:-)

Today, married 4 years, my wife, the girl, on her blog, said the sweetest thing to me she's ever said. Happy Anniversary Bear!

The Cake Is A... Pumpkin

Today was pumpkin-carving day for Halloween. We went to Dana Day's house, pumpkins in hand, to create our masterpieces. Immediately prior to the party, I had a bright idea; I was going to create THE CAKE!

What is the cake? Well, to understand this, you must be one of the initiated. If you are not, then you should go play Portal. Then you'll understand what I've created.

Portal is a fantastic game. It's also hard to describe. It's a little quickie game from Valve Software (yes, the guy does have a valve sticking out the back of his head). It ends up being a puzzle game with a twist. You're eventually given a gun that has two ends of a portal. You can fire one in one place, another somewhere else, and then pass through the "portal" that you created. Throughout the game, you're promised cake by the GLaDOS computer speaking over the loudspeaker following your trials and tribulations.

The cake is a lie!

If you're not interested in playing you can get a thorough synopsis of the game from Wikipedia and an explanation of the above phrase from Urban Dictionary.

Without further ado, my creation and its inspiration...

The Girl

Her birthday was yesterday. :-) It's just a shame she has to have this infernal headache right now. It's been going on for several days.

On the way home from work, I stopped at Godiva and bought her some chocolate to supplement her other present, which she knew about. We later went to Outback for dinner, which was quite tasty, and the ice cream store, which is phenomenal.

Afterward, we went home and watched Planet Earth in the evening, which is a pretty cool show. Great White Sharks are just awesome. That's the marine biologist in me coming out, though.

Nicely Wrapping API Definitions in Python

I was doing a project in which I needed a good way to create an API for the code.inspect fuction. I wanted to have some "globally accessible" variables for the API only, but I didn't want to screw around with having to modify the module's namespace, or running into the problem of from module import *. So, after some pondering, and some playing around and learning about decorators, I came up with the following solution, which I kind of like:

"""
The following code will take a class with static methods
and create a module API from it to use with the code.inspect
(or other) functions.
"""
import inspect
import code

class Singleton(object):
     """ A Pythonic Singleton """
     def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
         if '_inst' not in vars(cls):
             cls._inst = object.__new__(cls, *args, **kwargs)
         return cls._inst


class MyApi(Singleton):
    """This is a Singleton so that the identifying object and other attributes
    don't get overwritten, which could lead to things like race conditions.
    """
    _api = {}
    def __init__(self):
        for f in dir(self):
            if inspect.isfunction(getattr(self,f)):
                self._api[f] = getattr(self, f)
    
    @staticmethod
    def func1():
        pass

    @staticmethod
    def func2():
        pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    m = MyApi()
    code.interact(local=m._api)

All of this will provide your interactive shell with a list of commands defined in this class. Since they're all static methods, you don't need to know who self is or anything of the like. This should probably be a

Fencing 3: The Gating

Monday; Columbus Day. Today's the day I created the gate. This task is a great deal harder than it appears. The reason; angles. Wood really likes 90-degree angles. Anything else, and it kind of blows.

In the morning, I created an A-frame. Then I ate pizza. Then I put a few boards on. Then I ate fruit and nut mix. Then I realized that I purchased the incorrect hinges, and so I had to head to ACE Hardware for some other hinges. Then I came back and proceeded to hang the gate. The last step was to try to cut off the little extra bit of board so that the gate fits within its opening.

I'd be finished right now but for the saw. It ran out of the electron juice, and so the battery is currently charging. Two hours lapse, I'll be out there sawing the crap out of the side of that gate. Finally, the lock, and it's Miller Time! Well, Sam Adams Time, but that doesn't quite sound the same.

Fencing, Part 2: And No, Not With Swords

Fence day 2 happened today. We have a fence. Check it out...



Ken came over and helped. The girl supervised. It went smoothly for the most part. The only hitch was that we decided to do three beams across instead of two, and that required an extra trip to the Home Depot. But, after feeding the "hired labor" and purchasing the materials, we still saved about $700. Woo hoo!

See the rest of the pictures here.

Quicktime AVI Problems

I'm a Mac user. Generally, I love it. Once in a while, I have a problem that's decently irritating. My most recent source of aggravation has been playback of AVI files in Quicktime. Sometimes, depending on the codec, the sound just doesn't work at all.

Up to now, my solution has been to use VLC to transcode files to MP4 with MP4 audio. This time, no luck. So, I decided to be a good computer scientist and actually try to fix the problem instead of hacking away at it. I found a lot of posts online suggesting using the AC52 package or the xvid quicktime components, but none of that worked. Then, and I don't know why I hadn't found this before, somebody pointed me to Perian. Installation was remarkably easy, and voila, problem solved. So, use Perian to solve your Quicktime codec problems! Then, have fun playing back AVI files in FrontRow!

Fence Building - Part 1 (of Apparently >= 2)

We just started replacing a section of wood fence today. Now, I know that sounds exciting. Please, try to contain yourselves. "We" includes Ken, Kohnke, Drew, and me.

We started with this...


The first step was to take down the panels of old fence. That took all of 30 seconds, roughly. The second step was to remove the old uprights. Uprights number 3 came out with little effort. Uprights 1 and 2 were pretty difficult. I feel as though there were put there to mark a wood mine under our property. We kept digging, and we kept finding more and more and more wood. It looks as though the previous owners had a fence that was falling down, and so they just kept shoving more wood down there to brace up the failing fence. There was also some concrete down there. It was pretty interesting; and by interesting, I mean painful.

On top of that, one of the posts was a 10' post, sticking up only 5' out of the ground. Yeah, 5' of wood was buried in the ground. When Ken finally got it out, a little Chinese guy stuck his head up out of the ground and told us to stop shaking his fence in Shanghai.

Some concrete later, we have four new uprights. The concrete is drying right now. Then, we get to fill in the holes and finish it, which shouldn't be too horribly bad. So, we ended the day with this...


which was just about the time Amanda showed up :-)

Movie Review: Quarantine

Warning: There may be spoilers here.

That said, read on if you are interested, or if maybe you think you want to save $10.

The movie began pretty well. Its premise is that a TV crew consisting of a cameraman and a, let's say, reality TV show hostess, are slated to "shadow" a pair of fire fighters during a night shift. The crew gets a call to head to an apartment building. When they get there, they get locked in along with the tenants of the building and a couple police officers, and none of them knows why.

All hell immediately breaks loose. The little old lady that was the cause of the call to the police and fire department goes ape and tears into a few of the movie's cast. Then, as most zombie movies similarly progress, they get "infected" and the bloodbath continues.

Really, the movie did start out promisingly. Though the camera work was of the style of Blair Witch, which I hated, and Cloverfield, which I didn't see, it had potential. Since the main characters were a professional camera crew, I was practically praying that the camera would not be overly jittery and that I would be able to tell what was going on. For the first half of the movie, that was the case. Then, they decided to stop with the whole clarity thing. I understand the reason; I just don't agree with it. A jittery camera confuses the audience as a way of getting them to identify with the protagonists. I just don't think this trick works, and effectively just irritates the audience. At least that's what it does to me.

The lighting also ended up being schizophrenic. Initially, the movie lighting was fine. The apartment building had lights, and all was well. Then, a little more than halfway into the film, the producer must have run out of money for the electric bill, and the only source of lighting became the camera that acted as the audience's portal to the movie. Then, and I can't IMAGINE why this happened, the camera's light had to go iffy as though the battery was running out, and so there was a bit of a strobe effect through to the end of the movie. When the camera finally gave out, the end of the flick was done in night vision.

I really did think it had promise. It had a script. It had a few likable characters. I feel, though, like they gave up trying to get good scares out of the audience about halfway through the movie, and just gave in to having things jump out at the camera, which they could do because the camera ended up going "wonky." The lighting, the script, and any original scares in the film ended a little more than halfway into the film, though, and the movie degenerated into Blair Witch; no script and no lighting.

Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend shelling out $10 to see it in a theater. If it comes on cable sometime, watch it then. Instead, save your money go to see the new Bond flick, for which we saw a trailer.
Read more...

Date Night

The girl and I just got back from date night. If you recall, I won free sneak preview tickets via 98 Rock to see Quarantine. So, we decided to head to The Melting Pot before the movie.

I came home early from work and we left to go to Towson. We walked around a bit before five, and then went to the Melting Pot. It was pretty cool. We did, however, make the mistake of actually ordering a meal. They give you a pot of cheese first, complete with veggies, bread, and apples to munch on. Then, a salad; we each had a Cobb salad. Then, the entrèe. This is where we made the mistake. There were all sorts of meats and such, and the plate was enormous, even for two people. Finally, dessert. We had to fit this in! Who doesn't want melted chocolate with marshmallow and Oreos? I do. :-)

Finally, we went to the flick. There's a story in and of itself in the movie, so stay tuned for a review.

It was all pretty great. It was a nice, long dinner I got to spend with the girl, and we both enjoyed it.

My Theory is Definitely Sound

I hate driving in Baltimore. Most people somehow don't mind it, but it's a living nightmare for me. You disagree? Try going here and then finding your way back out without getting lost. I couldn't I got so turned around I accidentally went back the way I came. No wonder the girl got lost going to an interview in the area once.

Whoever designed that section of the city should be reanimated, made to pay to knock it all down, made to pay somebody else to redesign it, and then killed again. If he's still alive, we'll skip the reanimation part. Well, no we won't. We'll kill him, then reanimate him and continue the process.

Thankfully, I achieved my goal, which was to pick up the sneak preview tickets for Quarantine. Having done that, I learned that the sneak preview is next Thursday. I'm going. I'm interested in seeing how this movie is. It seems like it could be cool.

Little Jumpy Devils

Somebody is playing some cruel cosmic joke on me. It has to be. There is no other explanation. Somebody has to have created some little worm hole or something. One end of the wormhole is my basement. The other end of the wormhole is some creepy mad scientist whose idea of fun is to take crickets, line them up single file, and send them into the wormhole, sending each following the demise of the previous cricket.

Why? Because each of the last four days I've sat in the basement, heard the noisy raucous that couldn't have been caused by something so small, and then found and exterminated the source of the irritation. Rinse. Repeat. Four days. There's another one down here right now that seems to be particularly hidden and particularly loud.

Now if I could just find the wormhole...