January 2004

Yikes!
My father had a weather-related car mishap today. The email my Mom sent describes it as prety scary. Back in Virginia, things are icy and cold and I don’t care for that one bit. With some luck, it looks like the car was not lost, and my Dad got out and to work safely with a colleague.

The weather in San Diego may not be perfect right now—it’s overcast and a bit chilly and sometimes wet—but it’s head and shoulders better than ice, sleet, snow, and cold.

Alternating Color PHP Thinger
Sassy sent me some help for: : “$color = ( $counter % 2 == 0 ) ? $colorOne : $colorTwo; ”—it uses the modulo operator, described .

Thanks Sass!

Stupid RSS Tricks: PHP, Magpie, and RSS
I’ve just put up a listing of the most recent posts to websandiego using the RSS library for PHP called Magpie.

http://websandiego.org/recentposts/ is where I’ve put it.

http://websandiego.org/recentposts/source.php is the sourcecode in question. I think it was Steve Eisenberg who noted that YahooGroups provides an RSS Feed for the group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/websandiego/messages/?rss=1

The whole point of the syndication thing is to allow this kind of thing, and this is pretty nifty. It uses caching, and supposedly uses conditional GET to make sure the page does not hit yahoo too hard.

I’d love to hear feedback from people about what they think of it or if they have other ideas for how websandiego.org can use RSS. We still have an RSS event calendar on the front page—but that really is dependent on people using the Sharpe calendars. Sadly, it’s hard to get people to use a unified calendar, or even to publish a unified calendar.

Anyone have programming or other feedback?

Or even a better construct for doing alternating colors in a table. :-)

My clunky code is: if ($counter==0) { $color=$colorOne; $counter++; } else {$color=$colorTwo; counter=0;}

More on Magpie: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

(reposted from websandiego)

San Diego Blog!
There are some new and cool San Diego pieces over at San Diego Blog.

Well, I think they’re cool. Maybe they’re not. Hah.

Some great quotes
from The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck: “Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a profound tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.”

Remember…
America is Not A Christian Nation.

Search For Posts From My Old Co-Workers
gtm; jamisongold; edupoint; avencom; financialaid; bidland—some of these may be spam from “joe jobs”, so beware for content.

Usenet Posts From Old Email Accounts
Google groups, formerly Deja News Groups: artlung at earthlink.net; jcrawford at avencom.com; jcrawford at edupoint.com.

I remember this videogame
The Ending of Ecco the Dolphin for Sega Genesis

I have one, so I’m up to date with 2 million US kids
2 Million American Children Have Their Own Websites