Why must you be so pretty?
Apple has mastered the art of constantly improving their user interface so that whenever anyone gets a new iPod or Macbook I look at it, and then at my own, and think, ‘Well mine looks like crap!’ Well played, Jobs.
Archive | Technology
You’ve got some splaining to do
I tried to go to Lying Media Bastards just now, to get more information about the new Radiohead album (in short: go to the Radiohead website and you can buy it, legally, for whatever you feel like paying; I paid 95p, which is ~$2, and you should all do it too so as to encourage this sort of behavior). Unfortunately, LMB is down with a 500 Internal Service Error. I sort of took offense at the message, though (which is the default; I’d just never looked before):
“. . . Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@lyingmediabastards.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.” (emphasis mine)
“What the hell’d you do, Dan? Huh? Huh?”
The times we live in
How did anyone live without ubiquitous wifi? We had an oil change/inspection scheduled for today and I brought my Macbook just in case I could find a stray unencrypted network. When I turned it on, I was asked if I wanted to join the “Northtown Guest” network. Why yes, yes I would.
God bless you, intertubes.
VBA Regex
I’ve come to love regular expressions. Not only do they make me feel geeky and cool (like when I can turn up my nose and say “Well, I just use vi”), but they’re damn powerful. So, as I was looking for a way to make an EndNote-style importer for CIRRIE, it seemed like the obvious choice. The problem was that there just didn’t seem to be any information on the internet about exactly how I was to go about this.
I came across RegExpr from AiVosto, but it’s not free. I understand that not everything on the internet is free (though it’d be nice), but I’m already trying to totally redo our entire importing/indexing/database system and so asking for $100 with only my reassuring smile and insistence that “it’s better” probably wouldn’t help.
Then, on my third or so trip into Google to find something — anything — to help, I stumbled on an article by Mark Carter: basically, to get regex to work in VBA you have to flip a switch. That’s it. Poof, free regex support.
(and of course, you just have to link to xkcd at this point)
Hangin’ out with SQL*Plus
As I was messing around with Oracle at work this week, I contemplated the “like” syntax. I’ve used it a fair amount (mostly when I’m lazy and don’t feel like typing everything out).
Brief explanation for the SQL illiterate: you can use % as a wildcard in a query, so
SELECT * from thesaurus_terms where term like ‘C%’;
will match all the words starting with C.
But come on: it’s just such a relaxed way of getting data. “Give me all the data that, like, starts with C. Or something. Whenever’s good for you.”
UNO
One thing that you should probably know about me is that I play video games. It’s just one of those ways that I relax, along with reading and poorly-played street hockey. My primary platform has become the Xbox 360, which has at its core the Xbox Live service that allows you to play over the internet with other people. These games can be “hardcore,” which is basically a way to say that they’re complex and a bunch of idiots take it too seriously, but they can also be easy and fun games. I play Halo, sure, but a good round of Marble Blast Ultra (if you played NES, it’s a lot like Marble Madness) is always appreciated.
The most recent (as far as I know) game to be released on Live Arcade (which tends toward the simpler, saner games) is UNO. Yes, you can just go out and buy the game if you want to play it with your family — this version doesn’t even have local multiplayer — but now it’s possible to play with people all over the world. If this doesn’t seem fun to you, then imagine continually playing the nasty cards on a British college student (Mark knows I love him): it’s the same evil pleasure, times the internet.
So, four of us are playing a game and discussing the gaming weekend we have planned in a month. A bunch of people, who mostly have never met in person, are going to be getting together at a resort outside of NYC for almost a week. We’re debating whether or not playing UNO will lead to physical violence, and trying to figure out how to play it if they don’t have internet access. We’ll have enough 360s, sure, but can we hook them up on a LAN?
My wife, who has been listening the entire time, suddenly bursts out, “Why don’t you just play with cards?” We all got silent, and felt very dumb. Ah, the internet…
I love Buffalo
So it appears that I have some work to do on the blogging front. Mainly, that I need to do something. I think, for now, that I’ll leave the blatant image hacks I did of Mike Cherim’s ones intact and focus on getting in some content when I can.
I’ve gone wiki-crazy recently, and have managed to pretty much shape my courses around a strange mix of archives, technology and wikis. It should either be incredibly interesting or make me completely unmarketable; I suppose time will tell.
But what this entry is really about is that I love the weather here in Buffalo. This probably comes as a shock to most people, as you either
- Don’t live in Buffalo and envision us buried under a few feet of snow year round, occasionally peeking our heads out to see if the sun will be visible for more than a few minutes each day, or
- Live in Buffalo and hate the weather.
I’ve always been one of those freaks who loved the snow (even after I got into a really horrible accident because of it), and today when I walked outside I realized that it was absolutely beautiful out: a perfect spring day. It made me realize that fluctuations between cold and warm are better than warm year-round, since now I have something to compare it to; the whole you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone for 4-6 months. That, and I love the time when it’s not warm too, and, well… I’ll miss this place when I (almost certainly) have to move.
