Dale Miller

For some reason I have been in a movie-watching mood the past few evenings. Monday night was Alice in Wonderland. Last night was Starship Troopers and The Craft. Tonight I found myself watching Frostbite and The Fifth Element. I guess I’m just in the mood to be a couch potato for a bit.

I have, after much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, managed to follow the documentation in the Flickr API to allow me to add tags to photos from a program. I now understand frobs, tokens, api-signatures and other esoterica. For my purposes, it’s an overly complex method to accomplish my goal. After following it all the way through, I understand why I would appreciate it if I were writing a general-use web application to be used by multiple users. I found myself becoming frustrated at various times during the process with the necessity to build MD5 hashes for each call, arranging the parameters in alphabetical order to generate the string for the hash, and, worst of all, making my way through the tree of XML information returned. Whenever I start using constructs like $frob = $frobptr->{children}[0]->{content};, I know I’m in trouble. I understand the code tonight, but I’ll forget why it works in a week or two.

Now… since I understand the calls, I can actually go write my application — adding tags to photos in the U.S. County Courthouses group.

Yes, this *is* what I do for fun.

This time I *am* posting about those numbers you call to get the time, temperature, and sometimes weather. One of the first telephone numbers I remember learning was Franklin 6-8111 (376-8111 for those of you who don’t remember named exchanges). That was a time and temperature number run by First National Bank of Little Rock. First National merged with Commercial National, was bought out by Regions, and eventually gave up the number. It’s now owned by Alltel, and continues to give out the time and temperature. A year or so ago, I was talking to Mark about such numbers, and we went on a brief hunt. I discovered a fun one in Panhandle, Texas run by Happy State Bank. It had a very personal message at the beginning rather than the standard commercial. Alas, when last I called it, it had gone corporate.

In all the looking I did, I didn’t find a really good list of time/temperature numbers, so I thought it was time (ha,ha) to create one. I now have a (mostly empty) database and a web page to display them at http://dale-miller.com/cgi-bin/timetemp.pl. I have no idea how I’m going to publicize or populate it, but what will be, will be. I have an old list of numbers I need to start calling and check. So far I’ve called five and only had one working. That’s not a good ratio.

If you happen to know a time/temp number, go to the form and add it. Come on, you know you want to.

Abstinence
Originally uploaded by Dale Miller.

Abstinence until marriage – the ONLY way.

Is it any wonder that Arkansas has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation?

And I’m really wondering what the eyes have to do with anything.

I decided to be rather non-traditional today. I drove around northwest Arkansas photographing courthouses. unfortunately, I put off the decision to go rather too long and didn’t get out of the house until after 10:00. Thanks to early sunsets, my last two stops were quite dark by the time I arrived. I now have courthouse pictures in Charleston, Van Buren, Fayetteville, Bentonville, Eureka Springs, Berryville, Harrison, Marshall and Clinton. It was a lovely day for a drive. The only real downside was that since most everything was closed, I never did find anywhere to eat lunch. That just made dinner that much tastier. I do kind of miss having a turkey, so I’ll probably fix one for Christmas. It’s just an awful lot of food for one person.

IMG_3608
Originally uploaded by Dale Miller.

There should be some simple, marvelous description for this facial expression, but I can’t come up with the right words. (click on the photo to enlarge)

I have been at UALR for 27 years now. Last night, for the first time, I went to a UALR basketball game. I didn’t start out with the usual fare, though. It was the Lady Trojans vs. Rice. I enjoyed it, as much as I’m likely to enjoy sitting by myself at a sporting event. I’m not big on spectator sports in general. I think it’s rather a shame that the ladies games have abysmal turnouts. If I’m going to watch basketball, I’d rather watch women’s than men’s. I just find the style of play more interesting.

Since I decided to go to a game, I took along my camera. As you might expect of me, I took more pictures of the cheerleaders than I did of the basketball game. What can I say, I’m predictable. I may even have to go to a few more games just so I can play with my camera. I shot well over a hundred frames, of which 10-15 are actually decent. That’s not really a bad ratio. I shall go and post them to Flickr now.

Traffic Calming Ahead
Originally uploaded by Dale Miller.

In my quest to seek out unusual road signs, I happened across this one in Columbus, Ohio.

I made it back from Columbus safe and (mostly) sound. The class was beneficial, and reasonably interesting. I’m far from an Identity Manager expert, but I have a much better understanding of how the pieces fit together.

The meals I had Wednesday night (Polaris Grill) and Thursday night (Buca di Beppo) were among the best food I have ever had. I ate far too much while on the trip, and I’ll spend the next couple of weeks trying to work the weight off, but I enjoyed myself.

The class finished up early on Friday, so I had much of the day to occupy before my late flight out. I snapped a couple of courthouse pictures (Franklin and Fairfield counties), had a late lunch at Hooters, wandered around Easton a bit more, and still ended up at the airport fairly early. The flights were uneventful and I arrived in Little Rock only a bit later than planned.

My kitties were all happy to see me, and I was happy to see them. It feels good to sleep in my own bed again.

No, not the numbers you call, but there may be more about that in another post.

I normally wake up somewhere around 5:00 a.m. I do that because I’m generally a slow-starter, I have a 32-mile drive, and I’m supposed to be at work by 7:00. This usually works fairly well for me. However, this week I’m in Columbus (EST), and my class doesn’t start until 9:00 a.m. I find myself waking up at about the same time (4:00 here) and have four hours to kill before class (and it’s a 4-mile drive, so that barely counts). The upshot is that I’m already half ready for lunch by the time we get started. I don’t really want to adjust my internal clack, though, because I don’t want to mess up my normal schedule. I think I’m going to get a lot of morning reading done.

I checked weather.com before I came up here, and was expecting temperatures in the mid-50s with lows in the mid-30s. So far those numbers seem to be holding. I was (at least intellectually) ready for that. What I *wasn’t* ready for is the tendency for buildings to be kept a bit cooler than I’m accustomed to. I’m a southerner by both birth and inclination. We look at winter as that inconvenient time between fall and spring rather than a significant portion of our year, and we heat our offices and homes accordingly. I realize it’s more energy-efficient to drop the thermostat a couple of degrees, but I hate having cold hands.

Oh, for those of you who laughed at yesterday’s post…. I was far more awake this morning. I had neither wardrobe nor eyewear malfunctions this morning at the pool.