Journals

Ever felt like your friends don't give a damn about you?

It happens to me all the time. I have a couple of friends who say they're my friends, but they seldom remember me if I don't call first. I'm already a background element in everyone's lives. I'm the decorative NPC. I'm the optional quest nobody's interested in.

It could be easy to say that I have nothing to give, but that's not true. I care, I'm always there, they always have my unconditional attention. Yet I don't see any of that come back. I'm always the last option, the oh-well-if-there's-nothing-better. Is it asking too much to expect the same from them?

I know that as a computer geek I shouldn't expect to have a girlfriend, but a friend or two at least? Are my expectations so unrealistic? I'm starting to think they are. Actually wanting my friends to pretend they're friends? Pfft. Who would come up with such a thing.

Example: two days ago, one of them tells me one of his (female) friends wanted to see a movie. She said "Bring a friend, I'm coming with one too". Of course, only a week later I hear of this event. He then adds, "I'm sorry, I have to confess you weren't the first one I thought of". Well, not a surprise for me anyway - I'm never the first one anyone thinks of. Sometimes, not even the last one.

Then there's my other friend, whose friendship, company, support and overall giveashitness I appreciated the most. At one point we didn't go a day without talking in one way or another. But not now. For months already she hasn't written anymore, doesn't call, doesn't text, doesn't reply to emails, doesn't get online (to, say, msn) for weeks. She insists everything is alright, but (due to all the above) I still feel that "I don't care" vibe coming from her. She did call me for my birthday, though. But that's it. Is this all a joke? I just don't understand.

Life is always teasing me. There doesn't seem to be anything in it for me.

TLDR: I'm depressed, I feel worthless and forgotten.

Today is my 22nd birthday, if anyone cares.

Last night I had a dream in which I was Harry Potter. I was running around in a crazy maze with secret passages and stuff like that in a sort of team deathmatch HL - but with magic wands, and the teams were the Hogwarts houses. I remember thinking it was super cool and I had to make a map of that to put up here. Then I woke up and sadly, I realised it was a pretty shitty idea for a map.

I moved to a new house less than a year ago, and the new 'hood has way more frequent power outages. It's annoying as shit. I had to redo a lot of work. Until now. I got me a nice UPS.

Unfortunately it's rather heavy with its 4 batteries, and I can't put it on my surrounding... eh.. furniture, since it's mostly cardboard boxes I don't have a large desk yet (computer is on a small table, and everything else is on top of the boxes I haven't had time to unpack yet) I don't like to put stuff on the floor, but I guess it'll have to stay there until I get a proper surface.

A couple of days ago, a friend said to me: You MUST check out this game. No excuses. And gave me a download link. We occasionally share abandonware and rare underground games, so I just downloaded it and thought nothing of it. It was a rather small file (around 100MB, small indeed for modern figures) and apparently had modest computer requirements. I needed to download a missing DLL which wasn't hard to find anyway, and I had it running in no time.

It was a modest game indeed. The title screen was the first level, even. The title of the game... Braid. Didn't ring a bell. No game menu, no help screen, only 5 useful keys in my vast keyboard: The arrow keys and spacebar. And only one thing to do, too: play.

You play as Tim, an (apparently sad) little man with a red tie who is in a mission to rescue an evasive Princess that has been kidnapped. You jump on top of enemies to get rid of them, and Tim's mission - besides finding the Princess - is to gather some puzzle pieces that vaguely picture his memories... it's a platform game. It reminded me of good ol' Mario, only this one has a twist: You can't lose. If you die, you just rewind the game back to when you didn't, and keep playing. But hold on, it's not that easy. Most puzzles are thought out around the idea that you can go back and forth in time, and so you must do that often to be able to gather the keys and puzzle pieces in order to continue. Each world (6 total) has a different twist to it, but I won't spoil. There is not much to explain here, anyway, as the game does an awesome job at self-explaining - even without words, as the only text you'll see onscreen is the game story.

Throughout the game, the story is (intentionally) kept rather vague and confuse. Only when you get to the end you can kind of see the whole picture, but even then you'll have to stop and think about it for a moment. What you've seen is not what you thought it was, that's all I'll say.

I finished it last night at about 4am, I was hooked. It doesn't have mind-blowing 3D graphics, or a bizarrely convoluted plot, or HDR, or whatever. It's a beautifully simple game like I haven't seen in at least a decade (not to say two).

In my games rating, it gets a 9 just because Mario won't be beat off the top so easily. Tim wasn't around during my childhood

TLDR: Check out Braid. It's a must.

It rained earlier today and my window was open. The carpet in my room got wet. Does anyone know of an effective way to dry it?

As some might have already seen in previous journal posts, I'm working on a website for work.

As I have complete freedom over the design, I chose to make it in PHP to learn a new technology. It's going pretty well (special thanks to Penguinboy for pushing me in the right direction with CSS), but I'm facing a new obstacle right now. I don't think it's directly related to PHP though.

I need to make a conditional redirect, but I find I don't even know how to make a "normal" redirect.

The intended design is:

a.php has a textbox and a submit button. Enter the right string and you are redirected to b.php?event=stringentered . With a wrong string you just come back to the same prompt, maybe with an error message.

b.php only needs to send you back to a.php when no string is passed to it.

Right now, I only have one php page that does both, and it works, but I think it's a mess and I wonder if it would be "cleaner" with two pages instead.

Does anyone have an idea?

[PS. I could really use some text formatting features here such as bold, italics, etc. like in forum posts...]

I'm struggling to figure out how to do what I want with CSS. It's rather annoying. I'm building a website as part of my job. Without resorting to tables, frames or other ugly hacks, I want the layout to be simple. VERY simple. DISTURBINGLY simple.

What I want: A banner on top, a 4-item fixed navigation menu on the left column, text in the main area.

What I have: A banner on top, a 4-item fixed navigation menu on the left below the banner, text under the banner overlapping the menu. WHY?

Right now I'm testing inline then move out to linked CSS.

Code in my menu page:

<div id="menu" style="position:fixed;">
bla bla bla a-href menu items bla bla bla
</div>

I found position:fixed and position:absolute yield the same results. If I use float:left; the main text doesn't overlap it but wraps around it. I want it to be a column! GAAAHH!

Any ideas? Will be appreciated.

I have never been able to schedule my computer to shut down on its own.

I mean, it should be simple. Just go to scheduled tasks in control panel, add the task "shutdown -s" at the time you want it and that's it. But no. I always get some "access denied" error or something like that. Sometimes I hate Windows more than the usual.

Just came across my favourite episode of Dexter's Lab. Very Bondy.

I always wanted to make a short film in that style since I saw it. Sadly I don't have the means to produce it, with a proper soundtrack.

Also, Bonk.

I have had PHP listed in my CV ever since I had one. However, I don't remember typing a single line of PHP until today, when I had to script a page for my "second job" (I don't have a first one, got fired a year ago).

Today I found out I didn't know shizzle about PHP. But it turned out to be pretty easy so after a couple of minutes I had the page set up and working. Not pretty, just functional. I'll take care of the looks after it does everything I want it to do.

So today I found out I was ahead of myself. I suppose I knew I'd find it easy to learn if I ever needed it. I'm glad to know I wasn't wrong

Oh the tragedy! I feel like the world is coming to an end! This story is having a huge twist so early! Nothing in my life will be the same after this! And I still refuse to accept that... I'm going bald.

Hair naturally falls off, but this time it's not growing back. It's been over a year since I first noticed something wasn't quite right. The forested area is still the same, however it's density that has significantly decreased - especially in the last two months or so. I look at the mirror and I can see my scalp and each individual hair. It has even acquired the same colour than the rest of my face. I'm trying to get used to the idea that in a year, my head will be as shiny as a bowling ball. I try to convince myself that Jason Statham gets all the chicks, but my mind replies it's the accent.

Further proof that this hasn't been a particularly great year for me.

I tend to forget about journals. I'm bored so I decided to post my first one. Will it be ever read?

A philosophical observation
Here I was last night, very tired after a long day of homework, when I opened Google Earth. Not knowing what to do, I just navigated my way to a friend's workplace, and just for the hell of it, I clicked on the toolbar button that simulates sunlight. I moved the slider back to see at what time the sun had set, and... the whole building was gone, a large swamp was in its place. "What? Your workplace wasn't here this morning?"

It turns out I had clicked the button next to the daylight one - Historical imagery. I was looking at the same place, sometime in 1994. Not quite this morning. I navigated back to her house, but... her house wasn't there in 1994 either. Nor any others around it. Or the streets. Another nice, large swamp was there with only a few metres of dirt tracks coming in from the main road.

At this point I couldn't help but remember Back To The Future, when Marty finds himself in 1955 and the street where he lives doesn't even exist yet. But then another feeling filled my insides. A very unique feeling of emptiness, along with the realisation that along with the things that come and go over time, we ourselves are subject to the passing of time. What we were, what we are now, and what we will be, will pass by just like this forgotten patch of land turned into a nice set of streets and houses and who knows what it will become in the future.

Will we ever be able, by knowing what there was before and what there is now, to project and figure out what there will be later? There's no way to know.

Here, it also applies to the Rooms project. A (beta) version was compiled with my unfinished room in it. A snapshot of a past time, it will eventually be replaced by a final version with the finished room(s) in it, leaving the "in-progress" versions a memory of what once was.

I always wanted to write something philosophical-ish. Some people call me a sentimental. I'm just this nostalgic stupid.