The Whitehawk

If you’ve been wondering about the lack of updates to this site, then hopefully that hiatus will be explained when I move to the new host a couple of weeks from now, if everything goes well.

Changing web hosts is never a pleasant experience, which is why I tried to choose one host that has a lot of positive feedback, rather than going for the best value choice.

In case anyone is wandering, the site is currently hosted by Total Choice Hosting. In terms of hosting, or downtime, I have no complains. But I was screwed over last year when they asked me to pay a large sum of money for my .net domain because I had supposedly missed the payment, although I simply didn’t receive an invoice to do so.

Why didn’t I receive an invoice? It happens that we have to pay the domain in a separate part of their site, despite it being shown on the platform from which I payed the hosting (that platform had the invoice for the first purchase of the domain), and despite asking why I hadn’t received an invoice on the said platform and being told that I would receive it soon.

I still consider it a good host, and they have good value for their packages, and have always responded to my support tickets relatively quickly. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but this is the sort of person I am. When it comes to something I’m paying for I am: Fool me once, shame on you, and no, I’m not sticking around for “fool me twice”.

A couple of months back, a friend of mine recommended a show called Nana. He isn’t the type of anime fan to settle for conventional series like Naruto or Bleach, although he enjoyed the first seasons of the first. When I got home that day, I plugged the USB disk and watched the first episode. My first impression was: “Great… a show about a completely shallow innocent girl, and the emo rockstar,oposite of the other”.

After watching 47 episodes of Nana, in only three days, I’m certain that it marked me far more than any other Anime previously did. I greatly enjoyed Honey and Clover, it’s a well thought Anime. I also enjoyed Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien more than any other. But those two stories are somewhat distant from the real world. Although the things that afflict them are real, the situation that the cast is in is simply unconventional, and there’s this haze of fiction around it. Nana has none of it.

The characters are all flawed, in one way or another. They all deal with their issues in their own manners. They are all different, yet, they’re also incredibly similar in some ways.

If you’re looking for a sugar-coated love story, you’ll find none of that here, although the first episodes might misslead you to think so.

The show is about two girls, with the same first name (I’ll let you guess what that name is). The dream of the first one, who is nicknamed “Hachiko”, is simply to find happiness and become independent. The second one, is much more ambitious, and aims to become a famous singer with her hometown punk-rock group.

Although they don’t acknowledge it at first, the times that they spend together become the happiest in their lives. But fate eventually takes it’s toll, and destiny drives them apart from each other. Despite being separated, I love how they always silently talk to each other during the beginning and ending of each episode.

Usually every episode will start with “Hey Nana…” followed by a thought about the past, or with a rhetorical question on how to make a decision.

The music in the story is simply perfect. There are many dramatic moments during the story, and although one of the characters is very emotional and sensible, the music that accompanies the scene is always incredibly adequate. It’s great to see the difference between the style of their music, and their personalities. The contrast is almost as good as Black and White.

An interesting thought came across while I was writing this review: Who should watch Nana?

And after giving it a bit of thought, I realized that everyone should watch it. Even if they don’t like Anime. The story puts all soap operas, and even great American series to shame. Young teenagers and grownups alike could certainly enjoy this story, and learn something from it. Specially older people that sometimes have trouble understanding what’s going through a young person’s mind.

In any case, I’ve said enough. If there’s one Anime I’d recommend anyone and everyone to watch, Nana would be it. And yes, I loved it that much.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything in this category, but the question above came up to me when I was talking with my friend, David Peralty. Although some might answer that question almost immediately from the top of their heads, and clearly state that right blogging is in the middle, or entering, a golden era, I have to contest that opinion.

Social networking has never been as big as it is now, and most people I know, even the less tech-savvy, have an account on at least one of those websites, and most of them keep track of the events in their lives through a chronological order. Blogging has been completely molded into those sites, and although some might claim that they never owned a blog, they may just be blogging unaware.

But what about professional blogging?

Sixteen years ago, and for 30 years before that, my father was the editor of the most popular local newspaper here in Madeira. The payments were low, the hours he put in were long (at the very least, 12 hours a day), and what kept him going the most was really the love for the profession. Is professional blogging today very different from this?

Today, most newspapers manage to succeed, whether they are printing or showing their articles online, there have never been as many journalistic sources for news as there are now. And the money that the journalists, and editors, earn, is actually quite a lot, compared to what it was a couple of decades ago.

Let’s look at professional blogging today. Despite the reports of 6 figure earnings, like those of ProBlogger.net’s Darren Rowse, not everyone is as sucessful as he is, in monetary terms. To give you a small idea, some editors may earn, some professional bloggers get payed less than $5 per article.

To write an article, you can waste as much as time time as a whole hour looking for the most accurate report, or something “worthy” of being posted on the website. But sometimes it can also be as quick as 15 or 30 minutes. But how many of these would you need to write in order to earn a good payment, enough to make a living?

Crunching the numbers…

Let’s see, imagine you can write 8 articles per day, one or two of which have to be product analysis ones. If you’re being payed 5$ per article, which is already considered a “great” payment in the blogging industry, you’d be able to earn $800 a month. Although you can write many more articles than that per day, you can only so many decent articles per an hour.

If your employer has high standards, the best you’ll be able to come with is around 6 articles in 8 hours, which would be complete product analysis, and probably earn you twice as much as a normal article would. Even so, the monthly wage you’d receive would still be very close to that of the minimum wage.

It’s not uncommon for professional bloggers, who live solemly from their blogging earnings to work over 12 hours per day, which is how long my father worked for two decades ago in journalism, and he earned quite more than the minimum wage, although it was nowhere as good as what the earnings are today (in journalism).

And don’t forget that there isn’t any “clear” way to declare your earnings for tax payment. The best thing you can do is to setup your own company for computer services, and use the earnings from that to declare your taxes.

The blogging industry is indeed blooming, and more professionals emerge each month. But I don’t think that we can call this the “golden” age yet. Right now only those with a nack for business, or a great love for blogging should consider taking it up as a professional career.

This one is courtesy of Zarin, one of the Nyxsis Ragnarok Server GMs.

Sorry folks, today’s Design Journal won’t be about the redesign, but instead, about an issue which concerns me greatly.

I recently purchased two new Web Design Index books, that called “Web Design Index” (very original name) from the Peppin Press which feature a nice selections of websites organized by different categories.

If I were to choose the websites for a book of this sort, I would be much more selective. Some of the designs chosen, are indeed original, in terms of layout and overall look, but most of them also sacrifice having a proper structure entirely.

I have absolutely nothing against being artistic with your website. But with some of the designs I’ve seen on this book there are several basic interface rules that are broken:

The structure changes almost entirely between the different sections.
Some websites have numbers representing the different pages of the website, with no other identification other than the address.
Other have really big and nice wallpapers, and all of the content is jammed inside a tinny semi-transparent box with “scroll buttons”.

I’m not by far the best web designer in the world, nor am I even close to that. But I would never sacrifice a good structure, that helped the user interact better with a website for a difficult or unconventional one for the sake of style alone. Unless the single purpose of your website is to entertain the visitor visually.

There are exceptions, like 2advanced studio’s website. The layout is a bit unconventional, although it’s somewhat structured, but the aim of the site is to visually appeal visitors and to demonstrate the kind of services that they can provide.

If you can design a site that is as visually appealing as theirs, then yes, you can sacrifice the structure a little bit for the sake of a good visual appeal. But as I mentioned before, they are an exception.

How far can I change the structure without making the website a maze to navigate?

Well, I think that a picture, on in this case a website, is worth a thousand words.

The link above directs you to Wolfgang Bartelme’s website.

On the front page you will have the beginning of the latest article, and just below, a few links to the articles before it. When you click on an article’s title, you will notice that the whole structure below the banner changes, and that was one of the bad things I mentioned about some design focused sites.

So why does it “work” in Bartelme’s site?

I never thought I’d ever quote myself, but if you ever read that long text in the index page of my website, you will find this on the first paragraph:

When you first arrive to an unknown site, even if you don’t notice, you will always ask yourself four questions: Who? What? Why? and How? and the text that follows this is precisely the answer for each of those questions.

Let’s look at this Bartelme article, as an example.

Do we know whose website it is? Yes, we do.

Do we know what the website is about? We immediately think that the website is about Design, and it is. Even though it doesn’t have an explanatory tagline, like the one I have, the content of the site becomes evident almost immediately.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Even though the “body” of the site changes depending on the section, the most important part, which is the navigation, and the header (in the case of this particular design), remains the same. You can always identify where you are and easily return to where you were.

Certainly, there ways to make the website better, in terms of navigation. But for a website with such simplicity, it isn’t necessary unless it starts to grow beyond it’s boundaries and becomes more complex.

When I made this website, I didn’t really consider whether such elements were necessary, and when I look back at it now, I could easily remove 80% of the links that clutter the site. That is why the redesign will have such a fresh and simple look, compared to the current look of the website.

How can you prevent making your website as cluttered as this one?

Think about your target audience, and what your needs will be. For a website like mine, with only 4 pages (which will be reduced to three), you don’t need to make it very complex. In fact, with such a small number of pages, you are given more liberty in how you can give your visitor the information he needs.

Although I haven’t watched some of the best classic Anime series, like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop, I have watched enough shows I guess to determine my favorites of all time.

Honey and Clover was an Anime that marked me deeply, and make me think a bit more about my future. But there was never an Anime, movie or story that scarred me (yes, scar) as much as this one: Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien (The Eternity you desire).

It starts off as any other romantic Anime show with teenagers. And then things go horribly wrong, and we are driven into the middle of the most painful dilemas and grow to love and hate all of the characters, for various reasons.

This show had all the reasons to go wrong. It was based on an adult video game, that should have been reason enough. Instead, this show had a storyline so great that even some people I know, who had never touched Anime, not even with a long stick, watched it until the end, as fast as they could, and loved every second of it.

This is also, by far, the most depressing story I have ever seen. The characters aren’t immaculate, saints, or just pure evil. They are normal people, like you and me, who happen to be in the middle of a very difficult situation and they deal with it in the best and worst ways they can.

I guess you could call it a dramatic masterpiece. Which is why I’ll probably never watch this Anime again, unless I’m certain I can cope with all of the emotions that go through the story.

As I stand here typing this, I can’t help but to wonder how many people have “accidentaly” stumbled upon an unprotected Wireless network and have tried to use for no good misschief.

I live in two homes at the moment, my father’s where I have my “office” and where I usually do all computer-related tasks, and my mother’s apartment which is sort of like a weekend resort where I can just sit back and relax without the drudgery of the internet life.

Even though I enjoy being here, my hectic schedule, and the lack of an internet connection have sometimes come between what I need and want to do, but today, I surprisingly came across a slightly weak signal for a wireless network and managed to connect to it.

Despite being happy, after establishing an internet connection the first thing I did was to see if I could detect the owner’s computer, and if he was protected. My first concern was to alert him. Unfortunately, he isn’t, so there doesn’t seem to be anything that can stop me from using this privilege as much as I like. So should I?

No.

I hate to use such a corny quote such as this one that has been repeated half a dozen time in the Spiderman movies, but “with great power comes great responsibility”. When I told a friend of mine about my “discovery”, the first thing he told me was that I shouldn’t download too many things, because the owner might have limited traffic (in Portugal, most of the ISPs have very limited download limits).

If you’re relatively tech-savvy, going to any website that tests your connection, like SpeedTest.net, will give you an idea of how good the connection is. Thankfully, I have determined that this connection is one of the more expensive ones, so there’s plenty of bandwidth and unlimited traffic.

Being aware of this fact, should I take the opportunity to download things via P2P? That depends on whether the owner is using the connection or not. A quick trip to Microsoft Network will usually tell you if there are any other computers connected.

Should I alert the owner? Definitely. But right now it’s 2am, so I’ll do it tomorrow if he’s at home. How can I detect where the Wifi is coming from? Well, basically I just have to do a small trip with my laptop turned on and check when the signal gets strong or weak. I should be able to easily determine the floor, and I already know on which side of the apartment the router is on.

A lot of people avoid wireless networks, and technology altogether because they are badly informed or don’t bother reading the manual to properly protect themselves. While some could seize this oportunity to abuse the connection as much as they can. I will use it to help the owner, and “save him” from future problems with less mature people.

After my harsh breakup, and my father’s coincidental retirement, I have decided, for both personal and financial reasons, to move to the United Kingdom and start off a new career there.

Being in an island that works with a lot of international groups, where many Brittish people come to live in, certainly gives me an advantage. And my friends and family have been quite supportive so far. Also, thanks to my father’s involvement with the Rotary club international I may even be able to get some support from UK members.

I feel sad about leaving my friends and my family behind. But I also feel excited, nervous and motivated to start off on a new career and explore a world which is completely different from this small, secluded and peaceful island.

On the bright side of things, I’ll be closer to many more international companies, with a lot of opportunities to develop my skills and to earn a better payment. I have been looking at many job offers, and I’m happy to say that my CV can fit most of them, even the most demanding ones.

This also means that Design Journal will return, and thus I will start transforming the design you’ve been seeing during the past months into transitional XHTML and CSS. As for Anime, I’ve been watching a few here and there, but for the time being, I must focus on my future and on my skills, so don’t expect much Anime content in the near future.

I put this one under both the journal and rants, because it’s a little of both. My girlfriend and I recently broke off, or in her own terms, she wanted some “space”, so I gave her it, willingly, knowing that my space was just about to be taken from me.

There’s nothing worse than forcing a person into being with you. That is something that has always worried and plagued me, for as long as I’ve lived. It’s funny how you feel, after all of the goals that you set disappear, because your relationship ended. Surely, other people go through harsher hardships. Some relationships leave emotional scars, or babies to rise. I can’t say I’ve experienced the later so much, although I can understand, or at least relate to it a bit. But I can certainly relate to the first.

You can’t help but to compare yourself to the one who replaced you. People who’ve seen her, with him, tell me that they have no idea what she sees in him, compared to me. I know that some people will say anything they can, just to make the other feel happier, but I can’t admit that I don’t think about it myself. I don’t look at him as someone inferior, just someone fortunate to have seized the moment, but perhaps unfortunate when the future rises.

It’s funny that all of the things that we promised to each other: honesty, regardless of the consequences, friendship, even if we became separated; all seem to break as easily as the words came out of our mouths at that time. It’s funny how all the moments, the pictures, the love we shared, the love we made, the things we cherished, the people we were with, all disappear, and turn into nothingness, when compared to the pain of losing one another.

I hope that no one else ever comes to know this pain, no one else but her. What goes around, comes around. I have to believe that, or else I’ll lose my sanity. And right now, it’s the only thing I have left to lose. Everything else feels empty and meaningless.

Today I got a nice surprise when I found out that YUI had released a new single before I was tired of her latest album.

This latest song has a nice upbeat to it and would make a very nice Anime intro for some random shonen one. It’s a bit similar to her “Rolling Star” song, but I honestly prefer this one because it’s easier to listen to, and “Rolling Star” has some high pitched tones.

The second song on the single is a nice balad, which contrasts quite a lot with the first one. A few of my favorite YUI tracks are usually the “secondary” single tracks, and this one is no different. For those that are curious, those favorites are: “Winter hot music” and “Why me”, and I’m also a fan of “Blue Wind” from her first album.