By golly, this Web 2.0 stuff is awesome. Selina left a comment using her phone and now I'm posting using it as well. Can't say it's easy to do with one hand (old lefty is still not up to par), but at least I found out it could be done.

Wow, my thumb is bruising up nicely. Swelling is down -- but not gone -- and the purple is making its way in. Doesn't really hurt unless I try making a fist or try gripping somthing. Depending on my range of motion in the morning, I think I may pop into my doctor's office tomorrow just to make sure it's not a torn ligament or something.


And just so you know, the photo above doesn't do justice to the extent of the purpley-ness. We're talking DEEP PURPLE here...and it even goes around to the other side of my hand.

Contrary to my hopes, we lost the first game of the tournament and got sent to the losing bracket. Oh, the damn losing bracket. That meant we had to win 6 games in order to claim the championship, with the last three being back-to-back-to-back. Brutal. We made it to the second to the last game, but unfortunately the team had to try and win that one without me.

Boy, the injury bug was all over my ass today. The first injury was when I hyper extended my right elbow while rebounding a ball (from what I hear it was quite a spectacular scene). I had to sit on the bench and decide whether or not I could continue playing. It felt sore, but otherwise OK. I jumped back in and we pulled out a win.

We eventually met up with Rocky's team in the losing bracket, which is when the second injury occurred and put me out for good. Sometime towards the end of the game I did something horrible to my left thumb. My guess is that I either jammed or sprained it. I couldn't dribble with my left hand without pain shooting through my left arm. Oy. Somehow (bad left hand and all) I made a miraculous 3-point shot to put us ahead for good. Time expired and we ended up with the win.

There was no way I was going to be able to play the next game, so my old teammate from last year's championship had to step in for me as a replacement. I tried motivating my team from the sideline, but this was one of those back-to-back games against a rested team and you could tell our team was just out of breathe. They put up a good fight, but there's only so much you can do before your muscles tell you it's time to sit down. Oh well, there's always next year.

I'm proud of the effort my team made and, contrary to what I think (because I'm always so critical of myself), everyone told me that I played some good basketball. Now I just need to see how sore I'm going to be tomorrow morning...

Tip-off for our 2nd Annual 4-on-4 Basketball Tournament at work is at 9:00 tomorrow morning. Seeds were drawn out of a hat and my team ended up with the 1st game. It wasn't exactly a good draw. I don't think anyone likes playing the first game, but somebody has to do it. Rocky's game doesn't start until later, but we are planning on getting there by at least 8:00 so that we can get a little warm-up shooting done. God knows I need it.


Last year I was part of the team that won 1st place -- my medal is hanging in my cubicle at work -- and I'd sure like to add another piece of hardware to my wall. I guess you can say that I'm a "defending champion", but the teams are drawn at random so my old team got split up. This year I'm the team captain, which is funny because the General Manager of the company is on my team. Hmm...maybe I should put that on my resume under "leadership skills"...

While our team isn't the favorite to win as we were last year, I think we at least have a fighting chance. We just need to win the first game to get momentum going.

And oh yeah -- Texas 82, Stanford 62. Elite Eight, baby!

I'm sorry to all you Hillary fans out there, but she needs to step down from her high, yet 2nd place, horse and let Barack Obama and the Democratic Party focus on winning the presidential election. Mathematically she's still in the race, but in all likelihood she's not going to win. If by some miracle of God she does win, she better take up a 2nd religion -- because it's going to take the act of two Gods for her to win the general election.

John McCain and the Republican Party are loving every moment that this goes on, and I can't say that I blame them. If the shoe was on the other foot and this was a Republican slugfest, I'd be loving it, too. She's basically doing the dirty work for McCain by attacking her fellow Democrat while he sits back and watches the show, buttered popcorn in hand.

Here's the deal: Hillary needs to pack it up if she doesn't win the Pennsylvania primaries by a landslide -- but judging by past occurrences, she will neither win by a landslide nor concede the candidacy. No, she values her pride too much to even fathom the idea. The only person I dislike at this moment more than her is John McCain...although every time I see Hillary Clinton on TV blabbing away, it makes me want to throw something through my set and (gasp) vote Republican.

I think everything should be working now, but please report any problems you may encounter.

Selina and I just stepped back inside after watching the International Space Station and Shuttle Atlantis zoom across the Austin sky. It looked like two bright stars chasing each other through the heavens, but it's my understanding that the shuttle recently undocked from the space station and is actually pulling away in preparation for its return to Earth.

While most people could care less, we're both science nerds who enjoy moments like that. Personally, I've never lost my fascination with space and I hold high hopes that we'll land a man on Mars within the next 15 years.

Today I submitted my resume for a desktop team lead position at our complex on the other side of town. I wouldn't have any direct reports, but I would have a say in things like performance evaluations, merits, training schedules and budgeting. It's not the web developer position I was hoping for a while back, but if I get this job it will at least help to get the "leadership skills" monkey off my back -- God, that question always seems to pop up in every interview I've had no matter what I've applied for. I guess another good thing about this position would be that it may open some management doors for me in the future. Not exactly sure if I want to go the manager route, but at least it would give me the option.

The environment over there is completely different than the one on this side of town. It's more of a blue-collar workforce, so there won't be such a large concentration of high-maintenance divas walking the halls. It will also give me a nice break from the office politics that rule the world here.

The job posting closes at the end of the week and I'm assuming interviews will be sometime next week. I'll update as information becomes available. Cross your fingers and wish me luck!

Warning: The following posting is chock-full of techno-babble. Unless you own a Mac and are having issues with Safari 3.1 following the latest updates, please feel free to ignore this one.

I had a user running Mac OS 10.4.11 who installed the Safari 3.1 update via the Software Update interface. Don't know exactly what occurred during the install, but after rebooting she was no longer able to launch Safari (the icon would just bounce up and down). That's when I got called in.

Looking at the crash log for Safari (~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Safari.crash.log), I noticed the following message:

Host Name: [None of your business]
Date/Time: 2008-03-24 10:13:22.550 -0500
OS Version: 10.4.11 (Build 8S2167)
Report Version: 4

Command: Safari
Path: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
Parent: WindowServer [74]

Version: 3.1 (4525.13)

PID: 287 Thread: Unknown

Link (dyld) error:

Symbol not found: WebDatabaseDirectoryDefaultsKey
Referenced from: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit

Looks like something happened to the WebKit framework (at the very least). D'oh!

If you are seeing this same thing, I'd like to take the opportunity to share my fix with you. You will need the following four items:

1. A software program called Pacifist (it's shareware - do a web search for it)
2. Your Mac OS X Tiger Install DVD
3. Standalone Safari 3.1 installer (available from the Apple website)
4. An account with administrative privileges.

I downloaded, installed and launched Pacifist 2.5.2. Since this is shareware, you'll have to wait 15 seconds before you continue. While you are waiting, utilize the time by inserting your Mac OS X Tiger Install DVD into the optical drive.

Once Pacifist is open and the DVD is in the drive, click the "Open Apple Install Discs" button on the main screen. You can also go to "File >> Open Apple Install Discs" if you have a button-clicking phobia. When prompted, choose the option that corresponds to the Mac OS X Install DVD.

Pacifist will now read the package files from the DVD. This may take up to 5 minutes, so why not use this time to do a Sudoku puzzle, get a cup of coffee or do some calisthenics. Whatever floats your boat.

Once the package is loaded, you will need to drill down to the following level: [Contents of OSInstall.mpkg]/[Contents of EssentialSystemSoftwareGroup]/[Contents of BaseSystem]/[System]/[Library]/[Frameworks]. You should see a "WebKit.framework" folder. Right-click this folder and select "Install to Default Location".

You may get prompted with a message asking if you'd like to install "WebKit.framework". Make sure the "Use Administrator Privileges" box is checked, and then click the "Install" button.

You may get prompted for your credentails. Make sure you use an ID that has administrator privileges on the machine.

You should get prompted with a message telling you that the file already exists. Check the "Don't ask again for this installation" box and click the "Replace" button.

Once the installation has completed, you can eject the Mac OS X Install DVD and restart the computer.

After getting logged back in, open the Pacifist application again. This time, click the "Open Package..." button. Point Pacifist to the Safari31UpdUniv.pkg (it's inside the .dmg file you should have downloaded from Apple). Pacifist will now load the package.

Once the package is loaded, drill down to the following level: [System]/[Library]/[Frameworks]. Right-click the Webkit.framework (this is the updated version required for Safari 3.1) and install it to the default location. As before, you'll want to replace the files.

You'll may also want to install the following frameworks to ensure they were installed correctly: [System]/[Library]/[Frameworks] >> JavaScriptCore.framework
[System]/[Library]/[Frameworks]/[PrivateFrameworks] >> JavaScriptGlue.framework

Once everything is installed, shut down all applications and reboot for good measure. If everything went smoothly, you should now have a working Safari browser.

Now all the steps I performed may be overkill (like loading the original WebKit framework from the Mac OS X Install DVD and installing the JavaScriptCore and JavaScriptGlue frameworks), but I wanted to be sure I covered my bases. Feel free to shortcut it if you'd like.

This year Selina and I decided to spend Easter together at our apartment instead of spending it apart in two different cities. In times past I would drive to Waelder to spend it with my parents and she (and recently Ratchet) would stay here in Austin to spend it with hers. I think it made both of us sad to do that for the last 4 years, so today was a pleasant treat.



Now I don't know about everyone else, but Easter just wouldn't be Easter without a delicious lunch. We bought a small pre-cooked (black forest) ham from HEB earlier in the week for our main dish. Yesterday afternoon we made a trip to Whole Foods to look for sides and picked up a 1/2 lb. of mashed chipotle sweet potatoes, a 1/2 lb. of saffron orzo -- and a small apple pie. When lunch time came around, all we had to do was heat everything up and enjoy the meal. No slaving over a hot stove necessary!

After we ate, we sat around the apartment and wallowed in our fullness. We watched the Spurs beat the Mavericks (excellent), then I headed over to ye old computer to work on the new site. Selina sat in the bedroom and surfed the net for houses. She found some really cute ones that fell in our price range -- hopefully they (or some like them) are still around when the time comes. We rounded out the evening by watching Extreme Makeover - Home Edition and Here Come The Newlyweds. I still find it amazing that they are able to build such awesome houses in a week!

There are few things more scary than the sight of oncoming headlights when you're going 65 miles an hour down a major roadway. Believe me -- it just happened.

About 20 minutes ago Selina and I were driving northbound on Mopac when I noticed a set of headlights coming up the exit ramp on Windsor (24th Street). Instinctively, I moved over to the far left lane and slowed down a bit. Seeing that the person who obviously ignorant of the fact that they were going the wrong way, I started honking my horn while accelerating past the path of impact. I feel sorry for the car that was about 4 car-lengths behind me because I saw them hit the brakes hard in order to avoid the collision. Wow. If they weren't awake before, their hearts were certainly pumping a hundred miles an hour after seeing the headlights in their faces.

The dumbasses in the wrong-way vehicle (who were no doubt drunk out of their gourdes) proceeded to make a slow u-turn in the middle of Mopac before carrying on their merry way. Since I was already past the incident and could provide little information to dispatch other than a general location, I left the phone call to the poor motorists behind me. I figured they could at least provide a make, model or license plate number to the authorities. The jerks in the alcohol-mobile definitely deserved to be thrown in the drunk tank.

Screw it. I'm tired of waiting for this thing to be perfect. I'll deal with the aftershock of getting the details straightened out at a later time. I worked all day on the navigational issue I was having and finally saw the light. It's not as simple as I would have liked for it to be, but it's by no means a Neanderthal-ish piece of code.

Enjoy the new site and catch up with some updates that you probably missed out on.

OK, so I've pretty much gotten the posting & comments modules working the way I want them to. However, the NAVIGATION part has thrown a monkey wrench into the works.

I'm having difficulty wrapping my thoughts around how to navigate a database-driven blog without overburdening the server with SQL requests. Of course I can do it very simple-mindedly, but there would be SQL calls out the wazoo. That's not my style. I prefer amazingly simple, yet strikingly ingenious solutions...and therein lies my trouble.

In version #4, the "previous" and "next" buttons in the archives were simple to calculate because they fell into a weekly pattern (basically subtract or add 7 days to the current week to get the links in either direction). Now I'm having to deal with a "previous" and "next" that are constantly changing with each posting that is made. It's like trying to hit a moving target, although once you find the underlying pattern you can hit it with your eyes closed.

But alas, I've fallen into some of my trademark techno-babble again. Please, ignore the man behind the curtain.

Last week I went to the doctor because it felt like I had an earache. It wasn't quite as bad in the morning when I initially called to schedule the appointment, but by the time I got into the office the pain had actually spread to the whole side of my head. Heck, even my hair was hurting.

He took a look at my ear with one of those otoscope-thingies and asked me questions like "does it hurt more in the morning", "any soreness in the neck", and then did the whole "does it hurt here" routine. Judging from what he saw and my answers to the questions, he told me he didn't think it was an ear infection. His best guess was that it was some sort of sinus condition, so he gave me a prescription for amoxicillin.

I've been feeling better since then, but every once in a while I still get a twinge of pain. Right now I have that slight "medicine head" feeling, making it a little difficult to focus. The gastrointestinal side effects of the amoxicillin aren't too pleasant, either.

Seeing as it's lunch time here at the office, I think I'll go heat something up and then contemplate the #5 upgrade some more. I have a plan for the look and feel of the comment module and how the code is supposed to work, but I think I'm going to launch it this afternoon (sans the comment module) and just enable features as I go.

After Selina and I ran at the track over at Murchison Middle School, we came home, showered, ate some dinner and then sat around watching TV and waiting for 8:15 to roll around. What's so special about 8:15? That's when we were scheduled to depart for Mini-Date Night.

Now Selina and I have been dating for almost 5 years now (April 27th will mark our 5-year anniversary), so having a mini-date every once in a while is a good way for us to spend time together, talk and (most importantly) just remember why we fell in love in the first place. I really like them because, you know, after a while you start to kinda get caught up in the whirlwind of life and sometimes forget to slow down and just spend some quality time with your sweetie. Sure, we see each other everyday, but there's something special about actually setting aside some time for some good old-fashioned conversation.

For this Mini-Date Night we decided to head back to one of our favorite places -- Kneaded Pleasures on Far West Boulevard. Their coffee is pretty good, but in my opinion, their desserts are eff'ing awesome. I had a brownie that practically melted in my mouth. Mmmm-mmm-good! Selina had a darn good cookie, too. We sat around talking nerd for a while (mainly about Unix, if you can believe that), then we talked about getting a new Apple desktop computer and thoughts about our housing situation before we inevitably turned our attention to a little problem we're having with an old friend and a loan I co-signed. Sigh, I really wish I hadn't done that. Oh well...live and learn.

Even with the loan discussion (which really isn't a problem between Selina and I, but more of a problem between the two of us and the person I co-signed for), it was a great little date. Nothing exceptionally fancy, but it was nice to get away, eat some delicious baked confections and chat with my sweetheart.

What's the deal with people thinking that a four-way stop would be a fantastic place to make a u-turn? I just don't get it. If I take the Balcones/Pecos route to avoid the Mopac traffic, there are about five of these intersections between our apartment and my workplace. That's ten chances a day for someone to annoy the hell out of me. During a normal work week, it's common for me to see this happen at least once.

This morning alone, however, I had the pleasure of witnesses three such incidents occur. Lucky me.

I mean really, am I the only person who thinks it's (a) a bad idea, (b) rude and (c) slightly illegal? I'm not too keen on my Texas Driver's Handbook, but I seem to remember that a person making a u-turn had to yield the right of way to all other traffic. The people who pulled these stunts acted as if WE had to yield the right of way to them. They stare you down as they lock the steering wheel and plow through the intersection, then wave and smile as if you really had a choice in the matter.

I guess I really wouldn't care if there was no other traffic or if it was really quick, but there's a 75% chance that the u-turn is going to turn into a three-point turn (due to the narrowness of the road) and that there's someone other than the turnee at the intersection (especially during the morning and afternoon rush hours).

People are such morons. What can you do but shake your head and wait for stupidity to get out of the way...

I am now one step closer to having Planet D21 #5 up and running. I'm thinking that once I have the comments module working and I finish designing a nice front page, I'm going to go ahead and move #5 into production. I'll archive all the old stuff from #4 and worry about the data transfer later.

As my good friend Terri did some months back (see www.el-twirpo.com), I finally decided to move to a more Web 2.0 interface. Being the genius that I am, I decided to code everything myself rather than relying on something like WordPress. Why? Because I goddamn felt like it, that's why. Truthfully, I wanted to move to something that I could maintain more easily via a web interface and wanted to expand my skills as a psuedo-web designer. Using WordPress just felt like I was cheating myself out of an opportunity to grow.

As of right now I'm still a little limited on the functionality of the site, but heck, I'd say I did pretty well seeing as I started on this little project only 3 days ago (pats self on back). The comments module will be up next on the coding block -- and I don't think it should take all that long seeing as how I've already coded the posting module and they are going to be very similar in nature. And back by popular demand will be my "Photo Albums" section -- woo-hoo! Let me tell you, Selina is excited. I remember when you weren't somebody unless you where featured in one of my photo albums. My, how things have changed...

I'm a little sad that, as of the time of this posting, #5 isn't yet ready for launch. Seriously, I'm ready to yank the cord on the old site and plow ahead with the new one. I think it would be a little disastrous if I did that, however. I still need to think of a way to salvage all the old data from #4 without having to do a lot of manual work. Until then, I'll continue to post messages such as these to both amuse myself (which is always an important thing to do) and document my progress.