Monthly Archives: March 2009

Stargate Universe: Huh?

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Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) is reporting here on the new Stargate: Universe project that has been in the works for a while.

Apparently there was to be a teaser during the BSG finale on Friday, but I haven’t heard anything about it, nor seen it online through my usual channels (ie: I haven’t looked for it). Never mind, there’s a link at the end of the news article. DUH!

I’m not a HUGE fan of SG-1 although I do like it, and I want to like SG-A but haven’t had a lot of time to watch it so my enthusiasm for SGU is limited. Chris and I have seen both SG-1 DVD movies but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

So why am I writing about Stargate Universe? A couple of notable things.

  1. It’s a lot like BSG from the way it sounds. Attacked, stuck on a ship, fighting for survival, food etc.
  2. Robert Carlyle is one of the stars. I guess the movie thing wasn’t working and he’s moving into more television.
  3. Lou Diamond Phillips is one of the stars. See Robert Carlyle above.
  4. Ming-Na is one of the stars, although listed near the end of the release. I really like Ming-Na and think she’s an under-used talent most of the time.

Will we watch it? Like most new shows I have even a passing interest in, we’ll give it a go. I mean, 5 episodes in and we’re still giving Dollhouse a chance and it’s pretty crappy.

Awesomeness On Sunday

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This weekend was GORGEOUS, weather-wise. The concept of spring weather has hit Vancouver in full force and people are just loving it! So Chris and I took full advantage of it.

Yesterday, Chris and I hiked east, then south around Science World the Telus-sphere and along the south side of False Creek. We were going to go as far as the Cambie Bridge like usual, then back over into downtown, but given the absolutely phenomenal day, we kept going all the way to Granville Island and hiked around there. Then took the bus back into downtown, wandered some more, had some lunch (Taco Del Mar for the first time in years), did some `browsing`at Chapters and then made it home.

March 22, 2009 along the sea-wall.

March 22, 2009 along the sea-wall.

Today (Sunday), we took the dog with us. After some domestic chores in the morning, we kitted up the dog (harness, leash, cookies, water) and headed for the dog park at Bute and Nelson in the West End. It`s a 2.5km hike according to Google maps and Rumble just loved it. And when we got there, there were about 30 dogs. Looked like they were having a Beagle meetup like the Schnauzer meetup we went to because about half the dogs were Beagles. Rumble had a great time. One big dog handed Rumble his ass when he got a bit too familiar, which is good. Rumble needs to learn he`s not always the top dog.

Then instead of going straight home, we decided to take the scenic route and headed straight south to Sunset beach and picked up the sea-wall going toward home. The sea-wall is always interesting. People roller-blading, biking, hiking, boys holding hands with other boys, dogs playing in the ocean etc. So much to see and do.

By the time we got home, we`d gone about 8km in total. Google clocked it at 6.5, but they insisted we must have taken Pacific Boulevard which is much more direct (ie: shorter) than the sea-wall.

Now we`re all wrecked. The dog is crashed. I`m doing my blog and Chris is fighting with the computer. Nobody is moving much. Rumble actually looks a little scared we might want to play again. Poor guy.

Geeky and Cool together

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I’m not a modder. Never had any aspirations to be one. A modder (in my definition and as pertains to this post) is someone who buys a perfectly good computer, or parts there-of, and proceeds to make it something truly unique and cool, at least in their eyes.

Today, it’s not too hard to put in a bit of modification. You can buy cases with clear plexi sides and a LED cable set from any computer store (including London Drugs in Vancouver) and have a basic neon glow in a couple of minutes. Or you can spend months designing, planning and fabricating an elaborate steam-punk style case for your computer. Whatever your personal style, you could design something to match it.

The folks over at Minervity.com have collected a set of photos of the 72 “most killingest” PC mods ever. Even if you’re not into modding, I find it very impressive to see the amount of work some people put into their computers which are unseen by anyone, 90% of the time.

Although some of the works are blatant copies of things we see on TV, in movies, or video games, others are truly inspired. The PC built into a piano case is interesting. The steam-punk and Lego ones are innovative and even the ones based on someone else’s work (Star Wars, Doom, Halo etc) are pretty creative, at least in terms of how they are executed.

What’s on TV?

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Chris and I are both big fans of the classic idiot box, boob tube or ‘Radiation King’ as it is known. We’ve been known to slaughter opposing teams at trivia contests, not just because we’re older, but because we’ve seen more than our share of pop culture through the CRT screen.

Not to worry, we upgraded to LCD when we bought the condo. There just isn’t room for anything else.

Back to the topic at hand. What’s on tv? And it is almost always on, especially if Chris is home. I’m content to turn it off.

Monday: House, Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Dirty Jobs

Tuesday: NCIS

Wednesday: Lie To Me, Lost, Life (There’s an alliterative theme there)

Thursday: Bones and maybe Ace Of Cakes

Friday: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse

Saturday: Cops (my weekly guilty pleasure)

Sunday: America’s Funniest Home Videos, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Mythbusters

It’s not a bad list. There’s not a lot of crap on there like Desperate Housewives or other similar show (no Gossip Girl). We have a few things we download because they either aren’t on, we’re behind, or conflict with other shows. Burn Notice, and Battlestar Galactica are the two main ones right now.

We’ve tried other shows over the years, and there tend to be themes. Police procedurals (the CSI series), Dexter, Six Feet Under, Pushing Daisies (awesome), Drive (short lived, hardly had a chance) and others. They tend to be interesting, character driven and SMART television. We tried Ugly Betty, but it didn’t stick simply due to scheduling conflicts.

We challenge ourselves with Jeopardy most weeknights following a little warm-up with Wheel of Fortune while we make dinner and get cleaned up after work.

I’m a fan of nonsense TV too, hence my addiction to COPS and America’s Funniest Home Videos because I get to turn my brain off. I’m also a HUGE fan of most of the shows on HGTV (Canada), Food Network and Discovery Channel. I have a strong latent DIY gene somewhere and I think I can cook.

Anyway, all of that on top of working full time, taking care of Rumble and trying to lead productive friendly lives doesn’t leave much time. If it weren’t for time-shifting with torrents and VHS tapes, we’d never get anything done.

Give up some of it you say? Naw, that’s not an option until summer hits. Then it all goes away.

Shortening URLs for fun and… well… fun

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So I think we’ve established that I’m a dork, geek, nerd etc and an unabashed one at that. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me.

For a while, I’ve been trying to learn and understand the Zend Framework and the mysteries of the MVC design pattern or whatever you want to call it. Man, that shit’s hard.

So while trying to find a project to use as a test, beyond what they all show in the tutorials, I decided I needed a small project, possibly as a baseline. Something to build in standard procedural PHP that I might be able to rebuild in MVC in the future.

One of the things that the internet is lacking (not) is the URL Shortener. You know, like tinyurl.com, twurl.cc, and about 100 other sites. They take long unmanageable URLs with lots of parameters etc and shrink them down so they’re neater and cleaner. They also let affiliates cloak their links. So all you see is something like: http://cliklet.com/97bu8q and you don’t know where it goes so you can’t cheat them out of their commissions.

It also means you can Tweet them. Since they’re under 30 characters they don’t take a huge toll on your 140 character Tweet limit.

So I decided to build http://cliklet.com for lack of anything better to do for a few hours. The original setup is easy. The code is simple, and probably doesn’t need to be re-written in MVC. The main project has 4 pages. The index page, the shuffle code, the ajax page and the forward page. Technically that’s 2 more than I need, but I’m also playing with JQuery.

Tell your friends about Cliklet.com! Tell them to use it! Use it yourself. It’s awesome.

To round out the project and make it worthy of expansion, I’ll add some more features:

  • Login system to track cliklets, make cliklets private and access other “beta” features
  • Public display of the latest ## cliklets
  • Public display of the hottest ## cliklets
  • Possibly ad or self-promotion supported thin frame at the top (ala Twitpwr.com)
  • Ability to create custom links (not random)

There seems to be a few problems with this concept.

  1. No business model. Nobody pays for this, even for advanced features so the most you can hope for is some Adsense clicks if you have that on the main site or possibly some “newsletter” related sales or affiliate sales if you communicate with registered users
  2. Limited feature set. When reviewing other sites providing these links, additional features range from none (twurl) to about 6 and they tend to be the same. I haven’t looked at the “out of the box” stuff yet.
  3. Medium-low cost. Basically it depends on how busy you are. Serving a few links that aren’t that busy won’t cause much bandwidth but if it gets busier either in creating or serving links then bandwidth costs will increase slightly. Since we’re mostly redirecting it’s minor.

Keep an eye on Cliklet.com for changes, designs and updates.