var blogcategory = new Array();blogcategory[0] = "OBlog";blogcategory[1] = "Stuff";blogcategory[2] = "Website";blogcategory[3] = "Open Blog";blogcategory[4] = "BYOB";blogcategory[5] = "Road Trip";var blognums = 6;var blogarticle = new Array();blogarticle[0] = "When I was growing up, the M in the MTV stood for music, these days it must stand for mush or mindless or messed-up.
I've just got back from a short trip to Vegas, and as you do when you are in a hotel room, you flick through the channels on the off chance that you get a 15 second preview of the special interest film (no luck this trip), and you end up landing on one of the unfamiliar stations. Don't get me wrong, I don't watch MTV here in the UK, but I always thought it was a music channel, but no, it seems that it has become the home of \"reality\" TV. I put the word reality in quotes as I am dubious as to how real the program I was watching actually was.
I stumbled across a show called \"Parental Control\". The basic premise is that the parents of a poor child don't like their offspring's current choice of boyfriend/girlfriend so they interview a set of 10 prospective alternatives, pick one each and then force the current incumbent to watch their kid to go on \"dates\" with the new choices. Then the kid has to choose between the two new choices and their current partner. Ok, so not the greatest format of show, but what made it car crash TV was the fact that it all appeared staged, in fact I am sure I recognised one of the parents and the prospectives partners from other shows. What made it worse was that I sat through 4 of these shows back to back.
In case you were wondering why I was in my room for that long in Vegas, I was just recharging the batteries from the two mile walk back from the MGM Grand garden arena to my room at the furthest end of the block in the Excalibur hotel. Plus was tyring to straighten out after being scrunched up in the seats at the MGM Grand whilst watching the Mosconi cup of 9-ball pool. (Don't get me started on the subject of Americans and sportsmanship).
I do get the impression that the standard MTV channel is now a non music channel and is aimed at teens, but now, nearly 25 years on, I disagree with Dire Straits' Money for Nothing, I don't want my MTV.
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blogarticle[1] = "I don't know why, but I keep going back to this video, so I thought I'd post it. I think they've really captured the “Rob Green incident” really well.
Yes! We want information .... information ....
Well, what normally takes a team of developers hundreds of hours, I've achieved in a lunchtime and evening. Yep, I've developed another dashboard. Not satisfied with the initial dashboard, it came to me over lunch that I could create another one that provides yet more irrelevant information. It's like when I was diagnosed with Crohn's - you just don't know when the crap's going to stop coming.
So this is to make amends for the initial country pie chart that was basically a colored circle for one country. Now, we've gone totally the other way and found an excessive amount of data so that it plots to the pie chart and makes it unreadable because there can be too many segments.
This dashboard is accessed from the
places selection page that allows you to select a location and see what pictures were taken there. Noting that there can be multiple tracks per location as well as multiple pictures. The overkill is that it plots the number of pictures taken of each species of animal, so if you pick a location like Las Gallinas that has a lot of animals, the pie chart is very difficult to decipher. If you want a head start, the chart starts plotting at 3 O' clock and goes clockwise.
As with the initial dashboard, this one is also linked from the
photos home page.
Got sent this clip of Sir Alex missing his bus. Brilliant and a lot of credit to the creator.
Fergie Misses Bus ClipTried to find out more about the mysterious “McGroing” who created this and all I could find is comments to the effect of “you wouldn't want to order one of them in McDonalds and, if you did, you certainly wouldn't want to supersize it”
I doubt anyone’s been wondering about this, but on the off chance that it was something you were interested in, I thought I’d let you know what goes on behind the scenes. The website that you view is less than half of what has been created. For every part of this site, there are some administration tools. Really just a web interface that lets me (or Mr. O) make changes to the data on the site on the fly. As all of the actual data is stored in a database, it’s pretty easy to create a front end that lets you make updates.
If you’ve looked at the photos part of the site, it’s no coincidence that each of the pages look the same. I’ve created a front end tool that allows me to link to a directory, enter the page title and it will upload all the pictures in the specified directory, create thumbnails and the double click pictures, then create the pages that are you get to see. Pretty clever, even if I say so myself.
The big challenge really is that it takes more effort to create the maintenance tools than it does to create the part of the site itself. Take, for example, the forum section that I’ve just created. The site bit itself is quite clever in that it only uses four pages that display different data depending on variables that are passed to each page. On top of that there are another 11 files that allow you to create the entries (categories, sub-categories, thread titles and thread details) and edit the thread details if necessary making a total of 15 files.
There are 22 files in use to support the forums. These allow me to edit or delete any of the entries made. The ability to delete is actually the hardest thing to program here as you need to make it a cascading delete otherwise you would be left with orphaned records, for example, being left with sub-categories that don’t have a category to belong to. In addition to that, I created the ability to move either sub-categories or thread titles – so, if a thread seems to be in the wrong place I can just move it (or if many similar threads get posted under “Other” I can create a new category and move them over). Before you ask, you don’t need to move a category – just editing it has the same effect. There’s no real reason to move a thread detail – it’s unlikely to be posted in the wrong place, but in the unlikely event that it was, it’s probably easier to just cut and paste it into the new position (and by cut and paste I mean create a new entry in the right place with the same text and delete the old record).
So, if you were wondering, now you know.
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blogarticle[5] = "No don’t worry, I’ve not been influenced by our trip in the deep South, haven’t taken up playing the harmonica and writing songs about my dog running off with my woman whilst my sister is run over by a steam roller, it’s the promised retrospective of the trip now the dust has settled, the bags have been unpacked and the washing done.
So where do I start? I guess having been back at work for a couple of days, I start by planning the next trip and working out how I can get someone else to pay for it. However, knowing that it’s not going to happen I’d better tie up the loose ends on this one first.
So, would I do it again? Yes. Exactly the same way? No. That’s for a couple of reasons, firstly as I’ve now done that trip, secondly as I would do some parts differently. It was a strange trip although we had a semi-plan we didn’t have a mission as such. The coast to coast element got introduced in day one and then we half adopted an idea to find a strange place name in each state we visited and to also visit as many states as possible, but the latter two were almost accidental. If I were to do something similar again, I may adopt those two ideas and expand ensuring we had a tripod moment in each state (and obviously a bad pun about the place name).
I’d also liked to have spent more time on the road perverse as that sounds. I was prepared for earlier starts and later finishes. However that said, I would have had a rough idea where the end point for the day would have been to enable a bit of research on places to stay to avoid a couple of those places right next to train lines.
Would the trip have been better if it was just Rag and I? Tough question, that was the original thought, and if that had been the case we would have had the car fitted with hand controls so as we could have shared the driving, but would we have had the same experiences? When we did split it did allow Rag and I to crank up the stereo and stick Octane on the car’s satellite radio, plus we were able to get the early starts and the miles under our belt, but it felt like something was missing. It was difficult for John, not driving or navigating, he was always in the back looking out of the window, but that was always going to be the way with the road trip. What he and Ivan did bring was some local knowledge from chatting to folks in bars and taxis, without them we wouldn’t have found Tootsies in Nashville or the place in Vegas, or indeed have visited as many Hooters/Winghouses as we did, but Rag’s doctor may see that as a bad thing. I guess I don’t know what idea they had at the outset, but I was happy just covering lots of miles, eating and holing up in the hotel and blogging in the evening. I know that isn’t most people’s idea of a holiday, but it was a road trip and the holiday part came in Vegas, although I could have done with an extra day or so there (my bank manager may disagree).
I hope John and Ivan got something out of the trip, I know they had a good time in Santa Monica; it was a shame that Ivan was so ill in Vegas. I know how he felt; I’m still recovering from it now.
Ok so how about places I’d go back to? Tombstone would be good for a whole day, as would the Kennedy Space centre. Not sure about Pigeon Forge, intriguing, looked as if it could be worth another look but it’s not near anything else other than Dollywood and I don’t plan on visiting that.
What about Route 66? It’s a bit of a cliché now, as mentioned in a previous post, it doesn’t exist as a road in itself so is it worth travelling along? Probably not, it’s been done before, the one thing you can guarantee about our trip; no one has done that route before.
So what about the next trip? As Rag said in his posts and the vote page, we’ll look at doing another and no doubt base it around a sporting event, but we need to think about where and when. At least I don’t have to worry about getting a pass out to spend two weeks away from the missus and the kid, however knowing Mrs Rag I’d no doubt she’d pay me to take him away and give her the break.
What about future blogs? Well there is the OBlogs section on this site, but unless work suddenly becomes like a road trip with a new adventure each day, the frequency may be slightly less, but if there’s an opportunity for a bad pun I’m sure I’ll find a way of working it in somehow. So happy reading if you pop back once in a while, otherwise we’ll see you for the next trip.
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