Category: Cooking With Code

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Cooking With Code Home Base

The rumbling of ramblings

Please try again tomorrowI hate being sick, but being sick in the run-up to Christmas sucks big time. I’ve gotten no shopping done at all. (Being broke has nothing to do with it – when has that ever stopped the average American consumer?) I’ve had days recently where I’ve just been capable of the bare minimum of taking care of the kiddo, and that more than anything makes me feel like a large failburger with a side order of fail fries. I’ve been wanting to write something or create something…and just haven’t had the energy. I’m just kind of running on automatic pilot. It’s hard for me to just sit immobile and rest at the best of times, and nigh-on-impossible with the boy to take care of. He’s also still under the weather, though he’s gradually showing more energy and enthusiasm than I am, so hopefully this means he’s coming out of it. His cough is going away; mine seems to have moved in for the winter. I just want to be out from under the cloud of “blah” and be able to enjoy the holidays – is that so wrong?

In other news, I finally got around to upgrading the WordPress installs in most areas of theLogBook.com, some of which were still running very old installs indeed. It’s good to bring things up to speed security-wise, but with every successive WordPress update it seems like there’s a change-the-admin-dashboard-for-the-hell-of-it thing going on, and I haven’t liked it much since, oh, about 2.4. (The current version is 2.7.) Maybe this is just a sign that I need to try to get involved in the process rather than sit on the sidelines and bitch about a free piece of software, but I just don’t “get” some of the changes that are implemented – some of them seem incredibly arbitrary, or like cosmetic fixes that just don’t seem to be needed. I suppose it’s what you, the readers, see that’s important, and in that respect not much is changed (though I was irritated to see some previously “hidden” categories emerge front-and-center in the music review section – there are fixes for those that I’ll need to implement soonish). I do like the new “drafts” window though – when you’re dealing with as much in-progress content and as much scheduled-in-advance content as I do on theLogBook, that’s awfully handy.

Seems like there was something else I was thinking about thinking about saying here, but I’ve forgotten what it was, so this just wound up being random complaining. I think you all are used to that by now though.… Read more

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Cooking With Code

Oh hell yeah!

Look out! Oh no!Two lovely bits of news:

I’ve gotten video working on Scribblings again, see you can once more view gems like this or this or this. This feature has been broken for the longest time and now it’s back. Yay!

Maybe even better than that, I’ve installed a plugin that grabs comments from my Facebook notes and sucks them back into Scribblings as comments here – really the best of all possible worlds. Blog entries here are autoposted there, comments left there are duplicated here! (See this post for an example.) This is precisely the kind of incredibly useful stuff that has me seriously, seriously thinking of letting the Livejournal and Myspace dupes of this blog go dormant.

At this rate, when you come back tomorrow, my blog will be cooking breakfast for you.

/me goes to look for a babysitting plugin… Read more

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Cooking With Code

Menu madness

Damn you all to hell, you finally did it!There are times that I really lament that theLogBook.com’s main menu isn’t is much fun or topical as this week’s is – go check it out, I had a chuckle putting it together and dropping in a few in-jokes that nobody’ll ever spot. Some time back, I gave serious thought to trying to do more stuff like the strip of topically relevant episodes at the bottom, to make use of the site’s overabundance of stuff, but I can see where that’d backfire plenty fast if the major news of a given week was bad news.

Still, I wish all of the menus had a “hook” like this one does. I’m happy with it. 😛 … Read more

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Cooking With Code Music

Just a little regeneration

Scribblings version......whatever version it is nowAfter a little bit of tinkering with a woefully crippled but otherwise very attractive theme (I think the idea was, though I didn’t see this explicitly stated anywhere, that you’d pay for an uncrippled version), I’m happy to unveil the latest regeneration of Scribblings Of The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods.

If you’re reading this on Livejournal or Myspace…this won’t affect you a bit. Carry on. (My wayward son.) Those who do occasionally drop in on the point of origin of all of this blithering that I do, go have a look – I think it’s pretty cool, and I’m happy with the job I did of excising the not-quite-expert job of hobbling the original theme. I can live with the results. There are still a few very minor bugs to work out, but not game-killers.

I’m still picking out stuff for the end-of-year favorite-music podcast-o-rama. How’s three hours sound to you? No?… Read more

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Cooking With Code Critters

Kitten of the future

So, about three business days ago, I called eBoundhost to cancel the hosting there. Today they refunded the full amount I’d paid them. Good as their word. Still no sign of a refund from Globat. Heh.

Other good news: Phosphor Dot Fossils is nearing completion in database form! The entire arcade section – 200+ entries – is now in the database, and I have deleted the old HTML files. I’ve got fewer than 100 entries left to move over, and most of them are in the 2600 section. I figured, since I’m stuck with Globat for a little bit longer, I’d use the time to get more stuff moved over before we try to migrate again.

I fell in love with a kitten this weekend. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code

Big booma

Friday was a fun day. A really, really fun day. Where to begin?

Just the fact that people have been responding to the blog again is an indicator that the site’s been a bit more cooperative lately, especially on the database end, so I’ve been taking the opportunity to convert more HTML stuff to database entries while I can, as fast as possible, before I migrate the site to a new hosting service. The past two or three days have seen some really good progress on the Phosphor Dot Fossils front – I’m coming down the home stretch on getting all arcade game entries moved over, and I’m making good progress through the dauntingly large number of Atari 2600 reviews.

And then, all of a sudden, that whole portion of the site…just…stopped…working. Period. … Read more

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Cooking With Code Home Base Television & Movies

Random rumblage

The good news on the spider bite tonight is that it doesn’t seem to be spreading – well, okay, just a little, but not upward. The foot is reddish and tender, and I can see veins pretty clearly, which is really unusual for feet. Or at least my feet. I’m due back at the doctor’s office on Tuesday to see where this is going – though if my follow-up is 48 hours after my initial visit, I’m guessing that there’s Cause For Concern. Either that or they just like taking my money. Probably a little bit of both.

I found and fixed a couple of bugs in “Doctor Who in 35 minutes“, as well as chopping it up into segments about 3 to 3 1/2 minutes long to cut back on the insane load times. This also had a beneficial side-effect of sharply increasing resolution – now you can tell which clips I sourced from crap-o-licious 20+ year old VHS tapes recorded off of AETN and OETA when I was in high school! Yay! 😆

Speaking of video projects, I think I may have mentioned redoing the PDF DVD ordering page as an old fashioned hand-coded HTML page – basically in theLogBook’s old, pre-Wordpress look – so that orders wouldn’t be tripped up by Globat’s endless database server errors. Lo and behold, I’ve had more orders in the past 24 hours than I have just about the entire rest of the month. Can’t ditch Globat soon enough. Incidentally, we’re now coming down the home stretch of the second edition – and that means there are about a hundred of these puppies floating around out there. Guess it’s not over yet after all. The proceeds from this round of DVD sales will go toward getting us moved to a hosting company that can actually keep a site up. If you think I’m overreacting, check this out. Or this. Or this. Or this hosting review page which has apparently accumulated so many complaints that they’ve closed the comments down. 😯 I have a hard time believing that these jokers haven’t gotten some class action lovin’.

I’ll bitch some more later. But you knew that, right?… Read more

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Cooking With Code Home Base Television & Movies

It’s the bite of the spider, it’s the thrill of the fight!

So I’ve had this wickedly itchy thing on the back of my right ankle for about a week now. I’ve soaked it in hot water, wrapped it in cold washcloths that spent a little bit of time in the freezer, I’ve done my level damned best to leave it alone and not scratch it. This morning when I got up, took Evan to his grandparents and got ready to feed horses, it was pure agony trying to put my muck boots on. Then I noticed it was about the size of a half-dollar (for those of you old enough to remember the 50-cent coin, a.k.a. the JFK half-dollar, a currency that I sorely miss) , and varied in color from purple to brown, and did I mention it hurting like hell? It hurt like hell. So after horse feeding time, I went to the doctor, who said he was pretty sure it was some sort of insect bite, and really nasty too. He hesitated to guess as to what kind of insect, but when I went to pick up my prescription and the stuff I’d need to wrap the ankle to keep a pad over the hugely ugly and painful open blister that’s there, the pharmacist basically confirmed that what I had on paper was a pretty stiff cocktail designed for someone who’s waited too long to treat a brown recluse bite that was pretty nasty to begin with. Joy. So I’m pretty much an inside-dweller until cleared: no yard work, definitely no horse feeding, keep it as antiseptic clean as possible until further notice. I’m hoping I’m not staring down the barrel of any lasting damage, but the whole foot is bright red and you can see veins sticking out. Between that and the drugs I’ve been prescribed, I’m just feeling woozy about the whole thing. First various farm injuries, then mutant monkey toes with more joints than a toe should have unless it happens to be a finger, and now this…what gives? Has someone got it in for my right foot?

Oh, and speaking of the doctor, or actually, speaking of the Doctor, here are 45 years of house calls in 35 minutes. If you don’t know your Doctor Who mythology, I’d suggest that sometime in the next week or three might be an outstanding time to catch up. Or so I’ve heard. 😉

For those whose efforts to get a PDF DVD have been frustrated by the constant downtime courtesy of Globat, I have replaced the PDF ordering page with a hand-coded HTML page that doesn’t have to have their SQL database server up and running. Orders for the DVD have taken a nose dive since the beginning of this month…right about the same time these constant server issues cropped up. But now that won’t be an issue any longer, at least for that portion of PDF. Never mind “baby needs a new pair of shoes” – at this rate I’m gonna need a new pair of feet!… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Gadgetology

Thanks for the memories

The memory card snafu has been solved! Pantech pointed me in the direction of an incredibly useful piece of software called Easy Photo Recovery which recovered – get this – all but two of the photos that had vanished from the offending memory stick. (The two casualties were from this week’s ToyBox piece, and since that’s already posted the originals aren’t needed anymore.) This program is just amazing, and I had no idea anything like it existed – and I’ll probably be calling on its services in the future, since this isn’t the first oddball disappearance of memory stick photos I’ve ever experienced, and because I take a lot of pictures. (I don’t know anyone with kids who doesn’t, actually.) … Read more