March 30, 2006 on 2:08 am | In Cammy, Models, WIP
I don’t get new kits often these days, but when two cool Cammy’s arrived I’m still quite excited 
This is the masterful Reflect’s Cammy kit. The packaging is just a bit overdone! Loads of empty checkboxes to be filled in for custom declarations, and the famous “Do not ship liquids, blood or fluids in this packaging” warning on the side
I’m planning to alter her so that she’s in her Delta Red costume. Always like it better than her Shadowloo one.
The second one is Yukishiro’s Cammy, which is pretty rare since he only issued it once. This kit is also special in that it doesn’t have his usual “great pose, wacked face” problem that his other kits like Mai, Chunli and Vanessa have. I’ll work on this one first. I don’t yet have any good mod/diorama ideas for her though, so suggestions are welcomed.
March 25, 2006 on 8:57 pm | In Site news
Bleah still mucking around with the layouts. I wanted to get a CSS menu on top of the persistent bar, but it’s quite hard… I’ll just leave things ugly but kinda functioning for the moment.
Also tried out the Gallery2 gallery software, integrated with Wordpress. Here’s a sample album:
Don’t understand why Gallery2 uses such a tiny font, I’m going blind…
March 25, 2006 on 1:10 am | In Misc
One thing I noticed while testing my pages on Firefox vs. IE is that the page transitions much smoother. My pages are templatized by Wordpress, aren’t using frames. In IE it loads by refreshing the whole page. But in Firefox, it seems to cache the parts of the pages that don’t change, and only refresh the parts that do. Hence it appears as if I’m using frames without actually using them. Neat
March 24, 2006 on 11:36 am | In Site news
The transition to the new hosting service seems pretty smooth… unfortunately I used a SQL backup to restore the database, so a tiny bit of recent data has been lost (sorry Jesse lost your most recent reply ).
Still have to fix a few things though, like the forum and gallery databases.
March 22, 2006 on 11:36 pm | In Models, WIP
Still haven’t cleaned up the remains of angel-san’s wings. I almost used up a whole bag of feathers for them. Looks a bit sad doesn’t it 
March 21, 2006 on 10:27 pm | In Models, WIP
Now that I’m fed up with installing extensions and crap, time to get back to some modeling…
One of the projects in my backlogs - SV-51 gamma from Macross Plus, which you can still get from HLJ. I really like the flamboyant patterns on it, but it was a lot of work getting them on the dang plane. Big decals and curvvy body makes for several hours of tiring decal work.
There are still many small markings and stuff to go on. I’m thinking of building her without weapons, and then D.D.’s version with twin boosters. The good thing about decaling is that you can do it inside the warmth of your heater… for March it’s really cold in San Jose!
March 21, 2006 on 5:43 am | In Site news
More enhancements to Wordpress as I’m trying to improve the navigation in the site. WP allows you to define a hierarchy of “pages”, but there’s really no good way to generate navigation out of that before I discovered the WP-PagesNav plugin. Spent some time customizing the style sheet for it. Looks pretty adhoc but it works Many of the articles are integrated into WP - so that they can really work under one template. Also trying to make a CSS menu on the top RHS. Everything works fine in Firefox, but IE less so… not to mention it looks uglier. Ugh.
Web authoring really changed a lot over the last couple of years. I still remember the days of Dreamweaver and such. I liked using it until I got fed up with it not being able to render pages correctly. Now people are authoring contents inside a browser - that’s as WYSIWYG as you can get. And the content management system runs on the server side rather than on your PC. Platform has changed and I still can’t make my pages look professional 
March 19, 2006 on 8:16 pm | In Site news
As I’ve mentioned in my last post I’ve been considering switching to something that’s faster than phpbb to drive the site. After much mucking around different softwares I’m settling on Wordpress. Also, after I dug around a ton for neat skins, I figure I should have done this ten years ago - turning my first content page into the front page. Well now, no more silly robot picture that takes ages to load.
The only thing I still haven’t figured out is to integrate the users of Wordpress and phpBB. But I wonder if I need to do so if I don’t require registration for comments… just have to wait and see how this goes. I’ll upload the old blogs and conversations to WP later.
After installing Wordpress I’m converting bits of contents to Wordpress-managed pages. It should standardize everyone and make it easier to navigate the site.
I’m also messing around with a gallery software for organizing my pics. Later on that.
March 18, 2006 on 8:18 pm | In Site news
This time every year it’s time for renewing my hosting service. It’s simply amazing how much features these hosting service offers for the same price, compared with last year. For about $8/month you can get 400G bandwidth, and that’s 10x what I’m getting right now.
Also wondered about things like whether I wanna switch to a blog software (like Wordpress) rather than phpBB, since I don’t really have the will to maintain a community. Blog is a lot more suitable for this site it seems. Or if I stay forum, may be I should switch to SMF. The phpBB upgrades are pretty ad-hoc, and customizing by modifying php code is just creating obstacles to upgrades. Also, the lack of customizing options in phpBB makes it bordersome to block spammers. I’ve been getting spammers autoreplying with casino links all the time nowadays, and a simple option of disabling anchors in bbcode for unregistered user would have mostly solved that.
Also I’m not sure I want to stay with my current hosting service. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but there are just little things that pissed me off… anyway we’ll leave it as that 
And if you have read this far, I also put up the Kacchu Musume annotated WIP here.
The follow ups are here
March 7, 2006 on 3:12 am | In Models, WIP
For some reasons I was obsessed with making stockings with real fabrics lately. I think they look different than painted ones.
Since I failed many times over the weekend, I was excited to find something that kind of works, and wrote a how-to
on it even though I haven’t finished the kit 
Also I’d like to know if people have better ideas.
Here’s a sample:
Follow ups here
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