Others: [ juliebug | solas | Pixie | Sonya | Alan Cox | raskal | SilverStr | Rynsey | Sillz | ArcterCode ]
| 04/30/2000 |
In fact, this entire Sunday line up blew chunks. Simpsons was the most incohesive, badly put togeather cartoon I've seen for a while. Course, I haven't watched cartoons for a while. That's not an excuse. I watched the show mostly from the start and it was the most confusing thing I've seen in a while.
New people arrive at work tomorrow. This should be interesting. A new techy and programmer. I think in commemoration of the new month, new work schedule, and new people I shall be shaving the goat.
Well, it's 10:30 and I didn't get the sleep I wanted last night, so tonight I leave you now.
| 04/26/2000 |
| 04/24/2000 |
I did get some cool stuff done here though, a bit more time to play with it and I'll be happy. Basically I'm going to try to use the everything engine to do a page of some kind. I got it up and running this evening (everything.ufies.org) but really, don't expect to see anything other than the default vanilla install. The way that the "nodeballs" work is still a bit alien to me, so seeing an actual productive and working site might take a bit :) Especially if I have to learn XML first!
Greetz to Tig who made it here for Easter dinner (not mine mind you, I had yummy turkey with mom and dad). Good to have you back man.
My take on the Elian situation. I see that today he was forcably removed from the place in Miami. I say who cares. Not about that, but about this whole situation. It shouldn't have made it this far, and should have been resolved long ago by far less sensationalistic means. I mean, come on, I'm sure that this almost exact thing has happened many times before, but do we hear about it and see pictures of it on (apparently) all sorts of major newspapers? I think no, kind and gentle readers.
| 04/12/2000 |
Car update: Took it into ICBC and they basically just polished the scratch out. There is still a small dent but it's only visible if you know where to look. I have a sheet as well, but if I want to pay my deductable of $300 on a ~$325 repair job I can.
Bah.
Perl update: Got a call and guess what the guy (at least I got another name and phone number) suggested? "Maybe we sent you two currupt keyfiles" gads.... Anyway, today I shall discover where the problem is and fix it all myself I think!
| 04/11/2000 |
Well, it's been a while in coming, but I finally got some new wheels. I figured, well, my CD player hasn't been working all too great lately so why don't I just replace the whole fscking car.
So I did. I hit the online and found a decent price and then headed out to the dealership to get it. It was actually bought at a VW dealership (and had the financing done at an Audi dealership), but after a long long day last weekend I finally got it all done and finished up. In case you're wondering, yes that is a loaded 2 Liter VTEC powered '98 Prelude which redlines at 7500. And yes, that is the car I've always wanted (well, I've always wanted a not quite new prelude, not this specific one, but I'm certainly not complaining :)
So on Saturday I took it in for it's final buffing and safety inspection (they apparently didn't have it long enough to do these things yet). Got home around 5pm or so and crashed. Next morning I wake up and find this. So my question is now, who gets the beating? Hell, I haven't even started making payments and already I have to go to ICBC to be bent over for repair costs! ARGH!
This is why I have never had a new car before.
Anyway, there's some more pix (well, larger versions of them anyway) on the ArcterCam page. I also put up some new corny and rex pix on the ArcterCat Gallery page. Thanks for letting me use the digital camera dad!
| 04/10/2000 |
Actually got gas for 61.3 yesturday. Spent 13 hours in line and burned 2 tanks idling, but I did it! (ok, maybe not). Actually I just waited a couple of hours and got it on the way home when there were no lineups.
Yes, new stuff to the cam coming RSN. I just have to edit some images k?
Things here at home (that would be the NetMaster offices), are good. Except for stupid idiot support people (not us), I'd have much more done. See, I'm writing a shopping cart. Pretty neat stuff. Anyway, I've gotten to the point where everything is done. New graphics, the look is all integrated into the new website... everything. Well, except for the little detail of actually doing the credit card validation and charging. For that we're going to use a perl module supplied by a company. After trying it out I wrote them with a "this doesn't work, and here is why I don't think it works" email citing such things as functions that expect two variables but are only passed one and so on. Anyway, the response was "your keyfile might be bad, here's another one". So on faith (pah) that they knew what they were talking about, I tried it.
Same thing.
So I email them with a "that didn't work, here is why I don't think it works" message again. No response. We had some other things happening so we sort of ignored it for a while. Then it got to the time when we needed it to work ASAP (that would be now). So I send more emails. Eventually we find out that the people we've been talking to have been forwarding our support mail to a non-existant office.
Somewhere along the way we were sent another keyfile which worked just as well as the previous one.
Finally getting a hold of a real person this morning I was told that she'd passed on a message to the main guy here in Vancouver, and he'd be getting a hold of me RSN. At around 5 I all him and he's like "yes, I do remember seeing some email about that somewhere along the way". Gee, nice to know what good attention they pay to emails marked urgent (if it was in fact marked urgent). He emailed me (take a wild guess here) a new keyfile. This time he included the complete perl module at my request, just in case I had an old copy of the software or something.
Same results (except their test program that I was using was slightly different so the error message had some more text above it).
I eventually got a hold of the original developer of the program who of course doesn't support it anymore, but said he'd take a quick glance at my screen dumps and if it was a quick and dirty thing no big deal.
So this is where I am now. Tomorrow morning I plan to call back to the Vancouver office and demand in the most polite way (at first) to speak to someone who actually knows about this. I mean, I admit, I could be just stupid and have no clue about this all, but from everything I can figure you should be able to run their test script after installation and have it actually do something. Right? I could not know anything and all my bitching might be due to me missing something obvious... I hope so, cause I'd hate for this to be the way that this company does business (name withheld to protect the accused (for now)).
| 04/06/2000 |
Well, a nice $0.04 jump after a nice $0.12 one. Guess that makes up for it huh? Bastards.
Aside. U2's Live version of Sunday Bloody Sunday quite rocks. It's keeping me sane at the moment. But not sane enough for a small rant.
I hate our fscking web guy!
He did up the company's new web pages in some screwed up wank program from Adobe called GoLive. I'd put a link to it but the only results for it from a search on their main site is in the support database. I had to hit google to find it's page.
How does it suck? Let me count the ways....
First of all, check out the main page above. It's 80k of text. Just for a page that fits in a single browser window. And for what? Some mouseovers. This could be done by a real web designer in far less with the same results from an imagemap and some javascript.
The code it produces on the above (go view source, I dare you) isn't terrible. Sadly, our website guy has a mac. Go on, ask me how little of a problem it was to get his code to a workable state on a unix box.... I dare you. A long fucking time is the answer. I ended up going through the code in it's not-in-one-line-but-not-nicely-indented form and indenting and correcting it. Seems that the conversion randomly doubles letters for no reason. Some "if" statements were turned into "iif"s and some "function" were "ffunction" and so on. I ended up taking some working code of his and pasting it in to get it to work.
And of course it doesn't work even yet (just checking it under IE) because of the way that IE handles tables.
*sigh* Someone shoot me (or him) soon please.
| 04/05/2000 |
Well a bit has happened here lately. Not for tonight though, I'm waiting for some stuff first. Watch the cam site though :)
Good thing I filled up very recently too (see gas prices above). Mom was right, they do seem to make these huge jumps on a tuesday (at least when the price has had a semblance of steadyness for more than a day or 2). Something to watch out for.
Me? Tired, but going good. The new office rocks. I'm secluded enough now I can get work done better I think. I have my tunes, a rockin' box, and all my stuff around me. I'll have to get out the "Alan, CGFH" sign tomorrow morning (that's Computer Geek From Hell thankyouverymuch... though Code Geek might be more appropriate now).
Are you sure it's only tuesday?
