is a blog by Brendan
I have whiplash now! Great! Dammit! This is from about eight seconds of headbanging during “Blister in the Sun” at Erin and Stephen’s wedding. I used to be able to dance like that for hours, and now my limit is less than eight seconds.
I guess having ruined my spinal column in college is worth some cred. Maybe.
At work, we have this client we pay for data. The client likes to know that only humans are seeing this data, presumably because they are stupid and bill by the hour rather than the byte (and maybe because of HIPAA, whatever). My employer likes to have computers get the data for the humans, so we can stop paying the humans to do extremely tedious copying work. This is why I have spent a significant amount of my time over the last year creating and maintaining a kludgy application that gets the data by pretending to be human. It can trick another computer, but you would probably not be fooled.
As of this weekend, the client in question deployed a whole new method of connectivity: a tiny embedded custom applet that works okay for humans, but doesn’t have the features necessary for our kludgy impersonator. They disabled the old connection, of course.
This is why my boss and I spent two hours, this morning, trying to hack in to a system we are paying to access.
I need a new job.
I gave blood for the first time at GSP, which was, hideously, almost seven years ago. I haven’t gone a year without donating since then. At my current job, I’ve given at all but one (I was sick) of our company-wide blood drives, which happen every two and a half months. I’m fairly experienced at these things. I always prep with lots of water, and I eat a decent lunch, sans french fries.
But dammit, it keeps getting worse. I used to get nervous and shaky, so I started bringing my CD player along, and that helped. Then I started getting light-headed and hot at the snack canteen; last time I had to lie down with my feet on a box and drink nasty Powerade. Today I took twice as long as usual, so they had to reseat the needle–a new and disturbing experience–and I didn’t even make it off the donation table before I almost passed out. Giving blood sucks!
Not gonna stop, though.
Oh, duh, Apache rewrite rules. Um. (Now I just have to learn how to write them.)
I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.
I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?
Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.
Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.
And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.
It occurs to me that I really don’t care about my GPA. This is literally the first time in my life, or at least in my living memory, I’ve been able to say that. I was always ashamed of my Cs in Handwriting, and since fourth grade I’ve been straining for As (and, since junior year of high school, usually getting Bs). Right now I want to get through my two classes, finish a project and graduate. All that matters is passing.
Of course, that project may be the lurker below. I had a solid setup with a professor at the beginning of the semester; it sounded like work I’d enjoy, and there was even compensation involved. All we had to do was wait for the company that wanted the code to sign off on the contract.
It’s March 10. Guess whether they’ve done so. Guess also whether the aforementioned professor appears to care, beyond a little guilt.
I’m going in tomorrow to talk to my advisor and find out what I need to do to get the DBCAC site approved as my final project. It’s for a nonprofit organization, and the work is easily as complicated as what I would have been doing otherwise; I’ll even write a paper about it if they want one. The quiet assumption is that MS students get a rubber stamp on their project requirement by building a professor’s resume, but I tried that and it didn’t happen. I’m not going to let someone else’s short attention span keep me here another semester. School has ceased to interest me, and I’m going to be finished in May, one way or another.
In addition to Caitlan’s car, which (after its acrobatics last Wednesday) is totalled, Ian’s car is now a danger to drive; he’ll probably have to sell it for parts. Regarding Mom’s van, the mechanic told her to keep driving it for what time it had left, then leave it wherever it broke down.
Jon and Amanda, on their way to Tennessee for Christmas, skidded on ice and ran head-on into a truck. They’re okay, but the car is gone, and Amanda’s collarbone is broken.
It has been a bad December for cars, and for my family; but I am shaken by how much worse it could have been.
A year ago I was writing about the earthquake in Bam. I thought an earthquake death toll of around 50,000 was the worst I’d see in my lifetime. I was wrong, of course.
Update 2330 hrs: And my grandparents flipped their truck on ice on their way to Florida for Christmas. They are also miraculously okay, and also currently without transportation.
At least I’m done with school as of last night. One more semester, I hope, if I passed Performance Evaluation (yes, yes, course title replete with irony &c).
SKETCHBOOK
Ever In The History Of Time
which basically means I win.
I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.
(This entry is posted as dated in my pocket notebook.)
I’ve passed the Waddy Peytona exit probably a hundred times. For the first time in my life, I’m actually in Waddy, at a somewhat sleazy Citgo truck stop, in a back room with no windows. Ian is asleep on one end of the beaten couch; I’m writing at the other. By all accounts, we’re within a few miles of a tornado.
There’s a scattered copy of The Trucker, a half-sheet format free newspaper, on the floor. It appears to be largely concerned with rising diesel prices. Maria called two minutes ago to say that the heart of the storm should be where we are in about three minutes. The rain just slacked off a bit; it sounds like there’s hail mixed with it now. There’s a thick skylight over our heads, which makes me nervous, but it beats the big window-walls out front.
There’s a large TV back here, which is turned off, and a smaller cycling-ads set which is on. It’s connected to some kind of truck load monitor with four large buttons. Every ten minutes or so it shows “local weather,” by which it means the highs, lows and actual temperatures in five parts of Kentucky. Amusingly, it shows nothing related to storm or tornado status.
Maria just called again. Apparently the funnel clouds have dissipated just before reaching Waddy. It should be safe to drive in ten minutes or so.