Rinsefirst

I know that for the most part, all I do is talk about work and life, but really, that is what this blog is for. It’s to document my life, day in, day out, hopefully until the day I die. That way, some kid of mine can look back and say: SEE! Look how you screwed up when you were 18.

Ok, so that’s not the entire real reason, but it gives me the excuse to ramble on for a little bit while I wait for a computer to finish installing.

Let’s start with Nebraska. Nebraska was a great trip. For those of you who didn’t know, Amber came with. She got along wonderfully with the family in Nebraska (no surprise) and it was great for us to be able to spend Christmas together. Thanks to this holiday, there are photos of me wearing a pair of underwear (not just the underwear) that shall we say… promotes many funny things. I might post this photo, however, I doubt it.

The trip back was the same old same old. It was my birthday (as it almost always is if I’m not working at MSA on my birthday). Amber got the Sims 2 from Walmart so she played that most of the way. It’s a pretty cool game overall, and I’m impressed by how extensible it is. I’ve considered opening a shop for items that could be sold for the sims. Dont know if people would buy, but hey, you could try.

Since I’ve been back, it’s mostly been about work and sleep. Tomorrow, the MSA Computer Club is coming in, so I’m trying to get an image ready for them to put to use. Hopefully I’ll have 80% of it done by the time they get here. Just can’t forget to install anything. The rest of the time has been spent working on WLC and OXWAF. It’s coming along nicely, again I would show the world, but there is no easy way to do that.

I need to order a new server for JR here very quickly. I have to talk to my Dad about it though and about how we can fund this without to much of a headache.

Amber just got some sad news, so we will have to learn how to work through that together. I’m sure she will post her sad news sometime in the near future.

Well, the next CD needs to get put in this machine, so I guess I’ll get going on that. L8r World.

I don’t like it when my graph goes black, so this is a quick post in the midst of life. Life is giving me about 20 days to catch back up. Those 20 days known as winter break. Of course, they don’t really kick in til I get home, but who says I can’t get a head start on it from Nebraska. That’s right… I’m in a Nebraska hotel with my loved ones either in this room or in the room next to me (we have 2 due to reasons involving Amber coming on this trip). Lots of fun so far, just some friendly banter and to much pizza. The drive was good, and brief, but life was good.

Mezzoblue posted on the topic of the Apple Ipod and it’s design. I thought I would mention that I think both creative and the IPOD have it all wrong. I want something that’s 15 dollars. Holds no more than 6 hours of music at a high compression. Has 3 buttons like the old walkmen… Next (Fast Forward), Play, and Stop. No more of this browsing. No more of this fiddling with hard devices. I want it cheap and simple. Something that, when it breaks (like my tape cassettes always did), I can throw it out and get a new one without feeling guilty.

Ok, I should get some sleep now, I didn’t get any last night afterall. Night world.

I like my new routine of not going to bed when I talk to Amber. It gives me time to play around on my home computer and do things that I’ve been meaning to do. For example, tonight I installed the W3C validator onto JR Corps.

What’s that mean? That means, that you can validate any webpage by going to http://www.rinsefirst.com/w3c/ , or http://www.tumbledry.org/w3c/, or whatever is on JR /w3c/, assuming you don’t have a rewrite in place that is going to supersede it. I haven’t gotten around to tweaking it for the reason I installed it, but the fact is it’s there. Hopefully, no one but me and my associates will come to rely on it though, because it won’t look like that for long.

Some other cool developments from today include:

My room is clean for company that will be coming tomorrow.
I hooked up my original Nintendo in the process.
Blaine compled yet another cool feature in Oxwaf, which I’m not going to describe here other than to say "we can save now".  
I finished my first final, which means no more CSCI4131 (that was simple).And you know what, I don’t always say it often enough at 2 in the morning, but I love Amber.

My day as a timeline. Times are aproximate.

2:30 AM: Fall Asleep after battling with homework I didn’t get done. Pray I get it done today (Prayer 1).
6:45 AM: Ring Ring Ring:
6:46 AM: Hello? Hi Pat. What’s that you say? Teacher server is down? Be right there…
6:48 AM: Shower
7:00 AM: Out the door
7:07 AM: See teacher server in bad shape
7:40 AM: Leave message with Dan about where I left off and what I think he can do to fix the problem. Start praying that I surrive today, that I don’t have to come back to MSA today, and a prayer of thanks for the amazing sunrise he as provided me, as well as the free ride in traffic (rush hour went fast, Prayer 2).
8:50 AM: Arrive at art class
8:53 AM: Realize I don’t have my blank CDR’s to hand in assignment
8:54 AM: Realize I don’t have my book to finish my homework that I didn’t get done last night.
8:58 AM: Post a message asking for someone to kindly post the questions to the class forum so I don’t have to go find a book.Pray that someone posts the questions online (Prayer 3)
9:00 AM: Begin final project presentations, I went first.
My jukebox was pretty cool for a flash program, however, as a piece of art, I don’t think it compared to some of the other peoples. Richards interface for his was pretty cool and I liked the idea. There was one girl who had these boxes that were really well done that were layers from flash. I bet she got an A. I bet I didn’t.
10:00 AM: Someone posts the homework questions to the forum (Prayer 3 answered, Prayer of Thanks).
12:01 PM: Leave art class
12:15 PM: Start work on homework
12:45 PM: Homework finally catches on with my brain
2:30 PM: Submit some other homework (that I had done yesterday).
3:15 PM: Complete the computer portion of the dread homework assignment and print it off. Leave lab to go to commons to finish the written portion.
3:56 PM: Finish homework with what I feel are some very well thought out answers. (Prayer 1 answered, Prayer of Thanks).
4:00 PM: Hand in homework
4:30 PM: (In lecture) Realize wallet is missing (Prayer 4, start praying that I find my wallet.)
5:15 PM: Lecture ends, normal semester classes all done with, go hunting for wallet
5:17 PM: Two kind girls had found it and were still sitting there. They kindly returned it to me. (Prayer 4 answered, Prayer of thanks). Head to car.
5:26 PM: Talk to John about a floppy.
5:27 PM: Talk to Dan about the teacher server. Turns out he got it working doing using the predicted repair stuff. Very cool. Saved my night, help MSA, made me proud of him (Prayer 2 answered, prayer of thanks).
5:30 PM: Spot my car, the dome light is on…
5:31 PM: Realize dome light is on because door was left locked, but ajar.
5:31 PM: Try to shut door, won’t shut.
5:32 PM: Try to shut door, won’t shut.
5:33 PM: Try to shut door, won’t shut. Pray door shuts. (Prayer 5)
5:35 PM: Door shuts, with me inside. (Prayer 5 answered)
5:36 PM: Arrive at Gas Station
5:37 PM: Amber’s breaks Gas Cap off my car, but I love her for filling of up my tank.
6:00 PM: Crazy old lady trys to kill us with her car… Maybe she was having a heart attack or fell asleep at the wheel… Who knows…
6:30 PM: Arrive at church
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM: Put up redesign page message, setup paypal again, transfer domain ownership, and bill WLC. This should mean a new server ordered by the end of the year (yay!).
9:00 PM - 11:30 PM: Amber’s Dinner, Love her, Bourne.
12:00 PM - Home and relaxing by writing about today.I could go into more detail about any item in this list, but really…. What more really needs to be said… It was one bad event followed by one good event. It’s amazing how that works.

A late night post on xmlhttp… Who would have thought that something so interesting would come out of my mind at 2:00 AM? Maybe that’s why we don’t always get interesting stuff here… Wow though, who would have though javascript had that power?

Ok, so none of you have a clue what I’m talking about, with the exception of those who happen to speak to me tonight after I discovered it. It’s this block of javascript:

var mystring="id=true&blah=false";
var xmlhttp=false;
try{
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
try {
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (E) {
xmlhttp = false;
}
}

if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest!=\’undefined\’) {
xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
}

xmlhttp.open("POST", document.location.href,false);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8");
xmlhttp.send(mystring);
alert(xmlhttp.responseText);

I know many of you don’t speak javascript, but here’s what that says: Post some variables, without reloading the page, and then do something with what you get back. That means you could, in theory… have 1 static html page, 1 dynamic php document (that perhaps only returns some text), and you could have a page that never reloads (at least not in the browser sense) but could still be navigated. A very interesting idea…. Something that flash is really good at.

Of course, this brings back the downside that you can’t bookmark anything, but still… I can see how they do credit card pending pages now. It all makes sense.

Ok, I know I’m not talking much about it… Just try it out if your a programmer and see what happens :-). Take note of mystring and the last alert. If you need it to post to something else, take a look at the open line.

Ok, that’s all I have to say… Finals week is pending.

Here is some backwards logic for you:

To learn, I must not do my homework.

In fact, I find doing homework to be quite pointless most of the time, and for the most part, just busywork. However, that wasn’t the point I was trying to make. I can learn by doing my homework. I often find that if I do my homework I do better on tests. However, I also find that if I do my homework, I’m not normally learning something I want to be learning, and therefore: I don’t learn it.

To some degree, schools that teach students stuff they don’t want to know doesn’t make sense to me. I understand that some kids want to know astrophysics, but don’t want to learn math. That’s not possible. Therefore, they have to learn that stuff… But I want to program computers using logic, not using complex physics math that has to do with how fast a computer can fall out of a buiding…

Either way: the point of where I’m trying to get at is, at this moment, I have homework to do and I’m not doing it. Instead, I’m learning about flash and finding new things on Google.

Let’s start with Google.

Google seems to have launched Google groups. I figure they must have launched it today because I use Google basically daily, and tend to notice when anything changes on their fairly plain webpage. Of course, I could run off on my rant about how this is just another step in Google’s conquest of the world, but that’s been dealt with. Instead, I’m going to comment on the fact that it looks to be like yahoo groups but without all the junk that makes yahoo groups a pain to use.

The registration is also a lot simpler.

In either case, I signed up for the announcement group that announces all of googles new stuff. The plan being I can see all their cool idea’s when they have them. Eh, probably won’t work. If you want to join this really cool group, go here: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google-friends

I’ve also been learning about flash movies. Embedding video and mp3s into flash has to be one of the coolest things it can do. Mainly because it provides the means to use audio on a webpage, in a way that neither causes huge load times, or requires the user to have anything other than flash. The advantage here being that flash seems to be with about 98% of the web now, and most of them are running the latest version thanks to Microsoft.

That said, you might see some pretty cool content up here pretty soon, that is, if I continue to not do my homework.

Some other news, I’ve gotten many comments on the live bookmarks being cool. People want them. I think it’s time to write one of my first tutotrials for another site. When that’s done, I’ll link ya’ll up so you can make your own.

Sound good? I hope so….