The Grax Domain

25 Aug 2006 Twinkies: The final verdict

In my teenage years I went to the USA with my Dad and his girlfriend at the time for a holiday. I also took my old school friend along. We had
fun during the two weeks. One day my Dad bought a twelve pack of twinkies. I was excited; I was going to get the infamous twinkie I've
heard so much about on TV (mainly the Simpsons quote made by Apu "Silly customer, you cannot hurt a twinkie!")

However my dreams were to be shattered when I discovered my friend had eaten them all like a glutton. I didn't even get to look at a twinkie,
let alone try one. To this day I still hold a faint feeling of animosity towards him, and a heavy feeling in my heart that I may never get to try
the golden treat in my lifetime...

Until now. Thanks to my girlfriend, after her two week training/holiday in America, she brought me back a packet of twinkies! My face lit up with joy. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you The Twinkie™:



I unwrapped the packaging like a child on Easter with a grin on my face. I carefully peeled one from the wrapper and I took a bite out of it...

It was the taste of disappointment.

It didn't taste very good at all. The cake and the cream had a really nasty chemically sensation. It felt really artificial in my mouth. The
more I chewed the less I liked but I had to finish the twinkie I had in my hand. So I ended it, thus my dreams of enjoying a twinkie had ended too.

All this for a buck 25. My girlfriend and I got ripped-off.

This is the cake-like delight that has Americans ranting on about it? It's nasty! What's wrong with you people??

20 Aug 2006 The Art of Grax v2.0 (beta)

The Art of Grax has been revamped.

After a long while of on-off coding action and one final push over the weekend I have remade the website from scratch. The things I've done are:

• Given the whole site a new skin. Not longer will you stare at a sterile "My First Website" white sorry excuse for an online gallery. There's colour and interesting positioning of stuff.
• No more tables! The site has been rebuilt to be XHTML standard compliant.
• It uses a couple of custom-built PHP classes within the code. Nothing super-complex, but it works.
• There's the starts of XML within the site. Each individual picture is generated by PHP making an XML thingy and then the PHP processing it.
• The comments text fields has javascript elements in them for validation (ready for AJAX) but can function just fine without javascript.
• Oh yeah, I've added a few new pictures on the site too.
• Not to mention clearing out all the God-damn spam posts it's been getting!

All in all it a pretty solid rework I think. However there are a couple of things that I've left out (until a later date), partly because I really wanted to replace the old site ASAP and partly because I'm don't fully understand the XML technology yet:

• I originally wanted the site to have elements of AJAX, name the side gallery loading a new picture AJAX-style, but I just don't know how it's done. But it should all be set up for me to plug it in when I do work it out.
• I wanted to look into RSS feed, but I didn't get to adding it to the site. Again I'm not sure how it works but I will figure it out.

I'm pretty happy with what I've got. It is a beta however (basically I'm just covering my ass just in case one of you smart-asses points out an error) so if you do spot something wrong with the site, let me know.

In fact, just tell me what you think of it overall. Any comments, critics or suggestions let me have 'em.

15 Aug 2006 It's a-coming... Something... Newer...

Bear with me a while will ya?

I'm working on an update for a part of the Grax Domain. Fact is I've been working on-off it for the past few months (mostly because I've been distracted by everything).

Anyway, there's a fair bit to do but it's the home stretch.

Here's hoping I get something by the end of this weekend. ^_^

6 Aug 2006 [insert good title here]

*Steal funny idea for entry from this site*

[Insert funny and witty entry here]

*Feel a wee bit shameful and naughty*