October 2001 Archives

Think Geek has the next watch I want. It's a nice brushed silver finish with either a carbon fiber or kevlar band. Shows the date and is semi water resistant too. But three times a night it tunes into the atomic clock in Collins Colorado and sets its time to that. Man that's cool! And before you say it's unneccesary, is your watch accurate to within one second every Million years? I thought not :)

If the darn things didn't cost $300 a pop I'd probably have ordered one by now.

Other than the traffic cam/map page lying to me about how congested sr-520 was this morning, today's drive was a fairly mind numbing commute - which lead me to notice a couple of little things. First off I saw a car with a personalized license plate that read:  LQQKNLO  (appologies to Mac users who won't render that font very well). "lookin' low" with the Os in look as Qs so they look like little eyes. Heh.

While still lightly amused about that I pull up to a stop behind a red geo metro packed full with random crap. One of the items not too obsucred was a long blue rectangular box labled "Futurama: Collect-o-rama". I have no idea what the Collect-o-rama is (boardgame, chess set, US State Quarters map) but man I want one like nothing else :)

And thus the subject - I am easily amused. Entertained by battery operated lint removers. Lover of Zippos for they are Fire, Metal and Shiny rolled all into one.

Man parsing logs with perl is boring work.

Now there should be no more incorrect dates as - or rather if they are incorrect it's the fault of the server's date/time rather than whoever is submitting news.

When trying to fix this little glitch I found out something interesting about MySQL. It appears the MySQL (what this hosting company runs) doesn't allow for the results of functions (such as NOW()) to be the default value for columns - which makes it somewhat hard to have a column just track when something was posted. Sure there is the TIMESTAMP type that has this functionality sort of built in but that just screams "crappy work around".

So it appears the answer to the Linux/OpenSource question "why would anyone pay for software when free software is available" would be something along the lines of "when you want something without gaping holes in its feature set.

I just noticed Matt's post below... or rather the time it says it was posted. Perhaps Client Side date setting isn't the best - at least not when the client is on crack and thinks it's like 5 months in the past.

Way to suck Boeing :)

This morning I managed to both back into someone and crush the front of my truck at the same time.  Well crush may be an exageration but take a look at the photo and see for yourself.  We borrowed a flatbed truck to move a free hot tub (already up to 91 degrees, woohoo) over the weekend and needed to return it this morning.  I drove the truck down to the job site in south seattle and Andy (new roommate, Matt's brother) followed in my truck.  We got to a fork at the job site entrance and I couldn't remember which way to go so threw the automatic into park and hopped out to ask him.  But the thing about automatics is Reverse is right next to Park, and this particular automatic didn't like to go all the way into Park apparently.

So as I reach the end of the flatbed and Andy rolls down the window I hear the first piercing Beep of the backing up warning sound from the truck.  I try and push the truck to a stop for about a quarter of a second before realizing that's dumb and I'll likely hurt myself, and hop back into the cab to put it all the way into park.  Andy tried to throw my truck into reverse but couldn't in time so ended up slamming down on the parking break - which actually managed to stop the push of the flat bed and also prevented it from pushing my truck into the truck behind him. 

So there you have it.  I have a crappy morning, no breakfast and probably about $700 in damage to my hood, but at least it was all on my truck so no insurance problems and I got another "remember when I was so dumb I..." story about my truck to add with the "remember when my truck went swimming..." story.

Hooray!

Earlier last week the tool I'm working on crossed over from code to black magic. That is the users of said tool wanted to do something with it that I hadn't programmed it to do. All of the buttons where there for what they wanted to do, I just thought it wouldn't work (wouldn't work in that particular combination). It worked - I'm still not entirely certain how or why, but it does. Hooray, I got a free afternoon.

Today it got worse. After throwing out the weeks of work (see previous posting) I'm back working on my graphical query builder. I have it working building queries one level deep but hadn't yet worked out how to have it build them many levels deep. I had all of the buttons in place and just decided to try and see what happened when I built one many levels deep... it worked. I'm happy because i can stop hitting my head against the table trying to figure out how to do this thing but I'm a little hesitant to release it given that I don't know how it works.

Ahh the trials of a geek's job.

Oh yes, I also hit the karma cap on slashdot yesterday - time to move to k5.

It cost me $157 to develope all of my film from Italy. Well actually it only cost me about $50, but I also wanted the photoCDs so I didn't have to bother to scan all 300+ pictures (more than I originally estimated) and that was another $100. a Note, I'm not certain it was worth it. Sure it saved me time and hassle and I won't really miss the money since I'd planned on spending it, but the CDs aren't anything special - 100 megs of garbage application and 10 megs of pictures, whee. They (the photo development place) also cut off the a couple of pictures wrong so my picture of the Franciscan Friar has his head cut off.

Funny too, the day I got the pictures back I found a 12th roll of film (being devloped now) that has my pictures from Venice with the Indy Church (Saint Barnaba's Cathedral) on it so I can't even post that. *sigh*

Back to work I suppose, which seems today to consist largely of people saying "we really like the tool you built, only now we decided we want to do something completely different and throw away weeks of your work because we're fickle bastards, thats okay right?"... At least I get to leave early :)