Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

Yup, we’re still here. Just been busy/not felt like writing. Points of interest post-flood:

  • Drove past a hot air balloon that had landed on the side of the rode while coming back from a friend’s house.
  • Two days later drove under a massive lightning storm coming back from the same friend’s house.1
  • Tried taking some end-of/post-flood pictures around town, but did not want to cause any problems for those working in the affected areas. So pictures were all taken from the car while driving through the affected areas and they all pretty much sucked or at best were no better than the dozens of other drive-by photos already posted to Flickr.
  • Gave blood and it left me feeling wiped out for days afterwards.
  • Attended Convergence with AWelkin, Bryon, Amabaku & Oyarsa Elentari.
    • Had a complete blast but also got totally worn out.
    • First night of the con, while leaving to go out to get dinner, I thought I was on the bottom step when I was still 1 step up. Walked out, didn’t feel ground underfoot and fell smack down on my ass folding my leg under me and scraping my arm. Ankle got twisted a bit and is still vaguely sore.
    • Ate a lot of good food.
    • Bought my wife a ren-faire style corset. Yum!
    • Saw many good costumes around the con. Even got a few photographed.2
    • Went to a flip-book animation panel and watched the panel-host get rather confused by all the adults at the panel. He clearly was expecting this to be almost a form of baby-sitting.
    • Drank much good coffee & tea at the con’s CoF2E2 cabana.
      • Especially liked the Moon over Madagascar tea (Chinese Black and Ceylon teas blended with bits of bourbon vanilla).
      • Also quite fond of the English Toffee/Vanilla Latte they made for me.
    • Watched a stunning presentation from a local raptor center.
    • Attended a panel on GMing which gave me some ideas for a game I want to run.
    • Almost played in a steampunk LARP, but the intro panel killed my interest in it.
      • It was this particular group’s first year running a LARP.
      • They based the LARP on some sort of “How to Host a Murder Mystery” thing.
      • They tried to design it to allow players to continue to enjoy the con.
      • Except the players weren’t given any sort of characters. You were expected to go around the con searching for clues.
      • You could interact with the people running the LARP as the characters they were dressed up as or as “norms”. If you tried to interact with them in-character, they said they’d respond by interacting with you based on your costume. I only rarely run around in a costume and didn’t have one for this con, so that pretty much killed my interest.
    • Painted a miniature thanks to Reaper‘s demo painting. That was fun and something I haven’t tried in several years.

1 We were cat-sitting for them.
2 Several I only saw when either I or the costumer were running different directions and so I didn’t always get photos. *sigh* There was one kid in a really excellent TF2 Medic costume. Photos will be posted later, as I have to go through them all and clean them up in GIMP. Especially as my camera fritzed a few times and the image turned out all “purple-ly”.

Cedar Rapids Flood 2008 | Manzabar | Flickr.com

I’ve taken a few photos of the flood but not yet gotten around to pulling them off my camera. I got a bit tired of waiting to post my photos over to Flickr and I wanted to see what photos some others in the area had. So I create this mosaic of the flood photos I liked best.

I’d like to thank each of the following photographers without whom this mosaic would not have been possible:

Just to let everybody know, we’re still here and doing ok. Our house is approximately 1 mile outside of the 500 year flood plain1, so hopefully we won’t have to evacuate. Our main problem around here at the moment is a lack of usable water. The city only has one well working at the moment, so they can only output about a fourth of what they normally do. I’ve read various reports indicating it will at least a week if not more like 2 or 3 until things start returning to normal. If I get a chance to safely take any photos of the flood, I will do so. However I’m not going to run out and do that right away, as it’s both dangerous and possibly would put me in the way of safety/emergency workers. Those are the sort of people you want happy with you, so I’m not going to go out and do stupid shit to piss them off. 🙂

1 You can view the flood plain area via Google Maps.

The one thing I don’t like about my house would have to be the weather we seem to get around it.  In the 10-12 years I lived in that stupid apartment in Coralville, IA, I only remember going for shelter from tornado warnings maybe 4 or 5 times.  I think we’ve done that many so far this spring alone.  In the house, we hunker down in our basement in the sauna.  Unfortunately the door to the sauna doesn’t close properly so I have to hold it shut.  At the moment I’m doing so by wrapping a belt around the door handle and around my leg.  It sucks.

What sucks worse is while I’m doing it, the weather “reporter” announces that there is no warning for my city but there is for my county and doesn’t clarify WTF she’s talking about.  Never mind I’ve been exhausted all weekend from sinus issues and would love to be asleep in bed, nope.  I’m stuck in a sauna in a basement during a tornado warning with an idiot broadcasting nonsense.  *sigh*

On the bright side, the sauna is small and my lovely wife is with me.  Now if we actually get a proper latch on the door so I don’t have to hold it shut next time this could be kind of cosy.  *grin*

Side note: We brought the cat down with us as well and he’s getting petted by the wife at the moment.  I mostly know this because he’s twitching his tail in bliss and smacking my arm with the tail.

I use Rob Miller’s excellent Now-Reading plugin to track all the books I’ve read and am reading here at CoffeeBear. After my recent site upgrade I decided to tweak the single book template for my library. I noticed that the latest version of Now-Reading allows you to note who read a given book on multiuser sites. As my wife occassionally posts here I wanted my reads to be marked as mine, but the default output of the function Rob implemented only displays the user’s login name. Seriously Rob, what were you thinking? If you did not want to give end users the option to select how they want their name to print out why wouldn’t you go with display_name?

I looked at the code Rob used and with a little help from the Practical PHP I hacked together my own function based on Rob’s. By default print_reader2 works the exactly the same as print_reader1 but by feeding it an additional parameter, you get your choice of what to use to display as reader’s name:

  • 0: Prints out the user_login aka the username you use to log into WordPress.
  • 1: Prints user_nicename, appears to simply be an all lower case version of the user’s nickname2.
  • 2: Prints display_name, from the “Display name publicly as” field in your WordPress profile.
  • 3: Prints first_name, from the “First name” field in your WordPress profile.
  • 4: Prints nickname, from the “Nickname” field in your WordPress profile.
function print_reader2( $echo=true, $reader_id = 0, $display = 0 ) {
	global $userdata;

	$username='';

	switch($display) {
		case "1": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->user_nicename; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->user_nicename; }; break;
		case "2": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->display_name; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->display_name; }; break;
		case "3": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->first_name; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->first_name; }; break;
		case "4": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->nickname; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->nickname; }; break;
		default: if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->user_login; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->user_login;};
   }
	if ($echo)
		echo $username;
	return $username;
}

Side note: WordPress 2.5.1 got released today and it includes a security fix, be sure to update your blogs!

1 At least, I think it does. I’m not a programmer and I only know enough PHP to be dangerous to myself.
2 The WordPress Codex does not appear to define what this field is used for or why it exists, so that’s just my guess.