Winging It

My brother came down to visit (which was an adventure in itself — thank you Dulles) American University this weekend, so this morning we metro’d up to the school.

I tell you, there are parts of college to which I definitely would not mind returning. Interestingly, the learning part is the appealing part. I guess I say "interestingly" because so frequently one will hear someone reminisce about the craziness of college; the parties, the stunts, etc. I’m kind of glad that I miss the learning, or rather, the freedom to simply pursue those areas that interest you. Not that you can’t once you’re out of school, but it is harder.

Anyway, American University looks like a pretty cool school. It’s kind of expensive, but sounds like they provide good financial aid opportunities (much like Allegheny). The campus was rather pretty, if somewhat small. The whole thing is WiFi though, which is sweet.

Decided to go to The Front Page for lunch (off Dupont Circle). It’s a cool restaurant that I haven’t been to for almost 2 years now. If it were close, I’d probably go more often but King Street in Alexandria’s got tons of good and great places to eat, so going to downtown DC is kind of out of the way.

Also hit the Apple store in Clarendon. Just kind of browsed a bit. By the way, Holy Crap is the 30" Cinema Display big. I mean, ok, yeah, 30" is big and it’s something you can sort of grasp… but it’s really big. Seeing is believing I guess. The new G5 iMac is pretty cool looking, but I wouldn’t give up my G5 tower.

Guess that’s it.

Ok, so it wasn’t a big adventure, but it was a little one. Ok, maybe tiny.

I went to pick up my brother at Dulles. His plane was supposed to land at 7:08 PM. Ok, cool. I’ll leave work right at 5:30 and should get there not too long before he lands (or maybe even after if traffic is heavy).

Turns out traffic is very light. Like, extremely light and I end up there at 6:30. Ok, no big deal, I’ll kill time for 45 minutes.

7:08. Board says landed, but I’m going a bit stir-crazy. Waiting is boring and I didn’t think to bring a book with me. Doh! Amusingly, someone has checked a purse as baggage. One of the very very few times that I wish I had a camera in my cell phone.

7:15. Excellent, he should be appearing any time now. And with no luggage to pick up, we’ll be out of here shortly.

…

7:30. Well, ok, maybe there was a delay getting them to the gate so they could disembark. Funny bit here, some guy walks up to me (as I’m casually leaning against a railing in my work clothes — today khakis and a polo shirt) and says, "Excuse me, do you work here?" Uhhh… I chuckle and say no, to which he responds "Oh, well you look official."

I guess the rumpled khakis and polo shirt coupled with a bored but attentive look make me look like I’m some sort of airport official.

7:45. Did he get ridiculous on me and head off to some other baggage claim area? Where the hell did he go.

7:50. I’m getting ready to page his sorry ass and make him feel very silly when I see him exiting the passenger area. WTF?! Turns out that, no, the plane had landed about 10 or 15 minutes ago. So thank you Dulles. It makes me feel pretty good to know that you are willing to indicate that a plane has landed when it hasn’t. Good job. Spectacular.

At least someone thought I worked at the airport.

I thought it was Friday, but apparently I’m wrong. You see, Friday is suppose to be a rather slow day. No one has a crisis, lots of people have taken the day off, etc.

So why have I been running around like crazy for the last hour?

That’s when it struck me, today must not be Friday. By some cosmic glitch, it isn’t Friday even though it is.

Damn rude if you ask me.

So I updated to WordPress 1.2.1 as I mentioned earlier.

In doing so, I cleaned up a lot of the modifications I’ve made to the default WordPress installation (namely the Weather Box thing and the Neverwinter Nights server status). Basically I turned them into plugins so as to make it easier to upgrade to future WordPress versions.

In the spirit of cleaning up, I decided to fix the hidden categories hack. It’s still a bit of a hack, but it’s a lot cleaner in all regards. There is still some silliness (like with the calendar), but now hidden categories are much more integrated.

Ok, I guess it’s time to go to bed. After all, work tomorrow and picking up my brother at the airport.

Updated to WordPress 1.2.1, I gather it fixed a security vulnerability.

If you’re terribly interested, you can read up about it on the WordPress site.

I did some preliminary work on adding "hidden" categories to WordPress (my blogging engine).

It is not a private category modification. Here is what it does right now:

1. Hidden categories do not show in the Category list
2. Posts that are only in hidden categories do not show on the front page
3. If you are logged in, hidden categories (and posts to those categories) show

There are some glitches, too:

1. The calendar will "see" posts made to hidden categories, but those articles will not show up in that day’s posts (this is because some variables seem to get set when there are multiple posts on the same day so I can’t use them to determine if we are viewing the Home page or an archive view.)

Hidden categories can still be gotten to from many other areas (if you know the URL to the category, if you know the URL to a post in the hidden category, etc.).

Now that I’ve got a little knowledge of how the WordPress system works, I may try to add support for private categories. It’s a little tricky, and to do it so that it stays fast is going to require some thought (the hidden categories hack is not fast).

… while I fall asleep…

*thunk*

News-Miner - Past News — Bull Moose in Power Lines

Stumbled on this through Fark. If you don’t know what Fark is, check it out. I don’t claim to be a daily reader (or viewer? or… I don’t even know what the term would be), but a few references (from the Halloween lights and WWdN) today made me decide to see what was going on there.

Alek’s Halloween Decorations & Halloween Lights

Over the last couple of years, Alek has put up lights (for both Christmas and now Halloween) that are viewable and controllable online.

It’s a fun little place to stop by and check out from time to time while the "event" is going on. Here’s a direct link to the webcam page. He’s having some trouble with the "Slashdot Effect" so give it some time (an hour or two) if it’s not up.

Ugh… I was up way too early today to be in and "on call" in case there were problems with some maintenance work that took place.

It really needs to be Friday right now, not Thursday.