Death of a Friend

The death of a friend is never easy. Whether you were really close or not means no difference in the emotional pain you go through. I am experiencing it first hand, and my friend was very close to me. For you see, I left my Xbox360 on for too long whilst I proceeded to do some other activities, figuring I would come back to my game of Guitar Hero 2 in no time, and be able to continue it with ease. Unfortunately, my 360 didn't share the same sentiment. It obviously was depressed that it wasn't getting the attention it so dearly deserved, and killed itself.

My guess is overheating. I had it set in a small cabinet that I use as a TV stand. I wasn't aware that they got so freaking hot. So I let it sit overnight and cool off completely. I tried it again this morning, and I got the same 3 red lights on the Ring of Light, signifying a general hardware failure. Now I get to call Tech Support and go through their little routine of tests, hopefully to have them say "Send it to us, we'll fix it".

Moral of the story: don't let your 360 overheat.

The Week from Hell

Last week was definitely a PITA (pain in the ass). Monday rolled around as usual, and all was well. I stayed home from work to do run some long-overdue errands and just have a relaxing day to myself. It was also the early Christmas I had hoped for, with my new 18" wheels for my truck arriving, and then later the new tonneau for the truck as well. The only problem I had was that the tonneau was the for the wrong model, and didn't fit, so I have to return it.

Now comes the horrible part. I woke up around 3:30AM on Tuesday morning to a feeling of "something just isn't right". Wasn't sure what it was, but I figured it was just something I ate and it would soon pass. I decided to hit the bathroom, and thank god I did because as soon as I got in there, I started to vomit. It was pretty bad, and lasted almost 10 minutes. However, when it was over, I definitely felt better. I brushed my teeth, washed up, and went back to sleep. All was well. Until I woke up again around 6AM and basically did the exact same thing. This time it was worse because my throat was already raw from the previous session. What makes it worse was that it happened a third time around 9AM. After that, I had nothing left in my stomach! The rest of the day I just slept and drank water (and ultimately peed out my ass because I didn't eat any solid foods).

Wednesday was better, luckily, as I wasn't getting sick any, and I was able to at least eat a little bit of food. I had some bread (I know, I'm venturing out on that one), some Jell-o and plenty of popsicles to at least get my blood sugar levels back to normal and make me less exhausted.

Thursday was a trip back down the road of shit-dom. I went out to dinner with my girlfriend thinking that all was basically back to normal. I've been wrong before, but this one takes the cake. We went to Red Robin, and I was debating between a Chicken Parmigiano and the Bacon Cheeseburger. Smart me decided that the burger was the best choice of a meal. I had like 5 bites, a few fries, and I was "full". Paid for dinner, stepped outside and I sat in my truck for a minute before I just said "I'm going to get sick", opened the door, and puked right there outside my door on the parking lot. I'm just glad that I was throwing up food and not stomach acid, because Tuesday's events burned my throat horribly.

So yeah, last week was a bitch. I hope it rots in hell and I never get sick like that again.

Ride the Whip!

So last Thursday I was driving home from work, and lo and behold, I see a white SVT Lightning at a local dealer. My immediate thought is "man, that's awesome, I wanna go look". I decide that I should just hold off, check some information online (aka listing price of it), and see if it's something I can even afford. So that night when I get home, I do my research. I can afford it. The list price is something I can negotiate. Now, I just need a loan. So I go online to my credit union's website, and fill out an auto loan app. Done, in, should hear back within 2 days.

So I go over during my lunch break on Friday to just look at the condition it's in. It's a 2001, and it's white. Overall it's not bad (not excellent condition, but good). Has a few paint chips, some rust in the truck bed, and the front grill is rusted. Easy fixes (and good price negotiation points). I figure I'll visit again on Saturday and talk business.

Saturday rolls around, and I haven't heard anything regarding my loan. I call my bank around 11AM, and they have nothing on record that I applied, apparently their online app is broken (doesn't submit). So the rep asks if I want to do it over the phone, and I say sure why not. So I get that all done, and I choose to do a local pickup of the paperwork. She says it can be ready today, but the bank closes at noon (at this point it's about 11:15, and the bank is about 20 minutes away). So I hop in my car, speed the hell over to the bank, and at about 11:50, I have preapproved check in hand, and I'm good to go.

So I go over to the dealer, and test drive again, the works, finally we sit down to talk numbers. He goes through this long BS routine of trying to pull credit (so they can try to beat my financing, unlikely). Finally when we get to prices, the list price is at $23,872, which is absurd for the condition and the year (blue book for 2001 in excellent condition is $19,000, which the truck was not in excellent condition). So we go back and forth for a while, I finally say I can do $18,500 driveaway right here right now, I've got 2 checks ready to be signed. He says "I can't do that, I'd be losing money." So no go. Oh well.

I go online looking for some other local Lightning's to check out, and see one at a Ford dealership. It's dark blue, 2002, and has about 7,000 less miles than the 2001, but is listed online for $19,999. I go over to check it out, give it a whirl, and it's beautiful. Just about everything I wanted and expected from a Lightning. Only problem is that since it was traded in, the guy who owned it before put 20" spinners on it (real thing, not Walmart ones). No biggie, they're just not my style.

So we go into talks, and I end up driving it away for $19,999 including tax, title, and license. Not too shabby, as it ended up selling for about the blue book value for that year and the mileage.

So now I've got me a new truck that'll eat just about anything that people around here will throw at it.

Yay!

Viciously stolen from a blog somewhere else, I decided to fill mine out too! Pretty funny stuff, try it!

1. YOUR SPY NAME (middle name and current street name): Matthew Fincastle

2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME (grandfather/mother on your dad's side and your favorite candy): Vincent Twix

3. YOUR RAP NAME (first initial of first name and first three or four letters of your last name): J-Pon

4. YOUR GAMER TAG (a favorite color, a favorite animal): Red Moose

5. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME (middle name, and city you were born in): Matthew San Diego

6. YOUR STAR WARS NAME (first three letters of your last name, last three letters of mother's maiden name, first three letters of your pet's name): Pondernik

7. JEDI NAME (middle name spelled backwards, your mom's maiden name spelled backwards): Wehttam

8. PORN STAR NAME (first pet's name and the street you grew up on): Kuhli Seth Williams

9. SUPERHERO NAME: ("The", your favorite color and the automobile your mom drives): The Red Accord

10. YOUR ACTION HERO NAME (first name of the main character in the last film you watched, last food you ate: Walter Subway

OOP and Me - The $Real->Deal()

So my spat with a purely OOP site design is coming along quite nicely. I've been trying to break out some research on design patterns, but still have yet to truly understand what the hell they're trying to do, other than make it easier for developers later on. I don't think I need this for my site (it'll be just me developing, but if it does take off and I need developers, I'd like to have a pattern in place already). I like the factory idea, and it makes sense. The one I'm interested in, however, is the Registry. I sort of understand it, but I'm not exactly sure the true purpose and how to really implement it for it to make sense to me. I haven't implemented either of these into my design so far, but one day I will. For now, though, I'm sticking to my guns and going with what I know, which is just normal tight coupling (I know, bad bad bad!), but it works for me currently. I wish I could use PHP5, but my host has only 4.3, so I'm limited to a lot of old-world OOP. I had a few interfaces created, only to realize that they didn't work, and I didn't like the idea of using class extenders because I wanted to have the abstract parent to define the functions, not actually implement them.

Back onto my original thought process, I have implemented what I consider to be at least a partial "front controller". The class itself is called Page, and just handles the creation of the page, including the template (the templating itself is handled by a template class, soon to be abstracted by an interface [hopefully], including parsing through it), adding controls (dynamic stuff that the template won't be aware of, thus lightening the load somewhat of the template engine), dynamically loading necessary classes, and other maybe like 2 other things. I've got a few design questions that I've got to look into, including the page configuration being dynamic (not sure if I want to have a single sessioned config and be able to change it when I need to, or if I should load the config on each page to allow for different tasks to use different configs).

What it looks like so far, however is: (not all the code, only config portion)

function LoadConfig($config_file)
{
 $this->my_config = $config_file;
 $contents = file_get_contents($config_file);
 preg_match_all("/config\['([a-zA-Z_]*?)'\]\['([a-zA-Z_]*?)'\] = \"(.*?)\";/", $contents, $cfg_values);
 for($i=0; $i  $this->my_config_values[$cfg_values[1][$i]][$cfg_values[2][$i]] = $cfg_values[3][$i];
}

As you can see my dilemma, is I'm not sure if I want to pass it the config file itself, or just pass it a sessioned config (Singleton!! I understand that much at least). The way it is now has a heavier overhead because of the processing time of loading the config on every single page, but has a more modularized feel that each page in itself can be encapsulated alone.

Once I get some time to work on this from home, I'll be doing some testing of execution times to see if there's a substantial load time optimization that I'll be in for, or if I can let this one slip by as a "necessary evil", so to speak.

Until next time, $this->post->end();

President's Weekend

Hopefully this weekend will be fun. Monday is a holiday, so thank jebus for that. I don't have my psychology class either, so it's even better. Planning on trying to see Ghost Rider (yes I know, hokey movie, but I still want to see it) either today or tomorrow, depending on what the girl wants (and prefers). Having some friends over Sunday just because, cook out a few hotdogs, a few burgers, and just sit back and have a good time.

Still have a lot of work on my website idea, a lot of design details I need to work out. One of these days I'll get around to finding a graphic designer to do all that craziness for me, since I'm pretty bad at designing things and using Photoshop. I still want to get a prototype made and show it to a few people in the right places to see what kind of potential audience I need to be focusing my attention towards. I've got a few domains registered, though I'm still debating the actual name of the site. I've been brainstorming, and having a few close friends brainstorm some other possibilities on what to call it.

I will hopefully have that prototype done by the end of the month. It's going to be ugly, but at least I can have an actual version of what I envision will be an amazing site. It won't have any good framework behind it, but that's something I'll save and fix on the real release version.

The Beginning

I'm not exactly the most widely available person, nor do I have much leftover time to sit down and really write out blog posts, but I figure that this will give me something to vent my frustrations and excitements to, without having to worry about dealing with a live person!

My social life right now is getting better, I'm slowly getting to where I would envision it being. I've got a great girlfriend who understands my passion for everything computers (not necessarily understands, but accepts), and who shares in my sentiment of just sometimes needing alone time, or time with other people.

Work has been slowly dwindling, it seems. I've been finishing up a lot of my projects, so I'm slowly getting bored of not having 5 things I can potentially be working on at once. I do have a personal project of mine that I need to really get a jump on, but I seem to end up going out instead of actually starting it. I've got the basic concept and a few details drawn out, and the initial foundation of the database structure has been designed and written down, and actually partially created.

I'd love to tell everyone the idea behind my project, but it's my baby, and I can't risk someone stealing the idea and beating me to the punch! It's definitely unique, and I could see it as something really taking off if given the proper chance (and if it's designed right).