blueZhift Blog

While I was hanging out with my Dad last week I had the opportunity of totally vegging out in front of his huge TV in the basement. Sigh, once again I am reminded that all of my relatives and inlaws have bigger TVs than I do… Eventually I’ll probably buy some giant flat screen TV, not so much because of the higher resolution picture, or to enhance my video games, but because they take up so much less space. Lately I’ve been inspired to cut down on the amount of space eating junk around the house. A flat screen TV would allow me to reclaim some major living room realestate. Unfortunately, what I want is still way too expensive, but once the sets come down to say the $500 USD range, then I’ll get seriously interested. I was tempted a bit by the Xbox 360 launch and the upcoming Playstation 3, but right now I’m thinking of picking up a Nintendo Wii first. The Wii will be a lot less expensive ($250 USD) than those other two consoles, and doesn’t need an HDTV to get the most out of the games. So for now the 32 inch Philips will just have to do!

As promised (or threatened), I’ve bundled up my Worldtime WordPress widget.

Click here to download.

From the readme.txt file.

Description

Adds a sidebar widget to show current time and date of three places of your choice.

Installation Instructions

• Unzip the archive and upload peworldtime.php to your WordPress plugins directory.
• Browse to Plugins>Worldtime and click Activate.
• Browse to Presentation>Sidebar Widgets
• Drag the PE Worldtime widget to the sidebar location you want.
• Click the Worldtime configure icon.
• Fill in optional Title and then Place names and corresponding GMT offsets.
  (ex. Chicago is on CDT right now which has GMT offset -5)
• Click the configure dialog X to close it then the Save changes button.

Note: The Worldtime widget only displays the times and dates each time the page is loaded. So you’ll have to turn off WordPress page caching on the pages that display this widget for visitors to see the correct time.

The night before a trip is always filled with stress and excitement for me. But as I prepare to return home to bury and bid farewell to another grandparent, I am also filled with lamentations. It’s only been about 6 months since the last time I did this, and that was quite a heart wrenching affair on so many levels. Funerals are not about the dead, they’re about the living and how those of us left behind get on with life and our relationships with each other. As I witness my parents losing their parents, I cannot help but dread the time when I myself must perform the grim and final duties that all children owe to their parents. Still I will not let that weigh me down. These things are all a natural part of life, and while the emotions of pain and anguish are not comfortable, they are just another necessary pigment in the great portrait of life. So tomorrow I look forward to what new paintings God has in store for me, I’m sure my grandmother has an even better view of the picture now. Guess, I’d better behave myself.

After recovering from a pretty bad morning yesterday, I did the thing that comes naturally to me, I started writing code! I decided to widgetize my sidebar on the blog here. Setting up for the widget plugin was pretty easy and in the process I discovered some nasty stuff that was going on when my site was viewed in IE (it was my fault…). Next I decided to take a shot at building my own widget. I had always wanted to display the local time and date for a few select places around the globe. So first I wrote some PHP code to do what I wanted and then I used the Google Search widget as a template to create a widget that used the time code I’d written. After a few hiccups, I came up with the widget you see in the sidebar below the calendar. The widget shows the time in Chicago, Hong Kong, and Osaka which is a sister city of Chicago. I’ll package the widget code a little later for download so that anyone can use it. It isn’t a realtime flash clock, just good ol’ PHP. And the three places displayed are configurable.

Heh heh, I can’t speak Japanese very well, but I do know computer! One of the fun things about my job is all of the puzzles I get to solve. Right now I’m working on a project that has forced me to use VBA in order to create a very smart Excel spreadsheet. After the fun I’ve had with Python, it was a bit of a step backwards. But I’m very pleased that most of my guesses about how things should work, armed with a pretty good book, Office XP Development with VBA, are correct. The puzzle is nearly solved. The sweet thing about this is that the people using it won’t really have to do anything different than what they are doing right now! I love it when a plan comes together!

I wouldn’t call it an epiphany exactly, but on the way to work today I shifted a bunch of puzzle pieces in my mind and came up with a slightly disturbing result. My wife, the I’m not Gonna Blog WillowBrow, has been reading I Say a Little Prayer which just came out. Just prior to that she’d read On The Down Low. She told me that both of these are stories about the secret lives of gay black men. I thought it was interesting that she was reading this, but really didn’t give it any other thoughts until one other piece fell into place. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XI lately and I usually play as a female hume warrior named Laureta, just my preference… I was joking with her about how most of the female characters are actually played by guys and she may some off the cuff remark about how they were gay guys. Well this morning all of these pieces came together and I thought, Ack! My wife thinks I’m on the down low!

Well, just to cut to the chase, I am not on the DL and she doesn’t think I am either…at least that’s what she said. Later I joked, What!? You don’t think I’m sexy enough to be on the DL! She told me that the books were interesting, but the romance scenes were a bit graphic. This immediately got me thinking about yaoi and all of the paddle waving fan-girls at anime conventions. There just seems to be something about attractive men in romantic relationships with other men that captivates some part of the female imagination. Perhaps it’s something about seeing men in a way they’re not accustomed to. Or maybe because the couples are men, there isn’t the same identification with the characters that there might be in a story featuring heterosexual couples which allows some freedom from whatever sexual constraints the reader may have. I strongly suspect that most of the readers of these books are women, as are most readers of yaoi manga. I’ve been to some yaoi panels and learned a lot (had a lot of fun too), and I still don’t completely understand the attraction. But I do greatly enjoy the freedom to discuss it! Apparently so will a whole lotta other people at Yaoi Con in the fall!

Is life imitating anime? On the way home I saw a young woman on State Street whose short black hair had been dyed blue. She was dressed in a short turquoise skirt and grey stockings that had a look of grunge and goth to them. All in all, a nice combination, so kudos to you! it’s been almost 2 years since I saw my first blue haired babe in the wild, anime conventions don’t count.

I still can hardly believe it, but I was up until 2am battling it out in Final Fantasy XI. I’d been soloing a lot lately, but out in Selbina after a tourism run to Mhaura I realized that I was not going to get any further without some help. Since there were a lot of people milling about in Selbina, I put up my seeking party flag and sat down to wait. It wasn’t long before my warrior Laureta got an invite which I happily accepted. Then it was off to the hidden beach for what turned out to be 4.5 very fun hours of leveling up and honing my battle skills. The time just went by and I still find myself in a euphoric (or is it sleep deprived) state this morning. And all I can think about right now is playing again! If they could cook this stuff into little rocks and sell it on street corners for smoking, it would be illegal!

Okay, I saw the Chicago Sun-Times headline for this this morning, so I took a look on the web. In a nutshell, I think this is really only interesting because it involves young attractive women behaving badly, and there are pictures! So expect to see this all over the news. Yes, hazing, taken to extremes, is a bad thing, but if we start punishing young people for every little thing I don’t think we’re going to get the independent, mature, and creative people that our society needs to thrive. As it stands, I don’t think American culture in the U.S. has enough shared rituals. As a result we get scattered and sometimes abusive rites of passage like hazing in fraternities and athletics.

Click here to see the pictures for yourself on badjocks.com, rated PG, IMHO.

Well, looks like my attempt to rationalize skipping Otakon this year has failed! After determining that the source of my darkening mood today was rooted in part in having cancelled my hotel reservation, I decided that I would go after all. So I got a reservation at the hotel outside of Baltimore that I stayed at last year. It was okay, and will cost me half as much as the other place. So Otakon is back on baby! Trouble be damned!