I really need a tune-up

yo! mina-san, hisashibiri! been almost two weeks since i updated this blog. it feels like an eternity since my last post...

so, let's start with the updates. exams are over and i'm at home! yay! i get to talk with my dad and sister without using a phone - every day! or at least while i'm still home, which is for about a week. and talk about atrophy! i've been trying to design a website for some folks, and since the last one i designed was about 2 years back, and dude - i really suck now! here's a sample of what i did. i'll post the work in progress as i improve on it...good thing it's not due for another couple of weeks...

after i got back to school, i got myself involved with this chick that i've known for about a year or so...we ended up spending quite a bit of time together. this is going to sound arrogant and chauvinistic, but i think she likes me. and i like her too, but...

it's been the story of my life. i've never had a romantic relationship with anyone. and not for lack of trying on my part. Biyi tells me that women tend to like me, and it seems that way to me too, but my experience gives the lie to that. at least one girl has left my life twice without me working up the courage to ask her out. and i was kind of getting to it too... i've had one outright rejection (i've also only asked outright once), i've lost interest a couple times (more often than not, i just run out of steam), i've had to "give up" a girl for a friend (yes, my sickening brand of "honour" does the most amazing things to me) at least once, just about every woman who says she loves me is married, engaged or in a steady relationship...and now, this - but it won't work out. not like this. maybe later, under different circumstances. but it doesn't stop me from aching to call her, talk with her, be with her. call me desperate or a basket case - but i would really like to have someone hold on to my arm like i was her knight in shining armor. and i'm sick of waiting for a stone wall to suddenly cave in.

seems to me i really need to work out my issues - but that doesn't stop me from wondering why i seem to be saddled with unavailable women. ah well. it's just as well i'm not in a relationship right now anyway. i still have a long way to go, and i'm no good as i am right now. i need to get stronger, until i can protect my important people (i really have watched too much anime!)

Cleanliness is next to godliness...

no, that little sweetheart is not in the bible. for a really long time, i thought it was, especially since i thought i saw something like it in a bible. and no, you haven't exceeded your clean limit yet - just for all the closet slobs out there - and don't worry, i happen to be one, even though my membership is rather shaky. no, i'm not explaining myself either.

exams are almost over, so i'd best get back into the troposphere and hang on an antenna, since i'm not done just yet. and why do my friends know my blog? i can't say all the stuff i want to say on this one (and i'm too lazy to create another), ah well. you can't have everything your way, i suppose.

i actually check my mail sometimes, as opposed to merely looking it over and deleting things in it. that's how i found out about Nick Vujicic, an inspiring young man who reaches out to very many people every day. Nick was born in Australia, of Christian parents, and is a about year older than i am. rather ordinary, except he was born without limbs. and he's going for his dreams and making lots of impact. he's truly learned to "count it all joy". reading it this morning was rather sobering for me, as i was depressed and was about giving up on making any significant impact in life. my life has been a long story of uncompleted projects and abandoned dreams. it got to me yesterday, and i really wanted to give up on everything. i might have been voted "Most Likely to Succeed" at my elementary and secondary education levels, but i've not achieved anything of value so far - and i'm talking about almost 10 years ago at the most recent. i wish i could share the mail, but that would mean sharing my dad's email address (GMail does a great job of filtering out spam, but why tempt spammers?). still, i might just reconstruct the mail so you can share in this young man's amazing tale. get - and stay - inspired. life is meant to be lived with passion.

and finally, using Safari as an everyday browser might not have been such a good idea after all, as it crashes faithfully and consistently. Apple still has a long way to go in making this beast tame. till then, i wish them luck.

now, i've really started exams

first major paper tomorrow. i'm not all that grounded, but i'm confident that i actually know what i know - or am i just being arrogant and presumptuous? that has gotten me into trouble countless times. i just doing just as i feel like won't help anything. ah well.

i wish i had another blog

yo! long time, no blogging. maybe because exams are upon me. exams should be classified as a disease. you should say "i have exams" in about the same way you'd say "i have a bad cold". effects are the same too. loss of sense of humour for one.

recently, Woody asked me how many people know my blog. i wish nobody knew it. then i could write pretty much whatever i please in it, and not be concerned about reactions. but it is kinda hard to write wholeheartedly about someone when they most likely will end up reading it, especially if it puts you in a less-than-excellent light and they're important to you. daga, i still own this blog. creating another one will be a hassle.

a completely unrelated development is i may be in danger of becoming a pervert soon, since i have taken to watching fansubbed episodes of History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi, or as we call it in my room, our friendly neighbourhood perverted cartoon. dude, that series is very funny. it's rapidly outshining Bleach and Naruto as our most loved anime series. anyway, haven't had much sleep, so i doff my hat and down my pen (or keyboard) right here. sayonara!

Choosing an editor

i'm working on a project that requires a CMS, and i'm still unsure if i should code my own engine, or use a preexisting one. and if i code a custom CMS, i'll be needing a rich, JavaScript-based editor so that it's easier to generate standards-compliant pages (why should anyone know XHTML, simply because they want to add a news item?) when new content is added.

so far, i've taken a look at two: TinyMCE and FCKEditor. i also know about Kupu, but haven't looked at it. of the two i've tried, i'm seriously tempted to use FCKEditor. it's really like using Microsoft Word (pre-2007), and you can control the complexity of the editor (how many features are usable). the advantage i think it has over TinyMCE is that you can use it to upload images directly to the server, unlike TinyMCE requiring you to know the full path to the image you want to include. in its favour, TinyMCE seems smaller and less likely to overwhelm users - even with a full feature set. for both, however, i think the documentation is definitely lacking. in my experience, while most people have no problem with wiki-based documentation, i'm more offline than not - meaning that wikified documentation is at best, difficult for me to use. ah well.

going back to school

yeah, ASUU has called off their strike. meaning i get to go back to school real soon. ah well. nothing lasts forever. later

Who's going to teach us?

Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is a really good series of books. i was fortunate to have begun from the first book, which is rather unusual around here. anyhow, i started reading them again recently, and in the first book, The Eye of the World, at the end of Chapter 27, Egwene tells Perrin that Ila was giving her advice on being a woman. Perrin replies, "Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.". Egwene counters this with: "That is probably why you make such a bad job of it."

i never thought i'd find such a gem in that kind of book. but that precisely is the problem. today's men, by and large, have no idea what they're supposed to do - and more importantly, be - as men. and this is made more serious by the fact that modern men are generally out of touch with other people. men generally find it more difficult to actually relate with people than women (that's why she has more real friends than you do - and i'm not talking about buddies. i'm talking about real friends, who know your heart). dude, maybe someone should start a school or something for men. and don't look at me - i got my own row to plough!

a cursory look at Safari

&;p> after using Safari a bit, here are some things i've noticed:

• it supports SVG (haven't tested it myself), but while it supports web page and image drag-n-drop, it doesn't seem to do so for SVG files. a minus, as far as i'm concerned. Firefox doesn't much care what file type you drop on its window - if it can't open it, it'll offer to download it. considering i was only trying to test SVG support, and i hate double-clicking on any file (call me paranoid) to open it, this is a big minus. i mean, the other browers i used as a reference actually displayed the text of a Wavefront OBJ file. Safari just displayed the "no way, Jose" cursor.
  to be said for it though, its SVG support isn't that bad - though i think it could do with some work. Firefox and Opera beat it hands down in rendering some SVG effects. still, it's a ways better than IE's rendering the actual code of the SVG.
• no, i was not just sounding off, i actually cannot change the proxy settings in the preferences. that's great for when i'm at home and have no proxy. it's however going to be a problem when i get back to school - if i choose to use Safari
• i finally found the Safari equivalent of Firefox's "Clear private data". it's the Edit -> Reset Safari... menuitem.
• it seems Safari supports text DnD. i like it, because if i use a sensible editor like SciTE, i can author my blog posts offline and DnD them into the post editor, instead of copy-and-paste.
• i haven't got Safari to crash yet. i must be doing normal stuff - that means i'm doing something wrong.
• i'm sure it's not just me. i hover over the username field on the Blogger home page, and the cursor is a hand. seriously. it seems okay over other text fields, however.
• i don't know that the use of the OSX LnF inside a Windows application is a really good idea.
• what keyboard shortcut do you use to cycle tabs?
• some text i was entering in here magically didn't get submitted with the form...
• the way Safari pops up messages is wicked cool. the scrolling is awesome!
• what? no fancy highlighting or tooltips for elements with a title attribute? i can't see my acronym meanings!

well, so far, if i find anything nice or nasty, maybe i'll remember to update this...

Apple Safari for Windows users, and Yang takes the Yahoo! reins

you might already know that Apple has released Safari Beta 3 for both Mac and PC users. i downloaded it last night, and so far, i'm not impressed. first all, it looks like i'm using iTunes to browse - which isn't all bad. more importantly, the font rendering sucks in my opinion. From this article, and this article, i agree with Jeff Atwood - Safari's rendering sucks majorly, even with ClearType on. i've not had much chance to use Safari just yet - but i think Steve Jobs' dream of Safari having a quarter market share is a pipe dream unless they work out the kinks in their font rendering system. i wasn't able to change the browser settings as far as using proxies is concerned - and i'm not quite sure that using the OSX look and feel for just Safari is such a good idea. still, if you're adventuresome, you can get Safari and take it for a spin. personally, Firefox is still my major browser, and i just use any others to test web designs, even though i haven't designed anything since Adam was a lad now...anyway, Safari already has been shown to have some bugs and vunerabilities, so make sure when you install it, you also install Apple Update to be safe.

i first read it on Hack in the Box, then saw it on CNN last night, that Jerry Yang - cofounder of Yahoo!, has taken the reins of Yahoo! as CEO. the question is: is he the right person Yahoo! needs? my opinion: maybe. since he created Yahoo!, he'd ben in the best position to say what Yahoo! really ought to be doing. according to the report on CNN last night, Yahoo! can't compete with Google head-on, despite many pally-ups (Yahoo! has roughly $3.5bn US, Google almost $12bn US - meaning Google can outbuy Yahoo!). but Yang hasn't really handled this kind of resposibility before, and this might just be what could send Yahoo! into a tailspin under his leadership. still, for Yang to have been brought on board, it does mean that he's got the backing (if not the trust) of the board (or at least a part of it). i just hope he can do for Yahoo! what Jobs' done in Apple (whether or not i like to admit it - Macs are sexy!)

The state of the nation

It seems the saying, "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" is true these days in Nigeria. The new president must be wondering who he sinned against to cause himself so much trouble. first off, the outgone president (Chief Olusegun Obasanjo) gave Nigerians a "parting gift" - increments in both VAT and the pump price of petroleum products. for some reason i don't know, the tanker drivers went on a strike, suspended it, resumed it, and have apparently ended it. the aptly named PHCN (the aptness is for the interpretation, Please Hold Candle Nearby) is pretty much the standby source of electricity these days, and alternative sources require fuel. apart from that, long queues have appeared at filling stations all over the country, with people spending as much as three days to get scarce fuel. now, the NLC is going to begin a strike by 12.00am Wednesday (less than 2 hours from now) if there's no change in the price of fuel. it also seems that a number of new governors have inherited empty state treasuries. i sure am glad i'm not the president now. that said, i don't think there's a better time to be in this country. thank God i'm Nigerian!

Accident at home

i really shouldn't have done it. i should have never laughed. but it was so funny. really. i'm the (not always) proud uncle of an energetic, hyperactive 2-year old. and he's really a creation (literally translated from the Yoruba). right now he's asking me, "what is this?", and if i answer him, i'm going to get questioned to near tears. and no, i can't allow him watch TV anymore tonight. oh, yes - where was i?

as i was saying, i have a 2-year old nephew who is rather strong-willed (aren't they all) and he left his mom and went to pick up the iron she was using. of course, he got burnt. the funny thing was he never dropped the iron - just kept holding onto it with his right hand and screaming. that's one funny thing - and i thank God for it - what if he had dropped it and burnt himself even more? it was also funny because he didn't listen to his mom all day - and got himself into trouble for it. funny thing is, it was his mom he went to for comfort. of course, i pitched in, even though Bolu and i have an understanding: we're friends for just as long as he needs me (playmate, et cetera - i'm the only person who plays ball with him, for example). ah well. he's been bullying me for a while now, and i hope it stops soon...

Yay! Got my Internet connection back!

so i can blog again, and not a second too late. it's kinda cool blogging on Father's Day - even though i've not celebrated it yet. and it is kinda late to celebrate it - it's about 11.00pm. anyway, i've been challenged to get off my butt and get working and become excellent at what i do. thank God for everything. well, gotta go. see y'all!

Jawing @ home

man, it's been a long time! how have i coped with no internet for this long? anyhow, i've uploaded a new deviation at DeviantArt, so pls visit. it's really been great at home - i can now read multiple lines of text. isn't that great? and my friend is getting engaged this weekend. last weekend, i was at Music and Miracles, and it was the bomb! ok, that's about all i have time for on this post (actually, on the internet!). later!

looking to hit something

okay...i've been playing around with an idea in my head for a few days now...i was going to model a barrel in Blender (which i did), create a crate in Google Sketchup (changed it to a signpost), create some scenery in a Blender/Sketchup/Wings combo and setup and render scene in Blender. so i'm done with Sketchup for the moment, having exported to Google Earth...and try to import the file into Blender...but can't find the importer (Blender 2.44)! who stole the importer? why? do i get to hit them (or at least their monitor)? die, die, die! rethinking it - don't. i can't fix it yet, and you won't be able to if you're dead...ah well

last week i got to attend some sessions of the "Open Door" meeting at Canaanland. The guest ministers were Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, and Creflo Dollar. They kinda sounded the same (but at least i got to stay in the same room with them - it was a rather large room with lotsa other people in there, though ;) as when i get their messages and watch them on TV. no matter. it was a great and rather grueling experience (or at least going to and from Canaanland was, anyway) all in all.

i guess you'd have heard about C.S Lewis by now, and if you haven't, he authored the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. what you might not know is that he wrote other books, such as The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters.

now, i am in no way a C.S Lewis expert, but i'd never heard of the last title i mentioned above until yesterday. The Screwtape Letters is - if you will - a fictional account of the correspondence between a demon, Wormwood, and his uncle, Screwtape, as well as Wormwood's field notes. it basically outlines strategies for snatching human souls from "the Enemy" (God), and is very thought-provoking. while i celebrated Lewis' work in the past, i don't think you'll remain quite the same if you can get a copy of this work and read it. read it, and above all, think about what it says. 'nuff said.

Blender 2.44

a scant day after i read of the possibility of Blender 2.44 being released after @ndy won the splash screen contest, it's out! and since i finally got a fix for my ATI video card's problem with Blender, i'm going to be trying it out. maybe my gallery will finally get a new entry.

Inordinate laziness.

i heard that Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, created it because he was inordinately lazy. i also recently read that the person who developed the first programming language did so because of a similar reason. unfortunately, i can't remember his name - all i remember is that he's dead and got the Turing award.

anyhow, i'm developing this application and it's taken forever so far, and i'm not done. just when i had an end in sight, i had to go and break the code, and so i'm starting over. anyhow, i'm using wxWidgets as the application framework as well as the STL, and IBPP. i was not paying attention in church on sunday, choosing instead to work on my code, when Biola and i had a discussion about it. he wanted me to use Ultimate++ (U++), and proved his point by creating an application in less than 5 minutes using U++'s TheIDE. he also recommended using Qt over wxWidgets - because he's lazy and wants everything done quickly. i have the Qt 4 opensource edition, and some documentation for it - but i haven't just got round to using it just yet. i really would have loved to use U++, but the fact that i don't have offline documentation for it is kind of a pain. maybe i'm not just lazy enough.

Things need to change

so here i am in a cybercafe, since the internet connection i use at home sucks, and i'm trying to get a large volume of materials (about 50MB, give or take). i get told that the police is coming over, and in less than 5 minutes the cafe is nearly empty and the doors are locked. i guess i got warned specifically because i'm using my laptop and they go for guys with laptops. that's hard. i can't even move around freely anymore because some people are trying to get rich quick by ripping off other people online. really hard. anyway, my time will soon be up, and i'll leave the cafe. things really do need to change, and more importantly, i need to change.

What do they teach kids these days?

i seen it, but it's really hard to believe it. as you might already know, my school was closed down just before exams started. after loafing and goofing off at home, i decided today to take a look see at some materials in preparation for my exams. so here i am, looking through the complete course list of MIT's OpenCourseWare, and i see a course titled Magic, Witchcraft and the Spirit World under Anthropology. dude, like, what is that? what, they ran out of regular stuff to teach kids these days? time was, when you went to MIT, you went to learn something about technology, and you became an actual witch to learn about witchcraft - or you joined a seminary and heard about it. now, you can grab the details of witchcraft online - for free too, since the entire OpenCourseWare is licensed under the Creative Commons 2.5 license. that's just weird, for lack of a better word.

Opensource 3D on Slashdot

since Woody introduced me to Slashdot, i've always seen it mostly as a comedy site. for crying out loud, you'd expect nerds to have more sense. i rarely take anything other than a announcement seriously if it's from Slashdot. it seems like Slashdot lives up to its reputation: i got this article from BlenderNation (the original Slashdot article is linked therein). God help opensource developers!

now ladies and gentlemen, we present...sand!

from Wired, via GMail...