It’s a good thing that when I go to Dallas a week from now, all the shows I like to watch will have already had their season/series finales. There will be three movies out which I might potentially go see with my parents, and with another couple movies that I’ll bringing plus those already on the server down there that might be watched, there aren’t going to be that many free evenings left. Don’t forget that one night we’re going to see Wicked also, so if this isn’t well planned out in advance, there may not end up being enough time to watch everything.
One thing I need to do between now and leaving is figure out which DVDs I need to take ripped versions of to put on the server. Unfortunately the only (easy) way I can think of this is to manually compare the two folders, although I’m sure that there’s a way I could write up a script to do it for me. Actually, I’ve already thought of a way that should be pretty easy to do programmatically. The only downside is that I’ve fallen slightly behind in my DVD ripping, so I also have to do a little bit of thinking to figure out which ones I don’t even have up here at the moment either.
Personal - Seattle
So, I got my replacement PSU in the mail today, but it wasn’t the exact same model I sent them. To an extent this makes sense because I bought my initial one over three years ago and it’s no longer on the market. Instead, I guess they sent me one of the same power of what’s considered to be the same model line. The weird thing about it though, it’s some sort of half-modular, half-normal PSU. I’m guessing that the logic was to put the connectors that almost every computer would need physically attached, and then let the cables for all the other components be the modular ones in order to decrease the number of unused cables in the case. That’s actually quite a smart design, and if this PSU gets used in a smaller case like I’m currently anticipating, it might prove to be quite handy.
I got the first set of shopping done today for my Dallas trip, and I’ll probably do part two tomorrow when I’m back over in that area. I’ve measured my suitcase and an Xbox 360 box will fit just fine, so unless I have a last minute change of heart about my plans involving that, I’ll probably buy one of those here since our store now has them at a $30 discount. I can only imagine what the baggage screeners are going to think when my suitcase goes through and not a single clothing item is in it, but instead it’s full of electronics and software.
Personal - Seattle
So, last night I went on a little Amazon shopping spree and bought some TV season DVDs that were down in the $25 range (where I’m much more willing to buy them than when they cost $40 or so). Technically I think this was early this morning as my order confirmation emails are all timestamped today. This afternoon comes around, I get a bunch of messages from Amazon saying that stuff shipped. I have Prime, two day shipping, my stuff should be here Friday. Cool, DVDs to watch this weekend if I wanted. Fast forward to me arriving home from work, and there’s a package leaning up against my door from Amazon. Not expecting anything, I try to play “guess the item” based on the weight. Too heavy and thick for a normal DVD (and I didn’t have anything preordered that came out this week), but close to that shape. About right for a book maybe, but I didn’t order one? Turns out, Amazon didn’t need the full two days to ship me one of the items, 12 hours or so was totally fine.
I also did some more online purchasing today, this next one from Woot who happened to have a Roomba on sale today. I’d kinda been wanting one ever since I moved up here (and really, even before that, but my parents weren’t too sold on the concept), and while they used to be a fairly common product on Woot, it had been a while since I’d seen the last one appear. Ideally it will arrive sometime in the next week before I head to Dallas, but if not, it isn’t like it would have much cleaning to do anyway when I’m not around for a week. In fact, it’s price was basically just about twice what I pay for a cleaning service to come monthly, and a significant part of what they do is vacuum, so if Mr. Roomba can do a decent enough job, it may just end up paying for itself. Then, of course, the question is just which model do I want to buy for my second one (and beyond).
Personal - Seattle
Over the next week and a half, I’ll be making at least a couple trips to our company store. First, I have the copies of Windows 7 to buy for the file server and other assorted computers in Texas. Then, I’m buying a few copies at Mr. McDonald’s request which I will be delivering to him at some point over my trip. I think that’s all the shopping I have to do for other people, but there could conceivably be a trip in there to buy stuff for myself after one or both of those is something screams my name.
Could it be that my day tomorrow actually looks somewhat empty? On my calendar, yes, but my meetings this afternoon gave me plenty of stuff to be busy with tomorrow. For once it seems that I get lucky with lack of meetings and plethora of work aligning with each other.
Personal - Seattle
Hey, what do you know, my meetings today actually kept me fairly entertain and unbored. If we can repeat this pattern tomorrow, almost half the week will be over, and then Friday will also be a semi-full day. Since really I’m just looking forward to the end of next week at this point, the faster it arrives, the better.
At some point I’ll want to begin to make sure that I have everything ready for my trip. I’ve been holding off on finishing up Zelda: Spirit Tracks (although really, I’ve been able to entertain myself enough to not need to play it), and then I figure a Kindle book or two + my Zune should be good on the entertainment front. I really only need to take my laptop because it would be slightly weird to not have it with me, but I’m sure that I can find some way to put it to use.
Personal - Seattle
One thing that I say/plan that I’m going to do every weekend is upgrade my HP WHS machine to the software version, but I always get distracted from making a backup and following through with it. Yes, I realize that not having a standing backup anyway is generally a bad idea, but fortunately it hasn’t caused me any pain yet. Oh well, maybe a project for next weekend?
In the nearer term, tomorrow is definitely one of my more busy days of the week, although Tuesday is actually just as full. I should be in my office about all of 2-3 hours tomorrow which is great for the boredom meter but not so great on the getting stuff done outside of meetings front. That said, a couple of my meetings are the ones where it’s questionable if I serve any purpose at all being there, so I guess that’s why laptops and wireless networks were invented.
Personal - Seattle
Ah, a new blog year, a new set of stats. Ready to see what I’ve come up with? First, let’s go ahead and get a couple normal ones out of the way:
- 365 posts last year, from “Impressive Even to Me” to “My Own Personal Hat Trick”. Total count from 1163 to 1528, just around a 31% increase this time.
- Daily posting streak is now up to 1120 (4/22/07-today)
Now for the new stats:
- In the past year, I’ve had titles ranging from 2 words to 10 words. (Hey, so that’s what I was trying to calculate!) My most common word count was 5, coming in at just under 31% of my posts (113). The other highest ranking ones were (possibly predictably) 6 (23.6%, 86) and 4 (22.7%, 83). Before I calculated this, I expected 4 to be the highest, so that was slightly surprising to me.
- I’m fully aware that manage to squeak in a bunch of posts right underneath the daily deadline. 123 (33.7%) of my posts last year were made in the last 5 minutes (11:55:00-11:59:59) of the day.
- 10 posts had comics attached to them (this year, all from XKCD), 308 posts were made after my move up to Seattle, and then 30 of those were made back in Dallas. There were also 3 additional posts that were made from Seattle before I moved.
With the relative ease that I was able to collect those first two new ones (the last was easy enough to do manually), I’d expect to see a similar set of stats appear next year. For the next 364 statless days, however, you’ll just have to imagine what they might be.
Personal - Seattle
So, did everyone guess correctly for what today is? I sure hope so because if you didn’t, I might feel compelled to do something like point and make fun of you. Today, just to make sure that everyone really does know, is the completion of my third blog year (not calendar, that happened last month) of uninterrupted daily postings. Yep, between May 15th, 2008 and today there have been 1095 days, and in the time span I’ve made 1095 posts. Don’t believe me? Go find a day that I didn’t make a post on. I dare you.
With this post made, I can now work on my stats that will be appearing in tomorrow’s installment of The Daily Goob. Even if I had already done the coding I would have had to recollect them anyway, so really I’m just saving myself some effort by doing it all at once. Sure, that’s what we’ll go with. I’m all about the effort saving.
Personal - Seattle
It’s…Friday! Well, yes, but that’s not the real point. If you’re somehow not aware of the significance that will be taking place approximately 24 hours from now, then you obviously haven’t been paying that much attention. I’ll simply direct you to the archives in the column to the right and let you figure it out on your own.
I’m going to have to stop getting distracted by WoW and SC2 if I’m ever going to get around to collecting my stats. With my PHP method I should be able to collect many more stats much easier than I could with straight up SQL. As long as my server doesn’t crash (which would kind of put a damper on the whole thing all together), I believe my coding skills are of sufficient quality that I can collect everything I need to given the amount of time left.
Personal - Seattle
So I was thinking to myself, “Self, how are you going to do these stats? You could use SQL, but that’s just not going to be a very easy solution at all. What if you were to use another language, say…PHP, in conjunction with SQL to do things like word splitting. That would make life much easier now, wouldn’t it?” Indeed I believe it will. And, as a bonus, I can just have all my stats generated on a single page for me that I can copy and paste over. Maybe I’ll even find a way to integrate it as a page so that anyone can get stats on demand whenever they want? You see that the possibilities here are endless, limited only by that amount of effort I desire to put in (which to me honest, will be hard pressed to get above “minimum”).
While I still have a lot of work to do on my specs this week, I think the work divides up nicely between today and tomorrow. Unfortunately what would typically be about two or three weeks of time is being compressed to one in this case, so ideally there won’t be quite as high of a work:day ratio in the future. If there is, well, I guess I’ll just take into account how low that ratio can be at other times and average it out in my mind.
Personal - Seattle