The Gaming Den

So last Christmas I went to hospital for a holidayto have my gall bladder removed. And since then, that's basically eleven months off the codeine.

I've decided, based on the last eleven months, that not being an addict is not all it's cracked up to be, and starting this next work week I'm going back on the pills. I'm always stressed out, miserable, and generally in pain from mouth ulcers and minor burns, and narcotics happen to treat every single one of those things.

Also, the constipation worked in my favour.

So give it a few days, and I should be feeling a lot better.

Mouth ulcers have plagued me for as long as I can remember. Mouth wash can numb the pain temporarily, at the cost of stinging like crazy for around a minute. However, I'm rather fond of putting ice cubes in my mouth to numb them though, which also works for excessively spicy stuff if necessary. I understand just how annoying any sort of persistent pain can be. I'm hoping (but not too optimistically) that mind uploading to a robot body or something becomes viable sometime in the near future.

I'm very familiar with constant pain. I was born with bilateral clubbed feet, and had corrective surgery done when I was six week old.

While the surgery did the trick, I still have misshapen ankle bones, which has lead to me having arthritic feet.

I can't stand for even stand for two minutes before my feet start hurting like a bitch.

Hell, my feet are hurting my right now, and I'm sitting.

Well. I'm 27 now.

I still have to go into work, but I -could- have taken today off. Between that and the folks, it's a nice reminder that I deal with mostly decent people. And that's something I'm genuinely grateful for.

@Shrapnel: Ouch. Hoping SCIENCE! can fix it someday, or at least give you bionic legs.

@Maxus: Happy birthday?

Ice cubes are no good, because I have sensitive teeth (indeed, two teeth have broken, exposing those stupid nerve endings) and ice really hurts.

But I've started on the painkillers again, with one dose about 24 hours ago, and have felt great since.

radthemad4 wrote:@Shrapnel: Ouch. Hoping SCIENCE! can fix it someday, or at least give you bionic legs.

What I really want science to do is make laser weapons, because then I can vent my pain into super-condensed beams of light that can disintegrate a man's head at thirty yards.

I just finished my backed up class work for my web publishing class, after getting the final project done just before midnight. I was fully expecting to be up till 3 am doing that shit, before having to be out the door by 7am to get to class to present.

If anyone wants to see, my final project was a resume site that I can actually go on to host somewhere to pimp myself out as a writer and artist for hire, and it can be seen here.

Web design is fun! Also, it's smart to have it with journalism nowadays. I did the same thing (glowing recommendation!).

What host are you looking at using outside of your school's server?

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:What host are you looking at using outside of your school's server?

I like asmallorange.

Congrats. Any tutorial/book/practice recommendations for hobbyists?

Thanks guys. I hadn't gotten a chance to look into hosting sites yet as I just got it done at 1am this morning. I'll look at asmallorange though.

Rad: honestly, I had somewhat wished I hadn't taken the class and just gotten a book instead. That said, www.w3schools.com has most of what you need.

Thanks. Good luck

Prak_Anima wrote:Thanks guys. I hadn't gotten a chance to look into hosting sites yet as I just got it done at 1am this morning. I'll look at asmallorange though.

Rad: honestly, I had somewhat wished I hadn't taken the class and just gotten a book instead. That said, www.w3schools.com has most of what you need.

There's an... "underground", I guess you could say, movement against w3schools. (*)
They're an okay reference (primarily because their links are ever-present), but there's better stuff (for certain things, really though for ease-of-use w3 is still acceptable).
* http://www.w3fools.com/

CodeAcademy is a nice way to get your feet wet with web-focused programming.

One of the best Javascript resources (book-wise) is the O'Reilly guide by David Flanagan. It's a MONSTER of a read, though. I would actually say to try out javascript on codeacademy first... THEN read the book.

Javascript feels kinda familiar as I've messed around with Actionscript 2 and 3 a lot (really missing the autocorrection and ctrl space menu that IDEs for Object Oriented Languages have so a comprehensive reference would be extremely helpful). HTML(5), CSS, etc. are completely new to me though and they feel kinda weird at the moment. Thanks for the advice

Prak_Anima wrote:I just finished my backed up class work for my web publishing class, after getting the final project done just before midnight. I was fully expecting to be up till 3 am doing that shit, before having to be out the door by 7am to get to class to present.

If anyone wants to see, my final project was a resume site that I can actually go on to host somewhere to pimp myself out as a writer and artist for hire, and it can be seen here.

You may want to remove the word 'facile'.

It would also be wise to consider what happens when people shrink the browser window to only like 400 pixels wide.

radthemad4 wrote:Javascript feels kinda familiar as I've messed around with Actionscript 2 and 3 a lot (really missing the autocorrection and ctrl space menu that IDEs for Object Oriented Languages have so a comprehensive reference would be extremely helpful). HTML(5), CSS, etc. are completely new to me though and they feel kinda weird at the moment. Thanks for the advice

Actionscript is a superset of ECMAscript (javascript).

You can get some pretty awesome text editors with plugins and stuff for javascript.

For windows :
SublimeText 3 is nice, Notepad++ is classic and light.

Of course there are some IDEs that claim to support javascript, too:
Eclipse, Netbeans and ... ehm... webstorm?

If you're already using Adobe stuff, you could try out Dreamweaver as an IDE... if they still make it(?).

fectin wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:I just finished my backed up class work for my web publishing class, after getting the final project done just before midnight. I was fully expecting to be up till 3 am doing that shit, before having to be out the door by 7am to get to class to present.

If anyone wants to see, my final project was a resume site that I can actually go on to host somewhere to pimp myself out as a writer and artist for hire, and it can be seen here.

You may want to remove the word 'facile'.

I was going with that second definition.

foxwarrior wrote:It would also be wise to consider what happens when people shrink the browser window to only like 400 pixels wide.

Yeah, I designed at around 1200 px or so, and need to go in and set it up to actually only use that much horizontal space.

Prak_Anima wrote:

foxwarrior wrote:It would also be wise to consider what happens when people shrink the browser window to only like 400 pixels wide.

Yeah, I designed at around 1200 px or so, and need to go in and set it up to actually only use that much horizontal space.

I know it's used a lot now, but I'd suggest just using bootstrap.
Replace the default theme with one from Bootswatch, like Cyborg, Flatly or Slate.

From there break open the css file and add in your personalized extras like the background and Webelos icons. (I forget what they actually are )

Anyway, that handles all the resizing you want with minimal fuss.

edit: totally forgot aboutBrackets earlier when listing editors. Primarily b/c I haven't used it yet. But it looks neat!

Prak, I sent you a PM on your site about a resizing issue in your navigation. PMs are impossible to see here so I'm just letting you know about that.


On resources for web design: Just go to Stack Overflow whenever you have a question about anything. I find that once you have a background in something, seeing the code people actually use is more useful than a book. You'll find multiple approaches to common problems (gradient borders even though some browsers hate that shit, show/hide content using JavaScript/JQuery, etc.) and people will usually provide the logic behind why their way is the best way. Obviously some people provide shit code, but you'll learn to recognize it soon enough. You need a background, though.

For editors, I just use Crimson Editor (now Emerald Editor). It's very straightforward and just color codes things + lists line numbers and lets you do find/replace. Fuck bells and whistles.

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:For editors, I just use Crimson Editor (now Emerald Editor). It's very straightforward and just color codes things + lists line numbers and lets you do find/replace. Fuck bells and whistles.

That's why I like NP++
Although SublimeText is nice, too.

Rad had asked about IDEs, though, hence my ramble.

Smart man there, bells and whistles obfuscate real coding. Though, for journalism/web design they can be very useful (Dreamweaver in particular). As somebody who was launched into more than they knew, that being sysadmin and web developer for a company that had no fucking experience at all doing either of those things (I had to fix a MySQL database without them even knowing I had any fucking experience with it!), being able to pick up skills quickly and "fake it before you make it" were extremely important.

Not to say I faked it (I had a lot of school to learn all sorts of shenanigans), but to be good at web design involves being good at learning CMS and other technology's very quickly. That's another reason I like Stack Overflow, they'll give you the quick and dirty when needed.

The thing I like most about bells and whistles is that they prevent me from making minor errors that I find really frustrating to debug. I didn't have any trouble using C# on Visual Studio even though many of the keywords and functions are spelled differently than their Actionscript counterparts (Actionscript was my second programming language after a very brief stint with QBasic back in middle school), as the IDE told me immediately whenever I made a mistake. I'm guessing I'll just get used to Javascript and not having my hand held after a while (still keep writing 'int' in for loops instead of 'var' though that's because of Java and C# which I've been using for school assignments recently). I've been using Notepad++ so far but I'll check out the ones you guys recommended. Thanks

I have to say NP++ has been my long standing favorite. I've started using SublimeText (3) a lot more because of some of it's built in bells and whistles.

I want to give Brackets a whirl tonight.

For an 'actual' IDE though, if you can manage the install process, Eclipse is totally free.

@Pseudo : Yea, trial by fire seems to be a pretty popular thing in the wide world of "I.T.".