Lewies Blog

The power went out this evening.  I went for a walk around the neighborhood and power was still out when I got back.  I was clueless as to what to do.  A while later I grabbed my laptop and decided to watch War of the Worlds.  It was one of those movies I got from the Columbia DVD Club because I didn’t tell them that I didn’t want it.  Seems you got to manually opt-out every month.

The movie was put together well in everything except the end of story, or the explination of why the humans won.  There were all these bloody tree roots growing every where.  The alien robots couldn’t operate there force fields with birds flying around.  The ending narrator seemed to make it appear that DNA in our blood was the reason that the aliens all dried up and died.

Well, now that the power is back on after four hours, I’m back to living out the days of my SecondLife.

Yep. It’s my birthday.

Do me a favor and get me some referral bonuses.

Free Sony PS3

Free Video iPod

Free XBox 360

Join SecondLife, and yea - it’s free too.

My wife and I had some really bad service the other night when we went to get some late night toasted subs at WaWa.  Last time, it was three in the morning.  This time it was only eleven at night.  We walked in and we saw our esteemed friend behind the deli counter again.

I wispered to my wife that we could drive on down to the next WaWa and order our subs there.  She decided to give the guy a chance.  After all, his fingernails were no longer purple, and he looked a bit more sober.

She watched as he put some swiss cheese on a sub, then took it off, then laid some mayonaise on thick, then put the cheese on.  He was looking at a screen back and forth to the sandwitch.  Still new I guess.  Another customer came up and asked if it was the roast beef that he ordered. “No, it’s the homestyle roastbeef” was the reply.  Sheesh.  On top of that, the customer complained that he ordered a larger sub.

My wife looked at me and then ran for the door.

On the way to the next WaWa, we passed checkers.  My wife loves checkers.  She went through my wallet and pulled out some singles.  I told her to look again, there is bound to be a twenty in there.  Sure enough, she found it.  We went home happy with nice meaty sandwiches, drinks, and awesome fries.

A little over a year ago, I participated in an acceptance test for an upcomming service called NewsworthyAudio. The service converts news stories to audio. During the test, there were stories read by people, and others read by computers. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a person and a machine. They have software that has many “bits” of a real person speaking that strings those bits together to read out the story.

I bring this up because they sent me an email today regarding there service. They have 5 new free podcasts available in the iTunes library. They are also taking surveys in return for a free week of there service once they go live. If you are interested in what they are about, head on over to register and take the survey. After that, subscribe to the iTunes feed and listen.

I’ve been listening to many audio books on my way into work from the Discworld series. I’m up to book 10. I started looking for more information about the series and discovered that they had a game. Two games in fact. The first was on an old system that I hadn’t heard of, but I was able to download it off of there site and find an emulator and play it in my web browser. The second game came out 10 years ago and runs on the PS one.

I found the game on eBay and won the auction. When it came, I searched up and down all over my house for all of my parts to the PSOne. After an hour of this, I had a running PSOne hooked up to my TV and an enjoyable game on my hands.

The whole thing is setup with puzzles of collecting stuff so far. I run around as Rincewind, fully dressed in wizzards garb with a loyal chest of many tiny feet following me. Many characters from the books are there including cut me own throaght dibbler and the librarian (an ape). The game appears to reference many books this time instead of the first book alone like the first game did. I just hope I don’t get lost understanding the humor of some of the sceens that I haven’t heard about yet.

During my days of growing up with IBM compatible computers, an adventure game was commonly walking around different two dimensional artistic backdrops picking up things laying around and talking to people. These were games like Kings Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, Indianna Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Leisure Suite Larry, Space Quest, Adventures of Willy Beamish, Quest for Glory. Actually, my IBM PC Junior packed away has the first Kings Quest on it.

It’s nice to walk around like this, but also lacking. You don’t feel like you “are” the character, but more of the fact that you are directing the character. 3D has changed all of that. It’s amazing that this kind of 2D game exists for the PSone since most games for it are 3D.

Three o’clock in the morning and all is well.  Well, not really.  My wife and I were hungry and we went over to WaWa to get some grub.  We ordered and paid for everything just fine.  A new guy was making sandwiches and wasn’t sure what he was doing.  He made lots of goofy comments that made us think he was either on something, or just a bit slow.  He had purple fingernails.  I was trying to figure out if it was fingernail polish or if he had a medical problem.  He made one of the worst wrappings of the sub that I had ever seen.  Angel said that she had seen worse.  He totally messed up on the Turky bowl.  Actually we had to keep reminding him it was on the slip, and ingredients that were needed.  We started out with a small container of mashed potatoes and then he found a kaiser roll to go with it.  He started working on my sub and we asked where the turkey was.  Someone came and showed him the turkey and instructed him as to how the stuff was supposed to go together.  My own sub didn’t start off well.  He put cheese on the bun and toasted that.  Rubbery bread, yuck.  He put on a little cheese steak and a little sause from the meat balls.  Then he put on lots of lettuce and three handfulls of onions.  Just one handfull would have been enough.  I just figured I’d let him get on with what ever he was doing.  It was just taking so long anyhow.  Angel told him to forget about cutting it in half and just wrap the thing.  I stopped him in the middle and told him how to wrap it better.  My god.  After a long time, we were free to escape his mindset.

Sometimes, I surpass my own geneouse.  Something got done today that was an amazing solution to a difficult problem regarding cyclic redundancy.  The side effect of this solution has sereouse potential to solve some very aged and hard problems that have been left hidden away in a corner.

All of this has to do with the implementation of Http Modules within ASP.Net.  With these special modules, you can catch the process of a web page before the web server processes it in its own normal way.  The power of them is so strong once they are understood that you can make all kinds of tweaks that were never possible before.

So today, I solved an immediate problem, impressed the manager on how I solved it, and collaborated on how we could use the method to solve some past feature requests.  When I left for home, I already had a working solution up and running on my local machine in the office.  What a day.

I was doing my thing today, in the zone and programming with style. My co-worker says he’s gettng reports of people getting email. My heart just sank. I spent some time just trying to figure out who exactly got emailed. Over 300 people got the message. My manager was not too pleased when I told him the news.

By the end of the day, my manager was a little happy. I had completed some work for him that he seemed to be uncertain about in the morning. It’s like a television episode in a way. A problem in the beginning, catastrophie in the middle, and at the climax, the problem is figured out and quickly everything ends as it began.

I also found out that Macromedia offers a developer edition of ColdFusion 7 MX on there website. I feel like such a dunce. I went through all of this trouble to find a free server (BlueDragon), and here there was a developer version of the real thing. I also got a hold of a few ColdFusion samples (GuestBook, FileUpload, Portal) off of Planet Source Code and learned a few things.

I’ve been tasked to learn ColdFusion this weekend. If you see any web pages on the internet where the name ends with CFM, those are ColdFusion web pages. I don’t have any software, and a server wasn’t provided for me to work with. I was a bit confused on how I was supposed to learn the stuff. We have a new guy comming in on Tuesday and I need to know ColdFusion by then so I can help him get up to speed.

I did some searching on the internet. I found a product called BlueDragon that can run web pages with ColdFusion tags in them (ColdFusion Markup Language - CFML). It can run on its own on port 8080 by default, and you can also map it to Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS). The best part of the deal is that this server is free.

I found a few websites with ColdFusion tutorials. I also found that Macromedia has a website that I could use as a reference for everything CFML. I always looked down at ColdFusion as if it were almost a joke. When HomeSite started supporting ColdFusion tags, I was busy learning Active Server Pages (ASP). Thank goodness for that, as ASP has caught on greatly compared to ColdFusion.

It seems that ColdFusion has finally caught up with me. The good news is that I already know so many programming, scripting, and markup languages. This is making it easier to catch onto CFML.

A deadline is approaching to fix a mirror. Inspection is due this month and the glass is missing on the drivers side. I’ve been searching all over the internet and keep comming up with kits for the whole drivers side assembly rather then just the glass. I did find someone on ebay who can make custom glass cutouts for any model vehicle. The problem is - it is just the glass. I need glass with a backing on it as well. Don’t ask me where the backing went. I’m under the impression that it just “popped out”.

So the kit retails at $171.29 US. I’m usually finding it priced just below $90 on the internet and a very limited few price it just below $60. I wonder how much an auto dealer would charge to install the thing. Anyhow, if you have a used driver-side Pontiac Montana 2002 mirror available and it is still May, leave me a comment. One can only hope.