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So tonight's Conniption of the Evening came thanks to my sister, who, in some masochistic frenzy, decided not only to get her ears pierced three more times, but to complete the ensemble by thrusting a small silver spike clear through her left nostril! This of course put Sue into an absolute frenzy and sent me bolting upstairs so as to not get caught in the blast perimeter. Now, nearly an hour later, I hope the fires have died enough to where I can safely say that Erica's new ornamentation really isn't all that shocking. It's only a small purple stone that will certainly pale in comparison to my soon-to-be-completed full-body Polynesian tribal tattoo!

I think it's about time for a brief post with a bunch of links. Lately I've been working some more on this, playing with this, listening to this, reading this, and thinking about buying this. Also, last weekend I went to see them with him, her, and her, among others.

I'm doing something really, really cool at work right now. While I can't really give any specifics on what it will be used for, I'm reasonably certain that I can post a 30,000-foot overview.

The basic idea is that I have pretty much written a scripting language using PHP (which, ironically, is considered a scripting language itself) to act as a frontend for a very simple and user-friendly data retrieval system. The beauty of this "language" is its simplicity. It of course evaluates mathematical expressions like any other language, but the main work is done by just five simple built-in "functions" that get and process sets of data. I'm going to add one or two more to perform tests on the data, but so far I've just been trying to get the basic syntax banged out.

The amazing part, and the part that impresses even me, is the fact that the language does everything it needs to using just a whole bunch of regular expressions. Basically the regular expressions match a language construct and replace it with whatever it evaluates to. Because of this, the entire "language parser" is contained in just a single PHP page with about eight functions, five of which map almost one-to-one to the language's built-in functions. Again, I'm glossing over many of the particulars like the language syntax, how I validate the script, and how it processes the various kinds of function arguments— needless to say, I don't just use eval($script);!

I've been working on the language for only about three days now, but already it's fast, elegant, and functional; you can't ask for much more than that.

Happy Fathers' Day, Dad!

Prompted by last week's visit from Dave, the across-the-hall neighbor I mentioned, Eric, Mel, and I took a roadtrip down to West Lafayette to see Dave's apartment and hang out overnight at a nearly deserted Purdue. Seeing the campus in summer without classes, homework, responsibilities, and a few thousand other people milling about really gave the visit a surreal feeling. (Mel mentioned on the drive in that she felt as if her entire freshman year had been a dream that she was just now visiting in real life.) Once we got over the marked difference in environment, we pretty much just hung out and relaxed for the rest of the evening in Dave's surprisingly nice apartment. We eventually wore ourselves out eating pizza and watching TV, so we all crashed on various soft surfaces in Dave's living room.

After slowly regaining consciousness again this morning/early afternoon, the four of us walked around campus a bit and then stopped in at another friend's apartment. We stayed there for a good portion of the afternoon, but we didn't do all that much. Most notably, Eric and I played an amazing original Atari with a bunch of games I vividly remember from my old Atari 2600. (Combat was easily my favorite then as now.) We also eventually grabbed some dinner at a nearby restaraunt. Soon afterward, Eric, Mel, and I bid Dave farewell and began our trip back home.

I didn't know what to expect going into this short trip, but now that I'm back, I can certainly say I'm glad I went. Thanks for the hospitality, Dave.

I think the main reason I enjoyed work so much last summer was because I got to dive into completely new things. For example, before then I had no idea how to organize a database. Now I can pretty much whip one out in ten minutes. I had also never done server-side scripting, web form handling, user authentication, or for that matter any kind of computer project involving more than about 1000 lines of code. By the end of my three months, I had become quite proficient in all of these things as well as several other web-centric (how’s that for techspeak?) technologies and tools.

Now fast forward to this summer when I’ve been mostly working on PHP and MySQL development, both of which I started the summer feeling very comfortable with. Even though it hasn’t really been a “completely new thing” like last year’s projects, I’ve certainly enjoyed watching the phenomenally large PHP/MySQL project that I’ve been working on this summer come together. As part of the project, I’ve recently started getting into XML and XSL and all the interesting things one can do with them. This has led me back to that familiar feeling I had last year because XML and XSL really are “completely new things” for me and indeed most of the rest of the internet.

After playing with PHP’s XML parser and XML transforms (on both the client and server) since the middle of last week, I’m very tempted in one small corner of my mind to convert all of my archives and navigation into XML and serve a completely bleeding-edge weblog. This is of course deeply appealing to my inner computer geek who absolutely loves website redesigns, especially when they involve elegant new technologies. Pipe dreams aside, my point is that I’m getting near the “new stuff groove” that I had been looking for this summer.

My family seems to have an annual tradition of spring cleaning followed by summer purge. Because of this, my parents and I are getting rid of some stuff around the house by selling it on Ebay. We posted the latest batch over the weekend, so if you happen to be in the market for a bicycle, some Karate stuff, a digitizing notebook, a four-track tape recorder, uncut baseball cards, or Cakewalk Guitar Studio, then have we got some deals for you! If none of that strikes your fancy, then check back later as I'm sure we'll post some other stuff soon. Also, we could probably negotiate some kind of a discount if you buy something after reading this entry.

These past few days have been unexpectedly busy. On Thursday, my across-the-hall neighbor from Purdue came to town, so a group of us from the floor met him and hung out for the evening. After dinner, we watched The Boondock Saints, which is such a good movie that after I first saw it a few months ago, I immediately turned around and watched it again with the director's commentary. On a related tangent, while "researching" this post I found Troy Duffy's horrendously-designed, yet interesting Boondock Saints website which reports that a sequel is in the works.

Anyway, as soon as I got home from work on Friday I went to Tasha's graduation open house. The party certainly brought back memories from last year's open house run, and I had a fun time eating Tasha's food. After I left, I decided to stop by a store to buy Equilibrium and The Animatrix, two insanely good recently-released DVDs that I highly recommend seeing.

Over the past week, my sister has gone to both her last day of school and her senior picnic. Logically, both of these events led up to tonight's graduation ceremony. Congratulations and happy birthday, Erica.

Listening to tonight's commencement speeches almost made me look forward to college. (HA!)

I think that instead of a salutatory, schools should have the previous year's valedictorian give a speech. Who needs sunny and uplifting forecasts when one can get brutal accounts of bitter experience? (I'm kidding, of course... okay, maybe only half kidding)

I've been reading comics pretty much since I could read at all. Similarly, I've been reading comics on the internet ever since I first got a connection. Because of this, it makes sense that I found this interview with Get Fuzzy artist Darby Conly quite entertaining. As with any good web article, the interview also linked to several other interesting pages like this funny new comic that I hadn't thought to look at before and Bill Amend's personal homepage.

Today my sister Erica threw her combination graduation open house, birthday party, and crawfish boil. In honor of the event, I'm going to do something a little special for this post and turn the keyboard over to her to get the hostess' perspective on the afternoon. (Note: I added the picture links)

Well, I must say, I was quite pleased with how my open house turned out. I had been fretting about it, for in years past for birthday parties, I have had a somewhat, hmmmm, less than wonderful turnout (one of the hazards of having a summer birthday is that once people are out of school, they tend to forget anything and everything discussed within school, including completely unrelated subjects such as birthday parties). However, a good number of people were present at all times, pretty much, and we had a great deal of fun laughing about boche ball and peeling open crawfish shells. In fact, Tracy (one of my friends) had the heads lined up in rows as a testament to her shelling job. Thanks to all who showed up, and I hope you had loads of fun, and for those who weren't there, you missed the best cake (or so I'm told) of several openhouses.

Well there you have it. Thanks, Erica.