mike the mountain

Halloween, baby. Definitely my favourite excuse to dress up funny and harass strangers into giving you candy.

Thought this year was going to be a bust… Dreamgirl and I were signed up for some all day fundraiser with my office on Saturday (aka: grownup Halloween party day), and we figured we’d be dead by the evening and not really in the mood to drive an hour into Toronto to hit the big club scene. So be it, we’ll still hand out candy on Tuesday, and maybe just find a local bar to pop into.

Then salvation!

On Friday I got the call that every other member of our team had dropped out due to various illnesses, prior commitments, [insert excuse here]‘s, so we were free! Gee, I bet it’ll be easy to find costumes Friday evening of Halloween party weekend…

No worries, after surfing a few options we hit Hollywood Costumes up in Thornhill. Packed, but still a decent selection left. Chrystal found an AMAZING ghostly-spirit costume, all flowing white lace and gossamer. And just to match, I grabbed a wicked looking LOTR Ringwraith costume, all black, ripped and shredded and making a perfect match to the angel beside me.

If only it was that easy.

We figure we’re set for Saturday, have to pick up a couple extra accessories during the day, and then head to town for the big club crawl. I snagged us the last couple tickets for a great sounding event through Party Crawls. Should be a blast. Of course as soon as we get home we rip open our costume bags to try them on… Chrystal looks awesome, just needs some white face paint, stockings, etc.. I, on the other hand, pull on a black stocking with couple strips of mesh. It looks like crap. We try to twist and adjust it, stare at the pic on the bag, eventually we had to accept it. Half the costume was missing. All I had was the plain black piece that is to be worn underneath the big scary gothic cloak and hood. Useless.

Now I’m mad. Not only do I not have a costume, but I’m going to have to try and return the one I did buy after the big party weekend… I’m sure no one has ever tried to run that scam before. “Uhh, yeah, I know it looks like I wore it, and it smells like beer, but seriously it didn’t, uh, fit. Yeah. Can I have my money back?”

Oh yeah, and I still need to find something to wear for Saturday night.

No problem. Hit teh interwebs, grab a list of every costume shop in 50K, and first thing Saturday morning (relative concept when you get up at 5:30am all week), we’re on the road. Not a ton left. Big surprise. Finally get to one of the coolest costume shops I’ve ever seen: Seams Like Magic, in Waterloo. And there it is. Sitting right at eye level (for me anyways), front of the rack. Calling to me. The perfect costume.

Two words.

Zombie.

Cowboy.

Hell yeah! Now I’m REALLY excited. Grabbed a few accessories (bandito ‘stache, grey hairspray, “Severe Wound” makeup, bullet belt), headed over to Winners to grab a suitably cowboyish shirt that I wouldn’t feel too bad about ruining, stopped by a mall to grab some white fishnets and white Crocs for Dreamgirl’s costume, and we are ready to rock.

The party started out really well, awesome first bar, great mix of crowd, some amazing costumes (we took 3rd place, behind two guys dressed as Duff Beer bottles and a very uncomfortable looking “Horse From Brokeback Mountain”!). Unfortunately, as the night went on it became very apparent that this was not our scene. Each bar we went to got younger and younger, and neither of us really enjoyed being stuffed into an overcrowded bar full of drunk 19 year olds. Been there, done that, we were hoping for something a little more mellow. After almost getting in fights at two different clubs (someone tried to get “physical” with my Dreamgirl, so I got “physical” with him), we called it a night.

Even though it didn’t end on the best note, overall I still had a fun time. If you are in the mood to really rip it up and go crazy, I definitely recommend Party Crawls. Great group of guys, well organized, obviously having a ton of fun. Thanks again Mike!

Now where’s my candy…

~~~~~

Necessity breeds invention. Frustration breeds apathy.

When it comes to software (or any other tool), Necessity (“I need to get this job done”) + Frustration (“this stupid thing won’t work!”) = “Screw it, I’m using something else!!”

Yesterday’s case in point: Excel.

For some reason, Office just wasn’t working for me. Outlook crashed twice while trying to send an e-mail. Word locked up when I tried to copy a few lines of text. Excel just plain wouldn’t open, it froze on a blank screen (no worksheet) and half-rendered icons! Enough, bugger the whole mess. Fire up the ‘fox (IE7! Now almost as good as Firefox was 2 years ago, only with less security!), not enough patience to install OpenOffice at the moment, then I remember that announcement from Google a few days ago about their new spreadsheet application. Time to give it a spin.

First thing I needed was a test project. Something simple, so I wouldn’t lose too much time if I had to redo it later, but just complex enough for me to test the functionality.

I mentioned previously that I was testing out another new friend from Google Labs: Google Reader, an RSS reader/aggregator. Well, I haven’t looked back, and now use it exclusively. Looks great on my work PC and home Mac, super easy to use, no worries. The only thing I was missing from Bloglines was the ability to automatically generate a blogroll for my website here. I know some people don’t think much of personal sites that list a ton of links for sites they enjoy, but personally it’s one of my favourite things about blogs, link surfing all over the net, finding what other people enjoy reading that I may not have heard of yet. I needed to figure out a way to export my blogroll from Google Reader, even if I had to hard code the links into my template.

**GEEK WARNING**

Google Reader definitely did not make it as easy to export my list of feeds; clicking on Export (at least in Firefox) simply opened up another page with the raw OPML code, that one then has to save as an XML file, then manually change the extension. Still doesn’t help me that much. I suppose I could have just copied the raw OPML text and sorted out the links and titles I wanted, but I was hoping for something a little more elegant. While researching the protocol, I found a link to a Firefox extension that adds OPML import/export functionality to the Firefox Bookmarks manager.

This helps me.

I had a basic script written in Excel that took the exported bookmarks from Firefox and extracted the links and titles in the basic format I wanted:

<LI><A HREF="http://www.mikelawton.com">mike the mountain</A>

I used this for my blogposts when I would have a large number of links I wanted to put up. I always keep a “Temp” folder in my bookmarks bar where I would drop links I wanted to check out later. Instead of manually bringing up every bookmark and manually copying the info into a post, I would just export the Temp folder, drop it into Excel and come out with a conveniently formatted list.

Figuring the same process would work for me here, I went through all the steps, only here was the point at which Excel decided I was having way too much fun and proceeded to freeze on me. Multiple times.

And now we’re back to where I started this post!

Happy ending though, Google Spreadsheets worked like a charm, and even though I had to go through a couple extra steps, I now have my entire blogroll posted (if statically) on my site. Admittedly, I did miss having a Find/Replace function, but it wasn’t too hard to do it by hand.

For those of you using Google Reader and desiring a (relatively) simple process to export and post your blogroll, I offer the following:

1 – Google Reader –> Manage Subscriptions –> Import/Export –> Export your subscriptions
2 – Click on the “Export…” link; if necessary save resulting page and change extension from .xml to .opml
3 – With the OPML Extension installed, open the Bookmark Manager and choose Import –> OPML
4 – File –> Export –> Bookmarks
5 – Open the resulting bookmarks.html (or whatever you called it) in Word (I know, I know… you’ll see why in a second), converting from Plain Text
6 – Find the list of links you want to post, delete everything else
7 – Convert Text to Table, separating columns at quote marks (“)
8 – Copy table, paste into the spreadsheet application of your choice
9 – Delete/Insert columns and/or cells to get the tags, addresses, and text in proper order (ignore the extra BREAK tag in F5 in my picture)
10 – Use the CONCATENATE function to put the whole line together in one cell (see the formula for Column F)
11 – Highlight the cells and paste them into whatever editor you use

It ain’t pretty, but it works.

My dear friend Joey deVilla (aka: Accordian Guy) is having some fun at the moment with a little Googlebombing campaign against his deadbeat ex-housemate. A local news broadcast even picked up his story (link).

There’s nothing worse than having someone you thought of as a friend screw you out of money (I’ll tell you a story about a golf tournament one day), and I think that Joey’s response is hysterical and awesome and geeky in all the right ways. So in honour of Mr. deVilla, I thought I’d add my meager juice to the campaign. Good luck bro!

deadbeat ex-housemate
deadbeat ex-housemate
deadbeat ex-housemate

So because of various firewall restrictions at work, the only chat protocol I’ve found that I can use is Skype. MSN, Google, AIM, ICQ… all of them are blocked, but Skype goes through. Must use a different port or something, I don’t ask why I’m just glad I have a way to stay in contact. And it’s nice to use it to record phone calls on occasion!

Dreamgirl started her new job this week, and so I feel she needs a new Skype icon. Here’s a bunch I cropped out for her from a few recent vacations… I probably could have just sent them to her so she could choose herself, but how can I deprive the world of such beauty??

Oh, just for the record, here’s my icon:

Ed. – hmph. She made me take out a few pics… Oh well, there’s still enough hotness to go around!

Friday, October 13, 2006.

13/10/2006

1+3+1+0+2+0+0+6

=

13.

I love stuff like this!

(PS – Dow Jones index ended up 13 points!)

Any project that starts out with “hollow out a dead rat” has got to be something special. Oh the evil Halloween fun I could have with all these shiny metal filing cabinets and stressed out employees in the office…

Boing Boing: HOWTO make a glowing dead rat LED throwie

JEEZUZ JUMPIN’ JACKRABBIT this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!!

Movie geek-gasm overload, holy CRAP I can’t even process how many things in this trailer make me want to dance… Zombies! Tom Savini! Crazy Babysitter Twins! Knife-throwing guy taken to the ridiculous EXTREME! They call him freakin MACHETE!! Chaingun on motorcycle! Leg-gun chick! There’s not enough ways to say how psyched up I am for this movie right now!!!

Ripped from Spike TV’s Scream Awards, found it on Ain’t It Cool News. Thank God and Quentin Tarantino. Amen.

A recent post on the always-interesting Lifehacker convinced me to give Google Reader a try. I’ve sworn by Bloglines for as long as I’ve known about RSS feeds, and for the most part I’ve been very happy. There have been a few annoyances (picture alignments not being maintained for example, or the 200 post limit), but I can’t imagine having to go back to reading all my blogs the old fashioned way (actually visiting each site! scrolling through all the content! uphill both ways!).

Like almost with everything they do, Google seems to have put together another winner with their Reader. While certainly aesthetically more interesting, it remains to be seen if it can win out over Bloglines for functionality. So for the next couple weeks I’m going to be giving them both a try, see which one feels right. I know there’s a ton more out there, anyone have any other good suggestions?

~~~~~

“… and I must go.” ~John Muir

Flickr. Tag: Canmore

Three Sisters. Ha Ling. Cascade.

Knowing that places like this exist…

… and that I will soon once again stand amoung them…

… is what makes mornings like this…

… dark, cold, raining, traffic, tired, sore, sick…

… survivable.