My books for college just officially annihilated me. Forget for a moment my tuition, lab fees, and other expenses for a moment.

English 301
Book: $132

Public Speaking
Book: $81
Video Camera: $88

Intro to Perl/CGI
Book: $65

Advanced HTML
XML Book: $14
DHTML & CSS Book: $18

Total: $428.88

Please…. just kill me now. X_x

Seriously, the most reasonable book prices are for the classes I actually want to take. The rest are kind “meh” classes for me, but I need to pass them for my degree. Thankfully I have a hard time failing English and public speaking has never bothered me. (I’m not even sure why I need a video camera, but - oh well.)

Going to try to finish up one last eFiction modification before my classes resume tomorrow morning and then I’m poofing for a while.

Well, as you may have gathered from Jasson’s journal everything is still more or less going okay.

I really need to find out why I’m so quick to panic. I have two weeks where I’m fine; the picture of calm. And then suddenly I find myself either panicking or pissed off for absolutely no reason whatsoever. >_> *sighs* Basically, if I write a post where I’m super panicked, please don’t take me too seriously. You’ll know if it’s serious if Jasson says something.

….

We’re almost done with fall semester and then we have a bit before Winter semester begins. I’m passing my graphics class with flying colors, though relearning HTML has been a bit of a challenge. I haven’t done any nested table layouts in years… which means I am seriously out of practice. In my final assignment for that chapter, I couldn’t figure out how to get one of the inner tables to align properly. I’ve never been particularly skilled at forms either, so that gave me trouble too. The most forgiving chapter yet has been frames (wow!) and CSS (duh.) XD

However, my absolute lowest moment came when I had to make a CSS map. It was supposed to have little boxes that would appear on top of the map when you moused over the corresponding landmark. I would get one part working and then everything I’d done before would die on me. I finally got it working in MSIE, but the damn thing wouldn’t work in Firefox. Only after I turned it in did I find out I was one character away from making them work.

I wrote:

#point01
{ CSS goes here }

but I had to write:

#point01 A
{ Same CSS goes here}

I forgot to put that “A” at the end of the CSS declaration, which tells browsers that the spot is also a link. >_< Since Firefox is a bit more strict than MSIE, it didn't understand what I was doing.

Other than that, school is going pretty well. I’ll be glad when this semester is over, but I’m not looking forward to next semester either. I’m going to have about $400 - $500 worth of books I’ll need to purchase for just four classes.

I swear these publishers must be bandits. That much money for books is simply outrageous. Though I suppose I should be happy; since once I walked out of the bookstore at CMU once with $800 worth of books and supplies. All the same, I’d really prefer not to have to pay that much or tack that much onto my student loans.

I also recently discovered that I’m probably going to need to either buy more space for Lunaescence or simply buy another space for my graphics. I released two skins for the eFiction script last month and the downloads are simply killing my bandwidth. It took me a bit to figure it out, since I kept having hack attempts all last month. (More on that below.) Now that the chaos has calmed down, I can clearly see the suckage is coming from those two files. >_>

It seems strange (and almost flattering) to see hits coming from Web sites in Germany, France, Italy and know they’re using my eFiction skins. Seems even stranger when I look at my inbox and see all the requests for custom layouts and advice on how we did some things.

Part of me really is amazed by the reaction, but the other part of me keeps thinking “What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

Anyway, yeah… hack attempt. Last month, a guy in Italy released a full disclosure of eFiction’s security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. I mean right down to the scripting they should use. Fake gif images, SQL injections, and remote scripting — oh my. So I had several hundred attempts to find “suntzu.php” in my non-existent author image folders, plus attempts to create directories, strange e-mails apparently generated by my script, and more. Lets just say the archive only looks the same. On top of the security patches Tammy released, I damn near changed the archive’s entire file structure.

All while trying to get all this homework done. XD I’ll say one thing, if those people did any service it was teaching me how to multi-task better. Though I just wish I could whittle down the modification requests, layout requests, and question e-mails so I could do a new layout for my blog and get the Christmas layout done for the main site.

Well, we didn’t go to the hearing. Turns out either we weren’t supposed to or didn’t have to. *rubs her face* I don’t know anymore… I really don’t. So I’m just going to concentrate on school and not try to think about anything. Hopefully God will come through and let us stay here until we can fulfill our promises. My head just hurts trying to go over everything that’s happened in regards to this park.

So, I spent all day yesterday and today working on a quick 4th of July layout.

The title, Magnalium, is a fireworks term. It’s the most common chemical mixture used in modern fireworks (Aluminum + magnesium for those interested) and makes their colors more vibrant.

Since I really didn’t like my original floral layout, I used the same technique I used there to blend five different photos together into one unit. (A cookie to anyone who can find all five. ^_~) I made those damned stars by hand, since I couldn’t find anything I really liked to make them for me.

I’m going to start offering my sets for download once I’m done with them (Poison Paradise is already available), so my actual blog title is on a separate graphic. That way I can delete all mention of “Stone Circles” when I go to distribute it.

The textbooks haven’t arrived yet, so we’re sweating it out. The classes they’re starting us out on look like they’re going to be tough. We already have homework due on Saturday, which needs at least one of the books. -_-;; I’m really tempted to go back to Amazon.com and see if I can’t order another copy of my textbook and place it on express. Otherwise, I’m going to have to bluff my way through my homework. (That should be fun…)

I’ve done as much promotion as I can for now on my website. I’m partially hoping they’ll give me HTML programming next semester so I can MAYBE learn how to write PHP. I’d like to customize and consolodate the archives into three coheasive units, instead of having to watch and maintain the library, gallery, and oekaki separately. But, the promotion has been working. This month I’m up to 2500+ unique visitors and a gig of bandwidth. I’m probably going to have Jass get his own Photobucket account, so we can stop using our bandwidth for our LJs and forums.

Anyway, with promotion for Lunaescence as complete as I’m going to take it for now, I’ve moved on to promoting Arise. It’s hard, though. What do you say about it? What do you put when a directory wants a short description and then a long promo? For my domain, I just peek at my source, cut, and paste my site’s decription into the short one. Then, I just go into the site in depth for the large. So, I dumped Arise in a few directories and called it good until it gets going again.