The LOST premier last night blew me away. Maybe I just do a poor job of holding in my emotions, but I couldn’t help but smile through the whole thing. I do have to admit, though, that it was partially due to the company.
Mark, Gordon, Ally and I got together for (almost?) every LOST last season and made something of a tradition out of it. Each week a different person would have to cook the whole group dinner. I somehow got branded as the motherly one, cooking (baking mostly) things like potpie and lasagna, you know, the kind with ricotta and spinach.
We all got together last night (plus Annabelle) for the first time in 8 months to keep our traditional LOST nights alive through the final season. With Mark living in Denver and Gordon living in…unemployment? things are a bit different this year, so coordinating it happened all at the last minute. To make it easy on everybody else while we get back into the rhythm, I volunteered to cook for the premier.
I then realized only 20 hours before dinner was supposed to be served that I was going to spend 7 of those hours sleeping, 10 of them at work and school, 1 of them in transit, and the other 2 getting ready for bed/getting out of bed. Nowhere in there would I have time to find a recipe, go shopping, or cook. So Ally stepped up and took the responsibility off of my shoulders even though she had NO time to herself either since she had class AND and had to get ready to leave the state the next morning…er, this morning.
But she took it like the champ she is and threw together a simple but lovely salad, and cooked (baked! Haha, maybe I won’t be the matron this time around!) a few pizzas, one with veggies and the other with pepperoni.
Oh, I forgot to mention the other big difference between this season and last. Last year, 3 out of the 4 of us were vegetarian with me being the token omnivore (one that coincidentally hardly ever ate meat, not out of principle or taste, but out of lack-of-opportunity). All of our dinners were vegetarian, and each week’s appointed chef came up with a damn good meal. It’s going to be strange this season now that only one of our clan has stuck with vegetarianism. It’s hard to say whether Ally’s dual pizzas set a precedent of making meals that cater to all parties, or if we’re going to end up cooking strictly vegetarian meals out of respect for Mark (and laziness to not have to prepare two versions). I guess we’ll find out…
View CommentsI just installed a syntax highlighter tool here on Rhymes With Milk and am pretty excited about it so far. What it means is that I can paste snippets of code into WordPress’ post editor essentially verbatim, and a JavaScript function translates it into a nicely formatted version for the blog.
I had seen this sort of thing on other websites before, but only just realized that I might have a use for it, too. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about finding something like that, so I asked Twitter if it had any recommendations. True to form, Twitter offered me no help, so I started doing my own research. Finding the right set of keywords to search for one of these wasn’t easy, but I eventually stumbled onto Alex Gorbatchev’s webiste. It was exactly the one I was thinking of when I set out to find one.
After a super simple install (you just have to FTP the files to your server and add the right file calls in your header) and some custom styling, it was all ready to go. I did have a few problems personalizing it though.
toolbar functionality
The program has an optional little toolbar that pops-up when you hover over the syntax highlighter div with buttons for printing, copying, displaying as plain text in a pop-up, and a small “about” pop-up. I initially thought this toolbar could be pretty handy, but that some of the buttons could probably go—namely the print one. I hardly believe anybody is ever going to see my code examples, a small fraction of them are actually going to care about what they’re looking at, fewer would actually want to use it for reference, and none of them would want it physically represented so badly that there should be just a single button for them to accomplish that. But despite digging around in the core JavaScript file for quite a while, I wasn’t able to figure out how to selectively remove buttons. It looked like for me it was all-or-nothing.
I decided that I should go with “all” at this point mostly because of the copy button. The way the lines are displayed within the div make it so that when you manually highlight-and-copy, you also get stuck copying the line numbers. This little cumbersome detail made me think that having a single copy button that only grabs the relevant code would be convenient, but there’s some sort of XML file that the function looks for but could not find. Something like that. Again, digging around in the core files didn’t help me any, and unfortunately the official website has pretty poor documentation and troubleshooting help.
line wrap
The line wrap function, unlike the ones dictating the toolbar buttons, can simply be switched on or off with an appropriately placed “true” or “false” respectively. When turned on, lines wrap nicely (although no line wrap is generally all that nice when looking at code), expanding the height of its table row, pushing the following lines and line numbers down further. When wrap is turned off a scrollbar appears at the bottom. I almost prefer this method, but it doesn’t display everything beyond the edge of the box very nicely. For some reason, the lines alternating colors end at the edge of the box, and a solid background color is displayed beyond their right ends, and depending on the CSS, this color might not ever correspond to either of the line colors. Lame.
solution?
I found this guy who has created a modified version of the original syntax highlighter. His previous documentation claims that a few of the issues I mentioned above had been fixed, and a ton of extra (and helpful) functionality had been added. I downloaded it and started testing the different functions…and it fell short of the claims. For all that I could tell, I had downloaded the same damn thing as the original. And again, explanations on how to implement said added functionality was minimal. I gave up with it much quicker than I normally do with things mostly because the test html file that comes with the download (it’s meant to test whether the program works or not) was out of date. It was the test file for the previous release, not the most current. I couldn’t even use his own test file as reference on how to implement the various features. I can think of other ways to find reference, but I stopped there because even that kind of small oversight makes me lose faith in the developer.
Therefore, I stuck with the official release (not the mod) and just turned the toolbar off, and line wrap on.
I was going to leave you with a small C++ example since that’s the language I’m currently using the most, but it’s syntax mode is actually kind of lacking. So instead, how about we try doing a PHP program (which has much better syntax support) that uses the accumulation plan.
<?php
$myArray = array(12, 102, -44, 61, 0);
$total = 0;
for($i=0; $i<count($myArray); $i++)
{
$total += $myArray[$i];
}
echo 'The total amount in my array is ' . $total . '!';
?>
View Comments Until tonight, I had never sat at a bar by myself and drank. I see movies all the time that glorify it, but also enough drunks at the Cafe doing it to cancel out the cool.
I sit here alone mobile blogging from the bar at City O’ City on 13th and Sherman in Denver. I have a candle, a cup of water, and a glass of Wild Turkey in front of me, in order from left to right.
A super cute late-20-something hipster couple sits to my right reading their own books that they just bought from a used book store, neither of them more than ten pages in, looking up only every few minutes to have small but meaningful conversations with one another.
I have little to do here other than sip and be observant. But I’m happy doing just that.
I watch the bartenders do their work and shoot the shit with the usuals. They occasionally notice me watching, and we just smile at eachother. One bartender, the one that gave me the heavy pour, a girl, tells me that my smile is inviting, and says that every time she sees it she feels compelled to ask if I’m ready for another round or some food. I take it as I look lonely and need someone to be nice to me, but she says it’s a good thing. I believe her because her smile is reassuring.
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