for us, a new Star Trek movie is considered a major major event! =)
Honestly at first I was worried about getting disappointed. I’ve always been such a huge fan of Star Trek, but the last TV series with Archer didn’t really catch my attention that much. [I have to admit though, the series got much better in the latter seasons, and the very last episode was a master piece.] Also, I have always been a much bigger fan of TNG characters than the original series….. so, altogether I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Well, it turned out that the movie is in fact AWESOME, MARVELOUS, FANTASTIC and I could go on like this forever. =) I can’t put in words how much I enjoyed this movie! I can’t say much since I don’t want to give way spoilers, but I lets just say that this isn’t like any normal prequel. 😉 You think you know what has happened and what will happen? Well, think again. Also, I love the fact that this movie has re-built the main characters of the original series so that on one hand the signature characteristics aren’t lost, and on the other hand there’s much more koolness to them now than there ever was before. The movie has an awesome plot, awesome characters, awesome visuals and basically awesome everything.
And…. uhmmmm……. Spock and Uhura?? How exactly did that happen??? Well that’s certainly cute! =D
Picture of me at the “event”. 😉 Click for higher res.
