What a Pain
I thought I’d wrapped up all of my side jobs, but one came back to haunt me this week in the form of some changes that needed to be made to something I did a couple weeks ago. A whole lot of changes.
Actually, let’s just say that the client’s entire frigging site design is broken — and was from the get-go — and I must fix it. By the end of the week.
I’ve been trying to put in a couple hours on this job each evening this week, at least since Monday when I received the changes. I’ve made some progress, but not nearly as much as I expected given the nature of the changes. On any normal website, these tweaks — “fix gaps here,” “align these blocks there” — would have been fairly simple. But on this website, they’re not simple. Because the site was designed in ImageReady (yeah, that old Photoshop companion program before it was merged into Photoshop itself). And then cut up into ImageReady slices. And then saved automatically into HTML by ImageReady.
If you’re not a web designer, you won’t understand the significance of what I just said. Let me put it into layman’s terms: What I described was an old-fashioned way for inexperienced people to quickly throw a web page together. The problem was, the method resulted in a badly-coded web page that was assembled using the most inflexible HTML known to man, and which looked fine as long as you didn’t touch it, but which quickly went to hell in a handbasket once you started trying to fiddle around.
Worse, somebody started fiddling around before I was even brought on board with this project (yes, the design and its assembly have been done by someone else who remains unidentified). So what once probably looked like a very nice design on ImageReady’s canvas has already been rendered a jumbled, gap-filled mess. Now the client wants me to fix all these little things.
That’s hard enough on the face of it, but there are additional factors working against me, to wit:
- I’m having to make all of my changes in a Remote Desktop session where I have access to only Notepad. (This is because the site has built-in ASP.NET dependencies that have stymied my efforts to get a local copy running on my machine.)
- I don’t know what the original design looked like (in ImageReady) before it got sliced up, nor do I have access to the master files.
I’m rapidly discovering that this is going to take a lot more time than I’d hoped, to the point where I’ll likely need to spend Thursday and Friday evening, followed by all day Saturday, to meet the deadline. I am also starting to think that I should email the client tomorrow and let him know that the hours involved are going to result in what may be a bigger charge than he thought. This guy is usually very laid-back when it comes to money, however — being rather flush with it himself, as I understand — so that probably won’t be a concern, but I don’t want to drop a bomb on the guy.
Pork Buns, Pork Buuuuns
If you’re like me, you often sit in front of your computer screen and think, “Y’know, Weird Al has done so much to advance the cause of parody music in my lifetime. But what I really want is for someone to make a goofy parody of that kooky Asian pop music I listen to.” Then, if you’re also like me, you silently weep because you’re too white (and possibly nerdy) to do such a thing yourself.
But guess what? You’re now in luck: Patty Yu has taken the initiative here, creating the alter-ego BaO, who sings a paean to pork buns based on Korean pop star BoA’s U.S. debut single, “Eat You Up”:
I’m wasn’t a big fan of BoA’s original, but — like Weird Al’s own parodies of songs I didn’t initially like — I find Patty’s version entertaining and goofy, which made me warm up to the original a bit…to the point where I almost kinda like it now. I especially like the cameo by “Kim Jong Il” getting down with some pork buns and a couple of hotties. And not only is the quality of the parody song itself impressive, but the video is also quite well-done, something that can’t be said about many self-made videos in this day and age (and believe me, I say this as someone who has helped make some of those shitty self-made videos in his lifetime).
In a perfect world, this would be a win-win situation for both artists: Patty would be recognized for her creative talents, and BoA would get some badly-needed publicity for her English-language debut album, BoA, which is getting a re-release in September (after flopping pretty badly upon its original release this past March). Normally I’m against double-dipping like this, but considering the original album seems to have had an initial press run of about 25, a re-release might not be a bad thing (note: I’m not saying this is the ONLY reason the album flopped, but it couldn’t have helped).
You can follow Patty at her web site or Twitter, and spread the word if you’re so inclined. And BoA too, I guess. (Seriously, am I the only person in the world who doesn’t have a Twitter account? Should I rectify that?)
I now return you to your regularly-scheduled Oddball Update. Tune in later this week for the five-part epic “Chief Oddball Cosplays as SV-7“! You won’t want to miss it!
Edit (8/1/09): I now have a Twitter account, so I am no longer the only person in the world without one. Hoo-ray!
Over and Done With
Finally finishing up this work day…and in turn, this work week. I just submitted the longest status report that I’ve ever written. It was hard to believe what a huge scope of work I did in just the last five days, but putting it all on paper in my report — as I do at the end of every week — made seeing believing. Thankfully, I’m no longer engaged in the stress-inducing, hair-pulling, faith-in-humanity-destroying concept of side work, so when I put the wraps on a week like this, it actually means that I’m done busting my ass for a day or two.
Tonight, Apple and I are going to Roy’s, mostly (okay, entirely) because we received a $20 coupon for their establishment in the mail this week. I like Roy’s, but it’s pricey and it’s located close to downtown, so on the two or three occasions per month when we go out to eat, I rarely choose to go there. But money talks, and so we’re walking to Roy’s. Okay, driving. But it’s the same meaning.
It’s the off season here in Florida, in a lousy economy to boot, so naturally most of the restaurants in town are scrounging for whatever business they can get. I have to be honest with you: I’m enjoying the spoils. In fact, in the last year I’ve noticed that we’ve been getting a lot of these hefty restaurant coupons in the mail, even for those out-of-control expensive chains like Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. We also get them from local restaurants, who want to give us $20 off if we’ll just PLEASE GOD come in and eat there.
I think this is funny, in a way, because when the economy was booming, these same local joints basically said “fuck you” to us full-time residents, some even going so far as to stop taking carry-out orders from us working stiffs because they would rather serve their fancy-pants rich snowbirds in-house instead. Well, now a lot of those snowbirds have packed up and left, permanently, and many of us working stiffs don’t have the money to eat out as often as we used to, so what’cha gonna do? “Go out of business” was the answer for many local establishments, although I’m pleased to report that a number of really excellent places remain. In fact, this town is a far better place to grab a bite to eat now than it was at the time we first moved here, when the only kind of food you could find was fried grouper this, grilled grouper that. Now they even have Vietnamese.
Speaking of food, we’ve mostly been eating at home. If anything, actually, we’re spending more money on groceries now than we ever have, mostly because our extended stay in Thailand convinced us to start buying better quality (usually organic) produce, create more interesting and healthy meals, and just get a bit more creative with our cuisine. The results have been fantastic, and we have a whole bevy of stuff now that we can cook and enjoy at home. I’ve become a master of grilling fish, shrimp, steaks and all kinds of vegetables, while Apple has put together an array of international cuisine that includes Moroccan-style pork and couscous, Thai lad nah and spaghetti based on my grandmother’s classic Italian recipe. It’s actually gotten to the point where I don’t even miss going out to eat that much, which is saying a lot for me.
Of the “dinner at home” items I can prepare almost entirely myself, I’m perhaps proudest of my homemade pizzas. I don’t even deal with making crust; a pre-made crust from the supermarket is fine. I coat it with olive oil and then cover it with completely organic toppings, usually inclusive of pepperoni, mushrooms, finely-chopped onions and black olives. Ten minutes later it comes out of the oven and you’re drooling all over your shoes. Usually I’ll make one of those little personal-sized pizzas, eat two slices with a salad covered with flax seed and Italian dressing, and call it a meal. It’s fantastic.
Before.
After.
We’ve also recently discovered this really delicious garlic naan sold under Whole Foods’ store brand, and we’re both addicted to it. This week, Whole Foods had a buy one, get one deal on this stuff, so Apple bought a bunch of it today. It tastes great if you toss it on the George Foreman grill and get it heated up, then serve it either as a side dish with whatever you’re having — particularly if there’s sauce involved — or wrap sandwich-type stuff in it and eat it that way.
Tasty garlic naan.
As you might guess, Apple spent a lot of time studying the health benefits of various foods while we were in Thailand, as well as the often-undisclosed dangers of the chemical preservatives and other crap that goes into a lot of the stuff we eat here in the Western world. Honestly, I never thought I was going to be the type of guy who cared how much “high fructose corn syrup” was in his food. Until recently, I always thought people who harped on that were tiresome whiners who needed to just shut up and go eat a cabbage. But having done some study myself, I’ve gotten sucked into the whole “corn syrup is bad” cabal, and have joined Apple on our little “cut out the crap” experiment when it comes to our eating habits.
(And really, corn syrup is just shit as a sweetener. I used to think I hated Coke, but now I realize I just hated the janky corn syrup aftertaste.)
Anyway, time for us to get going. I’ll probably post yet more stuff here over the next two days, but in case I don’t, have a great weekend.
Retro Game Review: Ghost Master (PC)
Rather than devote an entire month to subjecting myself to retro video games — which will never succeed, if history is any indicator at all — I’m going to simply revisit a classic game whenever the mood strikes. When my dalliances in gaming’s ancient past are noteworthy enough, you’ll even get to read about them here. Who knows, you might be inspired to go look in the local second-hand shops for a gem you missed when it was new.
The subject of today’s Retro Game Review is 2003′s Ghost Master by Sick Puppies Studio, a small UK developer that was a division of Empire Interactive Europe Ltd. This somewhat unique strategy game casts you in the titular role of a Ghost Master, whose job it is to command a squadron of spirits as they haunt various locales in the town of Gravenville. You’ll hand-pick a team of ghosts for each mission you’re asked to undertake, and use them to accomplish your objective — whether it be to free a trapped spirit, punish a mortal for meddling in the supernatural, or simply scare everyone away.
The map screen lets you choose your next locale to haunt.
I had fun with Ghost Master when it first came out, but eventually I got bored of it and forgot about it. While waiting for the release of the new Ghostbusters video game on PC and consoles this past month, I was inspired to retrieve my Ghost Master disc from the closet and give it another spin. This time I’m having even more fun with it, and in just a few days managed to get much further in the game than I had before. It was such a good time, in fact, that I was inspired to write this post about it.
When you first start the game, you’re quickly thrust into the world of “supernatural politics” that reminded me a lot of the spirit bureaucracy of Beetlejuice (and do you realize that’s two Beetlejuice references in two consecutive reviews on this site? One more and Michael Keaton will probably show up). Before embarking on your first haunting, you’re assigned a small cadre of ghosts who will do your bidding on the assignment. The map screen lets you select which part of Gravenville you want to haunt next, although at the beginning you’re guided into a tutorial mission to start you off.
Next, on the Team Selection screen, you can choose which of your ghost team you want to accompany you on the mission. You’ll be presented with this same screen before each haunting, where you can either choose your own ghosts or let the game recommend a team for you. I typically find the recommendations sound, especially when you’re trying to free trapped spirits from the next level — more on that later.
Review: Sick Nurses (Suay Laak Sai)
Thai movie poster for Sick Nurses (Suay Laak Sai)
In Thailand, Sick Nurses was billed from the get-go as a horror/comedy, and knowing that up-front, the film makes a whole lot more sense. Whereas the Thai movie posters and artwork featured whimsical portraits of smiling nurses about to be grabbed by malevolent hands, the U.S. DVD cover chooses to dial up the gore, making the film out to be another spine-tingling Asian thriller. It’s not. It’s actually a macabre comedy about a bunch of obsessive-compulsive nurses, wrapped around a wanton gorefest straight out of 1970s exploitation horror. Aside from a few moments of unbelievably disturbing graphic violence, this is mostly a pretty amusing film.
The movie opens at a hospital somewhere in Thailand, where a doctor named Tar and his seven young nurse colleagues are up to no good. Specifically, they’re selling body parts on the black market. At least that’s what we’re led to believe by the screams of Nurse Tawan, who threatens to go to the police with this information just before the others tie her down and shut her mouth permanently by stabbing her to death. Doctor Tar then apparently dumps her body into the trunk of his Volvo, packs it with dry ice and calls up his “body buyers” to see if they’d like to take her off his hands. (She’s got very low mileage, honest.)
We’re then treated to the ominous opening question, printed on a title card across the screen: “Did you know that the dead always return to the one they love on the seventh day?” (Strangely, on the Netflix Instant Streaming version of the film, the subtitle on the screen at this point was completely and utterly wrong. Apple set me straight with the correct translation.) You see, Tawan was wronged in more ways than one: She was head-over-heels in love with Doctor Tar and intended to marry him, but after getting her little sister Nook a job on the nursing staff, Doctor Tar wound up seducing Nook instead — even getting her pregnant in the process. Hell hath no fury, and all that.
After the abrupt death of Tawan, the film jumps forward in time, to less than an hour before that ill-fated seventh day is about to expire. It’s the night shift, and Doctor Tar’s sultry nurses (who all look less like medical professionals than swimsuit models, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because at least one of them actually is one) are all congregating in the break room. Someone brings up the seventh-day curse, and the others dismiss the prospect in fits of girly cackling, spitting food at each other and other high-school-level horsing around. Besides, they say, the seven-day window will be closed in half an hour, after which that ghost is SOL. Of course, you know this means that the ghost of the murdered Tawan is, indeed, about to make her presence felt.
I’ll Never Give You My Money
You may have heard: the Beatles’ albums are being re-released.
On the surface, it’s a Beatle fan’s wet dream: the new discs have awesome packaging, (apparently) superior sound, and best yet — there will be mono releases, just like fans have been wanting for years! It’s a dream come true!
Hardly.
Being the hardcore fan I am, I’ve been salivating over these new remasters…but also dreading them. Dreading them because I know Apple Corps and EMI would not waste such a glorious opportunity to stick it to fans with outrageous prices, and I’m glad (?) to see I was not wrong: the new CDs will retail at the same old, gouge-tastic $18.98 MSRP the old, circa 1987 Beatles CDs were priced at. Oddly, though, The Beatles (aka The White Album) gets $10 knocked off its MSRP, and is now $24.98 (also, Past Masters is now a single, two-disc set that also retails for $24.98). So, I guess $35 for two CDs is ridiculous to Apple Corps, but $20 for one CD isn’t. Gotcha.
There are also two box sets being released: one with all the stereo CDs, and one with the albums in mono (God forbid they actually put the stereo and mono albums together, like with the recent Capitol Albums box sets — the only albums you couldn’t do that for are The White Album and maybe Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). In true, Beatle-price-gouging fashion, the stereo box set — 16 discs in all — is barely worth it: at $260, it’s only $17 or so less to buy the box set than to get all the albums individually (though this is better than the first Beatles CD box set from the late 1980s, which actually cost more than if you bought all the CDs separately…which would seem to defeat the purpose of a box set in the first place).
As for that mono box set, filled with mono mixes fans have been anticipating? It’s the only place you can get those mono albums — no single discs will be available. Better yet (?), the mono box set is limited to a whopping 10,000 copies, meaning the majority of fans who wanted these mixes most likely won’t get them (not in a store, anyway — watch Apple Corps claim piracy is killing the music industry when fans start trading the mono tracks online because they can’t buy them in stores). Better still (?), the mono box set will retail for…$300! No, I’m joking — it actually retails for only $298.98. What a bargain! But wait — not every Beatles album was mixed into mono, so the mono box set will only have 12 CDs in it. So…a 16 disc stereo set retails for $260, but the 12 disc mono set is $40 more. That makes perfect sense! It is a limited edition, after all!
I was pretty angry when I first read about this, because I wanted the mono versions of the albums…but for $300, Yoko, Paul, Dhani and Ringo can keep them. I’m sure $300 is a drop in the bucket to the Beatles — billionaires all — but to those of us living in the real, recession-hammered world, it’s not such a light sum of money. Eventually my anger subsided, and now I just feel sad. Sad because I’ve forever read about how the Beatles — in the 1960s — were always conscious of giving their fans “excellent value for their money.” Sad because that obviously no longer holds true — today, the Beatles & Apple Corps are just as money-hungry and greedy as everybody else in the business. Who cares if one in ten people in the U.S. doesn’t have a job — this is the Beatles! Sell your car, jackass! Sell your kids! They’ll understand! This is THE BEATLES! No price is too much for the greatest music ever recorded!
I’d seriously love to meet Paul McCartney and ask him to his face if he really thinks, say, Yellow Submarine is really worth $20. $20 for four Beatles songs, essentially, because “Yellow Submarine” (the song) and “All You Need is Love” are on other albums, and no one really cares about the George Martin orchestrations on the second half of the album. Is that excellent value for my money, Sir Paul? Is Let It Be — an album you have ripped quite a bit over the years, and which the other Beatles have all said is lackluster — worth $20? Are your mono albums really worth $25 apiece, which is flat-out ridiculous, no matter how you look at it? Is Apple still being run like in the ’60s, with people walking out of your offices with supplies left and right, and this is the only way to stay in the black? Whose idea was it to make the mono albums a limited run? If Apple wants money so badly, you’d think they’d offer the mono albums as separate, non-box set entities, if only to get your devoted faithful to buy the same albums over and over and over again. But that might be pushing it, right?
And before anyone brings it up, yes, I know the stereo CDs all have QuickTime documentaries about the making of each album on the disc. And the album art will be faithfully reproduced…blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t matter. I’d rather have (reasonably priced) mono/stereo two-fers than a freaking QuickTime documentary. And CD packaging isn’t that expensive. I’ve read various interviews with people associated with the Beatles and Apple Corps, complaining that the Beatles are losing money in this age of digital music. Whose fault is that? Who are the ones reacting so slowly to changes in the music industry (the Beatles are still one of the few major acts to not be on iTunes, largely because Apple feels Beatle music is worth more than 99 cents a track), slavishly clinging to the old way of doing things? We’re no longer in the bubble economy, guys, and if you think the Beatles name is enough to get people to plunk down $600 on your CDs, no questions asked, I have a feeling you might be in for a bit of a surprise.
It used to be about the music, guys.
PS – I really feel sorry for whatever schlub decides he (or she) wants to buy both CD box sets and The Beatles: Rock Band on release day (9/9/09!). All You Need Is…$850 or so. Unless you want to get the replica John and George Rock Band guitars too, in which case add another $200. Or you could take that $1100 and put a down payment on a car to enjoy your old Beatles CDs in while driving (or not, because you probably couldn’t get financing to buy the car).
Fix Wrong Sender on WordPress Comment Notification Emails
Since I moved this blog over to a new web host, there’s been a cosmetic — but annoying — problem with my comment notification emails. I finally figured out how to solve it, and because I devised the solution myself after being unable to find a quick answer on the Web, I thought I’d better document the procedure here. You know, for future reference. Or in case anybody else has this problem.
Okay, the backstory: Whenever somebody comments on a post here, I get an email notification. This is a standard WordPress feature. Normally, the email’s “From” name is that of the person who left the comment, which makes it easy for me to see who it was without even opening the email. But since I moved to a new web host, the “From” name on those emails was my hosting account username instead, and the domain was my shared hosting server — something like “box123.host.com.” Really ugly, and irritating as well because I could no longer see at-a-glance who left a comment.
It was obviously a server-related issue, so I did some Googling, but found little of benefit. The only thing that helped was this post, wherein it was suggested to modify the sendmail_path value in your php.ini file so that a fixed “From” email address is used whenever sendmail is invoked. But this was intended to mitigate sender name mismatches with WordPress’ admin emails, such as the spam moderation messages and new user notifications — not the comment notifications. I didn’t want all of my comment emails coming from my own email address, I wanted them to come from the person who commented. Even so, this solution was better than “username@box123.host.com”, so I gave it a try.
The custom php.ini took care of the admin emails, as expected, but my comment emails were still screwed up. I delved into the logic of this issue a bit further, and compared the headers of comment notification emails from my old host as well as my new host. Apparently, when WordPress sends those comment notifications, it tacks the comment author’s name onto the email, but doesn’t use their email address — it uses a dummy email address called “wordpress” that it doesn’t expect will exist. As a result, the email appears to come from: “Comment Author <wordpress@mydomain.com>”.
Well, that dummy email address was the source of the problem. My server will not allow this type of email header to be created if the “From” email address specified does not actually exist. It does some kind of check to see if <wordpress@mydomain.com> is a valid address, and if it is not, it will show “username@box123.host.com” as the sender instead. All I had to do to mitigate this was create an email forwarder — not even a real account, just a forwarder — called “wordpress” so that the dummy address would be seen as valid. Voila! Now my comment emails are back to normal: They appear to come from the comment’s author.
In addition, this solution makes the aforementioned php.ini hack unnecessary.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, I just blackhole anything sent to that “wordpress” address so that I’ll never see it. Not that I expect anybody to hit “reply” on those notifications and try talking to me, but given that “wordpress” is a known word, random spam attacks might otherwise stumble across it and start bombarding me with crap.
Hope this helps somebody. Or me, in the future. You never know.
