November 2000

Whew, I've been compiling CMS data, from Allaire Specta to Zope! Much of it is similar to Cam's finding, and some of it is specific to my needs. Once it's organized maybe I'll post it for comments...

Need some Geek Quotes and more Geek Quotes?

Lately I've been the one who puts the reporting Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. I've been digging into GD::Graph and writing lots of report generating and graph making code. Thank you CPAN!

Now that the hype has died down, I think it safe for me to admit this - I'm the one who let the dogs out.

I stopped by the office of dansays, aka dandot the other day after a visit to SPSP. I was downtown before that and stopped at PowerPlant Design, and briefly considered visiting the cyberdork, but since management has requested that I phone ahead before stopping in it wouldn't have been much of a surprise... I heard from Clint after he saw mention of my visit of Dan... See, I just happened by chance and coincidence to be in the building Dan works in and while we've never meet, I thought I'd drop by and give him a "weblog-type" greeting. I think I confused him a bit. Which is pretty understandable under the circumstance. Anyway, that's my story.

Thanksgiving? Bahh... anyway, my family did the non-traditional thing as usual - we had a Tofurkey. I know, among you meat-eaters "turducken" was all the rage, but do you really want to eat something with the word turd in it?

This just in: kottkenut.com, kottkenut.net, and kottkenut.org, still available!

Been much too busy lately, but, I have been doing a ton of research on things like, HTML::Mason, CMS's, and well, other stuff. I'm in the process of defining what our CMS needs to do, and that alone is a daunting task. Augh, back to more research...

Crud. Screw this snow stuff. I hate it. It takes too long to get to work, it takes too long to bundle up the kids, it's depressing outside, my feet get wet... And this wintery hell has only just begun...

Yesterday, for a change of pace, we watched Toy Story 2 and Toy Story. Whew! We also watched Mouse hunt the other night because Emma wanted to watch a 'scary movie.'

Kill me, please, someone kill me...

We made some great Goodwill finds last weekend, added a bunch of Toy Story characters to the mix, and even grabbed a Mr. Frumble. Whatta find!

In other news (???) it looks like I probably won't be getting a new computer this year. As usual, severe lack of funding hampers our ability to possess the things we want. So it goes... It would help if I didn't have to spend close to $40 a week on gas, but then again, that would require selling our house and moving closer to where I currently work, which would require someone buying our house, which hasn't happened yet, and isn't likely soon with the holiday season fast approaching. You can stop reading this now...

I had to fix some Active Server Pages. I don't know a lot about VB Script, or whatever the default language of ASP is, but who came up with the escape character being a "? Meaning if you want to output "Hello World" in perl (or most other languages) you'd do either: print "\"Hello World\"" or print qq{"Hello World"} or ten other variations. VB Script? It seems to be ""Hello World"" with " needed as the escape character for ". Which mean you could easily have <img src=""my.gif"" width=""5"" height=""10"" border=""0"" alt=""My Image""> And the comment character seems to be '. Augh... anyway, there may be betters ways to do this (I really hope there are) but for now, it's best to avoid ASP.

We went to a real live auction yesterday. It kind of sucked... As long as ebay can keep their 10,000 NT servers humming along they've got nothing to worry about...

Licensing B.S. has got me down... I contacted a company selling a piece of software that costs $199. A very reasonable price for what it does. Problem is, I want to deploy it across 50 sites, do they have volume licensing, or some other pricing scheme? No. Now, should I spend nearly $10,000 for the software I need, or spend less than that finding an open source solution that does 1/2 of what I need, then pay someone less than $10,000 to put in the rest of the features I need, plus specific features I'd like, and get the benefit of not having pay additional money each time I need another copy...

Speaking of licensing, most of the commercial software I install on the Mac OS is fairly straightforward. Under NT I've been having nightmare situations, licensing keys don't merge, the 'convert to full version' app doesn't work, inputting serial numbers *and* pin numbers result in 'INVALID PIN #' messages. Geez, it's a wonder anyone can get anything done using NT...

Yeah, I'm on an open source kick... I'm really not against commercial software, I'm just getting sick of the hoops I have to jump through just through to get it installed, use it, and get support for it. Aren't you?

on to gnew ideas: here are my new thoughts on solving this election thing.

• Bush and Gore are elected president. Both of them. Two presidents. Now there's a wacky sitcom!
• Neither are elected president. We have no president for the next 4 years.
• Make Nader president (?)
• Civil war! We could either team up by states (Bush states vs. Gore states) or person-against-person depending on who you choose, or, like in the old days, north vs. south. Come to think of it, aren't Gore, Bush, Clinton, Bush - aren't they all from the south? Hell, I say we do it old sküle style! I'm glad I'm in the north, I'd gladly go to war with the south...

People actually trust the media. Really. They do! Insane, but true...

Problem solution: The only option at this point is to take a giant saw, and cut off Florida from the rest of the untied snakes of generica. It should float away freely after that. (I saw this done once by Bugs Bunny, so I'm fairly confident it will work.) After that, the U$@ should then not have an el Presidante for the next 4 years. By then the grays will be in charge anyway, and we'll be slaving in the salt mines...

Republican, or Republican't? Democrat, or Demoncrat?

Reminder: DESTROY ALL GOVERNMENT...

Crap, here comes the spooks! Ok, RasterWeb - signing off!!!

Today's outlook: hurmmm...

Kodos or Kang? Who's it gonna be?

toDay is the Day that in the untied snakes of generica they pick a new leader. Seee, every 4 years they have what's called a 'leep year' and that means they add another day to the year, messing up calendars and network backups everywhere. So it werks like this. If you take night classes at the Electoral University, you get 2 pick the new leader. The choices, as they told me, are the guy who invented "internet" (people said it was either Tim Burns-Lee, or Bill Gaytes?) or a guy named George Bush, who was presidnet once before and used to run the CIA (but I'm not supposed to talk about that..) Therer are some little guys too (I think they're really short) and at least one robot/cyborg/replicant running really fast trying to see who gets to live in a big white house. The winner gets to have his own aeroplane and guys in black suits folow him around everywhere. Oh, besides the students of the Electoral University, they also let Big Business™ decide who gets to live in the big white house, see, this big white house has a room that is oval. That's why it's so coool to live their. Where I come ffrom (oopsm, this keybooard lacks the inpiut charachters) we do it differerntly. Maybe you guys should 2.

My family is anything but typical, or at least we think so. By 'my family' I mean myself, mrs. rasterboy, and the kids... It's diffucult for us to go out to eat because: we're vegetarians (well, Maddy and I cheat) we're picky (Emma is the worst, Maddy and I tie for 2nd worst) and we're slobs (Emma and Maddy can destroy a fine dining establishment very quickly.) So, with all that we still go out to eat. We stopped at Country Kitchen, which we soon realized might not have been the best choice (lotsa meat meals) but anyway, we get seated by this fellow who keeps calling us 'guys' as in "Hey guys, how's it going?" like we're old buddies or something. So, we order sodas, he brings them out, then manages to spill one on himself. So now he's in soaking wet pants, and he just kinda laughs it off. He's then right back with a new one, cracking jokes about how clumsy he is. We all laugh. The kids actually behave pretty well, we all actually eat at least some of our meal (success!) and our server guy comes back a few times to check on things. So, when he brings the bill, it says "Dude" at the top, and I say "Hey, what does this say?" And he says, "that says 'Dude' my name is Dan, but the call me Dude, I've been working here forever..." and, again, we all had a good laugh. Dude got a nice tip, and said goodbye to us, and the only marks against him were that he called me 'Sir' on the way out... Even though I'm considered a full grown adult (by some people) and I've got two little kids and a wife and everything... I just get all weirded out when someone calls me 'Sir'

I've been doing so much damn reading on content management systems lately, I think I'm gonna puke...

I didn't get to give much of a Halloween report, so here goes: Emma was Bubbles, the PowerPuff Girl, while Maddy was Magenta of Blue's Clues fame. I had nothing... that's ok I guess, as we really only got to go out trick r treatin' 1 1/2 times this year... We got a good load though. The observation was made that the weathier people in town didn't give out better candy, in fact they seemed to have worse offerings. I guess that's how they stay wealthy. I burned my tougue on hot cider some jerkwad was giving out, that was uncool. We saw a kid dressed as Drew Carey, that was slightly amusing. I got nothing else...

Wait, one more thing... so I find an open bag of Doritos in one of our cabinets that Maddy got for Halloween, and since it's been open for a few days, I toss it in the trash. Later Maddy is seen walking around the house with it. Yes, my kid eats out of the trash. It actually made me quite proud, she seems to be following in my footsteps. Now, the next morning when I threw something else in the trash, I noticed Maddy's cup laying in there. Seems that when she found the Doritos she decided to trade what she was holding (the cup) for a tasty trash can treat (stale Doritos.) Makes sense!

Where oh where is the straight-edge candidate!?

I wish Zope was just a little bit closer to the solution I'm looking for. It's close, almost there... argh... I have this fear we might get stuck with a ColdFusion solution... crappy proprietary stuff, crappy licensing stuff... ugh... The quest continues...

I don't see "Windows" anywhere on this list...

From the ActivePerl mailing list: "Also don't forget the biggest problem you have and is that you may have NT somewhere in your network. Find the NT and remove it. hurry!"

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