Appassionato

One blog post for the past year

Categorised as Design, Personal, Romance, School, Site-Related & tagged with gaming, Internet, maplestory, relationships, uni, wow.

In the last post, I said that the business card design was the first step in getting to this version 20 design. Guess what? I lied. I almost forgot that I had ever designed what I should now refer to as Appas­sionato Version 19.5. Indeed, this is the reason I once blamed Sheng Han for using a header back­ground image similar to mine:

Appas­sionato Version 19.5 (Click above image to see the live version)

All my guy friends thought this was the best design I’ve ever came up with, totally un-Rilla style, and it’s actually the first photo manip­u­la­tion I’ve done. Reasons why I didn’t go through with it:

• It looked perfect on my 1024 x 768 screen, but when I switched to a laptop with 1280 x 800 screen I realised that it was too small.
• The file size of all the images was too big for a blog.
• No one ever notices my favourite part of the design: the hanging wire aka “skip to footer” link.

Main crux of this blog post however: summary of the past year of my life.
Read more…

Failure made the climax of my day

Categorised as Internet & tagged with funny, Internet, sex.

I thought all grown males (at least through the Internet) would have become accus­tomed to such scenes under their own volition over their high school years? But perhaps modern males have not failed that far–yet.

A couple of years ago, searching “failure” in Google would produce something along the lines of George Bush for the first result. Today, though George Bush no longer grins back at the first instance as Google thinks “failure”, the fun has not just yet ended.

Not far down the Google search results page for failure…

At the time, this result was about 4th top.

Me: *eyes brighten up* OoOoOoOoh

Boyfriend: Don’t click it…

Me: *clicks*

…

*watches boyfriend run for his life (literally)*

*LOL*

Three hours later… That mis­chiev­ous boyfriend of mine decided to pull the prank on his friends. So there I was, tapping f-a-i-l-u-r-e-dot-o-r-g into the address bar on J‘s laptop. But four guys at the table, and none of them wanted to tap the final “Enter” key. Even­tu­ally, Jason’s own finger triggered the last step of the prank.

Before the page was fully loaded, one of the guys shut the lid of the laptop at the sight of… Mmm. Well, and there we were, a group of psycho-maniacs ROFL-ing at lime green and crap.

Damned businessmen

Categorised as Internet, Rants & tagged with Internet, shopping.

Dammit. I busted my monthly Internet bandwidth. Again.

Some of you in the nice Northern Hemi­sphere may be thinking “WTF Internet bandwidth” but yeah, that’s right. Telecom Xtra is the monopoly over our broadband Internet here and we get crap service at high prices. The plan we’re with gives 6 GB Internet bandwidth at the damned rate of $49.95 NZD ($36.00 USD) a month, not to mention we have one of the slowest broadband speeds in the OECD already.

Neither my sister nor I know what we did to suddenly bust the 6 GB bandwidth just four days before the recurring date but right now I’m having to suffer 56K dial-up speed. I can’t even load my site properly in Mozilla Firefox. Actually, let me rephrase that: I can’t load any page properly in Firefox so I’m back to Opera again. It’s killing me.

I had always been com­plain­ing about the crap broadband speed we got – about 150~200 KB/s down­load­ing from most sites – but now I under­stand what real pain-in-the-arse means. Last night, I was down­load­ing a file at 4 KB/s. The second file I down­loaded was pro­gress­ing at 0.5 KB/s. All this is due to the bloody rich firm that provides the bad service. They have no com­pet­i­tion to face in the industry so it doesn’t matter what price they set or what service they give, we all have to pay them. Die.

And to add to all the slow Internet killing my mood, I acci­dent­ally bidded on a 1 GB MP4 player on TradeMe when I thought it was a 2 GB. It wasn’t purely my fault since that auction came up in the search results when I entered “2GB MP4 player”. Anyhow, I won that at $57 NZD and realised I made a mistake fighting over it with another bidder. I then went after the 2 GB one I really wanted and won it at $59 NZD. Yeah. $2 for 1 GB upgrade. I should laugh? Heee. But, no.

It was the same seller that listed the items and I mailed him straight after­wards asking if we could please cancel the trade and I would be willing to pay any costs he had incurred in listing the auction, which would amount to something no more than $3.95. And he replied me:

Please pay $10 (admin and restock­ing charge) to our bank account

“Admin and restock­ing charge” my ass. It was just a Chinese guy bringing cheap MP4 players in from China and reselling here for triple or quadruple the price and he’s charging a sixth of the item’s price for some admin and “restock­ing” crap. The item hasn’t even been dis­patched! I shall now give the 1 GB MP4 player to my friend who doesn’t have one since if I do resell the item, I don’t think I’d find another stupid girl who’d bid up to $57 for it thinking it was a 2 GB.

So now, I am broke again. But at least I’ll now treasure my 200 KB/s download speed to come in two days. (Perhaps only for a week in, though.)