Joped.com

I just finally got checked into my hotel and its been an adventure already.  Except for my shuttle not showing up and taking a cab, the trip started out ok.  However, when I got into Vegas I knew something had to go wrong.  Yep, US Assways lost my bag.  Its amazing how an industry that goes to great lengths to create some annoying levels of security and policies, can’t seem to keep track of baggage.  That really frightens me, how is this possible ?  I can understand it happening once in a while, but its just far too common.

Needless to say, I need to sleep in dirty cloths tonight and need to wear them tomorrow as well.  With some lucky maybe my bag will appear tomorrow morning.  They have a limited number of flights here per day, and I was on the last one of the day.  Great.

What pisses me off more then anything is that I have no clean socks.  After wondering around my hotel for a while, I was able to purchase some dress socks.  Guess what, that is good enough for me. (For now)

I asked what the airline expected me to do about brushing my teeth and what not.  They responded with this small bag of stuff to get me through the night.  I am happy they provided it for me, but not happy I needed to beg for it.

So far Circus Circus has been an annoying hotel.  It took far too long for me to find my room.  I love how they have maps all over the place, and none of them indicating “You are here”.

I was told they have internet access in all the rooms, however I can’t find a jack and no wifi signal.  Good thing I brought my EVDO card.  The connection speed is far faster then it was last year, so I am just going to stick using it.

I am off to find something to drink and maybe a light snack.  I have a bit of a headache that I need to shake.

I _tried_ to buy a track from Amazon and it was the worst experience. Not only finding the track that I wanted was a pain in the ass (compared to iTunes). I had to download an application, that doesn’t work with Firefox. (I didn’t fiddle around with it much) So, fired up Safari and went through the whole process again.

Well, the CC they had on file was wrong. Rather then just re-checkout, I had to go through the entire process again.

Needless to say, I went back to iTunes and purchased the tracked I wanted in a fraction of the time.  Screw Amazon and their tax evading ways.

Stephanie introduced me to Pandora Radio on the iPhone.  This application allows you to search for music you like, then recommends music based on your vote of the music.  The voting is a very simple thumbs up or thumbs down.  However, pay attention to the information of why you are being asked to vote on that track.  Remember, its tring to figure out what music is fitting you.

The great thing is this application has a channel model.  It allows you to create multiple channels for whichever mood you are in that day.  This is great because I am into a large range of music.  Everything from The Doors, to Aerosmith, Type O Negative, Robert Miles, Led Zep, Disturbted, Guns N Roses, etc.  For those that don’t know, I absoultly hate country music.  The very thought makes my ears bleed.

Yet, I also suck at categorizing music.  Robert Miles is very sweet coding music, he has pulled me through some complex coding headaches.  The problem comes down to, I have been in a “club” a total of 3 times in my life.  Each time more uncomfortable then the other.  I don’t dance, so I will never attempt to.  Trust me, the world is better off if I don’t.

Pandora allows me to find new music that I like and didn’t know existed.

Its not limited to the iPhone, they also have the same service on their website.  I have not played around to see if there are any “syncing” features.  NetNewsWire has an excellent syncing feature that syncs my RSS feeds on the desktop to my iPhone.  I subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds, some of which are critical for my job.

I can pretty much guarantee I will be using it at work.  My limited music collection is starting to get a bit tired.

After all the shit that happened to me this week, I finally get a glimpse of what I have been looking forward to for ages.  I am really pissed I didn’t see it in the theater, but at least I get to see it

1080p Terminator 4 teaser

I just spent the past month totally rewriting Jokeped.  I procrastinated it for a few months then started on accident.  I moved the code base from a generic framework that I put together over to CodeIgniter.  I started out my venture by laying out the new models.  I quickly realized I was going to be able to get rid of a lot of crap code.

I reduced the amount of code on the site by at least 40%.  Everything has been switched to a cleaner MVC.  Previously, the framework I threw together did things a little strange.  It was closer to what phpGW Nextgen was going to be.  Data layers have changed greatly since then.  I use memcache very heavly now.

When I get some time, I am going to test the site running without a database.  In the event the database goes down, I should be able to run 100% out of memcache.  Its about 90% of the way there, just need to tweak some error checking.

There are only a few new visual changes.  I cleaned up most of the forms using a generic form building system I am developing.  I am working to finish this system which I will open source at a later date.

There are tons of alignment fixes and fixed the flow of a few elements.  For example, voting is much cleaner now with a single AJAX request when posting a vote.  As sad as it sounds, I finally got off my ass and made it so you can vote without javascript.

There are no more tables in the HTML, and I have cleaned up the CSS like you wouldn’t belive.  Although its no even close to perfect, its unbelievably nicer then before.  I am working on reducing the number of images I am serving on the site.  All the forms are using a generic image set, rather then a custom background for each page.

The other big change is SEO links.  PJ has taught me a lot about SEO and helped me clean some of the crap up.  I think I am starting to understand why my traffic on jokeped.com started to take a dive after I released the new interface.  I have much work to do on SEO, however this is a huge step in the right direction.

Anyway, go check out the new version and contact me if you need any help or find any bugs.

Normal blogging doesn’t work out well for me since I hate to type large amounts. I am lazy, what can I say.  However, I am going to give this opensource alertnative to twitter a try.

http://identi.ca/joped

Lets see how long it lasts for me, I will need some iPhone 3G support this week.  I will go to which ever provider supports the iPhone 3G with GPS and pics.   Not to mention, I need OpenID support.

Depending on what happens I might just work on it my self.  I am already maintaining 3 sites.  I have a complete rewrite of Jokeped coming out in a few days.  To the user not much has changed, just a few minor fixes and clean ups.  Its mostly backend code and SEO.

I don’t watch the news these days, its generally pretty depressing and its a good thing I didn’t.  I found out this morning that the great George Carlin has died.  If you are a big fan of George Carlin you will know he died and didn’t pass away.

George Carlin is by far my favorite comedian and I am very happy to say that I have had the great honor of seeing one of his shows live.  George Carlin is not only my hero but idol.  He has a way with words that is (ironically) indescribable.

I realized it was time to do some mild playing around with client side development on the Mac. Cocoa is the framework that runs the show on Mac (Carbon is on the way out). It requires the use of Objective-C.

For the most part, the languages I know are C style syntax. This makes it very easy to pick up new languages. When I switch from Perl to PHP, I picked things up very fast. I enjoy the look of PHP, which makes it my primary language.

Objective-C on the other hand is dead ugly. Function calls with []’s and class definitions with a plus sign.

C++
obj.method(value);

Objective-C
[obj method param1:value];

I find it very strange to have the left [ outside of object name. Its really going to take some getting used to. A few people have told me that once you get used to it you will love it. Well, we will have to see.

I have almost completed my first functional application. When I get better, I am going to rewrite it with a few more features and create a tool out of it. I will post more details in the future.

Ran into this 5v5 team that was 4 shamans and 1 pally.  Obviously, this guy was boxing.  Great focus fire damage, but any group with a clue can take them out fairly easy.

I had a part in a silly video we made at work, and of course I have to spread it around every where

After the credits, there is a few minutes of music … Don’t worry, I don’t get it either.

BTW, I am in the lab coat …