Just upgraded CoffeeBear.net to WordPress 2.6. So this post is partly to make sure all my plugins are working correctly with it.
I’d also like to take a momemt to thank AWelkin & Bryon for the gifts they brought back from Japan for me. I’ve now decorated my cubicle with 3 Tachikoma gashapon. *yeah!* Also a quick thanks should go out to my buddy/ex-coworker Eric, he mentioned more than once I just needed the right motivation to get into programming1. Well I recently had some slow time at work and wanted a way to parse some badly formatted data; so I wrote a Python script and while doing so certain things that have never clicked in my head about programming started falling into place. I’ve since started working on another Python script for a different project at the office, so perhaps there’s some hope for my coding-fu yet.
1 I do a lot of computer stuff, but have never been much of a programmer. Usually I just learn enough to hack somebody else’s stuff together to do what I want in rather ugly hacks.
Yup, we’re still here. Just been busy/not felt like writing. Points of interest post-flood:
- Drove past a hot air balloon that had landed on the side of the rode while coming back from a friend’s house.
- Two days later drove under a massive lightning storm coming back from the same friend’s house.1
- Tried taking some end-of/post-flood pictures around town, but did not want to cause any problems for those working in the affected areas. So pictures were all taken from the car while driving through the affected areas and they all pretty much sucked or at best were no better than the dozens of other drive-by photos already posted to Flickr.
- Gave blood and it left me feeling wiped out for days afterwards.
- Attended Convergence with AWelkin, Bryon, Amabaku & Oyarsa Elentari.
- Had a complete blast but also got totally worn out.
- First night of the con, while leaving to go out to get dinner, I thought I was on the bottom step when I was still 1 step up. Walked out, didn’t feel ground underfoot and fell smack down on my ass folding my leg under me and scraping my arm. Ankle got twisted a bit and is still vaguely sore.
- Ate a lot of good food.
- Bought my wife a ren-faire style corset. Yum!
- Saw many good costumes around the con. Even got a few photographed.2
- Went to a flip-book animation panel and watched the panel-host get rather confused by all the adults at the panel. He clearly was expecting this to be almost a form of baby-sitting.
- Drank much good coffee & tea at the con’s CoF2E2 cabana.
- Especially liked the Moon over Madagascar tea (Chinese Black and Ceylon teas blended with bits of bourbon vanilla).
- Also quite fond of the English Toffee/Vanilla Latte they made for me.
- Watched a stunning presentation from a local raptor center.
- Attended a panel on GMing which gave me some ideas for a game I want to run.
- Almost played in a steampunk LARP, but the intro panel killed my interest in it.
- It was this particular group’s first year running a LARP.
- They based the LARP on some sort of “How to Host a Murder Mystery” thing.
- They tried to design it to allow players to continue to enjoy the con.
- Except the players weren’t given any sort of characters. You were expected to go around the con searching for clues.
- You could interact with the people running the LARP as the characters they were dressed up as or as “norms”. If you tried to interact with them in-character, they said they’d respond by interacting with you based on your costume. I only rarely run around in a costume and didn’t have one for this con, so that pretty much killed my interest.
- Painted a miniature thanks to Reaper’s demo painting. That was fun and something I haven’t tried in several years.
1 We were cat-sitting for them.
2 Several I only saw when either I or the costumer were running different directions and so I didn’t always get photos. *sigh* There was one kid in a really excellent TF2 Medic costume. Photos will be posted later, as I have to go through them all and clean them up in GIMP. Especially as my camera fritzed a few times and the image turned out all “purple-ly”.
I’ve taken a few photos of the flood but not yet gotten around to pulling them off my camera. I got a bit tired of waiting to post my photos over to Flickr and I wanted to see what photos some others in the area had. So I create this mosaic of the flood photos I liked best.
I’d like to thank each of the following photographers without whom this mosaic would not have been possible:
Just to let everybody know, we’re still here and doing ok. Our house is approximately 1 mile outside of the 500 year flood plain1, so hopefully we won’t have to evacuate. Our main problem around here at the moment is a lack of usable water. The city only has one well working at the moment, so they can only output about a fourth of what they normally do. I’ve read various reports indicating it will at least a week if not more like 2 or 3 until things start returning to normal. If I get a chance to safely take any photos of the flood, I will do so. However I’m not going to run out and do that right away, as it’s both dangerous and possibly would put me in the way of safety/emergency workers. Those are the sort of people you want happy with you, so I’m not going to go out and do stupid shit to piss them off. 
1 You can view the flood plain area via Google Maps.
Ever since upgrading to the latest version of Rob Miller’s Now-Reading plugin, I noticed my single book pages were working but not displaying everything correctly. Specifically books I’d marked having been borrowed from my local library were being displayed as:
- I borrowed this book fromlibrary
When they should simply have a line reading “I borrowed this book from my local library”. I had spent much
time fiddling with my templates trying to figure out how the upgrade broke them and today I figured it out. The truth is my template was just fine. The problem is the newer version of Now-Reading was applying a new filter to book-meta1. That filter is wpautop and it was wrapping my variable in <p> … </p> tags. Those tags screwed up the display and made my variable checks fail. To correct the problem, I went into now-reading/default-filters.php and commented out add_filter('book_meta_val', 'wpautop');. Now my single book pages look like they’re supposed to again. Yeah!
1 This is a custom field available in the back-end of the plugin and it is where I store the information telling my template if I borrowed the book and from whom I borrowed it.
