Greg’s weblog

Adcritic is coming back apparently. For those of you who have never heard of Adcritic, they offered streaming commercials for free (can you imagine, commercials that you don’t have to pay for!) They always had the funniest commercials available for viewing. It appears that this will once again be the case, though for how long is anyone’s guess.

Well, the long weekend is finally upon us. It’s been a long time in coming, and I hope to get some resting and relaxing done, as well as getting some stuff done around the house. This means that I won’t be posting anything tomorrow, but I promise that I’ll make up for it with an extra special post on Monday. Make sure you check out this space on Monday, cause you won’t want to miss the excitement. Seriously.

The provincial budget was announced yesterday, and I’m kind of torn over the pieces that I heard about. They’ve increased the tax on cigarettes and alcohol, which at first blush seems like it wouldn’t affect me all that much. Well, it doesn’t, but it does amount to a tax on the poor, since the majority of smokers are not well off to begin with. On the other hand, smoking is a choice, and if increasing taxes will get people to try quitting, I’m all for it. I suspect that it will just increase the smuggling that already goes on to much greater proportions, turning even more of the population into criminals. On the other hand (how many hands do I have?!?) I heard from an unreliable source that the health effects of smoking cost the health system more than the tax on cigarettes brings in. That’s not right. Ah, why isn’t anything black and white anymore? (was it ever?)

Simpsons quote of the day: “HI. I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such self help tapes as ‘Smoke yourself thin’ and ‘Get some confidence, Stupid!’” – Troy McClure

Andy Richter does control the universe.

What a familiar refrain. Not much news going on at home. Erin’s dad is coming up for the long weekend, and that’s about it.

Just so you all know, the “dynamic filtering” gag was spotted pretty quick by Erin, even though I had set her up the night before, telling her exactly how I would go about doing it. I could have done it, with very little effort, just a little PHP scripting goodness, but it was far easier (and funnier, I thought) to just say that I was doing it, and not actually do it :) Good ole’ Occam’s Razor.

The Habs lost last night, in an important game against a weaker opponent. Oh well, we wouldn’t want things to come too easily now, would we? On the other hand, both Saku Koivu and Donald Audette are practising with the team. Audette plans to play on next Thursday, and Saku hopes to be back before the end of the season, after beating Cancer. Should make for a great playoff run, especially since I don’t think there are any real favorites in the East at all (unlike Detroit in the West).

Simpsons quote of the day: “I beat the smart kids! I beat the smart kids!” – Ralph

I spent all weekend working on a toolkit to make Roborally boards using The Gimp. After finally giving up on creating a new image set for the roborally board editor, I managed to make some progress. It’s looking pretty good, though only time will tell if I end up finishing the job :)

This means that I haven’t spent any time trying to change this site over to a different back end. Plus, I haven’t posted any pictures. I do plan to put them up, it’s just a matter of having time to do a proper job of it.

Erin and I went to the library last night, and I took out a bunch of non-fiction. I started reading “Made to Measure” by Philip Ball. So far it seems pretty good, though I’m only a chapter and a half in. It’s a book about materials science, which is something that I’ve never spent much time thinking about. I took out a bunch of books from various topics that I know absolutely nothing about, so hopefully the rest are as readable as this one.

Meanwhile, Erin left her library card at home, so she had to take out her books on my card. Am I ever glad the library doesn’t collect people’s reading habits and sell them to amazon or something…

Simpson’s quote of the day:
Bart: “From A-Apple to Z-Zebra, Baby’s First Pop-up book is 26 pages of alphabetic adventure!”
Mrs Krabapple: “Bart, you mean to tell me you read a book intended for preschoolers?”
Bart: “Well, most of it.”

Today’s post will be a short one, because I have to go shopping to buy [dynamically censored so that Erin can't read it] for Erin’s birthday (which is this coming Sunday. That’s right. A brand spankin’ new [dynamically censored so that Erin can't read it]. I implemented some dynamic censoring that will block out [dynamically censored so that Erin can't read it] from Erin’s browser, and replace it with [dynamically censored so that Erin can't read it], so don’t spill the beans in the comments ;)

Since I won’t be able to do a long post, like so many other days, I’ll substitute a good link (remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder…) Apparently The Louvre has a website, and it’s pretty nice. There’s lots of information on the exhibits and stuff – even stuff that they don’t let people see without an appointment is available online (it’s not as delicate on your computer screen, so you don’t need an appointment.) Their goal is to have the entire museum online by 2003 or something crazy like that. Anyway, Enjoy.

Simpson’s quote of the day:
Mrs. Lovejoy: “You’ve got to lead our protest against this abomination!”
Marge: “Mm, but that’s Michelangelo’s David. It’s a masterpiece.”
Mrs. Lovejoy: “[gasp] It’s filth! It graphically portrays parts of the human body, which, practical as they may be, are evil.”
Marge: “But I like that statue.”
Mrs. Lovejoy: “[gasp] I told you she was soft on full frontal nudity! Come on, girls…”

I think I’m going to download some RoboRally boards and print them out. There are some truly beautiful fan-created boards available on the net, so I think that’s what I’m going to do (rather than trying to find one of the expansions available locally) Plus, there’s a Roborally Board Editor that lets you create your own boards. I might even play with that one a little bit.

I’ve mentioned the search terms that people use to find this site before, but people keep coming up with new ones. Apparently “rectangular boob” brought someone here, as well as the usual suspects of people trying to convert their quicken files to MSMoney, or vice versa, people searching for simpsons quotes, krazy kiley’s, walmart and futureshop…I’m actually near the top of the list myself now – people doing a search for “Greg Mitchell” find this site first. If you want to see the full list of stuff that people have searched for (and found this site) you can see it here. Obviously this is the list from this month only – you’ll have to be an enterprising hacker to see previous months (well, not really.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “People now… Please, please, I can assure you that we’ll be using the most advanced, scientific techniques in the field of… body finding.” – Chief Wiggum

I’ve been thinking of changing the backend on this website, so that I have more flexibility. Specifically, there are API’s out there that allow you to have both a client side update tool, and a server side update tool, and I’m thinking of trying to convert this site to one of them. What does that mean to you? Not a heck of a lot. It does mean that at some point I’m going to move the hosting for this site to my own machine, since I’m going to need to install a bunch of stuff, and it’s not fair (or right) for me to ask Jason to install stuff on his machine for me. Don’t get me wrong, he’d probably do it, without blinking an eye, I just don’t think he should have to.

Plus, that way I can move all my bandwidth leeching hordes (umm, I think he means you ;) onto my own connection, which means that I will likely post stuff like pictures a little more often. (ok, you’ve got me, I haven’t posted any pictures in several months, but that’s more out of laziness than anything else) Hopefully, the software that I’m planning on migrating to will allow me to streamline the image posting thing a little more, which will lead to more images being posted.

When will this be taking place? I have no idea. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. I’ve got to figure out how to set up my dynamic IP thing, so that the site doesn’t mysteriously disappear for days on end. There’s other boring computer stuff that I have to do (well, it’s not boring to everyone, but I don’t feel like typing a long laundry list of stuff that I have to do.)

Simpsons quote of the day: “…you could see how many you could lick in an hour, then try to break that record.” – Principal Skinner on envelopes