Hmmm.. looks like that break-up party has fallen through.. apparently she got back with her boyfriend. Shazbut! More importantly, I wanted to give my sister her birthday present: a nanoloop cartidge. Ah well.

Still working on the chat system, but not so furiously so.. I found out that php supports sessions, which is what I should've used... right now it's a mishmash of javascript, php and cookies. Oy vey.

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HUH! I just noticed that the random image that is supposed to be generated for each entry was NOT very random at all! Apparently the shuffle php function doesn't work too well under certain conditions.

Anyway, I changed it to use good ole mt_rand (Mersenne Twister random), and so you'll see me naked a lot more often. Share and enjoy!

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Ah.. what a wonderful morning. It was actually WARM outside. Spring is in the air (again). Also, I have been working on babelle, surprise surprise! Hopefully I will have her dictionary and grammar database done this weekend. I spent over an hour of debugging trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to two db's at once (I had moved babelle's tables into a new db). Turns out that if you open two db's with the same settings, it uses the same link by default, even though I had explicitly assigned them to two different variables. Anyway, the code is now runnable, so it's just a matter of making sure it's right... eh heh heh...

Oh hey, my mileage went up! 553.6 km, 34.483L -> 16.1 km/L or 6.23 L/100km or 37.87 mpg. Yay! I'm especially impressed since I haven't even been driving all that conservatively, averaging between 120-140 km/h. I've read that around 100 km/h or about 60 mph is the ideal speed for fuel efficiency. But that's kinda hard to do when everyone else is zipping past you.

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I really gotta remember to reset my arrays before looping through them using while. Sure, I could use foreach but I snub my nose at such coding shortcuts. And thus I end up sometimes making mistakes like neglecting to reset my arrays.

Yes, that's right I've been doing some programming in PHP. Not just ANY programming; BABELLE programming! When I was in the hospital I vowed to complete some of the projects that I've left half built, bitten but not wholly consumed. The ones with potential for greatness, anyway. So yeah, these past few weeks I've been reworking Babelle's brain, as it were. Overhauled her handling of sentence structure. Increased the strength of her word associations, which will hopefully mean better grammar. I also found a whole slew of crazy insane bugs that make me wonder how she ever produced anything before.

Still in the testing stage, but beta-testing. I'll release her to the masses when she's ready, which should be "soon enough".

But man.. I was banging my head on the wall for a while there before relearning that I need to use reset (move the internal pointer to the top) on arrays when reusing them. Hopefully I've ironed out all the bugs and can concentrate on Babelle's algorithms and response times/efficiency. Fun fun fun!

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Well it's a fine how-do-you-do; my other memory stick died! For those keeping track, that's the second of two 1GB OCZ sticks dying. At least, I think it's the memory that's gone bad -- I suppose it's entirely possible that the motherboard sockets are gone, which would be quite the pain. On top of the cost of replacing the motherboard, there's the installation process. So yeah, I'm really hoping it's the sticks themselves that have gone. Strange, it's so quiet in my apartment when the computer is off. Is this how it must've been, back in the 19, uh, 1910s? I remember as a kid disappointed when in a house that didn't have a computer or TV.

The reason for rebooting my computer, for indeed it was otherwise working fine before I turned it off, was that I'd been fiddling with the webserver and needed to update my HOSTS file. Yes, fiddling with the webserver because I'm getting familiar with MVC and in particular, Symfony, a PHP MVC framework. Inspired, you might say, as I've been learning about MVC at work. That and jQuery, a nifty JavaScript library. Oh I am learning a lot, reminding me of my university days when faced with reading textbooks and scanning articles; mindnumbing stuff. Maybe my brain just gets full? Whatever it is, I get tired at work, head-droopingly tired. Thankfully I have started doing some real, productive work which keeps me awake through stress ie. concern that I didn't actually learn anything and just slept a lot.

Looking at real estate listings is a lot like on-line dating -- you flip through descriptions and pictures, musing what'd be like to live there/date them. After you've seen a few places (met a few faces), you get an idea of what to expect based on the profiles. And so you act less often, growing tired and not feeling the need to see what they would really be like. Oh sure, you believe that there's one out there for you, and so you keep looking but the day after day of mediocre or unsuitable (or simply totally out of my league) matches does drain one's will, leaving one to compare them with the ones that got away.

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2010/08/03 Hwan I won't say that all is well (for I don't believe it to be so), but I am better. Thanks to all for asking!
2010/07/20 QYV Expected range for Creatinine for guys is 60 - 110 umol/L
2010/07/20 llamariffic Hmm, macrocytosis here as well, but to be honest I've had it since before I truly embarked on drinking as a proper hobby. Similarly, stopped drinking entirely, and it didn't go away. Just one of those things, I think.
2010/07/19 girl ack!! It's weird to think that I am now a parental unit. It was nice to see you hwan!
2010/05/21 Hwan I recall trying earplugs well back in my undergrad years, to mixed results. My sleep was troubled by feelings of claustrophobia. I also have a, perhaps unfounded, fear of not hearing the essential alarm in the mornings. However, I may give these another go, thanks.
2010/05/21 llamatron Have you tried sleeping with earplugs? My flat faces out onto a main road, so I've started using the standard foam plugs. It took a few nights to get used to them, but they make a big difference.
2010/05/21 girl The original swedish title: "Men who hate women". I'm not sure if it's the fault of the translation, but I never liked the reporter dude.
2001/03/07 Hwan Damn.. it seems Unweb has since died. http://www.gamegrene.com/node/183
2001/03/07 TY SHARDEL YOU CAN TRADE WITH THE UNIVERSE AND ENABLE SOCIAL NEEDS, OR PERHAPS POST WISH LISTS, HUG THE GLOBE LIKE A BIG OCTOPUS... TY
2010/03/24 Hwan I am amused by the John Irving comparison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Irving#Recurring_themes