mad lib forms and backordered PS3

Published: 2 March 2010

Devin just sent this to me via StumbleUpon: “Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%. I think those examples look totally neat and I want to try out a mad lib-style form or two on 3till7. Maybe the comments form and contact me form.

Also, it seems as though the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing at Toys R Us: I got an email promptly yesterday morning saying that the PS3 120GB I ordered is backordered, despite 1) their web site saying at the time I placed the order that they were in stock and 2) not trusting the web site, I called and spoke to a person at Toys R Us who again assured me that yes, the 120GB PS3 was in stock and there should be no delay in my order. *rolls eyes* Seems like they should update their inventory list more often. I canceled the order and will wait to spend my money elsewhere. I’ve called my local Best Buys for the past few days but no luck so far; I will prevail!

My landlord seems interested in keeping me around. I’ve been going back and forth with her for the past few days about the rent increase and she had the maintenance guy come out yesterday to fix my patio door. I still don’t have a latch and the guy said he doesn’t know where he’d find one. It’s a modern door, it just doesn’t have a latch because the previous tenant was an asshole or something. Anyway, he fixed the seal on it so it no longer functions as a big heat-sucking hole in my wall, and he installed one of those frame-mounted bars that lifts up so you can open the door. I’m still using the trusty length of wood and my non-mounted metal bar to keep the door shut firmly, hoping for a better seal/more safety.

Posted in Daily life | Tagged | 2 Comments

cheap apartment not worth the rent increase

Published: 28 February 2010

I’m so annoyed right now. I found posted in the hallway of my apartment several copies of the same notice saying that rent would be going up at the end of everyone’s lease. The rent for one bedroom apartments is only going up “by $55″ and we’ll somehow get “FREE high speed internet and basic cable”, but somehow they forgot to mention how much studio apartments would go up. I don’t have a one bedroom apartment because I have one giant room, a kitchen, one closet with a door, and a bathroom. That is decidedly a studio. If I don’t have a damn bedroom door, you can’t call the area where I keep my bed a bedroom. Well, so I emailed my landlord and asked what the increase would be for my studio apartment. Sorry, it’s going to the same price as the one bedrooms. So for me, that $55 increase is actually an $80 increase. For this apartment, I don’t think so.

I lived in a larger apartment here in town that actually did have a separate bedroom and it was cheaper than the new rent. I lived in another apartment the same size as this one, and it was still cheaper by $450. And let’s not get started on the problems with my apartment that the landlord has refused to fix! How about my sliding patio door that has never had a latch? How do I keep it shut, you might ask? Why, with a stick and a sliding door bar I bought from Home Depot. This is the same missing-lock door that was supposed to be fixed before I moved in. Nope, sorry. Or what about the inside-door doorknob on my front door, the one where if you accidentally lock the bottom lock, you cannot unlock it from the outside and you’re thus locked out of your apartment? Yeah, that was put on by mistake and was supposed to be changed shortly after I moved in. Never happened. I don’t have doors on my closets, nor did they remove the old sliding-door rails that were there from the previous doors. I only recently got a door over the closet with the water heater and that was because I badgered the landlord and asked their maintenance man myself to do it.

Basically, I live in el-cheapo apartment and I was fine with this for the rent that I’m paying now. I chose to live with this apartment because the rent was so cheap, but if rent is going up to more than what I’ve paid for much nicer apartments in the past, in this same vicinity, I’m out of here. It just pisses me off because I was hoping I had found a place where I could live for more than one year. I hate moving and now I’m stuck digging through all the online apartment-finding sites again. I guess I should work on getting rid of unnecessary things again, before I have to move out.

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PS3’s hard to find

Published: 27 February 2010

I just wanted to buy a 120GB Playstation 3 but apparently everyone around here is sold out of them. I figured the console has been out for a few years and the 120GB version came out in I think September, so I didn’t even consider that they would be hard to come by. The Best Buy rep I talked to said he didn’t know if Sony was intentionally trying to dry out the market or what; some online news I read said they were having manufacturing difficulties.

I found the 120GB version on Toys R Us’s web site for $299 and it said it was in stock. Not trusting that to be accurate, since every other store I checked online was out of stock, and stores I called in person were sold out, I decided to call Toys R Us. I fortunately got stuck with a phone menu that you talk into instead of the kind where you hit different buttons. I say fortunately because the speak-aloud ones are easy to circumvent: just wail and squeak and squeal different inhuman noises. It frustrates the machine and causes it to say things like “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” and eventually “Please hold while I connect you with a representative.” Score! I got a guy who checked for me and said it did indeed appear to be in their warehouse and that there shouldn’t be a delay in shipping. We’ll see. I went ahead and ordered it from their web site; $299 PS3, $13 shipping, and $18 in taxes later, my PS3 order was placed.

Games I’m looking forward to playing:

  • Eternal Sonata
  • Heavy Rain
  • Katamari Damacy
  • Dragon Age
  • Heavenly Sword
  • Little Big Planet

If you have any PS3 game suggestions, let me know. :) Also, has anyone else had trouble finding these things?

Posted in Video games | Tagged , | 4 Comments

grumbling about personal blogs changing

Published: 24 February 2010

This will just be a brief post to grumble about blogs that I used to enjoy that have changed such that I no longer care about their content. This is probably going to sound whiny but it’s been bugging me for a while, so of course I’ve got to vent about it on my own blog. First off, there was Jem’s blog that I read for years. She’d gripe about stupid people she found online and their web site issues, and that was mainly what I subscribed for. Then she went and had a baby (congrats to her!) and I teased her about making a mommy blog, not ever thinking she’d actually go and do it. She apparently wants to have a mommy blog, though, and that’s cool, I respect that… But I don’t care to read it.

Melissa had stopped blogging for a while but, after having a child, got back in the scene. I was worried I wouldn’t be interested in what she has to say about motherhood because, damn, I’m a far way from wanting to have kids at all yet, but it’s nice to see that I do still enjoy her posts. I haven’t seen the girl IRL in several years and it’s nice to keep up with what’s going on in her life, even if she’s in a stage beyond mine.

When everyone around me (Facebook, blogs I read) seemed to be going baby-crazy, I considered Rose’s blog to be a bastion of what I find entertaining in blogs. She wrote funny, über-personal entries about her family dog, the assholes she has to deal with in retail, and her musings about the weird things in life. I just read an entry today though saying her blog will go in a more technical, professional direction, and this saddens me. I read Eric Lippert’s blog, Joel Spolsky’s blog, Ars Technica, and Stack Overflow for technical stuff. Rose’s blog was a break from all the geeky, technical things in my life, like a more personal Not Always Right-Reddit duo written by a single person. So hers is another blog from which I’ll probably unsubscribe. :(

As it stands, I read the blogs of a couple folks I know IRL, Melissa’s blog, and Leslie’s blog. I’m going to have to scrounge around some in people’s link lists to see what other blogs I might enjoy, because the ‘Personal’ folder in my Google Reader has slim pickings.

Posted in Opinions | Tagged | 8 Comments

convenient file searching with Ruby, grep, and file

Published: 23 February 2010

For my Linux kernel class, I often know that some struct exists somewhere, or remember seeing a macro defined in some file and it might be useful, but I can't remember where I saw something. I also end up trying to track down all the places a particular function is called, and don't want grep to go digging through every... single... file in the entire kernel directory structure when I only care about .c files. So, I dug up a lengthy combination of file and grep that limits grep's searching to particular files. I'm lazy about remembering this and retyping it on different computers, too, though, so I wrote a quick Ruby script to do it for me:

Ruby

#!/usr/bin/ruby

unless ARGV.length >= 2
  puts "Usage:  #$0 file_extension query"
  puts "\tExample: #$0 '*.h' 'struct list_head'"
  exit
end

unless ARGV.length == 2
  extra_args = ARGV[2...ARGV.length].join ', '
  puts "Warning:  extra arguments ignored: " << extra_args
end

file_extension = ARGV[0]
query = ARGV[1]
command = "find . -type f -name '#{file_extension}' -print0 | xargs -0 grep --line-number --color -H -o '#{query}'"
system 'clear'
puts "Searching #{file_extension} for \"#{query}\"..."
system command

Here's sample output on my Mac:

Searching *.rb for "puts"...
./finder.rb:4:puts
./finder.rb:5:puts
./finder.rb:11:puts
./finder.rb:22:puts

And here's some sample output from a Linux machine:

Searching *.c for "struct task_struct"...
./fs/fcntl.c:414:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:423:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:462:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:481:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:490:struct task_struct
Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment