Very Frankly Speaking

better than your blog.

December 30, 2009

Post-Christmas Update

Filed under: thoughts — frankspastic @ 3:49 am

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.

December 15, 2009

Wow three updates within two days?!

Filed under: thoughts — frankspastic @ 11:14 am

I feel like I REALLY need to start updating more. It’s still awesome to be able to go back to my Xanga and view old posts because it really helps me re-live college again. We all used to make pretty constant updates on Xanga back in the day, and they were all pretty detailed. Nowadays, we have Twitter and Facebook statuses, but it’s not the same. 140 characters or less AND you’re not able to search through old posts. I’m pretty sure that Twitter and Facebook don’t give a damn about the past and just delete your history. So in an effort to preserve the history that I am making, I will blog more.

Elaine and Kwan’s wedding is this weekend in Houston and it should be really fun. It’s just gonna be one huge party. I have to bring Winston down to San Antonio tomorrow though cuz we’re having Filipino Christmas potluck at Kat, Allan, and Rico’s on Thursday. We’re gonna play mahjongg and basically start acting like our parents.

Also, I haven’t decided what we’re gonna do with our free time after we win the national championship on January 7th. All we know is that on Friday, the day after the game, Deanne reserved some room at South, the bar they took us to for Halloween last year… We don’t really have any plans, which we really should… Conan O’ Brien has been thrown out there… and also, snowboarding at Big Bear is a serious option for me… It’s only freaking 90 miles away… about 2 hours from LAX cuz you gotta zig-zag through the mountains.

If snowboarding at Big Bear doesn’t get scheduled, I really want to head to El Paso before New Year’s and just drive up to Ruidoso. That just seems more of an expensive option cuz it’ll still involve me having to drive to El Paso. Kristine and I are seriously looking for something to do between Christmas and New Year’s because Thanksgiving was just a big waste. I REFUSE to do any work over the holiday break. I got called up while in Phoenix last year to fix crap cuz one of our database servers went down and that was a huge freaking inconvenience.

Kristine and I have had our wedding website up for a while, but we haven’t made it public since we don’t have the details laid out yet, lol. We should have it figured out for sure before the end of the year. If you can figure out the URL (cuz it’s working), i will consider buying you a beer.

I think that was a pretty awesome update. Gotta get stuff done at work this week so I can relax over the holidays!

December 14, 2009

Testing a post from my phone…

Filed under: mobile — frankspastic @ 9:44 pm

During the USC vs Texas game… Boooring…

Updated my Wordpress!

Filed under: web development — frankspastic @ 8:59 pm

Finally updated this thing to 2.8.6… Hopefully this will get rid of the spam that was plaguing my site…

October 7, 2009

Twitter Contests

Filed under: Uncategorized — frankspastic @ 12:58 pm

I feel bad every time I enter one of these twitter contests because they usually involve some sort of a re-tweet which happens to annoy my friends, but when I win the Canon 5D Mark II or the trip to Hawaii or the free HP laptop, maybe I won’t feel so bad.

August 31, 2009

Tweet Queue

Filed under: Uncategorized — frankspastic @ 9:52 am

Sometimes I have a lot in my head and I don’t want to tweet it all at once because it would just annoy the crap out of people.  So I’d like to submit my proposal for a Tweet Queue kinda thing.  Someone’s already taken the domain by the way and has done nothing with it.  What this app will do is just take all your tweets in the queue and periodically submit the tweet based on the time interval you have set.  That way, your tweets will be dispensed in an un-annoying fashion and you won’t forget to tweet whatever you just had in your head (because you were gonna originally save it for a tweet at a later time).  If anyone wants to create this, go for it.

Okay, i’m an idiot. It’s already been done.  http://twuffer.com/

June 24, 2009

Bands that suck.

Filed under: thoughts — frankspastic @ 11:29 am

Seether.
Nickelback.

UPDATED:
Hinder
Check back for more updates.

May 13, 2009

My new Blackberry Curve 8900

Filed under: Uncategorized — frankspastic @ 9:17 pm

So I definitely made the switch to T-mobile and got the Blackberrry Curve 8900. This phone is pretty great. It was way smaller than I thought it would be when I first opened it up. But that’s a good thing because the comparable Bold is pretty big.

Pros:

  • Screen resolution is great
  • Keyboard doesn’t seem as cheap as Curve 8300
  • Thin form factor
  • Standard headphone jack
  • Wi-fi UMA functionality compatible with T-mobile Hotspot
  • 3 Megapixel camera
  • GPS
  • MicroSD card slot expandable to 16GB

Cons:

  • EDGE network, not 3G

Other than that, there wasn’t much to complain about with the phone.  I have a ton of other friends who have blackberries and communicate over BB Messenger.  It’s definitely the best Blackberry out there, depending on your opinion about the Storm.  I would recommend this phone if you’re on T-mobile or looking to switch to T-mobile.

PHP Makes You a Lazy Programmer

Filed under: web development, work — frankspastic @ 9:01 pm

The fact that you don’t have to initialize your variables in PHP makes me a very lazy programmer.  With a large scale project that I’ve been working on for the past 6 months, I’ve really paid the penalty for dumb mistakes like not initializing and resetting my variables.  So just because PHP doesn’t make you do that stuff, it’s always best practice to do so.

April 17, 2009

PHP String Concatentation Performance

Filed under: web development, work — frankspastic @ 1:29 pm

I’m not sure if this is totally correct and I have no fixed way of measuring this (other than that I don’t get any timeout errors anymore) but I’ve noticed a significant difference when choosing between two different methods of string concatenation:

Slow way:

foreach($oranges as $orange){
$orange_str = $orange_str . $orange;
}

Better way:

foreach($oranges as $orange){
$orange_str .= $orange;
}

This is obviously simplified for example’s sake, but I had a situation where I was concatenating several hundred (maybe a thousand) elements to a string and I was receiving a “Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded…”.  My best guess is that with the first method, an actual copy of that string is being made in memory so you’re probably taking up twice the amount of memory than you should be.  That’s just my guess.

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »