Last night I played Sins of a Solar Empire (hereafter Solar) until midnight. I’ve finally got the hang of it. Three takeaways:

Bad movie.

Talk about rotten luck! Today while making a payment, I discovered that the familiar [E-Payment Card Payment] button had vanished into thin air….. I went to the ABC (Agricultural Bank of China) official site and found that just 16 hours earlier, ABC had suspended most e-payment card payment services:

I’m never one to back down from wrestling with the most bizarre problems—let’s see who comes out on top. It’s been ages since I hit an obstacle while coding, yet today I ran into a little snag—XML generated by PHP came out as garbled text when fetched with FLASH. After some digging I finally solved it. Recording it here, and also jotting down the general solution. If you also run into XML <-> FLASH garbled text, here’s a quick reference: 1. When you’re certain the XML is absolutely fine:First, FLASH reading XML and getting garbled text involves the static property System.useCodepage. Official description: “A Boolean value that tells Flash Player which code page to use to interpret external text files.” Defaults to false.

In the afternoon I watched Alvin and the Chipmunks. Mm, an immortal theme — family.

I’ve trekked over high mountains and lakes, visited orcs and the undead, commanded angels and demons, studied science and religion, crossed the ancient past and the distant future, savored the instant and the eternal, lived through the epic and the immortal.

TTPlayer, this music player that “everyone on the planet knows”, recently released its 5.2 official version. Judging from the newly added “Music Window”, TTPlayer is no longer just a simple player...

In the evening, listening to Only an Ocean Away, that gorgeous voice lured me online again to dig up info on Sarah.

/*Ranting below:***/ At this stage (representing only what I knew as of this season, July 11, 2008 CE), a grand declaration (Note: if you disagree with any of the following declarations,...

Yesterday at 2 p.m. I sat down to watch and finished at midnight — nine hours of the trilogy in one go. I took in a bunch of epic battles, witnessed friendship, family, love, and saw both the ugly and the beautiful sides of human nature.

Watched SGA Season 5 Episode 1.

Those moldy old projects from back in the day: Shenzhen Senmao Space Design Co., Ltd. website Shenzhen Fangde Environmental Art Design Co., Ltd. website Computer Application Basics course website

I only got into the SGA series this year—at the start of the year I binge-watched the first four seasons in one sitting.

Heh, this was originally meant to be a private little space. For one, I could collect fun stuff, write second-rate articles to bask in my own glory, and draw third-rate doodles to admire in solitude. For another, I could secretly subject WP to arbitrary, inhumane, destructive torture, abuse, and repair testing.

No matter how much of a force I am in strategy games, I’d still rather play simulation-style development games — which is exactly why I like Rise of Nations. Even in C&C-General (Command & Conquer: Generals), I like to pick the terrorist organization and grow a thriving little Arab town. By comparison, C&C3 Tiberium Wars gives you no room to play for development. I’m crazy about C&C3, but in the end I found that aside from the absolutely gorgeous battle scenes and a pace so fast your fingers cramp, it never gave me the feeling I was looking for — and the game is so damn huge.