I’ve been making this website a bit more to my liking every week. This week I decided to look into the possibility of integrating my Picasa web albums with this journal. How little did I know what I would get myself into.

Eventually, I made it all work as I originally had in mind. It took a couple of days to get there though. First off, I needed something that would make it easy for me to insert photo albums from Picasa into posts or pages. I quickly found there are some pretty decent plugins available. I settled on using Picasa Express x2

So far, so good.

Until I created my first page.

The horror began when I previewed my work. The results weren’t quite what I had in mind! The first thing I noticed was that the galleries I had inserted only showed two thumbnails on the same row, while it clearly looked as if there was sufficient room for three. It looked downright silly to have a whole bunch of rows underneath each other while a sizeable portion of the page was left with white, unused space.

Grumbling to myself I fired up my beloved Firebug – any self respecting web developer should have this tool – and started to poke around a little to see if I could free up a few pixels in the layout to neatly fill out the page. Eventually, I found I could adjust the margin of a linked image element by five pixels to nicely fill out the available space.

Satisfied, I stumbled upon my next nightmare. I found I could click on the thumbnails. Unfortunately, the linked image opened in the same window. I thought to myself: “No biggie! I’ll just go look for a Lightbox plugin!” This is where the real trouble started. There are quite a lot of Lightbox plugins available, so I thought I would quickly be able to fix things up! However, none of them seemed to want to work! Grrr!

My frustration grew when I found out other themes had no trouble at all with displaying the Lightbox! After some googling I found that Monochrome, the theme I’m using, is based on JQuery. So… I had to find a plugin providing a JQuery implementation of Lightbox. Fortunately, there are a few of those as well. Unfortunately, not all of them worked as intended. I don’t know why I was still surprised to discover this; one didn’t work correctly with Internet Explorer, another refused to work in combination with the earlier mentioned Picasa plugin.

Finally, I found the correct combination of plugins. It allows me to use Lightbox on my website, it works seamlessly with the Picasa plugin and as far as I’m aware it behaves correctly in all browsers. It appeared I needed the JQuery implementation of Simplebox. The downside to using this plugin is that it doesn’t automatically scale down images to screensize when they don’t fit. I don’t quite like this, but I suppose I will have to settle with having to work around this by making sure I don’t use over-large images.

At least the positive side of this is that I learned a lot more about WordPress, Monochrome, Lightbox and JQuery.

I’ve finally found the last few glyphs I needed to complete Subject 16′s video, in Assassin’s Creed 2.

The Truth shows Adam and Eve running through a futuristic setting. It looks as if they’re being chased by something unknown to the viewer. The video ends with Eve telling Adam she has the Apple. Here’s where I became confused… Adam and Eve have always been referred to as the first human beings living in Paradise until they could not resist to steal the forbidden fruit. The idea of them in a futuristic high-tech setting and the forbidden fruit (the Apple) being a device of power intrigued me!

Not only did it intrigue me, it confused me as well! Determined to find out more about this, I decided to counsel the infinite wisdom of the web. In short order I stumbled upon some forum posts putting things in order for me. The Truth video combined with the ending of the AC2 plot actually makes sense!

After Ezio deals with Borgia, he holds two pieces of Eden; the Apple and the Staff. The combination of it granted him access to the hidden vaults where he received a warning of Earth’s imminent destruction from the “Gods” themselves. Gods is the wrong word, but they were beings who had created humankind after their own image. These beings were overcome after Adam and Eve had taken a piece of Eden and because of this no longer under the control of their creators. Apparently the creators and their high-tech civilization have been wiped out completely and humankind will have to start from scratch.

Of course the knowledge of this has faded over the ages, until only the direct descendants of the bloodline remember. Or, at least that’s what we have to assume considering the fact that we’ve been visiting our ancestor’s memories in Assassin’s Creed and completing DNA sequences.

I was absolutely amazed to find the amount of conspiracy theories about all this on the Internet. Desmond’s storyline takes place in the year 2012. Oops! We’ve all heard of that year, haven’t we? Did some ancient civilization make a calendar that stopped at 2012? Why, yes, yes they did! There are people who believe the world will end when the Mayan calendar ends. But, I found some interesting posts tying this to the warning Ezio received.

Remember the warning about the Earth’s destruction in the vaults? Remember that Desmond lives in 2012? The piece of Eden holds the power to control people. Is that what is so vital for Desmond to save? Locate the piece of Eden to prevent the Knights Templar to control the world and reshape it to their ideals? The world doesn’t stop existing in 2012, no, a major conspiracy theory would be revealed which ends up controlling our lives. All of a sudden you’re not fighting an Assassin’s vs Knights Templar war, but a war for continuation of the freedom of life as we know it.

For me Assassin’s Creed 2 was just a bloody good game. Yes, I’ve turned into a bit of a fanboi as well. I had never looked so deep into the storyline at all and I’ve become curious how it will all turn out. It’s a shame it will probably be a few years before a new Assassin’s Creed will be released.

I guess I will have to be satisfied with replaying the entire damn thing… Again.

I have had very little to write about in the last few weeks, but today has sparked me in making a new journal entry. A couple of weeks ago, I started reading a new book, Ship of Magic. It’s the first book in The Liveship Traders trilogy. I picked up the book because I had read The Farseer trilogy and had simply loved it. I figured another three books of the same writer must be good as well!

At first, when I started reading Ship of Magic, I was surprised to find the book vastly different from any of the books about Fitz Farseer. I was a little disappointed when I realized the vast difference between the life of an Assassin in the previous trilogy and the life aboard a ship in this new book. I had no solid grounds for my disappointment and so I kept on reading. After all, I found the beginning of Assassin’s Apprentice a little dubious as well!

I’m about three quarters of the way though the book now and still I have no clear idea where the story is going. There are many different story-lines following different characters that are somehow related to each other. It tells about their lives and the adventures and hardships they are having.

So where do the Serpents and Dragons come in then?

Serpents are playing a large part in the story so far. They are mostly seen through the character’s eyes as dreadful sea monsters who attack their ships and devour their crews. However, occasionally there are (dreadfully short) paragraphs where the story shifts to the view of a group of Serpents. They appear to be chasing a memory that most of the Serpents have forgotten, but some of them still remember.

I’m guessing the storyline of the Serpents is the underlying part that will make all the other story-lines come together. Also a paragraph clearly hints that the memory of the Serpents is of times long past, when they were soaring through the sky on wings, instead of slithering through the oceans. I wish I could find the passage to quote it, but the reference of the Serpent remembering a time where the Lack was the Plenty and the Plenty was the Lack is clearly another way of saying that once they were creature of the Lack (air) while now they are living in the Plenty (ocean).

I can’t wait to find out at which point the Dragons will come into the story and whether my assumption about the Serpents is correct. I just hope I don’t need to wait until the last book of the trilogy, as was the case with The Farseer books. For now, I will conclude that I can agree to George R.R. Martin’s acclaim to Ship of Magic: “Even better than the Assassin books. I didn’t think that was possible.”