Apparently @Home is going to be shutting it’s doors in the very near future, so those of you who link to members.home.net/greg-mitchell should change your bookmarks to www.nodecam.com at your earliest convenience. There might be a bit of a delay in me switching over from members.home.net to someplace else, but if you link to www.nodecam.com it will still go here eventually :)

I was home sick yesterday, so that’s why no update. Mind you, this means that there’s nothing new either, cause I spent most of the day in bed. I’m back now though, and feeling fine. I even did one of the ugliest hacks in the history of hacks to a web page in order to work around a serious design flaw in a product that we’re using.

If you’re not interested in stupid programmer tricks, stop reading now. This search product that we’re using allows you to search multiple databases simultaneously. For the most part, the demo worked just fine, except we couldn’t customize the results, and that meant that the results were ugly. We bought the full version (for $500 US no less) and got it installed. I tried out the customization, and it didn’t work at all on the web server that we wanted to put it on - because the server wasn’t on port 80. Fine, I parked it on a different server for the time being, and the customization works fine - until you hit a link to go to the next page of results - there were two different links for paging, one which is auto-generated in the non-customizable part of the page, and one which was in a customizable part of the page. The first kind very kindly generated a new results page with all the proper results, but with none of the customizations. Pretty dumb. The second kind took the header customizations, but ignored the footer customizations. The way that the header and footer customization works is that a hidden input tag is placed on the form with name=Header and value=”file.txt” - the problem was that these tags weren’t propagating properly into the results pages. I tried to do some nice little DHTML scripting, to automatically add the required tags in, but unfortunately the document.forms object didn’t behave properly, because there were a whole bunch of forms that weren’t closed (ie there were 6 <form> tags, but only 2 </form> tags.) This caused me grief, cause I couldn’t just append the new input tag to the end of the form’s innerHTML attribute. How did I get around it? I appended the tag to one of the other input’s outerHTML. For whatever reason, this was the only way I could get it to work. The results from the search thing are now hacked up to actually behave the way that they should out of the box - though they still only get rendered by the browser because the browser is too forgiving. Boring enough for you?

Tomorrow: tales of the new coffee machine

Simpsons quote of the day: “You love Shake n’ Bake! You used to put it in your coffee!” - Marge

As was previously mentioned, the laptop arrived on Saturday - I’m liking Windows XP more and more as I use it. I’m not sure exactly what it is that I like about it more than 98/NT, but it just feels nicer somehow.

I noticed that MS Agent is part of the OS now, which is interesting in and of itself. Merlin comes pre-installed, though I haven’t seen him pop up anywhere yet and try to zap me.

The multi-user features seem to work pretty well, and in that respect Windows seems to have caught up to the *nix’s a little bit.

When I said that the boot times seemed decent, I was just going on a general feeling - well, using the Hibernate feature on the laptop (which saves the computer’s state) I was up and running in ~15 seconds from power on. That is pretty fast in my opinion. Doing a complete power cycle (ie. windows shutdown/restart) took quite a bit longer, but I think for the most part I’ll just hibernate it - it’s dead simple to put it in hibernation mode too - just close the laptop up, and it does it all for you. The nice thing is that it doesn’t use any battery when it’s in hibernate mode - though it does take a little longer to boot up than if it were in standby - which does suck juice (it’d drain the battery in 3-4 days on standby).

Anyways, that’s enough about the stinkin’ laptop.

I watched two football games yesterday, and I have to say that the NFL game between the 49′ers and the Colts was a more entertaining game than the Grey Cup. It takes an unusually entertaining NFL game to beat most CFL games in my books, and that one fit the bill - it was relatively close until Peyton Manning started throwing interceptions in the second half.

Oh - I almost forgot to mention - we got the cruise booking information, and we got bumped up another couple of levels - we’re in room A743 on the Princess Sun, which looks like a pretty sweet spot to be in - if you want to get an idea of where that is on the ship - it’s right at the back, just off the deck, and only one floor below the pool etc. Should be fun anyways, and it’s only a little over a month away now!

Simpsons quote of the day: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” - Homer

I got the laptop yesterday, so I got a chance to play with it a bit. It’s pretty sweet, though I’m not sold that WinXP is much of an improvement over Win95/98/NT etc. I like the new look, but beyond that, I don’t see much difference. The User switching is nicely done I suppose - especially in that you can switch users without closing down all your programs and stuff, then when you switch back, your programs are open (and coincidentally in the same state etc.)

Other than that though, there’s nothing really all that new and earth shaking. It does seem a little cleaner and stuff than 98/NT, and it boots in a decent time, though we’ll see how it is once a bunch of software has been installed on it. Currently all it has on it is MS Money, and VB6 (I suppose I also installed WinDVD)

Had the new furnace installed yesterday, and the duct cleaners cleaned the ducts today, so it’s been pretty cold in here with the heat off quite a bit. The furnace guys forgot to turn the gas back on to the downstairs furnace, so I had to call them out to do that - I didn’t know what the problem was, but I was pretty sure that it was something that they did (or as it turns out, didn’t do)

Fast Forward to Monday -> I lost my VPN connection in the middle of writing this, and couldn’t get it back, so I’m finishing it now. As it turns out, they didn’t turn the water heater back on either, so I had to light the pilot light and all that fun stuff.

No Simpsons quote for the bonus post…

Read this today, and had to share with you all: Michael Jackson is actually Skeletor

From the same site, I found this link: Switcheroo Zoo which lets you create cool creatures from animal parts. It’s a lot cooler than I make it sound.

That’s enough linky goodness for you today.

Ok, not really - I also found a link for a quiz that’s disturbing - That’s right, it’s the Fallwell-Robertson-Bin Laden Quiz - can you guess which one said what?

Simpsons quote of the day: “Go Banana” - Ralph

I’m taking Friday off because the furnace guy is coming to install the furnace, and hopefully the laptop will arrive at some point on Friday as well.

Not much else to say though. I’ll see if I can try to do an update or two this weekend, what with Erin being in Calgary and all.

Oh yeah, I suppose I haven’t mentioned that Erin is going to Calgary for the weekend (actually she leaves tomorrow morning, bright and early) on a business trip to a meat packing plant (the plant is actually in High River, but she’s going to stay at her Dad’s place Thursday & Friday night, then her Mom’s Saturday night (I think))

Either way, basically means that I get to spend all weekend walking around the house in my underwear drinking beer and belching (ok, not really, just had to give you a mental image that you won’t be able to shake any time soon)

Grey Cup coming up too :)

Simpsons quote of the day:
Kent Brockman: “Springfield has come down with a fever: football fever. If you have the fever, there’s only one cure. Take 2 tickets, and see the game Sunday morning.”
Public Service Announcer: “Warning. Tickets should NOT be taken internally.”
Homer: “See? Because of me, now they have a warning.”

Fun little lunch story.

A couple of coworkers and I went out for lunch today to a restaurant downtown that we hadn’t tried before - it shall remain nameless until you ask me what it was called.

Anyways, two of us ordered the fish and chips, and the other guy ordered spaghetti. We waited for our food, which seemed to be taking a long time to arrive, and it finally arrived. Anyways, the other guy who ordered the fish and chips looks at me and mentions that the fish doesn’t look like fish - it looks like chicken. I like to give the benefit of the doubt, so I broke open a piece - it was a little rubbery, so I thought it was probably fish. It had a faint fishy taste to it, likely because it had been deep fried in the same oil as fish, but it was definately chicken. The lack of tartar sauce and lemon should have been a tip-off :) Anyways, not a huge deal, even though the chicken sucked, and I was looking forward to fish.

So, then our waitress brings us our checks before we’re done. Again not a big deal. She mentions that she has to leave to go to a food safety class at 1:00 which is why she’s bringing us our checks early. Ok. I’m just hoping that the chef’s name wasn’t Sal Manella. Just tell us your shift is ending, or that you have to go to “a class” not that you’re going to a food safety class. This is one of those things that you hope your waitress has already mastered.

Anyways, we couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the lunch hour, it just struck us as so funny.

Ok, so you had to be there.

Simpsons quote of the day: [Insert quote from episode with three eyed fish/episode where Homer eats blowfish here]

Well, we ordered the laptop last night from www.ncix.com. I didn’t think to check if they had it in stock when I went to the checkout, and sure enough, they’re backordered. Still, with shipping, taxes, and an extra 256 megs of ram, it just broke the $2000 mark ($2010 or so) pretty good price, considering what we’re getting…So, basically I will have finally broken the 1 Ghz barrier, without having to add up the various machines in the house to get there :)

As a side project to that, we figured that if we were going to get a new machine, we might as well look at upgrading our MS Money 99 to a newer version. I went to the MS site, and saw that they have a demo for 2002 up - I immediately downloaded and installed it - wouldn’t you know it, it couldn’t convert our old data directly to 2002. I thought that it was complete crap that it wouldn’t, but I couldn’t get it to do the job. Well, we’ll try the latest version of Quicken then, it should be able to convert a MS Money file that’s three+ years old - Erin went out an bought Quicken 2002 - mistake, cause it doesn’t do ANY MS Money conversions. Seems silly to me - especially with their 60 day satisfaction guarantee :) I guess Quicken is going back. Anyways, when searching for a way to convert the Money 99 file to either quicken 2002, or Money 2002, I came across an article on the MS knowledgebase saying that Money 2002 (US) won’t convert older Canadian (or other international version) files properly - ie. each localized version of Money has it’s own format that doesn’t interoperate with the other ones (sorta) Basically all it means is that we have to buy the Canadian version of Money 2002 in order to get the Canadian version of 99’s data converted over… Unfortunately there’s no demo of the Canadian version, but from the looks of the American version, there’s enough new features to warrant an upgrade - when we’re getting a new computer anyways, it’s likely the easiest time to do it.

So, I’m kind of excited to get this laptop and start playing with it a little. It should be fun to have an up to date computer again - my old P200 isn’t exactly state of the art anymore. Plus, I get to play with Windows XP (which I’m looking forward to, despite some of the bad press) From the looks of things, it’s significantly different from win98/NT4, which are the Windows os’s that I’m used to.

Hey, my domain name is working now (www.nodecam.com) so now you can bookmark that site, and not have to worry about if I move it to a new server or something :) I’m going to set up one of those favicon.ico things so that I get a custom icon in the IE favorites lists and stuff. As an aside, I have set up email forwarding too, so you can reach me with [insertFunnyEmailAddressHere]@nodecam.com (everything gets forwarded to me, except erin@nodecam.com, which gets forwarded to Erin - though she doesn’t know it yet)

Simpsons quote of the day: “Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose: it’s how drunk you get.”