I can’t seem to find myself any good music lately so I’m gonna just share some old music… which is still good. In my opinion. Just a sampler.

Incubus – Are you In

A Perfect Circle – The Outsider

Reik – Inolvidable

WOW, I HAVE to see this place when we go to Victoria next month.  It’s absolutely my dream as the owner of a macro lens!

I know it’s Saturday and I’m not at work, but I just found the most awesome javascript library ever… People have been asking me to pull off data visualization features that I just didn’t know how to implement.  Well, someone’s developed the tools I need and it looks amazing.    A lot of the data I have is tree-like but I didn’t have anything to visually display it like a tree.  I can’t wait to put this into my work.

http://thejit.org/demos/

I set up some of the family with e-mail addresses on the @maulit.net domain.  Google couldn’t make it any easier.  Plus you have the full functionality of Gmail… most importantly… IMAP!

I’ve had a little bit of push from my group at work to start learning Python and the Django framework. I’ve been doing PHP for probably over 7 years now and it definitely got the job done for me. Over the past 2 years, I picked up Codeigniter and then the Kohana framework for PHP and it really taught me the point of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. But ever since I started working at AMD, there’s been a few co-workers who’d been raving about Django for a while and I’d never gotten around to really learning it until now when I’m actually being encouraged to do this next project in Django. It’s like 2:40 in the morning and I’ve been going through it and honestly, I’m not seeing any crazy awesome advantage to using this framework over what I used to be doing with Kohana. I don’t see yet how this is gonna be speeding up my application development at all. Okay, so I’ll give it one advantage: setting up the Models in a file and getting the database to create itself and being able to maintain the database and query it through the ORM is kinda cool. The ORM isn’t really gonna be Django’s selling point for me though because I’m probably gonna end up writing SQL queries myself because they just get too complicated to get an ORM to understand sometimes. One downside is the fact I have to maintain this URL routing file to point HTTP requests to a particular view’s function. It definitely allows for flexibility, but I wish there were some default URL routing that I could follow and only use this URL routing when I want to override the default URL routing. Anyway, I’m just gonna keep on trucking with this Python/Django stuff because I’ve heard good things about Python at least and that’s gonna keep me motivated to keep learning.

Day 1 is in the books and I have to say it was pretty decent.  Even though I think I’d already seen like 3 of the acts previously, it still turned out great.  Notable acts included:

Miike Snow – they’re really awesome live
Pat Green – I could watch him a million times and listen to his songs a million times and never get tired
Vampire Weekend – I really need to get their second album
The Strokes – “oh, they sing that song?!”  – I still think the lead singer is the worst vocalist in the world

So let me talk about prohibited items at ACL.  We had about a 25 minute trek from our car to the gate.  The lady who’s inspecting our bags tells me that I can’t bring my flag pole in because it’s over 8 feet.  GARBAGE.  EVERY FLAG POLE IN THE PARK IS WAY OVER 8 FEET.  We were on our way to return the damn thing and Rico calls just to tell me to try another gate.  So we did.  And I also turned the flag pole over inside my chair bag so that they couldn’t see that the pole could extend.  Alas, we got in.

Another prohibited item are cameras with removable lenses.  Everyone had a freaking DSLR.  I have a nice little pocket in my camelbak which they won’t even think to inspect where I can hide it tomorrow.  Awesome.

Lastly, I spent a good $50 bucks on the flag pole (which was partly why I was pissed after the first woman turned me away).  But it was money well spent.  You could see this flag from FAR away.  It also drew a lot of attention.  We seriously had like 6 or 7 people ask what flag this was.  We need signage saying that it’s the Filipino flag so that you can effectively tell your friend to meet under the Filipino and Texas Longhorn flag.  We also had random Filipinos come by and get all excited to see us to tell us that they were Filipino and it was just awkward after that.  Maybe we’ll just invite them to have a beer with us in our circle.

K, that’s all.  Maybe you will get lucky and get an update tomorrow.

The newest season of Dexter is coming this weekend and I can’t decide whether we should switch back to Showtime instead of HBO. Kristine and I are big fans of the shows on Showtime like Dexter, Weeds, The Tudors, Californication… but the movies on Showtime are absolutely horrible. We switched to HBO primarily because of the decent movies that come on every once in a while. Entourage is just about the only series we watched.. Haven’t really caught onto True Blood yet. Sigh, I dunno… I’m thinking we may just stay with HBO and get the Showtime shows through some other methods which I will not mention here

It’s Friday and I said I’d be posting some music every week. Well I’ve been slacking. I had to throw in another song from El Paso radio circa 1994. Did they play this stuff in any other city?!

First off, I don’t think I need a speech writer for what I’m going to say at our wedding.  Secondly, I wouldn’t hire a speech writer who can’t even spell the word speech.  The sad thing is that they’ve spent money to put this ad up.

Time Machine advertises itself as able to backup external hard drives, which is exactly what I need because I store all my raw pictures and video on an external hard drive. However, after plugging in my external, Time Machine never picked it up. Turns out that that external hard drive needs to be formatted as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. I think I’d formatted it initially as NTFS.. i don’t remember. Sooo, luckily I have enough hard drive space to copy all the data from my external to my laptop, format the external, then copy everything back. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, but it’s all in the name of keeping these pictures and videos secure.