Why web-based apps are good

It looks like it's going to be another one of those days. I know I have a hard drive going bad on my primary machine, and after being an idiot and thinking I'd defragment the damned thing, it barely, barely wants to run. Which really sucks because I've got a lot of data on there that I don't want to lose.

But... I have a backup plan this time. Unlike last time, I can actually log onto the machine. It just takes about forty minutes for the thing to settle down long enough for me to actually do anything. Once I get everything off of that drive, which thankfully isn't a ton, I'm going to see if I can run a utility to permanently mark the bad sectors as bad so that fucking Windows won't write to them anymore. I've got a ton of hard disk utilities, it's just a matter of finding the right one so that I can do it and not have to fuck around with this problem again, at least until I get a new hard drive.

The best part is that I don't have to worry about losing any of my documents. The last time this happened I got smart and uploaded them all to Google docs. They were already in open formats anyway, so there wasn't any problems with formatting when I uploaded them. My bookmarks are all backed up with xmarks, so the only thing I really need to worry about is a couple folders of photos and music, some of which I've got stored offsite already. But rather than upload all that data, I'm just going to transfer it to another machine if I ever manage to get logged on, which may not happen anytime soon, it seems.

Crazy Weekend

Dogsat for my brother this weekend, and also watched my sister's 3 year old niece, so it's been pretty crazy the past few days, but fun. Today I'm dogsitting for my aunt who is having rotator cuff surgery, a 3 month old puppy who very much likes to chew on everything.

Finally got a good start on the novel. I've figured out exactly how to make the book scary. A thief working in a totalitarian society in the future, who comes across a succubus bent on destroying her. Sounds pretty cheesy when you read it like that, but the images I have in my mind, if I can describe them properly, are scary as fuck.

Same-sex marriage may have a fighting chance

This is cool. A judge with a little bit of common sense asked a lawyer defending California's ban on same-sex marriage "What is the harm to the procreation purpose you outlined of allowing same-sex couples to get married?"

The lawyer couldn't answer, saying he didn't know. I'm guessing the people supporting this ban simply assume that everyone thinks exactly like they do, that it's worth upholding simply because they say so, when reality is quickly turning out to be the exact opposite.

Lost your porn folder?

A few weeks back I lost my secondary hard drive, and suddenly found myself without any porn! Well, not really porn, but I lost a ton of movies, music, and images, everything from fail pics to celebrities doing things they shouldn't and so on. Mainly it was my media drive where I stored all of my miscellaneous junk.

I had the music backed up, obviously, because that shit's too expensive to lose, and the movies I didn't really care about, so that left me with redownloading all of those stupid images I always think I'm going to post on forums and message boards but never do. Manually going through and finding them would take forever, especially since I'd collected most of them over a number of years, so instead of actually hunting for the pics, I hunted for a way to automate the task, at least a little bit.

Being a little bit of a geek, I knew there had to be a way to run a simple script from the command line (Linux, obviously). I considered writing a simple shell script myself, but regular expressions really don't like me, and I'm not familiar enough with shell scripting that I can just whip something up in just a few minutes. After a couple of hours of searching -- ok, maybe twenty minutes -- I finally found what I was looking for. A script to help me automatically download images from Google Image Search without having to use a single mouse click.

# First you'll have to concat a search term:

echo "What terms?"; read terms; terms="${terms// /+}"

# Insert in link like:

# "http://images.google.com/images?q=${terms}&svnum=30&start=0"

# Bash has no concept of "pages", so basically you'll iterate through the "start=$n" part until you're done

# or until someone comes up with a less crude way:

for n in $(seq 0 150); do links -source \

"http://images.google.com/images?q=${terms}&safe=off&start=${n}" \

| grep "href=/imgres?imgurl=" | tr "<>" " " | while read l; do for i in $l; do case "${i}" in href=/imgres*) \

i="${i//&imgrefurl=/ }"; echo "${i//href=\/imgres?imgurl=/ }"|awk '{print $1}'|grep -i "\.jp";; esac; done; done

done

# Now you should have a listing of images on stdout.

# Pipe output to a temporary file and wget from that file.

The script, as it is, will output a list of links directly to images all over the web. I typically run it with the following command: ./imageSearch.sh | tee results.txt

The "tee results.txt" just writes the output to a text file, which I then download using wget -i results.txt (I use other options as well) and sit back and wait. When wget is finished downloading all the images, I simply use my favorite thumbnail program to sort out the duplicates and ones I don't want, and I'm done.

Now, I made a few little changes to this script, namely on the line where it says for n in $(seq 0 150); do... You can change the numbers to anything you want. The 0 is the first page of search results, and 150 is the page where it stops. This will grab the first 150 pages of results from Google Images. If you want to change the number of results per page, just add &svnum=25 to the image search url and set the number to whatever you want. The default number of results per page is 18 I think, and I think the max is 50, but could be wrong on that.

Now go have fun.

Game Time

Been going through my collection of old video games and reinstalling a bunch of them. Some of them I'd entirely forgotten about, like Sid Meier's Railroads which is a fun but not too taxing game. Also played quite a bit of Sims 3 last week, just because as cheesy and lightweight as the game is, it's still fun once in a while.

Last night I reinstalled Rome: Total War, which is my personal favorite of the Total War games. I don't have the Barbarian Horde (Invasion?) expansion for it, but it's still an awesome game. Played it way too late into the night last night, and if I hadn't had to get up this morning for work I could have easily kept going.

Today I'm reinstalling Civilization IV, and I do have all the expansions for it, although I may not install them because the base game is fun by itself, and I really didn't feel like the expansions were worth the money I paid for them in terms of adding to gameplay. Also thinking about reinstalling Sim City 4 plus the expansions, although that game gets a little tiring after a few hours of sitting and doing nothing while your funds replenish themselves.

I might, later in the week, reinstall Doom 3, F.E.A.R., and Unreal Tournament 2k4 for a little FPS fun, but I'm still a Day of Defeat fan at heart, since that's the game that I really got involved in online gaming with. I still play it once in a while, too. Was never a huge Counter-Strike fan, although I played it with friends once in a while for something different.

The one game I wish I could find that I've apparently lost is Battlefield: Vietnam, but are there any servers out there for it anymore? I'd seriously consider buying that game again if I knew there would be servers to play on. Battlefield 2 didn't quite cut it for me. It was fun for a while, but for some reason I got tired of it pretty quickly. Same with the other Battlefield games. Most of them felt like a big letdown.

The only other game I want to find and reinstall is Call of Duty. The original one, not the sequels, and especially not the most recent, modern ones. I loved the original WWII version of the game, and frankly the modern weapons based games really don't excite me.

But I suppose that's enough for now. Had to dump Flight Simulator 9 and X to make room for these games on my hard drive as it is, so I should probably get through this recent vintage gaming kick and uninstall them before searching for and reinstalling anything else.

Oh yeah, also gonna reinstall the old, old, old Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, which I got free with the first Soundblaster card I ever bought, back in the pre-Audigy days :)

Trains are coming!

This morning's paper has an article on Dayton's proposed rail line as part of the government's stimulus project passed earlier this year. I've gotta say, I'm pretty stoked to see progress on this project. I'm a huge fan of public transportation, especially train/rail projects. I've lived in enough major cities to know that rail, done right, can be an outstanding way to keep cars off the road, both to decrease traffic congestion and pollution.

I'm hoping that the entire Ohio Hub project ends up getting built over the next decade or so, because if it does, it means I could potentially get rid of my car altogether and have one less major expense every month. If I end up getting my knee fixed so that I can walk more than a few blocks at a time, this will be fantastic for me, personally, and great for the region itself.

Dog-eared library books

I'm a huge supporter of my local library. Generally I read at least two books a week, stopping by there at least once a week if not more. I have always, since my elementary school days, been the kind of person who will use a bookmark to mark my place, and now I'm really annoyed that whoever had this book before me, countless people I'm sure, didn't have the common courtesy not to fold over the page corners.

Come on people. It's not your book. Return it in good order so that other people can enjoy it. I don't care if it is a $4.99 paperback copy of the book. You still don't dog-ear the corners. Grow up and act like adults, or stop borrowing books from the library.

Yay for Verizon+Android deal

I'm so glad to see Verizon is definitely going to be bringing in some Android phones soon, especially with Christmas coming up in a few months. I've been dying to get a smartphone for a couple of years now, but absolutely refuse to switch to AT&T or T-Mobile because of their god-awful contracts/service/customer service (you pick). I've loved my service with Verizon so far, and really have no desire to switch providers at all, so this is good news for me.

It also helps that I've been hoping Android would be the iPhone killer it has the potential to be since its inception. Not that I have anything against the iPhone, but lately Apple's policies regarding the app store have been, well, let's just say fucked up. That's why I want an Android phone more than anything else. My only worry is that Verizon, who has a bad habit of crippling the functionality of a lot of their phones, will be my only source for apps and lock out that Android store. If that's the case, then I won't upgrade. But if Google, who really should be pushing for an open app system, insures I can download my apps from anywhere, then I'll pony up whatever cash they ask me to, assuming it's a truly decent phone.

New novel idea

I've been wanting to write a monster novel for quite some time now. I've long been a fan of monsters, either zombies, vampires, witches, whatever, and I've written a number of short stories with those types of characters over the years, but only once did I actually write a novel. Well, I wrote the first draft of a novel, then put it away and never went back to it.

I'm kind of glad I didn't go back to that novel, about witches, partly because I think that thanks to Harry Potter the genre is kind of overdone for a while. Same thing with vampires. I mean, we've had the Anne Rice books which were made into movies, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Twilight, True Blood, and countless others in the last couple of decades, so vampires are very much overdone in popular culture. Werewolves don't interest me all that much, and zombies are quickly becoming the new hot item in Hollywood and in video games as well, not to mention Max Brooks fabulous books.

So I'm thinking of going a different route. A cross between science fiction horror set in a future, totalitarian city, and a murder mystery where the murderer is not human, but a succubus. My only problem is that while I've got the first part of the story fleshed out in my head, I'm not exactly sure where I want to take it. Often, I find that the best way for me to get there is to just start writing, but usually I end up going places that in the end I really don't like.

I'm trying to do this book the proper way, outlining the entire story from start to finish, then working out the details, but my brain doesn't always work that way. I know how I want the story to end, but it's the journey -- getting from the beginning, which I really like, to the end that I also really like that I find the most difficult. Guess I need to just sit down and start focusing on it.

But that will have to wait until tomorrow. Just got my hands on a copy of Sims 3, which is installing now, so I'm going to be busy for the rest of today :)

Blog reboot

Time to actually use this blog for something useful that I'll actually maintain. :) Random shit about my daily life. Hardly anybody will ever read it, but what the hell, I'm just doing it to kill time anyway.