I’ve been out of commission for some time now, because not only have I not had internet access but now my laptop has had to go and get repaired.

Around last week or so my laptop decided to freeze whilst playing Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and when I rebooted it, it wouldn’t stop doing the Startup Repair. So, somewhat regretfully, I reformatted my laptop to no avail and have had to send it off to HP to get an HDD replacement.

I’m expecting it back sometime tomorrow, which would just plain own. Unfortunately, because I lost everything on the hard-drive I have lost certain things I can’t replace, due to having no backup (I backup at the end of each month but this happened nowhere near my backup schedule).

So, I’ve ended up losing a few new designs I was working on (most noticeably, the Battlefield 1942-themed one I was working on, and I won’t be restarting it) as well as a few other designs I was working on in Photoshop. Most of the work I’m doing now is unrelated to web design because, when I get my laptop back, I wish to venture into other aspects of digital design to make a portfolio for a design course next year.

The worst things I lost was my website backups, game saves and World of Warcraft patches (for 3.0.2, which is ~1gb, not big but still annoying to download again). On another note…

Creative Suite 4. Yes, I am now changing the subject from my computer problems to Adobe’s CS4 set. I really only have a few words for Adobe on the matter: It all sounds bloody awesome, and I am rather surprised it does since CS4 was released so quickly.

Now all I need is $1,799 USD for the Design Premium set… hah! What I am interested in is the latest Photoshop and Dreamweaver updates (because any old features for InDesign and Illustrator are totally new to me as well because I have yet to try out those two products, which I will be). Dreamweaver CS4’s Ajax and Javascripting code-hinting is just goddamn tasty (since I like trial and error learning, afterall). And I rather like how Photoshop is heading into 3D Design.

I took a quick glance over some other Adobe products. Such as Adobe Contribute and Fireworks (because I had no friggin’ idea what Contribute was, now I know). Contributes ability to edit sites in-browser sounds good and Fireworks function to convert whole websites to PDF is just bloody insane.

It all sounds good in theory, but I plan to see how it sums up in practice.

It happened with Grand Theft Auto IV, and now it’s happened with Metallica’s “Death Magnetic”. Yes, it has been leaked. I’m not that surprised, to be honest, it was going to be online at one point or another. Whether before, or after it’s release, was just another story.

Personally, I’m not going to be downloading it. I want to buy it, if I don’t like it, I’ll probably just resell it.

I ain’t giving any links, go to any warez site or torrent site and you’re bound to find it. Kind of annoying, to be honest. People pay more for convenience (and when I mean “pay more” I don’t mean in money).

There is no doubt that the name Don LaFontaine might actually mean something to most of you, it didn’t mean much to me a few minutes ago. However, this is the name of a voice you know of, extremely well.

Don LaFontaine was THE voice of the movies. The voiceover master. He voiced over 5,000 different movie trailers and over 350,000 television commercials. He died, at the age of 68 on September 1st, 2008.

And now I leave you, with this video.

Yes, I am a Metallica fan. Nope, I didn’t grow up with them I just love pretty much anything Metal. My fave music genre, in fact (my fave bands being Metallia, Avenged Sevenfold, Marilyn Manson and Rage Against the Machine).

Metallica’s new album is coming out. Titled “Death Magnetic” it comes out on September 12th and to be honest, I can’t wait that long, I want it and I want it NOW. The songs I’ve heard from the official site are just too damn good. In my personal opinion, they just as good as they ever were. And I really do hope they make another album after this one.

So let’s list the previews, shall we?

The Day That Never Comes (god how I love this song)
My Apocalypse
A Little Taste of Death (9 parts of what I assume is an instrumental)

Click the links to listen to the songs via the official Metallica website. For everyone who loves Metallica or Thrash Metal in general then please, take a seat and reward your ears for all of their hard work. I think they deserve it.

…In the form of guides and possibly Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS). Soon I’ll be writing some very simple guides on Basic XHTML. I will be going straight to XHTML because it’s good to learn first, for anyone wanting to know. Any beginner web designer would learn it at some stage and because the W3C’s standards and rules for XHTML compliance are widely used and not as hard as some people may think, I will be using it. XHTML Transitional to be precise.

Transitional is obviously less strict then XHTML Strict. Hence why one is called “XHTML Transitional” and one is called “XHTML Strict”. I’m not an expert at Strict and I actually like some of the shortcuts that the Transitional standard allows. All my templates have always been coded under XHTML Transitional and future ones to come will always be as well. I don’t particularly want to change for anyone, unless absolutely necessary, of course.

Guides for HTML, XHTML and CSS will be made. That’s what I focus on. I do not focus on PHP or MySQL because I do not know anything about them myself. In truth, both PHP and MySQL both interest me quite a lot but I don’t have the patience to learn them and it’s harder for me to learn them via trial and error (I’m using the manual at the moment, I’ve heard it’s a good source for PHP information).

Trial and error is a damn good way to learn, IMO. I also believe people benefit from viewing other peoples source codes. Otherwise known as “open source”. I love open source products, with websites it’s not so much a problem because the source code of a website (even the style sheets used) are publicly available. With a software, the source code isn’t as easily obtainable but more and more programmers are giving people the chance to view their software’s source code, and I like how they’re accepting it just a little bit more all the time.

I’ll start off with teaching basic HTML. Questions like “What prerequisites do I need?”, “How hard is it?” and “What are HTML tags?” will be answered alongside examples of code. I will also recommend in every guide, that people try to follow me through things and I may even try to add a little quiz at the end of each guide for some “extra curricular activities” for people to test what they’ve learned.

What I do ask is that if anyone thinks I am a skilled writer, then please, think again. I am no writer, I have not written a small comic let alone a book or even a guide, for that matter (though I’ve tried). I will try to make it as understandable to newcomers as I possibly can but, if anyone doesn’t understand anything then never hesitate to contact me after my guides are written and I’ll be sure to try and help and explain further.

I’ve just found out, from a blog of a web developer (and a damn good designer at that!) that CSS3 exists. To anyone not familiar with web design of the sort then this entry is not for you, for everyone else, read on!

Yes, it seems I have been living under a rock for the past two years and the existence of CSS3 has somehow managed to escape my grasp. Until now, that is! I’m sure it’s common knowledge to most designers now, so you guys can probably just look away but to anyone uninformed, like I was, well CSS3 adds some pretty interest, and equally fun, opportunities for us designers.

CSS3 adds border radius styles, which I’ve known about for some time but never knew it was considered CSS3, as well as border images and the use of custom fonts (which you can ’scr’ link to). Custom fonts don’t really interest me though and quite frankly, I’m not up for the idea if people are going to abuse them and just use them all over the damn place. But border radius’ and border images will be of use, especially for me as I’ve wanted curved borders for a while now (without the fuss of images to aid you).

The problem however lies in the fact that most browsers do not support it. And I’m fairly certain there is no W3C standard for it. Internet Explorer 6 never supported it as far as I know and I’m unsure if Opera does. Mozilla/Firefox does support it but it seems Safari supports it best, at this time. As for IE7, I don’t think it supports it (not from my tests as of now). So even after two years people are still slow on the uptake there, which is sad really.

For more information and some live previews for CSS3, be sure to check out www.css3.info. And yes, I know I’m a bit slow on the uptake myself, =P.

Here’s the Age of Conan layout in a darker shade of… blue. What’s it for and why does it look different? Simple. This is the version I’ll be using for The Death Reapers, an RP Guild I’m setting up on World of Warcraft’s Steamwheedle Cartel realm.

It will also most likely used for The Ownerz, my Social Guild on the Barthilas realm (that is yet to get members, but then, I’ve yet to reach level 70, lol). There isn’t much difference to the layout except that the background is different and everything is blue. Some may argue that WoW isn’t blue, but I beg to differ.

Also note that the title was misspelled, not deliberately, I just couldn’t be screwed correcting it. As for the slogan, for those of you who have never looked up Warcraft lore - 26 is the year that World of Warcraft is set in.

Well I’ve had to remove the whole Friendly URLs option. Hover over a link and check it in the status bar, you’ll notice it says something like: http://randomtastic.com/?page_id=131. Friendly URLs change the links from that to something like http://www.randomtastic.com/development-journal/.

Since then I’ve had a few problems with updating Wordpress (which I will get around to, if it doesn’t screw up again) because every time I do, the whole Friendly URL option stuffs up and I’m left with a ton of goddamn 404 errors everywhere I look.

The Wordpress development team really need to look into an auto-installer in the next release, because that would be so damn helpful. Something that you could upload the zip file, have the CMS unzip the file and then put all the updates wherever and you can specify certain options (like if you’ve got custom templates, settings and plugins).

Some software does it, take a look at SMF (Simple Machines Forum). It can update the whole thing just by uploading the latest zip file. It can even add new templates and modifications by using the same procedure. It’s bloody useful, the forum software in general however is crap. Never use it, no seriously, don’t. It’s bloody shit and phpBB will serve you better. A damn ton better.

I am in dire need of some new glitches for Glitches Exposed. I haven’t updated that site for so long that it may start to grow a bit stale in the middle, a bit like bread does when you leave it out in the open air for too long (bread does, don’t ya know!).

Looking for glitches isn’t the easiest job in the world but if you have managed to find any please, PLEASE, contact me with them or you can send me them at submissions@glitchesexposed.com.

I don’t care how you format them. You can send me the glitch in whole text format or you can upload it to me in a Notepad (which will require you send it to me by the direct e-mail and the file will, of course, be scanned upon entry).

All help in this is greatly appreciated. As said, I am in dire need for glitches. Glitch videos, glitch screenshots, just plain and simple glitches. It doesn’t matter! Thanks for all your help.

I’ve started making my online Portfolio and, as of current, you can view all of the website interfaces (templates, layouts, designs, etc) by clicking here. Please note that I have decided against showing live previews of my templates. I was going to have them but after further consideration I have deemed it to risky to do so (intellectual property theft and the like). So I do apologise for that inconvenience.

The next parts of the my portfolio that still need to be created are the Forum Signatures and Other Graphics sections. It shouldn’t take too long to put those up (the only real time taken is to make the thumbnails for the images, everything else is a cinch). I really hate the work I done on my Signature images because I could never get them right, I just show them here purely for portfolio completion.

In other news: I have finally gotten my perfect UI for World of Warcraft (yes, I do play the game others hate :P) and I may post some screenshots of it later. I also may be working on a new layout so check out for the Development Journal section of the site coming soon!

L8erz guys. I’m off for this post!