Destructive Incorporated

I was thrilled when I saw Firaxis bringing out a new edition of one of my favorite Sid Meier's classics, 'Railroads!' Of course Railroad Tycoon doesn't quite stack up to the Civilization series, but it still entertained me for hours upon hours. First thing I did was look for some reviews of Railroads!, and found them quite lacking, which surprised me. So, trusting Sid wouldn't do me wrong, I went and bought Railroads! thinking I'd have a game to enjoy for some time to come.

While getting my typical morning fill on Google News, I happened to come across Only hype makes organic food healthier.

Obviously the author quantifies 'healthier' far differently than the medical community, health experts, and myself. I would definitely tend to lean towards looking at healthier as combination of being more nutritional/vitamin filled, having less chemicals/carcinogens, and higher fertility. All of these health benefits you will only receive from eating organic foods.

I re-launched the Kiss gallery! (see the box on the middle left for a random pic)

Ok, so in all reality I broke it about a week ago, and just got around to finally fixing it (I broke it pretty good). The important thing is it's back up, and has new features! Now if you feel like browsing lots of the pictures there is a slideshow feature which does all the work for you. You can even set how fast you want it to scroll through the pics.

I also did a few behind the scenes changes to the site, and I hope to do a few more in the coming days. One of the things I did was add

I have integrated lightbox into our site. When displaying images in your posts, add "rel=lightbox" to the <a href> tag! I'll post a few examples of what it can do below... this is a great AJAX feature, and I hope it assists in making your posts that much more exciting!

kiss 1

Or taking it a step farther:

#1 #2 #3

Well, I did a ton more tinkering today and I got a lot done.

First I got TinyMCE (think of it as a really basic document editing program built into your blogging and story content). Then I added spell-checking functionality to TinyMCE, try it out, it seems to work rather well!

Next I worked out the gallery a lot better. I made the ever popular 'kiss' gallery embedded into the main page. I tried out gallery2 but WOW did it eat the server alive! I was seeing near 100% CPU use out of a single user browsing, therefor we could only handle 2 users on our current hardware browsing at once, where we can serve nearly 10 people a SECOND on this page! That's a massive difference and while I like the look and feel of gallery2 I think its absolutely terrible unless you are hosting a family photo album that very few people will be visiting. I will write a review of gallery2 later and fill everyone in on its shortcomings. In the end I used a drupal add-on, 'acidfree', which is working out quite nicely so far and is already providing all the useful features gallery2 was providing with about 50-100x less server load per user!

There's a new web browser FLOCK, based on firefox available for everyone who's using web2.0 sites heavily. IE flicker, del.icio.us, our blog, news, etc.

It's all about integration of features from popular sites into your browser. I'm writing this blog while not even logged into our site from the browser blogging tool! It supports multiple blog accounts, so if you want to post a blog to your blog, and then another to clan-desinc's blog, its simply a click away. It's quite convenient, has a spell check and all sorts of goodness. A very solid browser so far.

First, the story of the X-box server. Just got a chuckle out of it.

And much more importantly, Cox already abusing net nutrality

Well, we used up one of our 2 allowed cheat disputes already for CAL. We got our ass' kicked pretty bad in the match (5-25). Thing was, mid 10th round while we were CT one of their players "Jaimz" looked at Nth, quickly went to Evil, shot him to death, then suddenly jerked 90 degrees back to Nth whilest still spraying at evil to shoot Nth in the head. It *could* have been amazing blind luck along with server lag but it also could have been hacking, and as bad as we lost it was worth asking the CAL admins to have a closer look.