Naughty or Nice?

We are in December and with that, we’ll be concluding the year 2011. This is also the same time we’ll be judge upon by our Dear Mr Claus.

I’m all grown up and so of course I know Santas all over the world are just lovely fathers putting on a costume to give their children something to believe in. Doesn’t help much for me when I’m a Singaporean Chinese as our dads don’t go to that length due to pride and we got no chimneys.

And so, based on the recent events that happened to me (breaking up, not paid promptly, loss of direction for my startups), the results are obvious…I’m naughty.

Of course there are happy events in my life (upgrading my HDD, scoring some As, going to NZ and Korea), but in comparison to those bad ones. I have to conclude that the bad events made a bigger impact on my life.

Breaking up is probably the worse. Besides taking it quite bad, like watering my face for 5 days straight, it really felt like a final blow to my love life. So its always like I describe, its more like a divorce. But because of my breaking up, I’m able to choose the University and study for as long as I can afford!

Scoring well in my Final Year Project is my top priority now…lets nail that A, Outsiders Allowed! (Yes, that’s our developer studio name…haha)

ITE != Its The End

ITE in Singapore stands for the Institute of Technical Education. However, what it signifies to most Singaporeans is that its a dump for those who didn’t make it in Secondary Education (aka High School in some parts of the world).

That’s where I graduated from. Back in 99′ I was sitting for my Cambridge Ordinary Levels Examination. I took the meaning more literal than my peers by just sitting down like any ordinary day and only picked up the pen to fill in my name. Not a single f*ck was given that day. (pardon the vulgarity but couldn’t find a better word to describe what I felt)

When the result was released, I realised the gravity of my mistake. No school was going to take me in and the only option written on my slip was ‘ITE-Certificate in Office Skills’. I was jealous and angry.

This however was a turning point in my life, I started scoring my first A there and it became addictive. I was mixing with the right crew (what people called geeks) and even group work was a breeze. I soon myself graduating from this short 1 year course with several awards and scholarships and eligible for advancement.

I would then go on to pursue a Higher NITEC in E-Commerce and this gave me my first knowledge of web programming and my first specialty. 2 years later, I graduated with more awards and even eligible for advancement into Polytechnics. I was on fire!

Now I am in Polytechnic studying what I love, programming, drawing and design. How many people wished they were doing what they love right?  I will be graduating soon and all I can say is that my grades are eligible for University…every single one available to me, even the firewalled local ones.

Not just that, I’m earning extra allowances through Web Development (what I learnt in ITE) and enjoying every moment of it. Compared to my classmates who are working as Servers or Retail Assistants and earning nuts for crazy hours of standing.

I’m not showing off or being arrogant but I want to share my story out there that landing up in ITE is not the worst thing to happen to you. It could be start of all good things to come, like me.

ITE graduates are not intellectually handicapped, they are brilliant people who were lazy or led astray. Work hard my fellow juniors, prove Singapore wrong.

What Drives You?

In your lifetime, I’m pretty sure you’ve met someone and thought to yourself, “I will never want to be him/her…NEVER!” Be it someone close or just some random jerk abusing his girlfriend in public, there is that SOMEONE.

For me, there’s quite a handful that made me the man I am today.

Firstly, my parents. I come from a broken family and so I never want to be like them and make my children go through the kind of life I’ve been through. I’m not saying they are bad parents but it just doesn’t feel good being a human soccerball.

Next, my elder cousin living with me. He’s not a really bad guy but his sense of responsibility towards family and finance is not one to look up to. I don’t want to hang my dirty laundry in public and so lets leave it at that.

Then there are the ‘sleeping’ people on public transport not giving seats to needy people like the elderly and pregnant ladies. And those that drive after drinking who ram innocent people in their moment of folly.

There so many more and you may think they are on my hate list, but nope. These are just people I don’t want to become, not hate. So me pursuing a higher education and doing my best in everything are all credited to these ‘someones’. This is my drive.

So…what drives you to become the person you are today?

Tutorial: Joomla Extended Menu Implementation

A preview of what we are going to make (minus the grey background below as this is a screen shot from my site).

First of all, go download Extended Menu from Joomla’s Extension section and install it into your system. I hope you already know how to do this but if not, I’m sure there are loads of tutorials out there.

Next, go to Modules and click on the name to go into its settings. Go ahead and set it according to the ones I have.

3 important settings to note:
1. Choose the menu that you want Extended Menu to be applied on in the Menu Name.
2. Choose Tree List from Menu Style.
3. Make the menu expand till what you need but I would think 3 is the max for most of us.

Please note that you do have to leave the Menu Class Suffix and Module Class Suffix as blank so the CSS that I’m going to show you will work as I’m applying the styling to its default. Don’t worry, only the menu will be affected and not all the other links.

Copy and paste this wonderful chuck of code I modified from a CSS Dropdown Menu Tutorial by Harry Roberts into the CSS from your template. Go to Extensions > Template Manager > *Choose Template* > Edit CSS.

#mainlevel{
	list-style:none;
	/* Clear floats */
	float:left;
	width:800px;
        margin:0px;
        padding:0px 0px 0px 10px;
        margin-top:2px;
	/* Bring the nav above everything else--uncomment if needed.*/
	position:relative;
	z-index:5;	
}
#mainlevel li{
	float:left;
	margin-right:30px;
	position:relative;
}
#mainlevel a{
	display:block;
	padding:5px;
	color:#900;
	text-decoration:none;
}
#mainlevel a:hover{
	color:#FFF;
	background:#900;
	text-decoration:none;
}

#mainlevel ul{
	background:#fff; /* Adding a background makes the dropdown work properly in IE7+. Make this as close to your page's background as possible (i.e. white page == white background). */
	background:rgba(255,255,255,0); /* But! Let's make the background fully transparent where we can, we don't actually want to see it if we can help it... */
	list-style:none;
	position:absolute;
	margin:0px;
	padding:0px;
	left:-9999px; /* Hide off-screen when not needed (this is more accessible than display:none;) */
}
#mainlevel ul li{
	padding-top:0px; /* Introducing a padding between the li and the a give the illusion spaced items */
	float:none;
}
#mainlevel ul a{
	white-space:nowrap; /* Stop text wrapping and creating multi-line dropdown items */
}
#mainlevel li:hover ul{ /* Display the dropdown on hover */
	left:0; /* Bring back on-screen when needed */
}
#mainlevel li:hover a{ /* These create persistent hover states, meaning the top-most link stays 'hovered' even when your cursor has moved down the list. */
	background:#900;
	color:#FFF;
	text-decoration:none;
}
#mainlevel li:hover ul a{ /* The persistent hover state does however create a global style for links even before they're hovered. Here we undo these effects. */
	text-decoration:none;
}
#mainlevel li:hover ul li a:hover{ /* Here we define the most explicit hover states--what happens when you hover each individual link. */
	color:#CCC;
	background:#790101;
}

I apologize for the poor styling of the code but I think its easier for you to browse than having the text wrapped within the block quote.
So if you have some basic knowledge of CSS, please go ahead and change them to your liking. If not, please do look for the Background: attribute to change the background color. Color: attribute in order to change the text color. If there is any other tweaking you want to achieve and don’t know how, please leave a comment so either myself or some wise developer can help you out.

Story: I was thinking of implementing a Dropdown Menu for my latest Joomla project and at first I thought it would be already in the default modules but I was wrong. So went on to search for some extensions that would make my life easier and after some recommendations, Extended Menu seems to be the winner.

Extended Menu is a no frills extension that uses pure HTML and CSS to allow developers to create a full (or more) W3C compliant site. Lazy me was thinking that a few switches will get me what I need and decided exploring. 15 minutes into my exploration and nothing worked! Was about to give up but went back to read the fine prints and noticed…”don’t use it if you are not sure what HTML/CSS is and you actually don’t care about web standards (accessibility etc.)”

This gives me a clue that I would most likely need to dwell into my own template’s file and do some tweaking. Wanted to see if any kind soul had any tutorial up and found one. Tried it but it seems to be for the previous versions and didn’t work. So that’s the reason for this tutorial and hope that it is of some help.