Busy Bumble Bees

I’m fuckin’ exhausted from the last week; the last 3 days have been chock full of Intuit-representin’, college-edumacated interviewin’, eatin’-on-the-company-dime fun, but it was work all the same.  Today was meetings from 11-5 and now I can finally breath.  Well, take one breath before sprinting out to go play volleyball with the You-Dub Hoespital team: The Screaming Pancs. I wanted to use that breath to tell you not to expect many updates between now and March.  I’ll be out of town for 2 1/2 weeks in February at different events in Mountain View, San Diego, and Las Vegas (w00!).  In the meantime, I’ll try to pop back in from time to time, but overall I’ll be MIA.

I’ll post more about last week and my upcoming plans this weekend, hopefully.

It Was Fun While It Lasted

Five years ago I moved out to California with a trailer full of clothes, books, and a computer. The good people at Intuit gave me a signing bonus of $5,000 (before taxes) and I used it to buy a Golden Tee 99 arcade machine off eBay for ~$2000 (including shipping). I had many late nights in San Jose playing Whazz with the Madd Scientist (before he was even known as such). I dominated him so thoroughly and embarassingly that I named myself the Whazzmaster. It’s not like I made him call me that at home, I just fancied myself The Whazzmaster. When it came time to buy a domain name for my new website I naturally used it, because duh, it fucking rules. Fun was had.

Five years passed: I’ve moved it four times (three with Judd’s much-appreciated help) a total of 10 flights of stairs and it is a heavy fucker. I haven’t played it much lately but when Scientist was out here earlier this year we hit a few rounds. Fun times, fun times.

I just sold it for $500 plus a $20 tip for helping the guy bring it down to his van. The dream has died.

*sigh* … say lah vee. Feel free to reminisce about how whazz has affected your lives. I know I will tonight. Break out the whiskey.

The Shrine on our desk.

Can I still call myself whazzmaster? Or do I have to change the name of the website? So many questions.

Hello, Is It Me You’re Looking For?

Looks like the midwest contingent has found the new site as well. Nice. Thanks for the compliments everyone, I think this home will be a lot nicer than the last one. For one thing, shit actually works. So I want to get my Battle of Bautista post up even though it is woefully late. I uploaded the videos on YouTube and everything.

Belly, AFAIK Stacy is working a double today. I tried calling her last night and no answer either. I think she must be tired from running around the country visiting deadbeats who can’t get up the nerve to move to the midwest.

There a Rails Meetup tomorrow that I’m going to. It looks exciting and I like the idea of Meetups, especially since (no offense to you guys) not many of my friends are that into technology. I also attended a SIG (special interest group) meeting on Ruby at Google last week, which was also a great experience. Man, Google’s campus is crazy, but I would need a whole ‘nother post just to describe it.

Scientist: get off your ass and quit “yeah, yeah”-ing wwhazz and buy a plane ticket for Slumberslam on Aug 20th. I expect to see you there, HOOOOGGGAAAN!

Posted from My Mac

I’m posting this from within TextMate on my back-to-life iBook. Yesterday I went and bought a copy of Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) and got it working on my old-as-hell iBook. The wireless is still broke, but now that I have wired internet access in my home it’s not that much of an issue. Whizz, my friends, whizz.

27th Birthday Retrospective

33410058

Originally uploaded by Whazzmaster.

I’m trying to post this from within the Flickr interface. I wonder if it will work.

1. The post was more about testing to see whether I could really connect to whazzmaster’s posting interface from within Flickr and post a story with one of my pictures there. Operation: success.
2. I’m in the process of uploading all of my pictures from the last 4 years to Flickr. I paid for a Premium account so I have unlimited storage (with a 10GB monthly transfer cap). It was pretty cheap ($24/year) and I can use it as a free back-up service for all my digital photos.
3. I can set the permissions on my photos to Fully Public, Friends only, Family only, or Friends and Family. Anyone who wants to add me as a contact so you can see my Friends pictures, just create an account and holler at ‘whazzmaster’.

Scientist and I were talking about the Tucker Max laundry thing when he was out here. My question: does he say, “Come over and do my laundry.”? Or does he work the fact that he’s Tucker Max into the equation (“Come over and do my laundry because I’m Tucker Max and of course you want to meet me.”)? Apparently Scientist’s case study will discern whether internet celebritidom plays a crucial role in the solicitation of free laundry services. Bravo sir, bravo.

– rollin down tha street, smokin’ endo, sippin’ on gin and juice

Fin

Fuck. Shit. Piss. I was told at the office that I’d either have to pull down whazzmaster.com or be fired. Since my job has brought in approximately hundres of thousands of dollars more than whazzmaster.com, lifetime, I think I’ll stick with the job. The last post will be up sometime this weekend; good-bye cruel world.

– say you/say me/say it for always/that’s the way it should be

Technology Is Great

A several-step process:

1. Go here: http://widgets.yahoo.com. Download and install the Yahoo Widget Engine for Windows or Mac (whichever, if you don’t know which one to get then you don’t deserve Whazzmaster being served to your very desktop).
2. After it is installed, download and install this widget.
3. Open the preferences for the newsreader widget. You now have two choices:
   1. If you want to get the last 6 posts to Whazzmaster delivered to your desktop, paste the following URL into the “Your RSS feed” text field: http://www.whazzmaster.com/~whazz/whazzmaster/blog/index.xml
   2. If, like me however, you want to see the last 6 COMMENTS posted to Whazzmaster, with links straight to the comment, paste THIS URL into the “Your RSS feed” text field: http://www.whazzmaster.com/~whazz/whazzmaster/blog/comments.xml
4. Enjoy getting Whazzmaster updates every X minutes. I know I will.

This is the end of your tech support. Figure the rest out yourselves. I don’t reccomend software lightly. I figure it’s gotta be easy enough for you retards to understand.

–when you mouseover the user, it shows an excerpt of their comment

Yeah, I’m Bored

I’ve just kinda gotten sick of spending any time whatsoever on this site. It’s not like anyone reads what I write up here; you just click the Comments button and start posting comments as made-up people. That isn’t so much why I wanted to have my own website. Instead, I’ll just post an open thread every so often and anyone who wants to can post whatever nonsense they please. Go wild, I don’t care any more. Here’s my digital home; go ahead and egg it, I guess.

Open Thread.

MovableType, What The Hell?

About one year ago (August 2004) Scientist abruptly asked me to move whazzmaster.com off of his webserver. Around the same time I began tiring of the effort needed to maintain the whazzmaster PHP code base that I’d built from scratch starting in 2001. So, with those two things happening in such close proximity I decided to migrate to a quasi-commercial blog application hosted on one of Scientist’s ex-co-worker’s web server.

Things began to hum along with a minimum of trouble, but there were annoyances from Day One that are starting to pile up.

Number one on my list: the home page for whazzmaster went from http://www.whazzmaster.com/index.php to http://www.whazzmaster.com/~whazz/whazzmaster/blog/index.html. That’s a long-ass URL, even if typing in whazzmaster.com redirects you to it.

For a long time I have been annoyed at the fact that when you post a comment you have to refresh the page to view what you just wrote. It becomes tiresome after being subjected to the problem even once, but I don’t have many options to fix it. The only option seems to be tracking down the issue in the Perl code and fixing it. The MovableTyp Perl code, while readable, does not lend itsef to casual hacking due to the judicious use of Object Oriented Perl and many libs being brought in. A.) I’m the first to admit that I’m not OO-Perl savvy and B.) I don’t have a test environment so if I break something I could fuck up the whole site. I’ve left it alone until now but now it’s starting to bug me on a hourly basis.

There’s a new bug that was introduced to a Perl module a while back that was causing 500 server errors when posting comments, logging into the site, or doing anything that involved writing to the MySQL database. Supposedly it’s fixed now, but GUESS WHAT, it still happens every time I login to post an entry, and reportedly it happens when people try to post comments as well. Well, whoopty-fucking-do SixApart, I guess it’s not fixed then is it. I just read some other users that trackbacked to the above-linked entry; one is dated 7/12 saying that the software is core-dumping multi-gig files to the web server directories, so not only is the bug causing posts to fail, it is also eating precious quota space. I can’t login to whazzmaster’s cPanel from work due to port 82 blocking but I’m going to check when I get home tonight.

All in all, I wish I could address everyone’s problems with the site but I just can’t at this time. I’d like to upgrade/switch but to upgrade wouldn’t fix the core usability problems and to switch would necessitate me redesigning the site again. And since I can never satisfy you fuckers with a design I don’t really want to go in that direction… that is unless one of you wants to buy me this.

RAJ OUT.

XTREME Open Thread

Back from Minnesnowta, but I have a ton of shit to do this week for work: doing designs, re-signing up for health, dental, and vision insurance, plus a lot of housework that didn’t get done while we were away. Feel free to discuss the ECW PPV or whatever it is you nutzos usually discuss.

RAJ OUT.