Well, after that post yesterday, I went home, rebooted and found out I had to reinstall everything from the ground up because the Windows 2000 installation died and I couldn ‘t repair, only replace it.
No, I’m not switching to Linux, but I might switch to the Flintstones’ Operating System. Seriously.
Okay, not seriously. But seriously.
Bam. Bam.
…and worked for Hallmark.
I found out that the cellphone doesn’t have to send just tiny thumbnails of the pix I take with it.
PS, commenting is still off so please email me your praise. And lots of it.
And not you.
There’s this stupid commercial that starts with two stupid women at a stupid spa, wearing stupid white terrycloth robes. Now, to show that the makers of this commercial do not think that just white women are stupid, one of the stupid women is black.
It starts out with the white woman saying that the product, some kind of stupid chocolate thing, is like zen wrapped in karma. She’s so stupid that she can’t even use those words in their Western, everyday, nothing-like-the-original-Buddhist-and-Hindu-meanings meanings (sic).
Then, then - God help us all - she states, as a male attendant walks by, that eating this product is like Dating A Masseuse Good. In front of the male attendant. Since it’s just a little too kinky to actually be in a commercial aimed at the obvious demographic during daytime television and prime time, I have to go back to my chosen adjective for this post to describe it; Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. Is she trying to entice him or trying to let him know that she’d rather date the masseuse? (Doesn’t she know that terry cloth isn’t sexy? Even wet terrycloth? Her robe isn’t wet, I’m just saying.)
I mean seriously, when they were writing this commercial and as the script and then the production were going through twenty different hands and minds, was the Stupid Filter made of used toilet paper? Seriously. Okay, not seriously. But seriously.
Still not as bad as Star Trek: Enterprise, though.
A short time after the writing of the above, I thought to google “dating a masseuse good.” Small world.
Okay, everyone. So far suggestions for my NaNoWriMo entry have been very good. Thank you all very kindly. The ideas have been very useful.
But some of you haven’t submitted yet. I remind you, participation is mandatory. Failure to participate may result in the inclusion of characters in the novel with less than flattering personalities. Maybe I’m serious. Do you really want to find out?
I would like to point out the deadline isn’t until Friday, and I’ve arbitrarily set midnight as the cut-off point. But it’s a twenty four hour world and midnight itself is an arbitrary human concept.
Oh, I forgot! Y’all Can Enter More Than Once!
I’m going to enter NaNoWriMo, the (Inter)National Novel Writing Month - it is actually global, the original organizers were just a tad Americocentrically chauvinist in their choice of name.
The goal is to write a (minimum) 50000 novel in the 30 days of November.
Last time, 2002, I wrote a fantasy, as I mentioned in an earlier post, but I missed the deadline. This time I want to write a science fiction piece, but nothing in my files really grabs my imagination for this project.
Okay, here’s the plan. You’re going to help me.
How, you ask? What are you going to do?
Submit a short list of ideas, in the comments here (if you can), via email (dwjoyes [at sign] barker pip tnir pip org), or through my LiveJournal blog.
Here’s the rules:
1> Give me minimum 3 word phrases (maximum 7 to 10- I don’t want you writing the whole thing).
They’ll be ideas as inspiration. I might use them literally or figuratively. I might combine them with other ideas, yours or other peoples’, or use them as dialogue. No guarantee cuz I have no way to predict. Your contribution to my imaginative effort. Cliches are okay. Plagiarism is not.
2> No Faulkner, Joyes (later edit: I mean Joyce, of course. D’oh. Duh.) or Escher - each phrase has to make reasonable sense
- eg ‘three blue spheres’
- eg ‘the aliens laughed’
- ie not ‘husband bracken hairband’
- ie not ‘avuncular carbuncle ankle’
- Get it?
3> Submit as many as you want; I promise I’ll use them all. You may not recognize them, but they’ll all be there and I’ll be able to prove it.
4> Tell your friends. Seriously. Tell your kids.
5> The deadline (because I have to read them all and make notes based on them) is the end of next week, that is Friday, October 20, 2006.
7> Wish me luck.
Not that I have any complaints in that department.
I marvel at how versatile php makes a simple static webpage. Along with MySQL it’s just - well - cyberotic.
In preparation for my Jeopardy project (and a still amorphous poll project) I am testing out various php doodads with forms and databases, using a faked up contact management setup with only one table.
I keep discovering neat functions in both PHP and MySQL that I will probably never use, but want to try anyway, cuz who knows when I’ll ever get a chance.
Oo, baby. What’s this do? Will that work? This was good last time; will it do now? Swirl or a tweak? Don’t be afraid! Something new? Something new. What if I do it this way? Yeah, baby.
I still got it!
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.
Two things, actually.
I’ve been trying to get my Ubuntu machine set up with Apache, php and MySQL so that I can try to learn them in their ‘native’ environment. So far no lucking fuck. (Oh, that didn’t work…)
I can install them all but I can’t fiddle the .conf files (or whatever) to get them to talk to each other. Apache works fine, but it’s just a basic webserver without bells and whistles if I can’t get the other two to cooperate. It’s not impossible; I just can’t figure out how to change the right lines in the .conf files. There’s no errors if I change the wrong ones, she just don’t work. As is proving to be typical, the examples are dense and obscure, the help doesn’t and doing it exactly doesn’t do anything.
What I have managed to do is to get the same trio working on my Windows 2000 machine. It didn’t at first, and I had the same problems as on Ubuntu. However, while searching for some comprehensive Apache/php/MySQL package for Ubuntu, I found a Windows based setup called WAMP that installs all three and basically configures them all for me. Again, that didn’t work the first time I tried it, but I cleaned up the registry, tried again and again and again and last night, I got my php test script (which basically just calls “‘phpinfo()”) to work.
There are also php and MySQL admin pages which worked fine, including allowing me to create a test database in MySQL.
So then, I installed a php/MySQL dependent wiki program from Sourceforge that I’ve been hoping to get going for a while and, after some more fiddling, that worked too.
TV, last night, was a bust, however because it was an embarrassment of riches with new episodes of good shows in the same time slots, all evening. Very difficult night for me in that regard, ameliorated to some degree by my success with the web server suite.
I will survive.
But the jury (and by jury, I mean Me) is still out.
Discovered alien. Couldn’t run it as me, because I’m not root. Couldn’t log in as root, neither from any app/point/terminal locally nor via ssh from my W2K machine.
Discovered ssh. Couldn’t telnet. Couldn’t ssh from W2k until I installed it from the Ubuntu gui.
Discovered nano. Why would anybody use vi? Or even vim? Taliban geeks, that’s who.
Disovered sudo and gksudo. Thank you, geek gods! Why can’t I log in as root from the initial log in gui?
Discovered chmod, chown, a couple of others. Couldn’t modify config files because I’m not root. Couldn’t log in as root
Discovered the Root Terminal. Finally! I nearly cried, I swear to Christ.
Discovered info.
Disovered .conf files.
Discovered I actually like digging around in the man files and about 20 different Linux pdfs and chms.
Discovered alien Apache works and alien PHP will install, but they ain’t talking yet.
Knowledge is Power!
(I feel like the kid in the SciFi story who finds the ancient computer left over by a lost civilization and he has to learn how to use it to save his people, but there’s a deadline looming and he’s really only a peasant farmer. Story ends badly.)
I’m thinking of entering NaNoWriMo again.
Write 50,000 words of an original novel during the month of November, local time. Easy.
Encourage me! That is not a request.
I entered in 2002, but didn’t finish within the month. I did finish it by about May 2003, I think, at about 70,000 words or so.
It’s a fantasy called “The Word in the Box” and it’s still a first draft, but if you want to read it, just ask.