days and days of waiting for UPS shipments

10-12 hours building and placing components

30-35 hours of web design

Priceless.

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This duzy took me around 30-40 hours to create, in total. The castle has blast-mitigating firing ports, a raised walkway, numerous gun placements, and a great labyrinth for ground battles inside castle walls.

You can download this map by searching for “A Castle Gigantico” – only available on the PC multiplayer servers (no XBOX port , sorry).

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When you stop voting for the candidates at least somewhat based on what they stand for, you get terrible candidates that mess up things for everybody, regardless of party lines.  We see good, well-qualified candidates get sidelined in favor of the candidate with the best hair. We get terrible politicians who got where they got by cut-throat betrayals and schmoozing. And yet, we keep voting them in.

It’s time to stop playing the political game by what color their party is, by whether they lean left or right, or who gave the most for favorable coverage.  Actually look at their records,  and vote for who will lead our cities, states, and nation for better.

• Do not use whole words
• Use a good mix of letters, numbers, and special characters as allowed (Like “$”, “&”, “%”, “!” and so on). A great mix is 40% letters, 40% numbers, and 20% special characters (may not be applicable in some circumstances)
• Don’t use family names, pet names, birthdays, or any other easily-guessed items as these can generally be cracked using only a little observation and investigative skills.
• Using characters to replace letters in words may seem like a clever idea, but in reality, password crackers have adapted to that technique long-ago. If you insist on using a word, consider using one that’s made-up, so it’s less vulnerable to being guessed.
• The more characters, the better.  Always use as many letters as allowed, as each digit or character makes it that much harder for a hacker.
• If you find you can’t remember passwords very well, use a text file on a USB card, or write the passwords on a piece of paper. Make sure to guard either. On USB or SmartCards, you can encrypt the text file (At least 256-bit encryption is recommended)

EXAMPLES

Bad Examples: MomsName194, MYPetsName, Password, Guest, Default, Admin, 1234, ASDFGHJKL,

Good Examples : u!0Y9z!Lt$93E83P!4V,   L05!a91MRnv8F2$3,   jLAz091Rr$RM19cn2!RA

To create a 3D Image, you simply need two images with the same basic viewpoint, spaced apart at roughly the same distance your left eye and your right eye are apart. The angle you see depends on the orientation of those two pictures. For instance, for a normal viewpoint you’ll want to keep the eye viewpoints level horizontally. Past that, it’s just tweaking the depth of the 3d image by moving the layers right and left and working with the transparency levels to get an appropriate image. I’ll leave the instructions to the pros, but those are just a couple of helpful tips.

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It’s currently up at http://www.lostinthetext.com/portfolio/

Reactions were mixed, however. For most, the game was either met with brief amusement and a few games played, or a resounding ‘meh’. But for some unlucky souls browsing at work, their regularly-scheduled on-the-clock google browsing turned into a dead giveaway as the sound from the java applet alerted everyone within a 5 meter radius, but only if they had both sound and the third-party plugin ‘coolpreview’ enabled on their computer. Within minutes, a hoarde of angry office workers and soundophobes was busy at work, registering their disapproval of the pacman stunt to anyone who would listen. However, in a great display of integrity, google kept up the pacman app, and as of the time of this writing the game is still up. Note – you have to double-click the logo to start the game (another fine moment for the eolas suit.)

The game featured the traditional “waka-waka” sound scheme of the timeless classic, bringing to mind memories of a simpler time in gaming’s history (and this coming from a child of the 80s).

1. For SEO, use one of the freely available plugins designed to let you customize the meta tags and titles for each page. I would personally recommend the “All-In-One SEO” Plugin, which offers an addition to the individual page settings where you can specify a number of meta tags and a unique title for the page.

2. Set a custom format for your page URLs. The default URLs for wordpress posts are, well, a little lackluster. Just a day and a month. Not a whole lot of context for Search Engines, which generally rely on the content and page URL to get an idea of what’s on the page, so they can index it. While generating a sitemap takes care of a lot of the bigger details, giving your posts a better URL can drive more traffic to the site through organic searches. You can set the custom page URLs via “administration menu > settings > permalinks”. Set the “common settings” radio box to ‘day and name’ or ‘month and name’ to add the page name to the post’s URL. You can also create a custom naming structure for your URLs, which will automatically be configured on previous posts as well.

3. Use the ‘AddToAny share button’ plugin as a quick way for users to send your blog posts or pages to a friend. Not only does it make it easier for the end user to send their favorite blog post or a funny joke to a friend, you also make word of mouth advertising much easier. You can set where it will appear, and it offers automated syndication to a large number of social networking and social media services, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Etc..

4. You can hide pages from wordpress’ navigation menu (wp_list_pages, for coders) without having to hardcode anything. The “Exclude Pages from Navigation” Plugin, and several similar plugins, offer easy ways to remove a page from the menu. In the case of the “exclude pages from navigation” plugin, it’s as simple as changing a dropdown box in the right-hand column of the article or page’s settings page.