Dan Conley

The last movie I saw in theatres* before Neil was born was New Moon. We went a few months before leaving him with family for an extended period of time, and when we did venture out for dinner and a movie it was to Panera and Sex and the City 2.

I’m not sure what kind of life I’m leading.

During the First Great Blog War I admitted that I saw Sex and the City on opening night. I’ve also read the entirety of the Twilight series, though only because Elizabeth was getting annoyed I was criticizing it without having read it. I’m okay with admitting this sort of thing because self deprecation is pretty fun, but in my defense I really didn’t want to see Sex and the City 2; it was better than the first but that isn’t saying much, and the opening was horrid.

I had thought that the Transit Drive In closed a year or two back, when the drive in on Harlem shut down for good. That’s not the case, though, and so we’ve talked recently about how we should go on a Friday. It won’t be as fun as when we had our wagon and could lay down in the back, but it’s still a good deal.

She doesn’t work this Saturday and so I looked at the movie lineup: there’s Toy Story 3 (the first being one of my favorite movies, but the second not nearly as much) and Grown Ups (meh), or Knight and Day/The A Team/Get Him To the Greek (the last seems promising), or Eclipse/Killers/Kick Ass.

I’ve heard Kick Ass is good. I’ll be seeing Eclipse in theatres eventually anyway, and while Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher are absolutely perfect for each other, white and yellow American cheese food products, I have no desire to see them together.

This would mean, though, that my ‘in-theatre’ run would be New Moon, Sex and the City 2, Eclipse. No. That will not do. A man has to have some sort of standards and sense of self respect, and so I am forced to draw a line.

* ‘theatre’ over ‘theater’ for the same reason as I use single quotes, cross my Zs and 7s and listen to rock operas: I’m pretentious.

Despite having a category on this site named ‘I am an Apple fanboy’ — it’s attached to this very post! — I don’t actually consider myself a fanboy. I like Apple products, sure, but I don’t think that they are inherently superior to every other piece of competing technology ever. They’re slick, and they do what they do very well, but you pay for that both in the price and the ability to do certain things.

That being said, there are currently four iPhones in my house, a Macbook, an eMac (remember those things), an Airport Extreme and an Airport Express. So, I suppose if the modern, white plastic shoe fits…

Despite what I said at the time, the iPhone 4 line was a disaster. I posted about the thrill of the line, of the friends to be made (and then forgotten: I never learned any of their names, which I quite liked) at hour 1.75. All told it took just over nine hours to get my phone. Nine. Could anyone think that was reasonable? Did anyone think that nine hours was worth the new phone? It’s a good phone, yes, but nine hours? By the time I had reckoned my fate it was at hour 5, during which we moved maybe 10 feet. But despite what Lifehacker says about sunk costs, I wasn’t about to give up just because I had things to do (like go to work or watch my son).

Now I have the phone, though! And a damn fine phone it is. People need to remember that 720p is not 720p is not 720p: the video camera is good, but not great. Elizabeth’s been loving it as I thought she would, of course, and so I get daily videos emailed to me and Facetime requests sent. She doesn’t care about aspect ratios, of course, and so it’s widescreen vertically, or maybe tallscreen, which is at once abhorrent and quite likely the future, because Apple declares it so.

The back and forth between the Apple and non-Apple camps are that this phone is revolutionary and that this phone has ‘incremental upgrades.’ I think it’s somewhere in the middle: sure, they didn’t invent video chat. But they may have invented the first video chat people will use. It’s not for everyday talking, but if you have something to show someone, or would just like to see them, it’s easy to use and works well.

If you hold it properly, of course, which I don’t. My left pocket has been for my phone for as long as I can remember, and so I pull it out and hold it in my left hand. Invariably I have one bar. I can’t believe that made it out of QA. There’s always something, isn’t there, which gives Apple detractors something to latch on to. I can write off Flash; meh. But reception? You kind of need that on a phone.

So now I’m torn, between not wanting to be That Guy flashing the latest and greatest technology at anyone who’s looking because it makes him feel superior, and between needing constant adulation and attention because goddammit I waited nine hours for this thing and I deserve a cookie or something.

I’ve now used the WordPress iPhone app twice: the day I got my iPhone and the day I’m waiting in line to get another.

I’m fully aware of the absurdity of having woken up at 5am and having waited in line since 6, only for the privilege of giving Apple $400 (Elizabeth got to sleep in) and AT&T two more years of my service. it’s dumb. I get it.

There’s a weird atmosphere when you wait in a line, though. It’s almost festival-like. Hundreds of people with a common goal being forced to endure each other for a period of time. You make single serving friends and get to experience a chunk of your life that’s totally different from the rest; almost like a boring mini vacation.

At least I hope it’s different from the rest of your life; if you queue for a living then you live a poor life.

Apparently WordPress no longer forwards old permalink structures, which I swore it did. This will particularly be a problem at Extra Guy, where we have about a year and a half’s worth of ?p=\d+  urls, but is also now affecting old dc.net posts (where I used index.php/2009/whatever and have switched to ?p=, with a possible change in the future to a real honest to goodness mod_rewrite style).

Bah. Hopefully I can find a fix for this.

I’d like to get outraged over the Facebook debacle, but I just can’t. It’s bad, yes, but… so? How is it not to be expected? Will people suddenly leave the site in droves? I did finally ditch my Myspace account a year or two back, but at this point Facebook seems almost like a necessary convenience, since everyone you know will be posting their pictures, videos and life updates there (my mom signed up after Neil was born because she was sick of missing the photos Elizabeth was uploading).

I’ve had this conversation with unnamed female friend X who’s named regularly elsewhere on my blog before, but Geekdad (a perfect site for me if there ever were one) says it best:

The lesson here is that you should only put data on the internet that you are comfortable with being shared, viewed or sold by people that are not you. In this era of social media and sharing, there have been so many cases of just blatant ignorance. What do you think will happen if you put inappropriate pictures on Facebook when your boss is on your friend list? Nothing? This isn’t the era of anonymous postings in forums and BBS chat rooms anymore.

It’s… interesting being on the friend’s list of my younger cousin, who will put up… interesting bits of news about herself (her sister at least used to have her AIM name private but gave out her phone number, at least to friends).

There was a quote that got tweeted (still a remarkably silly word) around this morning, which I saw from @kgs who retweeted @starkness and I think originated from @benhuh (Provenance, motherfucker. Do you know it??): “Facebook has become like AOL; it’s like training wheels for the internet. It’s a safe place, except for your privacy.” (edited for capitalization and not needing <140 characters).

Neil’s nearly three months old now (even closer to 12 weeks, if that’s how you measure it), and I haven’t touched a book since the hospital. (I’ve also barely played any games, haven’t written a damn thing that’s worthwhile and haven’t brewed. Luckily he’s the cutest baby ever, so I forgive him)

Here’s the stack I’ve got (either on my nightstand or something I’d like to get):

• John Hodgman’s AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE – god it’s great. It’s what entertained me while Elizabeth was busy not being in labor.
• Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book – we got about halfway through it while Elizabeth was pregnant, as my ‘read to her stomach so he knows who I am’ routine. We may need to start over, now.
• David Wellington’s 23 Hours and Frostbite – I’m actually pretty unhappy that there is a fourth book in his vampire series, as I thought the ending of Vampire Zero was a good way to wrap up the series. I’m also uninterested in werewolves, but I like Wellington’s take on horror tropes so I want to see what he does with it.
• Peter David/Claudio Sanchez’s Year of the Black Rainbow – I’ve gone into how I love Coheed & Cambria but don’t consider Claudio much of a storyteller before. Then he got Peter David and I perked up.
• Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind – it’s been a while since I’ve gotten into a fantasy series (Robert Jordan burned me pretty well on that front), but I hear good things.

Then, once the Wheel of Time series has been wrapped up (hopefully before Neil himself has kids), I’ll need to start that over because I simply don’t remember a damn thing except for Jordan systematically ruining all of my favorite characters, drawing out the series and then dying.

It’s been called off. In addition to, evidently, nobody thinking a person with degrees in history and library science could be a decent web programmer (I can, really!) I realized that the flexibility my current job provides far outweighs the gap between my current and deserved salaries.

But if you insist on trying to give me money, I’m certainly willing to talk to you.

If you don’t know PHP, you can safely ignore this.

I had been using the following code to get rows out of a database (it’s with Oracle, but I’m sure mysql_fetch_assoc() would work just as well for these):

while ($row = oci_fetch_array($result)) {
    $whatever[] = $row[];
}

But then it hit me: if I’m already fetching the next row of results in the while() statement, and only copying the results into another array, couldn’t I compact the code more? I rushed to that old sandbox of mine, test.php, and tried:

while ($whatever[] = oci_fetch_array($result));

And by gum, it worked.

I’m assuming there will be one of two reactions from people who read this far:

1. Well, yeah.
2. That’s horribly bad practice because…

But considering I’m entirely self-taught, I’m fairly proud of myself. And if I shouldn’t be, please do let me know.

Edit: And there it is! Since the loop creates the new item in the array and then fills it with the value of oci_fetch_array, there’s always an empty value at the end that messes with foreach(). It was a fun idea while it lasted, though.

I had a lovely conversation with a friend today; let’s call her B because she’s looking for a job and apparently doesn’t want anyone to know anything about her. She warned me about some scary information-aggregating sites and how much of my information was out there. ‘Doubt it,’ I said in my best Carl the bartender voice. I know what I willingly give up, and I’m okay with it.

‘I’m listening to your Pandora station right now.’ Yep, I like Stiff Little Fingers. ‘Your Amazon wishlist!’ If you want to buy me Man Walks Into a Pub, I’m certainly not going to stop you — and I made sure that it didn’t publish my address before I made it public. ‘danconley.net!’ Oh damn, you found my super secret website with my name in the url.

I’ve covered this a bit before, which is why this is volume two. Then I was perfectly happy at CIRRIE, but now I’ve decided that I need to look for a new job not because I’m unhappy but because I would really like to be able to be the sole income while my wife stays home with our son when he’s born. I’m looking for web development jobs, so I assume it will be standard practice to Google applicants, and while my doppelgangers are currently DAs in Boston and apparently football coaches and the like (I wonder if Boston got the sheriff from Pennsylvania; he seems to have disappeared) it appears that the lawyer or real estate agent who used to own me.com has let his registration lapse and so I am King of Google.

So has anything changed? Am I now furiously protecting every scrap of information about me? No. The thing about me is that I am a person, and I have interests. I’m not going to give you every detail of my personal life — my Facebook profile has every privacy setting on ‘nuh uh’ — but I’m not going to pretend that I am a blank canvas, not interested in anything you might not be or might find offensive. Not only would I not want a job that would require that, but they shouldn’t want me either. It’s not just that I have published lists of my interests — homebrewing beer, video games, writing, Coheed & Cambria — it’s that I also have unintentional snippets of myself out there, particularly Twitter. Currently, glancing over my recent Tweets (a stupid word, but it’s the standard) you can see that I hate frames in html, that I’m excited for The Decemberists concert I’m going to tonight and that I think being offered to ‘meet new moms’ on a pregnancy site sounds kind of weird if you’re a guy. That’s by no means a complete picture, but I’d say those are all fair snippets of who I am.

As I put it to B, there’s nothing you can find that I wouldn’t tell a person at a party. You’re not going to get long political tirades from me (though it’s easy to see I’m left-leaning) and if there are any drunken photos of me you aren’t going to see them, but I’ll probably sneak in a reference to Dr. Horrible or something geeky (last night at a friend’s I pointed out that we already have the technology for a replicator, as long as it only serves you ‘Earl Grey. Hot.’).

Oh, and TNG was better than TOS but if you disagree we can still be friends.

A year ago, I talked about how Coheed and Cambria (and you’ll notice that since then I’ve said screw the authority file) were pretty self-involved and juvenile. Then I saw them in concert. Since then, well, um, I’ve kind of gotten really into them. With Dave’s help, of course, but I now consider them ‘my favorite band where everyone is still alive’ (RIP Joe Strummer, Keith Moon and John Entwistle). As always, Dave allows me to get enthusiastic about something in ways that are otherwise impossible, leading me to think of the great idea (and timewaster at his fiancé’s wedding shower) to compare all the track ones, track twos, etc and make a ‘Numerical Best of.’ (Let me tell you, In Keeping Secrets vs No World For Tomorrow was but one of the hard choices that had to be made).

When we got the date for the bachelorette party he looked, idly, at Coheed’s tour schedule. The day before they’re playing in Sayreville, NJ, which is kind of close, but — oh, it’s 6.5 hours away? And sold out? Oh, okay. But it’s also at the Starland Ballroom, where they’ve recorded a live album. We could do this. We could take a road trip.

Which, thanks to eBay, we shall.

It’s spontaneous and slightly crazy in all the ways that my life generally isn’t, and it means that I’ll get to hear Gravemakers and Gunslingers for the first time since I found out it was totally awesome. A year ago I was ashamed by my fanaticism. Now I embrace the hell out of it. I know I’m a dork, but you know what the best part about being a dork is? You don’t care.