BS

Donchahateitwhencrapdrainsdownyourthroat?

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 | Life | No Comments

I know I do.  Haven’t gotten very good sleep for past couple days.  Then today I was officially on the phone at GoDaddy all day.   So I am sitting on these calls sounding like I am loosing my voice because I didn’t want to cough up a lung.  Whoever invented mucus/flem/snot should be shot. 

Decided to make things worse for myself by getting a Gyro for dinner.  This local place will take whatever ingredients you get and absolutely stuff the living shit out of it.  What I need to learn how to do is to eat slower… (Yes I know Ken… You eat twice as fast as me, but I still eat crazy fast compared to most people who didn’t come from the military).

You been watchin’ 24?  Wow, Crazy….

Oh, my left eye is still freggin’ crazy.  Twitching at random and all, well last night it threw me a curve ball and decided to feel like it’s burning when I went to bed.  I swear it felt like when I put my big ass bag of cayenne pepper away and then went to the bathroom…. It was so bad that I got up and went outside to my car to get the drops of Visine that I bought to keep myself awake on my road trip.  Which helped, until I layed back down again, when it once again felt like burning.   Bah, whatever, I can still see today.

My beer tastes bad, 2 different brands.  This can’t be good.

I might be brining back Ask-a-Smartass.  Rob got it in his crawl that he wanted to make a question answer database form with some validation and shiznit.  As you know, I rather enjoyed answering AAS questions, but there was too much spam and I didn’t have a database.  Now the bitch of it is that I can’t use it unless it’s a rss/atom feed these days and I’m not so sure he will get that to pull from the database and dump into proper format, so that would once again mean I have to spend a shitton of time figuring out how to do that on another script.  Seriously people, I am not a php/sql programmer.  I hate programming…  I like css, which is NOT programming.  Bah, whatever. 

I wonder if Fox would care if I were to encode all of the episodes of John Doe and put them in Flash on my site.  Greatest tv show ever and most people have never heard of it, and you can’t just buy it on dvd!

So is anybody going to post articles to A Smartass Education besides me?  I made you all authors, own up.  It would be cool to come to my own site and see new content that I actually had to read!!!

Cough Cough, Hack, Hack,  Grr… It’s summer here, I should not have a cold. Last week our temps were at 105 degrees.  So far this week isn’t quite that so high, but still… Not the point.

FYI; Fixed NES Load Issue

Monday, March 19th, 2007 | Site Updates | No Comments

Yes, I know a couple of you had complained. After server move I was unsure as to what the problem was with loading game saves, but I got it working again. Oh, and I was sick of Robin Hood being default so I changed it to Kung Fu…. I mean you can’t go wrong with a little Kung Fu.

Beyond that I am trying to speed up the load time of my page. I compressed all my javascript to shave off several k and reduced the number of items the feeds display a bit, but I am can’t shrink the image sizes at all so now I am looking to do something more extreme on the server, but I am waiting for response from the owner before It happens.

Enjoy

God of War 2

Sunday, March 18th, 2007 | Life | 1 Comment

I started playing God of War 2 this weekend. This is pretty much the only reason I am not working on the website.  It’s also probably the last good quality game for ps2 before I will cave in and buy a ps3.  Right now there isn’t any reason to get a ps3, but soon there will be, and my ps2 will just become a dust pile like all my old game systems (only unlike all of my other systems, I won’t just give that one away until there is a flawless pc emulator since there isn’t yet).

Ah, forget it, just watch the below trailer and perhaps you will understand why the God of War games are really addicting.

300 and Beer

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 | Helpful, Life | No Comments

I would of wrote this the other day, but I have been up too late every day as it is.  Last couple nights I have only had 4 hours sleep, though it’s my own damn fault, but It sucks in the morning when you end up taking a caffeine pill to stay awake.

Anyways the other night I decided that I had to watch 300.  I knew that this movie would either be fantastic or utter shit.  It did not look to have any middle ground.  Having decided that my asshole friend Rob went and watched it without me, grr… He didn’t really like it, but his opinion of movies doesn’t matter at all… Of course then my friend Chris text’d me and said it was in his TOP 5 movies now, and that did matter.

Ok, I’m sold.  So I called up Ken and he said he wouldn’t mind seeing it and that he should be home on Monday between 3 and 4.  This was perfect since I got out of work at 3:30, and I work half way between his place and mine, so I either go to his place or to mine and then waste a bunch of extra gas to go to his place later. 

Well, stupid corporate policy… My phone was set to silent and I had not changed it.  (Yes, I know I need to download that application that auto-switches cell profiles based on what cell tower you are using). So as I was just driving up to his place when I decided to check my phone only to see a text msg and 3 missed calls…. Ken wouldn’t be able to get to his place until 6.  It was just after 4 now. 

Well damn if I am going to go back home now.  So I went to the bar.  It was a local biker bar that I had been to before.  Never busy, but the bartenders are always hot and showing off what they got.  It actually used to be a strip club, but that’s another story…  So I decided to have a beer, one of the large ones (of course). I sat there for awhile and talked to the people in the bar.  All of which were regulars except me.  I think I disappointed some old guy when I didn’t know where something in Wisconsin was.  Didn’t want to disappoint him too much since he had a hacksaw laying on the bar next to him (seems the bar manager had asked to use it to cut something earlier…. still seemed odd to me).  Ended up talking to this other lady.  She wasn’t at all attractive or anything, but she was an individual and made for interesting conversation, and I was still talking to her when Ken showed up. 

Ok, now it was time for a movie… Well, almost.  We were hungry.  Went to Fridays.  Their menu selection looked good but our service and food sucked.  The only thing that it had going for it that night was that there was a ton of attractive girls there right by us.  Of course, if I had to guess they would probably have all been under 18, so I didn’t spend too much time speculating.

That done and over wit we finally got to see the movie, however I was planning to watch this as a matinee and now it was a late night showing.  I was tired when the movie started and a little worried when I saw all the guys just walking around in nothing but underwear and superman capes, but I got over that soon enough.

Why?  Because the movie was everything a red blooded guy needs in a movie at least since I watched it after 3 large beers.  The movie had:

1. Naked Chicks
2. Violence

That was it, and that’s also my entire review for it. 

If red blooded guy > then watch 300
Else > don’t watch 300 or even considering watching 300

Car paint down, window trim to go

Saturday, March 10th, 2007 | Life | 2 Comments

Well I got my car back today.  Painted.  It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good for only paying $340 (which is all I would pay him).  There are a couple spots that could use more color sanding and the guy told me he would do that free next weekend if I wanted.  Just needs it around the edges and the water jets.  Also I had him paint the lines on the car which he did paint the black lines but I had asked that he paint a small white line next to the large black ones and it seems he ended up using stickers for those, which of course is pealed up a tiny bit in one spot.  I didn’t even notice it until Rob pointed it out.

Oh well, unless you are really studying the car it looks pretty good.  Err… well except for the ugly ass area where there used to be a piece of window trim.  I am getting sick of waiting for the assholes who replaced my glass to own up and buy me a new one like they said they would, so I will probably start calling around to junk yards and put a wanted ad on craigslist.  In fact I will put up craigslist post right after I get done writing this.

For site today I woke up fairly frustrated.  My site wouldn’t load at all, which I did notice quickly was a DNS issue and more or less my own fault for not changing it when the servers were moved.  So I got that running but then NONE of my Smartass Education articles would load :( because it seems once again I did not have global variables.   I had a fix for it before but now the fix wasn’t working.  Well, this one Rob helped with, he told me to do something I had done before that had NOT worked for me before, however on the new server it did!!!!  Woohoo!

Well you know me, I am not content with just fixing something I need to make it shinier.  So I embedded the news feed into the webpage and then found a way to make it auto generate my sexy semi-transparent boxes.  Once I got this down I decided to convert my link of the moment to a delicious account and embed that into page, and then well… I just kept adding.

The problem comes now.  I want to add MORE feeds to the page.  However I am not sure how I will organize it.  Ok the obvious choice is call it Page 2, but that is kind of non-specific.  It is nice with the speed that ajax can load shiznit though so I am thinking I will end up having a bunch of pages of other feeds and will make it so you can set cookie to memorize which feeds you want on which page.

Well whatever.  I missed beer fest today.  It’s going tomorrow too, but I was unaware that it was only from 2-6.  It also costs $35 to get in, though that does give you 24 drink tickets.  I figured it would go on all night long, Just like a good ol’ Wisconsin Beer Tent.  Sigh

Well good times

Workin’

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 | Life | No Comments

Ok so I have gotten through my first couple days of work.  There was the paperwork / orientation / drug test day last week which was a nice short day.  Then the weekend where I tried to cram a ton of website work in.  I would have crammed even more in had I not been retarded staying up till nearly 4 am and then getting up with alarm at 6, only to end up going to bed early in afternoon due to exhaustion.  After that it was off to a normal job.

Granted it’s “training” for this and next week, so it’s not the same as what I will be doing, but so far it’s extremely slow.  I am at the “head of the class” and the teacher always asks me questions unless somebody else is volunteering  to answer it.  I sat and listened to a rep who has worked there over a year and a half today and ended up correcting him on several things he told the customer wrong.  Though I should of impressed when instead of giving an honest answer the guy managed to sell his way out of it.  I wasn’t really amused by this, but it seems most people doing this job that are technically inclined get promoted fast to different areas and those who do sales tend to stay where they are at since even though the sales is also supposed to be tech support, so long as a customer leaves the call happy then all is good.

Oh well, I am good at both technical skill and sales, so on the chance that they don’t just move me to webboard like they are trying to do, I should do very well.  It’s kind of a mixed bag, I would enjoy webboard more, but I would have to go to gilbert and I wouldn’t be doing any sales so I wouldn’t make nearly as much money even though the base pay is higher.  If I work the support/sales position then it’s in Tempe and is within walking distance of my house!

In other news there is my car.  I haven’t been driving it, y? Because on Friday I entrusted it to a guy who was going to repaint the hood and bumper for $400 and have it back to me good as new on sunday at 5.

Well he didn’t.  In fact he told Maria to just bring me to his place (to which he led her to believe it was done) just to show me the “progress” which was pretty much just primer on certain areas…  I was pissed and so was Maria since she had put her own reputation on the line to tell me how great this guy was.  Well this time he promised he would get it done on Monday and get it back to me by 5 on Tuesday.   Well at first I was happy when I pulled into Chuy’s and saw my car.  Until I got out and looked at it.  It looked like shit, though technically the right color all the painted area looked like it was textured, there was still sticker residue on one side of car, a couple of the small white lines were not painted etc..

I was flippant.  I was slightly calmed down when I was told that it was not finished and that when it was it would not be textured at all and the lines etc.. would all look good.  They brought my car back so that I could have it for the rest of the week and on Saturday the guy will come out to my house and finish the job there.  Still not happy about it not being done, they realize that I am not going to pay $400 anymore and what I do pay will only be based on my final satisfaction.  Went inside for a drink and the bar generously forgot to charge me for the pitcher+ of beer that I drank.

I do hope he gets done on Saturday and at a reasonable time and that it looks like a million bucks.  If it gets done early enough I am going to Tempe Beer Fest.

I added several more new artworks to site again.  Still going to keep it just new stuff for another week or so.   Oh, and where I asked for a better name for Smartass Reviews scratch that.  It was a stupid mistake on my part to call it that in the first place since I have been planning to call it Smartass Recommends for a couple years, and have written several blog posts where I reference that exact thing.  Not sure why I forgot it but it clicked to me again after I realized I was only writing reviews for things that didn’t suck.  Also I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, but that new link of the moment thing i took the time to setup.  Kind of worthless.  I mean I want it there but I went about adding it wrong, I will instead use del.icio.us since it does just what I need:  bookmark’s sites with my own descriptions and then puts them in rss feed so i can syndicate it on my site without having to manually add them.  Yeah, so no reason to have blog for links.  I will implement that soon.  Perhaps also my DiGG feed, but that will be somewhere else on the site if I do that again (you saw it before on the side of this blog, though I removed it).

Ouch… Grr, you know the feeling.  You have a sore or something and you can’t help but poke it… Well I have one on my gums right now.  It doesn’t take much to irritate and is really pissing me off.  It just appeared there this morning for no good ryme or reason.  So I am hoping it goes away tomorrow.

Tons-O-Changes (updated)

Sunday, March 4th, 2007 | Site Updates | No Comments

Today I fixed a TON of site bugs, and added some new features. I am not going to make big long descriptions about them but here’s the list of what I remember doing.

1. Added 85 new artworks, set only them to show up (for now)
2. Added a new “Link of the Moment” section. (This will eventually replace my old links page)
3. Fixed bug that prevented skeleton from loading
4. Fixed “The Fridge”, got rid of ugly white blobs and it now saves what you do again (Your welcome Tom)
5. Upgraded wordpress for BS and added 3 more databases for other sections.
6. Fixed bug in code that prevented IE from changing artwork with the artwork changer gadget
7. Took it one step further, got firefox to be able to use artwork changer gadget!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8. Converted entire “A Smartass Education” section to a wordpress blog for easier management.
9. Added everybody’s user account who is signed up on BS and made you all Authors on ASE!!!!!!!
   1. You can now post your own helpful knowledge to the site without even needing my approval, I know some of you are selfish and want to keep your knowledge to yourselves, but for those who aren’t, this will be a great opportunity. Ask me for details~!
   2. Oh, if you do post one (which you can already), it will currently post to the ASE page only, I have to manually add the links to the page for the moment because of the sexy way the posts are displayed. Tomorrow I will try to find a way to auto-generate my sexy links whenever somebody posts
10. Started work on ANOTHER new section called Smartass Reviews (anybody got a better name?), I got the database created, but haven’t started writing a review yet. The theory is you review something, and then put a link to buy it on Amazon & a link to download it with bittorrent if possible.
11. Converted the BS feed display to be written in PHP instead of Javascript, you may not see difference but now when you click the Home button bs will actually show up, before with the javascript it could not be reloaded into the page so it was just blank. Oh, I also made it a bit wider for the moment anyways.
12. Worked on new structure for smartass, not design, just code structure, however if I finish this project I will be able to make lots of themes and have the themes randomize or perhaps change with days of the week… This is quite a rewrite though, will probably take awhile.
13. Shrunk old design links, I was going to totally eliminate them, but I still want to convert them and I have room on page for the moment
14. Fixed search engine / form display page bug that caused it to sometimes not show up.

Whew. I shall probably be working on site a lot tomorrow since I’ll be up. It’s like 3 am, but I haven’t been tired, which sucks because I am setting alarm for 6am because I need to get used to getting up then for work training which starts early monday morning and goes for 2 weeks. I bought a $5 alarm clock to help piss me off every morning.

Grr, my stupid eyeball is twitching again. Perhaps it will stop when I get my car back looking like a million bucks. well, it will still have trim peace missing even if the paint is perfect it will still be goofy looking ;*(

Update: Everything was working fine when I went to bed.  When I woke up the BS feed wasn’t displaying on the site.  Yes I am doing it a new way, but it should of worked.  Seems that the 2 posts I had that I had re-posted had changed some punctuation to some weird characters and then the feed wouldn’t validate and then would not display.  Odd.  I seem to have taken care of it now.

Trust Inc.

Friday, March 2nd, 2007 | Life | No Comments

Just got back from the bar. Walked home, It was quite windy out but no matter… See tonight I left my car with a guy who couldn’t speak english, and am trusting that I will get it back on Sunday with a shiny new paint job…

Yes, trust is a bitch, but the guy does have street credit. He painted 3 cars in “The Fast and Furious” and has painted 4 cars from other regular Chuy’s customer’s. So I am trusting that he will do a good job.

You know that I am totally trusting when even after I gave up the car I kept drinking, and then played some guys at Tekken and lost twice (I did win 4 times, and it was tekken 4, the worst tekken game, but still…. you know I was off to loose twice).

It’s only $400, though that’s way more than the $250 I expected to pay (insurance bastards), still I did not pay in advance, and I am told if anything is wrong he will keep working on it until I am happy with it. Since other people at Chuy’s (my local bar) have had work done by him, I am confident that I will at least get my car back.

In other car news I am going to rage against the guys who “fixed” my window. I have left them so many messages because they never answer the phone on the warranty line. I am going to just start calling the sales number and forcing them to escalate me to a manager because they owe me some bloody parts. All of which are in stock at the nearest Mini Cooper dealership, so they have no excuses.

Oh, hmm should probably make a different post for this, but since I am making this one, why bother, right? Anywho, I caved in and took a normal job. Not to say I will quit making websites or anything, but I am not employed full time at GoDaddy. Yes, that’s right, the place that I was planning to be employed by when I first moved to Arizona. They took their sweet ass time when I first got here and I ended up getting sick of waiting and went elsewhere, but now I redid all their tests and interviews and have already “officially” started. Yes I quoted that, but that’s because I haven’t started training yet. Start that on Monday. I have to figure 30 min drive to work, and I start at 7am for the next 2 weeks, which will annoy the piss out of me, since I can wake up at 7 something, and can very comfortably wake up at 9, but getting up at 6, well that is a skill I have only mastered on nights that I drink too much (and then it’s about 4:30-5am I typically wake up at).

Since I won’t have my car until Sunday night, I will be at home. Which probably means I will crank out a bunch of new stuff for the site. 1 of them being a tutorial on how to get a free iPhone, and another thing will be an entirely new section, complete with it’s own syndicated feed. Look for it….

Good Times,