This is the reason I keep reading Slashdot. Sometimes the humor that can be found on that site is comedy gold.

Also, sometimes the Internet can be an amazing thing. Take Wikipedia for example. A huge online encyclopdiea that is editable by anyone with the energy to click on the "edit" tab. Coming from within the great inner workings of Wikipedia, I bring you an article. I know you've wondered about it. You've definitly heard about it. You've probably even been annoyed by it. That's right, Wikipedia has a page on the "All your base are belong to us" Engrish meme. Which reminds me, I should get the *nix version of that on a shirt. A shirt which is easilly avaliable from J!NX, and can be found on my wishlist ( wink wink nudge nudge ).

On the new-job front, after work I'm calling the owner of a comic book store downtown, to set up an appointment. An appointment for what, you ask? An appointment to see if they need a website. That's right, I might get to update/upgrade the website for Golden Age Collectables. Although their current website is okay, it could be a lot better. I don't know if I'm going to get the job or not, but I still think there's a lot to be done that could be fixed. And since these are points that I'll probably be presenting to the owner of the Golden Age Collectables, I'm going to go over the list here.

The page does have a few good things going for it. It has the location, phone number, and hours of operation right on the front page. It is at the bottom, however, so it might not be seen right away by people with smaller screen resolutions. There are also links to what you would think are the two most important links, "New Releases" and "Rare Comic Books". The colours are well thought out, and the overall layout of the page gives the impression that you're looking at the front of a comic book.

There are a few things wrong with the page, though. The first is the flash animation. Bad idea, especially since what the flash animation is doing is very, very trivial. It distracts the viewer, and makes it harder to focus on the menu, especially since it is sitting right next to the menu. Speaking of the menu, I can think of one option that is missing. They have a link for "New Releases" and "Rare Comic Books", but they don't have a link for "In Store". A link that people can click on to see what they carry asides from the new releases and rare comics. How do I check to see if they carry all of the Sandman-related comics and books, like "Death: The High Cost of Living"?

Here are some of the other things that I'd change if I got the oppertunity to work on this site. First, the size of the page has to be fixed. If you're going to put most of your content inside an iframe, then you should cut down on the size of your page. Try to make it so that no matter where the mouse is, when they use the scrollwheel, they scroll the content, not the page. Another thing I would change is the "Original Move Posters" page. That page could be filled with something much more suitable. If you're going to have a page showing off some of your non-comic paraphernalia, put all of your non-comic paraphernalia there, not just movie posters. Things like comic book related action figures, comic book related posters, collectable card games, and so on. You don't have to have a complete list, just a sample of what you have in store. Another page that needs fixing is the "Location" page. Asides from the fact that the store has recently moved, the page needs some pizzaz or something. A graphical map, or a link to Google Maps would be nice. A link to the page that shows what busses stop near the store ( like this pdf that opens in another window showing you the busses that service downtown Vancouver [pdf from http://www.translink.bc.ca]) would also be a good idea, or mabey just a list of the top five bus routes with a stop near the store. Needless to say, the "Rare Comic Books" and "New Releases" are in dire need of updating.

Wow. When you really sit down at take a good look at a site, it's amazing what you can see what's wrong with it. Like most of the spelling and grammar on my site, not that any of my four readers notice my spelling or grammar all that much. I do hope that list will help me get the job. If not, it will help the guy who owns the comic book store what to think about next time he wants to update the website. I will be giving him a printed version of that list, although with some nicer formatting.

In other news, California recently passed a law that bans selling violent games to minors. That's right, it's now illegal to sell a game with a 'Mature' rating to someone under the age of eightteen in California. This is the kind of thing that truly bothers me. This is like back in the 1960's, when they tried banning pornography. Except back then, the people doing the banning actually sat down and watched hundreds ( thousands? ) of movies, just so they could explicitly define what was 'porn' and what wasn't. Now they're just banning games without knowing what they're banning. Don't get me wrong, there are definitly some games out there that younger kids should not play. But it's not the duty of the government to say what games are okay, and what games are not. That is the role, the duty of the parent. This is just another law to garner votes from the lazy soccer parents of California. The parents who buy the games for their kids, and then are shocked when the game is filled with violence. They were too lazy to read the ESRB rating, or read the back of the package. I admit, some games probably need better descriptions on the back of the packaging. But the ESRB rating is usually ( 99% of the time ) a good indicator of the level of violence and/or sexuality in a game. Or better yet, the parent could do some freaking research before buying the game for their child. t's really not that hard. There are hundreds, if not thousands of gaming sites that review new games, and most will have a pretty good description of the type of game it is. They don't need to pass a law that makes it illegal to sell games to minors. They need to get parents more involved with their children, to actually pay attention to what they're doing.

Ergh. I'm going to stop myself from ranting, so I'll just end that tirade right there.

Oh, a while ago I was planning to do a review on some text editors to use for web development. I got lazy, so it's still in the "that's something I should start" phase. But seeing as I'm probably not going to finish ( or rather, start ) writing it, I'll post the results I came up with. I tested several editors, so here's the list: gphpedit, screem, bluefish, scite, and quanta. I was also going to test the "Write To HTML" save option of Abiword and OpenOffice.org, but I never got around to it.

The first one I tried out was Quanta, although I'm a little biased towards Quanta. Since I started using Linux, I've mostly used only Quanta for all my html and scripting needs. This is a feature-rich, well rounded KDE editing suite. It does highlighting in a large number of languages, including UnrealScript. That said, it does have a few downsides. For one, it is a KDE application at heart. Yes, I'm a Gnome persone, despite the fact I use fluxbox as my window manager. I don't like KDE applications because I find them to be incredably bloated, and the theme is a little too eyecandy for my tastes. That said, for the beginner programmer/web designer, Quanta is a good choice. It has well-written wizards to help you with some of the more obscure html, and is a fairly solid program.

Up next came gphpedit. This is a program designed mostly to work with PHP ( suprise! ). Despite that, it does support highlighting of a few other languages, but it mostly centers on HTML related ones, like CSS and XML. There was one glaring problem with this program. It didn't display anything properly. The lines got all messed up, and I couldn't read anything I had written. So on to the next editor, screem. Screem was a fairly nice program, and probably would have come out on top if it wasn't for one tiny bug. After saving a page, I'd often go preview it in Firefox. When I would come back to screem, it would either be frozen or it would crash when I tried to do something. Not very fun. So I moved onto Bluefish, to see if it was any better. Bluefish is a farily good editor, although to me it seemed like too much of a Quanta clone, but written in GTK for the Gnome people. Finally I came to scite, which is the editor that ended up winning. It doesn't have as many features as any of the other editors, but when you get to a certain point, having wizards and such isn't such a big deal. What I like about scite is that it's fast. Fast to load, fast to save, responds quickly when I want to edit. It's also got a small footprint, which is always a bonus to me (I'm something of a free space freak). So finally, I settled on scite, and it's what I've been using ever since.

Enough of my geekyness. Go have a life or something.

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