Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Survival Tips

    A co-worker has one of those page-a-day calendars, where you tear off each day and it has some interesting content of some kind… normally, they’re comic strips, or trivia, or word-of-the-day things, but this one is a survival calendar. So it has things like “Today in survival history” and “Today’s Hero” and the best, various survival tips.

    Among such choice tips as “How to stop a runaway camel,” “How to escape from a sinking car” and “How to foil an alien abduction” is one that was too good not to share here:

    How to Jump from Roof to Roof

    1. Look for any obstructions like gutters and small walls at the ledge of the roof.
    2. Make certain that you have enough space to land and roll.
    3. Check the distance between the buildings.
      Most people cannot jump farther than 10 feet, even at a full run.
    4. Run at full speed toward the edge.
      You will need 40 to 60 feet to gain enough speed to clear about 10 feet of distance.
    5. Leap.
      Make sure your center of gravity is forward. Try to land on your feet, then immediately tuck your head and tumble sideways onto your shoulders.

  • Is there a doctor in the house?

    My wife and I went to the Bon Jovi concert in Portland Monday night, and talk about a show. Damn right.

    The Goo Goo Dolls opened for them, and they were very good, too. Played to the audience nicely. Good choice to open, the crowd loved them.

    When Bon Jovi hit the stage, though, the audience went nuts. And if the Goo Goo Dolls plays up the crowd, then Bon Jovi has it down to an art form; they love their fans. I mean, the audience sang the entire first verse of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” not just the chorus, which you’d expect.

    Anyway. They played for 2 hours, a great mix of old and new of just about every hit you could name. Interestingly, Richie Sambora sang “I’ll Be There For You” while Jon took a quick break offstage.

    It was a great show, hell yeah.

  • Spring Ahead

    Daylight Savings Time for DummiesDaylight savings.

    Feh.

    I hate daylight savings.

    But I thought this picture would be amusing.

    Enjoy.

  • Paint

    This is the month for painting. We just got our house painted, and deck washed and sealed, and today we started painting Brandon’s room. He’s getting a light-ish blue, with a space-themed wallpaper border and bed set.

    Looks pretty good, so far. We’re doing the second (and last) coat tomorrow, and then next weekend we’ll be hanging wallpaper border.

  • Errata

    I was reading through PHP Advanced this evening and on page 63, came across something incorrect (regarding objects in PHP):

    PHP does not support multiple levels of inheritance, so you could not make a Grandchild class that extends a Child class that in itself is an extension of the Parent class.

    Actually, PHP does support multiple levels of inheritance, and you can see the proof yourself by browsing the source code of the PEAR DB class found here. The inheritance path for the DB_mysql object looks like this:

    PEAR -> DB_common -> DB_mysql

    And even the PHP website’s documentation confirms this (found here):

    You create a class, parent, and use extends to create a new class based on the parent class: the child class. You can even use this new child class and create another class based on this child class.

    Now, what is true is that PHP doesn’t support multiple inheritance in general— i.e. inheriting from multiple sources simultaneously. But chaining a string of class definitions singly is okay.

  • Items for your consideration

    So, we got a new cat this week.

    More specifically, my wife got a new cat.

    She’s been bugging me to get another dog, which I will not do; one is enough. So, more or less in exchange for that, I capitulated on a cat.

    So far, our other two cats pretty much hate it.

    …..

    Over on Tim Bray’s website, there’s an article on enterprise software— and a delicious quote I couldn’t resist reprinting here: “Software pricing continues to be a black art, and one which most people practice poorly.” How true. How so very true.

  • Oscar

    Didn’t catch most of the Oscars last night, nor did I really want to; I have no desire to sit through 3+ hours of drivel just to find out the only awards that really matter.

    (For those keeping track, those are best picture, director, actor/actress, and supporting actor/actress. Best script and musical score are okay, too.)

    Wouldn’t it be nice if the Academy Awards only consisted of these six awards? Then I’d watch them every year.

    And of course, I missed Michael Moore entirely. That seems to be what everybody’s talking about. That and Eminem winning best song.

  • No clever title

    I love the irony in this Slashdot posting: “XML Co-Creator says XML Is Too Hard For Programmers“. Reads to me like a title The Onion would publish.

    Anyway. The Slashdot post led me to Tim Bray’s weblog, which is pretty cool to me. (But then, I’m a geek and this probably won’t be as cool to you.) This is the guy who helped invent XML. His blog posts look pretty insightful and/or entertaining, and I rather like the design of the site. Simple. Uses CSS for all the layout, no HTML tables. Nice. I need to brush up on my CSS.

    On another note, I’m finally re-launching The Brew Site. I’m working behind the scenes to get all the PHP working and the site active, but I figure if I don’t do this now, I probably never will…

  • What are all the colors of the rainbow?

    Our trip to Portland today was definitely one of the odder ones.

    In short: The good news is, Kaitlyn’s eyes are as good as they’re going to get, according to the doctor, which is pretty damn good. No more surgeries. The bad news is, the doctor recommended a second eye surgery for Brandon, before he turns 2 if possible. Definitely not what we want to hear.

    As for the (gory) details of the trip, this is a doozy: Brandon threw up on himself and he and the car smelled like puke the rest of the day. We had to buy him a new shirt at Goodwill because the one he was wearing stank so bad.

    Then Sherri managed to spill a bunch of orange juice all over her lap and seat while trying to fill the kids’ cups with juice. That wasn’t as bad as the vomit, though.

    After the eye doctor we went to the Lloyd Center Mall and had a highly mediocre cheesesteak lunch from a food court restaurant called Steak Escape (yes, they actually have a website).

    On the drive home, we saw the brightest rainbow I have ever seen when driving through Madras. I wish I could have taken a picture of it; it was truly spectacular and almost made it all worth it.

    Incidentally, the answer to the question in the title is: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (purple). Seven colors. Sherri didn’t believe me that there are 7 colors and that indigo was counted, until we got home and she looked it up online.

  • Kon-Tiki

    We’re heading up for a day trip to Portland tomorrow for Kaitlyn’s post-op visit to the eye doctor to check how her eyes have progressed since surgery. Have to get up at 6 am though, that’s a bummer.

    Here’s a link too geeky/cool to pass up: The Contiki Operating System and Desktop Environment. It’s an operating system with built in web server and web browser originally written for the good ol’ Commodore 64. This may not seem like such an accomplishment given today’s advanced systems and seemingly limitless power, but for those familiar with the C64— or especially anyone who owned/used one— all I can say is: Damn.