Very Frankly Speaking

last.fm = win

frankspastic — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:17:40 +0000

I’m probably late, but I just discovered the last.fm app for my Blackberry. I’ve discovered a perfect harmony across several of my devices thanks to last.fm. The first step has been to setup your iTunes to scrobble all your songs to last.fm every time you listen to something. Also, when you connect your iPod to your computer, make sure all those songs you listened to get scrobbled to last.fm. If you’ve got that set up, you can access “Your Library” on last.fm anywhere – any PC, your iPhone, Blackberry, whatever. “Your Library” basically consists of the songs you’ve scrobbled.

So to make a long story short, I’ve got a nice little shuffled list of all the songs I listen to streaming to me on my Blackberry. And there’s no possibility of them giving me a crappy recommendation like Pandora or Slacker Radio can possibly do. If you’ve got everything synced up correctly, you will be on your way to success.

If you want to add me on last.fm: http://last.fm/user/frankspastic

Facebook is not Intelligent

frankspastic — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:32:04 +0000

Now seriously, why would you suggest that I become a fan of the competitor?

I’m Sick of Recursive Functions

frankspastic — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:30:47 +0000

In one of my recent projects, I’ve had to write a ton of recursive functions to iterate through tables whose foreign key references the same table. I’m sick of writing them, but I’ll have to say I’m pretty decent at writing them now.

Hey Carina… I’m Messing With Your Head.

frankspastic — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:23:53 +0000

I’ve been sending texts back and forth to this person who texted me by accident. The person still doesn’t know that i’m messing with her. She’s from El Paso due to the (915) area code.

Here’s the transcript of our texts so far… I wonder how long I can drag this out. Apparently we work at the same place.

Carina (Feb 20, 2010 1:20pm): Miner game 2pm. I’ll be at brew if u are in.

Carina (Feb 22, 2010 9:37pm): I just realized I never gave you my number. Now you ahve it, haha! This is Carina, btw.
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 9:38pm): Carina…Who?
Carina (Feb 22, 2010 9:40pm): Oy. My heart pains me…
Carina (Feb 22, 2010 9:47pm): You were just kidding, right?
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 9:48pm): Yeah… When did you get a new number?
Carina (Feb 22, 2010 9:49pm): I never got a new number… I just never gave it to you, haha.
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 9:51pm): Sorry… I’m engulfed in Olympic coverage right now
Carina (Feb 22, 2010 9:52pm): Haha, okay.
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 9:55pm): Game Wednesday?
Carina(Feb 22, 2010 10:00pm): Game wednesday? Huh? I’m so very confused at the moment.
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 10:00pm): Basketball
Carina(Feb 22, 2010 10:04pm): This is Carina from design… I don’t play basketball…
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 10:06pm): Miner Basketball!
Carina(Feb 22, 2010 10:15pm): Ohhh! See, i don’t keep up with school sports. I do not bleed orange
Phantom(Feb 22, 2010 10:15pm): What color do you bleed, then?
Carina(Feb 22, 2010 10:20pm): I do not bleed for I am invincible!

Carina(Feb 23, 2010 1:00pm): Dude she is like super angry that you are not here!! J/k
Phantom(Feb 23, 2010 1:01pm): Tell her to calm down
Carina(Feb 23, 2010 1:02pm): I am! But she’s not calming down! I think she’s going to explode with anger!
Carina(Feb 23, 2010 1:11pm): The model didn’t show up…
Phantom(Feb 23, 2010 1:23pm): What?? What happened?
Carina(Feb 23, 2010 1:37pm): She got sick. And no class on thurs.

Suck It, AppleCare

frankspastic — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:01:57 +0000

I’m anxiously awaiting my replacement topcase and keyboard which I bought off of e-bay for $50 bucks… It’s been a known problem with the previous generation of Macbook Pros (my model is A1226) that a small ribbon, which connects the keyboard and trackpad to a small board on the top case, tends to bend and no longer has connection. You can see this ribbon if you take out the battery on the bottom. I’ve been living for several months using an external keyboard and mouse with my monitor, basically using my laptop as a desktop, which isn’t that bad. But I would like to be able to surf the web and do my work on the couch once again.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemVersion&item=250574395218&view=all&tid=543124914015

You may or may not know about my quirks with Apple regarding getting your crap fixed. First off, if you don’t buy the Apple Care extended warranty after the first year, good luck finding parts. The only place I’ve found crap is on E-bay. If you try taking it to the store, they’re gonna charge you an ass load and make you feel bad for not buying AppleCare. They wanted $400 bucks for this repair. Screw you. I found this part for $50 bucks, jerk. All in all, I’ve spent about $120 bucks on replacement parts. My dad dropped my laptop once and I had to replace the optical drive. $120 is still cheaper than buying AppleCare so I win so far.

But you know what, I’ve thought about it and what other laptop manufacturer sells individual parts such as a new keyboard or a new casing? None that I know of? Maybe I’m being a little unfair to Apple. I’m actually glad they’ve only got a handful of models and I there are a decent amount of people out there who have the same thing and are selling their spare parts on e-bay. Sorry Apple, I’ll try not to be so mean next time.

Austin Javascript Meetup!

frankspastic — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:13:19 +0000

I almost forgot about this, but I just found out about the Austin Javascript meetup… Thanks to @andyhite for the heads up. I’m pretty excited about meeting some people to discuss this stuff because I’ve been having some pretty bad issues with my applications which are heavily reliant on javascript. The bigger it gets, the slower it gets. Especially with pages that have an incredible amount of DOM elements. I’ll probably update after the meetup to talk about how it went

http://www.austinjavascript.com
http://twitter.com/austinjs

MySQL Workbench 5.2

frankspastic — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:59:45 +0000

For those of you who like to see things visually, the newest release of MySQL workbench enables you to connect to your existing MySQL database and reverse engineer it so that you can see the full ERR (Entity Relationship R_____) Diagram in all its glory. For me this is helpful to see when I’m taking over a project I know nothing about. As long as the foreign keys are set up correctly, the tool should be able to do all the work for you. You can also make changes to the Diagram and then have it synchronize with your development/production database. This feature used to be some sort of premium feature that you had to upgrade and pay for, but I just discovered that it’s all included in the free download. I like free stuff.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench

Screenshot:

After reverse-engineering the existing MySQL database, you can get an ERR diagram that looks like this. Now your job is to nicely organize the tables.

Winston

frankspastic — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:06:24 +0000

This is our dog Winston.. He’s spent a lot of time in San Antonio with my parents since we’ve been out of town so much. But I don’t think they mind taking care of him especially since Chase died in July. I don’t know how we’d be able to take care of this dog especially if my parents still lived in El Paso… Dogs are a much bigger responsibility than we think. At least we know that he’s probably happy out there because he has a huge yard to run around in instead of being cooped up in a 1300 sq ft condo.

The End of a Decade. Holy Crap.

frankspastic — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:31:07 +0000

Can any of you still feel the after effects of the Y2K bug? Because, honestly, it’s making my life a living hell.

All kidding aside, I can’t believe it’s the end of this decade. This is the decade I went through college and became an adult. This is the decade I met the person I’ll be spending the rest of my life with. I’ve made so many friends over the past 10 years. I upgraded from a Motorola Star-Tac to a Blackberry. I built my first computer 10 years ago in high school with an AMD processor and now I’m working for AMD. I had a crappy personal HTML blog in 2001, the moved to Xanga in 2003, and eventually made the switch over to Facebook around 2005 and stopped blogging around 2006ish maybe. It’s so important to keep a record of all the things I’ve done. I bought my first 1.3 megapixel digital camera in 2001 which was a huge freaking brick and luckily I’ve got all those pictures still on hand. I really want to go back and grab a bunch of pics and highlight the good times… Sounds like a lot of work, but it’d be awesome. So at first I was thinking I was gonna take it easy this New Year’s Eve, but it’s the end of a decade and the start of a new one, so I’m thinking I might go out with a bang. i can’t even begin to fathom what’s in store for the next 10 years.

Post-Christmas Update

frankspastic — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:49:00 +0000

Hm, about that “updating frequently” thing. I failed at that. Anyway, I’m halfway through Christmas break and it’s been rather relaxing. I had to work a little last week while I was still in Austin, but it was nothing big. It was a SOAP connection that was being erratic, but I figured it out. I might actually make a post about it cuz that’s what this blog was originally supposed to be for.

Christmas was good… I’ve been maintaining an Amazon wishlist and basically got the stuff I wanted! It makes it so much easier for people that need to buy gifts for me. We’re both happy. If you’re interested in making me happy, here’s the link: http://bit.ly/4VPbVV. I got a camelback (water backpack) which will be great for snowboarding, a Canon backpack for all my camera stuff (beats the hell out of the other bag i’ve been using), wrenches, and a hand vacuum. All stuff I need.

I drove from San Antonio to Beaumont on Sunday and finally met Ramona and a few more of Kristine’s friends. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them until 4 in the morning, playing Apples to Apples, VC, speed, and a bunch of other random card games, lol. Oh yeah we went bowling for a bit too. Ramona’s gonna be one of Kristine’s bridesmaids so that brings our total to 7 on each side

We’re here in New Orleans right now. We’re staying at a 4.5 star hotel called Le Pavillion http://www.lepavillon.com. It feels very New Orleans-like, service is awesome, except parking is $28 a day! It’s really not that far from the French Quarter, maybe a short 5 minute walk to cross Canal St. We’ve been eating a lot. We’ve basically done every restaurant that Adam has done on Man vs. Food. Mother’s, Cafe Dumonde, and Acme Oyster House. We went to Mother’s on a whim, but then Krisitne remembered that this was a place that he had gone to. http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Man_v_Food/ci.New_Orleans.show?vgnextfmt=show. Kristine picked the other two spots, which were absolutely awesome. We might just follow everywhere he goes in each city we’re visit. But yeah, the food in this city is no lie. Oh, we also went to Deanie’s Seafood for dinner, which actually put my stomach over the top. So full. We came back to the hotel, grabbed our free PB&J that the hotel provides at 10pm every night and got too lazy to head out again for drinks. Sign of getting old.

Okay, not sure what I’m still doing up, but I need to sleep. We’re finally making good progress on Dexter. We’re on Season 2 Episode 4. I’m not sure why I’d been watching the other garbage on television cuz Dexter is so superior to anything else on TV. Okay, good night.