Firehed’s Blog

But not on purpose. I’ve had several coding projects going on, as well as mentoring for the local FIRST robotics team. A combination of spinning gadgets, CSS voodoo, PayPal’s awfully-documented IPN system, and a bunch of PHP and MySQL that I’ve never really used before kinda threw me a curveball (and of course sobbing for days after Apple’s complete failure to launch the new 12″ Powerbook, which now has me browsing Craigslist). SQL JOINs still don’t sit quite right with me, and believe it or not this is really my first time using cookies in my own code. In any case, I’ve been keeping busy. But I really do intend to review some gadgets and perhaps some software, ramble out something insightful, and maybe post up some code snippets.

So, more soon. One project is nearly done, another is in-work only, and the space heater snagged from Woot is thawing me out from this damned winter (Al Gore continues spreading lies. Lies, I tell you, lies!).

I decided it was time to pick up a "Bamboo Fun" small Wacom tablet, you know - to unleash my inner creative beast, or something like that. The black one was out of stock at the time, but I didn’t care for the look of the white one (any white peripherals tend to get stained) so went ahead and backordered the thing anyways. “We’ll notify you via e-mail when we have an estimated delivery date for this item.”

Later that day:
We now have delivery date(s) for the order you placed on December 28 2007 13:19 PST
(Order# ***-*******-*******):

“Bamboo Fun (Small) Black Tablet with Pen, Mouse & Graphics
Software” [Electronics]
Estimated arrival date: 01/03/2008
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In my quest to achieve local harmony between the computers in my home network, I try to centralize everything using a fileserver (come Macworld 08, I’ll likely be changing things up - how depends on what shows up then; regardless, a post for another day). Generally speaking, the idea of having a machine sitting somewhere that I can connect to at will and grab whatever I need works fairly well. It avoids tons of file duplication, is reasonably fast (wired computers see speeds near that of a local drive thanks to gigabit ethernet; 802.11n wireless is generally at least fast enough to stream 1080p h.264 video), and with a bit of router voodoo, I can grab any file I need from any computer with an internet connection.
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