Month: July 2012

all packed for Comic-Con

So the plan is to get up at 5am tomorrow, take a shower and grab a quick breakfast, then head out for the airport at 6am. If all goes well, I’ll be in San Diego just past noon Pacific time.

I got my laundry all done, and I’m all packed and ready to go. I haven’t been on an airplane since 2008, so I’m a little anxious about things. I shouldn’t really have any trouble tomorrow, but I’m worried that something might go wrong or I might forget something.
I’m trying to relax now, and catch up on a bit of SDCC-related news. Unfortunately, the big news item right now is the death of a Twilight fan who was camped out waiting for Thursday’s Twilight panel. She tried crossing Harbor Drive (against the light apparently) and was hit by a car. As sad as that is, I’m still very excited about getting out of NJ and enjoying a few days in San Diego, surrounded by like-minded nerds. The local paper has a good landing page for con news up now.

And I actually managed to leave work today at 6pm, with a fairly clean plate. I cleaned up my email inbox, so I’m done to just 9 messages in there, none of which require any immediate action. Pretty much all my projects are in a “waiting on somebody else” state.  I’m almost afraid to say it, since I don’t want to jinx it, but I may not have to worry (much) about work while I’m away!

peak geek

I’m killing some time this morning reading con-related stuff on the internet. Just stumbled across an article in the local San Diego paper titled “Has Comic-Con reached ‘peak geek?’“. Interesting question. The article talks about how TV is taking a bigger role at the con, as opposed to movies. I’m not much concerned about that either way. I’m honestly not seeing too much this year on either side that I’m interested enough in to actually wait in line for Hall H or Ballroom 20 or wherever else they might be having the ginormous panels. I’d maybe go to the Fringe panel if I could get in without too much hassle. I’m mostly interested in stuff that’s a bit more fringe (with a lower-case f). Like maybe the Gilbert Shelton panel!

no more iGoogle

I’ve had my home page set to iGoogle for several years now, on all of my home computers. (Prior to that, I was using my.yahoo.com.) I just found out that it’s set to be discontinued. I don’t really understand why they’d be discontinuing something that can’t be costing them much money, and that entices people to have a nice big Google search bar on their home page. It’s not scheduled to disappear until late next year, but I decided to switch over to something else now anyway. The only reasonable alternative I could fine was Netvibes. If you go to their home page right now, they’re pushing their corporate dashboard stuff, but you can still sign up for a free account and use it like iGoogle. It’s pretty nice, though the page is slower to load than my iGoogle page is.

what to bring to Comic-Con

I’m having a little trouble deciding on which of my many random gadgets I should bring with me to Comic-Con this year. I’ve been thinking a bit about how this has changed over the years.  I think, for the first couple of years I went, I probably didn’t bring any — no cell phone, no laptop, nothing. If somebody back home needed me, they’d have to call my hotel and leave a message. (And if I had to return the call… geez, remember how much long-distance calls from a hotel phone cost?) And I would just ignore e-mail for the week. It wasn’t a big deal. (Hard to imagine that now.)

I remember bringing various handhelds over the years — my Palm VII, Palm i705, Toshiba E310, and possibly others. And I have occasionally brought a laptop. And a camera.

This year, I will of course bring my iPhone and iPad. I’ll probably bring my Kindle, though maybe not. I want some stuff to read on the plane, but maybe I’ll just bring a couple of graphic novels. Or read comics on my iPad. I *should* bring a laptop. But the wifi on my MacBook has been acting up, so I may not be able to use the internet on it, unless my hotel has wired connections. And my ThinkPad is kind of bulky, so I’d rather not travel with it if I don’t need to. I’m seriously thinking about just taking the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard. I like the idea of not having to lug a laptop around with me.

This will be the first time I’ve gone to Comic-Con since leaving NMS. I had a bit more responsibility there than I do at my current job, so I felt then that it was pretty important to keep up with things, and have the ability to run Lotus Notes, and remote into the network, and stuff like that. My work now is such that I can probably just scan e-mail once or twice a day, and maybe shoot off a quick reply or two here and there. There shouldn’t be any real reason for me to have to remote in. If I’m lucky, I may actually be able to relax and enjoy the con…

More Comic-Con stuff

I spent a little time today double-checking some stuff related to my travel arrangements for Comic-Con. First, I found the paperwork from the last time I went to the con — 2008. So I’ve skipped three years. I guess that’s long enough that it’ll feel fresh and new, to some extent, this year.

This year, I’m staying farther away from the Convention Center than I ever have before. I’m staying at the Hilton San Diego Mission Valley, about 5 miles from the convention center. It’s on one of the con bus routes, but I know from previous experience that those buses can be less than reliable, so I’m happy to have found that it is also a 10 minute walk from the trolley station at Hazard Center. And they’re running some special trolley service for the con, so that should help.

PHP

I’ve been doing enough PHP work lately that this blog post really speaks to me. Here’s a good quote:

PHP isn’t so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

I kind of like Drupal, which is of course written in PHP, but I think I’d like it more if it was written in… something else. I’m not sure what.

You can certainly write good things in PHP, and Drupal is an example of that. CodeIgniter seems like a good thing too,  though I haven’t had much experience with it.

I recently had to do some work on what I’d call a “legacy” PHP site, which was basically all PHP spaghetti code, poorly done HTML, and questionable JavaScript. I wonder how many sites like that one are out there, written 5 or 10 years ago, possibly by an amateur, and working *just* well enough that nobody wants to pay to rewrite it from scratch. Probably a lot!