A Day in Paradise

Learning Movable Type: How to Make Money with Your Blog

Wow! Finally I can get rich quick!!! Gotta check it out sometime! Until then, just paypal me your money!

So it’s the Eurovision Song Contest, and “I-wanna-be-jlo” Greece is currently doing their thing, so I figured it was a good time to step out for a bit of blogging…

What’s with all the drums? 8 out of 10 acts have a set of kettle drums on stage? Obvoiusly the fact that last years winners were a big dance and drum number affected that, but it really is a bit crazy.

My favorite is Ukraine, it’s the only real song so far, not going to win, but at least they had heart. That guy from norway was by far the worst, I think they couldn’t make up their mind if they were going to be KISS, Queen, Marlyn Manson or one of the Village People .

The guy who clapped with his feet was good too

UPDATE
Thankfully it’s over. These things are hard to predict, but I think the winner will be between Malta, Denmark, and Latvia. Ukraine will get a lot of good votes.

UPDATE II
J-Lo from Greece won

Google

Check it out! Pretty cool stuff, I wonder when I’ll be able to add my own RSS feeds, that would make it totally rawk!

Another thing that would be neat would be to check more than one gmail account.

Quote of the day: Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. — John Lehman

We had a fantastic initial PHP UG meeting last night. Darren Cooper had acquired the use of a computer lab at FH (University of Applied Sciences) and nine people showed up. After a bit of chit-chat, getting to know each other and looking through the books that different people had brought with them, we had 2 presentations.

Using material prepared by Toby, Stephan Schmidt and Aidan, I presented PEAR and gave a quick overview of some of the interesting packages (HTML_Quickform, MDB2, Error/Error_Stack), as well as a quick look at PECL things (PDO, XMLWriter, and Tidy). Darren gave the next presentation about using COM with PHP to write a front end for Microsoft’s Index Server. A very nice talk which covered some rarely-seen PHP goodness, as well as some not-entirely-evil stuff from Microsoft.

After the discussing our next meeting, and getting a “volunteer” to update the website, we headed off to a local bar for a couple drinks and a lot more PHP talk.

We have a couple talks lined up for the next few meetings, one on Webservices in PHP5, Thorsten volunteered to give an “off-topic” talk on issues surrounding the creation of an online radio station, and there was a possibility for a talk on indexing documents using non-windows based platforms.

This meeting re-enforced the fact in my mind, that you don’t need to go to exotic conferences to hear about how PHP coders are using cutting edge technology in their everyday work. More than likely there is someone doing something cool right where you are, if not, then they probably think what you are doing is cool. Either way, find where they are, put together a couple presentations (as opposed to just chatting and drinking beer), and have fun.

So when’s your next UG meeting?

This is a notice to anyone who may be in the Frankfurt/MAIN area, there will be a PHP User group meeting on the Thursday the 12th of May (that’s this thursday, for those temporaly challenged). The meetup will be at University of Applied Sciences at Nibelungenplatz in Frankfurt. The directions for how to get there are here.

Enter building 6, go straight on to the stairs. Go up to the second floor turn left through the door and follow the corridor to the end, it’s the last room on the left. Room 204. We will have a variety of PHP books on display and thanks to Marco from PHP|Arch some good deals (reduced shipping) for group subscriptions.

The doors will open at around 19:00 and will officially start at 20:00. We’ll go until 22:00 when the doors close and if more time is needed we can move to a bar.

CNN.com - Friends find treasure buried in backyard - Apr 27, 2005

Two friends dig up a tree and find a two-foot-wide box with $100,000 worth of old bills, silver coins and gold and silver certificates.

Just discovered the Shabot comic strip. Some very good stuff, with interesting explanations of the jewish terminology used. Some particularly funny ones.

My question is why can’t Christians have such a good sense of humor about our faith?

A couple things really… you may have noticed my new poll box, please take the time to click whenever you see it change.

The most recent and long awaited PR update came, and I am now again the proud owner of a 6/10 site.

You may notice the new ads down at the bottom, that’s part of the digitalpoint ad network it’s free and as far as I can see fairly “non-evil”, I’ll be hacking the ads a bit to get them into a more palatable format. The idea is that you distribute the ads over all your pages (I have over 700 here) and then you are assigned “weight” which you can use to run ads. So I have links pointing out from all my pages, and am then focusing all my weight on one page. Because the ads are being served on the server side, and are not javascipts google will notice them and credit you with PR. At least that’s the idea. We’ll see how it turns out.

I just got a new camcorder, it’s a Canon MVX 200 pretty nice little thing, now I just need to get a card that will suck in the AV stream.

Browsing UB this morning reminded me of my favorite urinal story.

It was (really) late one night during the summer of 1997 when in Odessa, Ukraine. I was returning from a party and I was dying to take a whiz.

I had made it as far as the last tram connection which would bring me down the “fantana” line to our place. The transport system was such, that as a rule, you usually waited for 45 minutes only to have 3 trams come together.

There was a public bathroom underneath the tram stop, but I had never ventured down there… this was an emergency so I decended the dark stairs. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see another guy (who was obviously in my situation) standing by the door urinating in the general direction of the mens room.

Thankful that I didn’t have to venture any further, I took my place next to him and took a very relieving whiz.

phpguru.org

This is pretty funny… I guess if I’m ever going to be a super hero I know who to look up as the anti-aaron

OK, so regular WTS readers know that I’m Michael Robertson’s biggest fan. Here is an email I sent him (via the advertising department) after watching his latest Michael’s Minutes
(more…)

Here’s a little idea of how many visits WTS gets. These are counting Unique visitors, not hits or pages served.

Jan: 11904
Feb: 17148
Mar: 12757

the stats for the same period of last year are:

Jan: 3871
Feb: 4990
Mar: 5575

The reason for the spike of google visits as seen on Feb 05 was due to my google whoring and these two pages. They got a LOT of hits. March I had 12.9% of my visitors come in from google, Feb it was 17.6 and Jan it was 11.5%.

The point? Google Whoring works!

Lockergnome’s Problem Solvers -> Haxdoor-k (revisited)

Gah, I’m infected!!! MS AntiSpyware doesn’t seem to get rid if it either… I have no time for this crap!

I’m waiting for my Ubuntu CDs to arrive, then we’ll see the end of Windows!!!

WorldGuitar.com-Tuner

I’m always looking for something like this… although this one seems to be a bit high. Where was that other one…

This isn’t what I was looking for, but it’s worth a go… windows based tuner that uses your mike. Not too shabby

OK, well, that sorta sucked, but concerned Mike sent me an IM in the midst of my tuning session and pointed me to the Audio Phonics Guitar Tuner. So I’m downloading that now…

… too … late … must … sleep …