daniel-lim.co.uk

This whole thing needs a renovation. I simply must do it.

The site was hacked, thanks to Adrian for letting me know! All fixed! Will need to update Wordpress in a bit… and who knows, maybe I might even post something

EDIT: So I might have lost something about Langkawi in the database replacement… I wouldn’t worry about it!

I’m trying to think up a good way to display my portfolio. I want something that will be easily updatable (which is not the case with the current page), but also looks nice. I’m thinking of using WordPress to do it and I read a rather nice article about how versatile WP is for non-blogging pages, and I agree, but I need to find a decent theme to use for it. Something wide… I need plenty of space to show off images. Can anyone help?

In case I hadn’t mentioned it (which I haven’t) Marie and I are moving house. We’re moving to The Triangle, a new development near to the train station. Gone are the days of listening to the neighbour’s babies scream at the top of their little lungs and we welcome in a new era of living in a lovely little apartment that doesn’t quite have enough space for all the stuff we’ve accumulated since university. I kid, I kid! I love the apartment, it’s new and clean and the sound insulation seems to be in perfect working order! I’ll try and stick some photos up later.

My main issues with the move relates not to where we’re moving from, nor to where we moving to, but to the sheer number of things that you have to organise just to be able to move. I’ve got a list in my notebook of over 20 different people/companies/governmental bodies that need to be notified of my new address and the stress of trying to organise it all and actually move all the stuff is killing me. Thankfully, I’ve about half way through the list and the others shouldn’t be too hard to sort out, but just trying to think up all the people you need to tell is really hard.

What’s really adding to the stress is the fact that we’re also going on holiday. For 3 weeks. To Malaysia. Yeah, tough break I know! If only it wasn’t planned for exactly one week after our moving in date! So basically I’ve got to try and get everything related to house moving (including the actual moving) sorted before we fly off to the other side of the planet. It’s gonna be tough, but boy, there’s going to be plenty of time to relax once it’s all sorted out! I think we’ve moved almost everything, bar a few remaining items, but we still have to do “the big clean” (which is planned for this evening, yay!) and then pack for our holiday on Thursday evening. Friday night we’ll be heading off to my parents’ house and we fly out from Heathrow on Saturday.

I think I’m just resentful of the fact that we’ve just moved into this awesome new apartment and we’re not getting any time to spend it whilst we’re constantly going back and forth in the Mini ferrying stuff and once all that’s done we’ll be out of the country for three weeks! Naturally, I’m hoping to flood my Flickr account (currently overrun with Forza 2 screenshots) with plenty of images from out there too!

I’ve updated to the latest version of Wordpress. Apparently there’s a few improvements and a couple of bugs they’ve sorted out since 2.2. I just know I haven’t been at the mercy of comment spam for a long time. Other than that, I’m not really doing much else at the moment. Boring innit?

New Design Teaser - GH2

The title says it all really! Hopefully I can have it finished before I go on holiday! Hope you like it!

I could fill some space and say all the other Guitar Hero 2 designs I’ve seen so far have been pretty poor and that mine is going to be ace. But I won’t.

Advance Wars (Yellow)

Just a quick one from me this time! Thought I’d let you know that I sold my latest colour variation, yellow as you can see on the left, sold for 5.25 million credits! From what I can gather, there was an even more intense bidding war than the last time. The eventual winner after 236 bids was Bipolar Dolphin, who has the most ridiculous GamerScore I’ve ever seen! I’ve already had interest in the next colour scheme from one of the other big spenders who didn’t win the last auction, so there’s hope that the next one should also be quite profitable. At least, I hope so! Naturally I’ll be posting up when it goes for auction (both on Eurogamer and the Forza forums - check the previous thread for links).

I’ve been spending quite a bit of recent playing trying to tune up an Audi RS4, my new favourite car. I’m trying to keep it right at the edge of it’s group (B) and pushing it as far as I can. Spent hours running round Laguna Seca tweaking values… but man, it takes ages! Even longer than painting!

Speaking of which, I started a new design last week… it’s gonna be a big one! I’ll have a teaser image for you very soon!

Advance Wars Action Shot

Yes, I am aware there is a spelling mistake (answers on a postcard)! I have actually fixed that now, but obviously I don’t have an updated action screenshot.

Having a lot of fun in Forza 2 at the minute (when I can find the time to actually sit down and accomplish something)! I’ve been doing quite a lot of driving (I’m only level 15 at present), not very much tuning/upgrading and (comparatively) LOADS of painting! It’s so much fun, it’s just like a little jigsaw puzzle since you can’t import any graphics (despite some of the amazing designs that can be found).

Anyway, onto the main event! Last weekend I spent almost two whole days completing my first (proper) car design. As you might be able to tell from the screenshot, it’s a theme based on the character Andy from Advance Wars: Dual Strike on Nintendo DS! The main character decal is comprised of 342 decal layers!

Advance Wars (Red #01)

The design is for the Honda Civic R, which is a great little D class car; nice and easy to drive and reasonably powerful compared to some of the other D classers… So far, I’ve created two colour variations; red and blue. The red one, sold to halfsky, went for an unfortunate 16,606CR - not an ideal amount given the Civic itself cost me probably 12,000CR, plus a hefty fee on top for having it as a “Featured” auction (i.e. it appears at the top of searches)! Still, it was my fault, I didn’t pimp up the sale enough and I didn’t have it ending at an ideal time for most people to reasonable buy! Oh and I only set my starting price at 5,000CR! Big mistake!

Not to balls it up a second time, I made sure I thoroughly pimped it in the Forza 2 Eurogamer group and I also set the starting price at a cool 50,000CR. I managed to sell it for a whopping 285,606CR to fellow EGer Shadow Thi3f! Apparently there was quite an intense bidding war going on, with 88 bids (not people) going on the auction before closing. There seems to be some system whereby if people place bids with very few minutes to go, it extends the auction time so more people can get bids in… quite a good idea (since there’s no eBay-style maximum bid) but it does mean the auctions can go on for way longer than scheduled!

Still, I made a profit, so I’m happy! There are going to be 3 more colour variations coming over the next week or so, so stay tuned!