Under Observation

Yesterday, my brother managed to do a BCNM40 with Mercredi and Rezo. It is a battlefield in Horlais Peak, in the San d’Oria region, where a group of three people maximum can enter. It is famous because it can drop a very rare item, the Peacock Charm (Accuracy +10, Ranged Accuracy +10 Dark resistance -10). There are three enemies on the field, all of the mind gazer type. Two are rather small, and one is larger.

July 17, 2006

Additions and changes

I’ve been writing a lot in the past weekend. The fact that I have some definitive art gave me the impulse after many months of inactivity. Being totally dissatisfied with the state of chapter 4 (the latest I’m writing), I completely reorganized it, moving one section to the top and rearranging the behavior of some characters (like Satsuki, who was a little too hysterical) and cut off part of a flashback.

July 14, 2006

Finally!

Finally I get to blog about S.T.E.A.L. after so many months! That’s because finally I have illustrations for the novel after all these years! As I said on my [previous post on the matter]({{ site.url }}/2006/02/08/it-lives/), I had been in talks with two artists at the time. One simply disappeared after a while (and then I read on her deviantart page that drawing is not a priority… it would have been nicer if she had told me at least), while the other took a good deal of time (around seven months). But now, thanks to the incredible drawing skill of Too, I have the first set of seven pictures I commissioned (out of nine)!

July 10, 2006

New happenings on Asura

I’ve recently slowed down my rate of playing at Final Fantasy XI, mostly because the new update is scheduled for the end of the month, and I don’t have much to do nowadays. Besides, part of the people in my group are on holiday or taking breaks so I won’t get to do anything until the 28th of August or so, when I’ll be back from holidays.

July 8, 2006

The power of the shell

Yesterday I was trying to adjust some files in order to make a program use Affymetrix SNP arrays data (instead of arrayCGH data like the program was designed for). I had a big (116,000 rows) tab-delimited text file and I needed to use only part of the columns there.

July 2, 2006

Image editing using FOSS tools

I’ve already explained in a previous entry that I like to tweak images, extract them from backgrounds and so on. However I didn’t like that I needed Windows to perform my actions, as I want to use that operating system as less as possible. I tried then to use FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools available on Linux to see if I could do the same job.

July 1, 2006

Widget fun

As you may have noticed the theme and the layout changed slightly. I updated the [Regulus]({{ site.url }}/www.binarymoon.co.uk/projects/regulus/) theme to the newest version, making it widget-enabled and improving the overall layout. That means I can customize my own sidebar as I please without coding using the so-called Widgets, and that’s why it changed. The only problem is that the gallery now looks a little fuzzy, but it’s ok for my tastes.

July 1, 2006

Kubuntu Dapper arrived

305 Yesterday when I went at work I found an envelope coming from Canonical. Inside, there were the five Kubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake” LTS CDs I ordered from Shipit. Those are Live CDs that will run Kubuntu without any needs for installing (though I’d have preferred real install CDs). 307 I will probably try to hand out a few of those: there are already a few people using Linux where I work.

June 25, 2006

Image editing

I like to tinker with images. I’ve been doing this since I first started doing amateur web design, back in 1996. At first it was to create images for my own web pages (Sailormoon, ADG) but nowadays it’s like a hobby I do when I have free time. It can be fun.

June 25, 2006

Implosion

Over the course of three days, Heaven’s Inferno has imploded. This all started between disagreements in the leading council, mostly due to immobilism on one of the parts, Grummish. This person had a good and noble attitude towards helping and people behavior, but sadly “real game” scenario proved to be rather different. People that are 30+ act like children, even, which is rather saddening. Anyway, in the end the same person made a long rant after Dynamis-Beaucedine (I wasn’t there, as it was during night time), that caused, like with my previous linkshell Inferno, a huge hemorrage of members.