Rev’s Thought Dump

So we sat down last night and decided to stream some tv to ourly newly hobbled together “media center”. We watch some house flipping on TLC and eventually found our way to Extreme Make Over: Home Editon. Which, as far as I know, is now the ONLY edition having realized that there are just some wrecks you CAN’T save.

We used to watch this show way back in the first season or two. Back when it was a glamourised ‘This Old House’. They’d find some people whose home was just trashed for one reason or another and they’d come in and fix it up. It was always full of technical detail and discussions about the design of the house and rooms. Interesting stuff.

What I saw last night (three episodes worth) was terrible. It’s gone from the entertaining show we once knew to this publicity engine for sponsers. Sears, Ford, etc etc all getting their plugs in and intermingled with that are emotinal bombs of truly news center proportins.

For example, they’re going to build a house for a family whose husband is deployed. Lot’s of emotion there. They bring him back for the week while they build the house. Okay. During the prebuild interview with the wife they drop this nice emoti-bomb.

Host: “oh, it’s going to be fabulous. We’ll fix it all up and we’ll finally finish this house your family always wanted.”

Wife: (smiling and nodding): “Yes, it’ll be wonderful. A great releif of stress….”

Host: (suddenly serious) : “But, you know your husband won’t be able to stay, will he?”

(dead air with the camera pointed at the wife for what seems minutes until she finally gets it and breaks down into a crying fit and let’s the guy console her. )

WTF?! That was pretty pointless. Here’s another good one.

Brother fire fighters are getting their house in New Orleans rebuilt after the tragedy. At one point one of the brothers is talking about serving the community and then breaks down and leaves the room. The cameras are of course waiting in the hall to capture it. When Ty asks what’s up his brother tells him it’s been really bad lately. Bad calls and recently there was a fire where they couldn’t rescue the people inside and Ty whips out this heartfelt one liner: “Oh, and he like had to she the babies burn?”

WTF is that?!

It’s so not abut the construction anymore either. The houses in all three shows were built in a 45 second music montoge in the last 15 minutes of the show. Just a quick “zip” and it’s built.

It used to be that the carpenters would take on a special project and you’d see how it was done and a special reveal to the family. Now the things they work on are hardly even mentioned. Almost under the breath. Sad.

I think it started to head south when it appeared the powers that be were starting to notice the show. I recall tuning in to find that they tacked an additional hour on to the show for a special “behind” the scenes. A show which might be cool if it focused on the people and the projects. But that actually talked about how the show was made from a production stand point. Things like highlighting how much showmanship goes into it all. The filming and refilming their approach to the “unsuspecting” family’s house. And how the people are alerted well in advance.

I’d rather they were a little more genuine rather than so over the top and disgustingly emotional.

It really has become the offspring of marrying the evening news with this old house and reality tv. Very sad.

(posted from iPhone)

So, the first thing it does upon restarting and reactivating is start another terribly long back up.  Didn’t we just back up about 5minutes ago when we started all this?  And.. where’s these supposed to be faster now?  Hrmm we’ll see how it goes.

So here we are at day two. More late rising and coming to work to find vista pooping itself. I had to just complain to the walls rather than twitter. I finally just IM’d some from twitter and let them know vista is full of crunchy fail.

I got the idea to do my own Mojave experiment and setup a cam to record all the problems I encounter with vista. But, I’m really good at that, coming up with new projects to not finish. If anyone else picks that up and runs with it let me know.

Opened OmniFocus a total of once today. Created a folder for work repeated tasks and that was it. They talk about people with ADD suffering from being unable to remember or know things that aren’t in the immediate moment. I completely understand that. I’ve been reminded three times this week that we’re supposed to have a garage sale this weekend. =\

Was talking the other day about how effective ADD folks could be if they came from money or just managed to hire an assistant. If I was riding on daddy’s money I’d start a company and hire people to follow through on all the ideas I have. And my assistant would remind me of the things I was supposed to be doing, besides zoning out.

Total change in direction I’m in the Seattle XCoder’s meeting. Listening to someone talk [insert name]. Funny he’s admitting he hadn’t really used a Mac before he wrote a 2000 page book on it. Interesting, I get that feeling about a lot of tech books.

In google in Fremont listening. He’s talking about getting his first Mac in 2003. This is turning out to be pretty interesting, but this is supposed to be blog and not a series of twitter posts. I’ll save the review for another post.

Okay, Gizmodo is CONSTANTLY posting about Legos. (That’s not all of them either.)  It’s quite apparent that it’s part of some paid advertising, like those annoying articles you see in magazine with the small print at the bottom “paid advertisement”.

I just want Gizmodo to admit it and disclose that fact.  Why does it bother me?  I don’t f’ing know.  I just know that every time I see a Lego article in my feeds I know it’s Gizmodo writing about it. And I just know that it’s obnoxious.  Lego’s are very loosely tech.  Sure there are Lego Mindstorms, and all of us nerds start with Legos.  But.. but.. leggo of the legos already.  Jeeez.

This is where I’m supposed to blog about my first day without using twitter to spout off every 2 minutes. And so I shall.

Today “seemed” productive. Of course I got into work just after 9 and everyone else was out having been up all night with the server move. Though the whole ride in on the bus I was chomping at the bit to tweet this guy and celebrate his first day of school, as witnessed by the tag still attached to his new dockers. Weee! Fought the urge to snatch it off as he walked by.

Look, ma! New pants!

Played with OmniFocus more as I filled out tasks for projects I’d created but never elaborated on. I like the concept of GTD but I sense it’s not for people with ADD. You have to remember and be motivated to check your list all the time. I’m bad at both. But, I think I can give it a shot with OmniFocus’ location awareness on the iPhone. If I can set it up properly hopefully I can remember to bring it up when I get home, to work, to the store, etc..

iTunes 8 is looking pretty snazy.  Got a PowerBook from a friend and finally setup the media center I wanted so we can relax on the couch in the front room and watch movies and listen to music.  Sat on the couch last night doodling with the computer and listening to music with the new iTunes 8 visualizer running on the screen.

Hooked up some old speakers I had and shoved the sub woofer in the back of the piano - which the whole center sits on. Now the whole piano acts to resonate the bass.  Whoa.  Had to turn it down a lot.

I should post this before I throw it in drafts again and forget about it. Most of this post was written in the WordPress iPhone app while on the bus - I’ll save how fucked up the Seattle bus system is for another post.

Later.

Can anyone tell me what the hell is going on here?

That is all.

I was busy getting other posts ready but I had to jump in wit this! OMG, check this out! What the heck is it?!  Write a winning caption and you can do a guest post.

P.S. I was so going to send this to you, Gorilla Sushi, but it was too good not to use myself first.

Today, on “Where Are They Now”: the story of a drug crazed.. who wait.. wrong post…

So, plenty of people, throngs even - okay one - have asked, “Rev! How DO you do those snazy polls for Poll-a-pallooza!?” The answer is simple,  wp-polls.

Hell, I’ll even throw in a free tip! If you create a poll and put it in your post, don’t also display it in the side bar widget. This confuses the javascript running the poll and it will fail to register the votes properly. (Learned this one the hard way.)

Okay, have fun rockin’ out to Poll-a-pallooza!  More polls coming to the second stage soon!

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I’ve been using wp-hascash for a while not and it was a bit of a pain in the ass to setup at first.  There’s making sure you have the wp_head called before the closing </head> tag and comment_form called before the closing </form> tag in comments. But I started running into another error that was visibly manifesting itself as my other scripts on the page failing to fire and thus some visuals all out of whack.

After digging around a bit in the debugger and google I found this little bit of info that has fixed every issue I’ve had with wp-hashcash in the last few version of WordPress and wp-hashcash.

Error: document.getElementById(”wphc_value”) is null

so as to avoid this, it’d better to check beforehand if it’s null. So to say:
change line 372 from
echo “addLoadEvent(function(){document.getElementById(’wphc_value’).el.value=wphc();});\n”;

to:
echo “addLoadEvent(function(){var notNullWphc= document.getElementById(’wphc_value’); if(notNullWphc){notNullWphc.value=wphc();}});\n”;

Hopefully this will help folks out there suffering form the same “WTF?!” situation.

P.S. wp-hashcash works very well.