dont use subdivide at alll, either use edgeloop subdivide by clicking r, or select just the edges in edge mode and click normal subdivide

 "Usually I try to keep everyting quads"

keeping everything quads is not necessary, the trick is to keep what needs to be quads quads and what needs to be a triangle a triangle.  you can look at it this way-  make a plane and subdivide it a couble of times.  now pick a ring of squares and extrude it once.  notice how in the outer corners at the bottom you have five squares meeting at one point.  on the corner at the top you only have 3 squares coming to a point.  on the inside corners on the top you have five squares meeting and on the inside on the bottom ou have three squares meeting.  if you think about that for a while you'll start to understand topology concepts.

as for triangles-  you should only use them for wrinkles that arent realy part of your main flow or wrinkles within your main flow but where you dont need the extra resolution everywhere else

its not the metric standard, its the way here too.  just take physics. right handed system. on the other hand it would be kinda cool if the world changed to a left handed system.

you shouldnt have to go against what you learned in middle school.  its still a right handed system, and if your thinking in 3d you should be able to turn just as easily.

does middle school math teach 3d graphs?  lots of blender code is for the ease of the developer rather than the ease of user (not that developing it is easy).  to make it easiest to program it has to have a right handed system meaning you have x on your forfinger, y on your thumb, and z on the other fingers.  in order to keep the system right handed to work with mathematical papers and have the x in the frontal view and whatever is coming towards you be positive, blender flips it.

thats how it happens in 3D chordinates, right hand rule, i think its this way usualy so that they Y is coming out and is positive from the front view and up is positive.  its exactly the same way as my new renderer works.  

Edit: the y+ is actualy going backwards in blender so that the X can be on the side that people are used to it on.

there is no fix to this, its the way it should be.

furthur edit:  its done this way on paper also when calculating stuff due to the fact that when you normaly look at the paper for a 2d graph its flat and horizontal with the ground as a projection, to keep consistent with this, when working in 3d and the paper is not imagined as a projection.

i'd love to win 500 dollars but... dont have the time.

if its circular, i would extrude it out again and size it up to be exactly the same size as the outer ring, then select all the verts that you want to merge and click merge doubles.

yay- its back up in the tutorials section- however its just the link to the old tutorial for now- no new comments ability.

there seems to be a new optional 3ds max interface for  blender, check it out on blendernation. 
http://www.blendernation.com/2007/04/16/maya-3ds-max-layout-with-icons/
(i personaly highly dissagree with this interface, i love the current one an extreem amount because its soo efficient... but for a blender noob i remember it was realy hard to get used to the interface, it took maybe 3 weeks just to get used to how to move items on the screen)

things like yafray render to a final image and are not realtime.  blender's game engine uses directX or openGL,  There would be no reason whatsoever to render with yafray.  there are a couple of other realtime renderers like unreal engine, but i dont think you can use it directly with blender's game engine.

this cant be good, i'm in china now (sorta off topic)  but i'll see about rewriting it or getting it back up when i return.

i dont think the fact that its hay matters so much, as long as it looks like some sort of feild of a "grain"  
i did the seeds by changing the opacity and color of tips with a gradient map, so i dint think its possible to make it denser.  right now i'm trying to figure out how make the front look denser without compromising rendertimes too much.

nah, its not a 2.43 problem,  what video card are you using and what settings do you currently have it set to?  if you have antialasing set to on, either turn it off or turn it to let app decide.

well, the technical aspects i am already more than familiar with, not only that as you can see from this image, i have already basicaly done it.  plus, the tutorial you are pointing towards is aimed at grass, not hay, in blender particle build.  What i need is some artistic critique to get this looking as good as possible, sometimes its just not as easy to judge your own work.