Just what is this site about?

Generally, whatever I find interesting enough to link to in a given day. Interesting, to me, usually covers video games, technology, science fiction, webcomics, space, random science topics, and U.S. technology-related legislation. I tend to get a lot of material from sites like Slashdot, digg.com, and Kotaku (check the links section for a nearly complete list). I'm not the most long-winded person in the world, so posts are fairly brief and the commentary is generally minimal (though I do have fairly strong biases towards certain topics--I'm pro-space development at any cost, I'm anti-music industry, and I'm a total Nintendo fanboy).

What programs do you use to make this site?

You may have noticed that this site isn't exactly 'top of the line'. This is partially because I prefer to write the HTML/CSS myself, rather than relying on Dreamweaver or Frontpage to do it for me (the other half of the reason is because I'm a bit lazy). I use EditPlus as my HTML editor, mostly because it's the only HTML editor I've found that word wraps code without adding another line. Its spell checker is a bit rudimentary, but it works for what I need it for. For the few graphics I have I use The GIMP (for filters and other Photoshop-type tasks), Irfanview (for resizing, mostly, on a side note, Irfanview is easily the best image viewer out there, free or otherwise) and, occasionally, Microsoft Paint (yeah, I know, but it still has it's uses). For day-to-day uploading, I actually just use the Windows command line to connect to my FTP server, but when I'm switching hosts or uploading a bunch of pictures I usually use Filezilla. As far as browsing goes, use Mozilla Firefox or Opera (my browser of choice).

Who are you, anyway?

Just some guy with a lot of time to waste. I attend a University and work in the IT department of a local community college. If you feel like dropping me a line, feel free to do so. Spelling and fact corrections are welcome, but complaints will be ignored, if you don't like something deal with it or go somewhere else.

Why do you bother with this?

This site, in addition to giving me a small web presence gives me a nice excuse to mess around with web development stuff whenever I have the urge, as well as being a nice place to practice writing skills. In short, it's a hobby (it'll certainly never make me any money).

When do you update?

Blog entries are posted daily, usually around midnight, give or take a couple hours either direction. The only reason a post will be missed is if I am, for some reason, unable to get to a useable internet connection. This happens every now and again, but even when I does happen I still write a post, it'll get posted at the next available opportunity. Ever since I started this site I have not yet missed writing a post. As far as the other sections, the Gunpla section gets updated usually around three times a year (whenever I get a new Master Grade, or Fix Figuration). Other sections are updated periodically, though this usually means rarely.

What kind of computer to you have?

Glad you asked, my computer (Perspicutron) was put together in the summer of 2003. It runs an AthlonXP 2500+ (Barton core) overclocked to 2.1 GHz on an Asus A7N8x. I have 1GB of CAS2 RAM running in dual channel, a GeForce 6600 with 256MB of RAM, two SATA Western Digital hard drives at 160GB and 320GB, an Asus DVD+/-RW drive, and an old SoundBlaster Live! card. Of course, a number of those parts weren't there originally (I think only the sound card has survived since my last computer, built around an 800MHz Athlon Thunderbird). I wound up replacing a number of drives thanks to a really bad power supply failure back in 2004. One day I noticed that the power was on, but the screen was back as if it wasn't receiving any signal. I rebooted it to find that the hard drive had failed and could no longer be recognized by any computer. Unfortunately, when I swapped in an older hard drive, the same fate befell it and shortly thereafter a puff of smoke billowed out of the power supply. That cheap piece of crap fried the control board on a DVD-ROM, CD burner, and those two ATA hard drives (thankfully, my SATA hard drive, which I stored most of my data on, was unharmed). I'm probably lucky it didn't get my motherboard. That weekend I hit Fry's and dropped nearly a hundred bucks on a nice Antec power supply. Never trust cheap power supplies.

Alright, I still haven't found anything better to do, so why don't you give me a little history on this thing?

Back in the mists of ancient time, say, February of 2003, starting my own little blog began to seem like a good idea to me. I had always wanted to make a website, but I never could figure out what I could possibly put on one that would remain interesting for an indefinite period of time. Fortunately, with blogs, I discovered I could throw down whatever I felt like and still be taken seriously (or, at least, what passes for seriously online). I'll also admit to being inspired by the, now defunct, blog of one of my friends, Dan. So I went out and signed up for free webspace on FortuneCity and Thrid's Tiny Corner of the Web was born. The entries were very short, badly spelled (since I wrote the site from within FortuneCity's HTML editor, there was no spell check handy and I was too lazy at the time to paste it somewhere else) and poorly written (even by my standards). Also, in order to prevent the FortuneCity banner ads from appearing, I didn't have any color or graphics (yeah, it was bad). Eventually, though, things started to shape up. Gradually I found some focus for my entries and started to add less and less suckier content elsewhere on the site.

After a while I found myself leaving FortuneCity for a subdomain of one of my coworker/boss/friend Mike's sites. Free of banner ads, I finally started to add color and a tabled-layout. By the end of 2003 the site's design had moved firmly into the style of the late 1980's. The Gunpla section of the site was created around this time and it continues to be the source of the majority of my traffic (which isn't a lot). I continued leeching off Mike's good natured for nearly a year.

In 2004, as a birthday present, Dan bought me the rhetoricalramblings.com domain name and I decided it was time to strike it out on my own (by which I mean, suck it up and pay for my own web hosting). It was a this point that I actually started making graphics for the site and gradually updating the layout to the level of an average site from the early 1990's.

In August of 2005, I gained a passing interest in learning CSS, and created this very page as a test bed. I managed to knock together a rudimentary CSS design (which looked fairly similar to my old tabled design) and applied it to the rest of the site. My curiosity temporarily sated, this page was ignored until near the end of the year at which point I completed and posted it.

In truth, CSS and I weren't getting alone together very well--I still didn't know enough about it to really make the design as clean as it had looked with tables and I rapidly became aggravated by various tag incompatibilities (at one point I was just about ready to ban Internet Explorer from my site simply out of spite). So for about a year the site looked pretty half-assed. Finally, in December of 2006, I sucked it up and adopted a much more professional CSS design from Strictly CSS (a great resource). While it irks me a bit that I'm using a style sheet that I could never have built up from scratch, the site actually looks halfway respectable now. Perhaps next year I'll give it another go.