Reloading Spoons

Thoughts Old and New Spiralling Unheeded

Previously, on Hishgraphics blog… It has been months since I posted. The last published blog post announced of our entire household’s infection with COVID-19. Sorry to disappoint some readers, but we yet live. The infection did not saddle us with severe symptoms. However, I have not posted for a long time and it is time to rectify that. The reason why I have not posted is because I found it a huge chore to conceive blog posts, formulate the text and prepare images. In the interim, besides the week-long COVID-19 bout, I have been for the last two years suffering from eczema, and last week a doctor diagnosed me with arthritic psoriasis whereby my left knee hurt immensely making it hard for me to be mobile. This has (not had) the effect of making it hard to manage my classes in the previous semesters. I enjoy the classes and interacting […]

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I just installed the Google Fonts into the PivotX's header.php

The First Post of an All-New Hishgraphics Blog

The blog is thirteen years old this year. It has gone on for far longer than I could have imagined back then, with now over a thousand entries. I selected the CMS formerly known as Pivot to build my blog back in 2005. Two years ago I replaced old, vapourware Pivot with PivotX, its successor. Little did I know that the PivotX was already also vapourware by that time. Welcome to the Hishgraphics WordPress Blog! For the time being the old blog still exists at its original URL here, but I have decided to install WordPress into the root folder of the web server and eventually use WordPress for everything. I decided on WordPress because it is currently actively supported by developers. Meanwhile PivotX will slowly continue to fail as old PHP functions are depreciated over time. Over the previous weekend (and after two weeks of experimenting on a  test […]

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Hishgraphics Illustrations Video

I’ve been playing with OpenShot Video editor on this Linux Mint laptop. I downloaded the one in the repository, which was v1.4. Keyframe animation was a joy with it, but I was not able to copy and paste animation properties from one video clip to another. I did a little digging and I discovered that OpenShot 2.0 had been released recently and this version allowed me to copy paste animation properties. After the upgrade, I discovered that I had less control of the animation than I did with 1.4. (For example, I could go to and easily set the values for the start and the end of the horizontal position each clip with 1.4.) In any case, this is the result of my tinkering about with OpenShot. I am certain I will get the hang of it as I keep using the program. How is this for a TV commercial?

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Three structures in the distance

Three Structures

It appears that I have upgraded the blog from Pivot 1.4 to PivotX 2.3.11 after many months – no, years – of fretting if the CMS which has been vaporware for quite some time would die on us without warning. It was either get left behind by technology, or to upgrade. Upgrading runs the risk of causing irreparable damage. Especially to the ones and zeros that made up this weblog’s flat file database. Last weekend, I made the plunge. It took me seven hours plus change just to import the old database to the new and there are still issues to be resolved. For example, the URL of each entry used to be ^blog/pivot/index.php?id=(number). Now their URLs end with ^blog?e=(number). I need to read up on htaccess code to allow all the multitude of links I have dropped all over the internet over the years to be redirected to their […]

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Tagging The Entire Weblog

I seem to be on a roll this weekend. Yesterday, I spent some hours trying to fix the layout in Internet Explorer, as noted by Sila in the previous article’s comments. This morning I’ve started to activate the Pivot weblog‘s Tag feature. This should help further categorising the articles herein, and to search them based on the Tags. I find that its more versatile and faster to implement than the Categories feature. I will leave the Categories feature on the left column for the time being. If it still feels redundant to have it on after some time, I will remove the Categories block. After tagging the last 80 entries, I have discovered that the tag cloud looks like this:  

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The Layout Goes South

I’ve been trying to code the CSS file for the weblog all morning. I woke up and thought, how nice it would be if the site was optimised to a width of 1024 pixels. So I tinkered. And after altering and jury-rigging a bit of code here and a snippet of script there in the CSS file, I have arrived at a temporary solution before I needed to stop working on it. Here’s how it looks like using three different browser types on a 1200px by 800px screen: The left column is still there. It’s just overlaid by the centre column. I shall return to fix this for IE users.

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Dreadwind Rising: A Blog Upgrade

Many, many months after the latest version of Pivot had been released, and remember that this weblog uses the Pivot content management system to… manage its content, Hishgraphics blog has finally been upgraded. It was for a very long time running on version 1.30 codenamed “Arcee”. As of yesterday, this blog has been upgraded to version 1.40.5 codenamed “Dreadwind”. It feels great performing the upgrade manually – uploading files individually and rebuilding everything – instead of using some automatic upgrade application. After about 4 man hours or so, it’s back in business. Not that it really matters for the regular visitors of the blog, but there you go. As a behind-the-scenes bonus, here are some pop-up images of the administration interface:

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Fabulous ‘Friday’ Five Meme

So Athena tagged us and since I’ve been so bad about blogging lately, I decided I would take it on! :-). Plus, conveniently, it IS Friday! So here goes: DO YOU PREFER… 1. To watch or participate?Participate, preferably. I hate sitting around while other people do stuff. 🙂 2. Malls, catalog shopping, or the Internet?NEVER Catalog shopping. Malls for clothes (must…try…stuff…on… woi, gua not kurus like last time, ok??), and Internet for other things (Maggi mee, Spices, sometimes books, etc.) 3. A bath or shower?Shower. I tend to take a shower anyway after a bath – I don’t feel clean sitting in the water after a while. And I’m too hyper to be able to enjoy and relax in a hot bath. Sometimes I even work in the shower, that’s how hyper I am. 4. To talk to people by telephone, in person or by e-mail?Depends on who lah! 😉 […]

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ƃolq ǝɥʇ ɹǝʌo pǝddılɟ ǝʌ,ı

˙ʞuıɥʇ noʎ ʇɐɥʍ ʍouʞ ǝɯ ʇǝl ¿ɹǝʇʇǝq uıɐɹq ɹnoʎ oʇ ʍolɟ poolq dlǝɥ oʇ ʎɐʍ sıɥʇ sǝlɔıʇɹɐ ǝɹoɯ ǝldnoɔ ɐ ǝʇıɹʍ ǝqʎɐɯ ¿ʇɐɥʍ ɹo pǝʇɹǝʌuı ƃolq ǝɥʇ ǝʌɐǝl ı plnoɥs ¿ʞuıɥʇ ǝldoǝd noʎ op ʇɐɥʍ os ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝuıɟ ǝq llıʍ ƃolqǝʍ ǝɥʇ ʞuıɥʇ ı ǝloɥʍ ǝɥʇ uo ʇnq ˙ʎɹʇuǝ sıɥʇ ƃuıpɐǝɹ ǝlıɥʍ puɐʇspuɐɥ ɐ op puɐ ǝsıɔɹǝxǝ plnoɔ noʎ ʇɐɥʇ sı ʇı ʇnoqɐ ǝpısdn ǝɥʇ ˙ɹǝʌo pǝddılɟ ǝq oʇ ʇı ɹoɟ ʇɥƃıɹ sı ǝɯıʇ ǝɥʇ ǝqʎɐɯ ˙ƃolq ǝɥʇ ɹoɟ ǝƃuɐɥɔ ɐ ɹoɟ ǝɯıʇ s,ʇı ʞuıɥʇ ı ʇı ʇnoqɐ ƃuıʞuıɥʇ ǝɯıʇ ǝɯos ɹǝʇɟɐ ˙dılɟ

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This Weblog Is China-Friendly

It’s been in the news since last year that China has been censoring internet into the country. So, thanks to a website called greatfirewallofchina.org, I am able to test whether the subject matters of Hishgraphics blog entries are forbidden to be view from within China. Apparently, we’re not blocked! Yay! (Or, who knows, perhaps because of this post we will be before long, heh.) Greetings to everyone reading from China! Peace, y’all!

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Blog Upgraded

This is the first entry using the new version of the content management system Pivot 1.30 RC2, as opposed to the pre-upgraded 1.24 version of old. So I might as well say something meaningful. I can’t think of anything at almost 1 am. So I think I’ll put up an image for your viewing pleasure.

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HaXX0rzed!!!

This is the first entry after the site was hacked and evil and vile javascript and php codes were written into the blog’s templates and database files. Many thanks to Fairiz Jafar of EasyNet Interactive, our webhoster, for noticing and monitoring the trouble almost a full day before I contacted him for help. His help on a Sunday was very much appreciated, getting the site back up. Two of the most recent entries were lost, but it’s no big deal. The Hishgraphics web journal is back online. Click here to read a description of what happened in the Pivot Support Forums. It was a long weekend, needless to say. But I said it anyway. *sigh*

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Random Banner Images

Now thanks to Pivot’s Rotator v1.0 extension, the weblog’s banner up at the top of the page randomly rotates through a bunch of images I made up just for the occasion. More images will be uploaded for quantity’s sake. Refresh the page, or just read the entries to see it in action.

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New Blockquote CSS

I noticed that like the old comments style, the blockquote style for this website is just a bunch of indented paragraphs. So, to ensure the blockquotes are easily seen, I’ve added a bunch of lines to the css file, causing anything in blockquotes to resemble: Click here to watch the Robot Chicken representation of how Palpatine reacted to Vader after the first Death Star blew up. Hilarious. A quote from my recent post from this thread in the Holonet Forums.

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