A Scattered Brain

As I gear up for my annual NCAA Tournament Pool (details to come closer to tourney time) I have been working on a completely new site design with new features and a more flawless method of keeping the site up to date.  In previous years, the pool program I use would run a scheduler periodically and build all of the web pages for my site and upload them via FTP.  Not an entirely bad solution, except the FTP wasn’t the most reliable and would just die in the middle.  I’m sure this was more of an issue with my free cox.net account than the pool software, but nevertheless I wanted something more.

Low and behold, in comes PHP and MySQL to the rescue.  Now, I can use a database on the web server that will still have to get updated by the scheduler in my pool program (connected via ODBC).  Instead of having to FTP all of the report files, I’ve written PHP functions to connect to my database and update things automatically.  So far everything has tested well and looks good.  I think there are still some reports that will have to get uploaded unless this year’s software adds more information to the database or I work more on parsing through the data currently there to generate all reports myself.

PHP was fairly easy to learn and work with once I figured out how scoping of variables work (quite differently than all other programming languages I’ve worked with in the past) and the speed seems to be reasonable as well.  It reminds me a bit of Java Servlets  in that you use the scripting language to generate HTML code.  I look forward to hopefully enjoying a much more automated pool running experience this year.

Greetings all,

Ok, I finally paid off my Saturn, and while I love the car and feel I have the last manual transmission in the United States, I’m jonesing for a new car.  I don’t need a new car, and I certainly don’t mind what I’m driving, except I love the little information gauges you can get in luxury cars.  I’m talking about really cool things like MPG, Average MPG, Miles left in tank, Gallons left, Extra trip odometers, etc.  I had all of this in my rental car (Mercury Grand Marquis, baby blue, perfect for retirement area Florida) and loved it even for just the two days I had the car.

So, this made me start looking for cars with this kind of information.  I’ve given up the idea of a navigation system… I hardly drive anywhere new so I really don’t need one.  I don’t need a new radio/CD player as mine is just fine and I don’t care for the XM or Sirius which tends to come with the navigation features anyway.  However, the Driver Information Center (GM’s term for these nifty features) is available on a Chevrolet Impala.  Hmm… a nice, new, fairly affordable Impala sounds really nice and the new design is pretty sleek as well.  Sounding better.

But, do I really want to chain myself down with another car payment just to get these nifty features and lose the manual transmission?  Hmm… there has to be a better way; someone somewhere has to make an after-market gauge that can keep track of these things.  During my lunch break, I decided to search for such an item expecting to find a whole bunch of them.  Alas, I only found one, and it’s not cheap at $170, but for a computer geek who likes to know weird things about driving statistics, this fits the bill.

It’s called the ScanGauge II and it has everything I mentioned above and even more than that.  This thing totally looks like the way to go.  ($170 is a lot cheaper than $27,000)  I’ll have to think about it and then find a place where I would actually put the thing that would work in my car.  Another nifty feature, supposedly coming out soon is the ability to upload the data to a computer.  That would probably just about send the wife packing, huh honey?

I’ll let you know if I get it and if I do, how it works out.  Have a great day!

Ahhhh!!  So after my new printer woes (documented thoroughly in a previous post), I decided that it was time to rebuild our laptop… from scratch.  I’m going to get that printer installed properly, dammit!

I pondered this decision for quite a while weighing all the pros and cons (no need to detail those here and bore you even more) and finally made the leap this week.  On Tuesday I backed up all data files and programs to my MP3 player, which conveniently has the ability to store data files as well, which took a while, of course.  And yesterday, took the plunge and used HP’s nifty little quick restore to format and rebuild the computer to factory settings.

VICTORY!!! Everything came up nicely, got back connected to my wireless and after a few updates to Windows, tried to install the printer.  Bingo, bango, bongo, worked the first time.  Ahhhh… I feel better already.  Uninstalled some of the silly programs that came with the HP, got my and my wife’s profiles started back up and we’re off to the races.

Tonight, I just have to transfer back our data files, install Office and then we’ll be back in business fully as I can add programs I truly used at my own pace.

My thoughts now are that I should have done this long ago.  In college, I would generally rebuild once a year to extend the life of the computer (and often times, switch operating systems to my latest choice in Linux, remember I am a total geek!).  This laptop had been going on 3 years without a rebuild.  Now it can go another two or so before we really have to dump it for something new, hopefully; we’ll see how I feel after Windows Vista comes out.

Well, most of you have probably stopped reading by now.  I would have too if I were in your shoes.  Have a great day and keep on keeping on!

So, my wife and I just bought a new HP All-in-One printer since our other two printers pretty much became unuseable around the same time and I’ve spent all freaking night trying to install the software for it.  I know you probably don’t care, but while I’m trying to download the contents of the CD to my computer (500 MB eek!) I’m going to vent.

5:15 pm - First install - I’m really excited that it has a network interface so that we can print even if our laptop isn’t at it’s dock, that’s just way cool.  The install takes about 35 minutes in all, but isn’t too bad.  I have to reboot and then finish the setup… no problem.  Then I try to use the software to scan and it gives me some BS about having to reboot or re-install.  I reboot just to make it happy and the same thing occurs.  So I try to re-install just that piece but I can’t find an install for just the scanning piece so I uninstall the entire package and try again.

6:00 pm - Second install - Here’s where things really start to go wrong.  I install again and somewhere in the middle the installer crashes, just disappears POOF!  So, I do what any reasonable person would do, I reboot hoping it finished but just didn’t look like it.  Now I can’t do anything but print (no faxing, no scanning) so I’m two steps back.  The software doesn’t even show all the icons I need… so I uninstall again.

7:00 pm - Third install - I reset the printer and everything to their “factory” defaults (funny, the time didn’t clear and the network settings stayed the same, the only thing that changed is Auto Answer was turned back on for the fax).  Re-install a couple of times without uninstalling hoping it would get past it’s crashing point… you guessed it, not a chance.

… (tried this a few more times until…)

8:30 pm - HP Support - I first look up on their website under installation issues to see if I can find my problem(s).  I do, but the solution is uninstall/re-install.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, to me too.  I then try to call HP support.  After being on hold for about 10 minutes someone (who was most certainly not from this country, but that’s another blog altogether) answers and for some reason can’t hear me talk and he hangs up on me!  So as a last resort, I use their chat service and that proved to be utterly useless… he only suggested that I copy the install files to my local hard drive and try the install again.  If it works, kudos to him, but in my experience, I’m not all that convinced.  I did also find some files that may have been trouble and deleted them but again, I’m shooting at straws.

Now - The file is almost finished downloading and is copying from the temp location to my desktop and I will give it ONE MORE TRY tonight.  I’ll let you all know if it works, as if you truly care (and I’ll pretend that you do).

Wish me and my printer luck.  Once it gets working, I think it’ll totally rock!