Divine Lunacy

It has come to my attention that there is a rumor about me having a pet robot who likes to gamble…

(20:35:24) ImNotMexican 14: you have a brother and a sister
(20:35:28) ImNotMexican 14: mom and dad
(20:35:33) SFX Soup Nazi: Hm. Basic.
(20:35:38) ImNotMexican 14: and for a strange reason a pet robot
(20:35:52) SFX Soup Nazi: My candriod?
(20:35:53) ImNotMexican 14: that likes to gamble at that

Before things get out of hand, I feel it is my duty to inform you that I do, indeed, have a gambling pet robot. He is a candroid purchased from thinkgeek.com. You too can own one…

I’m afraid this gambling addiction is my fault. For my eighteenth birthday, I recieved, among other things a candroid and a scratch ticket. Thinking nothing bad of it, I let the candroid scratch part of the ticket. To my great dismay, he stole the scratch ticket, and used his winnings to start a life of gambling. He lives in my room, on top of my computer. Each night when I go to bed, I am extra careful to take all my money with me, as well as a knife to guard against candroid attacks. The candroid is a dangerous creature. Read more at thinkgeek.com…

A look into the everyday life of your not-so-ordinary geek:

“Hello World!”

If anyone didn’t get that then you’re obviously not a geek. Greg and I are testing something to see if it will work for a new site. We’re planning on making an all encompassing news site/review site/everything site. It’ll probably be up in a few months or weeks depending on how lazy we are. You should visit DL every day to see when it will be up. I’m going to continue updating this with the names we thought of for the new site:

• Creative Cognizance
• Communitive Conversance
• Enlightening Erudition

If anyone’s wondering, Greg has decided to let me guest post occasionally on his blog so keep looking out for my posts.

I’m six days late with this one, but at least I’m blogging.

I began to feel sick during fourth period last Tuesday. Despite my poor condition, I signed out and bought some greasy, calorie-filled crap from Dunkin Donuts as I usually do. As the day progressed, I began to feel worse, until about sixth period, at which point I reached the pinnacle of crap. I opted not to change for gym because I was far too sickly to participate. (at least I wanted Mr. Hauser to think that…). I told him I wasn’t feeling well, yet he still refused to give me credit for the day. We were to begin team handball that day, and in preparation, we were watching a cheesy informational video about it. As the video played, my condition began to worsen as if it were in inverse proportion with the time left on the video. ( [condition]*[time left]=k, where k is some constant. ) By the time the movie was over, I felt like I was in an oven. Mr. Hauser instructed all those who were not changed to go sit against the bleachers. I stood up, walked over to the bleachers, and leaned my head against the top. The next thing I remember is Mr. Hauser saying “Greg, you just fainted. Are you alright?” I smartly responded “I don’t feel well!”. He then helped me stand up and sat me on his chair to wait for the nurse. By the time the nurse arrived, my vision had blurred so much that I could not see anything. My vision was restored immediately after the nurse laid me on the floor. I was fine, but they made me ride a wheel chair to the nurses office. I went home and lived happily ever after…

Not quite… I felt very feverish for the rest of the day, but that’s quite beside the point. I went to see the doctor later that day, just to make sure I wasn’t dead or anything. The food I had purchased from Dunkin Donuts earlier that day ended up on the floor of the waiting room… Enough said… I’m fine now. I was fine on Wednesday. It was all just a stomach virus.

I am now, but I wasn’t when the question was asked. How does one answer such a question? The most correct answer is clearly “Go away before I become angry and throw a pillow at you.” Every time I get a chance to sleep late, she comes and asks me if I am awake…

HA! Take that Eskimo lady! If we had a snow day every time I didn’t do some of my homework…

Albeit frames can be useful at times, they are generally a BAD web design practice and should be avoided by the average pseudo-geek, who is clearly lacks the skill to wield them.

The preceding was a public service announcement from someone who is extremely pissed off.

Thinking myself smart, I went coded a website in standards compliant XHTML 1.1, CSS, and a lot of PHP. The web site’s back end was driven by wordpress, with a few alterations, and a plugin to handle the meetings page. This architecture met the needs of the customer perfectly as the main objective of the site is to provide news updates to Pascoag Utility Customers. All of the pages were dynamic wordpress pages, and all of the news posts were wordpress posts. The previous practice of the Utility District was to email Mark Mingain, of M² web design when they wanted to update a page. The almighty webmaster, as they call him, would then edit a static HTML page to reflect the requested updates. It is my opinion that a customer should not need to email his host in order to update his web pages. Incorporating wordpress into the site was a way minimizing interaction between the “webmaster” (I use that term lightly.) and the customer. Updating was simply a matter of typing a post in the WYSIWYG editor, and clicking submit.

The situation turned out to be more complicated than I ever could have foreseen. The webmaster could not comprehend creating a MySQL database, and granting a user privileges on it, even given the incredible power of cPanel (a GUI back end). I spent an hour on the phone with the webmaster, and he still came short of giving a user privileges on the database. This phone call was indicative that the “master of the web” I was dealing with was in reality, nothing more than a pseudo-geek. When he told me to excuse him because the GRAPHICAL BACKEND looked like Greek to him, I knew that only time would tell exactly how deep his ineptitude ran.

And so I was right. Granting privileges to a database user turned into editing a very straightforward line of PHP (editing a string that was passed to the browser via the language construct echo.), and cringing as I read the following email:

It’s not that easy, since both web sites were programmed in 2 different languages the old (HTML) and the new (PHP).

What needs to be done is for PUD to review the NEW site ( http://www.pud-ri.org/iindex.php ) and the current one to see what pages/content is missing. Create a punch list of what needs to be added and/or deleted then Greg can make the necessary changes.

Once those changes have been made, Greg should then either publish the site to his development server ( http://pud.divinelunacy.com/ ) or zip/archive the code and email it to me and I will then post to the PUD development area. PUD will then review the site and changes and either bless it or make final adjustments, and then repost until PUD is satisfied.

Once the site has been blessed Greg will get me the code and I will then published and it will be in production.

Greg, if I missed anything please feel free to jump in.

Chris, hopefully I explained it well enough for you.

He was correct in stating that the new site used PHP, and the old one was merely static HTML, but he was wrong in saying that they were programmed in two different languages. I find it rather liberal to refer to coding HTML as programming, but I guess that’s just a matter of opinion. At any rate, the wording that he used puts PHP and HTML on the same level, despite the fact that HTML is a markup language and PHP is a programming language. (Not to mention the fact that my code was XHTML 1.1 compliant ;).) I made extensive use of CSS as well. I am also inclined to point out his tautological use of “and/or”. Or is a logical operator that returns true if either one or both operands are true. That is, the statement: Any person whose name is Greg or uses a Das Keyboard. describes me even though both conditions apply to me. We must remember that or is not synonymous with xor (either or). I digress…

When I finally gave up control of the site, the webmaster failed comprehend the purpose of the friendly back end. The wordpress backend was designed to allow the PUD personnel to edit their own website without interference from third parties. The update via email practice continued. It was about a month before everything was running perfectly (aside from the misspelling of Affiliates, which has yet to be fixed.) The last email I received from the PUD was a very climatic thank you sort of email. It sounded as though the new site would be fully operational within the next week or so. More than a month passed before I saw something that slightly resembled the website Joe and I worked hard to design appear on the PUD server. In the meantime, I noticed that the wordpress directory, and all of the PHP files had magically disappeared.

The new PUD web site may resemble the web site that I poured hours of love, and hundreds of lines of code into; those graphics might look like the ones Joe designed, but don’t be fooled, they are. The site makes fallacious claims that Joe and I made it. Believe me when I say: I don’t even know how to code a web page that has only 24 lines of HTML, but is 28 errors away from being compliant XHTML 1.1 (including the missing DOCTYPE.). Our design and our graphics were ripped off, but not a line of that website was coded by me.

Some people will never learn when it is appropriate to use frames. They are a useful tool, but they should not be used in place of CSS’s all-powerful styling capabilities. I highly recommend NOT using M² web design for anything other than satire. Go ahead and be a pseudo-geek if it’s the best you can do in life, but DO NOT shit all over my code. (Live Journal readers: Take note of the mood ;).)

It has been quite some time since I posted, and since I have nothing more exciting to post about, I figured I’d just post this essay…

I always have had a love for problem solving. This first became evident at the age of two when I learned to open the screen door. Two became twelve and preschool became middle school, but my passion for problem solving was, unfortunately, not reflected in my work for mathematics class. In fact, my seventh grade mathematics teacher would be astounded to learn that I plan to major in the field. However, middle school ended with a transition to high school where the study of mathematics merged with an emphasis on understanding concepts, and the math “problems” of the past became the promise of my future.

My love of mathematics grew exponentially in high school, when in my junior year, I was placed in an advanced geometry class in the company of freshmen. Mr. Horne’s advanced geometry class was very different from any other mathematics course I ever had pursued. With regularity, a large word problem called “problem of the week” was assigned. Many of my peers banged their heads on their desks in agony at the thought of the collision of words and numbers, a written assignment in math. I, however, was inclined to run around the classroom with glee, though I was able to restrain myself most of the time. Unlike the work assigned during class, the problems of the week were long, counterintuitive problems that required serious thought. When solving these, I often secluded myself in my room for hours, emerging from my lair only for the occasional drink of water or to pace around the house. It was the thrill of thinking about these problems, and the joy of solving one followed by the composition of a ten-page report detailing several solutions that brought me to realize my love for mathematics.

As I prepare to travel beyond high school, I find that my need to solve problems is channeled through the medium of mathematics. Many nights I am late for dinner, unwilling to part from a particularly intriguing problem. When I finally conquer a problem that has escaped me for days, I feel elated. It is the same elation felt all those years ago when I solved the problem of the screen door. Now I stand at a new threshold where mathematics is the key that opens the door, the combination that unlocks the future, and the formula by which I will build a life.