Tuesday, October 28, 2003

And this is from Sean: What I learned this weekend: Do not go to the post-rehersal party with a group of guys who have been drinking since noon: Reason: John was so drunk that he could not recognize any of his friends and kept on introducing us to his mother by the wrong name. He also said, "Ma whad' you do to hair? You look fuckn' hot! Fuckn' hot Ma" John then nestled his head in the breasts of the groom's mother  To which she replied, "Oh, John you used to be such a cute little boy" Henry at this point is a close second, by tripping and knocking over people and landing on the floor. Then someone crapped their pants, or farted, we shall never know. We went back to the house. This house had one of the large grates in the middle of the first floor that has the single boiler/radiator beneath the grate. I believe this is the sole source of heat for the house. Henry is convinced that taking a piss on this Boiler is a good idea. He took one of those pisses, as if he had been holding it since yesturday. It ranked up there with the top 2 worst smells I have ever had to experience. We evacuated the house for a good 1.5 hours. Some of us even took our clothes out to our cars, because it was so pervasive, engulfing, gaging, permeating smells, that somewhat sober ones did not want to smell like burnt piss at the wedding. The smell was so nasty that it woke the Groom sleeping upstairs. We didn't get our deposit back.   5:22:27 PM    comment []

Moth Ball Ashram This is from Greg, my high school swimming team mate: We have some squirrels who live in the attic crawl space of the dorm building where I sleep. This being an ashram and all, we don't eat them (even if this is a deep South ashram); but we do want to get rid of them. So one of the guys went up there with a box of mothballs and dumped them all around. He even got strategic about it and used a board to roll them way down into the eaves - way down into the eaves where we will never, ever be able to retrieve them. Then he comes downstairs and reads the side of the mothball box. "Do not use to get rid of squirrels, bats, or other large pests." The result is that the dorm is no longer inhabitable, due to the overwhelming stink of mothballs. We were up there last night with a vacuume cleaner trying to suck them back up. I have no idea what fraction of the total number we retrieved. We've had fans - lot's of fans - blowing all day up there with all the windows open, hoping that'd help, but, as I mentioned to some of the people here, you can't exactly "air out" mothballs. Putting out a strong smell for vast periods of time is sort of the whole point of them. In any case, I don't know if the mothballs did anything for our squirrel problem, but one thing is for sure - that dorm will be a great place to store our woolen goods for a long time to come. And don't worry - we've figured out places to sleep for all our guests who will be arriving for a program tomorrow. 5:04:15 PM    comment []

A warning to ye... I can't impress upon ye enough:  set error_handling to E_ALL (verbose) when developing PHP.  You will cut your errors in half.  You can do this in three ways:  uncomment the following line in your php.ini file: error_reporting = E_ALL .  This will affect all PHP scripts add the line error_reporting = 2047 in an .htaccess file.  This will affect only php files in or below the directory of the .htaccess file. add a line of code at the start of every php page: error_reporting (E_ALL);  This will affect only the files that you alter. After you do this you may get a whole page of warnings about undeclared variables.  This is a good thing, since it forces you to declare all variables and lets you know when you introduce new ones into the mix by mistake.  You will  at some point mis-type variable names.  Without error reporting turned verbose, PHP accepts these mistakes as real variables: $species_code = "WAE"; if($speces_code == "WAE"){ //do stuff} The above code exhibits a bad feature of PHP; that you don't need to declare variables before using them. I introduced a variable called speces_code to the PHP script and since it is blank it is not equal to "WAE". It just skipped over this comparison without a blink! Also, set error reporting to zero when in production so that visitors cannot peer into the inner workings of your code and directory structure when they encounter an error. 11:47:51 AM    comment []