Supercalifunkinbusy

05.11.2004

This has been one of those weeks where on the surface there didn't seem to be much to do, but I've managed to be kept more busy than I would have thought.

Continuing from the Prince concert high from last week, I downloaded a trio of Prince albums from the NPG Music Club. The albums (or maybe they're collections) are C-Note, The Slaughterhouse, and Chocolate Invasion. The latter is my favorite so far, as I seem to be hooked on at least 3 of the songs. I also picked up the One Nite Alone Box Set at my local Best Buy yesterday.

So now I have a lot of Prince to catch up on while I do regular work, extra website work, and think about the wrestling game in the background. It makes me glad I've got a vacation coming up Friday. At 5:00. Sharp.

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What?

05.07.2004

Last night's Prince condert in Nashville was awesome, and I don't use words like "awesome"! I could try to sum it up, but I would fail horribly.

So I'll leave it to others to sum up.

Maybe my ears will stop ringing in the next couple of days.

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Cinco Da 5th

05.05.2004

This has been my day to support the independant entrepreneurs of the world.

It started with my latest wrestling purchase - Mat Dickie's Booking Mpire. I've had so much fun with Wrestling Mpire, I've just got to see what the next game will do. I got way more than $15 worth of enjoyment out of the first game, so I'm hoping to do more of the same with this game.

I also ordered the latest MC Chris cd. I'll be the first to admit that his music isn't for everyone, but if you're a nerd who likes rap, Star Wars, and high voices, he's definitely worth checking out.

I guess to keep going on the same path I'll have to find a non-chain restaraunt for lunch. What types of un-franchised eateries do we have around here?

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MMORPG-ing

05.04.2004

I have finally taken my first step into online gaming. I installed City of Heroes Monday night and have managed to put off most other things while I was at home. I've always been intrigued by super hero games, and this one being a dedicated online game was a good excuse for me to expand my horizons.

Since I'm pretty much learning from scratch, I've picked a big, stupid, smashing character. To have fun, he's big and blue (definitley Tick-ish) and named "The Big Blue Yonder", because I figure all the Tick puns would get old after a while. I've managed to waltz around the map, bludgeoning thugs, leveling up, all the things you're supposed to do in a game like this. After a couple of hours, it's all the same routine. I really don't see how people get hooked on these things (like Everquest).

My moment of the most fun came last night when I started noticing how many Ticks there were, and then I would go stand beside them until they ran off, just to see if anybody noticed. Most of the Tick costumes are pretty good. One, Blue Justice, had the perfect feel of the live action series. I started to laugh when I saw a conversation between two other people about how many Ticks there were running around (and I even got a compliment on my costume design). One guy said he had seen 10 different Ticks in the past 2 days. I'd seen 2 others and only been on a couple of hours.

So, it's a fun little game. Server lag for me is kind of annoying, but I chalk that up to being in the boonies. Maybe I should make a different character, one that shoots fiery electro-coils of doom or something!

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PHP Freading

05.03.2004

A couple of weeks ago I added a little weather scroll to the top of the page, mainly because I had been playing around with some code and it was a fun little mental excercise. Much to my surprise, a couple of people actually liked it! Much to my chagrin, after moving servers last week, the weather scroll seemed to be broken.

Basically the weather scroll comes from me reding a file from the Weather Channel, parsing it until I find what I want, and then printing that section out. After moving servers, I would only intermitantly (I have got to get a spell checker!) find the results I wanted. Having only moved servers, I wasn't sure what the problem was.

Well, it all boiled down to PHP and how I was reading in the file. I was reading it this way:

$fh = fopen($counter_file, 'r');
$somebuffer = fread($fh, 30000);


And then trying to parse through the results. It turns out that the page I was reading was big enough that all of it wasn't getting read into the buffer, even though it was under the filesize I had specified (something to do with network packages and streams - I only make web pages, I don't know everything behind it!). So, to fix it all I had to do was:

$fh = fopen($counter_file, 'r');
while (!feof($fh)) {
$somebuffer .= fread($fh, 8192);
}
fclose($fh);

This reads everything into the buffer all at once before any parsing begins. It's one of those things that makes obvious sense, it's just that the code behind it all didn't exactly work like I thought it did. But know I know. And that's half the battle!

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