*What I’m Watching or Listening to Now*

Random Marathon O’ Shit… *rolls eyes*

*Random Question* OR *Random Quote*

I’ve been working on a few projects again recently where the developers are from all over the world, so English comes in a variety of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘broken’, and ‘what the fuck did he say?’… Anyway, the ‘question of the day’ has nothing to do with working/dealing with foreign speakers or even about how they view Americans. Instead, the question is why does America have such an endless supply of morons that make us all look bad to the rest of the world? Here’s an example… I was at the McDonald’s drive-thru a few days ago and could hear the woman in the vehicle ahead of me order.

Customer: “Do you have a pen?”
Employee: “Do you need a pen ma’am?”
C: “No, it’s for you, I have a really big order and you better not screw it up.”
E: “Don’t worry about that ma’am, the register takes care of all that when I enter it in.”
C: “Fine, I have a coupon for the Whopper… it’s a buy one get one free, but before you ring that up …”
E: {interrupts} “We don’t serve the Whopper, did you mean a Big Mac?”
C: “I don’t care what you call it, I have a coupon. Now, as I was saying, before you ring up the first one, I want that free one to be my second order
before I have another coupon that’s buy one get one free and so that first one is going to be my free one from the second coupon.”
E: “Ma’am, it doesn’t work that way…”
C: {interrupts} “Don’t tell me how it works, I pay your salary with my taxes you little punk” {Note: the guy sounded like he was in his 30’s}
E: “Ma’am, is there any way you could come into the lobby and we can figure this out?”
C: “I will not come in, I’m in line already because I’m in a hurry.”
E: “Sorry about that ma’am, please pull around to your second window and I’ll have a Manager waiting to speak to you.”

The woman pulled around and I was finally able to order. After pulling around myself I noticed she was still parked in front of the window yelling at the manager because they wouldn’t take her coupons. At one point she just screamed “Give me my g*d damn Whopper” and the employee said “Then go to Burger King where your coupons are for a whopper, we have the Big Mac here… She pulled away from the window towards the road so I moved ahead, got my food, and had to sit there because the stupid bitch still hadn’t pulled out of the parking lot and there wasn’t enough room to leave. 🙁 All in all, I felt bad for the employee and probably wasted about 20-25 minutes of all of our lives because she wasn’t even at the right place.

P.S. I think I got food poisoning that night as well.

*Actual updates*

As I stated above, I’ve been working on some projects lately (directly and some indirectly) that I’m rather excited about. Below are just a few that I can share, in no specific order:

NextGen Portal

This project has changed so much since originally being introduced somewhere around a year ago. It’s changed hands a bit, it’s been fully rewritten from scratch multiple times… pretty much everything is different, except it’s core purpose. As the first part of the name suggests, this project takes the original “HTPC Portal” to the next generation.

History:

Technically it all started with the ‘basics’ (SickBeard, CouchPotato, Headphones, and a few others) which spawned both MediaFrontPage and Maraschino. XBMC Forum user “hernandito” created a ‘wrapper’ for Maraschino that had a slight resemblance to MFP (don’t remember if that was intentional) in purpose. Not long after its initial creation, I took over the lead of “HTPC Portal”, while continuing to work with hernandito I rewrote his version in PHP and started adding a few things here and there. The project kind of fizzled after a few active months, mostly due to my medical issues, but since most of the site worked properly and there weren’t really any ‘death bugs’ I kind of lost interest. Fast forward to the end of the year and I decided to silently start working on it again (haven’t updated anything on GitHub yet). I’ve written the entire thing from scratch adding a whole pile of new features and should be ready for some beta testers soon.

New Features:

• Entire Framework Built Specifically with HTPC related features
• Quick Switching between HTPC Apps (SB, CP, Sab, etc.)
• Image ‘Checker’ (for now, scans your media sources and allows you to monitor for missing ‘folder.jpg’, ‘fanart.jpg’, ‘logo.png’, etc.)
• Simple Editing/Updating of certain XBMC Database fields (Hopefully more can/will be added) : No MySQL support, internal database only at this time
• Other stuff I can’t think of right now…

HTML Generator

I’m not attached to this project.
In under a month since the first public release, the author DeadSix has taken a wonderful app for HTPC enthusiasts to show off their media collection to friends and family and made it even better. A few days after initial release DeadSix and I started talking, I mainly was giving bug reports, some feature suggestions, and beta testing. When he introduced the ability to select a theme to the generated output I wrote two themes that are included with the app and plan on updating these as needed for future versions and possibly adding more of them later.

Some Select Features:

List based on latest version at time of writing (6.2)

• Auto (or Manual) scan of your XBMC Database (MySQL Support coming soon*)
• View both poster and fanart (optional) image for each show/movie (if available)
  • Click either of these images to bring up fancybox (per video)
• MediaInfo (Codec) scanning of media details
• Ability to sort your TV/Movies (by name, date released, last played, XBMC ID, File Size, Resolution)
• Auto Generation (start program with ‘/auto’ switch)
• Ability to show/hide pretty much anything
  • Trailers (plays inline from YouTube)
  • Generated On
  • Last Played
  • File Size
  • Release Date
  • Episode Count
  • Studio
  • Rating
  • Info Link (Displays IMDB/TVDB/AniDB link for media)

*Listed as an upcoming feature on first post of thread
More information available about “HTML Generator” on its XBMC Forum Thread.

So Far Unnamed Project

A new C# project I was contracted for in regards to network management… Once I finish it I’ll talk to them about maybe releasing it (in whole or in parts). I’ve always been more akin to the web development side of programming so this is my first C# application, but as DeadSix seems to say, “All programming is the same, you know one, you know them all” and I have to say that I’ve learned a lot so far with this app and Dead’s right in the sense that I’m picking it up quicker than I had originally thought. Granted there are a few things that take some getting used to but if I realized they were this close I probably would have made the jump years ago and been able to make some ‘real’ money on a more regular basis.

The Rest

I have two other projects I’m working on, the first should be done by this weekend and the other one is just one of those “doing it for myself” kind of things that I’ll get done some time… or more likely never. But I’ve been working on this post on and off for hours (TV is distracting) and it’s after 5am so I’m going to bed and I’ll try to start posting more often again. Well, one last thing, speaking of posting more often, part of the reason I haven’t been posting to often for the last six months or so is I got back into using Facebook (mainly to get certain friends to stop hounding me about it) but now I’m back to the “Fuck Facebook” mentality, so I’ll try writing here instead.