greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Not that I was going to see BloodRayne anyway, but.

    Some guy over on Livejournal by name of Howard Tayler (okay, so he’s got a webcomic) really, really didn’t like the film rendition of “BloodRayne.” And I quote:

    I’m serious. If I find out that you went and saw this film after I told you not to, I’ll phone your friends up and tell them to go to your house and pour ants in your bed. And when you wake up screaming, covered in ants, you’ll think “at least I’m not still watching BloodRayne.”

    […]

    I’m not trying to tear this movie a new anal orifice. I assure you, the film already has SEVERAL, and it defecates simultaneously through all of them. You don’t want to get any of this on you.

    His review is a fun read, if only to see how a writer of decent talent can thoroughly eviscerate a movie.

  • Pesky Metal Mystery Discs

    It’s been bothering me ever since the first time I walked along a sidewalk on a block the city had converted to the new “pay to park” meter scheme. Glued down at every parking space I saw a flat, round lump of metal that served no obvious purpose. Last week I noticed that the discs along one stretch of sidewalk have a website address stamped into them. Huzzah! And so I jotted the information into my trusty phone and hurried home to check out the site.

    Well, okay. It took me most of a week to remember that I’d jotted the information into my trusty phone. Ahem. At any rate, I now know what the heck those things are. They’re gorilla post mounting plates.

    Huh?

    The idea is that the city can quickly and easily attach one of these gorilla posts in case there’s a need to mark a space as off-limits. Since there’s no actual meter present at the space anymore, what else are you going to attach the “no parking” sign to? It’s actually rather clever, though I hesitate to ask how much of the average Portlander’s tax money went into all of this extra equipment (above and beyond the electronic gadgets, that is).

    At least I won’t have this mystery keeping me up nights anymore. One insomnia trigger down, hundreds to go.

  • Striking A Balance Betwixt Old And New

    I accomplished my first post-switch goal today. Most of the old content and linkage resides where it should once more, and the theme generally matches what came before. I think it looks cleaner and snazzier now. Of course I would, though, wouldn’t I?

    As I indicated yesterday, however, a considerable motivation for making the platform change was the ability to do fun and interesting new things with the website without actually becoming a programmer. To this end I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins which you can see and enjoy on the new Status page. I found the myStatus plugin while looking for examples of how WP’s standalone Pages feature works, and that led me to the incredibly-cool plugin modestly named “The Execution of All Things” as well as to a succession of last.fm plugins, one of which tried to break my site (fortunately EZ-Scrobbler works like a charm).

    I need to bring over the old Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater material, the NaNoWriMo ’02 excerpts (in later years I simply posted them in the main journal’s Art category) and decide what to do with my old “bio” page, but otherwise I’m done. Whew. Heck, I even cranked out some new rotator images to liven things up at the top of the page.

    So here’s the new site, as finished as it’s likely to get, ready for me to play with, ready for you to enjoy. It looks a lot like the old site, but behind the facade lies code that makes me happy.

  • Gee Dee Vee Three

    I bet you weren’t expecting this, were you?

    Let me make one thing perfectly clear from the get-go: I loved Monaural Jerk. It let me do some fun, geeky things. I could, in theory, do almost anything I wanted to with it. Unfortunately, over the last few months I’ve felt increasingly trapped by what I wasn’t able to accomplish without taking the time to fully learn the PHP language. I may be a geeky sort of fellow, but that’s more involved than I really have time for anymore.

    After many months of using WordPress for the anime site, as well as sporadic tinkering with the Portlandbloggers page, I decided that this is the platform I want to run with from here on out. (That is, until the next big thing comes along in a few years. I am a geek-dilettante, after all.)

    The process of getting from point where-I-was to point where-I-am was, indeed, quite the learning experience. Starting with an import script from Monaural Jerk v0.43 to WordPress 1.5 graciously provided by Michael Alderete (who also helped with a lot of the debugging) and kludging in some dotcomments import code, I set to work finding all of the fiddly little bits that went wrong. This included such fun as misnamed variables, non-escaped apostrophes, mismatched database insertions and just plain pig-headed stupidity on my part. Oddly enough, considering that as of this very morning I’d all but given up on making the conversion work, I was surprised to manage two major breakthroughs in the space of an hour. And here we are!

    Of course, now I need to get all of the fun extra bits from the old site back up and running on the new. Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned the basic “look” of my website. I just need time to construct a working template that more-or-less matches the kludgey old stylesheet rig I was using before. That project is now on the top of the list. Cross your fingers, folks.

    Welcome to Version 3 of greyduck.net. I hope you like it here.

  • Didn’t I do this last month? Didn’t it turn out much the same way?

    Thanks to my dear Twinlet North, I had fifty bucks to blow. (I could make a truly disturbed joke here, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the perverts in the audience.) Unlike last month’s debacle, I figured, this time I’d have no trouble at all spending that gift card money, especially when the venue is upgraded from Fred Meyer to Best Buy. Right?

    “Wrong!”

    First I looked at headphones. (The better Sony pair? $100. No thanks.) Then I looked (briefly) at computer games and came to the same conclusion I did last month, namely that what I most assuredly don’t need is another massive time-waster when I’m already paying a monthly fee for one (or two, depending on how you count it) major gaming experience(s). I looked at speakers, but I don’t really need a surround-sound set for the A/V computer since it’s not like I really have a room that properly supports the set I already have on the “gaming” rig. I looked into a RAM upgrade. Too damned expensive, that turned out. I thought about a sound card upgrade, but the only device that looked remotely useful still lacked the bells and whistles I’d be giving up by switching to a card that doesn’t support the Live!Drive I/O bay. I considered, repeatedly, and discarded, repeatedly, the idea of buying a faster wireless card for the laptop.

    Finally a solution presented itself. What if I took the ATI Radeon 9000-series card out of the living room multimedia PC and swapped it with the All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 from the A/V computer upstairs, then spent a whopping $20 out-of-pocket for a TV tuner card with which to continue the VHS capture work I (periodically) perform on said A/V computer?

    Brilliant!

    Let’s just gloss over the issue of how much time this dithering process actually ate up out of the evening. It’s not terribly important, anyway. Ahem. I did manage to finish in time to dissuade my (very patient) shopping partner for the evening from buying purple rhinestones for her iPod. Not only that, but I bumped into something of an old friend, namely Wendi’s best friend Amy’s husband, Michael. Spending a few minutes catching up with news from that quarter improved my evening a bit. Having them come over for Diablo II gaming sessions was among the highlights of the later years at the old house.

    If I’ve learned anything from the combination of this experience and the last one like it, and I probably haven’t, it’s that I need to have a much clearer idea of what I want to purchase before I enter any given geek-toy store. We’ll see if I can take this lesson to heart, eh?

  • New Year. New Goal.

    I set myself a modest goal, three hundred sixty five days or so ago, of posting entries on at least 95% of the days of the calendar year and getting the overall site posting rate up into the upper 60 percent range (at the time it was at about 63%). It ended up a matter of posting many short and silly entries, but I accomplished my goal with percentage points to spare.

    This year I’ve set a somewhat different goal. I want to maintain a 75% post rate for the year and I want most of what I write to be more entertaining, more detailed and (hopefully) more interesting. In short: Write less often, but write better.

    If I can pull this off, visiting this site may end up being a form of entertainment even for people who don’t know me personally. Hey, it’s something to shoot for. What’s the point to surviving from year to year if we don’t set ourselves the occasional challenge?

Calendar

November 2025
S M T W T F S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

My Links