Hatkirby on June 27th, 2010 at 5:42:56pmOkay, these appear to be becoming regular, lol :P. Anyway, today's topic is on ABUSED-AS-A-CHILD COMMAS. No, seriously, I mean COMMAS THAT ARE USED INCORRECTLY OR NOT AT ALL. Some examples:
Notice that when the orb in motion comes in contact with a stationary orb, it reduces the counter on the stationary orb by 1. Once an orb's counter reaches 0 it explodes and is removed from play, and you receive 1 point for doing so. This is the only way to earn points.
Read that bolded part out loud. Seriously. Is there no pause after the zero? Replace the number with a word and it'll become clearer. "Once an orb's counter reaches zero it explodes." There should be a pause in there because "Once an orb's counter reaches zero" is like the cause and "it explodes" is the result. "Once an orb's counter reaches zero, it explodes." Aw, how lovely. Here's an example of the opposite:
Every widget is derived from GtkWidget. This means, changes to the properties of GtkWidget will effect all widgets. Furthermore many other widgets have "parent widgets". For example properties of GtkButton will also be applied to GtkCheckButton unless it is explicitly stated otherwise.
That pause between "this means" and "changes to the properties of GtkWidget will effect all widgets" is ENTIRELY UNNECESSARY!!!! OH MY GOD! brain explosion I'm very sorry, I'm just VERY easily annoyed by what I consider poor English, which may also be considered perfectly normal English by those who aren't insane. Who? Oh, and by the way, it's "affect", not "effect". Pwned.
Hatkirby on June 26th, 2010 at 6:47:12pmYes, Pillowcase Season 3! This poll was good, except for one person who OMG VOTED NO?!?!?!?!? HOW DARE YOU!??!?!? :P
Did you like Pillowcase Season 3? YES hugs - 3 vote(s)! Nah, it was a bust like Season 2 - 1 vote(s)! Season 3 is over?!?!?! - 2 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!
So, guess what peoples? I AM IN AUSTRALIA. HOW AWESOME IS THAT. It also happens to be Sunday. I didn't have Internet access yesterday and I freaked out when I realized that today was Sunday, but then I remembered that it's still Saturday in America! I'm saved! :P Anyway, here's this week's Caption'ds:
Hypocrisy
Rocket Feet
Anyways, I am very happy to be in Australia, though I am worried about if I will be able to keep up posting once a week, due to my limited Internet access. Hopefully it'll all work out. :)
Hatkirby on June 22nd, 2010 at 12:30:16pmiOS 4 came out! About two hours after yesterday's post was posted, I believe. Yes. It took another half an hour to download and install the update, but it was pretty much worth it. Check out it's awesomeness!
Home Screen Wallpapers These look REALLY NICE. Seriously! The default ones look really boring in the options menu, but when you put them on, most of them look really nice! I chose the fifth row, second column. The one with the shades of blue. It looks nice!
Multitasking As I ranted about yesterday, this has been a bit of a disappointment because apps have to be updated to support it, but I have seen some of its capability because Wordpress has been updated to support fast app switching! I just switched out and then back in and IT WAS IN THE SAME PLACE!!!! :P Anyway, I just really hope that Byline and Palringo get updated for iOS 4 because that would be awesome :P.
Omg Problems Speaking of Byline, I think the current version conflicts with iOS 4 or something because it now crashes randomly, which is really annoying. Meh!
iBooks OMG! iBooks is awesome and I never thought I would say that because I'm really a "real book" kind of person, just like I'd rather purchase CDs in the store than online, but iBooks is cool because there is a fairly nice selection of free books that you can get that you can just read when you're bored and you don't have a book on you! As we all know, Winnie The Pooh by A. A. Milne (but not the sequel) is available for free (and I'm a huge Winnie The Pooh fan, seriously :D), but there are also some other good books like Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol and The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. I'm having fun! :P (Though I do like to make fun of the large number of names I recognize in the free list from Social Studies class like Adam Smith and Karl Marx and John Locke, lol :P)
Orientation Lock This is very useful. If you're laying down and you want to read your iPod, but it keeps changing orientation, what do you do? Double press the home button, swipe to the left and tap the lock button! Now it's locked in portrait mode! :D It's very useful, but one thing that annoys me a bit is that you can only lock in portrait mode, not landscape. Meh.
Folders Folders are pretty cool. I have so much more space now! :P And it's pretty cool, if you put two apps that have a number on them (like notifications) in one folder, the folder will have a number that is the sum of the numbers inside it! WOW I COULD HAVE WORDED THAT BETTER! :P One thing that annoys me, though, is that the icons for the folders are a bit ugly. It's just a black square with smaller versions of the contained icons. It could've looked better, that's all I'm saying.
Anyway, enough about iOS 4. It's quite awesome and I look forward to my favorite apps coming out with multitasking ability, but there's something else I have to rant about. Remember yesterday when I told a story about how I had to maintain an old version of iTunes on my virtual machine so I could sync my iPod? And how I thought that iOS 4 was out because iTunes 9.2 was out? Yeah, I have come to realize exactly what iTunes 9.2 does, and the thought did cross my mind sometime yesterday, but I dismissed it, hoping that it wasn't true.
It was true. You need iTunes 9.2 to be able to sync with iOS 4. Ouch. Anyway, I have been spending a horribly long time converting my VirtualBox virtual machine to a VMWare one and IT WORKED. iTunes 9.2 worked! I don't know exactly what's wrong with VirtualBox (and I did like it better, VMWare seems a bit slow to me), but I am happy that I can now sync my iPod.
One last thing. While I am happy that I can now sync with iTunes, I did mention yesterday that I would be very happy if I could sync with Banshee. Well, guess what! Someone spent a week hacking Banshee and apparently got libgpod to work, which includes iPhone/iPod touch support! WOOT! It's not out yet, but you can read about it here: http://monotorrent.blogspot.com/2010/06/hackweek-v.html. I hope it comes out soon and that it's as awesome as possible! :)
Hatkirby on June 21st, 2010 at 12:44:22pmWell, at least not at the time of writing this post. Which is about 10:30am EST. And I'm not really insulting iOS 4, I just think it's been a bit overhyped and some new revelations have really diminished it's wonder for me.
First, I want to start by writing about the horrific time I had trying to upgrade to the firmware that I thought came out already. I know, I should have read more into it, but I was excited for some of the new anticipated features. Anyway, this story needs a bit of an introduction. I have been an iPod user for about three years now and although I remain apathetic towards Apple, I do have one huge complaint: there is no version of iTunes available for Linux.
While this is a major inconvenience for me, I have been able to survive for a while. While I had my second iPod, a yellow Chromatic which I loved (rest in peace), I had to restart the computer and endure Windows Vista's mind-numbing slowness if I wanted to add a single song to my iPod, which is why I generally added songs in batch, which grew pretty annoying because I would then have to wait to be able to listen to a song (I'm obsessed with play counts, please help me). Anyway, I finally became sick of this and tried some Linux media players that have claimed to be able to sync with iPods.
Rhythmbox made me sick. It really did. I just did not like it at all, and half the time I listened to a song, it wouldn't scrobble to Last.fm (again, I'm obsessed, keel me). Next, I tried Banshee which I eventually fell in love with. It was smooth, sleek and worked very well. However, I don't know if I ever managed to sync my iPod with it because my iPod died right around then. It was very odd, the buttons just stopped working while the rest of the iPod clearly worked because shaking it skipped to a random song.
Anyway, I eventually got an iPod touch two weeks ago and while I do love it, I needed to find somewhere to sync it. Banshee wouldn't work for two reasons: it had no iPod touch/iPhone support (even for music) and I wanted to be able to have apps. Eventually, I realized that a virtual machine would probably work perfectly and so I downloaded VirtualBox and set up an installation of Windows XP in it. It was all fine and dandy until I installed iTunes and it crashed every time I tried to open it. What?!?! It turns out that versions of iTunes 9.0.3 and up do not work in VirtualBox. There was a workaround, though, install iTunes 9.0.2 instead, and I did and it worked perfectly. And for the last two weeks, I've been running 9.0.2 and syncing with my iPod touch peacefully (except for one incident in which I accidentally updated iTunes and had to downgrade again and re-import all of my music, but that was before I got my iPod touch).
My problem was probably the deceitful early release of iTunes 9.2. I immediately assumed that it meant that iOS 4 was out as well, because, well, it made sense! Anyway, I stupidly tried to update my copy of iTunes and what do you know, it starts crashing. So I had to spend an hour downgrading, re-importing and then re-syncing because of course, iTunes didn't recognize my iPod after I reinstalled it. And I have 600+ songs, so that took quite a while. Anyway, when that was finally done, I restarted to my Windows partition and planned to use the iTunes there not to sync, but just to update. Lo and behold, iOS 4 WASN'T OUT YET. I think I started talking to the computer at that point "WHAT DO YOU MEAN 3.1.3 IS THE CURRENT UPDATE? I THINK YOU'RE WRONG. YOU ARE WRONG. I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG."
Anyway, that's my story about trying to upgrade to a not-yet-available firmware, now let's talk about how iOS 4's new feature lineup may be a bit misleading. Let's start with the big one: MULTITASKING. Probably the most anticipated feature of iOS 4 is the ability to run more than one app at once, a feature which most other mobile devices have had as a stable since forever.
Well, let's get something straight here: it's not really multitasking. Apple introduced seven new features that make it seem like more than app is running at a time, but they're really not.
- First, background music. Apps can choose to keep playing audio once you've switched to another app, something that the iPod app has had forever. This allows you to do something like play a song on Pandora while doing something else: Pandora isn't really still open when you switch to another app, it's audio is just still playing.
- Second, background VoIP. For most people, that means Skype. This one I find a bit confusing because it's fairly specific, but basically it means that you can continue a VoIP call even when in another application.
- Third, background location, which I'm not even sure I understand, so I'm going to skip that one. Read about it yourself.
- Fourth, push notifications, which allow popup notifications to be sent to your iPod while doing other things. Don't be fooled, however, this has been out since iPhone OS 3.
- Fifth, local notifications, which are basically push notifications that don't rely on Apple's servers. I don't really understand this one either, but dun kill me, I have more to rant about.
- Sixth, task finishing, which allows a task that you have started in an app, such as uploading a photo to Flickr, to even while you aren't in that app. Really, that app isn't open anymore, it's just offloaded a task to a background process. This one scares me a bit because you never know if an app has task finishing enabled or not and you could potentiality cancel an task you didn't mean to by switching apps, thinking that it'll still continue working.
- Finally, the most deceitful of them all, fast app switching, which allows apps to save where they are when you close them so that they start right back where they were when you open them again. Really, when you close the app, it is closed and nothing else is being done, unless something was offloaded to task finishing, it's just that when you open the app again, it remembers where it was.
All of this put together really isn't multitasking, it's just a facsimile that looks a bit like multitasking on the outside. While this is probably good enough for most people, there is one more rather huge catch when it comes to iOS 4 multitasking:
Applications have to have multitasking features enabled.
When we all upgrade to iOS 4 in a few hours when it gets released (my bet is noon PST, which is 3pm here), not every app is suddenly going to have these seven multitasking-like features. Developers have to add these features to their apps using new APIs and then re-submit them to the App Store. So unless the author of your favorite app is reasonable and committed, you ain't gettin' multitasking. In fact, I've already heard that not only is the new Facebook app hideous, the developers have neglected to update it for iOS 4. How do you like dem apples? Not that much, thanks.
Anyway, hopefully iOS 4 will come out later today and I will get it and hopefully multitasking won't be as horrible as it sounds. And I'll write another post about the things I do like about it. Yeah, right. No, seriously. :P
Hatkirby on June 19th, 2010 at 2:01:39pmAnother week is over, another poll for me to write about. It seems that we're quite in the majority here, with iPod touch lovers :P. iOS 4 comes out in two days! YAY! Anyway, here are the results:
Do you have an iPod touch? YES AND IT'S AWESOME - 8 vote(s)! No is sad - 3 vote(s)! I have an iPhone! It's the same thing- gets shot by Starla - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent, which really doesn't make sense here - 1 vote(s)!
Just a notice for peoples, this Thursday, I'm going away for about a month so please forgive me if updates come late or if I gasp forget to post one week. I'm going to try to write all of my posts in advance so that I'm not rushing because I will be fairly busy. I'll be back, though! :P
In other news, Pillowcase Season 3 ended today. A moment of silence. :P No, it had a great run and is actually the longest season of Pillowcase so far. I hope you enjoyed it! And that is what this week's poll is about! :P
Anyway, time for caption'd!
Lauren Is Really Quite A Bad Influence And I Think It's Time We Sued Her
Unrequited Love
Hopefully, I'll have a few more posts to post this week (I neglected my RANDOM ENGLISH RANT last week! :P) as a few interesting things have happened recently and don't worry! I won't completely vanish while I'm gone! :P
Hatkirby on June 18th, 2010 at 12:30:17pmOh my goodness! So, yesterday, it was my birthday, and I was sitting around feeling sad and stuff and then I logged on to my diary to write a depressing post or something and I saw "UPGRADE TO WORDPRESS 3.0". Ignoring that run-on sentence, WORDPRESS 3.0 IS OUT!!!! On my birthday! Yes, yesterday was my birthday, everyone hug me. But, seriously, this was like a present or something. :P
So, I upgraded my diary to Wordpress 3.0 (which wasn't too difficult, just a standard Wordpress upgrade) and immediately noticed a difference in the administration panel. "What? Everything's gray now! What happened to my color scheme?" Well, as I just figured out, you can easily change your admin panel color scheme back to blue if you like by going to "Your Profile". In fact, I'm not sure I ever set my diary's admin panel to blue, so I may just be insane! lol O_O
Anyway, one of the more exciting things I was waiting for in Wordpress 3.0 was the unveiling of the new default theme, Twenty Ten! And is it a looker! whistles :P It is actually quite a pretty theme, with a nice header image (which you can change; there are some pretty presets there! Or you can upload one :P) and a nice sidebar (for once, the calendar widget looks GOOD :D). My only problem with the theme is that the text of the posts is a bit big, but I'm sure that I can change that by tweaking the stylesheet. :)
Do you know what is exciting? Apparently, you can now set your admin login/password DURING installation. How fancy! I can't wait to set up another Wordpress blog (which I seem to do all the time because I have no life) and not have to create a new user! :P Speaking of cool new features that I haven't used yet, have you heard? Wordpress MU and Wordpress have merged! Omg! Now you can host thousands of Wordpress blogs from one single Wordpress installation! How choclatey! :P I don't see how I'm possibly going to abuse that anytime soon! :P
Isn't this fun? There are many other new things that you can play with in Wordpress 3.0, SO GO CHECK THEM OUT :P. Anyway, Wordpress 3.0 is quite fun and I can't wait to see the various ways that I'm going to abuse all of the new power it holds by creating some god-awful Frankenwebsite. The last one tried to eat my children! Well, if I had any children. Imma... Imma post this now, okay? :P
Hatkirby on June 12th, 2010 at 3:45:04pmI love it so when the Yes option and the No option get the same number of votes, because then I gain nothing from the poll! :P Anyway, here are the results:
Do my random English rants make you want to shoot me? Because.... there's more. :P OH GOD machine gun - 4 vote(s)! I love you anyway! hugs - 4 vote(s)! Another option - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!
I want to point out that while this week's poll may look random, it isn't. Guess what. I GOT AN IPOD TOUCH!!!! :D I love it dearly, and I want to see who else has one. So there. It doesn't infringe on my annual goal. :P Also, despite the name of the post, last week's poll wasn't random. :P
Gah, I seem to have neglected to post frequently this week again! I'm trying! :P I'm collecting ideas and stuff, but I've just been VERY lazy recently. It's quite annoying. Anyway, it's time for Caption'd!
Drugs And Fauns
Stranger Danger
Okay, so, um, hopefully I'll post more frequently this week. And hopefully you won't all stab me for continuing to post random English rants. Because, like last week's poll said, there's more. :P
Hatkirby on June 6th, 2010 at 12:37:15pmHEY KIDS, IT'S ME AGAIN!!!! I'm feeling very English-angsty and I have that urge to throw stuff again, so it's time for another RANDOM ENGLISH RANT! Today's topic is LONELY ADVERBS. THOSE LONELY, MISUNDERSTOOD ADVERBS. (Why do I keep misspelling lonely as lovely? Well, adverbs are quite awesome. So they're LOVELY YET LONELY ADVERBS. We can work that into the script. It's okay, subconscious, I'm on your side.)
Nothing gets my "I THINK I'M GOING TO LAUNCH NUCLEAR WAR ON A FIVE YEAR OLD" up like "I didn't do that good on that quiz." NO, YOU DIDN'T DO "GOOD" ON THAT ENGLISH GRAMMAR QUIZ, JOHNNY. YOU FAILED IT. YOU WILL NOW BE DEPORTED TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN.
Grammar lesson, kids. An ADVERB is a descriptive word, usually ending in a telltale "ly", that modifies verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. An ADJECTIVE, like "good", is a descriptive word used to modify nouns and pronouns. Now, let's look at that statement above again, shall we?
"I didn't do (verb) that good (adjective) on that quiz." What is modifying what? If you're an idiot, you may say that "good" is modifying "quiz", in which case the sentence would translate to "I didn't do that good quiz." Are you copulating with that quiz or talking to it? No, good tries to modify "do", or more specifically, how you did on that quiz. But adjectives can't modify verbs, can they?
NO THEY CAN'T.
Here comes my best friend, "well". Why? Because Samara Morgan lives there. No, really, because it's an adverb! Adverbs are lovely. (My subconscious is happy.) It's actually rather sad. Adverbs are far more important (in my opinion) than adjectives, yet they're often shifted off to the side when it comes to parts of speech. Adjectives get their names in headlines (FAT MAN FALLS OFF STEEP CLIFF ONTO IMPORTANT BUSINESSMAN) while adverbs have to be content with living in obituaries (Melinda Jones died peacefully in her sleep, though a chainsaw-wielding madman was just about to sneakily sneak into her room and murderously cut her head off.) Adverbs are great. Just embrace them.
Anyway, using adverbs, that sentence turns into "I didn't do that well on that quiz." HORRAY. I AM VERY HAPPY THAT YOU DIDN'T DO WELL ON THAT TEST BECAUSE IT IS FAR BETTER THAN NOT DOING GOOD ON THAT TEST. Seriously, you could use that as a double entendre because "good" can be used as a noun too, sometimes. "Johnny did good on his test? How, did he recycle it or something?" Loffle. (AHH THUNDER)
This is one of my most commonly heard transgressions in the English language. PEOPLE, HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO ADD AN "LY" TO THE END OF YOUR WORDS? "I ran so fast the other day!" Okay, all of my examples so far have been irregular, but you get the point.
Oh god, I'm going to end up as an English teacher. And some kid is going to come in and complain that he did bad on his Math test and I'll throw a textbook at him. And I may possibly have to go to court for it, but if any of that happens, it'll happen on Four Island, which I am the sovereign leader of and have already created a law that allows abuse on the grounds of incorrect grammar. Except if I accidentally does it. That then does count not at all.
Though I sort of just lost all of my English teacher cred by starting a sentence with a conjunction. Oh well.
Hatkirby on June 5th, 2010 at 8:50:45amWow, varied! And I found this very interesting. Ointment. What? Sorry, WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU.
Do you like it when I post more often? Yes! Everything is good! - 4 vote(s)! Randomness makes me feel ill. Post less, but more. - 3 vote(s)! I dunno. - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!
No, lol, I was listening to Frou Frou but really, I am very interested in that last week I posted so often and then I put up this poll and didn't post at all :P. Other than the random English rant that I'm afraid scared everyone away from the site :P. No, I know you people are busy, it's okay, just bring cookies when you come back, right? :)
On that particular attractive note, it's time for Caption'd! I think I'm going to post two today instead of one and see how it goes, okay? :)
Prophecy
Mind Reader
Yay! Anyway, hopefully I'll post more frequently this week and... yay! :D
Hatkirby on May 30th, 2010 at 12:30:54pmHey, look everybody! It's time for a Random English Rant! This is a segment in which I see something happen OVER AND OVER AGAIN, and then go a bit insane. THERE I GO AGAIN! ... ... ... ... AGAIN!!!!
Anyway, today's topic is on the fact that....
PREFORM. IS NOT. A WORD.
Well, it is, but it doesn't mean what you think.
Preform is commonly used by people who don't know better as a synonym of perform. In fact, it's probably a typo, but the users of said typo often don't know that it's incorrect. Le gaspez! I myself used to be frequently guilty of this horrible transgression. :P
To perform something is to bring something about. To preform something is to, as it sounds like, form something beforehand. I have never, ever, ever, ever, EVER heard the word "preform" used normally in context. :P So, don't use it! I PERFORMED THE ACT OF MURDERING EVERYONE WHO SAYS PREFORM. I PREFORMED A SWORD SO THAT I WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO DO THE MURDERING WITH WHEN IT CAME TO THAT.
Sound easy? It is. Or it isn't. That really depends on your IQ. :P
Okay, I probably sound really rude now, so I'm going to leave before I get lynched. And remember, kids! Performing a play is good (as long as you get good reviews), but preforming a play (before you can get those silly copyright use approvals) can get you chased down Main Street by a torch-wielding mob! And we all know which one of those is better for the colon, don't we?