Hi there. Yep it’s that time again. What time? That time where I try to actually get this blog started off right by adding some content. Yeah.. I know I should probably re-name this thing to “Textwall Quarterly” at least then I have an excuse. Anyhow here we go again. This post will be related to EVE Online. Probably the most awesome spaceship based scifi MMO on this friggn’ planet which I play for quite some time now. I jumped into my pod back in early ’05 to be exact for those who want to know… and for those who don’t, well now you know it anyways. If you do not actually play EVE Online or are anyhow familiar with it don’t fear. As long as you’re interested in science-fiction in general you most likely find this post enjoyable as well.
A few words about the page design
I was asked about my theme of this blog a couple of times so I figured “let’s throw in a quick article”. Such a thing is a bit easier to find and also easier to reference if the question comes up again. Anyhow currently I’m not using a custom made theme. I went with a pre-made one called Jarrah 1.7 made by Templates NeXt. The original plan was to use it temporarily and then create a custom made one. However I decided to modify this one because it’s a nice base to work from.
Currently I intend to fine tune the typography a little. Meaning fonts, font size, word / letter / line spacings and such things. I also want to make use of some of the already usable HTML5 / CSS3 features (maybe even go with custom fonts I don’t know yet). Most of the eye candy will however be optional in case your browser doesn’t support it which it however should. Why? Because I believe if you browse the internet a lot you should always use an up-to-date browser especially because of all the security concerns with outdated browsers. You’ll also get to see all that planned stuff when sticking to the hated Internet Explorer provided you go with the newest version, since IE9 can handle all that very well.
Anyhow that’s it for now and even longer than was planned.
Books: “Ancient” but still a good source for scifi
Although I’m a computer and scifi geek who loves technological advancements, in particular the numerous electronic gadgets we have these days there is one particular piece of ancient technology I re-learned to embrace just a short time ago. I’m speaking of books here. The good old plain printed ones. What I figured out was, those books are still one of the best, if not the best source of new stuff for scifi loving people like me.
Let’s face it there is not really much happening in the scifi business on television or the big screens right now. Sure there are some decent movies and TV shows out there right now but nothing of the sort that would tie me to the screen for hours and leaves me forgetting all that is around me for a little while. So they are not really “epic stuff”.
EVE Online: A Future Vision
Just wanted to show you guys a little trailer about an online game I play that goes by the name of EVE Online. It’s a spaceship based and really complex MMO. The stuff you see in this trailer isn’t really how gameplay is currently. The stuff with actually walking around on stations with your avatars is in development and scheduled to be released around summer and the planetary combat portion is part of a completely other game that’s currently in development.
However I just figured it’s a really nice future vision the developers have for their long running and pretty successful game. In addition it’s a pretty good and very solid video rendering/editing work the guys have done there.
Yeah and to be honest I wanted to try out the youtube embedded player thing. So here you go.
I’m doing it wrong
So it’s been about three weeks since this blog got started and that’s about the time frame when my last article hit the interwebs on this particular blog. That’s not really what I planned but unfortunately I didn’t really had that much time during the last few weeks to do some posting of my own. That’ll change shortly as I got some nice drafts for a few new articles up that just need a little refining. So there will be more regular updates from now on but not in the style of “oh look what I had for dinner last night”… well there might be if it was really really incredible, like not from this world and I think you should try it too but yeah… let’s not dwell there. It’ll be, more or less, meaningful and/or cool stuff.
On a related note I discovered somewhat of a “bug” within my WordPress configuration today which more or less prevented comment posting. The system was configured in a way that comments would require administrative approval before being displayed. While some people like that in order to prevent spams I usually want to give the automated spam filters a try at first. All that isn’t really a big deal the huge problem was, as moronic as I can be sometimes, the notifications about new comments that have been written, were sent to an email address I no longer check on a regular basis. Both issues are now resolved. In short: I fixed comments.
I finally know what “Chrome Fast” means
So Google’s web browser Chrome is out for quit some time now and I’m sure a lot of you already use it or have at least tried it. If you’ve not done so do it now. Although I wasn’t really interested in Chrome until a few weeks ago I can’t believe I haven’t tried it earlier. It’s incredibly fast, the UI is minimalistic as is the feature list.
When you install Chrome you basically get a very rudimentary browser which can display a modern website without any problems. There’s no BT client, no email client function, no IRC, no nothing but displaying websites, downloading stuff, making bookmarks and a word spelling correction. Everything else however is available via plug-ins and exactly that is the beauty of it. You only need to install stuff you’re actually using not like the waaay to overloaded Opera or the too much bloated Firefox. The side effect of this is, that Chrome is a damn fast browser. I couldn’t really believe it myself but even complex websites with a lot of JavaScript load pretty darn quick.
Think I’ll stick with Chrome now, even though it comes from the evil corporate overlord named Google. Those guys just know how to code a browser there’s no denying that.
So if you haven’t tried it and you’re tired of the speed of Firefox or can’t stand the feature overloaded Opera anymore go give it a try. Oh and if you’re using the IE, especially IE6 you definitely should get another browser no matter which one. Even Microsoft wants to see IE6 bite the dust…
By the way if you’re a Linux user what do you guys run? Chrome as well or something else that is similarly fast and minimalistic?
The elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top
So… I finally snapped, went nuts, gone ba-zerk, fruit looped… I’m a few fries short of a happy meal.
How so? Well I finally did the one thing I always thought I’d never do: start a blog. Might as well bow down and jump on the Facebook Bandwagon, too… ah not quite there yet. So why the heck start a blog when there is more than a gazillion, which actually is way to much, out there already?
Simply because I can and I’m somewhat bored with a little too much time on my hands here and there. So might as well use it and do something besides gaming, watching every single bit of good scifi stuff I can get my hands on, which is not really much these days to be honest. Wanna know more about that completely nuts person writing this blog then check out the about page no point in writing/posting it all here again. That would be a bit redundant and that’s not the good kind of redundancy believe me. So what will this here all be about? Hit the jump (or not) and I’ll tell you… maybe… (continue reading…)