Here is a classic picture of Florida at street level. Florida, the State that can’t do anything right. They say people come here to hide. Seems to me, they could do a lot better but maybe that could be some people I know, so I won’t mention it.
Cowboy Mike called, we are getting together in an hour for a photo shoot of his peppermills. He didn’t have his camera for the past three weeks. This is good timing, as I’ll use the Thrift eBay account and plug these heavily. He also reports being hassled by the Runt, who repeatedly calls him in a drunken stupor after midnight. We could put the Runt away any time, but we are waiting for him to do it himself. The Runt does not seem to understand that they will put him a mental institution this time, where there are no “sentences”. Then he can be with all his new age friends forever, blaming the world.I’m missing my flash drive. The last I used it was at the shop, so I’ll check there first. Good thing everything is backed up. I stayed up totally late last night and read the PHP specifications. The book claims that it does create “dynamic web pages” but does not give examples of exactly what that is, a disease I call the “MicroSoft Mentality”. It explains in detailed jargon how each function works, but not how to use it to do anything practical.
The manual also says that there are on-line catalogs that use the PHP-MySQL-Apache partnership to display “only the requested product information”. It must be a two-step process, where the customer fills out an on-line form (don’t we all love to do that?) which is processed by PHP located at the server location. That is, the server sends the form in HTML and responds later. Simple as this is, no book I’ve read outright says so. I’ll be in the shop the remainder of the day trying to find samples of what I want.
The few catalogs I’ve seen just use the PHP as a front-end. That is, the PHP does not generate the web pages, they merely direct the server to send certain static pages. Also, the catalogs seem to scroll down the page infinitely, something I don’t want.
Next, we get back to Steve, the cancer guy. The last rumor is he was to be in the slammer for another near-year, recall? It seems that he is due to be out in another six or seven days. That would be wonderful news, particularly for Pudding. Ah, how could I just get rid of a lovely little cat I’ve known for months. Hey, watch me. All his gear is ready, including a bicycle to get him on the road again.
Next in line is the peanut parade. I know I’ve said to stick to Jumbo peanuts, but what to do if they have run out? You buy the cheap ones, work all day on the database, and swear you’ll never trust Publix again. I say unto Publix, run out of free samples and harpoons, but not peanuts. I got over to Cowboy Mike’s for the photo shoot. Things went well but he kept cracking me up with some kind of impersonations while I was trying to concentrate on good photos.
Mike and I got to talking. Sure enough, due to a [yet another wasted] practice at the Runt’s place, we have almost a full set of Blues material He has a cda disk of the tunes [like “Alberta”] that I will quickly rip to MP3s. He’s got a place or two on the beach lined up, and yes, I remember all his material. So he came by the shop and I burned a few copies.
It took me hours of research, but I went through the more obvious web sites that display query results in a picture format. It can be done, but can it be done by me in time? I think I’ll move slowly and surely on that one. This part of the day was broken up by this crabby lady who came in. She had a laptop that just would not play PowerDVD due to some strange setting she had adjusted. She began to whine that it had worked properly before. I straightened her out. Yes, it did work, then it did not work and you brought it in here. I don’t care how it worked before, it now works like it is supposed. to.
You want my peeve? Okay, it is morons who activate all those automatic features, like chat lines, instant messaging and buddy list, saying “I like to know who is on line with me.” Can’t live without that, you know.
Except, every time we have to reboot the computer, a very common repair event, yes, you have to pay while I wait for all that logon crap to do its thing. This one had the attitude we were supposed to know. Lady, we are repairing the computer, not the way you log on to AOL. I have no idea how you spent the last year configuring AOL, you should have kept track of all that. I actually told her I was going to stop helping her if she did not quit bitching. It is not our fault her computer cannot be fixed.
On that topic, it was a strange problem. When you booted the DVD player, it reduced the size of the desktop and would not play. Even uninstalling did not correct the problem. I rigged it up so she could use the dreaded Windows Media Player.
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