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.

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

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’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.

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.

Dear sir or madam:

I occurs to me that perhaps your store is in desperate need of a reorganization.

Not a shuffling about of employees; no, instead I think you seriously need to consider exactly why your items are where they are, and whether they couldn’t perhaps be put somewhere else. Perhaps somewhere that makes sense.

I suppose that may be a radical concept. Perhaps there’s some secret law of product placement, known only to the upper echelon of supermarket managerial staff, that can somehow maximize product sales by placing them in the exact opposite place a patron would expect. One might think that, being dairy products, it would follow that when milk and cheese are next to each other, that yogurt would also be next in line. And then eggs, perhaps. Not so, you say! I’ll give you that they are all in the same general quadrant of the store, taken quite broadly, in that they are all in the very back of the store, but I suspect that this is more for economical reasons, as it would require multiple refrigeration sections to store the eggs in the optimal area, likely between bread, avocados and children’s cereals with ‘O’ in the title.

Instead, you must be content with having the dairy items scattered willy nilly along the refrigerated section. I have put much thought — much more than I should have, I know — into trying to discern exactly what the overarching philosophical design is. Are your meats organized by animal, or by cut? Are eggs next to poultry because they both come from chickens? If that is the case, why is cheese so far from the ground beef, next to pork chops? Is it because the source of cheese can be any number of animals, and so you consider it a grab bag of sorts? I admit to visiting your store as infrequently as possible (my doctor has informed me that a cardiac condition makes it inadvisable to try to navigate your labyrinthian aisles), but do you perhaps change the location of your cheeses weekly in order to maximize the randomness of it all? Or is it instead some sort of astrological imperative, handed down by superintelligent beings as an experiment, your security cameras transformed into scientific observation points? Will, one day, a human skull made out of crystal appear in the middle of your snack cake display?

It should be noted that the grievances described above are but the tip of the iceberg as it relates to your establishment, but as previously noted I have a health condition that prevents me from thinking about such matters for more than a handful of minutes, lest my heart burst from my chest and throttle my brain in a futile attempt to make it all stop.

Yours, sincerely,

DRQ Conley III

More than that, I think, it’s that I don’t think it’s anybody business what the hell I’m talking about. This generally goes for all conversations, but at least when I’m face to face with a person they get the whole picture. Maybe. it’s hard to describe, but the end result is that you should never call me on the phone, ever, especially if you’re my wife and insist on using speakerphone in the car even though that further obscures what I’m saying.

The olive polo shirt I’m wearing is a thatched weave, almost. Were I to know more about sewing and fabrics then I could be more specific, but instead I will have to allow it to suffice in that it is certainly not smooth. Down the front of it the texture remains the same but darkens, as three — no, sorry, four — dots of varying sizes mar the fabric. These are from wearings past, which inexplicably outwitted the washing machine. The collar buttons up, all the way today even though I’ve been told that it looks better open just because it felt too free, almost like not wearing a shirt at all. Now I can feel the comforting closeness of it, the mystery texture, around my neck.

Today’s pants are corduroys, which I admit to giving a lazy attempt at spelling before right clicking and allowing OS X to correct for me. There is a famous story about corduroys, though I cannot remember now exactly what it is, and so each time I wear them I am reminded vaguely of my childhood. Alternating ravines and mountains, perfectly straight, run down the legs, creating a whooshing sound — though not as obvious of one as I had been led to believe — which makes me call them, if only to myself, my Ninja Pants.

Black socks (they never get dirty; the longer you wear them, the blacker they get: another childhood reference for some reason) wrap around my ankles, digging in. I’ve said in the past that the greatest joy that comes from wearing socks pulled up your legs is the feeling when you take them off. Thinking about them now has driven the itchiness into a frenzy of sorts: I long to lift up my pant leg and scratch, bringing blessed relief. These are the second kind of black socks I have (three total, including the fancier, thinner, oddly patterned ones), and have much thinner, sleeker ribbing. They seem to be legitimate dress attire instead of tube socks that happened to fall into a vat of dye. Which sock I wear on any given day is random, of course, though I do take care not to combine the varieties except in cases of extreme sartorial distress.

My shoes, also black, are smooth, and would be shiny were they not scuffed with dust placed there by the opposite foot resting on top in a tic I can’t quite explain (do I feel compelled to turn my lower body into a diamond shape?) Around the laces the smoothness of the material bunches up, drawn together in grooves by overly tightened laces. Perhaps this means I buy my shoes too large for my feet. The laces hang, haphazardly, to one side or another, double knotted in a ritual dating back to my grammar school days to ensure they wouldn’t come untied (as all my shoes did, which is why I was always grateful for a new pair that was velcro). It honestly had not occurred to me, nearly 25 years old, until this moment that I can probably safely tie them only once.

The bottom of the shoes is different from my previous pairs, despite the outward appearance of being identical (dress shoes and my wife appear to be the only facets of my life I am disinterested in changing repeatedly). Rather than multiple groups of four circles connected in a square, almost clover-like, these are a myriad of diamonds with perpendicular lines in the middle forming crosses. They litter the bottom of the shoes, in theory providing traction but in practice giving just enough room in between each other to pick up small bits of paper and rocks that may be unwittingly tread upon. They cover the entire bottom, with the exception of the arch, where it narrows for no reason that I can see besides giving the illusion of thinness, mirroring my foot stretching slightly into the air. What sort of person looks at the bottom of their shoe enough to make such aesthetic changes necessary?

This took far longer than five minutes. I hope that’s not against the rules.

How do you eat your food? Assuming you have multiple foods in a meal — say, a burrito, rice and beans — do you eat all of one before moving on to the next, or eat them all equally?

I’ve never been a Sequential Eater. My philosophy is that I want to enjoy everything for as long as possible, so I’ll take a few bites of one before moving on to the other. At this point, it’s automatic: look at the results of a fish fry when I was 75% done:

I had never given this habit a name, until I realized that my coworker/friend Brie did the same thing. She had dubbed it Sandwich Pickle Chips, since that’s her standard lunch (Brie’s philosophy of A Good Lunch could be a post in itself). Now, though, the battle lines have been drawn. Our foes have been named, and they are many. Which side are you on? Are you one of us, or one of them?

I suppose no one really gives it much thought, but then most people wouldn’t notice they had six peanut M&Ms left, two of each color, and then eat them in an even amount. (please note that I have never considered myself to have OCD; I just like symmetry).

They were Brie’s M&Ms, by the way.