Author: Robert

Robert Belknap has been writing online sporadically since 2001. See the colophon for more details.

The Rock Bottom Remainders

Jenny and I went with a friend of ours to see The Rock Bottom Remainders at the Fillmore last night.

(Looks like they need to buy more bandwith – here’s another site with some info.)

For those that don’t know, the Rock Bottom Remainders a band comprised (mostly) of notable authors like Amy Tan, Stephen King, Dave Barry and others. Jenny is a big Dave Barry fan, which is the main reason we went. The exact group composition varies from show to show. (For example: Stephen King did not perform last night.)

Barry claims that they suck, and has no idea why anyone would actually want to hear him and his literary cohorts play, but they really weren’t that bad. (Due, in large part, to Roger McGuinn, who is along for the ride for this tour, and “actually plays IN TUNE“)

Jenny got an autographed copy of “Tricky Business“, while I purchased a RBR hat and CD.

A couple of my favorite highlights from the show:

  • Robin Williams as a “suprise guest” to open for the band.
  • Amy Tan in a cross between a biker and a dominatrix outfit singing “These Boots Were Made for Walking”.

Last night was fun, I’m glad we went.

Edit: At least I’m consistent in my inability to spell “Barry” correctly

Edited on Apr 25th 2003, 21:51 by Hooloovoo

typing weirdness

I’m becomming more and more convinced that my typing skills (such that they are) are deteriorating rapidy.

I commonly make juxtaposition errors, like “teh”, taht”, “fro” and so forth, as well as mis-CApitalizing the second letter of a word many times (most commonly an “A” or an “E”)

Today I noticed a new one: Over the last few days when typing the phrase “to the” I’ve gone back to re-read a line (or run spell check) and noticed (or had the spell checker notice) that I actually typed “the the”.

Just now I was about to send an email to one of the VPs of my company when I saw that I had typed not “to the”, (or even “the the”,) but “to to”

maybe I should go sign up for a typing course or somethign.

(There’s another one of those juxtaposition errors…)

Edit: Some typos were intentional – others were not, and have been removed.

Edited on Apr 18th 2003, 23:40 by Hooloovoo

Flame Warriors

One of the moderators on another forum pointed this link out to me claiming it described the forum’s users perfectly. It’s a collection of characatures of many of the personalities one is likely to encounter online.

I’ve seen many of these archetypes myself. On mailing lists, on message boards, on community blog sites…

I said this weekend, but then I got bored.

Lexi, you may be interested in this link: http://simpson.hooloovoo.net

(If you want to see what it’s going to look like, check out http://gallery.belknap-family.net Same software, different content. And you’ll be able to upload new images yourself 🙂

Update: After banging my head against some poorly written error codes, I finally got the software installed on the site, and set up a test gallery. I just got off the phone with Eric, who is now in posession of login information for the two of you.

See what happens when a computer geek’s wife gets off work late? Instead of cooking dinner, he plays with server configurations. 🙂

Okay back to dinner cooking for me – seafood and veggies in peanut sauce over noodles. Kinda of a half italian – half thai – half leftovers kind of thing. Wait… that’s 1½ of a dinner – I need 2… Oh, I forgot about the salad. There, that’s better. 🙂

Edited on Apr 12th 2003, 03:13 by Hooloovoo

I didn’t break it, I swear.

There’s a nifty little program that I use at work (and I home) called ACDSee.

One of the features that comes in handy is the “print contact sheet”option which I use during the selection process for image galleries. When you get 200 some-odd screencaps and you need to pick 10-20 “good” ones, being able to print out proofs can be a life saver.

Anyway, I started a print job at 16:11 of 120 images (but these are much higher rez than normal) I got it about 15 min ago (17:22) I’m still waiting for the second batch I stared at 16:25, and there’s someone in the print queue after me who just wants to print out a 300k word document.

I didn’t break the printer, I swear. You’ll get your word document – but it may not be tonight.

can any php/regex guru’s help me?

I need some help with a small php function problem:

I need a function that does the same thing as pathinfo() [Link] until such time as I can brow-beat someone into upgrading the version of php being used on the server a site I’m working on is going to be published to.

From the function reference found here, it seems like it should be relatively simple to solve using regular expressions. I’m going to take a crack at solving the problem myself, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask for help here as well.

Edited on Apr 1st 2003, 01:07 by Hooloovoo

Edited on Apr 2nd 2003, 17:27 by Hooloovoo