Innovation when you least expect it.
Personal
New Theme Available
Aug 31st
I’ve been tinkering around with different themes for WordPress lately. While browsing the database, I came across another theme that fits my specifications: Simplistic, blueish, and has a fixed width and a single sidebar.
The default theme will still be Mystic, but now you’ll also have Simplistic Blue and Webby Blue to choose from.
I have still yet to find a nice, blue based theme, that’s WordPress3 compatible.
Night!
Wallpaper Series: Bokeh Rings
Aug 26th
I’ve created a set of neat wallpapers in Photoshop. I saw a tutorial online for it, and I decided to do it as I needed a boost in my Photoshop skills. I usually work with Fireworks most of the time for web development.
For those of you who don’t know, bokeh is a style of photography that focuses on the forground, while making light sources in the background appear blurry, or more precisely, appear as blurred rings or stars.
The wallpapers are 1920 by 1080 pixels, I may decide to do them in other sizes. For now, just center them.
Water Drops
Aug 15th
I was bored earlier and a rain shower had just passed, so I took my camera out and tried to get a picture of a drop of water landing in a bucket. After about 5 minutes, I managed to get one.
Ram. I has it.
Aug 9th
I was checking out my old laptop yesterday and turned it on for kicks. Surprisingly, it still booted faster than my desktop. I’m keeping it preserved; maybe it will make an artifact one day. An expensive one.
I also had a whopping 449MB left on the massive 1.35 GB hard drive.
The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World
Jul 1st
A group of people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians — if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. Any islanders who have figured out the color of their own eyes then leave the island, and the rest stay. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (excluding themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph.
On this island there are 100 blue-eyed people, 100 brown-eyed people, and the Guru (she happens to have green eyes). So any given blue-eyed person can see 100 people with brown eyes and 99 people with blue eyes (and one with green), but that does not tell him his own eye color; as far as he knows the totals could be 101 brown and 99 blue. Or 100 brown, 99 blue, and he could have red eyes.
The Guru is allowed to speak once (let’s say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island. Standing before the islanders, she says the following:
“I can see someone who has blue eyes.”
Who leaves the island, and on what night?
There are no mirrors or reflecting surfaces, nothing dumb. It is not a trick question, and the answer is logical. It doesn’t depend on tricky wording or anyone lying or guessing, and it doesn’t involve people doing something silly like creating a sign language or doing genetics. The Guru is not making eye contact with anyone in particular; she’s simply saying “I count at least one blue-eyed person on this island who isn’t me.”
The answer is not “no one leaves.” Much care has been taken to make the wording as precise and unambiguous as possible. If you’re confused about anything, please let me know. A word of warning: The answer is not simple. This is an exercise in serious logic, not a lateral thinking riddle. There is not a quick-and-easy answer, and really understanding it takes some effort.
Way to go Dell.
Jun 20th
So I called Dell yesterday and after an…
Wait, let me start over. So I text/chatted with them yesterday asking about the Windows 7 CD that came with my laptop. The computer shipped with 7 Home Premium on it, but they sent a Windows 7 Started Edition CD by mistake. So I want to reinstall the OS, but not via the recovery partition. I look at the CD and say “Oh dear, wrong CD”. So I chatted up tech support where a nice lady (Whom I had to explain the problem three times) said she would send me a copy of the Windows 7 Home Premium CD AS WELL AS a completely new hard drive with it preinstalled. I told her that the CD would suffice, but she was insistent that I took the hard drive as well. (Maybe I’m not smart enough to install it from a CD).
So anyway, the CD is being delivered, as well as a new 320 GB hard drive. This isn’t the first time Dell’s been so giving, by the way. Over the course of the four years I had my old desktop, they replaced the motherboard, CPU, and monitor for free. Its near impossible to get to tech support, but once you’re there, its all good.
Thanks Dell.
Posting
Jun 5th
I know, I haven’t posted in a while. It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing, it’s that I’ve been too busy lately to even sit down at my computer, let alone make a post! In fact, there was a whole week where I didn’t even turn it on! I couldn’t believe it either. 200 e-mails much?
Since I posted last, I took a trip up to the states to deliver a new boat (Details on Facebook). The trip back to the Bahamas was both long and short. It only took 20 hours, but when you are on shift from 3AM to 12PM, it can mess with your head. Suffice it to say, I had a nice long sleep that day when I got back.
So, whats new on the interwebs…?
I made a few changes to www.ngclan.net (New homepage) and made some changes to this site (beta.tascrafts.com coming soon!)
My GeoIP database has over 2500 entries now! w00t! (Click)
Oh, I fiddled around and came up with a new site idea! It’s an image uploading and exchange site. Upload an image, and you get a random one back uploaded by someone else. I’m gonna put a few more features on it in the next few days. www.imgswp.com
Updated Some Sites
Mar 1st
Finally got around to fixing the menu on www.georgetowncruising.com. There were some issues of it jamming up with certain versions of Internet Explorer. That’s all taken care of now; turns out it was a DOCTYPE problem.
This site got a mini-update as well. I updated my portfolio with new images, and unlocked it! I also updated the About section and updated some other stuff.
On a similar note, the QuickPlayer also got a bit of an update. I wrote a php script that dynamically generates the playlist based on the mp3 files in the music folder, so now there’s no having to open/edit/save/upload it every time I upload a song to it.
What else? Oh, I’m going to give Twitter another shot. I really dont see the point of having it unless you have a few hundred followers, I think FaceBooks better for status updates, but hey.
OH AND GET THIS. Remember the post I made ages back about Google ads not showing up on my computer? Guess what? I had modded my hosts file ages ago and put pagead2.googlesyndication.com as a test site to see if it worked, and forgot about it. I dont know what made me check there, but that’s where the problem was. Now I’m getting ads like I should. I guess thats a good thing.
Okay then, bed time. I’ve been having alot of late nights and longs days, so a good nights rest is in order. I say that as I see 1AM roll by :)
-tas
Internet Rant
Jan 27th
GRRR :evil:
So a container truck drives down the street on Friday afternoon and clips a few phone lines coming off the pole. Mine being one of them. The phone company here doesn’t do weekends, and they close at 4. The truck hit the lines at 4:15 ish.
I call the maintenance department on Saturday because I know a guy there and he says they cant work without a work order from the main office. So I call them on Monday morning bright and early and say they will look into it. I call them that afternoon and they say “Oh, we cant get there today, we’ll be there sometime tomorrow”. Tomorrow being Tuesday. They finally repair the lines around lunchtime on Tuesday.
Then what? They decide to do maintenance on the whole system Tuesday afternoon and it goes down again. :(
Then I was having problems with my modem|router|router setup today. AND NOW its working properly again.
End rant.
Goodbye, Barge
Jan 20th
In memory of “The Barge”.
We’ve had this boat, named “The Barge”, for about 10 years now. It used to be a workhorse when we still used it, but ever since all the buildings have been built, its just been sitting on a mooring, slowly rusting away.
Back when we were still building up the property, the barge used to bring over concrete, lumber, and other supplies to the small island that we are on. Everything here essentially came over on it.
Just the day before yesterday, someone from a marine center just a few miles away made an offer on it, which was actually more than we were expecting to get from it. Alas, the time has come to let it go.
The twin Detroit 671′s fired right up (after I put a new battery on it), and I brought it over to the dock using the engines alone; the steering was frozen. The past two days have been busy, cleaning the rust off of it, making sure everything was working, and getting our old junk off of it.
Tomorrow my friend and I will be taking it to the marine center to drop it off.