Tag ljbackup (14)
pride and prejudice and zombies and "star trek" and wedding and words
Mood: busy
Posted on 2009-05-11 14:03:00
Tags: movies ljbackup wedding books
Words: 377
In reverse order:
- My bad. I posted to Facebook that my epic jury duty recounting was 9500 words long, which sounded more improbable the more I thought about it. Indeed, my word-counting was counting characters instead of words, so after a little tuneup the statistics show it was only 2228 words long (still my longest post ever). In fact, now I know I write an average of 200 words per entry! And over the life of my LJ (including protected posts which don't show up in the public statistics) I've written 204550 words, or around 126 words a day.
- Wedding stuff is going fine. I sent the invitations out today at lunch!
- "Star Trek" movie = good. We saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, so I had a Romulan Ale before it even started which made it even better. (also, Kirk's Iowa steak with McCoy's baked beans, while arriving extremely late (the waiter took half off the price) was delicious) The new 4K digital projection thingy was incredibly crisp and I really enjoyed the movie. (talking about seeing it again soonish!)
- I have a long history with "Pride and Prejudice". I was forced to read it in 7th grade and hate hate hated it, didn't understand most of it, and got a "D" or something like that on the test. As such, I never had any desire to watch the A&E miniseries even though my mom and sister(s?) loved it, and I generally went on with my life.
For my birthday, djedi got me Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I started reading it, and awesomeness ensued. The first paragraph is:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.There was enough zombie happenings to keep me interested throughout the book, and I even got kind of engaged with the non-zombie plot, which is nothing short of remarkable. Also, there are illustrations!
epic flying mount!!
Mood: excited
Posted on 2007-06-20 09:07:00
Tags: ljbackup baseball rice worldofwarcraft
Words: 200
With the help of djedi, I bought my epic flying mount last night! (big screenshot of required money) It, in a word, is awesome. I will have to see about getting one of the cooler looking ones (right now it's green) but it is super fast.
One of the advantages of putting my sample LJ backup online (created with LJBackup</shamelessPlug>), besides the neat statistics, is that when people do searches and click through I get to see it. Like, I'm one of only two results on Google for "homer 3d" "fermat's last theorem" (the search leads to here), which someone clicked through to last night. Oddly enough, Google doesn't find the original LJ post...
Rice plays NC State today (and tomorrow, if necessary) at 2PM Eastern - if they win one of these games, they advance to the championship series! Go Owls!
Also, LiveJournal will be selling permanent accounts starting Friday for one week. They cost $150 and you're a permanent member for life (like being a paid member but you get more space and userpics). I considered it but I think I'm going to pass for now. (the last permanent account sale was in 2005 so they're pretty rare)
Check out xkcd!
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2007-01-05 10:37:00
Tags: rave ljbackup xkcd webcomic
Words: 82
So I recently got turned on to the webcomic xkcd. I discovered them from the sandwich strip, but there are lots of other computery random strips, as well as a few sweet ones. Even better, it's syndicated so you can just friend xkcd_rss to get the latest ones on your friends page. And don't forget to rollover to check out the extra tooltip :-)
In other news, LJBackup seems to be working again. Let me know if you have a problem with it...
LJBackup is here!
Mood: proud
Posted on 2006-12-20 21:06:00
Tags: ljbackup
Words: 16
LJbackup is live! Give it a whirl and let me know if there are any problems.
almost Christmas!
Posted on 2006-12-20 14:01:00
Tags: ljbackup links
Words: 349
The holidays are upon us! This is our last week in town (we fly out Friday for Christmas & New Year's in Texas) so we've been busy trying to take care of things. Like the TiVo Cablecard adventure djedi mentioned yesterday. I'm leaving work a little early to be home so they'll hopefully come and hopefully fix it.
I got some time yesterday to work on LJBackup. Now, it works pretty well - I was able to use the web page (which I haven't made public yet) to download a zip file of my journal. I even figured out Apache RewriteRule's to redirect from a .zip file to a script. I was planning on giving up on having it done before we leave, but I think a little more work (want to add a few more features) and I'll just put it up. I'd like to have the "finished" product included in my real backup, which I need to do tonight.
Jason Kottke recently had a Celebrity Mii Contest (Mii's are the little avatars you can create on the Wii), and here are the results. I like the winning one a lot, and my other favorites are Jack Black, Admiral Ackbar, and V from V for Vendetta. Kottke's blog is excellent - read it every day!
"Episcopalians Against Equality" - an editorial that ran in the Washington Post this morning about the 7 Virginia parishes that severed ties with the Episcopal Church and threw their lot in with a conservative Nigerian archbishop who supported legislation to criminalize "Registration of Gay Clubs, Societies and organizations".
I hesitate to post about this. Michael Crichton wrote a book called "State of Fear" which expressed the view that global warming wasn't a scientific fact (and later professed publicly the same). Michael Crowley, a writer for The New Republic, wrote a long column (subscription required) criticizing him for this view. In Crichton's latest book "Next" he made reference to a political journalist "Mick Crowley" who was a child rapist (excerpt is disgusting). Michael Crowley and "Mick Crowley" are both Washington political reporters who attended Yale. Slimy slimy slimy.
update day?
Music: "Hooked on a Feeling" by David Hasselhoff (thanks, David!)
Posted on 2006-12-16 23:04:00
Tags: ljbackup dodgeball wii
Words: 469
Hmm, Friday was quiet on LJ and today seems to be update day. So I'll continue the trend!
Last night djedi and I went over to a new friend's place to play Wii. It was fun! Although, a lot of what we played was Monkey Ball minigames, and these don't seem to be up to the caliber of previous versions. There are some good ones in there, though - the key is avoiding the stupid or impossible to control ones.
This morning was dodgeball! Unfortunately it was another stupid 9:00 start, but I was dedicated enough to get up on time. :-) Anyway, our first match was against a team that only have five players (six play at a time), so we went six on five against them. We did well at first, holding about even with them, but they ended up winning 10-4. Had some good games, though, including trading "I got you outs" with a cute muscled guy on the other team. He was better than me, though...
The second match was against "The Hasselhoffs" (yeah, really). They even had matching shirts with David Hasselhoff's face surrounded by the text "Don't Hassle the Hoff". As could be expected of a team that has uniforms, they crushed us 14-2 (and the last game we won because they were screwing around). One guy on their team even made a phenomenal catch - he was on the ground and caught the ball between his legs. It was unreal. Also, I got hit by a stinger (the small balls that hurt!) twice dangerous close to the crotch area. Luckily, no permanent damage was done.
Came back home and did some programming and played some more Wii Sports. I've already reached Pro level at tennis and I'm getting closeish with baseball! It's a lot of fun.
Played some WoW...had a slightly frustrating MC run because the server reset twice, so we had to basically start over twice. Luckily we weren't too far in, and the rest of the run went relatively well, including our first downing of Ragnaros after the patch.
Just went to djedi's office's holiday party - it was a lot of fun! We played ping-pong and air hockey and watched some football. I think my Wii Tennis is helping my ping-pong game. Also, I want to be warmed up for facing destroyerj come New Year's :-)
Finally fixed the frustrating LJBackup problem over which I almost killed a hard drive. It turns out when you're using prototype.js to do an Ajax call, you have to use "post" as the method, not "POST" (even though "POST" is supposed to be more compliant, or something). Anyway, making decent progress and I'm hoping to wrap things up before we leave on Friday!
Hope everyone's holiday season is going well. Only one week (give or take) until Christmas!
just a day, just an ordinary day...
Mood: stressed
Posted on 2006-12-13 08:30:00
Tags: ljbackup politics links
Words: 465
On the way in to work this morning, I heard an editorial on Marketplace. (by David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush) He decried "populist economics" (basically the protectionist aspects of them) and sounded concerned since Democrats had just been elected. He said that, if they caused just half a percentage point of growth to disappear, that would be the equivalent of losing New Mexico's economic output, and in 20 years (assuming everything else stayed the same...) our economic advantage over China would be down to 3:2. But it was weird, because he never ever said a word about why assuming half a percentage point of growth would be lost was at all reasonable or anything. I'll excerpt from this Fire Joe Morgan post:
Then he said that maybe if Burnett hadn't mouthed off last year and been benched for the last week of the season, who knows, maybe 5 years $55 million could have been 5 years $75 million. Then, without backing that up, he then proceeded to chastise AJ Burnett for what he labeled a "$20 million dollar mistake."
You can't just make something up out of nowhere and then use the made-up thing to criticize someone for something that actually happened.
Maybe if Paul Konerko had not only hit 40 HR last year but has also invented a cold fusion machine, instead of $60 million from the ChiSox he might have gotten $50 billion from the government. That's a $49.994 billion mistake.
Wii impressions
Mood: busy
Posted on 2006-12-11 16:41:00
Tags: ljbackup wii
Words: 834
So I got a Wii on Friday, and as you'd expect, djedi and I spent a long time playing it. But maybe not in ways you'd expect!
So we unpacked it and set it up, etc. I had played with a Wii Remote (i.e. controller) in stores before, but it's a lot easier to control it when you're at a "normal" distance from the TV and sitting down. The main interface is really a pleasure to play with - you get a slight rumble every time you roll over a button, which is a nice touch.
Anyway, the first thing we did (after updating the firmware) is create Miis for ourselves. A Mii is a little graphical representation of yourself - you get to choose the hair, face shape, etc., etc. I'm not very good at such things but it was kinda fun, and the results are at least recognizable!
After friending omega697 and others, we played around with Wii Sports (the pack-in title). It's kinda neat because you play as your Mii :-) There are five sports that come with it - here they are, ordered by how much I liked it:
The two games we had bought were Super Monkey Ball and the new Zelda. We haven't started the new Zelda yet, but we did bust out a little bit of Monkey Ball. Overall, I'm a little disappointed. The main mode (you tilt the Wiimote to move the level) is OK but I have more dexterity in my thumbs then I do in my whole hand, so everything seems harder. (and I hear the levels get crazy hard quickly) But, I really bought it for the 50(!) party games. We've only had time to play through 15-20 or so, and for some of those we were calibrating the Wiimote wrong, which may explain why many of them just didn't seem to work at all. I guess we'll have to reevaluate them... (we've been scoring them out of 5 so we can remember which the good ones are, since there seem to be plenty of duds and uninteresting ones) Anyway, poor control leads to a lot of frustration.
We also bought the original NES Zelda through the Virtual Console and played through it.(passed it last night!) It's a lot of fun - good game, and it is more fun playing it on a controller and TV screen than through an emulator on the computer. It's emulated very well - even the slowdowns when too many enemies come on the screen. For added fun, a third party will be making adapters so you can play the Wii with NES or SNES controllers, which is kinda neat.
Anyway, the gist of it is that I've enjoyed it a lot, and I'm looking forward to trying it out with more people come the holidays, assuming I can find two more Wiimotes and nunchucks. I'm still in the gimmicky phase (anything motion sensing is cool!) so we'll have to see how it fares with Zelda, etc.
On a non-Wii note, I hope to have LJBackup finished before I leave for the holidays. (next Friday) A bit optimistic, but I did some more stuff on it this weekend so there isn't too much left to do...
Safe-wii first!
Mood: cold
Posted on 2006-12-05 19:25:00
Tags: ljbackup wii politics links
Words: 128
The Japanese Wii manuals safety pictures are hilarious! So darn cute. And here are some equally cute fake Wii safety pictures! I still don't have one, though.
I put up a new version of a sample LJbackup - the only thing of note is the stats page now includes the longest posts. Interestingly, my longest posts is a friends-only meme I posted, probably because the word counting is pretty primitive and inaccurate (counting HTML tags as words, etc.)
Same-sex marriage appeal in Maryland was argued yesterday. It's pretty neat being in a state where this is even remotely possible! Here's a fun quote:
"Our laws should reflect what is best for children, not what is best for adults," she said.
LJbackup preview!
Mood: proud
Posted on 2006-11-28 22:55:00
Tags: ljbackup
Words: 123
So I've gotten things mostly working: to demonstrate, I did a public-only backup of my journal. Things to note:
- it does memories and polls and tags
- the statistics page is fun! I learned that I'm happy a lot. Also, tired. You can also see all of the comments you've made on my journal, if you're into that sort of thing. (I am)
- it's pretty much feature complete, as far as I'm concerned. I need to wrap it in a web interface, though. Oh, and I was gonna look into exporting ical events for the entries so they can be imported into, say, Google Calendar.
Anyone see any problems or anything they'd like added? I might add a "longest posts" category (by most words)...
back in the cold
Mood: discontent
Posted on 2006-11-27 14:49:00
Tags: ljbackup poll
Words: 172
Thanksgiving was fun. (except for the flight down - it felt like my sinuses had acid in them for about an hour and that my ears were going to explode on the way down! Cold + airplane == bad) It was nice to see David's nephews again, although I didn't really feel like taking pictures so I didn't. Weather was good, too.
I actually got up early Friday morning for my first Black Friday experience. I was trying to get a Wii but came up short. (the gamestop in Victoria didn't get any...) The crowds in Target and Best Buy were amazing - at least a two hour wait to check out, I'd say. Luckily (I guess) I didn't have to :-)
I was in a bit of a mood last night after getting home so I worked on the LJ backup some more, and was able to make it spit out a calendar (which I had been dreading). Thank goodness! Oh, and here's a fake poll for example purposes when I get around to parsing them:
keep on keepin' on
Mood: sick
Posted on 2006-11-22 09:59:00
Tags: ljbackup
Words: 184
The verdict is in: I do indeed have a cold. It started last Friday or so and increased in intensity slowly, so I wasn't sure if it was just allergies or what. But lots of people around me have been sick in recent weeks (although I thought I had already had that cold), so it's no shocker. The goodnews is that I was much better this morning than I was yesterday morning. And it's amazing the difference that softer Kleenex make when you're going through 100 or so a day. And I hope my ears don't explode on the plane today. (we're going to see djedi's family for Thanksgiving, and also get a Wii!!)
Being sick and playing WoW and trying to get a Wii hasn't left me with a whole lot of time to work on LJ backup, but I'm also at a point where I've done a lot of the fun stuff and the more irritating stuff is left. Hopefully I'll knock those out in the next few weeks and be done with it.
Hope everyone has a happy and safe Thanksgiving :-)
I've never owned a console on launch day...
Mood: sore
Posted on 2006-11-19 23:22:00
Tags: ljbackup dodgeball wii
Words: 270
...and today is no exception! I woke up at 6:45 and went to a number of different stores to try to obtain a Wii, but to no avail. I really should have preordered - didn't want to because I've seen people get screwed with that. (i.e. PS3 where they don't receive enough units to cover the preorders) But there seem to be plenty of Wiis today (the first Target I went to had 120), just none went to me. I did manage to snag an extra controller and the two games we wanted, though. (new monkey ball and zelda) A gaming store near work said they're getting another shipment in Tuesday, so I'm still hopeful! Interesting Wii FAQ here.
In other news, I was tired after dodgeball yesterday (lots of running around!), and I noticed my arm kinda hurt when trying to throw. So I'm already feeling kinda sick (think it's just a mild cold or allergies at this point), and today I'm sore all over my freaking body. I didn't put two and two together until just now when I tried to do the throwing motion with my right arm and it hurt in like 8 different places. Hopefully that'll go away tomorrow.
My LJ backup project is coming along decently - I'm now downloading all posts and comments and saving them, as well as displaying some neat statistics. Things left to do:
- generate yearly archive pages, like this
- read in polls and parse and display them
- hopefully find some way to find out which posts are memories
- more neat statistics, like who you use the <lj user="whoever"> tag for most
project.begin()
Mood: excited
Posted on 2006-11-07 08:23:00
Tags: ljbackup projects
Words: 180
Vote today!!
Thanks a lot for y'all's comments on my post yesterday! I've decided to work on the LJ backup thing. For some reason I sorta half-started on it a while ago and was convinced that it was going to be really hard. Last night I spent most of the evening coding (djedi wanted to make sure I was actually enjoying myself and not just doing it because I felt I needed to be working, but I really do enjoy coding, especially at the beginning of a project!) and got to the point where I can fetch all comments to all of my posts and I can fetch my posts, so that's a lot of the hard part. I'm even displaying it decently, although I need to work on comment threading and prettification and such. I can even do neat statistics - 43 people have ever commented on my journal! (42 real users, 1 generic anonymous user)
Since I have to wait at home this afternoon for the cable people to come, I'm hoping on getting more stuff done as well :-)
This backup was done by LJBackup.
