Mostly Harmless

Wanna burn 1.5 gigs of bandwidth in 4 hours?

Just post a new Justin & Kelly duet: j2k-timeless.mp3

My bandwidth quota should kick in sometime tomorrow-ish.

It’s my FICO score.

Amazing but true! I’ve replaced the (terribly out of date) Buffy-O-Meter in the side-bar with a PHP countdown timer, cleverly titled the “Kelly-O-Meter,” for reasons which should be readily apparent.

I almost had to learn some PHP for that but instead I lifted code from someone else — in keeping with the true spirit of the internet.

I did have to make one modification to the script though. In addition to plugging in the *release date o’ the moment for Kelly’s CD, I had to fix the coding atrocity, which was a giant block of “if’s,” like this:

if ($month == 1) $month_name= "January";
if ($month == 2) $month_name= "February";
...
if ($month == 12) $month_name= "December";


For the love of Pete! What the hell is that all about!! Twelve lines of code to set the freaking month name. Twelve. Twelve. What the f*ck is wrong with these people? Ever heard of a little thing called an “array?”


$names = array ("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", ..., "Dec");
$month_name = $names[$month-1];


See, look, two lines.

Ironically I’ve taken out the bit that actually prints the month name, (but I may put that back in)… point is that I don’t have eleven extra lines of pure crap that get evaluated every time. If the computer could talk (well, mine can) it would say “Listen punk! I told you eight lines ago that $month_name is “April”, what the hell is wrong with you?”

* observant readers will note that the countdown goes until April 15th but Amazon says April 1st. Amazon is behind the times and hasn’t been updated with today’s release date. I think this is the 5th new release date for the CD. The movie, filming now, is still scheduled for April 25th.

All we need are salted peanuts, beer, and maybe a pool table to complete the transition of our office into a happenin’ bar. We already have the dart board.

The darts aren’t the manly, hard steel, pointy variety, they are the blunt-nosed magnetic tipped variety. The neat thing is that the magnets are very strong and no matter where you throw them they seem to stick to something, e.g. metal white boards, filing cabinets, computer cases, the wall (if you know where the stud is), and even the dart board itself if that’s your poison.

Currently the dart board is festooned with a picture of Osama bin Laden; the last round of six darts saw four kill shots to the head, the grazing of an ear, and a flesh wound to the shoulder.

Armageddon it!

I guess FX decided to not show any Space Shuttle movies this weekend (namely, ‘Armageddon’) in light of yesterday’s sad events with the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Instead they are showing ‘Aliens’ — where a lot of people die in space.

To escape the news of the day I went to see a movie: ‘Final Destination 2‘ — where a lot of people die in the most gruesome ways possible. Here’s a snippet from a review: “Considerably more graphic, with decapitations, gougings, skull piercings and amputations.”

Ah yes, that’s a “Happy Fun” movie, to be sure. (It actually was pretty good.)

I saw a preview for another movie, which is the sort of movie you’ll want to take your kids to if you want them to have nightmares about rats, and Crispin Glover, until they’re 50.