I got this link from a mailing list about an interesting concept. Basically it’s an experiment about putting something vulnerable and insignificant like a small robot with it’s final destination tagged on it and determine people’s response. Do they ignore it? Or interfere? The experiment takes place in New York, one of the well known busiest cities.

The results were surprising in that every tweenbot eventually got to their destination unharmed with random people’s help. Some just pointing the tweenbot to the right direction, some “saving” it from danger when it got stuck or was heading towards dangerous places like roads.

Read more about “tweenbots” here.

Hurray! i’m a complete noob at Maya. I have a reputation in class (and the lecturer knows it) for ruining my own UI. Making things disappear or doing strange stuff that makes things not run smoothly. Things that take people 5 mins to do smoothly takes me 2 hours because I need to troubleshoot. Yes! Troubleshoot for just simple small insignificant things. Almost every step I take is a challenge and a big hurdle which definitely is not normal.

Either way, I managed to cut down funny stuff from happening to me by half and this is what I came up with for my assignment.

Obviously not very impressive. The task is to make a set. It can be a room in the house, or anything. Most people made rooms as suggested by the lecturer. I chose to make the living room. It looks simple but a lot of dumb details were blurred out due to distance. Such as the speakers…

Can’t really see from the overall shot. Makes me feel like an idiot for making details that can hardly be seen. Still it was fun. At first Maya was to be my most hated subject. Now I’m actually enjoying it. I can’t imagine learning it by myself. I’d have died from frustration for all the strange mistakes I make that no other noob beginner in class make.

I launched dreamweaver the morning before I head off to Malaysia and worked without sleep for over 24 hours till the very last minute where I had to turn off the computer and carry the luggage to the taxi. Still I could not finish it in time. Just this morning, I finally completed "Blue Not Here"; christened with the inability to think of a good name at 5am other than stating the obvious.

I’ve never done clean corporate looks before. I thought this one looks cleaner than the old ones but on second looks, maybe not. Having 3 columns makes it difficult to beat 2 columns in terms of simplicity and I have been doing 2 column layouts all along. Admittedly, this is still a little too messy and is hardly corporate. But hey, at least I’m managed to stay away from pasting a wallpaper and working the site around it. Still, someone would not be pleased and this would probably burn holes in his eyes. At least I’m trying so give credit for that! Plus, this layout is the one that made me read the Float Theory which I have been resisting the need to read.

It was a difficult site to build thanks to blogsome’s smarty templating system that isn’t all that smart afterall. It is simple for beginners to use but so inflexible. I really hate the way it generates the html code. It’s so restrictive, it’s like a mother hen smacking my hand saying "No you can not" to everything I want. One good smack is how my date looks like now. By right, this post’s datestamp is supposed to have "Dec" written under the 20 but noooo, they generate the date all in one line, enclosed within a <h2> tag. It now looks awful but there’s no other way to do it and I’m getting lazy from having to go back to the drawing board each time it gives a smack so I left it with just the number.

Enough of smarty rant. I’m done with this layout and it shall stay this way. End of story.

The layout is actually still not completed. I released it anyhow. Its just taking really long and halloween is near or rather just passed. The timing seemed right.

Asides from the Loli Ruri and the background of Nifflheim (Ragnarok Online), everything else here is self drawn - mostly by mouse, spider is done by pencil then scanned in for editing. The hardest to draw using the mouse would be the tombstones. Luckily, it turned out alright. Not a fantastic layout but something morbid is nice for a change, and yet not too morbid for me to get too uncomfortable about while working on it.

It’s one of the layouts that I really had fun working on and also acquired the most headache.

Asides from the layout, a few things have changed. Password protected post are now split into three levels. One for general, just to protect the identity if i name anyone. If you know me in person, password is easy to guess or I’d just give it out anyway.

Second level for very very close friends, only three people have it actually. So don’t bother badgering me so you can have fun reading the emo posts >.< If you don’t have it, chances are, you never will.

Third level is adminstrative level only. So yes, you three will still see password protected posts although rare.

Passwords aside, after I fix up the knitty gritty bugs and such of the site, I’ll be importing the posts from the old one over to Blogsome. Did anyone did such a migration before? If you do, mail me if you used a better method than just copying and pasting. Arigatou in advance!!!