OT: I need an Avatar

[President_Elect_Shang]

Well despite my prior pissing and moaning; especially at a certain person here, I think I am here to stay. Well at least till Shrapnel shuts the door or old age takes me out. Anyway I need an avatar and thought I would ask for suggestions, especially since the community seems to have taken on new members with skills along those lines. I have no idea what I want but I would like something new and fresh; suggestions anyone?

[Suicide Junkie]

I've bumped the avatar thread for you.

The post that the search function led me to was quite incredible; it was about an avatar for you, on page 50-something!

[President_Elect_Shang]

I tried searching by David’s comments and by “House”, “1000”, “Avatar”, and all three in one line with a wild card or two for good measure. I also had a 50 per page result restriction set and gave up after a good spell. Thanks for the help in finding the thread, now what to use? What kind of person do I come across as? Consider this a license to be honest and insulting if that’s how I’m perceived.

[Fyron]

You need to add + to all of the words (including first) to do "and" style searches; default is "or" (which is of course useless).

[President_Elect_Shang]

Cool I did not know that, thanks. Does the wild card (*) work?

[Atrocities]

Looks like your old Avatar PES. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Fyron]

A search for "adaman*" turns up 0 results, so it looks like no.

[President_Elect_Shang]

I’m the last person to say I have a vast well of knowledge on computers (ha-ha-ha) but I was under the impression that the wild card was sort of; universal? Can I say I three times in the same sentence? I just did it twice there. And none there…

It is, or was, my old avatar. SJ found it for me but feel free to answer the question. A lot of tension is off my shoulders since I graduated. Never new how short tempered I had really become. Anyway I am a much cooler customer now.

[Fyron]

I have never seen a web based search that uses wild cards.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Really, like google or yahoo is where I use it and that seems fine.

[Fyron]

Hmm... I don't see any purpose to a wildcard search. A search for "adama*t" is pretty much just a search for "adama", but filtering out any page that doesn't have a t after it somewhere. It doesn't find things with "adamant" in them very well. A search for "adamant * mod" makes the results completely irrelevant compared to "adamant mod". Something like "adamant *" is pretty non-sensical, cutting out ~17% of the results without any apparent rhyme or reason.

[President_Elect_Shang]

So what would be a more effective way to search given the following: You want to find a modification for a game called Space Empires 4. You know this mod starts with “adama” that there are more letters but you are not sure how many more, and that there should be a “T” in it but you can’t tell if the t is the last letter or not. How would you advise someone to do this search? I have a computer class with the kids tomorrow and will include your suggestion. Naturally I will talk about looking up koalas or some other equally odd spelled animal like aardvark. Maybe I can talk about modding the koala and aardvark so you can mount meson blasters to them…mmm…

[Fyron]

I don't know, probably search for a list of space empires 4 mods or sites hosting mods, and go from there? I can't think of a way to use wildcards that narrow the search down in predictable ways (at least with Google; maybe another search engine handles them better). Maybe someone else can?

[President_Elect_Shang]

I’ve never bothered to question this before. I hadn’t planed on talking about searches tomorrow so I won’t. What I will have to do is some research into effective search techniques.