Tuesday, November 29, 2005

FIDE Knockout

In case you haven't been following the FIDE World Cub that is currently under way in Russia, well, it's under way! Two of my favorite American players are playing, Gata Kamsky and Hikaru Nakamura. I'm hoping that Gata does well. He's been out of the chess scene for a number of years, having once been one of the top players in the world. Hikaru, the young wonderkid from New York, was knocked out in the first round. Anyway, I won't go into details, if you're interested you can check it out at http://www.chessbase.com. They have regular updates on the status of the event.

No soup for you

What a disappointment. I went down to watch "The Office" at around 10 tonight, on my tivo, just to find that there was nothing. Nothing. So I searched through the handy on-screen channel guide to see what went wrong. Nothing. It wasn't on. The tivo was right, but it felt so wrong.

Luckily my night is almost over anyway, so it didn't mess up my whole day! Speaking of days, I've had worse. Not really so bad today. A few accomplishments too. Let's hear it for psychologically unstable, emotionally challenged, utterly hopeless me having a not so bad day. The wonders of the world never cease to amaze me.

Until next time, enjoy the miles!

Ed.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Happy Thanksgiving

I've always thought that there was something magical about the first snowfall of the year. Once you get past knowing that the next 4 months will be full of cold, wet, damp, dark, and dreary, it's all good. Speaking of good, I caught the last 30 minutes or so of Kenny Chesney on TV last night. I was having my guitar lesson and, when I was getting ready to go, Janice happened to be watching it on TV. After that Faith Hill was on. I'm not a big Faith Hill fan, but I do like her new song "Fireflies". I know, sappy. So I left after she sang it.

So here we are, Thanksgiving Day. I'm really hoping to spend some time today working with the scriptaculous autocomplete functionality. My main goal is to be able to do some customizations of the drop down that it creates for you. I know how to do the basics, change the background color and border, but when it adds items it creates "list items" instead of just "items". What I mean is that, if you're familiar with lists in Word, it creates a circle next to the item that you have in the list. I think it's because I'm using a local array to populate the list instead of an AJAX call to populate the list with dynamic data. I say that because I went through the source for the control, and it looks like when you call it with Autocomplete.local it uses the
  • tags, but when you call it with a link to a page that contains your data it doesn't use those tags. We'll see.

    So, what is scriptaculous? It's a javascript library that someone developed to simplify certain functionality for web development. It comes with certain effects, drag and drop functionality, autocomplete functionality, and more. I'm not sure where it will fit in for me in the long term, but I was interested in it's autocomplete functionality. And it does seem to be one of the more popular javascript frameworks out there.

    Happy Thanksgiving!!!

    Eat well, and be well!

    Ed.

    Sunday, November 20, 2005

    Freedom

    Time has a way of passing us by. Where does it all go? So much to do, so little motivation. That's what I always say. Now I'm no Lemony Snicket, and for that I am truly thankful, but unfortunate events... that's my game!

    Last Sunday I had the opportunity to direct my first chess tournament. The turnout was about half of what was hoped for, but it was a fun day with a lot of good chess. A special thank you to Tom Smith for organizing the event, Ed Kostreba for all of his help, and Larry Williams for his last minute appearance and giving Ed a ride home.

    I picked up 2 games this weekend. One for the pc and one for the xbox. "The Movies" for the PC and "Path of Neo" for the XBOX. What do I think? Suck and Sweet. The bad news, I just don't get into games like I used to.

    He looked a little lost walking out the door, but I think I knew what he was searching for...

    and now, back to the rest of my life.

    Ed.

    Saturday, November 12, 2005

    The more I learn

    Sometimes I'm amazed at how much there is to know. It pains me to know that I'm one of the ones stuck in the in-between. How do you get out of it? Is it even possible? Welcome to my life.

    As unexpected as it may have been after yesterday, I found this morning that it wasn't meant to be. The Matrix: Path of Neo doesn't work on my computer. My graphics card isn't powerful enough. I'd consider upgrading it, but knowing that my computer is passing 3 years old, I'm pretty sure I'll find that I have another problem shortly thereafter. I think I'll call it "suck". Maybe I'll consider picking it up for the PS2 or XBOX, we'll see.

    I did a little more work today with AJAX and designing a test page for what may someday become my crowning achievement. Mostly, though, I slept.

    For tonight I'll leave you with this:

    How you ever gonna know, if you never chase the dream?

    Thanks Garth.

    Have a good one, Ed.

    Friday, November 11, 2005

    I'll take that to go, please.

    da da da do do dum dum
    da da da do do dum dum

    Who would have believed it? The good news is that it wasn't all bad. Nope, it just started out that way. I guess that's what we get playing this lifetime lottery. Yes, I stole some of that line. Come on now, I'm not that creative.

    Today I was on holiday. Yep, Holiday. That's what I'm calling it! Plus, I'm pretty sure it was a holiday today, I just couldn't tell you what one. I'm just another part of the unfortunate degredation of our once proud society. But, even so, it was still a holiday!

    My day started out with a trip to McDonalds. Originally I wanted some honey buns, what can I say, but I needed some money and the bank machine near the convenient store was a little "questionable". I won't go into details, but needless to say that a last minute change of plans took place. I went to another bank machine, and that brought me to McDonalds. My Sausage and Egg McMuffins stripped me of a little over 4 dollars. Since I had just come from the bank machine, with only twenties in my wallet, I was a little surprised to only receive a few cents back. hmm... this was going to be uncomfortable.

    "I'm sorry, didn't I give you a twenty?"
    "Nope, you gave me a five."
    "I'm pretty sure it was a twenty."
    "No, it was a five."
    ... trainer guy speaks up ...
    "You gave him a five. If you want I'll check the tape."
    "yeah."
    ... trainer guy leaves ...
    "what did he say?"
    ... so I'm a little slow! I just said yes cause it seemed like the thing to say ...
    "he's going to check the tape."
    ... trainer guy goes to check the tape
    ... which is going to say I gave a five
    ... since newbie cashier guy says I
    ... gave him a five ...
    ... trainer guy returns ...
    "The tape says you gave him a five."
    "I gave him a twenty."
    "If you have a problem with it you'll have to talk to the manager at the next window."
    ... I drive up to the next window ...
    "You the one that said you gave a twenty?"
    "yes"
    "I'm not trying to say that you're lying, but the tape says that you gave a five."
    "I gave a twenty."
    "The only way to prove that would be for me to cash out the drawer and see if it comes out over."
    "ok."
    "Do you want me to do that?"
    "yes, please."

    And to make a long story short, I left my name and number. I wanted to get home because Kip and I had a multiplayer game of Civ 4 planned. After we finally got the game set up, my phone rang. It was the manager from McDonalds:

    ... it's been a while, so I can't promise the words are exact ...
    "Hello, I'm calling for Jack Black"
    "This is Jack."
    "Hello Jack, this is Jane Doe from McDonalds. We cashed out the register and found that it was $15 over. Since you are claiming that you gave us a twenty, I'll leave $15 in an envelope for you with your name on it. You can just come in and pick it up whenever you want."
    "Thank you."

    There you have it. In the end they still wouldn't admit that I was right! I was not impressed with their customer service on that one. More to come in a bit...

    So, back to Civ 4. After about 15 minutes of playing Kip calls me. "This sucks". And that was that. Multiplayer Civ 4... sucks.

    So, what was good about today? Well, I did more research on AJAX (Asychronous Javascript and XML) and some of the various frameworks out there to simplify implementing it. I bought 2 new movies, one of which I watched (The Perfect Man). And... I bought The Matrix: Path of Neo, which I installed but haven't tried playing yet. I'll save that for tomorrow. I'm concerned that I'll find my computer just a little too old for a graphics intensive game, and I'd rather avoid another disappointment today.

    Aside from that, as usually, just another day in paradise!

    I hope you're enjoying yours.

    Ed.

    Wednesday, November 09, 2005

    The Road and the Radio

    Kenny Chesney's new album is finally out! I think I need to listen to it about 25 more times before I have a good feel, but right off I can say that I really enjoy about half of it. Not a bad start! So far one of my favorites is "Like Me". There's an interesting article about it here:

    http://www.gactv.com/artists/chesney_k.html

    And on that note...!

    Ed.

    Saturday, November 05, 2005

    The fortune cookie

    Happiness isn't in having what you want but rather in wanting what you have.

    Wednesday, November 02, 2005

    Some place that he'd rather be?

    Civ... 4
    What is it good for?
    Absolutely nothing!

    I haven't forgotten you all. Nope, just been a busy week. I still want to get my games up from the tournament this past weekend, so hopefully I'll get to that this weekend... if not sooner. I did want to mention that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been delayed. Now it's due out by the end of February. I'll get by. I still haven't purchased Civ IV yet. It pains me to no end. I think part of it is because I loved Civ II so much, and didn't get into Civ III as much as I had hoped, so I'm going back and forth on whether it's actually worth the purchase. These days it's like that with everything. Sad. Very Sad.

    It wasn't that many years ago that I used to go to the store every friday and look for a new game to buy. What I do now with DVD's I used to do with computer games. It was one of those weekly trips that first got me into Diablo way back in the late 90's. It turned out to be one of my favorite all-time games.

    No chess tournaments this weeked. Larry and I decided not to go to Bradley to play. Instead we're going to play in the 1-day the following weekend in Florence. That gives me a little time to practice some more. I need to tune up my game a little bit after this past weekend. Primarily I need to look over my loss in much more detail. It was one of those games where I was sure at several points that I was better, but in the end I made the final mistake. And so it goes...

    Alright, I'm getting super tired. An early night to bed I fear. Another sign of my impending age crisis. I was hoping I'd get another 20 years before I hit this point, but hey, at least I got, umm, forget that.

    Have a good night! I hope that my friends out in Bend are doing well and missing me this year. Soon! Spring? We'll see. But not forgotten, never that!

    Ed.