If I were to make a soundtrack for my own life (a maximum of 15 songs) out of my playlist content, I do think it’d look something like this (do forgive the numerous incoming anime and video game references, but that’s about how it’d look), in no particular order:

[Breath of Fire 3] Overworld theme 2 / Akari Kaida, Yoshino Aoki
– Every nice guy has to have a cheery, upbeat, melodic tone that accompanies his day.

[Chrono Cross] Leaving the Body / Yasunori Mitsuda
– Sometimes, you feel like disconnecting from your consciousness. This song embodies that.

[Chrono Cross] The Star-Stealing Girl / Yasunori Mitsuda
– The slower melody of this song is harder to decide on. Would I use it on a somber moment, or for something depressing?

[Chrono Cross] Frozen Flame / Yasunori Mitsuda
– It has this mystical feel, like a building energy; Something that I’d use while scheming something.

[Final Fantasy 8] The Man With the Machine Gun / Nobuo Uematsu
– Break out those guns, ladies. It’s time to have a firefight!

[Final Fantasy 8] Mods de Chocobo / Nobuo Uematsu
– There’s that upbeat music again, but this would be more like a party theme for me.

[Legend of Mana] To the Sea / Yoko Shimomura
– Cheerful, upbeat, good for a long road trip.

[Final Fantasy 10] Aeon Battle / Junya Nakano
– Simply because this is like an overcharged version of the Song of Prayer from the series, which I actually enjoyed.

Song of Prayer:
Ieyui
Nobomenu
Renmiri
Yojuyogo
Hasatekanae
Kutamae
——
Pray, saviour
Dream, Child of Prayer
Forever and ever
Bring us peace

[Final Fantasy 10] In Zanarkand / Nobuo Uematsu
– It’s quite a pretty piano piece, which just about everyone needs.

[Blood on the Asphalt #06] Thank You, Dee Jay (Dee Jay Stage) / José the Bronx Rican
– I don’t dance. I just pull up my pants. … who am I kidding? I’d actually try to dance to this. It’d be a hot little number, too.

[sgxmusic.com] ICO - Save Me / SGX
– Also known as SuperGreenX on OverClocked Remixes, this guy has put together a rather catchy audio feast that lasts nine whole minutes. I’d use this for something high-energy. If only we had trapar…

[交響詩篇エウレカセブンOP4] Sakura / Nirgilis
– Cherry blossom, Cherry blossom. I like this song, with its heavy dipping into another song (Amazing Grace). For trivia’s sake, the album should read, “Koukyoshihen Eureka Seven OP4″, if my memory is accurate.

[Days #01] Days / Flow
– This song is almost my penultimate. It contains lots of energy and meaning for me.

[Ikaruga #08] Metempsychosis / Hiroshi Iuchi
– There is a hidden power in words. Metempsychosis is one of those words. Remember it. Metempsychosis is my penultimate. Nothing else completes me.

Dan, sorry about that. Taking a quick break, and then coming back to pour the rest of my energy into finishing that up for you.

What made today even better was that it was one of my other PayPerPost days, where I met the 30 days up requirement. So while monitoring the forums to see what everyone had, so I knew what to look for, and generating the HTML needed to put the whole thing together… I got a $10 payment for what I would do if I had an unlimited budget.

So, I think I’ll go treat myself to something to eat (budget be damned :)), and get back to work.

i am so jittery right now, i can’t make sense, i just hope I won, oh god oh god…

PLEASE LET ME WIN.

I, I can’t make sense of anything right now!

Calm enough now, I think, to put it in my post.
WordPress, Hold On.

$1k is worth forgetting the alt attributes on the images this time. …Well, almost. I came back, stitched the image together, and added an alt attribute, because I’m nerdy like that. I am so unbelievably shaky right now, because I think I got it in under the wire!

make money blogging. serious money.

I don’t know, really. I just know that my level of excitement is phenomenal.

I’ll take a moment later on, when I’ve calmed down a bit more, and make a single image of that post, so that each person who comes to see it won’t have to deal with all those gaps that I can’t make WordPress stop inserting (because of my theme settings, I wager).
So, I calmed down, stitched the image together, and pulled it from my home box to my hosted plan here since it was faster for me to tell the shell to wget from my home box, rather than find an SFTP client, install it, feed it info, and upload that way.

I’m actually quite honestly in a high level of shock.
When I got the email, I was stunned.
When I read the other email that came with it, from the PayPerPost forums, and saw that it pointed to a very special blog entry, I was even more shocked.
I normally don’t win contests or anything. I’m usually the guy who not only loses, but loses hard.

PayPerPost…
Ted, Veronique, and the rest of you guys, all I can really say is THANK YOU! for that opportunity.

The only downside to all this excitement is, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to take another opp.

I pulled out all the stops, cranking through Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Google Search, AltaVista, Yahoo, and anything else I could think of to pull this off, but I cannot locate the last piece.

The $1,000 post opportunity is already up, which means all the pieces are in the wild, in at least three locations.

It hurts to lose, but it hurts more to lose big.

RACIELLE# ls *.jpg
1.jpg 14.jpg 23.jpg 28.jpg 32.jpg 38.jpg 48.jpg 59.jpg 65.jpg
10.jpg 15.jpg 24.jpg 29.jpg 34.jpg 4.jpg 49.jpg 6.jpg 7.jpg
11.jpg 17.jpg 25.jpg 3.jpg 35.jpg 42.jpg 50.jpg 62.jpg 8.jpg
12.jpg 18.jpg 26.jpg 30.jpg 36.jpg 43.jpg 55.jpg 63.jpg 9.jpg
13.jpg 2.jpg 27.jpg 31.jpg 37.jpg 44.jpg 58.jpg 64.jpg

I am determined to win this. I think I’ll give the searches a 30 minute break, and get some work done.
$1000, you shall soon be mine…

If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have discovered GroupLoop.com today.

What GroupLoop is, is almost simple to explain.
It’s a way for a group to get together, organize, discuss, and plan their work, all from the convenience of one website.
I know that some of you may be thinking, “But that’s what email is for!”

I couldn’t disagree more.

Email is fine for some things, but when you want to plan important things that affect everyone, email becomes the single point of failure. If John’s home email account is full, the messages will start bouncing, and he won’t even know you’re trying to contact him about something. If Beth is out somewhere, and can’t check email for six hours, but you’re trying to get her to show up for something in six hours, she won’t see the message until it’s too late.

Woe betide the corporation that tries to communicate solely by email, too. It’s fine for private, one-on-one communications, but to manage important lists, it’s better to have some sort of web based interface that you can rely on.

It becomes a trivial task for a user to log in to a single webpage, and at a glance, know what’s going on with the plans.
This is the kind of service GroupLoop offers.

I had the priviledge of trying it out for myself today, at no cost.

Account creation is almost painless, and the Terms of Service are rather easy to read and digest, which made signup easy to do.
The only thing I would change on signup is that I would NOT send the user’s password in an email to them, when they just put it in the form. That defeats the purpose of a secure password — having it mailed back to you in the clear. I’d also consider securing the form used to do the signups; Maybe insert a humanizer of some sort (captcha, audio captcha, simple math question, account verification code — pick one or two, preferably the last two, since math is the universal language, and it’s not that hard to click a link in an email) to make sure someone doesn’t decide to slam that signup form with cURL or other utilities.

Once I got signed up, I went straight to the login screen.
What I would change here is add some sort of identifier as to what group this is. Sure, you have the URL, but it’d be nice for me to see “Pixelechoes Network” or some other identifier that shows me what group it is, which would help to assure me that I’m not wandering into a spoofed page.

Logging in was simple, as it should be, but again, I’d rather secure the login form there, as well, which I do feel would appeal a bit more to corporate entities considering the adoption of the system.

When you log in, the interface is relatively clean and simple, with very few changes that I could suggest:
On the home page, I’d consider adding a link to create a new message, calendar event, or upload a document next to the respective modules. It would fit in well, and keep people from having to dig in to navigate and get to work.

… okay, so it would save a single click in each case, but it would make the user interface make a bit more sesnse. I was expecting to see “Post new message” next to “Recent messages”.

I had a look at the messages tab after that.
They offer users a simple markup format (similar to that of Markdown, or Textile) for formatting their messages.
This is a good thing, I would say, since it’s easier for newer users to adapt to their system.
I would also consider offering the opportunity to switch on a BBCode-like system for those who are more familiar with it, or need more power than the proffered markup.

While looking at messages, I’d like to see the most recent message either in its entirety or the first thousand bytes, and all subsequent messages show only fragments (first five hundred bytes or less). However, something tells me that if a Greasemonkey Pro got their hands on this, they would put together a user.js that would pull off this exact request, so I’m not entirely worried.

Looking at the calendar, I can say they did a good job with making it easy to add any group calendar event to anything that supports the iCalendar format (which would be just about every calendar/planner software that a user can mention, as far as I know).

On the Document Upload feature, I’d like to see recognition for more formats than just Microsoft Word. Stuff like the Open Document format, or LaTeX, would be nice, for starters.
I’d also like to see an indicator there as to how much space the files are taking up, so that it’d be easier to know when you’re getting close to the limit.

In summary, [tag]GroupLoop[/tag] looks to be a rather promising tool, and I do wish them success in their endeavour. I would also hope that they do consider analyzing any feedback they get, and seeing what is plausible to fix.

– nifty tool. Thanks for showing it to me, [tag]PayPerPost![/tag]

I’ve got the base of my template system pretty much laid, mimicking the old design, but in far more efficient code. No font tags, for example. Everything is determined by a stylesheet here, and once I get the content all ported the way I’d like it to be done, I can write the OTHER stylesheet for it to give Dan a choice to work with.

I enjoy doing semantic code like that. When I know I can go in, and bodyslam something with a single stylesheet change to get a drastically different look, I’m actually quite happy.

This is why WordPress works so well for so many people. Back in the day, before the full on template themes came up, we could simply fling a stylesheet at the core files, and have a different look. You still can do it with WordPress: Gutenberg (my old style with the column on the right side) was actually based on the older WordPress 1.2 (and 1.5) core template, simply modified enough to stand alone with the newer WordPress 2.0 style system.

So, if there’re no real interruptions, I should easily finish the redesign for Dan today, and this pleases me.
Back to work.

Now that I have done this, I am looking at an undisclosed number of pieces for the [tag]payperpostbignews[/tag] puzzle right now; I am glad to bring you piece number twelve in this puzzle:

PayPerPost continues to be a very viable way to make money online, and it’s as simple as “Log in, get bloggin’, get paid!”

Remember, posties, first to get ‘em all and assemble ‘em gets a cool grand in cash. How cool is that?

Bay News 9 reported^[a] on Sunday that drivers are to give cyclists a three foot berth, or face the consequences.

Failure to do so, and being spotted by an officer will result in a moving violation fine, as well as points added to your license.

What would please me more is if cyclists would actually, you know… used the sidewalks when they’re available and in reasonable condition. Too often have I driven or cycled down the road, to watch some cocky cyclist riding half-in the lane for traffic, causing everyone behind him to slow down and honk their horns.

Fix that particular issue, or start ticketing the cyclists, too, and I will be more pleased with the idea.