The Grax Domain

28 Oct 2004 "The Beauty of CSS Design"

I was browsing the web doing some research on how to optimize framed web sites for search engines. I know I know, frames are bad and should never be used. But that's what the last guy did to the site I'm working on. Oh well, ce la vie. Anyway I stumbled across CSS Zen Garden. It's a site entirely design using CSS (or so it claims). It has the neat little feature of applying different cascading style sheets, which were designed by other people, to the site. I'm a little impressed. I'm sure other people has done this sort of CSS managing before, but this is the first time I've seen this sort of thing before. I'll add it to the Links page for future reference.

25 Oct 2004 Aliens Vs Predator (the movie) Review

I went to see this film expecting it to be a gross perversion of the Alien and Predator series, much like the Martix sequals. My my was I pleasantly surprise. It's actually pretty darn good.

Set in the not-so-distant future of October 2004, wealthy guy Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) discovers a hidden pyramid in Antartica and wants to make a mark on the content. So he hires a bunch of experts from around the world (hence the different accents) and goes inside the temple. They then realise that the Pyramid is a Predator built hunting grounds for them to hunt Aliens. Then they wind up in a middle of the hunt. Don't they feel silly.

This is one of those films that you go to see if you like to see two brand names going head to head with each other with the use of current film technology. The FX were good (except for the cheesy Martix-style panning of camera that they did once, why did they bother?), the fights were more or less satisfactory, and the plot wasn't important. I think the 'feel' of the film was at a similar level to the original Predator movies.

I'm not too sure about how true to its roots the film is. I've not read many AVP books or comics, and I doubt the movie has too much of a link towards the computer games with the same name. But I'm not too concerned about that.

Aliens Vs Predator is worth going to the cinema to see. It's definately worth renting out once it comes out. Probably in about 3 months time if the film does well at the cinemas.

GRAX RATING: 4/5

I did a little review research after the film to see what other people thought of AVP. Here are some of them I found with an indication of whether it was positive or negative:

• http://www.wordsfromhere.com/movies/77.html - Positive
• http://aggressive-voice.com/zzz181.html - Negative
• http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64571,00.html - Meh...

21 Oct 2004 From Web Programmer to Web Janitor

Goddamn the site I'm working on is such a mess!

And I'm not talking about the front-end stuff. The HTML coding behind it is terrible. It follows no basic W3C rules and there are pointless tags everywhere (damn FONT tags), nested within each other! I've spent most of my efforts just tidying the code up and making the site look presentable, like some sort of janitor (or casual technician). I would have just dumped the site and start again, if it wasn't for the fact the I'm gonna be sending off a bunch of e-mail to lots of people tomorrow saying there's new stuff on the site.

The site will be ready for the mailing list in the evening tomorrow. Then I set to work on updating it and making it better. It'll be super-efficient by the time I'm through with it, like German Sex™.

20 Oct 2004 The perks of Barn Life

There's two things that I have noticed when you work in a converted barn house next door to a farm. The first thing (and my employer did warn me about this) is that it gets damn cold in the winter. I'm talking ice cold hands and feet at the desk kind of cold! The second thing is that farmers tend to have fields. Fields which they cover in animal poo. Lots of poo. The stink around the place is actually pretty bad So far the closed doors and windows have blocked out the smell from entering the office space.

You can smell the poo when it's cold. I dread to think what it'll be like in the summer time, when it's sweaty hot and the poo gets to bake and spread it's super-heated aura of stench around the surrounding area! I dunno if the not-so heavily fortified doors and window can hold out.

I'll let you know next summer.

18 Oct 2004 I got something to say about cars:

Cars. Cars, cars, cars... Oh dammit, I can't think of anything to write about. All I wanna say is that I gots me a new car on Saturday (a Nissan Primera, lovely cars they are). But it bloody broke the same night that I brought it. I really really, can't think of anything interesting to say about it, apart from the fact that it's in repairs, and I got a Vauxhall Vectra as a courtesy car, which is nowhere near as good as my lovely Primera. I'd think of something better to say but I'm distracted by my neighbour and her friend. They're at my window right now, in their "cool" poncho's. What's the deal with those damn poncho's?? They look like something that my granny would knit. And people pay £40 for them!! Women....

What was my point again...? Oh yeah my car. £3000 for something that broke within 24 hours. Still, at least it's getting fixed under its warranty.

Oh, I also gots me a new job too, as a Internet and Mail Order manager! At last, my dreams as doing web stuff for a living is coming true. I'll be working for Pukka Clothing and that's the site I'll be working on, amounst other things. The Mail Order side of things will be interesting because I've never done anything like it before and I have no idea what I'm doing! I'm sure I'll pick it up as I go along.

Well that was random.

11 Oct 2004 Affirmation; The power of positive thinking

I recently finished reading The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century and it was quite a funny read, me being a Dilbert fan and all. But I want to talk about the last chapter. Scott Adams stops being funny and talks about serious, different ways of viewing current theories. namely that time, gravity, action/reaction, and reality could all be optical illusions. Then he goes on about Affirmation, and how it changed his life. This made me curious.

The basic idea behind Affirmation is that you have some control over your enviroment using your thoughts. In other words, using positive thinking to get what you want. One technique Scott used was to write out his goals 15 times using the format:

I, [insert name here], will get/do/achieve whatever.

Accord to Scott, whatever he wrote down doing this technique eventually became true. Really unlikely things. I'm not entirely sure how true or successful this technique is. After all Scott got this information from his friend who read it in a book somewhere. But he says it works and so do his friends who've tried affirmation.

So I figure "What the hell, it doesn't cost anything to try it.". I've spent the last couple of days writing my goal out in the metioned format. Nothing's happened so far, but apparantly these things take time. I'll let you know if it actually works. If anyone else has used or heard of Affirmation techniques before, please let me know how good it is or if it has indeed changed your life for the better. I'm interested to know.

Oh and before I forget; The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century is a good book. Definately work a read, even if you're not a Dilbert fan. Probably.

GRAX RATING: 3/5

1 Oct 2004 Some links update.

I've added a couple of new links on the links page. It's mostly for my benefit really, because they're links to my friend's site and I keep forgetting their addresses. Plus it's a little bit of free advertising for them.

If you don't want me to link to your site, or can think of a better description of your site (there isn't one for those two currently), feel free to let me know. :)