21 More Sleeps!

When they announced they were making an american version of The Office I was a bit skeptical. I was a big fan of the UK series, and I was just doubtful it could be as good, especially when it came to creating the Tim / Dawn relationship. I was glad to see that not only were they able to recreate it, I think they have surpassed it. Sure The Office is hilarious, but I only watch to see what happens with Jim and Pam. The season two finale was written by Steve Carell, and it was 40 minutes instead of 30. In that extra ten minutes we got to see the best "cliff hanger" ever:

What does she mean by "Yeah I think I am." ?

A short clip from the season two finale (3:01).

I am really looking forward to season three:

NBC's Jim and Pam Promo for Season 3 (1:39).

P.S. This is post 199¾!

Good News!

I have to say I am extremely excited about this new Beta Blogger. It has a lot of new abilities, but it was missing some of the features of the original Blogger, including my favorite one. Yesterday they announced that they have added in that favorite part into the beta and we are now able to edit the HTML in a blog template. The sad/exciting news is what they had to say about it though:

The new template language is completely different from the old one. So even if you're used to working with classic templates, you'll need to learn some new tricks to directly edit the new templates for Layouts-enabled blogs.

I have a feeling that this weekend I'll be up to my armpits in blog templates! I can't wait! For those of you also interested, here is a link to this announcement on the beta blogger blog: http://buzz.blogger.com/2006/08/new-old-feature-on-beta.html

P.S. This is post 199½!

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

I had a fortune cookie today that said:

"You will be coming into a fortune."

Rating Widget

My brother-in-law Nick is, I am proud to say, a fellow Blogspot blogger. His blog, saskbirding.blogspot.com, is a bit different than mine though in that he posts pictures instead of words (and since the former are worth a thousand of the latter I have to blog like a mad woman just to keep up). Anyway, I have seen some other photo sites where one can rate the pictures and I thought this might be a cool project to try out.

I decided to see if I could find something that could just be dropped into the blog post template, but instead I found a tutorial for a five star rating system based on CSS. This tutorial was great for making the display, but didn't come with a back end. So last night I created a database for it and wrote up a page that will save the data to the database as well as read back the average rating. I added it to my blog by adding some javascript into the blogger template. It works great for automatically adding a way to rate a blog post, but unfortunately it isn't going to work all that well for Nick's photos - unless he stores each picture in a different blog post, but his format so far doesn't fit that model. I'll see what he says, but in the meantime, try out the new rating widget on my site.

P.S. I've disabled the ability to rate any articles less than 4/5 stars. (jk)
P.P.S. This is post 198!

Quote of the &*#!@ Day

Warning! The following blog article contains coarse language intended for adult audiences. Reader discretion is advised.

Actually I'm just joking. There is coarse language in this one, but I think swearing is actually quite funny. Honestly, if you were ever to hear me swear you'd think it was so ridiculous sounding that you'd just laugh at me.

I am a computer programmer. I find it fun, but sometimes it gets to me. Programmers have to break down a process into it's tiniest bits of logic, and then use specialized computer 'code' to tell the computer to carry out those very same logical steps. These days the development environments are very good at letting you know when there was a typo in your code, but almost no good at all at letting you know when you've made a mistake in your logic. Sometimes finding those logic errors can be very tedious work and other times it is downright, pull-your-hair-out frustrating.

Today Shaun said something that for me captures the true experience of computer programming at it's worst. It is a bit harshly worded, but it is very similar to thoughts that go through my head at times. I think most programmers out there will recognize his frustration just as I did and laugh along with me.

Last night there was an automatic update done for our software. There was a problem though that caused an unexpected result for many of the clients that ran the update. Today we received call after call after call, and I spent all morning on the phone. I used my time restoring computers to the pre-updated state, while Shaun looked in his code to find the problem. A while later he said "I found the problem."
"What was it?" I said.
Shaun's answer both shocked me and made me laugh. Just like a true programmer who just realized a simple mistake had big consequences he said, "I had a fucking 'true' instead of a goddamn motherfucking cock-sucking son of a bitch 'false'!"

I believe that swearing goes hand-in-hand with programming, and if Shaun's ability to swear means anything, I think it means he's a hell of a good programmer.

P.S. This is post 197!