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Of out of all the websites that qualify as Works of Art I can think of few that were not Japanese in origin. Perhaps it is the writing system and the subsequent dexterity? Could it be their religious dirty-phobia that keeps their designs minimal? Or could it be their suicidal work ethic? If these reasoning sound weak it is because they are. The Japanese just happen to produce some very beautiful websites.  One such produces of beauty are at mono-lab. They produced monochrome, the free wordpress theme I have now started using here, and I simply love it.

I love it so much I wanted to thank them. Now first I should explain the beginning of the story. Imagine me, bored, perhaps I’ll reskin the blog. Normally I skip the absolutely most popular themes, the internet does not need yet another aero themed blog. I’ve often fared well searching in the, popular, yet not near first page popular range. This time I found monochrome, I want to fill the blog if only to do the theme justice.

Now as an amateur programmer the first thing I did was inspect the template’s source files.  I noticed to odd things, first there is no license, and there is a file called “japanese.css”.  So now that I am curious what is it I see when I view the author’s site? They are giving out the psd, and no sight of a license. This solidly puts them in my FOSS section of gratitude. Due to these facts plus the large presence of beautify Japanese typography  I am now very excited.  So I had the perfect idea, I’ll thank them, in japanese.  A simple task I think, I can watch whole TV shows what is a little complement compared to that?

ありがとう、これはさいこTheme!

Thank you, this is the oldest theme!

Wait? “The oldest”? Yup, thats not what I intended to say.  In fact it is closer to a word for ‘Last, end, conclusion’ than the word “best” I was trying to say. So I can at least edit it right? Oh no, all the buttons are in japanese! Ok don’t panic, look at the target URL, ok so one of the links leads to a URL containing “reply” in it, it must be the other one. Ah, it appears to work. Fix my mistake and submitted. Wait! Now there are two comments! A dictionary look up later and I find that the button I had pressed meant “quote”.  So I’ll make one more post, maybe they will not ban me.

I’m so sorry, I thought that was the edit button, I didn’t mean to say that the theme was “さいご” I meant “セっこう. ORZ

So in the end I, insulted them, and spammed them. No regrets though, I’m sure they’ll understand and I still came out plus one awesome theme.

I ended up making three point one games. Of which the point one game was the most successful.

Note that it actually works! Oh sure, “works” is a bit realitive, but the flash player does not crash, so it works.  It got ~300 plays. It got some complements about the art style.

My justification for this was it is “art”, a psychological test if you will. But you of course say, “Wait, didn’t you say this was the most successful one?” Well it turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought that it was interesting, a large Finnish flash site homepaged the game, and soon one of its competitors also hosted it. In total it got 25K plays, pretty good for half a mornings work.  Sadly I think this gave me an inaccurate impression of what people will play, after all if a really bad game gets 300 plays and a slightly better bad game gets 25K then imagine a slightly good game?

By the end of making this one I was really enjoying playing it. Sadly it was either not a slightly good game or I had miss estimated. ~500 plays, although it was fun to learn blitting.

This one was actually developed at the same time as Kuroi, it too meet the same result ~1000 plays. Many commented that it was too short, which does leave me the option of expanding it in the future, I don’t think I will.

On a final note I did “earn” about 12 dollars, spread across about 3 sites, which means I’ll never actually get the money due to being far below payout. But eh, that’s more than I’ve ever earned on the internet before, of course if I did this to earn money, I would have been disappointed.

In websites I got two more done, Cameroncreekmining.ca and Japanesesimple.com. Cameroncreekmining is my father’s hobby company’s website and was a fun project. Not only did I get to impress my father but I also got to try out a new CMS, Concrete5, all while getting him away from his old website which had been built using some shovelware website builder. The neat thing about concrete5 is that it uses a in browser editor so that he can now edit the site anywhere he is without touching any html. Hopefully this will acutally get him to do so every so often. Japanesesimple.com is my personal project, I’m learning japanese and finding interesting things along the way so I thought I might as well share with others. In truth though I just really wanted to make another website and do so in a field I am interested in.My thought is to keep the subject matter simple and basic, allowing me an actual finish date.

Another area I have spent some time playing in is adwords, since my father has products to sell it would be silly for him not to advertise them. Another excellent excuse to do something fun and interesting.

After playing the awesome series of story mods by Puce Moose http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4730 I decided to take a swing at it. I kept the story small so that I could focus on polish without getting getting sidetracked with making it grand.

Update, now version 1.0:
This new file fixes a major bug and greatly improves the story telling.
Some how I had included every single script from Fallout3 in my esp. I am sorry to anyone who has lost game play due to my mistake. I have now deleted the old bugged file.

Finding the story:
Since this is a small mod I did not want to bother the player with a note such as is used in the DLC and Puce Moose’s stories. To access the new area you must go to Canterbury commons, it is the first door to your right when you enter Uncle Roe’s house.

Possibility of mod conflict:
This mod uses a prefix for everything redefined so there should be no conflicts. The only problem that might be encountered is if another mod changes Uncle Roe’s house in which case depending on load order the player might not be able to access the quest.

Credit:
Credit goes to Puce Moose for his inspirational mods and these websites for fortran source code, all snippets used under fair use as well as their respective licenses.

http://orion.math.iastate.edu/burkardt/f_src/f_src.html

http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/fortransrc.html

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/lib.stat.cmu.edu/jasasoftware/llca.txt

Copyright for this mod:
While this is my first mod I would like to this that it is well polished and enjoyable and I would like it to be used with no restrictions. To that end I release any copyright of mine relating to this work under the CC0 license. In plain English this means that you may do what ever you want with my work, with some restrictions that I am not allowed to release in certain nations. If you do live in a nation to stops copyright creators from releasing such rights as attribution I promise not to prosecute if you were to “accidentally” to not comply fully. With that said I do not expect anyone to actually reuse these files, one can dream though. If you do end up using any of this I would love an email: daniel.mark.dressler@gmail.com .

Thehiddendocumentv09 | 10 KB

Which brings me to my next failure, I just woke up today to find that my computer would not turn on.  Turns out my Silver Stone strider is striding on its last legs and that it sometimes makes a “pop” then it has to be turned off at the back for a minute or so. I’m going to take a risk with this and use it until the Earthwatts I ordered arrives, I can only pray that it does not blow up and take other hardware with it.  Especially now that I do not have a backup. What I think I will do is turn it off at the back when it is not in use.

My speakers and keyboard also have seen better days, I’ve leave them.  Really all this can be attributed to the fact that I got off the upgrade wagon, I like my new found frugality.

PS: I see that the foam on my secondary chair’s arm rest is splitting, I’ll leave it until I can justify buying a really nice chair.

• I’ve started adding descriptions from the map’s orignal topic if there is a useful one there.
• I’ve got some more Japanese studying done.
• Did well, I think, on my last Social Test hope I also do well on the finals.

PS: Is there really no one that wants to help me get maps up?

• It would be a related URL so that if we play the cards right we might just be able to get it to show up on google searches.
• It would be wordpress based, include a directory of maps and host maps.
• There should be a easy  to use GUI tool for changing maps, the SAMs are so simple it is a shame that nothing automated has been made.
• It would be a platform for both sides of the community, if new users want to go deeper they may.  As I see it now the amount of drama will simply stare new users away.
• It can be hosted on my dreamhost account although if it gets big as I hope it does ads can be added.  Thats neither here nor there though.

The entire point of this would be to get new players to SMR and get the content that is already out there to people.  There is a need for this as can be seen from the fact that people are still downlaoding SMRI.