Orange on orbit

   

mahercubed has been launched in the night of 30th August, few hours before the merdeka countdown. Mahercubed
is supposedly a forum dedicated to maherians, but others are welcomed nontheless. Cubed is the effort of three form 4 students who noticed the
need of a certain medium to express thoughts among maherians on the
net. Arman has made a custom
design for the forum with a little bit of tweaking of the available
template. Quite statisfied with the design eventhough didn’t make too
much of a change. Loyal readers of d3ly.com please spare your time and visit us, help us make a great community.

w00t! After staying up late last night, burning the so-called ‘midnight oil’, I finally got my wordpress template working. I’ve analysed the <?php inside the ’simpla’ template and pretty much figured out some of their functions. Still dunno how to do the comments.php though, it looks pretty darned complicated, but things are looking up - most likely would learn it during the upcoming holidays. Just for the record the design is called ‘green’ meant for armangrafie.com, a very simplistic design, too simple probably. If I were to make it into a real template, I would need to add a sidebar.

   

Asked a web consultant in Lowyat.net for recommendations of webhosting providers, among the suggested providers, I chose easy-interactive.com which offers both local and US servers (atleast what he said). Since my site is targeting on international audience, I plan on getting a server in the US. The whole price for webhosting + domain is RM168 a year, pretty reasonable. The plan offers 150MB disk storage and 10GB monthly bandwidth along with the usual stuff, Apache, PHP, MySQL. And yea, my dad agreed with it too, w00ts. So I’ll get it up atleast at the end of the year, giving me enough time to learn more on server-side coding and Wordpress, not to mention more CSS. Trying to ensure that my blog goes up before my big trip to Japan and blog all the experiences

For the domain, I initially planned for simply arman.com which was obviously taken. No luck also with armand nor armann. So came up with a slightly longer name, armangrafie.com. Just made this nonsense composite word with my name and photography, or, as in dutch/german called fotografie. Made some mockup design for it too:

 

I’ve decided to take photography as my new hobby and passion. I don’t mean those crappy compact digital cameras, I’m talking about the serious stuff, digital SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras. Ofcourse, it’ll have to wait until I get a job, which is atleast another decade or so :(. I guess it’s kind of natural for web/graphic designer to have passion for photography. Obviously because their work pretty much invloved in manipulation of images and visual elements, what’s better than editing your own image right? I’d really like to use one of these to capture the urban beauties of Tokyo - especially akihabara and shibuya. Also the beauty of people who live there, there should be plenty of moe cosplay in the streets of akiba.

 

   

Anyway, the camera I’m planning to get is either Canon EOS 30D or Canon EOS 350D/Kiss Digital N. Both are well over RM3000. For a form 4 student that costs an arm, a leg and a kidney. The 30D features: 8.2 megapixel, 2.5" LCD display, simultanous RAW and JPEG recording, 5 fps and 30 large JPEG frame burst, etc etc. I also might consider getting additional lenses and a tripod. Daydreaming?