“Never stop chasing windmills”

July 16th, 2009 Comments Off

My father came up to me one day, with an odd statue of Don Quijote made out of nails and screws and other odd pieces and decided to get it for me.

3727713704_e6f6c30175

I was surprised of getting such an odd gift in for no particular reason, but just as I was about to leave I asked him why he thought it was a good gift for me. To which he replied:

“It’s so you’ll remember to never stop chasing windmills”

I was puzzled, but at that time I didn’t think much more about it. But given some recent events in my personal and professional life, I started to understand what he really meant.

I’m a child at heart, as most people are, eager to obtain and toy with new things, feelings, places. To discover and experience as many things as possible. One of the things that recently made me happy was the new camera I bought, which surprised me with it’s incredibly quality right on the first shots.

But it wasn’t until I took off it’s “training wheels” that reality hit me. It wasn’t me who was adjusting the settings, make them just right so the shot would come out great. The camera did that for me. And taking a picture without those assistants isn’t as easy as it sounds, but I’m slowly grasping it, and applying what I’ve learned from friends and relatives.

How long I will use this camera is anybody’s guess, but in the same way that I use a computer and never get tired of it, I wonder if it’s really possible to get tired of photography? Perhaps one day I’ll get tired of the device itself, or feel tempted to obtain a newer model with new things, most of which I’ll never use.

But I don’t think I’ll ever lose that “want to discover”, whether it’s in my photography, my code, my games, my life, I’ll always thrive to find and chase new windmills.

Given wings between 4 walls

June 17th, 2009 Comments Off

A false feeling of freedom, much like our Democracy, is one of the best ways to keep people under control.

And many times people you relate too will give you a bit more rope for you to roam a bit more freely, at first you’ll feel exhilarated with all the new things you can accomplish. That is until you realize you can’t do much more than what you were doing before, in fact, when applied to a work position, this means you continue to do the same as before, and a bit more!

The only way for you to escape the walls or grasp placed upon you, even with your newly found “freedom” is to keep pushing the walls back and breaking the limits of what you are and aren’t supposed to do.

You have to question your ability to fulfill a certain task as much as your superior questions your ability to respond to them. The people who rise in high-hierarchy companies faster are not those that limit themselves to what they should do, but those that take the extra steps and blur the lines between their rank and the next.

It’s not about whether your good enough or not to accomplish the task, it’s whether or not you’ll take the extra effort, go the extra mile, read an extra book, and accomplish the task successfully. As Paul Arden’s book I recently read is called, and underline once more: “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be.”

MiddleClickClose for Safari 4

June 9th, 2009 § 2

As much as I disliked Safari 4 Beta’s new tabs, because they made the browser incredibly hard to use in terms of tab management, the new final version is almost flawless.

Being that “almost” means you can’t middle click to close an open tab, instead, by default you have to do CMD+W or click the little close button on the left side of each tab, which kind of makes the whole “fastest browser on earth” thing silly, since you take a bit longer to operate it.

Thankfully, a nice guy called Joey Gibson made a small plugin that enables this simple feature. In order to install it you need to first get SIMBL and install it (if you haven’t already).

Then you need to install the MiddleClickClose plugin following the instructions on Joey’s site.

  1. Get the binary package: MiddleClickClose.zip
  2. Create ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins if it doesn’t exist
  3. Unzip the MiddleClickClose.zip into this directory. You should end up with a directory called MiddleClickClose.bundle
  4. Restart Safari

And finally you need to apply this fix that Joey also explains in this entry with a small change:

You can edit ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/MiddleClickClose.bundle/Contents/Info.plist, changing 5525.13 to 5528.16

Note: in order to open the “MiddleClickCLose” bundle, you need to right click it and select “Show Package Contents”.

Instead of the number Joey gives, use this one:

  • 5530.17

When I loaded Safari it instantly told me that the plugin had been made for the wrong version of Safari, and showed me the version number of the current version, so it was a pretty obvious fix. Even so, some people are less tech savvy, so I figured I’d post this to help them out.

I take no credit for this fix and only did this for the community. If you want to give anyone credit, then go to Joey’s blog and thank him.

The state of the gaming and mobile gaming industry

May 25th, 2009 Comments Off

When we think about great gaming companies (nowadays) three names come to mind: Sony, Nintendo and Sega Microsoft.

But lately we saw the joining of another potential competitor to those three: Apple. With their incredibly hyped cellphone and it’s great touchscreen interface game companies seized the opportunity to try and grab some of it’s increasingly-bigger market share and develop games for it. » Read the rest of this entry «

IE6 conscientious web design workflow

April 25th, 2009 Comments Off

Even though my company has decided to stop supporting IE6 for our upcoming projects it doesn’t mean we should ignore it completely. At least I don’t.

A lot of web design firms have been pushing and advertising different websites to try to “kill” IE6. Expression Engine will stop supporting it in their next release, and franqly, with IE now in version 8 we have very little reaason to support it unless you live in an under-developed country where PC specs are minimum. » Read the rest of this entry «

New template

April 21st, 2009 Comments Off

As a sign of having free room to breathe again in my host I decided to spice up my blog design and bring it something to what I wish to give my visitors when they visit my “custom tailored” which will be coming soon™.

This template I’m using this time, is what all websites in a perfect world would look like. A world where customers wouldn’t say “let’s use up this empty space over here and put animated banner gifs with comets that fly around them” (sadly, this was a real customer).

I’ll be changing the title’s color to blue tomorrow, and some of the orange highlights, but only because blue is a color that is better suited for this site than it.

This incredibly beautiful template called Oulipo was made by an equally beautiful and talented designer called Andrea Mignolo. I thank her for making this available to everyone and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I wish that one day all websites look “like this”, but seeing how intrusive advertising seems to be this year, I really don’t see that happening any time soon.

CSS layouts with 1, 2 or even 3 columns – dear Lord!

March 31st, 2009 Comments Off

The company I work for, Navega Bem, has an interesting team to say the least. Each of them have very specific skill sets and personalities, but what makes it the most interesting is that almost everyone performs a very specific job.

With this said, I’m mostly responsible for technical assistance to our customers, fixing small mistakes in websites and putting together all of the designs my colleagues put together. What makes that task interesting is that they know very little, if anything at all, about HTML and CSS.

This results in some very awkward designs that make my life a living hell, though I admit they help me tackle some unusual design issues. Today’s task was to make a layout that could be either 2 or 3 columns. And I wanted to achieve that without resulting to multiple templates for the website, so I used a very simple solution: margins. » Read the rest of this entry «

Not dead – just out of webspace

March 4th, 2009 Comments Off

I’m currently out of space in my webhost and the free size has reached a critically low level. Although I can still post a few more articles, I’d feel much better if I could get some free space back.

The reason for this is long and complicated, and I’m certain that I’ll be able to write a great article about how it happened, why, and how I worked around it.

(the space isn’t being occupied by the blog alone, I’m currently hosting a few websites the company I’m working for is/was developing)

Manga users rejoice with Windows 7

January 26th, 2009 Comments Off

Every week me and some friends “gather up” in some key websites to obtain the latest chapters of our favorite japanese comics. Some of you may know them as TV shows, as the most popular usually become licensed and then turned into a cartoon show that we call “Anime”. Examples of such Mangas are Dragonball, and more recently Naruto and One Piece.

The latest chapters of our favorite Manga are usually released by some dedicated teams that translate the scans, the scanlators, and distributed by popular file-sharing sites.

For many years Manga fans have been forced to find and use programs that support image-browsing inside zip files in order to read their weekly chapters, unless they had the patience to individually unzip all of them.

Although you could already browse files in Windows XP and Vista, we were still limited by having to single click each page and close the viewer in order to browse a whole chapter or volume.

Thankfully Windows 7 supports file browsing zip files almost as if you were looking at an ordinary folder. For manga fans this means that no more using ACDsee or another image-viewer program.

I for one welcome 7 as our new image viewer overlord, and it’s about time that someone or something dethroned ACDsee from it’s lonesome throne.

A Retribution Paladin’s thoughts – The Divine Shield Nerf

December 29th, 2008 Comments Off

There’s no point in beating around the bush. Divine Shield is getting nerfed.

With Wotlk most of our DPS stopped depending on our melee combat swings and seal damage, and more on skill damage. With that said, and given that roughly 70% of our damage comes from our spells and special strikes, it just didn’t make sense to give us full invulnerability and full damage during it’s duration.

Although I’ve used Divine Shield in the past as an offensive spell, it’s very clear that Blizzard doesn’t want it to be an offensive spell anymore. So what can my fellow Retri palas do about it? And I’m talking about the ones that cast the bubble instantly and faceroll on the keyboard after.

  1. Don’t let your enemy gain too much distance – Switch to Seal Of Justice, continue running after your enemy and judging Light or Wisdom, depending on what stat you need at the time. If you let your enemy recover too much when you used the Divine Shield you might as well have let him kill you to start with
  2. Depending on what type of enemy you’re fighting, it is usually after the DS that you should blow your cooldowns, but not your trinket. Your bubble should be your first or second trinket, depending on what spell landed on you (remember to keep your Hand of Freedom hotkey very handy)
  3. Save your trinket and stuns for when you find an opportunity to burst the enemy down. Don’t waste it out of desperation. If you don’t find a proper opportunity to use it, don’t. What’s the use of trinketing out of something to survive some spell or skill if you have no stun to immobilize your target

Rule of thumb is, if there’s a way for you to avoid taking damage do it. And in most cases, if you’re blowing your cooldowns before your target is, you are on your way to a defeat, even if you take him down.

Retribution paladins really shine in burst damage and short combats, but if your fight starts lasting more than a couple of minutes and you blew all your cooldowns before your adversary did you’re already in a bad situation. Exceptions to this rule are, of course, when you have more than one opponent and have to try to quickly burn one down.

And don’t get two upset if you’re taken down in less than 10 seconds. RNG is a big part of this game, and some fights are simply not meant to be won. Then again, the same goes both ways. What distinguishes a good player from a mediocre is what you can do to counter the odds when the RNG is against you.

If you lost a combat by a small margin and your enemy chose to run away than to reduel you then I wouldn’t consider it a complete loss. Just make sure you take note of his nickname and let him have second chance at proving what he’s worth when the odds are equal to both.

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »