I’ve been about fitness for pretty much my entire life… While growing up it was more because of my environment and how I grew up than it was wanting to be physically fit. But I was fit nonetheless. It wasn’t until around my junior and senior years in high school that I really started paying attention to advancing myself physically — but even then it was hard for me to achieve the goals that I wanted to achieve because of genetics, metabolism and just being young.

In high school I took a couple of weight lifting classes so that I could gain a little weight. I didn’t want to be a stick, though at the time I wasn’t all that worried with how I looked; I generally just wanted to gain weight and strength. My strength went up, but my weight not so much.

Before I enlisted in the United States Air Force I weighed in at 117 lbs. That was ridiculously skinny for my height (roughly ~5’8”) and I was actually told at MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) that I had to gain three pounds or I wouldn’t be able to join. Because of sheer ambition, I gained 6 pounds before I went back two weeks later. I know, you’re probably thinking “6 pounds is nothing,” but hey, I seriously could not gain weight to save my life. At least prior to my MEPS visits. Or so I thought at the time. The picture below is me when I was 17 years old (before MEPS, as I went there while I was 18).

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I’ve always been an advocator of the use of www in domain names. While these days most people don’t actually type that into the address bar, it still serves a purpose whereas using your root domain ¹ has negative technical implications.

Of course your average end-user will not care nor need to know why using www is appropriate — and they really shouldn’t need to know; It’s more of a server-side issue and it’s up to the administrator(s) to think about. Your users should be able to access your website whether they type in example.com or www.example.com.

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My girlfriend Vaesis writes professionally and as a hobby. She’s been writing a few stories of her Elder Scrolls character Triskele and the various adventures that Tris has around Skyrim and its dangerous tombs. If you’re interested in reading some of these great stories, check them out over at Northern Lights where Triskele’s Tales are told.

Be warned: these are really good.

Currently at Northern Lights…

1) Campfire

“And then she surrendered like a helpless doe and I had the best night of my life.”

Triwold smirked at the boasting of his youngest sibling as he honed the edge of his skinning knife. The flickering light of the fire in their midst reflected upon the steel as he slid his whetstone down. Thorald grinned broadly, his story now finished, and he looked from Triwold to the middle sibling, Ysengrim, who was just shaking his head to himself.

“Come on! No one ever succeeded in warming that wench, but I did. Hah. And what a warming it was.”

Thorald sat back against a treestump, his green eyes toward the nightsky as he reflected upon something that, without a doubt in his self-loving mind, was yet another tale of glory to add to his already existing legend. Ysengrim scoffed.

Continue reading Campfire →

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I recently relaunched this website after moving away from creating pre-made and custom forum templates. With this change, I decided to go with an entirely new approach: I installed the Textpattern CMS. After getting the [very simplistic] design up, I wanted to add a third-party commenting system (because let’s face it, the core comment system is very lacking).

After a short amount of research, I decided to go with Disqus — which I’ve seen before but never really used. Because I’ve never used Textpattern or Disqus in the past, it took me a while to find out how I could add the comment count to the home page of the website.

While I didn’t need to follow a tutorial on how to integrate Disqus with Textpattern itself, as it’s very easy to do, I did run into a great little tutorial over at TXP Tips on how you can integrate the commenting system with your site. If you have been using the standard Textpattern comment system, you’ll find that post handy because it teaches you how you can import your previous comments into the new system.

Once you have that set up, it’s actually quite simple to get the comment count attached to your articles. What you’ll want to do is paste this code before the </body> tag of your site …

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Isss awesome. I bought a copy as a gift for my girlfriend earlier today and played it myself for a couple of hours tonight. I’m not a graphics whore, but I can appreciate when a game looks outstanding. The visuals, the atmosphere — everything about Tomb Raider is breathtaking. I haven’t gotten too far just yet, but I can say that this game is definitely a good purchase if you’re thinking about picking it up.

Do note, however, that the game is a reboot of the Tomb Raider series and isn’t accurate in its story. I can’t really comment on that aspect since I’m not versed in TR or Lara Croft’s back story, but that’s what I heard from said girlfriend. If you’re not worried about the story being accurate, or even if you are worried, it’s still a great story on its own (so far and from what I’ve heard, at least).

Below are some screenshots I’ve taken from the first ~60 minutes of the game. The graphics are set at the highest setting, Ultimate (with no options customization or third-party post processing).

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The MyBB theme that I’ve been working on is seeing some nice progress lately; I’ve been pouring a lot of hours into it and I’m really getting into a groove. The design is starting to shape up well and is looking fantastic, though there’s still much work to do.

In this update I’ll show you a crop of the postbit that I’m working on…

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I posted a few days ago talking about my Mustang and listed some of the various modification I made to it. At the end of the post I left a few pictures. This time, just pictures. Yeah, again. I thought to take some more today after a nice handwash and quick wax (literally quick-spray wax since I was a bit too lazy to go all-out with the good stuff).

Here we go…

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As I posted previously, I got back into developing a theme for MyBB. So far I have quite a bit of it coded, though a lot of this is very likely to change as I continue to develop the theme. I think it’s looking pretty good!

This site that you’re on now is basically where I got the inspiration for what I’m currently working on. It’s a lot less simple because it’s a forum and not a small, personal blog.

Here we have the forum index:

Again, this is a coded mockup and things will be changing. You’ll notice that the Last Post arrows are not aligned correctly and there are some other elements that I want to work on. The Last Post arrows will be simple enough, but I got distracted working on the forum display…

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I finally took a few shots of my ’06 Ford Mustang today and got them uploaded to my Facebook. I’ve had the car for a little over two years now, and I’m still loving it. It actually looks completely different from when I first purchased it, as everything about the car was stock back then. So far I’ve added the below customizations to it, but I’m leaving out most of the small stuff since there’s quite a lot and I, quite frankly, can’t be assed to list absolutely everything. The links lead to the exact item that I purchased (don’t worry, I don’t ever use affiliate links).

• Fixed Black Antenna
• Black Billet Grille Combo
• Raxiom Smoked tail lights
• Black Strut Tower Brace
• Ford Racing Cold Air Intake with BAMA tuner
• TCI StreetFighter Ratchet Shifter
• CDC Rear Decklid Panel

Along with all the little things I’ve added here and there, the above are some amazing mods for the Mustang…

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I’m finally back to making a new MyBB theme. It’s been a while since I’ve taken on any custom jobs since I relaunched the website, so I thought I’d go ahead and crack into my hobby again and create one just for fun.

I normally do a rough mock-up of the look that I want to achieve in Photoshop, then I get to coding and the bulk of actual “design” is done straight from there. I know a lot of people tend to do near-full designs in Photoshop before hopping into the code, but I can’t bring myself to sit and do this and that in the program; I want to start on an install of the CMS or forum I’m designing for and take it from there. I’ll admit that this method takes a lot more time than the traditional way, but I don’t mind — it’s still really fun to do.

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