Kurtopia

Thanks, Mike!

Yesterday, I read this post on Lifehacker in which they requested photos of people’s “go bags.” (Yeah, I’ve never heard that term, either.) Thinking that they wanted pictures of the gadgets you take on the go, I thought to myself, how fortuitous! I’m about to pack my bag o’ gadgets for a trip to Miami. I’m going to participate! Then, I revisited the post and read it a little more closely. They define a “go bag” as “the on-the-go bag that you throw over your shoulder whenever you head out the door that contains pretty much everything you need to get things done away from your desk.” Then I glanced at their sample photo, and barely saw one gadget. So I’ve determined that I’m stupid, and I still don’t entirely get what a “go bag” is. However, I do have a photo of my travel geek bag and its contents! And rather than let it go to waste, I’m going to share it with my adoring public (of one). I present to you my travel geek bag:

So let’s see what we have here, shall we?

• The bag itself is a Jack Spade laptop case.
• In the center, sporting an Autobot symbol, is my Thinkpad T43, which will soon be replaced by a Dell XPS M1330… if Dell ever gets its act together, that is.
• By the top-left of my laptop is my new Samsung Blackjack in all its sexiness.
• Below the Blackjack is my Nintendo DS Lite, along with a few Gameboy Advance & DS games.
• Below the laptop is my Garmin nüvi 360. (Ooo! An umlaut!)
• Around the corner is my Logitech V270 Optical Mouse for Bluetooth.
• And last but not least, my Canon PowerShot SD800 IS.
• The other various and sundry items strewn about are just cases, chargers, and whatnot.

So there you have it! I think that should be enough to keep me occupied on the plane and during any downtime in Miami.

I’m a bona fide Lifehacker commenter! See?

While walking my dog this afternoon, I discovered that Brave New Worlds is opening ONE BLOCK from where I live! ONE BLOCK, I SAY! I love my neighborhood. Story by Kurt.

I only recently discovered the wonder that is Robot Chicken, and I can’t get enough of it. Thankfully, there are about a gazillion clips from it on Adult Swim’s web site. Below is one of my favorites. It’s brilliant!

This post on the How-To Geek inspired me to try out blogging from Word 2007. So far, so good! Word seems to have successfully connected to my blog, and now I’m typing away. The moment of truth will be when I try to publish this. If you’re reading this (and you are!), then apparently everything worked out!

I learned a valuable lesson last night, and managed to escape from the situation unscathed!

I was working on some enhancements to the events calendar on the LGBT Center’s web site. Specifically, I was working on a list view of events, which would group events occuring on the same day under the same date. This is insanely easy to do in ColdFusion, but every time I try to recreate it in PHP, I feel as though I’m reinventing the wheel, and it’s always quite painful.

I felt as though I almost had it last night, when I apparently sent the PHP script into an endless loop, with each iteration throwing an error. So what’s the big deal? I have a custom error handler which sends an email for each and every error.

By the time it stopped, I had literally thousands of error emails in my mailbox. I was convinced that I was going to get yelled at by both the email admins at Wharton as well as Penn web admins. Fortunately, neither happened, so I guess the whole thing wasn’t nearly the cataclysmic event it felt like at the time.

From now on, I’ll make sure I’m not developing using an error handler meant for production. Not smart.