PalmTalk

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We filmed the first episode of PalmTalk today! It was different in some ways from what I was expecting, espescially in terms of how things flowed, but I was very impressed with some of the things they were able to do technologically with the cameras and effects. The guest, Lorraine Young, was really charismatic and had a great product to demo. All in all, I would say it was, well, a first episode. Ever seen any of the early episodes of Friends? There are definitely some things that are going to change before next week, and things are only going to change for the better, so I’m excited. I’m also curious to see how the whole thing turns out after all of the post-editing stuff they do. Anyway, I’ll see on Tuesday. The main dowside is I think I left my laptop AC adapter there, or at least I hope I did, because I can’t find it. Right now my laptop is hibernating until I get it back.

After the taping I had a very nice dinner with Sarah at one of my favorite chinese restruants, Ming’s on Montrose. After that I headed down to Kaveh Kanes, a great coffee shop downtown on Prarie with free WiFi internet access. Tonight was the monthly meeting (first Friday of the month) for people who listen to the radio show Technology Bytes, which is on Wednesday nights. I’ve heard it several times before and it’s a fun show to listen to. The people who were there were very interesting and we talked for a very long time from topics ranging from Apache 2 to Amiga to Minix to BeOS. I must admit that I was there partly by accident–I thought it was a HWUG meeting. I really enjoyed it though and afterwards I ended up going to House of Pies around 1 to continue the discussion with two unix/freebsd sysadmins I met there. It’s strange how much you can find you have in common with someone in such a short period of time. Also it was nice to meet the people who actually do the show, and you can tell they’re really technically competent and nice to talk to. Oh, and got another ‘tech support’ consulting job today, fixing a paper jam! What will I do next?

Hardware Work

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It’s strange how tides can change so quickly in my business. I thought my plate was full with three seperate websites in various stages of development, but within the last 48 hours I’ve been contacted by four other clients looking for very traditional consulting work. The “going back to my roots” comment in the cloud post might be turning out truer than I expected. How I got my start in the computer business was six or seven years ago building computers from parts and selling them with razor-thin margins–and really good support. Now all I need to do is start turning a profit . . . 😉

Cloud Pictures

Photolog

When I was young I would go on trips to exotic locations and come home with nothing but pictures of the clouds in various cities, states, countries. Looking back I would say that clouds are certainly a unifying aspect of global scenery. 9-4-2002–Going back to my roots. You can never have too many cloud pictures :). Actually I really enjoyed the way the light and dark clouds contrasted in some of these pictures. Grab a full size if you feel like replacing that boring cloud backgroud that comes with Windows 95 and on. Tip: when viewing a photo you can click on it to see a really big (2048×1536) version, which usually varies from 300-600k in size.

Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival 2002 Schedule

Music

So far I’ve only seen this in print form, and when they put it online last year it was in the form of a inaccessible, unsearchable image, so as my public service for the day I’ve written out the schedule for the upcoming Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival, and added links to the artists where I could find them. I’d like to expand this with personnel of each group, so if you know who’s in what band let me know in a comment or email.

5th Annual Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival
September 26–29, 2002

Sponsor: Kemah Boardwalk

Cosponsors: University of Houston-Downtown, Houston Professional Musicians
Association, Local 65-699, H&H Music Company

Founder and Festival Director: Robert Wilson, UH Downtown Arts and
Humanities Falculty. Member and Director, UHD Civic Music Program

Thursday, 9-26

6:00-6:50 McGinty Brothers Quintet
7:10-8:00 Steve Allison and Resolution
8:20-9:10 Eddie Lewis and Living
Rhythms

Friday, 9-27

6:00-6:50 Woody Witt Quartet
7:10-8:00 Tribute Quartet
8:30-9:30 Trumpet Great Bobby Shew with HPMA Big Band
10:00-11:00 Pamela York Trio

Saturday, 9-28

12:00-12:50 Salsa Maria
1:10-2:00 Tony Campise
2:20-3:10 Ron Wilkins
3:30-4:20 Carol Morgan
4:40-5:30 Carlos Garnett/Will Cruz Latin Jazztet
5:50-6:40 Norma Zenteno Latin Jazz Band
6:45-7:00 Presentation of the Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Achievement Award
7:10-8:00 Sam Jackson Jazz Orchestra
8:30-9:30 Saxophone Great Ernie Watts
with the Pamela York Trio
10:00-11:00 Warren Sneed

Sunday, 9-29

1:00-1:50 Young Sounds of Houston Teen Jazz Orchestra
2:10-3:00 Ethan Atkinson Group
3:20-4:10 UHD Civic Jazz
Orchestra with Trombone Great Ron Wilkins
4:30-5:20 Sax No End
5:40-6:30 Mike Wheeler
7:00-8:00 The Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra

Continue reading Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival 2002 Schedule →

Smart Quotes in PHP

Asides

One of the true joys I find in reading different websites is when the author of whatever text you see has taken the time to make his text typographically pleasing to the eye through the use of proper typographical elements. CSS has enabled designers to shape text on the web in ways that allow for far greater control over presentation than the creators of HTML ever envisioned. However, I see many sites where it’s obvious that great pain has been put into the layout and presentation of the text, but there are still things like single and double prime marks being used instead of true quotes or apostrophes. Part of the reason for this is it’s a pain to enter the proper entities in when you type, especially if the entry is being added through a normal text box like most blogging software use. While I’m not going to go start a society (more) I still have written a small function in PHP that will hopefully make the world a better place, one curly quote at a time :). Thanks to my dad, Mark Pilgrim for inspiration and the code that got me started, and Barrett for help.

A little background: This whole thing started a few hours ago when I was writing a paper and when I looked back to proofread I saw that there were a number of occurrences of words like it’s, where writing out the HTML entities had become so ingrained in me from various situations where I hand code that it was now translating into my ‘normal’ typing. At that moment I immediately thought of ten other reasons why it’s probably better for the content to be entered into the database as a single or double prime and then translated to its proper character on display. Most of all, it’s just easier, and the free flow of ideas into your writing is not impeded in any way. My mind also went back to an entry I read on Dive Into Mark early last month which addressed a similar issue, but from looking at the code I saw no easy way I could drop that into my site. And thus this very generic function was born. It can be dropped into any PHP application anytime you want to make some text display worthy. Without further ado: Update: fixed a display issue, and a small bug.

Continue reading Smart Quotes in PHP →

Connection Happiness

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I’m here at school on one of the ubiquitous wireless connections and things are moving at least an order of magnitude faster than they usually do. I have no idea what’s changed, but I’m not complaining. Before it was like being on a 56k connection, and I was actually using it to see how my pages would load at slow speeds! Now it feels like decent broadband.

In other news, I got the smart quotes function so it doesn’t mangle my HTML, in fact it’s running on this site now, but it took a slightly ugly workaround and I’m searching to see if there’s a better way. Watch this spot.

Not Ready

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About an hour ago I posted a really neat script which will translate normal prime and double prime characters into ‘curly’ quotes where appropiate. Unfortuately I still have a few bugs to work out, so bear with any ghosts you see in the blog machine today.

Average Day

Photolog

9-3-2002–Since this is the first day I’m back at school and have my camera I wanted to walk through the routine I’ve started to build up. Unfortunately since I was running a little late I didn’t really get an oppurtunity to take any pictures of my Human Situation discussion class, which is by far my favorite (and smallest) class. I did manage to capture the four ravenous but cute squirrels that say hello between classes. Then we move on to my huge math class, and finally to the parking lot with cars as far as the eye can see.

Currently Playing

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You may have noticed that the Currently Playing sidebar is now back online, afer about 14 days of being out of commission. This was because of a combonition of my desktop computer’s grahpics card going wonky and Winamp3 coming out. I really don’t like version 3 very much and I’m going to wait a couple of iterations before I try it again. Right now I’m enjoying my favorite pianist of the moment, Bill Evans.

8-31-2002

Photolog

8-31-2002—even though summer is over now, in spirit if not in weather, I wanted to try and capture some of the things that symbolize summer to me: ants, grass, dirt, bushes, sun. Update: added about a dozen more photos from tonight. Interesting perspectives at the River Oaks shopping center, and some car logos, a new theme.

Comments Back

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Well it looks like the issues with MySQL 4.03 aren’t going to resolved anytime soon, and it was messing up other applications anytime a variant of SELECT DISTINCT was used so I went ahead and rolled the installation back to 4.02. So things should be working fine now; if you see any bugs drop me an email or something. I’m getting ready to put some new summer-themed pictures up, so keep your dials locked.

MySQL 4.03 Bug

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I seem to have stumbled across a bug in MySQL that crashes the MySQL server every time a query is run. For that reason the comments on this page are going to be disabled until I can get it worked out. The good news is that all entries now have trackback enabled and I’ll post more about that as soon as the comment thing is taken care of.

Camera!

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Well I am delighted to say that, thanks to some lobbying from my mother and the graciousness of Annette at Best Buy, I have been issued a replacement for my broken P71. Now this is by no means a testament to their superior service; if this camera ever breaks I’m sending it to Sony, not Best Buy. Their replacement plans can be very useful, but I’m not going to waste my money again on a so-called service plan. All in all though I’m just incredibly grateful to have my camera back. I can’t wait to start taking pictures again! 🙂