crafty

Serger Test #1

While I was sorting through some of my random crap last week, I found a Ziploc baggie of buttons. Pins. Whatever you want to call them. I used to collect them, once upon a time — not really as a hobby, just as something cool to have. Kind of like my varieties of Post-It Note pads. But I digress.

It occured to me that it’s kind of pointless to keep all this crap if I’m only going to pull it out of a box every now and then, look at it, and put it away again. I have other knick-knacks and keepsakes that I’m planning to make shadowboxes for — but for my button collection, a simple fleece display will do.

I had threaded my new Singer Tiny Serger (purchased at Savers for $3) with hot pink, blue, and yellow thread, so that I could tell a.) how to thread the bitch thing, and b.) if it didn’t work, where the problem lay. As it happened, there was no serger troubleshooting needed, but threading it took FOREVER. I really didn’t want to have to rethread it for my next project… so I chose a relatively funky-friendly project to practice with.

All I did was serge around the edges of a 12″x18″ piece of white fleece, install eyelets in the corners (I didn’t use interfacing, and that might come back to bite me later), and thread a couple thread chains from the serger through the eyelets for hanging. Just add buttons. Pins. Whatever.

An extremely simple project, but fun and useful. I’ll get this arts-n-crafts thing down yet.

geekspeak 12 Comments

OMFG SQL WTF BBQ

Dude. SOMEBODY please tell me what’s wrong with this statement:

$query="UPDATE eventTable SET date='$ed_eventDate',
   eventTitle='$ed_eventTitle', location='$ed_location', 
   desc='$ed_desc' WHERE eventID=$ed_eventID";

I’ve been fighting with this one line for over an hour, trying to get the damn LSM calendar to update, and it keeps telling me I have a syntax error. I know it’s gotta be something small and stupid, but fuck if I can tell what it is.

If you know what’s wrong and you’d like to share, or if you might know but need to see the code around this to be sure, please share your infinite wisdom with me.

I’m getting that old frustrated “Come on, Diana, it’s time for a break / No, I’ve almost got it, I don’t want to stop now” feeling that I used to get when I was learning attempting to learn Macromedia Lingo back in the day. Except this time, I’m not going to stay up all night and watch Weird Al on MTV or Futurama on… whatever channel it was on. I’m going to go to bed instead.

Update, 8/24/2005 8:55pm: It was my variable names! I used “date” and “desc” as variables, and they’re reserved words. Once I changed my variable names, the query worked in MyPHPAdmin. I’m still working on getting the actual page to update, as I have several variable names to correct…

reviews

Last.fm

Audioscrobbler was, at first, a curiosity for me. I downloaded a plugin, and it gave me stats about the music I listen to. It could also spit out an RSS file of what I’ve been listening to in the recent past, which was also quite cool.

It suddenly got cooler.

Audioscrobbler has rebranded itself Last.fm, and can now give even more statistics. Click the “recommendations” link, and Last.fm will look at your favorite artists and give you some other artists you might want to check out. (For me, Last.fm suggests The White Stripes, Wilco, Weezer, Badly Drawn Boy, and Ben Folds Five, among others. I’m already a White Stripes fan, but I don’t listen to them much anymore — Last.fm doesn’t know that, though.)

The absolute coolest part of the new Last.fm, though, is the free Last.fm player. Without paying for a premium Last.fm subscription, you can download the player, click the “Start Radio” link, and select “neighbour radio” to listen to music selected from your Last.fm Neighbours, people who share similar musical tastes with you. Plus, the Last.fm Player transmits the songs you’ve heard, so that they count in your own Recent Tracks and get added to your stats. If I thought shuffle play on my iPod was sweet, this kicks it up a notch. BAM!

But wait! There’s more! On certain artists’ Last.fm info pages, you can click a “preview track” button to listen to a stream of 30-second previews of the artists’ songs. Very cool feature, and it saves the time of going and searching for the most popular song by an artist and downloading it and deciding whether it rocks or sucks before downloading (er, I’m sorry, I meant buying) the entire album.

No, I was not paid for this plug. I’ve just enjoyed discovering this new aspect of my cute little Audioscrobbler. I mainly use Audioscrobbler / Last.fm for finding new music, and this makes the process much more streamlined.

There are some bugs with the system, though. The Last.fm Player is still a touch new, and the buffer stutters sometimes, but I haven’t had too much trouble with it and it’s starting to bug me, especially when it totally stops playing and I have to relaunch the app. Also, the Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes doesn’t upload the play count from my iPod — which is unfortunate, as I listen to most of my music on my iPod these days (several hours at work vs. a couple hours at home).

It’s fun, though. Go sign up. I’ll be your friend, and it’ll be keen.

drumcorps 2 Comments

A Confession

I’m still pissed at myself for my lame rehearsal yesterday. The entire rehearsal wasn’t lame ? the corps made some fairly decent progress overall ? but my own personal performance was sub-par all day. What really gets me is that my poor performance is entirely my fault; I can’t just chalk it up to a bad day. It could have been avoided had I actually practiced during the past two weeks.

It had to be painfully obvious that I hadn’t practiced ? at least, it was obvious to me. My endurance was pathetic. I could barely play by the end of rehearsal, and my lips are still swollen, even today. I tried to admit it and shrug it off at the same time by admitting to my closer corps friends that I’d been working on the website instead of practicing my mellophone.

The truth is, I did neither.