Barkerburgh

Woohoo!

Scary! Exciting! Maddengly short! On again today at 5:00pm Eastern!

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
     But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
     All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

      - William Shakespeare
      - Sonnet 30

Couldn’t have said it better myself.*

Last night it suddenly occured to me that I have two working (apparently stable) OSs (Windows 2000 Pro and Debian’s Ubuntu Linux), powerful server side processing and a DBMS on W2K (php and MySQL, the same to be working soon on Ubuntu), three different browsers on W2K (Firefox, MSIE and Netscape 7), Firefox on Ubuntu, and pretty much all the proper manuals and documentation, in part thanks to Reid.

I experienced a feeling akin to wanting to be on a trip to Mars in a homemade spaceship. Glee.

What shall be my first project?

A little background. ‘Coronation Street’ used to be on weekday afternoons on CBC for years. Then they moved it to 7:30pm. Actually better for me. Then thanks to last year’s hockey playoffs and the Olympics, it disappeared for several months. I think that in the first nine months of 2005, we got maybe three months of Corrie. The Sunday morning back-to-back rerun of the previous week’s episodes was useful, when it was on, but it wasn’t during the Olympics. When Corrie finally came back, it was on at 7:00pm, which left my 7:30 timeslot open. What to watch?

Jeopardy.

Still with me? Wow.

So here’s the project. A web page produced on the fly by the server that will be a generalized browser version of this image, the Jeopardy starting board:

And one for Double Jeopardy, with the cash values per question doubled. Get it?

The category labels will only be “Category 1″ etc, though. I don’t need to know or input the questions for each category per episode, I will just need to click a radio button for Right or Wrong. This will be sent to the server, where the question’s dollar value, my answer etc will be stored in a table, and a sister table will tally my cumulative winnings, rightings and wrongings, by episode, date, time, etc.

I’m still designing the database in Java-based Freemind mind mapping software from sourceforge. What a great tool.

I figure it’s a little fancier than “Hello World”, which tradition I respect the hell out of, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t help me learn php and MySQL.

Look close, the dark forms are shadows. The light stripes are the camels.

Thanks to Anneli!

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, because it’s hilarious.

The local Fox affiliate carries South Park weeknights at midnight.

The episode where I first noticed it is called “Cancelled” and in it, the boys discover that Earth is an alien reality show that is about to be cancelled, resulting in the destruction of Earth.

These are Joozians, alien network executives, (apparently meant as satires of the supposed Jewish domination of the television industry) to whom the boys go to beg them not to cancel ‘Earth.

See their antennae? They have similar organs on their shoulders called ‘jagons’. They party with the boys at a Joozian strip club….

… and get so stoned that they suck each other’s jagons, which carnal act we actually see on Comedy. Kenny gets a Polaroid of the act.

On Fox they do a tasteful fade to a hangover scene. The boys use the Polaroid to blackmail them into cancelling the cancellation and go home.

The first time I saw that version of the episode, I thought ‘Huh. I was pretty sure I saw them suck their jagons before…” Later I saw the same episode on Comedy. Yup, jagon-sucking.

What is hilarious to me about this, is that the show is a cartoon, digitally mimicking the original crude construction paper cut-out technique of the early show, AND it’s on at midnight.

Who are they protecting?

Not forgetting the fact that they’re fncking cartoon aliens!

And it’s Fox!

The script for ‘Cancelled’…