// August 29th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // America, Politics

Sarah Palin and Tina Fey look identical, but what would happen if they were given each others’ roles?

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// August 27th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Random

I love geeky terms. For instance, I can spend ages talking about CSS elements that won’t render properly in a certain crap browser to many of my online friends.
This is stating the obvious, but methinks one should avoid discussing – or even mentioning – computer-related terms with our less tech-savvy acquaintances, even in moments of weakness.

For one thing, humans are naturally curious…

Natalia: Feeling any better?
[I was whining about feeling tired earlier]
Me: I’m looking at random crap about MySQL databases, which is waking me right up.
Natalia: Uh… What is MySQL?

… And if you try to explain, they still won’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

Lulu: I keep talking to my mum about chkdsk.
“Oh, I could check it…”
“NOOO, MUM, IT’S NOT CHECK DESK, IT’S C-H-K-D-S-K!”
Me: …A.K.A. *headdesk* :g_doh:

Basically…

FAIL!

// August 23rd, 2008 // 11 Comments » // Internet, Plurk

I joined Plurk some time during June 2008 during the general hype on Twitter, thinking it was just another website for me to use a couple of times before abandoning. It’s got nothing to do with the service, but my general laziness when it comes to adopting new things – my friends have a hard time convincing me to join anything, even when it comes to simple things as joining forums, and I can be a bitch if someone needs a referral credit for something. An example is shown below.

Person: “Can you do me a massive favour and sign up for [blah] using my referral code?”
Me: “No.”
Person: “But it’s a [blah] website with [blah blah blahs]!”
Me: “Still a no.”
Person: *expletive*

However, being a natural sheep, I followed the tweeting crowd – or should that be baaing ‘herd’? – and signed up for Plurk. Baa.

I soon found out that Plurk was more interesting than it appeared to be. Almost everyone I was following on Twitter seemed to be signing up also, and I soon found myself in a little community of people, all getting used to this new website.
To be honest, I didn’t exactly warm to Plurk at first, muttering about its’ “fugly colour scheme” via Brightkite on Twitter – confused yet? I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, brown and blue will never go together, no matter how much you try and dress it up.

Anyway, long story short, I eventually grew to love it, ‘fugly colour scheme’ and all (probably because I changed it as soon as I could). I began plurking more and tweeting less, loving all the conversation a random plurk could manage to generate. One of the most important things I found, however, was the amount of new things I was involuntarily learning every day from plurkers. Like Twitter, plurkers shared links, but the fact that you could embed images and videos in plurks made me, a fickle person, feel more inclined to click them. Aside from the fact that I was getting Rickrolled more than ever *glares at @Tenebrous*, I learnt many useless useful things that will be embedded in my memory forever, courtesy of plurkers.

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// August 16th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Me, Nostalgia, Website

On the 25th of December 2005, I registered twilightlullaby.net via my current host, ToastyHost, probably because I was bored at Christmas, and hey, what better way to do that than to pick random words that sounded weird together and register a domain? I already owned a domain previously (we’ll skip over the part about how I was so excited the year before to be finally getting a .com!!!111oneoneone!!!!), but I ditched my old domain name for this one, because I thought it sounded better. Srsly, WTF was I thinking?! twilightlullaby.net became my personal website of sorts, with crap layouts, weird blogs, and stupid tutorials. In fact, I still have a lot of twilightlullaby.net’s stuff in a ZIP file on my computer.
I was pretty proud of it at the time, but let’s face it, it was utter crap! The layouts were all fixed width and aligned to the left, would not display properly in any other screen resolution outside of 1024 x 768 (although I optimised it for 800 x 600 for some strange reason), and wouldn’t work in any browser outside of Firefox. Not because I was ‘elite’, but because I had just discovered Firefox and thought it was the coolest thing on earth (mainly because it loaded a hell of a lot faster than IE, and had a lot of cool addons), and accidentally uninstalled all my other browsers, thinking that all code would display the same, no matter what browser it was on. Oh, how n00bish of me. My website was a classic example of Web 1.0, haha.

Later on in the year, I discovered NaNoWriMo, and ditched my ‘beloved’ – I use that term lightly because I was really starting to get bored of it by then – website in order to finish writing a 50000 word novel. At the end of the month, my novel was completed, I’d met a lot of new friends, and hadn’t updated the website since the beginning of the month. Yep, procrastination had sunk in. I put the website on an open hiatus, thinking I would save it for a rainy day. Just when I was thinking about actually doing something to my website again, something went wrong.

During that November, I was so busy writing that I didn’t notice at all that my host, ToastyHost, was having major problems. Well, when I came back, I saw for myself. There was downtime on a Twitter scale, the host couldn’t be contacted, and, worst of all, when I registered, the domain came free with the hosting, i.e. I had no control over it whatsoever, and couldn’t change the nameservers.
When the time came to renew my hosting again, I just wasn’t able to do it. ToastyHost had died, my domain was gone, and I waved goodbye to my crappy little personal site.

Three years later, I was randomly doing searches on Whois, when I saw that this domain name was available again. Not surprisingly, no one had wanted to buy it in the 3 years it had been held by the registrar – I couldn’t be bothered to buy it back because of the bloody expensive fee the registrar was charging.

After much discussion on Plurk about whether to buy it or not, I bought twilightlullaby.net again. Basically, I wanted this domain for nostalgia.

Three years on, I hope I’ve learnt from my bloated code, my appallingly bad taste in layouts, and general suckiness. If you think that I haven’t, feel free to poke me and tell me what I’m doing wrong. I’m currently using a premade Wordpress theme at the moment to avoid making any Wordpress themes.

Also, twilightlullaby.net’s name may be crap, but it’s become a little piece of my history that I can’t bear to get rid of, if you know what I mean.

I will still blog on Vox occasionally (well, I’m certainly crossposting with it at the moment), but for now, this domain, with all its’ history, shall be my main blog.

Welcome back, twilightlullaby.net. In retrospect, I really did miss you quite a bit.