HyBriD54

I was just curious on how people here learned HTML or XML (assuming you did, which, judging by the fact you are actually here on this board). How long did it take for you to learn the basics of HTML? How proficient are you right now in HTML? Which resources did you use when you were learning HTML (or are currently learning HTML?). How did you find learning HTML?Thanks.

If you have the time, you can try using w3schools. W3schools provides Do-It-Yourself type of tutorials, so you can input your own coding and see the effects for yourself, which can be helpful. At the moment, I'm still going through .css and XHTML. http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp That's the introduction to HTML for w3schools.

I use a 1GB Toshiba USB Flash Drive and a 256MB Imation Flash Drive. Well, I don't rely on them all that much anyhow, so I only require approximately 250MB+ space to store my documents for work. And wow, 500GB Hard Drive (I think you meant "External" XD), I really need an upgrade to my hard drive space on my computer... 80GB is just nothing nowadays.

Seeing as it's probably a machine doing all this what with the beeping and the lack of human response, it's probably unintentional. Definitely no need to be scared.. & I second what the above posts suggest.It will probably help the person on the other end as well, who's spending ridiculous amounts of money calling you only to have you end up feeling harassed. =/Best of luck =]

Aaaaaand... The third installment of the Super Smash Brothers Franchise! Super Smash Brothers Brawl! *drumroll* For those who have not/do not know this awesome awesome fighting game: Super Smash Brothers Brawl is a beat-em-up featuring a tonne of characters from your favourite gaming franchises (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, Warioware, Fire Emblem, Star Fox etc.), as well as some third party characters such as Snake from the Metal Gear series. Ever wondered if Mario or Kirby would win in a one on one duel? Well, here you can find out. It's for the Wii though, so it may be inaccessible to a larger proportion of gamers, but hell yes it is fun. The online mode isn't exactly good though, sometimes it's far too laggy while sometimes it can be completely smooth. It also needs a chatroom or something, rather than anonymous brawling all the time (except from playing with your friends via Friends Code). What I DO like, however, is the music! It's so nostalgic, and all the music fits in. Kudos to the music producers of the game and bravo to Nintendo for making such as awesome game.

It's a good idea, but I don't think it'll work at our school, simply because most teachers don't look at whether or not you're using a browser. But they DO look at what's on the screen. So if you're going to a site that obviously doesn't look like a History essay (which is most sites), they'll notice. And a lot of the teachers at our school know to get suspicious students to actually open up the taskbar windows to show them.For us, filtering is delivered at the proxy level. And we are required to login using a student account each time we use the internet. So it doesn't matter what browser we use, we still have to connect to the proxy that delivers the filtering. And no matter what the best tech geeks try, NOTHING gets past it. Every single proxy server we have tried is blocked, and other tools like Tor don't work either. We get away with a lot of things because our student accounts are all remote desktops. But the client also has software installed on it. So what we generally do is surf the net or play games on the client, and when the teacher comes around, we open the full-screen remote desktop session which hides all the client's windows and taskbar etc. and even if they ask us to open our taskbar windows to show them, they'll never suspect anything outside the remote desktop session. But the client software is very restricted. The start menu just has the shut down option, a very restricted selection of software, and the shortcuts to the terminal server (i.e. our remote desktops). The computers don't let us open up explorer, but we've been able to get around this using explorer toolbars on the taskbar, which haven't yet been disabled. Don't even think about command prompt or regedit.Yes, we have a very restricted set of permissions. But hey, we have some of the most tech-savvy students in the state. So the tech admin department has go to pretty desperate measures. Just recently, one of my friends got hold of the admin password. But he's too ethical to use it to change anything.

Firefox 3.I've tried most of the popular browsers but always end up going back to Firefox because of extensions. Adblock is particularly useful, because you'll come across websites which are just plain annoying. I don't mind text - that's understandable, because free services are driven by advertising - but when you come across stuff which is just sick or annoying (like that emoticon ad that literally plays a sound of an obnoxious person yelling "HELLOOO") - you need to get rid of it before it drives you insane.

Does anyone here have a stress ball? If so, does it actually help when you are stressed?I got a stress ball for $5 today. It's blue and has these horrible bumps on it, and when you squeeze it, it does this creepy thing where the bumps get bigger and turn into bright green pimples. Frankly, I think it would make a person even more stressed...One another note, the stress ball came with instructions, and had an interesting point to make:"Squeezing the stress ball too hard may cause it to leak." Isn't the whole point of a stress ball for it to be squeezed as much as possible? How do you let your anger out on something if you're going to have to worry about it breaking?

Sorry to point it out, but I think you've made a bit of a typo. =s "Without the computer hardware, computers would just be a giant paper weight" I think you meant software. Interesting read though =]

The filtering software makes it hard to even get legit work done at school. For example, you could be looking up interesting landforms for a geography project and find some interesting link, only to have it blocked for being "uncategorised".If students really wanted to play games or whatnot, they could easily bring stuff from home on a USB mass storage device..But then, if they had no filters at all, there would be panicking parents showing up at the admin office complaining about it. Filtered internet is still better than no internet at all. =/

Why on earth did Google change it anyway? The old one was nice, simple, and well recognised. Not to mention that the new one lacks a border and has a gradient that can clash with the background. (Vista anyone?)Interestingly, Firefox 3's search bar still uses the old one. (Yay)

I always found this amusing. God doesn't care about what operating system you use. Really. =](Although I think Christian edition comes with the bible pre-loaded onto it. Never heard of Muslim edition though. And Satanic seems to be a bit of a joke.)

The Inheritance series is pretty good; the similarities with Star Wars still bug me quite a bit (Obi Wan and Brom; farmer boy finding something special leading him on the path to greatness; Murtagh's role as Han Solo and Darth Vader.)... but the books are well written. I'm looking forward to reading the rest (September 20, you say? Awesome)

Hmm. Sounds pretty awesome. I wonder what kind of games they would make if they teamed up... I would try that game out for sure. They make totally different games genre-wise however, so I'm not completely sure how it would turn out if they actually did the merge-game making thing. And I never really thought Blizzard would be the type of company to do this type of merge... The website looks pretty sweet too.

Haha. I've got tonnes of things that annoy me really badly or make me mad [yup, I am one aggressive person, but I'm "normally" passive, unless you bug me].1. Acting extremely corrupted repeatedly. Repeatedly referring everyday things to stuff like the reproduction organs [it's difficult to even say 69 in Mathematics without someone making an extremely crude comment]. I mean, although I'll get used it and I don't exactly mind people saying stuff like that occasionally, but when someone says it so often I can predict what they are going to say next...2. An all-too-loud person. In class, people who talk SO much and SO loudly deserves some punishment. Honestly. They distract others from learning and they also ATTEMPT to answer every single question our teacher [our Information Processes and Technology teacher is VERY carefree, and yet he STILL gets very annoyed at a particular student in my class] but end up getting around 90% of them wrong.3. When people "steal" your stuff for "fun". It's ridiculously annoying, but tolerable at first. But when you find so many objects missing, you'll probably end up flaming the living daylights out of someone. Not that this happens much but hmm...

Thanks very much OpaQue. None too shabby, the design and all looks really sweet. A bit more easier to use, you don't get the password thing anymore. But... not to be picky or anything [ignore this if you wish], but green doesn't exactly look the best...

Hmm, a massive amount of research must have been put into them. to get all the literary references. I wonder how long Lemony Snicket planned the series for before writing it? The plot seems pretty simple and maybe starts to get monotonous but then you hit book five and there's this big conspiracy what with VFD and all. something random i found on wikipedia:in The End, the last picture of the ocean, the waves are actually shaded so that it looks like a question mark.interesting? XD

A large difference between the Command & Conquer series (even though Generals is quite similar to the Blizzard-type RTS game franchises such as Warcraft and Starcraft) is that it has literally no unit limit, meaning you can construct an ultra large force (not too big or your computer will go kaput when it attempts to run all the units' commands at the same time, resulting in a fatal error mostly).As the previous posters have mentioned, the Command & Conquer series is extremely fast paced. When you have specialised units attacking a unit they are rather effective against (an example of this is the Dragon Tank vs an infantry occupied Civilian Structure [does not apply to bunkers]. The Dragon Tank would annihilate all infantry inside the building once a bit of it's flames manage to reach the building itself in an instant), you will find that the units will die extremely quickly, making micromanagement more difficult in the Command & Conquer series than in say, Starcraft and its expansion Brood War (an RTS created by Blizzard).

Most of the games on the Wii console tend to be family-friendly oriented or a "kiddy" kind of game (as I myself own a Wii console, and basically all my games aside from the games like WiiSports have Mario in them). Well, I guess if you don't mind playing those type of games (playing with friends is fun). Currently I am playing Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and they are both pretty good/fun. The main difference in the other two consoles and the Wii is the sensor feature I guess, so if you prefer moving around a bit, then the Wii is for you (and your friend/family too)

Yeah... Running firefox portable on my USB drive utterly destroys my school's computer (it's very very slow) so I end up using Internet Explorer again instead. I've got alot of other portable junk included with it too which I don't even use (even though I know what it is for... I think). Although I must say the Firefox 3 installed on my computer recently is really sweet...And where is this flash fix thing you mentioned may I ask?

Have you tried that ninja game or whatever you call it? "N" was it? That one where you're the stick figured dude and you have to go through the door while escaping all those ninja killing machines like lasers, sensor bots, machine guns, missile launchers, electrical platforms and all that. And you have to collect those gold coin thingos too! It's pretty fun, although it can get notoriously difficult during the later stages (although there are some handy cheats there to skip levels for you >=]. And it's downloadable as an .exe file so you can put it on a USB flash drive and play it elsewhere.

The BIOS for the Playstation Two should come from your own Playstation Two console. It is illegal to download a BIOS online (although you can probably simply google the right BIOS and its respective code) for use on a Playstation Two console.Also, unless you have an extremely powerful rig right now, you aren't very likely to run fully 3 Dimensional games at full FPS rate. If you have one that can run it at an extremely fast rate (at around 300%) you may as well do nuclear weapon simulations.

From your list:I own a Wii, a Playstation One and a Playstation two console.I am currently playing the Wii (Super Smash Brothers Brawl is so fun). I haven't tried the Nintendo WiFi Connection (I haven't even set it up from my home router) but I hear the Nintendo Wifi Connection feature for Super Smash Brothers Brawl is quite laggy and not as good as the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 online features on many of their games. And I was planning on buying the Playstation 3 for some various Playstation-only exclusive games but now I hear the new Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy XIII, was going to be released on the Xbox 360...? That completely sucks, oh well. I guess the Xbox will probably dominate instead of the Playstation this round.

The last [fiction] book I read was "Class A" by Robert Muchamore, the second in the CHERUB series about an organisation that uses children as spies. It was ... really good. One of the main themes was cocaine dealing and there was technical information as well as entertaining action and humour. All the CHERUB books (that I've read) maintain a sense of realism despite the main idea being something that could be seen as extremely farfetched.

Hmm, you've got some good points. Actually, that's what happened with me and A Series of Unfortunate Events. I watched the movie, liked it, then read the books. I thought both were pretty good but you always lose (as well as gain) something when you translate something from page to screen...