The holidays are hard work. I’m finally beginning to realize this. Between the shopping, decorating, and rush rush rush feelings, a whole lot of effort goes into prepping for a cold night in December. Now that it’s finally here, and most of my stuff has been taken care of, I guess I can enjoy it. I just wish it was more fun getting here.

The #1 ranked Fighting Illini basketball team continued its dominance over every other team it’s played when we beat Mizzou at the Border War game Wednesday night. Mom, Aaron, Tony and I went and had a great time. We met up with Josh, Sarah and Chad and Company afterwards. I’m still drinking water recovering. Earlier that day, I went to the Casino Queen in STL and lost all my Christmas money. But, I got to lose it at $2 craps, and that’s pretty great.

Winston is doing well. The week I’ve been home I’ve played nursemaid and chauffer for him to his different doctors and events. He just had another dose of chemo yesterday and is hanging low right now, but he’ll be okay.

I should go and get things ready for tonight/tomorrow. Happy Christmas blog fans!

Welcome to the new site with the new look. I finally moved away from my home-grown blog to a pre-packaged one called Wordpress. It uses PHP and Mysql, so it’s almost the same as mine. The upside is I get a bunch of cooly features I didn’t have before (like skinned themes, different views, plugins, etc.) and it didn’t take any/much work to get that going. I also can port the features I had in my blog to Wordpress hacks or plugins (I’ve already done a few,) and those things I can share with others.

What I haven’t figured out yet is how to integrate the non-blog pieces of the site into the blog. I don’t know if I want to have them completely isolated, or somehow mixed.

I’m on vacation all week, and so far it’s been busy and lazy. We’ve been decorating, baking, shopping, wrapping, cooking, watching movies… I took Winston to the vet yesterday for his checkup and we’ll go get some more chemo on Thursday. Braggin Rights game is tomorrow night, and I’m pumped. There’s so much to do, I need to be treating this as a ‘work week’ and getting up and going to bed at a normal hour … But there’s something really fun about staying up late over Xmas break, working on nothing important at all. I’ve been doing that since college. Seems like the last couple of winters it has been blog editing, along with playing cribbage with Junior. I should see if he’s still interested in that…

Two days ago, I put out garbage like normal before I left for work. The leaves from raking this weekend were in bags on the curb. My trash company will pickup the lawn bags if they have stickers on them I purchased from the trash company. It sucks, but it’s how they get their money for yard waste. I had more bags than I had stickers, so I just tagged the ones on the outside of the pile. I figured they can take what they will, and if they leave (heh, get it, leaf any…) bags I’ll just get more stickers.

And then I drove into work and noticed gas on Green street was cheap… $1.67/gallon. (It’s sad that I think that’s cheap…) I figured with finals week ending and the holidays here, prices are going to shoot up soon. I needed to fill up anyway for my trek home this weekend, so I stopped and filled up.

On the way home from work, I noticed gas had shot up to 1.85. I had chosen…wisely. And then, when I drove into my driveway, I noticed all the leaf bags had been picked up; even the ones without stickers.

I win!

This one is to see how the [[wiki words]] are working. Interesting thoughts:

mooseyard.com/Jens/index.php?name=thoughts-on-wikifying-wordpress

weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress-12-wiki-integration/

I think the second one is closer to what I’m looking for, but the first is easier so I’ll start there.

Mental note dropped here so I don’t have go looking for the info each time I need it:

Sun 12/19/2004 Valparaiso Assembly Hall 4 p.m. CT
Wed 12/22/2004 Missouri St. Louis, Mo. ESPN2 7 p.m. CT
Mon 12/27/2004 Longwood Assembly Hall 7 p.m. CT
Thu 12/30/2004 Northwestern State Las Vegas FOX Sports Net Chicago 6 p.m. CT
Fri 12/31/2004 Cincinnati Las Vegas FOX Sports Net Chicago 7 p.m. CT

Oh, btw, today is Garfield’s most not favorite day - Monday the 13th.

Another hour’s worth of fidding with WordPress this evening, and now I have skins (or themes or templates or styles, or whatever your preferred name for them is,) working for the site. I tried to grab some of my favorites - simple ones, but ones I liked. It’s cookie-linked with a preference, so you can pick your favorite.

I really like that some features I can just turn on, like skins and post categories, and the search works, and there’s a calendar. There are some functions I still want to find or port from my blog before I go live with this, but it’s good enough for now. I’m going to keep loading this up with content so I can see more recent stuff. I’ll try to keep the old blog in sync, maybe.

For the first time in a month, I spent the weekend in Champaign. Saturday, I slept in and watched the #1 ranked Illini beat Oregon. Then, I did bills and got caught up around the house, and went to the CS holiday party. We went out afterwards to a new bar downtown Champaign that’s the ‘new’ Blind Pig, but has a painted sign that says REFRIDGERATION outside the bar. It was a pretty cool place.

Today, I slept in again and raked leaves. 13 bags of leaves out of the backyard, to be exact. I had been meaning to get these up for a while, but as I mentioned, I’ve been gone. Now to see if the trashman will take them in a timely manner.

I watched “In the Bedroom,” a 2003 acadamy award best picture (and 4 other awards,) nominee. It wasn’t that great.

It’s really cold and windy right now, and the wind whistles around the storm door at the front of the house. Oh, this is also my first post in WordPress, a new blog software I’m evaluating.

People who aren’t perl geeks can skip over this entry.

A reference in perl is like a pointer in C; it’s a scalar that acts as a location to another data structure. References allow you to get the most out of perl’s three native data structures - the scalar, the list, and the hash. Perl doesn’t support multidimension arrays, but it does let you have an array of references, where each reference can point to another array. References are pretty slick, as I can have a hash of a hash of a hash.

The problem is I don’t use references that much, and each time I need them I have to relearn them. Specifically, using n-dimensional hashes and foreach loops. So, here’s my blog entry so the next time I’m looking for info on references, I can start here.

Old newsgroup post explaining references

Perldoc’s perlreftut - Mark’s very short tutorial about references

My latest code snippet that seems to work with this data construct:

$MASTER{”2004-11-04″}{”2302-g”}{”users”}{”mussulma”} = 3;

foreach my $day (sort keys %MASTER) {

  print "$day\n";

  foreach my $radio (sort keys %{$MASTER{$day}}) {

    print "\t$radio\n";

    foreach my $tub (sort keys %{$MASTER{$day}{$radio}}) {

      print "\t\t$tub\t\t\t\t(Max unique ";

      my $uniq = scalar keys %{$MASTER{$day}{$radio}{$tub}};

      print $uniq;

      print ")\n";

      foreach my $val (sort keys %{$MASTER{$day}{$radio}{$tub}}) {

        print "\t\t\t$val (" . $MASTER{$day}{$radio}{$tub}{$val} . ")\n";

      }

      $ap = radio_to_ap($radio);

      if ($tub eq "macs" or $tub eq "users") {

        print FH "$day,$DATE{$day},$ap,$tub,$uniq\n";

      } 

      if ($tub eq "totaltraffic") {

        print FH "$day,$DATE{$day},$ap,$tub," . $MASTER{$day}{$radio}{$tub}{"total"} . "\n";

      }

    }
  }

The part that always makes me stumble for a bit is using the foreach loops. I suppose I could do each nested foreach loop with the data reference I used in the previous foreach, but I find it easier just to keep the whole data structure intact. There’s probably a better way to do this.