cleverswine.net

I’ve been working on some code to display various pieces of my web life here on cleverswine.net. My first chosen task is to display my recently listened to album covers from Last.fm (like you see in the side bar to the right). I could have used the widget that I’m currently using, but my end goal is a little different (more on that later). Plus, I’m learning PHP, and it’s always fun to learn a new language.

I uploaded my code to Snipplr in hopes of getting some feedback and/or criticism.

One of my regular reads is FanGraphs, which is a site about baseball players and statistics. I’ve been questioning the Astros’ decision to keep Brandon Backe for a while, and FanGraphs backs up my opinion in an article published today.

Brandon Backe just may be the worst pitcher in baseball consistently given start after start… Why this man still gets paid to pitch in the major leagues befuddles me.

Meanwhile, the MLB playoffs are starting and I have no team to cheer for. I don’t care for any of the NL teams, and I’m not familiar with any of the AL teams. As usual, I’d prefer to see the NL win the World Series. I’d probably lean towards the Brewers (strong lineup) or the Phillies (Brad Lidge). As for the AL, maybe the Devil Rays since they had such a turnaround season. For the most part though, I don’t care who wins.

I’ve just installed the BitNami WordPress Stack on my laptop and it was so easy, and so cool! After the install, I had a fully functioning Wordpress up and running locally - complete with Apache, MySql, and PHP. After installation, I exported all of the data from cleverswine.net and imported it locally - again, super easy. As a result, I have a copy of my web site running locally that I can play around with. Sure, I could have installed Linux and set up everything that way, but I’ve had a hell of a time getting Linux to work on my laptop (I tried bleeding edge Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mint). Anyway, I happen to be very pleased with Vista.

We watched the season premiere of Heroes last night. We were warned by various sources that it would be bad, and they were not wrong. The story line seems desperate so far, as if the writers are more concerned about the hype than they are quality. The characters seem more shallow, and the dialog was just horrible (which can work in shows like “Buffy”, where dry humor and spoof are part of the game). “Are you going to eat my brain?” Some of the special effects were ripped straight from “Saw” and they so didn’t work in the context of Matt being lost in the desert. The whole episode was cheesy and infuriating, and was made 100 times worse by the lame one hour countdown show that preceded it. Alas, we’ll continue to watch, as will most people, and the Heroes team knows that. It can only get better.

Testing a Flickr plugin that I just installed…
This is a waterfall in Oregon called Bridal Veil. Yep.

We’ve started looking seriously at houses to buy. We even have a real estate agent (Leslie, a family of a friend). It’s supposed to be a buyer’s market, but I’ll tell you, houses in Portland are still outrageously priced. I believe I read that the average price here is more than $300k. However, I get the idea that sellers are more than willing to come down quite a bit in price. After looking at just a couple of houses, they were practically begging us to buy the place.

As for location, there’s a dilemma. Without assigning blame, I’ll just say that we require a large yard, a large house, a modern house, a safe neighborhood, and a close-in location. Those things put together, especially the location, are hard to come by. The closer you get to Portland, the smaller the yard and the older the house. Mind you, we both love old houses, but times have changed and most old houses don’t accommodate our modern luxuries. At this point, we’ve found some places in the far East - around the Mt. Scott area.

I’ve uploaded a handful of wedding photos. We still have hundreds to go through, so many more will be coming soon.

It’s been a house-like weekend. We started the weekend by continuing our search for a house to buy. We have a couple on the radar, but nothing perfect yet. Today, we inadvertently started rearranging furniture in our house. We’ve made the living room look much larger and nicer. It was a bit exhausting and we had to cancel our plans to see the new Coen brothers movie. We may see the movie tomorrow afternoon. That’s all I’ve got.

My family in Texas recently sat through yet another hurricane. This time it was Ike, and it was a direct hit to Galveston and Houston. Luckily, my Houston (Katy) peeps went unscathed and those in Nederland/Port Neches had only minor damage to their houses. They were lucky because if the storm surge had been much higher, they would have had flood damage in addition to the wind damage.

On a related note, the streaking Astros were forced to play two “home” games against the Cubs just 90 miles from Chicago in Milwaukee. From what I hear, the Cubs fans that showed up were quite rude and obnoxious. The Astros fans, and players, were understandably angered over the whole ordeal. Given the amazing pitching from the Cubs, we wouldn’t have won anyway, but still it would have been good sportsmanship to treat a team in turmoil with a little respect. Most of the Astros players have families that were directly affected by the storm and they had to make a last minute flight to Milwaukee to play a home game in front of their rival’s fan base. Not to mention, they are now on the road for an entire week while Houston recovers without them. Oh well, it’s just baseball, I reckon.

I’m working on getting all of the good wedding photos online for your viewing pleasure. I’m not sure whether I’ll use Flickr or if I’ll install a photo gallery application to the wedding web site. I’m leaning towards Flickr at this point, as I just installed “Gallery”, which is nice, but sort of a pain to set up and it’s a tad slow.