He is not so square.

Chuck, one of my best friends, was hit by a car on his motorcycle on Thursday. He is okay, save a quite a few bruises and some serious road rash, but his bike is totalled. It is clear from the details in this situation that the other person was at fault, but the thing that really gets to me is that the person who hit him didn’t even apologize… What a bitch…

Beth, who I haven’t seen since graduation, is coming over this morning and we are going to grab some breakfast….. Too bad I don’t have a Zoob to throw at her… :)

I added <link> tags into my LJ styles… If you are using recent builds of Mozilla you can activate the Link Toolbar (View->Show/Hide->Site Navigation Bar->Show Only as Needed) and when you are reading my journal or my friends page you can use the Next and Previous buttons in that toolbar to move through the journal pages (they function the same as the “Previous XX/Next XX” links at the bottom of this page) In addition, the Top button on the toolbar will take you to the most recent journal entries. Finally, LiveJournal themselves added <link> tags into the Post/Read Comment pages to allow you to step back and forth through journal entries that way (one by one).

AFAIK, Mozilla is the only browser to support link tags well, but I only use Mozilla so the other browsers are really irrelevant to me anyway.. :) I tried viewing the page in whatever version of IE comes with Win2k and didn’t see anything special to handle the link navigation, but I didn’t try too hard because the nausea started to set in quickly… :) As far as I am concerned, I have no need for multiple web browsers to be installed on my machine, so I don’t have Opera, K-Meleon, or any of the other browsers installed to test with… As far as I am concerned, I don’t even want IE on my machine, but I just don’t feel like bothering to get rid of it… :)

I got home from work around 7pm or so… I should have stayed late, but I actually got a ton accomplished in the few hours I was there, and I was kinda burned out a bit… Anyway, I figure all the extra time I put in last week can make up for a bit of a short day today… I was supposed to go to a party at Frances’ today, but I scammed out ofit, just because I was feeling tired and wasn’t in a “meeting tons of new people” mood…

I was kinda excited to be home tonight because I figured I would be able to hand out some candy to the trick-or-treaters… I put out my pumpkin (lit, of course) and raised the blinds and turned the lights on, but to no avail… These smart children of today must have realized that you can’t get blood from a stone; College kids don’t have money, and therefore probably don’t give out candy.. :) Since my block is almost entirely populated with BC and BU students, I guess people don’t see this as a lucrative sugar haven.. That’s ok though, because now I have more candy for me. :)

That new Tomahawk CD is really cool… Now, of course, I am a bit of a Mike Patton fanboy, but this CD is one that everyone can enjoy… As opposed to many of Patton’s other experimental side-projects, this CD is mostly Rock, which just a tinge of weirdness thrown in…

Well, around 11:30 the cable guys finally showed up and hooked up my new cable box… There was something very liberating about watching them remove the second cable line… It reinforced that I no longer have A/B cable…

After they left I jumped in the shower (figured I would toss that in to make you all lust after me) and then left for work… When the bus dropped me off in Harvard Square, Adam called to tell me that the Red Line trains were being shut down due to some medical emergency at the Charles/MGH stop. It turns out that an MBTA worker was struck and killed by the train, which isn’t cool… Unfortunately, this poor turn of events made me walk from Harvard Square to Kendall Square… That is a long walk, but it was a nice day out so it wasn’t too bad….

Then I got to work and found out that a bug that was filed for me last night wasn’t really my bug..

While I was in Harvard Square I picked up the Tomahawk CD (Side project of Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Fantômas) and Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard)). Sounds pretty cool so far… I am hopefully gonna see them live at the Middle East the week of Thanksgiving.

They said he would be here between 8 and 10am, which gives him another 22 minutes to get his ass here…

I thought this was funny, and figured some of you would as well… :)

Talked to My Roommate Parise for a few hours tonight, which was definately good, since we haven’t had the opportunity to chat for quite awhile… He seems to be doing well and enjoying himself… We will hopefully get a chance to meet up over Thanksgiving, but if not, Christmas break is a must… :)

Time to go to bed, the cable guy is going to be here between 8-10am tomorrow to install my digital cable (finally!).

I put my pumpkin out tonight, but I couldn’t find a proper pumpkin candle…. Fortunately, my pumpkin is gigantic and I could fit the glass jar candle I had lying around inside of it… I will look for a proper pumpkin candle tomorrow…. It did look quite badass thought…

Now that the stress has subsided a bit, I will talk about my experience at work on Saturday… Adam and I made a pact: We would go into work on Saturday and sneak in a few features that we both wanted to see before our QA freeze. Our goal was to not only sneak these features in, but to also still come in before our deadline (the 1st). So we got to work around 2pm, maybe a bit afterwards, and we started hacking…. I chose the “Make the server spit out RDF for the Table of Contents” project, and Adam chose the “Make the Search and TOC windows into sidebars” project (and a few other clean up projects). The server code is mostly Omar’s domain, who wasn’t around to answer questions, so I was flying by instruments…

I had lots of annoying trouble, barked down a few wrong trees, and made some gigantic mistakes… We were at work until well past midnight, do the math, it was a long fucking time… Towards the end of the night I was getting tunnel vision and decided that it was time to put the project away for a night or two and come back at it fresh… Of course, then I had an epiphany, and after another hour or so I had it mostly straightened out.. I left it somewhat working, confident that the glitches were simply special cases in my recursion that I wasn’t accounting for… I was mostly right…

One of the problems I was experiencing (which I mentioned earlier) was that the server was working fine in the debugger, but not from the CLI. Well, it turns out that it wasn’t the fact it was running in the debugger that was causing it to work, but instead the fact it was running in standalone mode and not daemon mode. I showed it to omar, and within 5 minutes I understood my stupidity… The server was reassigning stdout to the socket for forked processes… No processes were forked in standalone mode, so therefore no fd inheritance… :) So all my cout calls were simply slamming the client with lots of XML it wasn’t expecting.. :)

Other than that, I was basically right, after determining a few special cases in my recursion, I succeeded in my goals this afternoon, and by quitting time the new pretty TOC, in all it’s glory, was working in both online and offline mode…. This made me feel much better… We only have a few small tweaks to do to the UI and a feature or two to polish off, but we are definately on track to come in early…

I found my bug, and so we are now generating our TOC information in RDF, which is a dream to work with in our new UI….. Rockin…