Wish Me Luck . . .

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. . . as I head out into the massive throngs tomorrow (today) to do Christmas shopping. I’ve made the list; I’ve checked it twice. If I had any sense this would have been done weeks, if not months ago, but this should be an adventure. If you want to join in for the time of your life, give me a call :). Or not: apparently my phone has been giving “Ciruit busy” messages to people all day. Hopefully T-Mobile will resolve all that by tomorrow.

Almost There

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I believe that in the weblog medium, nothing should come between the world and your words. Ideally you should be able to type a block of text, and it will be presented in a typographically sound, semantically meaningful manner without any intervention from you, the blogger. Unfortunately, everyone is caught up in presentation. Personally I’m very familiar with this because my aesthetic compels me to do things like curl my quotes, define every single acronym, and use paragraphs instead of multiple break tags, but this is a barrier to publishing. Before I had the curly quotes script, I would manually type in the HTML entities every time I used an apostrophe or quote, which as you can imagine can be very tedious. That’s been taken care of, and the code has even been integrated into Cafelog, the classiest weblogging software out there. I’ve addressed the paragraph problem in a rather superficial way that needs some looking at, and today I decided to take a look at the acronym problem. I’ve got it working just fine, I just need to hash out a little code that sorts an array based on the length of its key, and then I’ll put it up on the scripts part of the site. After this I want to clean up the paragraph code to deal with block-level tags, and then maybe port this BlogTimes thing I’ve been seeing around to PHP.

Update: Darn recursive acronyms! How ironic that the acronym PHP is messing up my script!

Update: It’s now online.

Cheeky Photocopies

Humor

It’s not often you find a gem like this on a fairly reputable website, but they have a quite humorous answer to the question Our office parties can get a bit out of hand when people start playing pranks. Will our photocopier support anyone’s weight? Here’s a taste of it:

If the office Christmas Party goes really traditional and you end up making ‘cheeky’ photocopies, you won’t be exposed to toner or harmful light for long enough to hurt you, but you may well find yourself spending the rest of the evening face down in casualty, having shards of glass removed from your bottom. This is a surprisingly common occurrence, as photocopiers simply aren’t designed to be robust enough to take any kind of weight, even if yours has managed to withstand a lot of rough treatment and kicks all year.

Creative Commons License

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I’ve been following the Creative Commons for a while now, and finally it recently came online. I browsed the site a bit, read through the featured profile of the Rice guy, but didn’t really do anything. Today I decided to choose a license to put all of the original content of this website under, and you’ll find the details at the bottom of every page. This means the photos, scripts, text, everything is available under this license. So enjoy!

Random Number Generator

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There used to be a relatively nice random number generator on the computer where we do the HPUG meetings, but when they redid some stuff they took it off. We used to use it to pick winners for door prizes, and all was good. But since it’s been gone we’ve been resorting to less-than-random methods for picking winners, and the Web-Tech SIG was having the same problem. So I decided to put a little something together. Enjoy!

Oh Christmas Tree

Photolog

The first of the Christmas photos are up. Expect many many more :). Also I feel the first picture in that album deserves a little explanation, as it is a dump of everything except my laptop stuff and camera I carry in my backpack. Many people often remark to me that my backpack is too full, so I decided to see exactly what I carry around in it. From left to right there is my CD case, some cheap in-ear headphones, retractable phone cord, two Orinoco 802.11b cards, some Burt’s Bees chap-stick, Penguin mints (with extra caffeine), my migraine medication, a Tecom USB Bluetooth adapter, house keys, some gum, cheap electric razor, optical USB mouse with retractable cord, retractable cat5 cable, Taking Your Talent to the Web by Zeldman, and a Stowaway keyboard for my Clié.

Pun-A-Day #21

Humor

Paints were a very precious quantity in the good old days, and British merchants could make a young fortune supplying paints to the colonies.

One company sent a clipper ship full of red paint across the ocean. It had the very bad luck to collide with another ship full of blue paint.

As a result of this disaster, both crews were . . . marooned.

Saturday Night

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Well yesterday night turned out very well, as I got a chance to hang with Sarah for a bit. Then I met up with Rachel and Arizona (Arida?) at Brasil’s for some liquid refreshment. They had italian sodas, I had hot chocolate. Then we rented 40 Days 40 Nights from Blockbuster which we watched in Rachel’s dorm. It was a hoot, like I remembered. It’s also need because the main character is named Matt, is Catholic, and does web design! What are the chances?

The night called for some food again, so off to IHOP it was. You see the most interesting characters at IHOP when the clubs are getting out, especially the one on 59.

After that it was back to the dorm for a Chris Rock song, which was quite funny. Rachel also showed me local file-sharing that she uses at Rice which is quite nice. It makes sense that those connections would be much faster than anything going over the internet would be. The other cool thing that Rachel had was a XM radio in her car. I don’t know if I’m crazy about the $10 a month price tag, but some of the stations were very cool. What’s funny though is that we ended up listening to a CD anyway :). Finally we watched the Kevin Smith classic Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which was also as funny as I remembered it.

Pun-A-Day #20

Humor

Just when you thought you were safe, they’re back . . . with a vengeance.

There was a snake called Nate. His purpose in life was to stay in the
desert and guard the lever. This lever was no ordinary lever. It was the
lever that if moved would destroy the world. Nate took his job very
seriously. He let nothing get close to the lever.

One day off in the distance he saw a cloud of dust. He kept his eye on it
because he was guarding the lever. The dust cloud continued to move
closer to the lever. Nate saw that it was a huge boulder and it was
heading straight for the lever!

Nate thought about what he could do to save the world. He decided if he
could get in front of the boulder he could deflect it and it would miss
the lever. Nate slithered quickly to intersect the boulder. The boulder
ran over Nate, but it was, in fact, deflected, leaving history to
conclude that is was better Nate than lever.

Photolog Back

Photolog

Due to certain extenuating circumstances, I have fallen a little behind on the photos. But don’t despair: I didn’t stop taking photos, just stopped uploading them. If you check out the photolog now you’ll see that all the latest and greatest are up. Enjoy. I’m really looking forward to taking pictures over the holidays, but I’ve found that certain things, such as christmas lights, can be a real challenge to capture. If only there was a way to capture the smells, sounds, feeling, as well as image of everything that’s around you, then I could take some good “pictures.” This is by far my favorite time of the year.