New site version! It's been long overdue for a revamp, but a lot of work has gone into improving functionality.

Some new features include:

• reorganized gallery
• commenting now available for gallery images
• lightbox images (no more pop ups, so long as you have Javascript enabled)
• AJAX comment forms
• easier social bookmarking with AddThis.com widget
• easier-to-read color scheme :)

There has also been a lot of optimazation of the code and database (which is more or less negligable to the viewer, but helps the developer - me - keep things running smoothly). The site has been tested on Firefox 3 and MSIE 7. Due to inadvertent circumstance, there has been minimal testing on MSIE 6 as well, but please remember that I do not intend to support it anymore.  If you find anything that looks odd or isn't working, please don't hesitate to email me about it.

Let me introduce Cadee, the pinnacle of evolution in my Spore-iverse.

After a relatively easy progression from the cell stage through the tribal stage, I found myself in some trouble at the civilization stage. The green nation petitioned me, "help us go to war with the blue nation," and because the blue nation was safely far away, I agreed. Unfortunately, declaring war on the blue nation was tantamount to declaring war on its ally, the orange nation, who was right next door to me at the time. Whoops. While struggling to defend my little city against the orange guys, and take a city or two for ourselves in the process, the mighty red nation gobbled up all the other nations in the blink of an eye. Generous bribes and compliments to the reds then became the order of the day.

So there I am with two cities under my control, while the red nation controls the rest of the whole darn planet. Huh. Well, we were on quite cordial terms, so it was easy to allow my cities to sit around and generate a lot of money while nobody came attacking. But war was inevitable when the goal of the civ stage is "conquer the planet," so when enough funding had accumulated, it was off to attack the neighboring cities. For such a fleeting moment, I had control of 4 cities, and this unlocks ... aircraft! But my funds had dwindled and the reds were quickly decimating my territories. It seemed like the end, when suddenly, their thirst for vengeance was quelled (or something), and the reds retreated, leaving me one small, land-locked city to keep. Little did they know, this single act of non-aggression would be their eventual undoing.

For now we had aircraft! Far more efficient in city-capturing, if only we could afford them... No matter; with the reds appeased, it was again a simple matter of waiting for the cash to roll in. Once a surplus was built up, it was all downhill for the reds from there - we went from one city to six in no time. And then this little icon lit up at the bottom of the screen... "I..C... B... M?" As Rirath called it, I had found the "'win the game' button" - one press (and $36k) later, the globe was mine.

And now... to space!

Rented the Wii version of Okami from GameFly, thinking I'd give it another shot despite my bland impressions of the Japanese PS2 version the last time around. Well, after a few hours of trying to play it, I'm sending it back. The Wii controls are just awful; brush techniques take forever to get it right, and fighting requires very deliberate Wiimote swings for consecutive hits. The graphics appear to be a bit more saturated than the PS2 version, but also more blurry, and in a couple of places there was noticeable lag.

In short, avoid this cheap port of the game; stick with the trusty old PS2 version.

Google released a new browser last week, called Chrome. Gave it a shot, and while it's certainly the fastest browser I've seen yet, it holds no real enticement for power users due to its lack of customization and extensibility. And while Google promises that add-ons are forthcoming, I can't see them being too pleased with a potential AdBlock for Chrome. Not that their displeasure will prevent the release of such things, but a nice part of Mozilla's approach is that you can find nearly any available add-on on their centralized site, and that top-recommended extensions - such as AdBlock - are brought to the forefront for your consumption. I can't see Google mimicking a distribution center like that without some restrictions. Still, if you want a very fast browser and don't care about add-ons and such, Chrome might be a good choice for you.

I have been playing Spore, which has sparked a great deal of controversy over its DRM restrictions, while failing to impress some anticipating reviewers. I for one enjoy the game, not so much for the gameplay which is indeed pretty simplistic (so far - I've heard the Space stage gets a bit tougher), but for the fun of taking your single-celled organism and designing iteration after iteration up into a full-blown creature of your own imagination. It's like building that monster out of play-dough when you were a kid, but then having it come to life. If you don't find fun in that sort of thing, then no, you probably wouldn't enjoy Spore. As for the DRM, I agree that it's ridiculous, but I love the logic leap that people make when they say, "well the DRM is awful, so I'm telling everyone to pirate it instead." While I won't say that such a sentiment is right, it's true: this generation can and will pirate something - music, movies, games - if it doesn't like the restrictions placed upon it by its owner(s). That's not going to change, and I think publishers would do themselves a favor to wise up and realize that things like DRM are only hurting their legitimate customers.

Finally, I got an iPhone. Well, not so much "got," as "was provided with." My cell phone is currently a courtesy of my employer, and up until now I was sporting another smartphone, the Treo 755p. It had so many weird problems I don't know where to begin listing 'em. Worst of all, it would often reboot upon receiving an incoming call. It would tell me I had "insufficient memory" when as far as I could tell, more than half the memory was free. It once erased everything on the expansion miniSD card I put into it. And as something of a finale, when I was gathering up my contact info to transfer to the new phone, I noticed it had - for no known reason - assigned my special ringtone for personal contacts to just about everyone on my contact list. In short, it was a device I could force into working, but never really enticed me to want to work with it.

Others in the office seemed to feel similarly only meagerly satisfied with their phones, so when they found out the new iPhone 3G supports MS Exchange (an essential), the switch was quickly approved. While I'm not an Apple fan (this is, in fact, the first Apple product I have ever owned), I must admit this thing is leaps and bounds over my previous smartphone in almost every way. I love how the browser is a real browser, rather than the poor excuse for one that most phones have which will ruin the page layout and can't handle Javascript or any other web technology more advanced than HTML. The touch screen in general is just a good idea too... I love scrolling with my finger, zooming in and out with double-clicks, and just pushing stuff to use it rather than having to navigate there with directional keys as I once did. There are some gripes as well - why no video camera? why no copy and paste? - but overall it's probably the best thing you can get for the money in smartphones.

Last weekend, Rirath and I attended the Flash Forward conference in San Francisco. It was our first time attending, but apparently in years past the conference has had multiple tracks so you could pick your speakers throughout the day. Not this year though; only one track, so you're all gonna hear from the same people whether you've any interest in them and their work or not. I know David Carson has quite the list of credentials, but there was little conveyed through his hour long presentation other than "here is my portfolio of print work from the 80s; let's all look through it together." Similarly, a couple of developers from Disney.com took an hour to tell you about... Disney.com, and how special and cool all of their Flash work is. Well, yeah, it's pretty impressive, but again, give us something to take away other than "look how cool our website is." Obviously they can't give away Disney's code, but tell us about how you made it, how the challenges were overcome; give the rest of us poor saps some advice. A few other presentations also felt more like a sales pitch than anything else...

But that's not to say there was nothing good going on. Surprisingly, some of my favorite presenters spoke more about ideology than about Flash specifically. Hoss Gifford gave a wonderful talk about user interfaces and simplicity; how there is such a thing as over-simplifying (I'm looking at you, Apple hockey-puck mouse), but that at times you have to insist on your design as the right choice (apparently the iPod click wheel received much criticism in early user testing, but they went forward with it anyway and now it's the standard that so many players try to copy). Lynda Weinman (of Lynda.com, of course) also gave a thought-provoking talk about education in the internet age. Our educational system really needs a revamp in light of current technologies and new learning methods; not all of the current practices need to go, but concepts such as on-demand and branching learning, and especially teaching students how to find knowledge rather than rote memorization of it, need to be integrated with the learning process.

There were others I enjoyed as well, and perhaps I'll expand this post (or write another) later. Well, I'll drop one more in for now, since you can go see his neat artwork on his site: Erik Natzke. Overall it was a worthwhile experience, though I would likely favor a return to the multiple tracks style of conference.

As for the website here, it may seem like I'm neglecting it, but really I'm spending more time than usual on it... offline. There should be some big changes coming along soon. In the meantime, forgive me if there aren't a lot of new skins being posted.

Okay, so it seems I lied a little in my previous post when I said there wouldn't be any new content updates for awhile. New Crisis Core skin available. I've also got some drafts for Soul Eater skins...

And I fixed an error that was messing up the comment forms on the newest news posts. This is why the site needs some code development attention. :]

I might've made this post last weekend, but my draft of it was sitting in an unsaved window when Vista decided to reboot itself in the middle of the night for updates. It's a new computer, so I hadn't turned that setting off yet, but it's always been something I hate about Windows - don't turn off my computer without my say-so.

On that note though, having had this computer for about a month now, I don't see what all the negative fuss about Vista is for. I can't name anything specific to complain about, and certain tasks are easier than they were in XP. I can understand that perhaps people were hoping for some innovation from Microsoft (...wait, really?), and this "Midori" project sounds interesting (if anything ever comes of it), but it seems like if you were fine with XP, you should be fine with Vista; it's just another iteration in Windows.

Anyway, on to whatever my original topic was... Ah yes, Comic Con. It came to town last weekend, as it does every year around that time, and it feels like the internet has descended upon San Diego. All the niche-popularity webcomic authors, media companies hawking sci-fi entertainment, anime product retailers passing out cat ears, and dorks dressed up as MySpace.com (true story) flood into our little downtown enclave... which isn't so little, really, but feels moreso when there are an additional 125,000 people in town.

Myself and Rirath attended the con on Sunday morning, browsed the expo floor for a few hours, and saw John Cho and Kal Penn (of Harold and Kumar fame) on a panel, where they were quite amusing. Neil Patrick Harris was supposed to be there too, but apparently skipped town to go direct a play in London, boo :P

Commentators are starting to wonder whether the "comic" is going out of "Comic Con," to which I must say, "you're only just starting to think that?" Last year was the first time I went, but it had the same feeling as this year, where the TV, movie and video game attractions seem bigger, louder and better than the comparatively plain comic book booths. Personally I can't say I'm opposed to this though; digital media is of greater interest to me. If the comic guys pull out of Comic Con, I'm sure they'll be missed... but not by everyone.

In other news, I'm working on some website development (...for this site, I mean), so I may not be updating with much content for awhile... but hang in there. I've adopted, and am really enjoying writing in jQuery. Javascript is such a cumbersome language that I'm usually reluctant to use, but jQuery makes it make sense. Why put up with some convoluted method of DOM selection in plain JS, when jQ makes use of the CSS selectors we already know? It's intuitive, which JS never has been for me before.