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Oi. There was something wrong with my connection this morning and I was unable to put up a morning update, not like there was much to say. I was able to pull myself away from the game when I came up against a Demilich.. and kept getting my ass kicked. This is one of the drawbacks of being the first ones to play a game. Nobody else has had your problem yet and you can ask for help. Argh! It's tough to be a pioneer..
Anyway, I did a bit of snooping, and it seems as if Laz has stepped up his updating efforts now that I'm basically incapacitated. KGL too has something up, while I can't seem to access Jax's site. FlyingS has somehow become a gourmet chef. Uhh.. I'm being called. Crap.
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I guess I don't notice this too often, but the traffic lights reminded me of something. During our trip to the west coast last year, I noticed how different the traffic lights were. Well, they all have the standard red-amber-green lights, but the placement and shapes were all subtly different. Different enough that the driver (if he's from a different area) has to pay attention to the signals so he doesn't end up as road kill, yet similar enough to be able to pick up the basic signals very quickly. Anyway, one of the things that I noticed with the lights in my neighborhood was that for standard intersections (without separate signals for left turn lines or other extra stuff), each direction of traffic had two traffic signals. One on the left side of the road (or on the middle island if the road was very big), and one on the right. Each signal has three lights (one of each colour with red on top and green on bottom), and all of the lights are the same size, save one. The top (red) light on the right signal is noticeably bigger than the other lights. Why is that? There's probably a simple and obvious reason for the modification (like maybe drivers usually look there first?) but nothing comes to mind.
Now I know that the lights in Quebec are pretty much screwed up (okay, maybe not screwed up, but they'd catch a neophyte quite unawares), and I know that while in Winnipeg, I had no idea that the flashing green was not an advance green. (I can't remember what the flashing green meant.) I dunno, are there differences in traffic light signals in different regions in the country? I personally have only driven in the immediate area (and the west coast trip, and Ohio, and Montreal, and..). Okay, maybe I've gone places, but I'm wondering if there are some regional specific traffic rules (like no right turns on a red light in Quebec) in different parts of the country (or continent).
Okay, enough with this nonsense, I'm going to get back to fighting that demilich.
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I already mentioned before in my journal the reasons why I was taking down the Guestbook, but I figure that I might as well put some thoughts up (seeing as the previous comments were a few months old).
About a year-and-a-half ago, I thought it would be cool to throw up a Guestbook to find out the type of people who would come and visit this site as well as obtain some sort of feedback that they can post up for "the world" to see. I was also getting some e-mail responses to some of my entries, so I figured that setting up some sort of Guestbook thing would be a good way to facilitate communication between the readers and myself (and communication between the readers themselves!). It didn't take long for me (via GBC and weirDo) to find a way to set up a Guestbook on my site without using third party sites. This search started me on the journey to learn Perl. What an amazing language. Anyway, after a week or so of toying around with the scripts, and learning how to set up CGI (common gateway interface) scripts, I finally had the thing up and running. I was actually proud of that accomplishment.
That pride didn't last very long though. I realized very quickly how timid people were at putting up comments. It's the same thing as leaving messages on answering machines I guess. You never know what to say that won't offend anyone and make it worth the effort of actually putting something up. (Then again, it was pretty easy to post and read these comments..)
In any case, over the past year-and-a-half, I've had sixteen entries. Depressing sixteen. From those sixteen entries, there were eleven different people who posted comments. Well, eleven isn't that bad, except for the fact that over that period of time, there were over seven thousand unique hits to the site. It's like people would come to the site, check it out, shrug, and continue surfing. It's like people didn't care, or couldn't be bothered to comment despite some of the rather strange things I've posted up there. Now with the comment script in place, people have been commenting much more regularly (usually it's the same four yahoos, but hey, I don't mind). Sometimes we even get discussions. I think that's pretty cool, don't you?
So now we have reached the crossroads. What do I do with the Guestbook that never really took off? Leave it up? I could do that. It doesn't take up much space and there's basically no maintenance on it (seeing as nobody is using it). But I'm very much a neat freak when it comes to code. This site is no exception. I don't like loose ends, so I decided to cut this part of the site out and concentrate on some of the other parts. (I may be cutting some more things down in the near future.)
In any case, those are my thoughts. If you have any comments, then e-mail, or post something up in the comments!
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