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…in three years…

Monday, January 7th, 2013 at 1:01 am

Today is a special day for me. It’s the 3rd year anniversary since I quit World of Warcraft. Ironically, I was playing casually last month but that whole phase seems to have gone. I’m not sick anymore and back to doing/working on things that “matter”. I wrote a similar post last year and the year before.

What I’ve done in the last year

worldofwarren.com
2012: 164 posts between Jan 7, 2012 and Jan 7, 2013. On average, roughly 13.7 posts/month. As with last year, falling in line with my hope of 150-200 posts.
2011: 187 posts between Jan 7, 2011 and Jan 7, 2012
2010: 308 posts between Jan 26, 2010 and Jan 7, 2011

warrenshea.com
Completed! Even though one year ago, I was saying this was almost done…but I only finished in May 2012. Anyways, finishing this was a great feat and led me to my next project

kotobishoujo.com
45 – retroactive blog posts
55 – pages including statues
3 – other pages (checklist, faq, contact)

Twitter
2012: 594 (totalling 3425 since Jan 10, 2010)
2011: 1486 (totalling 2831 since Jan 10, 2010)
2010: 1345

Improved development skills

  • Improved quite a bit in jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, AJAX this year mostly due to warrenshea.com
  • Improved a lot in PHP due to the Facebook work project I had including learning the JavaScript/PHP SDK, Facebook App Creation, Like Gates, and Facebook and Twitter Share Dialogs
  • Installed/learned WAMP and Media Wiki

Note: Keep in mind that for 95% of these movies/shows/cartoons, I’m not technically just watching them. They’re just ON while I do other stuff, like dev or photography.
Movies

  • Karate Kid [Rewatch]
  • Catch Me If You Can [Rewatch]
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes [Rewatch]
  • The Terminal [Rewatch]
  • The Prestige [Rewatch]
  • Karate Kid (2010) [Rewatch]
  • Tremors [Rewatch]
  • Training Day [Rewatch]
  • Superman Returns [Rewatch]
  • Gattaca [Rewatch]
  • Kick-Ass [Rewatch]
  • Back to the Future [Rewatch]
  • Wall-E [Rewatch]
  • Avengers [Rewatch]
  • Star Trek [Rewatch]
  • Men In Black [Rewatch]
  • The Rise of the Planet of the Apes [Rewatch]
  • Memento [Rewatch]
  • Jurassic Park [Rewatch]
  • The Lost World [Rewatch]
  • Jurassic Park III [Rewatch]
  • Good Will Hunting [Rewatch]
  • Gone in 60 Seconds [Rewatch]
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 [Rewatch]
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze [Rewatch]
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 [Rewatch]
  • TMNT [Rewatch]
  • Turtles Forever [Rewatch]
  • Casino Royale [Rewatch]
  • Quantum of Solace [Rewatch]
  • Skyfall
  • Independence Day [Rewatch]
  • Jurassic Park [Rewatch]
  • Catch Me If You Can [Rewatch]
  • The King’s Speech [Rewatch]
  • Pursuit of Happyness [Rewatch]
  • Star Wars IV: A New Hope [Rewatch]
  • Iron Man [Rewatch]
  • City of God
  • The Butterfly Effect
  • Indie Game The Movie
  • The Goonies
  • The Illusionist
  • The Prestige
  • Anchorman
  • Avengers [Rewatch]
  • Amazing Spider-man
  • Brave
  • Dark Knight Rises
  • Spider-Man [Rewatch]
  • Spider-Man 2 [Rewatch]
  • Spider-Man 3 [Rewatch]
  • Jiro Dream of Sushi
  • Avengers
  • Titanic 3D
  • Titanic [Rewatch]
  • Scott Pilgrim [Rewatch]
  • Battle Royale [Rewatch]
  • Up in the Air
  • The Godfather Part III

    • Show

    • House S1-S7 [Rewatch], S8
    • The Walking Dead S1-S3
    • Gilmore Girls S1-S7
    • Glee S1-S2 [Rewatch], S3
    • Pushing Daisies S1-S2
    • Hell’s Kitchen S9 [Rewatch]
    • Breaking Bad S1-S5 [Rewatch]
    • MasterChef S3 [Rewtach]
    • Dawson’s Creek S1-S6
    • Big Bang Theory S5 [Rewatch]
    • Mistfits S3
    • One Tree Hill S1-S4 [Rewatch]
    • Glee S1-S2 [Rewatch]
    • The Glee Project S1

    Cartoon

    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) S1-S9
    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) S1
    • Samurai Pizza Cats E1-E13
    • Spectacular Spider-Man S1-S2 [Rewatch]
    • Batman The Animated Series [Rewatch]
    • Justice League: Doom

    Anime

    • Tekkaman Blade II
    • Tekkaman Blade
    • Steins;Gate
    • X-Men Anime
    • Persona
    • Spirited Away

    Reading

    • The Art of Racing in the Rain [Novel]
    • Ultimate Spider-Man 1-89 [Comic]
    • Amazing Spider-Man 654-700 [Comic]
    • Prince of Tennis Vol. 1-42 [Manga]
    • Hikaru no Go Vol. 1-23 [Manga]
    • Neon Genesis Vol. 13 [Manga]

    Gaming

    • Super Mario Bros. Wii U [Wii U]
    • Contra III: Alien Wars [SNES][Replay]
    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time – Normal Mode [SNES][Replay]
    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time – Hard Mode [SNES][Replay]
    • Kirby: Return to Dreamland [Wii]
    • New Super Mario Bros [DS]
    • Super Mario 3D Land [3DS]
    • Zelda: A Link to the Past [SNES][Replay]
    • Braid [PS3]
    • Kirby: Return to Dreamland [Wii] [Replay]
    • The New Super Mario Bros 2 [3DS]
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword [3DS]
    • World of Warcraft – 80-85 – Annataz
    • World of Warcraft – 80-83 – Aldino
    • World of Warcraft – 80-83 – Sheaman
    • World of Warcraft – 80-82 – Blackcanary
    • World of Warcraft – 80-81 – Sudoku
    • World of Warcraft – 80-81 – Grimlock
    • Tiny Tower – 161 Floors
    • Diablo 3 – Level 43-52 (Monk) – Normal mode, Nightmare done, Hell mode Act 1
    • Diablo 3 – Level 1-20 (Demon Hunter) – Normal mode

    Art
    None

    Photography

    • Kotobishoujo: Scarlet Witch
    • Kotobishoujo: Phoenix
    • Kotobishoujo: Dark Phoenix
    • Kotobishoujo: Batgirl Black Costume
    • Kotobishoujo: Poison Ivy
    • Kotobishoujo: X-23 X-Force
    • Kotobishoujo: Christie Monteiro
    • Kotobishoujo: Catwoman
    • Kotobishoujo: Liara T’soni
    • Kotobishoujo: Supergirl
    • Kotobishoujo: Evil Supergirl
    • Kotobishoujo: Wonder Woman
    • Kotobishoujo: Batgirl Black Costume
    • Kotobishoujo: Supergirl
    • Canon Rebel T3i – new DSLR camera!

    Video

    • Converted 22 VHS Tapes to Digital
    • Converted 12 Camcorder Tapes to Digital

    What I hope to accomplish this year

    worldofwarren.com
    I hope to consistently update my achievements section.
    I also hope to do a few figure reviews. I have a lot of toys that don’t get much spotlight and I’d like to give them some.
    If this blog stays as is – a journal of my life – I plan to leave it as it. If I change the direction of this blog, I would hope to create a Facebook page for this.

    warrenshea.com
    This is done and I haven’t been updating/needed to update it much. At some point, I’ll have to gather any projects worth showing from May 2012 to now and add them to the Porfolio section. Otherwise, I’m pretty content with this.

    kotobishoujo.com
    I purchased the domain for this last year, in Oct 2011 but only started doing stuff with it in May 2012. It’s been about 7 months and while I’ve done a lot, there’s still much to do. My hope is to definitely finish this thing this year. And then I can start with other stuff…

    Blogging
    I’m content with my blogging. It’s not as much as I’d like but I don’t have the content to fill…so it all works out :)

    Reading, Art
    Don’t really care about these two things anymore…

    Gaming
    Here’s my Gaming TO DO list:
    The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time [Replay] – In progress already
    The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
    The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword [Replay]
    Mega Man 1 – 5
    Mega Man Zero
    Super Mario Galaxy
    Super Mario Galaxy 2 (maybe)
    Final Fantasy III (VI)
    If I stick to this list, I should be able to get it down fairly easily.

    Photography
    Learn more about Photography !
    Improve on my macro shots including finishing my Kotobishoujo.com pics and adding some figures to my Figure Review section
    Purchase a 50mm (details pending) lens for everyday shots.

    Improving development skills
    Learn MVC and apply it to warrenshea.com (via backbone.js)
    Improve my OOP.
    ASP.NET MVC?
    Become Microsoft Certified in something? SQL?
    There’s a lot I could put here, but technology is always changing…it’s hard to predict what I’ll want to know in the year.

    How I’ve changed professionally this last year

    It’s been a critical year professionally for me. I’ve been looking at posts from the last 3 years and 2 years ago, I had a crushing experience – not getting the senior developer role despite both applying and feeling qualified for it. Oddly enough, I got the role, unofficially a few months after. And I had that role, title and responsibility, but not the pay for a year+.

    After doing the role but not getting paid for it (for a year~) my work ethic changed. It got worse – I’d come in late, and I’d leave early. In a way, justifying my job and low(er) pay by working less hours, to increase my pay ratio I guess.

    And 1/2 way through last year, I finally got my promotion + salary increase. But unfortunately, my work ethic stayed around the same – poor. It only becomes great when I work on an interesting project. And that’s more for personal gain/motivation than professional (well, I guess it’s both).

    So basically, I’m enjoying my life now. I got my senior developer title. I got my senior developer pay. But I don’t work that hard. And I choose the jobs I want…cuz I’m a diva. Though I tend to also take shitty projects. Funny thing is, I actually downgraded my title (but not my pay) to Intermediate Developer, so I that can still develop and do less project management/overseeing. I’d still rather develop than be in meetings and talk/consult. There’s still much to gain from being in the front-lines. I got very good at being confident with my voice and critical thinking/situations – making the right call/judgement in a critical situation. It’s a skill I think will help throughout my life. To weigh my options and determine what’s best.

    How I hope to change professionally this year

    I’ve been casually interviewing. Talking with headhunters. I’m finding that a lot of people find me on LinkedIn, but once they go to warrenshea.com, they’re sold. They want to talk to me about job…cuz my website is so awesome :D Unfortunately, in these scenarios, most of the jobs they offer suck. Not interested in being the only developer on a site/in a company. Sigh…stop offering me that crap.

    Not sure where I want to go professionally actually…but I want to improve my development skills personally and professionally. Again, I don’t always know where I’m headed but as long as I’m pointed in the right direction.

    …in three years…

    I’ve done a lot since I quit WoW, three years ago today. It’s funny, WoW’s not even a part of my life anymore, it seems odd to pay some kind of tribute to not playing it when I barely think about it nowadays. But I guess I must always remember the 5 years, 400 days of playtime I wasted to that game. I must always remember to keep busy to make up for that time.

    Reading last year’s post, I’m in a much better place happyness-wise. And isn’t that what it’s always about? Being happy? The answer is: yes.

    Posted in All Posts, Blogging, Daily Randomness, Games, Introspection, My Life, Past, Secret Project KB, Site Updates, warrenshea.com, Web Design, Web Developer, Web Development, Work, World of Warcraft, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

    I grow weary….

    Thursday, October 25th, 2012 at 12:48 am

    …of my Secret Project KB.

    There’s just SO MUCH content to create/pour. I knew it’d be a long project but I underestimated my need for perfection and thus, how long I’d spend re-doing something (like photographs) that are 90% perfect.

    I’ve only been working on this project since June…5 months (though I took a month break).
    In a previous post, I budgeted 2 months. (I often underestimate projects as I too strongly believe in my abilities, especially the one that says I won’t procrastinate).

    In that previous post, I also said 1 more month for warrenshea.com and it took 5 more months. Looking back at my posts, warrenshea.com was being on and off worked on for about a year. >_< Though technically decently complicated, I know the reason was that it took a long time to compile the portfolio section and that I really struggled with the writing. Geez. Worldofwarren took no time to set up. Anyways, I'm going to try to continue and finish my Secret Project KB. The key is eternal vigilance: consistently working on it every day, until it's finished. Taking a day break turns into 2 turns into 5. Once Secret Project KB is done, I've decided to take a break from my projects (plan subject to change) and take some time to study/re-learn regular expressions, read that clean code book, get better with jQuery, and learn Backbone and Node JS. These projects I’ve had are too time consuming with very little payoff in terms of learning new things. I need to change it around: quick projects where I learn a lot. How will I do that? I’ll have to think about it ;)

    I also want to rewrite some of my code given that I’ve learned new things. I think that’s a really good idea.

    I was also thinking about taking my javascript files, turning them into PHP with a JavaScript MIME type, and loading them with a querystring that tells it to minify.
    So I would work with a PHP (that renders in Javascript) that’s heavily commented and organized and all that.
    But when I load the script, it’ll be something like
    <script src=”javascript.php?minify”> and it’ll output the JavaScript file without comments, which I can remove with PHP and regular expressions.

    The purpose of this is to serve up a minified, very short (and thus, small) javascript file when used to load the page. However, when editing the file, I can add as many comments as I want. That way, anyone who wants to read/learn the code, can understand it (by going to javascript.php) whilst I still serve up a small file (by loading javascript.php?minify). WIN WIN.

    I might do this with my CSS too.

    Anyways, that’s what I have in my head. SOUNDS LIKE FUN. And isn’t that the real goal? :)

    Posted in All Posts, My Life, Secret Project KB, warrenshea.com, Web Development | No Comments »

    Site Updates – Facebook Status and Recent Comments in the Right Col. –>

    Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 12:00 am

    Wow, when was the last time I did any type of site update?

    Anyways, I did some worldofwarren.com maintenance today, first time in a while.

    What I did was add 1 Facebook Status to the right column, underneath the 3 Twitter Tweets.
    Below that, I added the 3 most recent Comments, underneath the Facebook Statuses.

    I didn’t want to display the comments too prominently on my site as it’s not my content, so I make you simply click “See most recent” to see them. I notice that sometimes I get really good or interesting comments on really old posts. It’s very likely no one would read those though…(other than me) and I find that unfortunate. I’d like those voices to be heard/read.

    I really hope this doesn’t discourage people from commenting. Comment on this post if you think it’s a bad idea…and it will ironically do what you don’t want it to do! So….basically, I’m saying there’s nothing in it for you.

    <Technical Tutorial>
    Getting the Facebook Status to work was pretty difficult. There’s a Facebook RSS feed but you can’t just pull from it. But that’s the same as any RSS feed. You have to create a proxy to bypass the cross domain issues. It’s super simple:

    proxy.php

    <?php header(“Expires:Mon, 31 Dec 2010 05:00:00 GMT”); ?>
    <?php
    if ($_GET[“type”] = “xml”) {
    header(“Content-type: text/xml”);
    $page_contents = file_get_contents($_GET[“url”]);
    }
    echo $page_contents;
    ?>

    and I just call any XML/RSS via URLs like this:

    proxy.php?type=xml&url=http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:warrenshea
    proxy.php?type=xml&url=http://www.worldofwarren.com/?feed=comments-rss2

    Unfortunately, for some reason, Facebook doesn’t allow this. They have this whole Developer API you have to work with to get the Facebook Statuses. Why? I think that imo, having Facebook Statuses come up as simple RSS feeds for people defeat the purpose of Facebook, as well as they lose money on advertising if you can pull the Facebook Statuses from other sites.

    So I had to do something else for Facebook Status. I’m not going to write a tutorial since I didn’t make it. I will say that I got it HERE:
    PHP Show Your Facebook Status on your blog/website
    </Technical>

    Posted in All Posts, Development, PHP, Site Updates, Tutorials, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

    One SQL Statement to Destory the World (of Warren)

    Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 4:34 pm

    ^ That’s supposed to be a play on “One Ring to Rule the World”….which is my butchered version of
    One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
    One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
    from LOTR.

    Anyways.

    So I brought my site down today. Well, technically I only brought the blog portion down, but that’s 99% of my site.

    This is how it happened.

    When I did my migration a month ago, for some reason apostrophes were replaced with an obscure character encoding, probably due to the Database not being the correct coding (ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 or vice versa).

    I was trying to do a SQL statement on the wp_posts table to replace all instances of
    ’ to ‘

    This was the SQL command I ran:

    UPDATE wp_posts
    SET post_title = REPLACE(post_title, “’”, “‘”)
    WHERE (post_title LIKE ‘%â%’)

    To translate: If there’s an instance of â in the title of the post, find ’ and replace it with ‘

    Simple. Anyways, I ran the code and it worked like a charm on all the titles. I next had to replace the content of the post. Easy right?

    The SQL command should have been

    UPDATE wp_posts
    SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, “’”, “‘”)
    WHERE (post_content LIKE ‘%â%’)

    But instead, I wrote

    UPDATE wp_posts
    SET post_content = REPLACE(post_title, “’”, “‘”)
    WHERE (post_content LIKE ‘%â%’)

    To translate (minus insignificant details): If there’s an instance of â in the content of the post, replace the content of the post with the title of the post.

    As a result, all my old posts’ content was replaced with the title of the post. OMG >_< I created a ticket with my hosting provider and they happened to have a backup of the database from yesterday morning (so I was only missing 3 comments from then, of which I obtained through Google Reader/Feedburner + FireBug). I got it restored within an hour or so…. But I still have to fix that apostrophe problem still….but this time, I’m kinda really afraid to do so :'(

    Posted in All Posts, Development, My Life, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | 1 Comment »

    (Major) Site Updates

    Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 2:32 pm

    About a week ago, I started some heavy dev on warrenshea.com.

    Here are my fixes:

    • The ul/li spacing on bullets (for all 4 themes)
    • Added FourSquare and Flickr (signed up today!) to my Social Media Icons
    • Twitter feed is now taken via PHP as opposed to JavaScript
    • All JavaScripts have been combined into 2 JavaScripts: JavaScript libraries (which contains JQuery, jQueryUI, SWFObject, Konami Code, and JQuery prettyPhoto libraries) and the regular javascript file (containing various inline JavaScript, etc). Originally I wanted a single JavaScript file but I figure that the JavaScript Library file doesn’t change but gets loaded every time. This way, the 143kb file, which is of considerable size, can be loaded via cache while the 22kb file that changes dynamically with each theme and page will be loaded each and every time. Better to do it this way than to load a 165kb (143 +22) file every time.
    • All CSS has been combined into one as well, including media print and media screen
    • Megaman theme has combined 18 images into one sprite.
    • Blogger theme has combined 4 images into one sprite.
    • Naruto theme has been tweaked slightly, the kunai is now gone and it’s now a functional, usable site. I’d been meaning to do this for ages…but I was lazy
    • Gmail (and Megaman) themes used to use JavaScript to determine the width of the main content. It no longer uses JavaScript and the width is determined via CSS. This means that the page loads faster on both these themes (this is due to the width not longer loading during page load, as it was before via JavaScript). Now it loads “instantly”.
    • Due to the revision, all pages should be 1/5-1/3 smaller in file size, as well as have significantly fewer server calls. It’s quite a considerable improvement!
    • On a backend side, made it so that only 1 “sidebar.php” (the right navigation) file exists, all in one spot as opposed to the old way, in which every directory had it’s own sidebar.php…just another way of centralizing things

    To Do:

    • Any (unseen) fixes due to the code changes
    • I’ve done .GIF sprite conversion but I still need to do .PNG sprites…and, not sure if it’s possible to do repeating background images with sprites but I found it not possible…so all my repeating images are still single, standalone images. Will need to research that more.
    • Professional Theme, Simple Theme (already sorta done…), and Mobile Theme
    • Fix Mega Man item preload image

    While the changes are mostly unseen, it’s not to say they aren’t felt through the hopefully faster load times and less server processing…or is it more? Less client-side stuff at least, which is a good thing…it also makes it easier (for me) to create more themes. Anyways, glad it’s done. I worked pretty crazily on this the last 6 days….it honestly felt a lot like when I played Zelda. I’m a creature of….obsession. Once I start something that’s within my grasp and motivation to complete, I just spend all my time on it. The real question is…what’s next?

    Posted in All Posts, Blogger, GMail, Megaman, Naruto, Site Updates, Web Development, worldofwarren.com | No Comments »

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