Books Are Good For You
Threadless T-Shirt: Books Are Good For You. Love it!
Things I Loved Last Week: Week #2
January 4, 2009 – January 10, 2009
Well, I spent most of this week sick with a head cold that knocked me down for a few days. Regardless, here goes my list for the week. One of these entries is sarcastic. Try to guess which one.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Death by Black Hole.
An incredibly interesting and funny interview with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He talks about the process of dying in a black hole, defines one of my new favourite words, “spaghettification”, and tells the audience about the asteroid that may destroy the Pacific Coast. A fascinating discussion about some terrible things that may happen to the Earth.
“Ninety nine percent of all species that ever existed are now extinct. That is not the signature of a planet that is in love with life.”
Learning that none of my JavaScript works in Internet Explorer 6.
My boss went to Cambodia for two weeks after Christmas. The day she returns, we are to present her with a full, bug-free copy of our latest project. On Wednesday, we discovered that next to none of our Javascript works in Internet Explorer 6. I know it was rather remiss of us not to test, but we’re not the best at browser-compatibility testing.
Anyways, IE6 is a mystifying piece of badness. There are lots of things in it that make no sense at all, like how select boxes are drawn by the operating system, and not the browser. What this means is that modal dialog boxes, as well as mouseover-style menus, don’t draw themselves on top of those elements. Web 2.0 style applications use these sorts of elements quite often. The solution? Something called an iframe shim, which makes no sense at all. I have so far wasted a number of days attempting to make these elements play well together. We need to find a new way to draw modal dialog boxes, drop down style menus and a calendar widget. Before tomorrow morning at 830 am. I’m not expecting that to go well.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl
I loved watching Billie Piper as Rose Tyler in Doctor Who, so I decided to download the show Secret Diary of a Call Girl to see if she could really act or not, and I learned that she can. It is an odd cross between a comedy, a drama, and a softcore porn. I have now seen far too much of Billie Piper’s body, but I still found the show excellent. Her character is quite compelling and I enjoyed watching the two parts of her personality conflicting with each other. I would recommend this show to a couple of friends, though I’m not sure if it would be my friends who are obsessed with Doctor Who or not.
Getting our spare room set up.
Alan and I recently housed a friend of ours for about four or five months. In that time, he stayed in our spare room, which had formerly been our computer room. Since our computers were nice and cozy in their new home, and we wanted to hide our TV a bit more, we turned our spare room into a TV room. We put the TV and our gaming systems in the closet so we can hide it when we have guests, and the spare room now has our DVD shelf, our plastic shelving units, and our futon. The living room is fantastically empty, and will make a great space for dance contests and Twister. Or our cozy chair can go there for our new reading corner.
I Love A Good Bandwagon
Well, Courtney and a few others I know have done this requisite beginning of the year blog post, and I love a good bandwagon, so here I go. Just so you all know, I’m stealing many of these from other people, as original thought and blogging don’t seem to go hand-in-hand for me.
2009 Goals / Resolutions
Sort and tag my music collection. This acutally started about two weeks ago now. I have around 5,000 songs on my computer that comprises my music collection, which isn’t really a lot. Unfortunately, the files have become woefully neglected. My preference for file names is the format %artist% – %album% – %track number% – %song name% and I want that data to be in the ID3 tag accurately as well. Most of my files have the artist name and song name accurately, but most do not have the remaining data. The task at hand can be broken down into these subtasks:
- Get rid of songs I no longer like. It’s normal that tastes change over time, and mine certainly have.
- Ensure file names are as complete as possible. Wikipedia is really good at telling me what albums my songs come from.
- Ensure ID3 tags have the correct artist, album, track number and song name. Extra data [genre, year, etc] is good as well, but not required.
- Maintain a good directory structure.
Because I’m a Linux nerd, I use rhythmbox for my media player. For this project, however, I have been using mplayer from the command line, because I love the command line. Maybe I’ll write a super boring post about my sorting procedures. Maybe I’ll draw a flowchart for it. I like flowcharts.
Blog more. Because I’m pretty sure you all need to know about the minutiae of my life, like my music sorting procedures or how I make a super awesome lasagna or what I think about The Doctor this week [still love him]. I have a wedding to plan. I’m sure you’re interested in that, right? No? Too bad. But seriously, I don’t do a lot of writing that isn’t comma-delimited in my day to day life, and it’s an important skill to craft. A couple of weeks ago I sat down to write a couple of paragraphs about an event I had attended, and it was like pulling teeth. Seems like writing is one of those ‘use it or lose it’ sort of entities.
Finish that damn quilt. In the summer of 2007, I started a quilt. An easy beginner quilt. By September, I had the four big pieces that made up most of the quilt completed. By November, I had those pieces sewn together. I haven’t touched it since. All I have left to do on it is make a border of some sort and a back. My mom, the quilter in my life, says it should take three or four hours to add the border, tops. Maybe I should just sit down and finish it, then it would be done and I could move on with other projects.
Get Zend Certified. It’s probably important to stay up to date with what’s happening in my field. With that in mind, I am going to get my Zend PHP 5 Certification, and then maybe after that my Zend Framework Certification. I’m not sure about the ZF Certification, though, as I use Symfony on a daily basis and am not sure how good it would be to have those two things in my head at the same time. Also in this goal are sub-goals of improve my server administration and database administration skills.
Plan a Wedding. Mine, to be exact. We have a date set, and that’s about it really. I’m sure there are other details that are probably important. I should really look into that. Sub-goals: get in shape
Write A Wordpress Theme / Customize My Wordpress. This design is ugly and I want to make something prettier. With a better sidebar. And better photo integration. I love io9’s website (and content) and want to steal at least some of the elements from their page layout.
So that’s it. We’re going to call these goals, not resolutions, but they are what they are. I’m not sure the overflow of months into the years columns really requires such traditions as these, but taking the time to reflect and consider is always good.
