Thankfully, I’ve finally managed a few short days from work to spend with my friends, and family.

The entire story is long, and boring, so I’ll minimize the impact with bullet points: Most of these are boring factoids, rather than anything providing amusement. Sorry.

  • My flight was delayed nearly two hours – after a three hour layover – due to damage to the plane.
  • ...which we ended up flying out on, anyway. Thanks for thinking about my safety, America West.
  • It is possible to snap over 100 photos in two days, without even trying.
  • Pocatello, ID has a Denny’s with delicious, edible food.
  • ...Billings, MT does not share this trait
  • Montana Highways once again have speed limits: They’re usually 75mph, unless otherwise posted.
  • The desert lands of NV, ID, MT, and WY look exactly the same. Only the mountains change.
  • NV gasoline prices are nearly 25% higher than that of MT, WY, and ID.
  • Diet Vanilla Cherry Dr. Pepper has virtually no flavor. However, it goes deliciously with ‘French Burnt Peanuts’.
  • It is possible to get 40mpg, despite driving against the wind, uphill, in a downpour.
  • ...however, the wipers are not capable of keeping up if you are averaging over 50mph.
  • Once you have Country (Chicken) Fried Steak in the upper Northwest, it’s impossible to enjoy it anywhere else, again. IT’S JUST THAT GOOD.
  • It is possible to fit three cans of cola in the trunk of a ‘98 Escort ZX2. The ability to hold anything else is purely coincidental, and unintended.
  • Yellowstone Park is slowly growing back from the hellacious fire of 1988. The tiny trees are poking out from the burnt embers. It’s beautiful.

I apologize for the lack of updates – I’ve been busy, rather so, away from the Internet.. and haven’t had much time to work on my playtoys.

However, I’ve got a new little tool I’ve been coding. Based upon a semi-portable SQL backend (yes, my infamous shim), it will work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite. Being written in PHP, it is a highly portable program, and will run on virtually any web capable system. It will track employee times, status, and their whereabouts. Useful for secretaries who wonder where the techs are, I fathom. I don’t have any specific reason for creating this application – other than I think it might be a nice way to waste a weekend. I’m sure others will find it useful, as well!

[Edit: Slightly updated layout, and a bit more coherency. Yes, the interface will evolve.]

After settling upon this design nearly two years ago, I was sure there would be some bugs to crop up – and I found them. Being CSS based, not only text based browsers dislike it, but Konq 3.3.x seems to dislike my css divs due to a bug in it’s handling of border code. It will render the full div as inherited if you specify a border to inherit.

I will be toying with the CSS live at times, so pay no heed if it looks strange.

I must say I was shocked this afternoon to find an email asking me when My Music would be fixed. I noticed that the bandwidth use had gone downhill – but it never did more than a few hundred megs a month, anyhow. After looking at my base64 encoded URLs, I realized that I still had the references in place for my old test domain, the now defunct ‘esrc.us’. Oops!

This has since been rectified. Dave, I feel sorry for your ears. Why anyone would want to hear my horrible remake of modfiles (on ten dollar headphones, none the less) is beyond me, but you’re welcome to ‘em!