BrockLi Soup

Allow me to summarize the State of the Union address for you

People want to kill you. Weapons of mass murder AND destruction. For reals.

Iraq is in great shape - they even voted not too long ago. We fight for freedom (unless it’s here, in which case you might be a terrorist). If we leave now, we’re cowards. You’re not a coward, are you?

Hey look, I brought along the family of a dead soldier. I’m a good guy, right?

They’ll kill you! THEY’LL KILL US ALL!!

I can order surveillance on you, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it (thunderous applause, cut to Hillary Clinton with stupid expression).

Nine eleven Iraq freedom liberty Al Queda Patriot Act terrorists Iran nukyular God Homeland Security terrorist Jesus.

I only watched 20 minutes before I lost interest, but I think we all know how it ends. God Bless America.

Preface: Earlier today I talked to my mom, and I told her I was spending the afternoon geeking out. She called back this evening to ask me about something else (it’s also worth noting that I’m the only one of her kids with curly hair).

Mom: You still geeking out? Me: Yeah, I’ve been sitting in front of the TV working on my laptop for a couple hours. Mom: I hope it’s not on your lap! Me: Don’t worry Mom, it’s not on my crotch. Mom: Good, because I want curly haired grandkids someday.

A couple months ago, she called to warn me not to set my laptop on my lap because she saw an article about it killing sperm.

You would think that writing a plugin for Movable Type would be pretty easy, especially if you’ve read that it is, in fact, pretty easy.

You would be wrong.

Based on what I’ve seen, writing a plugin for Movable Type is a colossal pain in the ass. I don’t even want to do anything complex - I just want to manage a list of movies I’ve seen recently, and display the last five in the sidebar. Previously, I posted an entry into a Recently Viewed category (which you can see here) that wasn’t displayed on the main or archive pages. The most recent five posts were put in the side bar, and linked to IMDB (through another hack - the Excerpt on every entry was just the URL for the movie’s page).

After spending a couple hours this afternoon reading information about plugins and trying to make sense of it, I’ve lost interest in finishing the site today. I DID get it upgraded to MT 3.2, which is a start, and means that you folks using news readers will probably be flooded (especially on LJ). Sooner or later, I’ll reign in my ridiculous category list, restore my portfolio and about page, and come up with a new design (which, you may recall, was the original goal for the day).

And dammit, writing a plugin can’t be THAT hard, right? I’ll probably take another crack at it soon, because it’s really irritating me that I had no luck with it today.

I decided that it’s finally time to re-design and upgrade this site (like I was going to over three months ago), and I wasn’t going to say anything about it until I finished, but I need to mention this. In backing up everything, I found myself with a 24 MB SQL file. Now, the only tables in there are for Movable Type, and I’ve only got a couple hundred posts on this site, so I was surprised to see that it took up so much space.

Until I took a gander at the file, that is. Most of the lines started with “SpamLookup”, Sure enough, I can’t even open the Activity Log, and the mt_log table has over 75,000 rows. I can’t imagine what would have happened without SpamLookup. MT 3.2 is supposed to have decent spam prevention, so hopefully it won’t be much of a problem once I upgrade.

In a similar vein, the Spam in GMail is reaching impressive levels. For a long time, I emptied the Spam folder every few days. After a while I was nuking a dozen pages every day, so I just gave up. Messages in there are deleted after 30 days, but I’ve still got 8984 in there. A couple dozen still make it to my Inbox every day, but that’s a lot better than it could be.

I almost forgot to get the pictures from this past weekend off my camera. Here they are.

John first mentioned JSON about a month ago, but at the time I had no inclination to look into it and find out if it was something I could use. It came across my radar again today thanks to a Particle Tree article that I never finished reading, but that’s not important. The long and short of it is that JSON is really just a fancy name for eval-ing JavaScript objects - one of those “why didn’t I think of that” kinds of things.

The few times I’ve tried using Ajax, I’ve spent most of my time fighting with XML parsing (or convincing IE that it was XML I was trying to parse), so the allure of native JavaScript objects was enticing. I talked with one of the guys at work about writing a function in PHP that would take an array and generate the appropriate code, until I came across the (seemingly de facto) “official” JSON page. He’s got references there for pretty much every language you’d expect to do web development in (and a few you wouldn’t) - including JSON-PHP, which does exactly what I was going to. Couple that with Prototype’s quick-and-dirty Ajax.Request, and you’ve got a Web 2.0 application quicker than you can say “What the hell is a Web 2.0 application?”

QuirksBlog has a pretty good post comparing JSON, XML, and HTML snippets, if you’d like to further consider your Ajaxing options.

Way back on Friday, Casey, Schmitty and I drove up to RIT for F-ed Up Movie Night (censored for the easily offended) (that’s you, Mom). They say the trip is half the fun, but they’re pretty much always wrong. Once in a while, though, I get to take a long drive with people I really enjoy, so this was a good trip.

The weekend was good - not great, but good. I got to see a bunch of people I missed, but I also had to see a handful of people I had no interest in seeing ever again. I suppose that’ll happen, though. I never made it to Mark’s for a plate, but I did get to do Dibella’s and Dinosaur BBQ, so it worked out OK. The movie night featured a pretty good lineup - The Silent World, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, A Dirty Shame, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - and ended quite a bit earlier than usual (a welcome change, with the 8-hour drive home the next morning).

I did a lot of thinking and soul-searching over the course of the weekend. Arriving back in Rochester wasn’t the homecoming I thought it would be. I realized that what I really miss is the Rochester of two or three years ago, before friends started graduating and leaving town. There are still a good number of friends there, but there are also a lot of new folks that I don’t know well, and the whole dynamic has changed. It’s actually sort of a relief, because I don’t feel like I’m missing much by being a few states away.

I also decided that I’m not as happy here in VA as I thought I was and have been claiming to be. I spent four years living with close friends, and it’s been tough adjusting to my own place. I’ve got several friends in the area, but they’re spread out enough that I don’t get to see much of them.

I don’t know who Casey was quoting when she said, “Don’t expect to find it here if you don’t bring it yourself,” and I couldn’t say it better. I certainly can’t blame anyone else for the fact that I spend so many of my evenings hanging out at home. We’ve been seeing movies at The Drafthouse almost every Monday, and doing dinner once in a while, and I always have a great time. I want to see if we can’t start doing coffee or something the same time every week, further north in DC or out west towards Tyson’s Corner, so that more people will be close enough to join us. I definitely want to see the sights and museums in the District, and I’m entertaining the idea of starting a local chapter of the Sunday Night Film Club. I’m happy when I’m with people, so I need to take the initiative and get them together.

There’s a lot to do in this city, and there’s no reason for me to be sitting around being bored. I’m not sure yet that I made the right choice in coming to DC, but I do know I made the right choice in leaving Rochester. Sooner or later, this will feel like home.

Oh, and the birthday bit - I started this blog a year ago today, under my account on the CSH server (actually, the “We done moved” page is still up). I never got around to re-doing the design, or writing all the things that I meant to, so maybe those will be some last-minute New Year’s resolutions.

When I was trying to find a place in Arlington, I checked Rent.com, because that seemed like a reasonable place to start looking. They have floor plans and photos for a lot of apartment buildings and developments, so you can get a a decent feel for the place before you drive out there to see it.

More importantly, they offered a $100 reward if you find a place through them. And since I did, a Visa debit card showed up in the mail today.

I can think of all sorts of fun things to spend $100 on, but I think I’m going to do the responsible thing and toss it in my glove box for gas money. On the other hand, if my car gets stolen, it will be the most valuable thing they walk away with, so maybe I’ll just spend it on hookers and blow.

In the fifth or sixth grade, my science teacher asked the class, “What do you know about the word ‘frequency’?”

“There’s an R.E.M. song called ‘What’s the Frequency Kenneth?’, I think,” said I.

At the time, I didn’t R.E.M. was cool, so I was embarrassed to say it. I knew the song from Monster, but only because of my cousin’s seemingly eclectic musical preference. But man, at that time, R.E.M. represented everything I wish I was.

I just found about the Panda Cam over at the National Zoo. Somebody go wake that little bugger up.

I could have sworn that I wrote about this a month ago, but my year-end roundup is the only reference I can find. I have yet to touch a cigarette since quitting in early October. Things went surprisingly well for the first few weeks. I was expecting to crack during one of the drives between Virginia and New York - driving is always the toughest - but I’ve made it three and a half months. I certainly didn’t think I could make it this far, and I don’t think any of my detractors did either. I’m pretty sure this is the longest I’ve gone without a smoke since I was 17.

I can’t say that I miss it terribly. I almost never wake up coughing, unless it’s been a particularly cold night (I tend to leave the heat low). I’m sure that I’ve saved a fair bit of money, though I don’t feel like calculating the specifics now.

Even so, I find myself pining for a smoke now more than ever. It gave me something to do. When I was nervous, I’d smoke. It was a life saver in crowded bars where I didn’t know many people. It gave me a chance to organize my thoughts when I was stumped with a problem. It provided some measure of social outlet; non-smokers don’t believe me when I tell them how many people I met because of it.

And finally, I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. Every time a character takes a drag, I wish I could do the same. I remember watching The Way of The Gun at Shaun J’s about a year and a half ago. Every time the characters pulled out a smoke, we’d pause the movie and climb out the window onto the fire escape to enjoy one ourselves. Another time, in Dan and Rhubarb’s room, Boondock Saint’s took us about three hours to finish because of all the smoke breaks (granted, we were drinking too, so there were a lot of piss breaks).

I keep wondering if it’s safe to have the occasional smoke yet. I know, at the back of my mind, that the first one will be the end of me, but I try to convince myself that I can have one now and then without getting started again.

I’ve done well so far. I have no intention of buying a pack, but I really didn’t think it would get harder along the way.

I was checking the Virginia DMV site to see if they would be open tomorrow.

All DMV offices will be closed on Friday, January 13, 2006, and on Monday, January 16, 2006, in observance of Lee-Jackson Day and Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

Anyone who does any JavaScript development should give the Prototype framework a try. It provides a lot of helper functions that replace a lot of code. For example, there’s a $() that effectively calls document.getElementById(), but allows for several arguments and will return an array of elements matching those IDs. A few functions handle form access and processing, and there are a handful of AJAX functions I haven’t tried yet. It’s nothing that I couldn’t do on my own, but it makes things much easier. I just started playing with it at work yesterday, so I haven’t found out what it can really do, but I think I’ll be using it for other projects.

Unfortunately, the official site has next to no documentation. The code is simple and clean enought that reading it is enough in many cases, but it’s not all too clear. Thankfully, plenty of people have come before me, so there’s some decent information out there. The two I found most useful were Particletree’s introduction and Sergio Pereira’s guide.

I like to listen to Coheed & Cambria because the singer’s voice reminds me of the Chipmunks Christmas record I had when I was a kid.

Reassuringly, my car passed a safety inspection. Not so reassuringly, it failed the emissions test, but the guy was revving it up something fierce - a Lexus would smoke if you whomped on it like that. So, I can’t register it in Virginia unless I have it repaired (which may involve a new EGR or catalytic converter), which isn’t something I can do right now. I only paid $500 for the damn thing in the first place, so it doesn’t make sense to pour a few hundred more in every few months. I’m starting to think I could get away with replacing the car with a motorcycle, but I have no moneys. I want to find a newer, bigger car, but that will cost even more.

As such, I’m going to my Contingency Plan, which depends on a Lottery win. I tried to buy a Lottery ticket today, but the gas station that does car inspections doesn’t sell Lottery tickets.

I had Contingency Plan B, but I forgot what it was. I’m pretty sure it involved more work, so that leads us to Contingency Plan C, wherein you all send me a dollar. You overachievers can send several dollars if you’d like - in fact, it’s encouraged! - but you don’t have to if you’d rather not.

Worst case scenario, I have to take the bus in to work. So, let’s all pull together, folks - I don’t like mingling with the commoners.