so today after work, instead of resting up after a long’s day work, i went to investigate why there was flooding in our front yard when the sprinklers are on and to fix the geyser in our backyard.
it turns out that one of the pipes had a break in it and i had to dig it all up and replace it. the backyard break was because it looks like a dog chewed off the sprinkler head.
that was the excitement of my day.
there are now two fantastic vista media center plugins that i consider must-have for any vista media center install:
1) media browser – great media browser for your content.
2) vista media center tcp/ip controller – control your media center remotely via HTTP calls!
how cool is vmcController? i’m making a web page that my iphone can hit to control the media center. way more stable than the mediaremote app i tried using that served the same function.
the organizers apologized about the epic fail that was the great american food and music fest. i think it’s pretty decent of them to acknowledge that it all didn’t work out.
it also turns out that livenation is honoring refunds for all those who went. call 1-888-598-4299 with your order number to get the refund.
because of the twitpocalypse, my favorite twitter client for the iphone is broken. this pisses me off to no end because i feel that twitterific is really the only usable free twitter client i’ve used. and now that i can’t be kept up to date with my tweets, i have been pretty disconnected.
so i spent the last few hours writing a web page that emulates the look and feel of twitterific so that i can at least have a view into twitter. man, let me tell you, the twitter wap pages are just ridiculously awful. they are so ugly, it is unusable.
what’s cool is that i got a lot of help with some libraries already written for the twitter API, so the low level work of dealing with their web services didn’t need to be done. makes my life pretty easy. i have to say that i’m pretty happy with the results. i even went as far as converting the #tags and the @user links so that they go to the correct places. there was a little smarty plugin magic. i never thought that i would be writing my own smarty plugins, but i ended up writing two: one to “twitterize” tweets (hyperlink URLs, link tags, and link users), and one to tell you how much time has passed since a time ( x seconds, minutes, hours, or days).
it was kind of fun, but i want my twitterific back! apple app store, hurry up and approve the upgrade! i can read my tweets, but i haven’t bothered to write the code to make tweets!
i went to the great american food and music fest in mountain view today. it was the first ever and there were many food network starts present at the festival. on our way in, people were grumbling and complaining about how long of a wait the lines were. they were not kidding, we heard stories of people waiting in line for two to three hours!
apparently the preparation of food took so long that people just couldn’t deal with it and decided to leave without their included first plate of food. on our way in, some people who were so frustrated with the event were leaving and gave me their free meal tickets. we ended up getting three free plates which we were able to use.
the lines were long. we waited for over an hour for what i thought was way-overrated cheesesteaks. in my opinion, jersey joe’s in san carlos still reigns king.
we bumped into a lot of familiar faces while we were there, so that was pretty cool. overall, i would say that the festival for food was an epic fail. the side events, however, appeared to run smoothly. the book signings yielded long lines, but the demonstrations and music went by just fine.
we got to watch the sf weekly best burger contest. bobby flay was one of the judges in the event. it was pretty cool to see him.
all in all, my favorite food of the day were the buffalo wings. mmmm.
so after reading the subject of this blog, how many of you thought that i was talking about the alcoholic beverage, wine? if so, then you just don’t know me at all! no, i’m not talking about wine with grapes, i’m talking about the open source project wine.
my old laptop has been having some issues with memory leaks. i’m not sure why the windows xp install i had was leaking memory, but i was running out of virtual memory all the time even if it was just idling! i decided that it might be time for me to try the hackintosh route again, but i remembered all of the hassle that it took for me to get there and decided to try something else.
just for fun, i decided to try fedora again. yes, on the eve of fedora core 11, i decided to install fc10. i haven’t run some flavor of linux as a primary OS on a laptop in a long time and it’s pretty impressive to see just how far the linux user community has come along.
since friday evening, it has been a complete blur. i have been working close to non-stop friday, saturday, and parts of sunday. monday crept up with more issues and i didn’t leave the office until around 8:30PM. yesterday was another long day, but not as bad and i think the brunt of it has finally died down and we are officially out of panic mode.
it’s a good thing, too, because getting out of panic mode timed pretty perfectly with the launch of our project.
somewhere in all of the business, i was able to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. 4 dozen cookies were made and i brought them into the office yesterday. all but 4 were left when i came into the office today. crazy, huh? i didn’t even get to eat that many, so i think that another batch will have to be made soon.
i’ve been battling with making cookies for the last 4 weeks or so. i would take the butter out of the fridge and intend to make it, but by the time the butter has had time to get soft, i was too tired to make the cookies. finally, i made them, but when i took them into the office, they all disappeared very quickly. 4 dozen!
looks like i will have to make more cookies!
our doorbell is located upstairs. it is not very loud. this becomes quite the problem when we have people or we are cooking in the kitchen downstairs and people ring the doorbell. we just don’t hear it.
on numerous occasions people have rung the doorbell and there is no repsonse from us. today, i am happy to report that that problem is no longer plaguing this household. i got a door chime extender. all it really is is a sound-activated remote control which then activates a separate doorbell. so far it has worked great in my testing, but so far no one has rung our doorbell since i installed it…