Secretssssss

I re-updated the blogroll (on the right sidebar).  Wwhazz alerted me to the fact that he found it helpful to have prominent links to The People’s Champ, Arlo’s Bloggity Bloggity BlogBlog, and others.

Additionally, our old pal Big Al opened a new web site at http://blog.mlbsecrets.com that has up-to-date info on all the latest baseball rumors.  Example: yesterday I looked and found out that Ben “Fucking” Sheets worked out for ten (10!) interested teams the other day.  I assume that he will sign for a hojillion dollars somewhere and then NOT get injured, thereby completing his unusefulness to the Milwaukee Brewers.  It seems like it’s a good time to leave a Wisconsin professional sports team and then get fantastically good again.

Wwhazz’s birthday was this week, as was madddddddd’s, as was manders’.  As is alandovos.  Basically everyone I know: Happy Birthday.  Wwhazz and bellygirl went out to dinner and snapped a picture of the all-time best bar special ever. Ever.  I hope they don’t mind me reproducing it here:

The Best Bar Special Ever

Prepping for a move

I’ve slowly moved all my other websites to my new hosting provider, and now all that’s left is whazzmaster.  I’ll be prepping for it over the next few days (exporting the data from this server, setting everything up over there, and then importing everything).  Once it seems all set to go I’ll throw the switch and update the DNS records.  There may be some problems as we switch, and some of your most-up-to-date comments may not make it over there, but I’m gonna try to get as much as possible.

Also, got the new Punchout for the Wii; it’s pretty cool so far but I’ll update once I’ve played it a bit more.

Wayyyback Machine

Using the Wayback Machine you can look at what the interweb was like wayyy back in the day.  Before floppy brown hats, theoretical poker physics, and a cast of thousands there were several versions of Zach’s homepage known as Chaos Central.  I can’t find the OG version because I can’t remember what the non-Computer Science UW hosting URL was (alandovos, you remember?).  For your pleasure, however, review two early, early, early versions of whazzmaster.com:

The version from the latter half of my college years (run with Perl scripts and a file-based database).

The version from when I first moved to California and the maddddddddd scientist taught me about MySQL and PHP.

Have fun until I get back from Miami, weirdos.

Boop-a-doop

What’s been going on lately? Well, Cal’s girlfriend won the SF marathon, and wwhazz’s wife navigated a dangerous intersection.  I’ve been playing WoW again lately (though not too much!) and my friend Jay got me Dead Space for the XBox 360.  The last ’survival horror’ game I played was the original Resident Evil game for the original Playstation.  I’ll tells ya– s’ a lot spookier in 1080p with surround sound.  Space horror is more frieghtening to me than regular horror and I’m not sure why.  Anyways, I got stuck on the tutorial level when my idiot game-man couldn’t open a door.  I got past that now.

Soooo, the Badgers suck at football now? When exactly did that happen?  The Packers seem to have righted their ship for the moment, but I still can’t win a 3-teamer to save my got-damned life so there’s that.

This weekend we’ll be heading up to Door County to celebrate mama’s birthday, and then next weekend is the Big Throwdown for Halloween.  I don’t think anyone planned a party, or if they did I was left off the invite list, so the Main Depot it is.  Luchas all around.

I’ve been quite busy trying to launch my new web site– wowtracker.org.  Basically it’s a site to track card collections.  I’ve been playing the WoW trading card game for awhile now, and made it to track my own collection.  I’m trying to see if it would actually generate any ad revenue.   I’ll soon be moving it to a new server, so that link may or may not work if you click it.  In fact, better just not to click– I was only trying to beg off not updating in a week.

Finally, I found out today that I’ll be out in the Bay Area November 9th-14th, so if you are hungering for some moneypenny, uh, I guess you’re in luck.

Techno-roundup

I can’t believe I can update Whazzmaster from my iPhone with the new Wordpress app. Crazy times we live in; crazy times.

On The Receiving End

The Brewers really took one (or twelve) to the chin last night.  I’m not sure why everyone is/was so keen on Dave Bush; I’ve never seen him as anything other than mediocre.  His fastball is slow, he works slowly, and he regularly gets roughed up for a bunch of runs (particularly early).  Good ol’ Ned is high on the kid, though, so that means he’ll be pitching (and losing) for the rest of the season.  Early in the game things looked good.  It was in the fifth that the Reds really broke the door open and streamed through.  Say lah vee.

In the ‘April Showers Bring May Flowers’ equation, we’re firmly in the ’showers’ part.  Rain two days ago, rain yesterday, rain today, thunderstorms tomorrow.  The grass is starting to turn from brown to green, which is heartening and I was able to jog to the gym yesterday.  I just gotta wait out the next week; then it’s off to California from the 20th to the 26th, followed by a Las Vegas vacation.

I decided to start writing about the housing crash and my opinions on it, but I haven’t posted anything yet because I’m unsure where to start and because, when dealing with a contentious topic such as this, I really hem and haw when discussing it.  I need to make sure I present my views correctly.  I hope those posts will be more thought out and edited than the dreck I currently serve to you, my adoring friends.

New WordPress, Design, Twitter, CAL

WordPress 2.5 was recently released so I upgraded the software running the site. I also updated the visual design to a 3-column layout so that I could add a new Twitter feed. Twitter is an interesting app that lets me post quick little blurbs to the blog from instant messaging, text messages, or the web. Kinda cool, and I wanted to try it out for awhile. While I was working in the site admin section I took the opportunity to clean out the cruft in the links section: removing sites I don’t go to anymore and adding new ones that I frequent often.

In other news, the Brewers have started the season well by taking 2 of 3 from the Cubbies at Wrigley, then sweeping the hapless Giants in the Miller Park opening weekend. With the extreme exception of the Gagne Explosion on opening day, the bullpen has looked good. They kick off a series at Miller Park tonight against the Cincinnati (boo!) Reds. I don’t hate Cordero as much as everyone else seems to; if Cincinnati wants to lock up a closer for 4 years at close to $50 million, go ahead. I actually wouldn’t have felt very good about the Brewers laying out that much dough for a closer. If Cordero works out well for them, ok, if not then “ha-ha”.

BTW– Scientist, that vocoder link was fucking awesome. Good find, I’ll link to it here for posterity.

iPhone-ified

I’m proud as pie to announce the next great leap in whazzmaster.com history: http://iphone.whazzmaster.com. It’s really basic right now, but all the important stuff is there: comments. I know you idiots love typing grotesque examples of the English (and whazzzish) language on there, so the first version only shows comments, comments, and comments, grouped by post. I’ll probably add the posts on there at some points, but for now we’ve got glorious comments on-the-go. Could you get the same info myriad other ways? Yes. You definitely could. But that would preclude me from deploying my first Ruby on Rails application, so too johnny-be-badd for you.

I should note that if you aren’t using an iPhone or a Safari browser, that link will likely look like complete garbage. Sorry you Treo dudes.

It’s snowing outside. Hard.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

Well, I went and upgraded whazzmaster.com to WordPress 2.3.  I wasn’t sure what would happen when I attempted to upgrade so I set aside some time today (since I am home from work sick) to give it a go while I shivered in bed.   I just found out that the button to add a link doesn’t work anymore, so that’s great.

But I did make two changes that I wanted to highlight:

1.  Since few people read the post, and instead use wm.com as an all-purpose message board, I’ve moved the Recent Comments section front and center.  It still list the last 10 comments by time submitted.
2. Additionally, you can now post a comment directly from the front page: Simply click the “Add a Comment” link and you can submit a comment directly to that post without loading it and scrolling to the bottom (I guess this is for the truly lazy).

I’ll be doing some other things off and on, but it looks like the shit is stable for the moment.  HOLLLARIT.

Busy Bumble Bees

I’m fuckin’ exhausted from the last week; the last 3 days have been chock full of Intuit-representin’, college-edumacated interviewin’, eatin’-on-the-company-dime fun, but it was work all the same.  Today was meetings from 11-5 and now I can finally breath.  Well, take one breath before sprinting out to go play volleyball with the You-Dub Hoespital team: The Screaming Pancs. I wanted to use that breath to tell you not to expect many updates between now and March.  I’ll be out of town for 2 1/2 weeks in February at different events in Mountain View, San Diego, and Las Vegas (w00!).  In the meantime, I’ll try to pop back in from time to time, but overall I’ll be MIA.

I’ll post more about last week and my upcoming plans this weekend, hopefully.