okay, the first test rss pages have been put up here. that's right, they're simply pulling from the generous feeds over at waferbaby. i haven't even added them to cron yet, mainly because I want to get as many of the news pages as possible setup. also, i'm not sure if I want to devote an entire subsection to certain sites, mainly because i'd like the sites to be aggregated into pages, so that i can quickly pull up all the news i'm interested in on just a few pages, rather than several. for now though, at least the system works. i have to manually run the perl script which creates them but this way i don't create a million pages with an errant crontab. i also removed the entire news section from the "latest" pages, mainly because if i have at least 5 new pages a day added up there, that won't leave much room for anything else. next up: further site aggregation and a little better formatting. we'll see...

waferbaby : news

• doctor doom

  one of our relatives passed away last night. obviously i'm upset by it, but he had a particularly nasty form of cancer, was in his eighties and had lived a good and full life, so it's not so bad. he's far from the pain now, and that's gotta count for something. but it got me thinking; apart from putting the whole fear of mortality into me once again, i've started to muse over the ceremonial side of things. when you take a step back and look at it from a clinical perspective, the whole tradition of gathering around a bunch of people in black that you probably don't like to either burn or bury the body of someone you know in a wooden box just seems so freaking bizarre. to be honest, i try not to think about it. i know little to nothing about how death is handled in other cultures, so enlighten me (and possibly everyone else).

• make this easier

  yes, there's no better way to unwind after a long week or two of pure coding than by, uh, coding some more? so i rewrote more of the site's underbelly, mostly because it was bugging me and i worked out a cool way to make it cleaner. you won't notice any changes, but i sure will. i'm like that. elftor is one of the few web comics i read these days, so it makes this new fusion all the cooler: fusion: elftor i'd add a disclaimer about the violence and gore contained within, but this is waferbaby. we have pictures of pixelated men sexoring pigs.

• bulgarian hottie

  after enough requests, i've caved in and added a feed for this news page. you guys are fucking crazy, but i guess that's why i love you.

• kenya not

  i'm exhausted, which is amusing when you realise that i've hardly moved around all day; i have to get this site that we're building finished before tomorrow morning so we can present it to the client. i'm almost done, but i figure i'll still be up most of the night, so i popped in to my cafe and with impeccable timing arrived just before they closed. not only did i fill up my mug, but i stayed around to chit chat and watch them clean up. now you're probably thinking that, for you at least, there's probably nothing more boring than watching a bunch of people clean up a cafe at the end of the day. but, what with me being me and all, i was totally fascinated; i've never actually worked in a job that involved being in direct contact with the public, nor have i worked in the food industry (my first real job was in a dental warehouse, for fuck's sake). it's strange that i've never given it a second thought; i had no idea that it was so involved to clean out a food-related workplace, or rather, i'd just never bothered to stop and think about it. i mean, why would i have? i'm going there for coffee, not some damn hygeine lesson. on the same train of thought, i asked them if it's difficult to appear so polite and happy the whole time you're at work, and as i expected they all said yes. that's yet another thing i take for granted; the whole staff being courteous when you're ordering thing. i'm a big fan of the little details. could you tell? so, my fine feathered friends, i suggest that next time you go out for a coffee, introduce yourself to your barista, your waitress, or your chef, and then come back here and tell us all what sort of a reaction you get. it's all about spreading the love, baby. and i mean spreading.

• bowtie camera

  i really should be sleeping, so i'll make this quick, but congratulations are the order of the morning; to elftor for turning one today, and to sikuri for becoming the 1000th mybaby user. whee!

• wayne

  it's raining. it started raining today when the sun was out in full effect, being all sun-like and warm, and yet it was pissing down like godzilla with a full bladder, and it hasn't let up since. moving right along. you'll want to be sure to check out the brand spanking new fusion episode by my good friend emily; all the kids will be talking about it! fusion: potato's dream it's one of those busy weeks with lots of paid work to do and little waferbaby time to be had, but i'll manage to sneak some in. i always do.

• release the hounds

  you may remember him from such simpsons voices as mister burns, smithers, principal skinner, reverend lovejoy, ned flanders and about a bazillion others; the corner monkey sits down with harry shearer for a bit of a chat. corner: harry shearer, on the simpsons and voice acting. today's soccer match was awesome (it gets better every week!); our team won 3-0, i think. at one point during the game i managed to kick amy very very very very very hard in the shin; my first major damage inflicted during a match. sorry about that, amy.

• hey pig

  now that i'm happy with the new baby syndication stuff, i'm rewriting the feed tool to be much more reusable, as you do. if anyone is keen to check out the code (which is a php class), then let me know; if there's enough demand, i may just release it properly - honestly, it's not that big a deal, but it makes my life easier. nothing can stop me now. yay, soccer soon! i'm all pumped up and way too hyper - this morning i took one of my own mugs over to my cafe and they filled it with their steaming, sexy brew. rrowr! it's kind of scary: i know their coffee so well now that i'm able to tell which barista made it just by the taste. i shit you not. would i shit you? shit no. no shit. also, it turns out that my cafe is also frenzal rhomb's favourite cafe. there you go.

• hey come on

  nothing is as amusing as inebriated boys; we hung out at the duke hotel tonight, and half of us talked about immigration and the politics thereof while the others talked about dimples and some sort of deeply repressed homosexuality, from the sounds of it. but i digress. i can't remember being this happy in a long, long time; work is going well, i've been pretty damn healthy (touch wood, so to speak), i have awesome friends, and i'm actually being social and going out of the house and so on. look out, i'm getting all personal and misty. please note the exits to the front and rear of the craft. now that i think of it, it's unusual for me to be both single and very, very happy, but hey, there you have it. maybe i'm growing up? mmmmmmmm. so anyhow, how about that web-related stuff with all of those things with the thingie? way to deflect getting too personal there, daniel. why thank you, daniel! i should sleep, because we're playing soccer tomorrow, but i really like this song, so i do believe i will sit here and shake my little white butt just a little bit more.

• crawled up in side her

  hi. so i've actually been out and about, and stuff. weird, huh? life is good, and i love my friends. hopefully you're all having as good a weekend as i am.

waferbaby : brainstorm

• what's your earliest memory?

  asked by d.

• how do you feel other countries perceive your own?

  asked by d.

• what's in your fridge?

  asked by d.

• can you really know someone you meet online?

  asked by d.

• what's your favourite dish to make?

  asked by d.

• how would you define a geek?

  asked by d.

• what's your most secret desire?

  asked by kelly.

• what was your childhood like?

  asked by d.

• how do you feel about the politics of your country?

  asked by d.

• where do you see the web in five years?

  asked by d.

in addition to the quote below, check out this explanatory cartoon from tom. sums it up quite nicely.

the news pages have been taking all my free time, but i did manage to find this hilarious quote on the tom tomorrow site from our good friend senator byrd. and, over on the new republic, be sure to catch a similar gaffe right here from our good friend connie chung. finally, be sure to visit the latest howler which mentions some debating points long since forgotten by the press. okay, back to that coding!

my (relatively) new work shoes keep surprising me. they've managed to kill me almost twice on the metro, where for the lack of grip on the soles i kept sliding until i hit the side of the train doors while attempting to board. admittedly, i was running to get on, but i heard the noise and saw the doors close and tried to slow down and ended up terraplaning into the side of the car. ouch. today i discovered that if i altered my walk slightly, i could get my shoes to make the "clippety-clop" noise that horses, hands and coconut clapping can make. It's odd to be able to walk down the hall with each foot making three distinct noises in a row. hopefully by the end of today i'll have the news feeds completely finished (yesterday i had to cut out to pass an mcsa test) and can start assembling the pages. we'll see...

the news pages are almost there; the amount of coding will probably curtail much blogging. quickly though, thanks to the reminder from folks over at waferbaby, the venerable vulgar vitriol known as elftor turns one today. not for the young, mature, old, or those with Ventricular Fibrillation. or anyone related to edward. i'm so close to getting the site completed i can almost taste it.

finally, i managed to get the dredwerkz search page up and running. i tried working it in perl, if only due to my desire to bulk up my perl abilities, but i ran into the same problem i've always had with perl: namely, that it forces you to divorce the code from the page! i would have had to send the requests to a .pl perl script, which would then take it, interface with the database, and generate the results in it's own html page. of course, this html page wouldn't fit into the regular schema, so i'd have to massage the code by hand. i did end up creating the page (check it out here! it does actually search the backend...) but decided not to waste time sprucing it up to look like the rest of the site. the alternative was to figure out a way for the perl page to pass on the results to the regular php page. in the midst of this conundrum, i fell down. luckily for me, i knocked some sense into me, and decided to record it in php. it took just a few lines and some .htaccess file modifying but now the page is fully functional. almost. right now we're limited to the fbi school of searches, namely, only words that are together. i'm working on a more robust engine but for now at least you can type in edward and get all of my articles. also, you can simply use the syntax (like with the archive page) of http://dredwerkz.com/origins/search/word to search for all articles containing the word 'word'. cool, eh? try it out! i also added links to each blog entry title (like this!) allowing others to go directly to the inspirational words i hammer out every few hours. once i get the new news pages set that'll mean that every part of the site is operational. just one more hoop and i'm there!

i just fell down a couple of steps outside work because i was zoned out from lack of sleep, nutrients and sunlight. scuffed up my leg a bit and reinjured my already fight scarred knee. i'm about to bite into a chili-dog to help recover. pity our poor treasury secretary, who yet again on sunday, and then again today blunders his way through diplomacy, causing scuffles all the way. he makes my stumbling look positively inspired...maybe it's time to call it quits.

it's too hot to even think this morning. therefore i'll merely note that the dems have gone back on the offensive and also managed to simultaneously set the legislative agenda for the nation. the best part? even if the republicans attempt to co-opt our legislation, the nation as a whole still benefits! kind of makes me almost forget i only managed to score three hours of sleep last night. work today is going to hurt...

for those of you who read regularly, (yes, yes, i know that in actuality there are no fans right now!) you know that on occasion, i've knocked my hosting provider timehost. it's only fair then, that i share when they do a good job, as they did recently: i asked for a perl module (xml::rss) to be installed to allow me to pull news feeds into the news section and adolfo (the guy I normally deal with) closed the ticket out over the weekend. in addition to the rss stuff, i'm also closer to getting the search engine up and running, and, as always, the wayback machine now has the latest archive page updated. all for your viewing pleasure.

after the unseasonably cool days of thursday and friday (where temperatures at one point peaked at 67°!) today is back to being a rotten district morning. at 6:45 am, when i arrived at work, the temperature was already above 80° but the heat index made it feel above 88°. later, the index will go over 110° and a severe weather alert has been declared through tuesday! what can make me feel cooler on a day like this? two things: one working in the sub-basement near a bunch of testy servers means that my division keeps the place cool 24-7. second, these two cartoons from toles that i read this morning kept my head from overheating with anger: first one, second one. go toles go!

i'm in the midst of altering the news pages to use rss to pull live headlines from different locations around the web...this will be my test page until i can complete the work, at which point i'll implement it in the news section. well, here goes! first attempt: check out this article over in the news section. it doesn't actually exist: it is generating the page from some rss feeds. ideally, i will have the php page itself generate articles, thus creating a new rss page each time it is loaded. hopefully my server can handle this strain...

a short note: the designers of the 'bike lane' in maryland along mcarthur blvd and falls road must have been smoking something when they laid it out. don't get me wrong, i love bike paths (although most are too narrow) and given the choice between a shoulder-less two-lane road full of potholes and a nice smooth bike path, i'll always take the path. the problem in maryland is this: along mcarthur blvd, there is a large shoulder on the side running into the district (the other lane has no shoulder at all) with bicycle logs painted on it every half-mile. at times, it can be smooth, but in other instances, it becomes cracked and almost unrideable for those of us with road bikes. on several occasions, it also decides, arbitrarily, to cross the road onto the other side. nothing's more frustrating than riding along at a good clip and then having to stop in order to switch sides. also, because it's just an extended shoulder, it's actually illegal to ride against the flow of traffic, which complicates matters. if it was a distinct bike path, both inbound and outbound bikes could go on it: as it is, however, i felt guilty riding on it going out of the city because i'd pass other bikers who clearly looked surprised to see someone headed out on it. it's a bike lane though, right? finally, the macarthur bike path near the end of the road simply stopped. on the left side. for me, this meant stopping one final time before crossing the road. shouldn't this have been thought of?

things worsened once i turned onto falls road. at first i was overjoyed to discover a discting bike path, instead of an expanded shoulder. however, unlike the stretch on macarthur, the part on falls road kept crossing side roads, and at each side road, an elaborate system of large bumps was put in place to ensure that one couldn't ride at a decent pace. in addition, unlike the macarthur section, which only crossed the road about 3 or 4 times, the section on falls road crossed every few hundred meters. after the second crossing, i gave up on the bike path, stuck to the road and made much better time. i can't imagine in what world it made sense to have it meander so much...if the path was even used as a walking path or sidewalk, there was no point to having it cross the road so often. if i paid taxes in maryland, i'd be angry that such poorly constructed paths passed as bike-friendly. of course, i live in dc, with atrocious streets, yet i'd like to aim for voting representation first before i go off On the bike paths here.

another convert to the land of sanity! in this tom tomorrow blog entry, tom spills the beans on the secret behind advertising. (hint: it doesn't work!) as i've been noting this for some time, i'm not surprised. it's frustrating to see so many people rail against a practice that is completely promoted by the industry which can make money off of it: smart business should simply not fall into the 'everyone advertises so i should too'. try reading advertising, the uneasy persuasion for hints as to how the system works. of course, before flames head my way from people in pr, there are instances in which advertising does help (movies and books come to mind) simply because these items are timely, and failure to learn of their existence results in a failure to purchase. but for the vast majority of items we purchase every day, like dishwasher liquid or the latest toaster, advertising only seeks to get a little market share, and consumers have learned a long time ago to ignore claims from advertisers. so follow tom's example and fight back!