Thanksgiving Weekend

4 comments (closed), posted on november 28, 2004, tags: me

The weekend was extremely full. Thursday I spent Thanksgiving at my mother's house in Staten Island, where we ate lots of food and watched a few movies. The drive back to Brooklyn at midnight was like driving during rush-hour traffic. Apparently most people only want to see their relatives for the day and then high-tail it out of there. I'm not saying that's how I felt, of course.

Friday we were in New Jersey for our five-year high school reunion. Ugh, what a nightmare. I was not a fan of 98% of those people five years ago, and I'm certainly not any more so now, so it wasn't a lot of fun to be crammed into an American Legion hall with 80 of them for nearly 4 hours (and we left early). The place immediately fell into old patterns—all the "cool" kids hanging out at the same table, all the "uncool" kids clinging to small groups on the outskirts. It felt patently high school. Disgusting.

And Saturday was Katia's mother's birthday so we spent the day readying a large dinner party and then spent the evening eating and hanging about. Some of our friends came later that night and after a few hours of tea and dessert we said congratulations to her parents for their 25th wedding anniversary (which is actually today, but it was past midnight) and headed back to Brooklyn.

Today we cleaned up the apartment, took a walk in the nice afternoon and finalized some Christmas lists. The last few days I've been up until at least 3AM and this morning we forced ourselves to wake up early so we'd be tired tonight. Well, it worked. I'm struggling to make it to 11PM.

How was your holiday weekend?

Less Jerky

5 comments (closed), posted on november 26, 2004, tags: me

So get this: the person who hit our car the other day (and left a fake note) wasn't as much of a jerk as previous assumed. Apparently, after he or she hit our car (and drove away without leaving behind details) he called his insurance carrier and told them he hit a car and gave them our license plate number. The strange thing is, we both have the same carrier, but for some reason, instead of finding us in their database by our license plate number, they had to find us through the state or something. Either way, though, they found us.

Now Geico is paying for all of the damages! Wahoo. We just saved $500. Obviously I'm thrilled that this person at least had the decency to tell someone about the collision, but I am still angry that they left behind a blank note. In the end, though, our car will be fixed and we won't have to pay anything for it—and I'm thrilled.

Unsolicited

6 comments (closed), posted on november 23, 2004, tags: web

I got a call on my cellphone today from an 877 number. Sometimes it happens—I use my cellphone as a primary contact point for my credit cards and such—but it is usually rare. "Gah... ger... um, uh... G-Garnet M-Murphy?" Not a good start. "Garrett," I said. She said she knew she'd mess it up. She told me she knew I had just bought a new domain, and she was calling from Aplus.net because I could use some hosting and web design services now. It took a moment to sink in.

"What, did you crawl the whois listings and call me unsolicited to sell your services?" I asked, dumbfounded. She said yes, she knew I would need their services. "This is the most atrocious thing I have ever heard," I said, to which she responded that whois listing are public records and they can do whatever they wish with the information.

Well, I'm here to say it: no you can't. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. And it needs to stop. Aplus.net sucks. Spread the word.

Two New Features

3 comments (closed), posted on november 16, 2004, tags: site

I finally started to use Del.icio.us a few days ago and instantly realized how much easier it was than putting sidebar items into my own database. So today I whipped up a simple Del.icio.us class that calls their open API. Every hour it downloads new links I've added and drops them into my database (scheduled with a cron job). Simple and effective. Because of this, there will probably be more See Also items in the future (it's so much easier!).

Also because of this (and since there were already nearly 70 items) I've added pagination to the See Also archive. Now you won't see just a giant list of items, they'll be split by the current setting of 10 items per page. My page controls look identical to d's so credit is due. I couldn't figure out any other way to effectively do it, his way seems to be the best. I also increased the number of items appearing in the sidebar to 6 rather than 5.

There are a few more things to implement with this Del.icio.us support, including links to the tags and handling for when I edit a link on the Del site. And since the pagination code is done now (it was crazy simple) I will put it to use in the category archives, where some pages can get very long.

On a related note, my Codebase is really coming together. I'm in the finalizing/commenting code stage at this point and it will be a short while longer, but I've finalized the pricing scheme and it will all be released soon.

Smashed Up

14 comments (closed), posted on november 15, 2004, tags: me

At some point in the last 24 hours, while our car was parked on the street near our apartment, some jerk smashed its front-end. The damage, although not severe, is pretty bad. The best part of our smash-up hit-and-run? The person left a fake note. That's right: the jerk put a blank piece of paper in the window of the car.

I can only assume they did this because they noticed witnesses to the collision and decided to fake leaving a note in hopes that no one would call the police. Well, it worked. No one did, and so we have no clue who hit our car. I'm going to knock on some doors tomorrow and see if anyone saw it happen but my hopes aren't high. It's just one of those things—live in New York City with a car, your car gets smashed.

Speaking of Games

6 comments (closed), posted on november 10, 2004, tags: entertainment

A long while ago I wrote something to grab my game data from my Gamespot account, extract all the important bits and put it into a fun design I whipped up. I did it just before Gamespot went through many rounds of site modifications during which they changed their profile pages quite a bit. After a while I stopped trying to keep up with them and let my page fall into disrepair. But they finally seem to be done for now and so, after many regex fixes, my page is working again.

You can check it out: Games!

It looks like absolute shit in Internet Explorer. That's because IE can't handle transparent PNGs without work and doesn't support adjacent sibling selectors which I use extensively. I'm not going to make the effort to make this work in IE. Use a better browser to view it. It's valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS and it looks great in good browsers.

If there's enough interest, I'll release the source for this (even though it's messy) so that other Gamespot people can have their game data on their personal sites.

A Complaint

8 comments (closed), posted on november 9, 2004, tags: random

Dear PayPal,

You provide a great service. Granted, you've upped your fees a little in the past year and had a pretty bad outage recently, but other than that you've been doing a great job and I use your services all time time without hesitation. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that I use your website so frequently, I wouldn't be about to lodge my complaint:

Please replace the photo of the ugly bastard (above) you have in the center of your index page with something more appealing.

Now, I know what you're going to say: looks aren't everything. And, while I agree with you in general, in this case I have to disagree. That guy is just hideous. Is this what you wish potential customers to be greeted with upon their first visit to your site? Some sort of hook-toothed squinty-eyed mega-chin? Would new customers feel safe storing their hard-earned money near a guy who looked like that? I'm telling you: if that guy walked up to me on the street at night I would clutch my purse extra tight. I mean my wallet. My wallet. Especially if he was smiling strangely like that and leaning his head back just so.

The thing is, you have two other pictures on the site, just under that monster's snapshot, and they look pretty normal. Why not have them be the focus and push this troll's photo into the corner of one of your obscure pages (like the thrilling FDIC Pass-Through Insurance page!). He could sit there grinning all by himself, reserved for scaring accountants and people who get lost.

Thanks in advance. Oh, and please apologize to that man's children for me.

Love,
garrett

Entertainment Weekly

4 comments (closed), posted on november 8, 2004, tags: entertainment

Lots of good stuff recently to entertain yourself with. If you haven't seen The Incredibles, you must. It is, in my opinion, Pixar's best work to date. I'm sure it helps a little bit that I'm a sucker for superheroes, but nonetheless it is a fantastic film. They have so much fun with the family's abilities and when you combine that with stellar visuals, great voice acting and a great story, you just can't lose.

Also worth seeing is Sideways, a movie most people haven't even heard of. It stars Paul Giamatti (Private Parts, Man on the Moon, American Splendor) and Thomas Haden Church (most notably "Lowell" from Wings) and it's a quirky, often hilarious road-trip picture about wine, love and failure. Oh, and wine. Can't forget to mention the wine. Anyway, see it. It was directed by the same guy who made About Schmidt and Election.

And if you're the video-game-playing type, this is a good month for you. Tomorrow, at long last, Halo 2 is released. I preordered my special edition copy nearly a year ago and I'll be playing it the moment I get home from work tomorrow. If you've got XBOX Live and you'll be playing Halo 2, please feel free to email your gamertag to me (garrett at maniacalrage dot net). I'm sure to be playing quite a bit and it would be fun to play with some of you guys.

Next week two more important games are being released: Metriod Prime 2: Echoes and... finally... Half-Life 2. Both look to be absolutely excellent games and both guarantee that I will be glued to my television or computer for quite some time. I am even considering taking a look back at Counter-Strike now that it's running on the Source engine. I haven't played CS since I left college, but I think I played it the equivilant of four lifetimes while I was there.

If you're not interested in first person shooters and have a Gamecube, take a look at Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It's a fantastic game. I've been playing it for the last few weeks and I can't put it down. Very clever and a whole lot of fun (plus about 30 hours of gameplay!).

Oh, and we can't forget that the Nintendo DS comes out in the States on November 21. Very excited about that, even though I'll probably wait until around Christmas to get once since they'll only have a few games out until then. We'll see. I have a feeling there will be quite a few game-related entries here in the coming weeks.

Four More Years

14 comments (closed), posted on november 3, 2004, tags: new york

So, that's that. Kerry just conceded. Congratulations, America—you've voted for four more years of invasions and war, economic decline, deficit, poor education, fucking the environment, shitty healthcare, running Social Security into the ground and more. Good for you. Oh, and let's not forget that Bush might have the opportunity to nominate three justices to the Supreme Court. See you later, Roe v. Wade. Oh, and I hope none of you people with cancer or Parkinson's expect to see a cure any time soon. At least not in this country.

The saddest thing about this whole election is that America is changing for the worse. We're becoming more and more conservative. What happened to the progressive America? What the fuck is wrong with you people? Is this all that you want in life? Is this the American dream? You think Bush is a fiscally responsible president? All you bastards who lost your jobs over the past 4 years still voted for him. What's wrong with you?

I'm especially outraged by the exit poll statistics on how many people voted for Bush because of his "morals." This is the closest election we've had in a long time and for all intents and purposes, it was decided by religion. I'm sickened. Canada looks really good to me right now. I'm sure I'll write something a little more eloquent at some point but for right now I can't even get it all out. This is a sad, sad day for this country. I'm ashamed.

Vote!

7 comments (closed), posted on november 2, 2004, tags: new york

It's your responsibility and your duty as a citizen of this country to vote today. Don't let anyone fool you—not voting is not exercising your democratic right. There's no excuse for not voting. If you don't like the candidates then write someone in. Voting is one of the few things you have as a citizen of this country that allows you to help change things for the better. Today is a very important day for our country.

I've been reading a lot of weblogs recently who have resigned themselves to saying that thinking this election is more important than others is silly. I disagree. We are currently at war in Iraq—a war which is dragging on and on and in which the casualty rates are climbing steadily. Women are beginning to lose their right to choose. Our education system isn't getting better. Our environmental policies are a joke. We still don't have nation-wide healthcare. Social Security is in danger. We lost our projected surplus and now we have one of the largest projected deficits in our history. We are declining. Things aren't getting better. We need to fix things here or it's only going to get worse.

Anyone who tells you that we're doing well in Iraq is brainwashed. Anyone who tells you the middle class was the major benefactor to the most recent tax cut is brainwashed. There's a lot of fucking brainwashing going on these days. I'll tell you this much: I don't think Kerry will be the best president we've ever had. But I do know he won't be one of the worst. If Kerry even manages to stop the deficit increase and repair our relationship with other countries, he'll have done better than Bush.

Please—even if you disagree with me: vote. Today is important. I'm going to leave comments open on this entry because I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the subject (especially those of you outside of the US), but I will be quick to remove any comments that are spam, attacks or off-topic.