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Weird Quotient

For most people that know me this will be no surprise

54% are more weird,
11% are just as weird, and
35% are more normal than you!

Georgetown Loop Railroad

Last weekend we decided to go up an ride the Georgetown Loop Railroad here in Colorado. Not a very long ride (4 miles total), but it has some nostalgic value because they still run a steam train. The highlight of the trip is the 100' high curved bridge at "Devil's Gate"










The route connects Georgetown to SilverPlume, two towns that are only about 1 mile apart but over 600' in elevation difference. So, a direct run would not work without running a cog train. More info on the rail line can be found here: http://www.georgetownlooprr.com/

Who is R.A.B in Harry Potter?

I think I know who R.A.B. in the THBP is. In OftP they are discussing the Black Family tree and the mention Sirius's brother: Regulas Black. Who was a Death Eater and killed by or at the order of Voldemort. Just a guess for now, guess we'll find out in book 7.

Programming Thoughts

You know that life as a programmer leads you to find out interesting things about people. Some people do the ODDEST things to computer programs.

Guess the old saying is true... "Assume that no matter how dumb you think a user is, they are dumber."

No more wisdom

Last Tuesday I had all four of my wisdom teeth taken out... completely lost the entire day, but it was not near as bad as I was expecting. The Dr. did a great job. Was back up and ready to go Wed. afternoon so not a whole lot of down time.

Weekend happenings

Saw "The Wedding Crashers" this weekend... great no-brainer. Also recently saw "The Manchurian Candidate" (the new one with Denzel) was not really into that one. Went to the new BBQ place in town with Kari & Matt. It was supposed to be authentic southern BBQ. I'm not sure about that. I give it a 2 outta 5. After that we went over to there place and shot some pool. Really enjoyed the evening.

Last week was pretty warm.. several days above 100... sooo glad we have A/C now. Before we had it, we had a couple of nights where it was 87 in the master bedroom, way to hot to sleep in.

Pic of the new place

BBQ

We finally had the house warming party for the new place on Sat. I think it went rather well. Had about 40-50 people drop in, have something to eat and take the tour. I know I had a good time and I hope everyone else did.

Getting Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Jody and I went out at 11:45pm on Friday to get the latest Harry Potter book. Thought we would go by Borders and pickup a copy. Well when we got there the place was packed. I really did not expect to see 500+ people in the store. Anyway, we waiting in line to get our coupon to get in another line. We were number 583... ack, gonna be awhile to get the book. No we didn't reserve a copy or preorder it. We figured with all the hype it would be easy to pickup. But seeing that we were gonna be in for a long wait I decided to run over to the King Soopers (grocery store) to see if they had a copy. I had noticed they would be selling it. So about 12:15am I was there and by 12:20 I had a copy in hand. Took another 10 mins to check out because there were about 50 people there as well. So I headed back over to Borders and picked up Jody and we headed home with our new treasure. When I picked up Jody they were still calling out numbers below 300, so we would have had a much longer wait there.

Couple of thoughts about Justice O'Conner retiring. I'm a little concerned about the successor that GB is going to pick. Justice O'Conner has been the swing vote in some very important cases recently and I would hate to see the High Court taken completely over by a group of people that all have the same opinion. I think a little diversity is good for the court.

Playing with Drivel.. well this is my first post using Drivel. Seems ok, would be nice if the spelling checker would suggest a word rather than just telling me I spelled it wrong. My spelling is aweful.

mplayerplug-in status catchup

Well where to start....

I am the primary author of the Firefox browser plugin mplayerplug-in it is a tool that I wrote because I was sick of having to dig around in the source HTML, download the file and then play it locally. So after 2.5 years later it is a pretty decent tool, not the best thing ever but is solves the problem most of the time.

Version 2.85 is the current release and here is what I am working on now for 3.0

Modular architecture. The enable-* flags are going to be gone from the conf file. I'm making several plugins from the same source so that the emulation of the other plugins can be better. You need mplayerplug-in to do RealMedia but nothing else. You'll just install the mplayerplug-in-rm.so and .xpt files and it will be done

Why am I doing this. Well to make Google Video work with mplayerplug-in this change is necessary, also it makes a few other things a little nicer from a code generation/configuration POV.

As for Google Video. I currently have it working on my machine albeit with some caviats. Currently the javascript that Google uses is kinda tricky, more so than it needs to be, and so the Javascript support in Firefox 1.0.4 is not up to the task of making it work. I have tried a nightly build of DeerField (Firefox 1.1) and it seems to work better, but not perfect yet. I had to add some additional JavaScript methods to mplayerplug-in as well. I have not commited this code to CVS yet, but probably will soon.

Well that is were we are as of today.