It’s been a long time, but I’ve started fiddling a bit with web design again. While I do like K2, I prefer to make my own design. And K2 was always meant to be temporary here until I found my long lost design groove again. And I think I spotted it out in the gutter, drunk out of its mind. It’s in rehab now.

I’ve started work on a Wordpress theme tentatively called Kestrel. I’m writing the basic layout now with the theme development page readily available in another tab.

I do admit that it feels a bit messy to use pure PHP instead of a template language like Movable Type uses, but I’ll manage.

Since doing live editing gets messy I’ve set up a local web server hosted on my file server. lighttpd as web server, PHP and MySQL.

lighttpd is very nice for local development — it doesn’t include the entire kitchen sink like Apache does. It took a bit of work to get it going the way I wanted, though. For a while it decided to send me the PHP source code instead of passing it on to PHP – but only when I accessed a PHP file from my workstation. When viewed locally it worked properly.

Don’t fall down the stairs.

I think I broke two toes. Unhurt otherwise.

Left: Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese in The Terminator.

Right: Solid Snake from Metal Gear.

I am impressed with the comments and how active your site is. Some spam comment

Active? Ha! I’ve been anything but active around here lately. I keep trying to write more, but there’s not really much happening right now.

Things are finally starting to happen on the medical front. I’ve talked to a new doctor, and he was of the opinion that whatever ailed me, it sure wasn’t a depression — something my previous doc was hellbent on. So now I’m off the meds, and I already feel better.

He was also of the opinion that while I showed some characteristics (I can’t really call it symptoms, since I don’t see it as an illness; merely a non-normative state of mind) of Asperger’s syndrome, it wasn’t severe enough to call it AS proper. So right now it’s merely an autistic spectrum disorder until they’ve figured out some letter acronym that fits me. And I don’t really agree with the “disorder” part either.

The number of autistic traits present determines the severity of autism in the individual. These autistic traits may be beneficial for some disciplines like science, mathematics, engineering. Wikipedia

I can’t say that I have a very big interest in the various sciences, but I do recall having a pretty easy time grasping the concepts back in school, while others struggled with it.

I talked to a psychologist for a bit last week and did a computerized personality test; next Monday I’m meeting him again for a followup on what the test says about me.

Since I’m pretty interested in informatics, I pointed out several problems with that computerized test. Whoever designed the application clearly wasn’t a designer proper. The questions were of a “yes/no” type, but many questions were formulated so that answering no made the sentence a double negation. That confused me a lot. It would have been a lot clearer if the options were “I agree” and “I do not agree”.

And now I’m off for bed. I’ll try to write more frequently around here now.

Stop doing that, Warren. It’s wide open for abuse, such as me making all your readers who read via your RSS feed see this.

What I’m talking about is publishing all your Technorati occurences and Flickr comments in your article feed. Reading your own stuff? I love it. That’s what I want. Reading what every boring entity on the planet writes about you? In French? No thanks, not interested. I don’t speak French.

I suppose I could have e-mailed Warren about this instead, but where’s the fun in that? Feel free to call me a dick in the comments.

I had a letter waiting for me when I got home after watching V For Vendetta, of which I might rant later. US air mail, eh? I rip it open.

Some silly domain registrar, Domain Registry of America (who in the fine print state they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the government of the United States) wants me to host this very domain, and what a fancy name said domain has, at them instead of Gandi, my current registrar.

I would consider it if their yearly fee wasn’t 216% of what I’m paying right now. €26 per year? I pay €12 now. That pricing has no attachment whatsoever to reality.

And why does your spam look so much like a bill? Hidden deep in a paragraph you say that it isn’t, yet you do your best to make it look like one. Add some FUD about “losing your online identity” and I put you on my shit list.

Well, thanks for sending me something to light the fireplace with.

I don’t support Netscape, Firefox or any other webbrowsers since I believe that there should be one HTML standard and not a dozen. Pixels on the web

Ahahahahahahahaha!

Way to not understand what a web standard is, buddy.

“Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer. These audio files are broadcasted over the Internet automatically to subscribers of specific podcast channels.”

Via digg.

Sadly, Filerush has kicked the bucket. That was my premium place to get new game demos and trailers via torrent downloads. Where will I get that stuff now? Filerush had a nice, minimalistic stuff of new items without any intrusive ads. I don’t want to wade through crappy ads and uninteresting articles to get to the good stuff.

Foxit Reader: a quick, small alternative PDF reader as opposed to Adobe’s slow, bloated Acrobat reader.