I just read this review at Ars before coming over to the in-laws to fix the computer. I also read at SplinterCell.com that Chaos Theory, the third in the Splinter Cell series from Ubisoft, should hit the store shelves on March 31st. I’ve still got the GameStop gift card from work, now I just have to figure out how to choose between these two console gems.
Monthly Archive for March, 2005
If I were left in a vegetative state with little or no chance of coming out of it and returning to my previous lively state, contributing to society, please donate what working organs I have and let me rest in peace. A vegetative state is not something in which I want to be, and I hope that my family respects my wishes.
If I were vegetative, and my wishes are not respected, if I do come out of it, there will be hell to pay.
It’s almost 8:30 on Friday night, and I’m contemplating dinner as I catch up on some reading and work. I’ve taken a short break from "the project" to find that there are even more people who have nothing better to do than spam blogs. I’m now averaging about fifty spam comments a day. Luckily, I’ve got Spam Karma digesting the spams in ten message chunks.
Among my other reading, I did find this article about the not so free iPods that just about every website seems to be hawking lately. You know the ones I’m talking about, with the highly active flashing banner ads with a pic of the latest iPod (probably ripped off of Apple’s website), possibly even including a "hit the iPod and win!" slogan. The jist of the article is that, as I have been trying to explain to the naïve who actually think it’s a free iPod, is that while you may not necessarily be giving any money directly to these companies, you are consenting to having your privacy (and inbox) ripped to shreds. You’re also agreeing to sign up for all sorts of commercial garbage that require up front fees or that require you remain a member for x amount of months to prove you’ve signed up with an affiliate.
I found out about PyMusique. It’s the latest of DVD John’s DRM-related projects. Apparently, the iTunes Music Store does not add any DRM to your downloaded tracks until after they’ve completed downloading to your machine. PyMusique allows you to purchase your iTunes straight from Apple, but prevents the iTunes application from adding the DRM to your music. This application will probably stop working, if it actually does work, soon after Apple or its music partners get wind of it. While it still requires that you pay for the music, it cuts out the DRM, and thus cuts out the step of burning the restricted music to CD and re-ripping it without the DRM (still perfectly legal, as far as I can tell, but I’m no lawyer).
Well, now it’s almost 8:45 and I still haven’t put much thought into my dinner plans. I had, however, contemplated asking if Mel wanted to go to Sushi Station, but she was nowhere to be found when I got home. And I’m having problems with Chris’s phone, so I haven’t called anyone, either. For the past several days, Chris’s phone has refused to send or receive any calls. I did manage to get one call out to the house on my way home. I haven’t been able to repeat that feat. Woo…I feel winded after all this typing. Maybe I’ll just nuke something in the fridge.
Today is garbage day. Sometimes I bring the garbage cans out late on Tuesday evening, but usually I get up Tuesday morning when I start to hear the truck go around the block collecting garbage and rush to get the garbage out to the curb. Not today. With as little time as Chris and I have spent home this past week, we barely have two garbage bags filled with, well, garbage. So, I’m not going to rush. The garbage man is just going to have to pick it all up next week.
Chris and I went to Woodfield today because she needed to buy a new pair of shoes or a dress or both for tonight’s Alumni Night for the HEHS Musical South Pacific. I had other motives going to the mall, but they were known by all - check out the iPods at the Apple Store. You might ask, "If Mark wanted to check out the iPods, wtf is a pic of a leather jacket doing here?"
The answer to your question is that I did check out the iPods, but then I decided to head over to Wilsons Leather with Mel. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the store was its much smaller size in the "new" location. I put new in quotes because I know that Wilsons moved a while ago, I just haven’t really bothered to come to the mall very often in the past few years. I headed towards the back, where they have the important stuff: jackets, coats, trenchcoats, etc.
That’s where I found the leather trenchcoats. Unfortunately, I only found two styles, and neither really said, "Buy me!" After being helped for a little bit by one of the store clerks, I decided that if I would buy the coat, I’d have to talk it over with Chris first. So, I did, and she stopped by the store to see what I found (she found a dress herself). She didn’t like the trenchcoats I showed her, but she thought the jacket I found was pretty nice. Since it was on sale, it wasn’t that hard to convince me that I should/could buy it. So, now I’m finally the owner of a new leather jacket once again. The new jacket will just complement my outerwear wardrobe, not replace my old favorite. Chris and I decided that Bessie is still wearable, so it’s not quite time to retire her.
I logged into my blog’s admin page, ready to write a pointless post about my headache. On my dashboard, I saw that someone had posted a comment to one of my posts about Laurie Boncimino. That made me wonder about how someone found my little post about Laurie, when there were so many news posts I found that pointed directly to the site her family made after her disappearance.
On my search to find my site with just Laurie’s name, I found so much more before finding my post on the fourth page of Google’s results. I knew Laurie was a cheerful person, who always had a smile and a nice thing to say. When I’d come into Starbucks in the morning feeling a little down, she’d make a point to smile at me and ask what’s wrong. That someone I didn’t know would bother to ask made me feel better almost immediately.
What I did not know was that Laurie was in Harper’s Honors Society Phi Theta Kappa (not suprisingly), and that she was accepted into Indiana University for the fall of 2005 (Harper’s Community Catalyst, page 9). She was asked to speak at Harper’s commencement ceremony after receiving the Motorola Award for Excellence, the most distinguished award for Harper students.
Katie Hova, a close friend and a co-worker of Laurie’s, started this thread at CollegeSlackers.com, there were so many people who knew her and were as concerned as I was about her safety. Many were also like me, sharing in the shock about her death. While I will miss Laurie, I can’t possibly miss her as much as her friends and family. I was just a customer, and I can’t bring myself to go to the wake. So, Katie, Scott, Jessie, Erin and any other friends and family of Laurie’s that come across this, my sincerest condolences to you on your loss. Having almost lost two people close to me to suicide without much warning, I can only imagine the pain and torment you are experiencing right now.
Forget about my headache, because I have already. As death often does, put things into perspective. Tell those you love that you love them, and let them know you are there for them always, in good times and in bad.
I was inspired again to do more work on "the project" tonight, so I worked on the authentication features of the site. Checking the shopping cart after creating an account, it seemed to work just fine. Then, of course, I clicked on a link to show me the cart again, just to make sure it wasn’t holding a cached version of the page. Lo and behold, all the items in the cart disappear.
I frantically switched to phpMyAdmin in another window, only to find that the items are still in the cart table of the database. Upon further examination, I find that the customer ID number assigned to the cart items seemed to change as I added items to the cart, effectively adding items to other users’ carts! An hour of putzing around with php, I realized that somehow my $_SESSION variable that identifies the logged in customer was being modified. Once I renamed the session variable to something else, the problem just disappeared. Damned session variables (well, all variables for that matter) - always wasting my time.
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