S I T E


→ the beginning

man, this site started holyshit a long time ago. I wanted a site to call my own since I first saw Mina's site. of course, she's gone through several since then, but it used to be this beautiful, extremely simple pure black and white site back in 2003/2004 or something. yeah, that was a while back. it took me about 2-3 years to really get it right though, but in 2005 I got myself a free webspace that was incredible - no ads, 250mb space, and that was pretty much all I needed, I only wanted the place for fanfiction hosting anyway, and all the art I would have put up was hosted elsewhere like photobucket and livejournal. that site was my pride and joy though, I studied the source pages of a million different sites, read a ton of tutorials and understood none of them, and finally based my site off of Mina's design and I had myself an incredibly simple, but rather elegant if I do say so myself, site.

and it was perfect.

I had that thing for maybe max 2 years or so. I coded each and every page in text-edit by hand, and uploaded and re-uploaded over and over again in order to check whether anything was going wrong. a single page would take me all day to code, because of this extremely long and tedious process, but man, did that help me understand html a lot better than I used to. unfortunately, in the midst (well, the end, really) of applying for college applications, I applied last minute to Parsons the New School of Design and my only option in order to apply on time was to create a website featuring my entrance portfolio. so I took down my beautiful site (then called kejime) and re-created it to feature my portfolio. not-so-long story short, I was wait-listed and eventually rejected from the school (I didn't care, by then I'd already decided where I was going and sent in my letter of intent and deposit), and around that time my host went defunct and this time for good.

so, if you're wondering why there's a two year gap since I last had a site (well, you wouldn't have, but I've just told you that there was one), that's why.

→ the present

as it is now, this site is coded using dreamweaver cs3. I learned how to use dreamweaver in 2007 when taking a beginners website design course in which I ended up being the unofficial teacher's assistant since he didn't teach anything I didn't already know and there were many, many, many young and bratty high school freshmen who thought they were the shit. I still don't quite trust this program, especially since cs3 has a way of bitching out on me, and the designers obviously designed this system for someone who doesn't know how to type given all the drop down menus that keep popping up when I type a tag. I trust my fingers significantly more than I trust the program, but it's convenient to be able to see just what I'm doing, and dreamweaver does do a good job of checking my tags to make sure I don't have a broken one in here randomly. it would have taken me hours to check my work and find what was wrong with my text-edit to cPanel method I was using back in the stone age, so this is at least far more convenient.

it's also nice to have this nifty little ftp option that Gen set me up with, and that is compatible with dreamweaver. I thought it was ohsoconvenient to easily transfer files through ftp at a click of a button, but no, I underestimate the state of modern technology. I'm actually able to directly save into the ftp without having to go through a C:// folder at all! I am impressed, oh yes.

I am not, of course, absurdly impressed with myself for being able to create collapsible text sections and therefore using it anywhere it seems possible. no, I would never.

→ the name

trueno.xiongmao

Gen tells me that she wanted something panda, and something foreign. so she chose Chinese, being that Mandarin is indeed a wonderful language that I love, and listed in the handy dandy online dictionary is 熊貓 (xiongmao): panda. I knew what she meant, of course, but at the same time my brain went, "...but I thought that was 貓熊 (maoxiong)," but I dismissed the thought. later on I told my brother my subdomain name (trueno) and he snorted at my joke (read on, the joke follows this story) and voiced the question I'd been thinking before. as it was convenient, he didn't bother covering the phone when he asked our parents, "is it xiongmao or maoxiong?" my parents replied, "...what's xiongmao?" so I did some research: generally most of the Taiwanese people I know grew up learning panda as maoxiong, but it turns out that both xiongmao and maoxiong are interchangeable and we all recognize what a person means when they say one or the other regardless of the one we're more familiar with. it seems that generally Taiwanese people know panda as maoxiong, while mainland China/people who read simplified recognize panda as xiongmao.

so which one is more accurate? Xiong means bear, while mao means cat; xiongmao would therefore be translated as "bear-like cat", while maoxiong would be translated as "cat-like bear". ...I think a panda is a bear, and therefore maoxiong would be more accurate, but like I said before, they're used interchangeably and Chinese-speaking people recognize both regardless of what they're used to. my brother says he read an article where apparently at a zoo they wrote down either xiongmao or maoxiong, but since Chinese is generally read right to left, and English is read left to right, someone had just transliterated it backwards, and that's where the confusion started. I can't guarentee the accuracy of my restating the articles' contents, as I haven't read the article myself, but it does seem like a plausible circumstance.

right, the joke. my subdomain is "trueno", while the domain name is "xiongmao". where is the joke in this? well, as I just spent two paragraphs explaining, xiongmao means panda in Mandarin. Trueno, however, is the brand of car that Takumi drives in Initial D. Fujiwara Takumi drove an 86' black and white Trueno, and so the characters called it the "panda trueno" for the most part (other names included "10 year old junker" and "eight-six"). ...it's a real nerd joke, I know. but I thought it was funny.