My Experience Learning Italian – Post 1

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I’m in the process of randomly beginning to learn Italian. I don’t know why, I just woke up this morning and thought ‘I want to learn Italian’. So I went on to Live Mocha, which is where I’m relearning my German. I use this because it has a community of people who are also learning other languages and people who are native of the language you’re trying to learn can correct you and tell you what you did right/wrong. This is generally awesome and with my German I didn’t see much trouble when I received corrections. But I also used to know German, so I guess that helps.

Well, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of the Italian one is just nouns. It’s just knowing boy, girl, man, woman, you, me. And then saying stuff like..is rich, is poor, is whatever. But this thing also doesn’t tell you how to switch between feminine and masculine yet, because that’s in a later lesson. Well let’s just say that in my clever attempt to switch out nouns, I sent up a red flag among the Italians and suddenly I had tips on how to switch from feminine to masculine and some confusion was thrown in by also pointing out the difference between singular and plural terms.

That didn’t bug me. But their explanation for it was written in Italian. So you can imagine how difficult that was to try to decipher what they were trying to tell me was. My only saving grace was that French is very much based on Italian/Latin, so I got there pretty quickly. On the plus side, here’s what I learned.

1- By default, switch the e at the end of a descriptive word when dealing with a female actor. (pretty standard, we have this in French too)
2- Don’t be clever and switch things around until you have at least a minor grasp of the language or else people send you complicated explanations back with words you’ve never even dreamed existed.
3- Even when you see words you didn’t dream existed, having a backup language helps a lot.
4- Think about what I’m writing in my submission. If I don’t want them to correct me based on something I didn’t mean, then I need to be clear.
5- Take it all constructively and be even more determined.

Consider that my random useless post of the day. I just wanted to talk about it.

If any of you are using Live Mocha as well, go ahead and add me to your list! I’m arvanhalleorg on there.

Hope you guys are enjoying your day.

Script Frenzy – Day 3 & Mum’s Birthday

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It’s officially day 3 of Script Frenzy, for many abroad it’s already nearing the end of it, but some of us are still mid-way through. I have yet to write a single word today, which is unfortunate, but I’m giving myself a bit of leniency, since I’ve already obtained 15 pages, which puts me 4.5 days into the competition.

I’m not entirely sure that it’s going very well so far, but it’s moving along. What I mean by that is; It’s not being written out how I’d prefer, but it’s getting out of my head and I guess that’s what’s most important during this first portion. My main difficulty is that I see this movie playing out in my head and I am trying to get it out in script form, but I’m lacking vocabulary and I think it’s the reason it just feels off for me. The dialogue and the quirks in the characters are coming out strong, just as I’d plotted them out, but I want the scenes to make an impact, not bore people to death, so I’ll see how it goes.

As is, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be able to finish this 15-20 days into the competition and then I’ll sit down and start rewriting scene by scene. I won’t remove anything or add anything vital, because that’ll just make me want to rewrite the entire thing, but I’ll at least start rewriting scenes and making them better.

On this fine, beautiful, over-heated day in Montreal, it is also my Mum’s birthday. She’s turning 44 today and she’s still looking as pretty as ever. I think what’s really making her happy about it all, despite getting a year older, is that everyone still looks at her shocked when she says her oldest (me) is turning 26 this year. They just can’t imagine being a mother so young. I think it’s pretty cool. My real grandmother is turning 60 or 61 this year, so we’re a pretty young family. It’s kinda cool.

So, my Mum is one of the coolest people I’ve ever known. She’s always treated us (my brother and I) with respect, kindness and understanding. She’s always encouraged us to better ourselves and learn more, without making grades a vital portion of that. It was more of a consequence of enjoying the process of learning. After all, if you love learning, then you retain the information you see. She’s always been there for us when life isn’t going so well and she also lets us in when her life isn’t going so well either. She’s one of my best friends and I’ll always be grateful for the things she’s taught me as a human being. I love helping people, being kind to people, showing compassion and changing the lives of others and it’s in large part thanks to her.

Thank you very much for being you, Mum. I love you with all my heart :) I know I can be very stubborn sometimes, but that’s just because you gave me my thick skull.

I hope you have an awesome birthday.

For those of you doing the Script Frenzy, I hope everything is going well for you and that writer’s block hasn’t hit you yet. Make the most of this long weekend!

Have a great day everyone.

Switching jQuery versions

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The following is just a small blurb from the post I wrote earlier today for a blog we’ve started at work among in the web team. You can go ahead and read more about it here.

“This is a snippet of code that I was working on this morning with the input of a coworker for the concept. Basically we needed to have a way to include a navbar at the top of every site, which includes javascript functionality, but also doesn’t conflict with already present jQuery libraries.”

Small note: In IE, you need the jQuery.noConflict() line to be separate from the rest of your snippet code if you want it to work. IE seems to have an issue with the XML connotation of CDATA Comments. It sucks. I swear I’mma just boycott them until they conform. Okay, I won’t, but it’s nice to dream. I don’t know why IE does this to be honest, it just does.

<script src=”js/jquery-1.4.2.js” type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”></script>
<script>var $newJS = jQuery.noConflict();</script>
<script>alert(‘do a bunch of stuff here’);</script>

Skinput

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I thought this was a pretty cool little gadget. Skinput is basically using your skin as a way to interact with an interface. The input comes from tapping your skin. Awesomely cool in my books. Sci-fi finally being realized…we’re not so far off from the bracers with the information screens in them that flip up and start pressing things on your arm. How cool. I can’t wait! I’d use it even if it meant putting sensors under my skin. Really.

Anyways, so there’s a blurb on Gizmodo.

And here are two videos explaining what it is.

Please keep the ‘fucking cyborgs’ comments to yourselves. Constructive thoughts would be good.

Colorbox with Javascript

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For the past 6 months at least, I’ve had varied versions of ‘JavaScript embedded into Colorbox’ as a search term that has led to my website and after numerous occasions of useless dead ends on my site, I thought that I’d go ahead and write a post about a very basic way to get this done.

The easiest way to call a Colorbox is with the following code:

$(“idColorboxLink”).colorbox({href:”/link/”, open:true});

Visit the demo page for Colorbox to see other ways to open it.

There are exactly 5 ways that you can place your JavaScript so that your colorbox content will be affected by it.

onOpen (Before Colorbox opens)
onLoad (While Colorbox is opening)
onComplete (Content is displayed in the Colorbox)
onCleanup (While Colorbox is closing)
onClosed (Colorbox is closed)

Then you just enter them into the code as follows:

$(“idColorboxLink”).colorbox({href:”/link/”, onOpen:function(){}, onLoad:function(){}, onComplete:function(){}, onCleanup:function(){}, onClosed:function(){}, open:true});

If you had a function like…fillField, you could just call it like this:

$(“idColorboxLink”).colorbox({href:”/link/”, onComplete:function(){fillField()}, open:true});

This probably could have been much more elaborate, but I’m more a use it to learn it kind of person and I thought that this might at least provide an idea of what to do if nothing else for those who are searching for this.

Have a great day.

Ahhh…Script Frenzy. It’s that time again.

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Okay, so we have a full month (the month of April) to write a 100-page script for Script Frenzy. It’s the sister competition to NaNoWriMo and sadly, I think I’m going to fail this one almost as badly as I failed NaNoWriMo. I made the fatal error of introducing a character that I felt would make the entirety of the story much better and far more interesting, but it wasn’t feasible in the timeframe allotted to the competition.

Now though, I’m specifically sitting down a week ahead of time to try to work out the plot and really see if there’s any chance that another character might try to get its own cameo. Yes, we’re allowed to do that with this one. I specifically remember getting an e-mail about it from the NaNoWriMo newsletter that we should go ahead and start planning things out. So I am.

Now I run into a whole new problem! I have too many different ways the entire thing could end. Do I kill someone? Do I have someone sacrifice themselves? Do I let them all live happily ever after? Do I let the bad guy win? Hmm…the potential. It all sounds potentially intriguing and I’m looking forward to starting Script Frenzy, but it’s driving me nuts already!

I’m trying to keep a few short things in mind while I work on this one though:

1- Don’t introduce anyone or anything new that wasn’t in the original plot.
2- Avoid the temptation to aim for perfection on the first draft.
3- If it sounds stupid, write it anyways, I can make it sound better later.
4- Have fun.

And that’s about it. Anyways, I’ll update this one in a week and see where I get at.

Enjoy your day and to those participating in Script Frenzy, try to keep the insanity for April 1st.