The Irish Thug

In just over 5 months since I mentioned I was designing a website for the lacrosse team, the day has come that it has been unveiled to the world. As usual, a bunch of things were found to need fixing in addition to the things I knew still had to be done.

Go check it out. Northeastern Men’s Lacrosse

I’d say try everything out, but I don’t think the captains would appreciate the random emails they would get if the contact for was used without really being directed at the team.

… eight to go. It’s official, I broke my right pinky finger. For future reference, if you are going to try and stop a lacrosse check with just one finger, don’t use the pinky. It doesn’t work.

In keeping with my habit of not actually posting about something when it happened, I waited about 2 weeks to get this up. I had a big splint on it over the weekend when it happened, which was pretty awkward. But now it now just keeping the last joint from bending (where the fracture is). Going back sometime next week to see how it is coming along. On the whole it could be worse. I can’t write, but I can do most other things with my right hand. Common task that is surprisingly hard with your weak hand: wiping your butt. Non-common task that I am surprisingly good at with my weak hand: Wii Sports.

Last week was my birthday and to celebrate my friends and I went to see Queens of the Stone Age. The show was very good and was the best way I’ve celebrated a birthday in recent history. In an intriguing twist of fates, it was also the bassist’s birthday and according to Wikipedia, we were born in the same year as well. But that’s enough about that, let’s talk about the good stuff.

Joshua Homme is an underrated guitarist. It’s ok, I didn’t know his name either until just before the show. Queens of the Stone Age works essentially on the same level as Nine Inch Nails. It’s Josh’s band and the people he plays with is in a semi-constant rotation. That fact makes the following comment even more amazing. The band as a whole was very tight and always in time with each other. You could see that they were always looking around to catch one another’s eyes to make sure they were in pace with each other.

I went in expecting it to be an Era Vulgaris (newest album) show. I was happily surprised that is was not that at all. They even played some songs that I had not heard before. One of the best songs was Better Living Through Chemistry. It’s one of my favorites of the band, so it was great to hear it live. The lights they used the most were yellow-green and blue strobes that pointed at the audience. The lights were all programed to switch right on the beat of the song, which added to the tightness of the music. While this is a minimal lighting set-up, the performance of Sick, Sick, Sick had one of the best lighting effects I’ve seen. For this song, they added two lights that were pointed at Josh as he played. These two lights would strobe in opposition of each other so it looked like he was turning back and forth every quickly, almost as if two people were standing there.

Other comments on the songs they played go as follows. I would have preferred they use the slot for Feel Good Hit of the Summer for one of their stronger songs. I would have played Suter Up Your Future instead of Make It Wit Chu, but that song went very well so I can’t complain.

On the whole, great show and a great way to celebrate a birthday. Hopefully I’ll be able to top it next year.

…is not up yet and it is not my fault. My end of the website is done. There are a few subjective style changes that could be made, but everything runs.

The reason why the website has not been published yet is because Northeastern Club sports is being slow in giving the team access to server space. Last Monday I sent an email asking for server space. Of the two people that received this email, one emailed me back saying that it was the other person’s responsibility, as he is our supervisor. The reply also stated that all our supervisor had to do was fill out a form online so that the request could be processed.

I did not have any other contact with the team supervisor until I went to talk to him last Friday. He clearly wouldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t gone to see him. He seemed to just vaguely remember that I had sent the earlier email. While I am in his office, he fills out the form and says “next business day, it should be ready”. Next business day means Monday, so I have to wait a few more days.

Monday comes and goes. Tuesday comes and goes. Still no response from our supervisor. On Wednesday I sent an email asking for an update on the status. Again there is no response, so I sent another email Friday morning saying I would be coming by his office to talk to him. He was not in his office at all on Friday.

I am alive. I have just been very busy lately with school. All my classes are good and interesting, with the exception of Technical Writing. It’s not very interesting and thus the homework takes lots of time to do. The light at the end of the tunnel is it is my last writing class. Then I will be free to do just programing and engineering work.

There are a few ideas for posts that I’ve had, but pushed off. I’m going to force myself to go threw with the latest one, I just don’t have time now. But I think it will turn out well.

The lacrosse website is going through the process of being published. It will be nice to see it up and running after all the time I spent this summer putting it together.

That’s it for now. I promise to be back soon.

This was the message I was met with when I went to Dell to see what I could do about my laptop. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start from the beginning.

Thursday morning I was reading some blogs while I should have been getting ready for class. And then, black. The LCD of my laptop had become completely unusable. Faint outlines of where windows should have been could be seen, but even the simple task of following where the mouse was on the screen required much concentration.

Within a few minutes I had told my computer to restart. (Well, actually, I thought I had told it to shutdown. I ended up clicking the wrong button.) As Windows was booting up, the screen worked as it should. Within a minute, the screen had returned to it’s darkened state. Another minute passes as I try again to locate the shutdown option and this time succeed. I head to class considering the fact that I might be the owner of a new computer in a few days and the joys that would come with Vista. (Laptop screens cost around $400+, so it is often not worth it when that money could be used for a newer, better machine.)

The saving grace here is the fact that I have a second monitor attached to my laptop. This meant I could still use my computer, I just had less area to work with. Without the extra screen I would have been out of luck as working around the problem would have been much harder.

I get back from class and start searching for anything that could find that might let me resolve the issue of the broken screen. After scanning some “If you send us your machine and your first born son, we can fix it” websites and one “Ok, these are the steps you want to take to completely dissemble your laptop and do stuff to it” website, I went to Dell’s website.

Nosing around the My Account section I see those magical words listed above. My laptop is just a month away from the end of it’s three year warranty. I hopped on Dell’s instant messaging support service, had a relatively short conversation explaining my situation. They told me they would be shipping a replacement screen to their Boston office and to expect a call in 1-2 business days to schedule an in-house replacement. The call never came on Friday, which is fine, it came promptly Monday morning. We agreed that 3-4 on Tuesday would be a good time for both of us. Four o’clock that afternoon I get a call from the Dell service guy. “I’m sorry, I’m running a little late. I will be there in an hour.” I explained the misunderstanding and moved on as this was the worst thing done by Dell throughout the whole ordeal.

Tuesday comes and the technician arrives with my new screen in hand. I then watch, like a worried mother, as he begins to do surgery on my computer (which would be the one thing I’d grab from my room if the building was on fire). The procedure was fairly simply, lots of tiny screws and some cracking sounds as the plastic case popped apart as it was designed to.

The new screen has been working fine as I count down the next 23 days hoping that if something else is going to break, that it happen sometime before the 17th of August.

As mentioned before, I’ve had to close chances to get to see Tool perform live. Wednesday I get a call from the same kid saying he has one ticket for Thursday’s show. With that short notice I know it’s a lock that whoever I’m replacing absolutely can’t make the show.

The show was at the Tweeter Center just outside of Boston. The seats were the last row before the roof ends, but were dead center. The stage setup was guitar front right, drums off center right back, the mike for Maynard off center left, bass front left. They pretty much never left those positions. The most interesting thing about the show was the fact that at no point was there ever a light on Maynard. All you saw was his profile, he didn’t face the audience, against the LCD screen behind him.

The set list was a great mix of their albums.
Jambi
Stinkfist
Forty-Six and 2
Schism (extended)
Rosetta Stoned
PUSHIT
FLOOD
Wings For Marie (Pt 1)
10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)
Lateralus (With Big Business Drummer)
Vicarious

I really can’t say enough about the double drum solo during Lateralus. These two guys just went off on their drum sets. They did some back and forth drumming, but in general just played, and played some more.

It’s hard to pick a favorite of all the concerts I’ve seen since they all have different flavors. This concerts flavor was straight up, bad-ass, hard rock. Very glad I finally got to see them and check off another band from my To See list.

A gem I was introduced to by my Film and Lit teacher.

Select Points of The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

• No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
• Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
• Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
• Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.
• The use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials.
• Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.
• In general passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element.
• White slavery shall not be treated.
• Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.
• Pointed profanity (this includes the words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ – unless used reverently – Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression however used, is forbidden.
• Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot.
• Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions are forbidden.
• Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains.
• The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.
• The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful.

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 was written to be “A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures. Formulated and formally adopted by The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. in March 1930.” Read the full text.

A few weeks ago I talked about how I was reworking the code runs My Music Choices. Now I am ready to show what I’ve been working on to the world. The layout has been slightly altered so that the list can be reordered with just one click without using the sidebar I had before. However, that is the small change that wasn’t the main focus of what I added.

The big part of this upgrade is that it now uses the Audio Player to let users to listen to samples of each song I have mentioned. The samples can be listened to in each post directly, or using the music list to open a new small window that will play the selected sample. It will take some time to get through the backlog of the old posts, but you will see the samples popping up as time passes.

At some point I will make the Music Listing plug-in available for other WordPress users to download and use themselves. But for now, I will be keeping it to myself in case I find a few bugs or want to tweak some aspects of the code.

I’ve been really busy coding this week. Almost all of it is back-end things that you will not notice, but it will make me feel better. What I’m doing is re-writing the code that I’ve been using to list My Music Choices and my Lists so that they are written the way WordPress Plug-ins should be written.

This also became much easier when I learned how to use Xampp to run a local server for WordPress. This lets me test out all my code before I try and make it public for you to see. It’s better because it prevents me from bringing down my whole website because I had a bug in my code.

And since I’m never one to only have one project running at one time, I started kicking around some ideas of what I want to do with the website for my lacrosse team. I’m really excited about diving into this one because it will be my first website that has a real purpose and not just me adding things because I think the are neat. I also will get to design all these things that will make the webpage very dynamic and require very little input from which ever person on the team is in charge of updating the news items and such.