geek in charge
I intended to buy this list yesterday:
Amazing Spider-Man #559
Secret Invasion Fantastic Four #1
Instead I bought:
Amazing Spider-Man #559
Secret Invasion Fantastic Four #1
Captain Britain and MI:13 #1 (Secret Invasion tie-in)
The New Avengers #39
The Mighty Avengers #12
Thunderbolts “Reason In Madness” One Shot
Ah, to have a new hobby. I can already see this is going to be bad.
Heh.
I spit out small chunks of life onto Twitter each day and now I realize how little I actually update my blog. I need to sit down and think about exactly what I want to post here, if anything actually. I do like having a place to put down larger ideas (I know I’m going to reference that XML::RSS post in the future for instance), so maybe I just use it like that.
Worth thinking about more, but only if I can do so in less than 140 characters. Argh, see?!
Always been a fan of LWP::Simple, but today I was asked to get the first post from a blog’s RSS feed.
# fetch the feed
my $feed = get($url);
# parse the feed
my $rss = new XML::RSS;
$rss->parse($feed);
# return text
my $desc = $rss->{'items'}->[0]->{'description'};
my $link = $rss->{'items'}->[0]->{'link'};
And you can do whatever you want with the RSS tags (title, etc).
In my goal of trying to get back into comics, here is a list I am going to try to get together this month as a “catch up” kind of thing. For Marvel I think I’m going to try and follow Spiderman, and any Avengers titles, plus any large cross-comic stories (such as Secret Invasion) from now on. I’ll also start collecting Invincible singles (I’ve been collecting the trades) starting at 42, and later I might look into some DC titles if I’m not overwhelmed by the above.
Get list for now for my own reference:
Amazing Spider-Man 546 - 555
Civil War Amazing Spider-Man TPB
Civil War Road to Civil War TPB
Civil War TPB
Invincible (2003) 42 - 49
New Avengers Illuminati 1 - 5
Secret Invasion (2008) 1 & 2
Mighty Avengers 1 - 14
Avengers: The Initiative 1 - 12
I don’t know about any one else’s plans for their economics stimulus checks that started going out yesterday, but make sure you don’t just squirrel them away. I have my doubts about how much this is going to help the economy, but on the off-chance that it can, I’m going to make sure and spend the money. Such a patriotic sacrifice, I know, but I do what I can.
Some plans:
And we’re not even getting our check till July some time. That’s pretty lame but I’ll spend it now and “restock” the actual check later. I don’t want people who get their checks earlier than me to have all the fun!
Update: My wife was so gracious as to remind me about Mother’s Day coming up as well as an outlet for the fundage.
I’m a geek. Supergeek even.
If I don’t know it now, I can learn it quicker than most others. I just have a knack for APIs, languages, and pretty much any other tech-related thing. I do sys-admining, networking, programming and database administration. Like my tag line says above, I’m a geek of all trades.
But how do you build that into a backend portfolio? There are entrepreneurs and other idea people out there lacking real implementers. Someone who can actually put their nose to the grindstone and really crank out exactly what is needed and handle all the IT angles, not just one.
Now, I’ve been a entrepreneur myself. Helped start up one of the companies I currently work for actually. What I’m best at however? Anything with 1s and 0s, that’s what. Leading a team or knee deep in code myself.
But how to share that with those idea people? Just keep talking into the wind, “network network network” or just build a portfolio so huge it breaks the interweb? The catch with a portfolio is my magic is primarily unseen — databases, beautiful maintainable code, firewalling, networking. I don’t do web design, I do web application development from the ground up. The skin I put on it can be thrown together by any decent graphics artist. The real beef is behind the scenes.
How do you portfolio that?
… but I couldn’t. I’m not that deep into the language to start getting all nerdy with its subculture.
I am digging the language though. The way polymorphism is so key. The way it handles sequences. Its default data types. All very cool.
Still investigating how I’m going to use it online for web apps. I have a few concerns I really need to look up for information on:
Those are just a few. As I poke around more I’ll get my answers and of course more questions along the way. So far I am enjoying it though.
At around 5:30-5:40 this morning, my wife and I woke up wondering why the hell our bed seemed to be shaking. She suggested earthquake, I suggested Godzilla. Yeah, I was still a little sleepy in the brain. But as my thoughts cleared a bit, I realized that it probably was an earthquake. We didn’t give it much thought since it felt so light and was over so quickly, so we went back to bed.
Waking up at our normal time just an hour or so later and it was confirmed to be an earthquake. And what are my friends on Twitter talking about? Earthquake of course. Not only that, but how news of the earthquake and details thereof were being shared on Twitter a full half-hour or more before traditional media was really even talking about it. What a great show of how cool Twitter can be. Many think it is just another narcissistic outlet for Web 2.0ers, but really it is a great, fast way to share info with your connections.
Makes me wish I had kept my iPhone next to my bed. I would have Twittered along with the rest of them. But I had to get back to fighting Godzilla — I think I was Mothra.
Seems like I’ve been too busy at work lately to use Twitter or Facebook very much. And I’ve fallen out of answering threads on LinuxQuestions as well. Really need to change that.
Which is funny to say because I couldn’t give a damn about my non-online socializing falling behind as I pretty much never do that anyway. It’s weird to be naturally anti-social, but try to branch out a bit now and network online.
What is it with online socializing though that compels people to try and amass as many “friends” as possible on this site or that? Facebook for instance. If it were up to me, I’d only link to people I’d actually socialize with in person, which is pretty few truth be told. The kind of people I’d like to play Scrabulous with or throw down in a Zombie fight bonanza. Instead I get invites from people I just barely know and now I have to add them or it gets awkward when I do see them in real life.
Twitter is for sharing ideas, so I’m open to adding and receiving connections on there. Same for LinkedIn. But when do we get a social network site where the point is to share it with your true friends, not just every random stranger that comes along? I suppose that is heresy in the Web 2.0 vision of social networking and its core of pure narcissism.
I sure as hell wish Western Digital (WD) would have taken more time to research how to give us cheaper, bigger, solid state hard drives than to spend it making a whole line of rainbow colored ones.
Are there computer users out there, standing at Best Buy, and agonizing over which color to choose to match their drapes? Maybe I’m being a curmudgeon shaking my cane at kids on the front lawn, but I remember the day when computer equipment came in black or beige and not much else.
I just find it funny to think about the meetings that must have went into this. Who came up with this idea in the first place? An exec in a board meeting asks how do we sell more, and someone really said “Make them in more colors”. I could be totally wrong of course and their sales for those drives will go up, but I recently bought a USB backup drive and was going to go for a WD one, but chose Maxtor instead. It came down to cost-per-gigabyte and whether it had a “one touch” backup solution with it, not what color offerings were available.
Oh, and the Maxtor one came in brushed metal. Geeks loved brushed metal!