Hero Clix

10.14.2002

As is my custom, when interested in a new game I buy lots of rules and accessories before ever playing it. I was in the comic store one day and the Marvel HeroClix game caught my eye. It looked cool and sounded like a fairly fast paced game. Me being me, I bought the starter set and about 6 booster packs over the course of a month, just to get started.

Have I played yet? No.

Now they have a DC Comics version. The figures are a little more detailed, but the game is the same as the Marvel version. Now you can pit Superman against The Hulk. Spiderman vs. Batman. It just sounds more cool to me that way.

And eventually I'll play.

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Errand Day

10.11.2002

Today is my day to try to catch up. I'm leaving for a fun-filled extended weekend trip to Destin late this afternoon, so I'm taking the day to do the things I've been putting off.

Exciting things, like finishing up my laundry, getting a haircut, and visiting my local neighborhood bank to both put money in and take money out.

Don't you wish you led the exciting life of a contract web developer?

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Upgrade Demon Begone!

10.10.2002

I am the worst when it comes to installing things on Linux (ask Jerry). When setting up the Open Bio webserver, it took me 2 weeks to get everything configured correctly. Along the way, I put together 4 pages of cut-n-paste commands on how to duplicate everything I had done.

I've gotten pretty confident about installing new PHP libraries and modules. The latest thing I've been playing with is JP Graph, a cool little graphing utility for PHP that generates the graphs as PNG images. It's neat, it's fun. It required me to load 4 modules to apache. That's where things get hairy for me. After half a day of playing on the development server, I got everything set up. It all worked beautifully. This morning I had to make the same changes to the live server.

I had my cut-n-paste instructions.
I had all the tar files in place.
I had the 4 modules configured, made, and installed.

How would it go? What would happen?

How long can I keep myself in suspense?

8 minutes after shutting down apache, I brought it back up with all the new stuff in place, and working like a charm.In the words of the A-Team, I love it when a plan comes together.

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Things You Never Want To Hear Your Mom Say

10.09.2002

Last night I'm helping Mom put up the valence I designed so meticulously. She had everything needed to mount it to the wall. Angle brackets, screws, drill, stud finder, the works! Being the manly son, I grab the drill and start securing everything. It's going find until, while mounting an angle bracket, the screw goes through some drywall, a little open space, and then finds a stud. Evidently, the screw I was using doesn't like studs, because it wasn't going in. Thinking I had the wrong angle, I put a little more weight behind it (and when I put a little more weight behind something.....), pulled the trigger on the drill and tried again.

At that point mom said "Your screwing now, boy!" which was quickly followed by a quick chill up my spine and a cessation of all drilling.

I hope I never hear her say that again, I really do.

Luckily, the rest of the valence installation went without any more problems. Well, I can't really hangstuff straight, but that's not enough of a problem to mention.

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<strike>Web</strike> Valence Developer

10.08.2002

Last week I ended up helping mom design a valence for the dining room window. She had a book with lots of different examples, but just couldn't find one she liked. Taking a page from the Web Developers Guide, I took two of the designs she kind of liked, smooshed them together, and created a hybrid that would work.

A little graph paper and some measuring later, and she's got herself a valence. Tonight I have to go by and help her mount everything on the wall.

Maybe now I start a new career in interior design? I could call myself "Mr. Russ" and say "Fabulous" a lot.

Or maybe I should just stay right here and keep typing out HTML....

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