Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Well, sort of.

It could only really last so long really. If you are looking for one central target for abuse on the internet, Wikipedia has to be a good candidate.

But it was also a shining star. If anything saved my belief in humanity, it was Wikipedia and the general concept of wikis. The fact you could put something on the internet that anyone could edit and people wouldn’t crap all over it and abuse it as much as possible.

Of course this isn’t the case, there is a lot of abuse of wikis, most of which seems to be targetted at mine. Still, it was nice to imagine, at least for a little while that people on the internet were on the whole nice people that weren’t looking to screw you.

Wikipedia has now increased it’s restrictions though. It has three levels, protected (nobody can edit), semi-protected (you need to be registered for 4 days) and unprotected. Recently, lots of pages have been moved onto a higher protection level. To stop abuse of course, but it’s a sad that they need to use this kind of protection to protect pages.

If you want to read more about the changes, there is an article on News.com.

If you ever find yourself needing to escape literal characters such as \n in PHP, the function you are looking for (and which I have been looking for, for the past few days (on and off at least)) is addcslashes.

This seems to take care of it…

<?php
$escaped = addcslashes($not_escaped, "\0..\37!@\@\177..\377");
?>

Then use stripcslashes when decoding it. If you are putting it into a database you will need to escape it again when inserting it but you don’t want to escape your literal characters then so you can just use addslashes (or something more secure, try mysql_real_escape_string).

I feel I have been quite productive with regards to coding recently. I got to bed at 1:30 am on Monday night and dragged my ass out of bed at 9 the next morning so I could get some work done and I got a full day (well not a full, full day but a good day at least) of coding in before going to Sarann’s for the movie night. Well, movie night is probably a bit of a strong term, we put on Madagascar but we soon got talking and I don’t really know what happened once whey were sent into the wild.

Myself, Claire, Kieran and Michelle all ended up crashing at Sarann’s. Claire has a quite amazing ability to fall alseep at super speed. Me and Kieran were just talking for a few minutes and next thing we know, Claire was fast alseep. And this was only at like 1:30.

I woke up at 6:30 at which point Kieran informed me we had achived the required 5 hours sleep and so should now get back to coding :D. Which I pretty much did, I got a bus home and coded until I had to leave to met everyone back at the Quilted Llama for lunch. Luckily my EFT had kicked in as I literally had no money in town. I spent the remaining cash I had on my day rider in the morning and lent £2 to my sister so I literally had nothing at all. But I was able to take some money out even though that money should be in my savings account. But I AM going to put it back, someone make sure I don’t spend it!

I now have more money thankfully as my gran and grandma have given me £80 worth of back-dated pocket money (I still get pocket money off them, how cool is that :D) so I’m less screwed that I thought I was but I am still going to keep expenses to a minimal, at least until I get a job.

So yeah, over today and yesterday I have done a lot of coding which has been cool, I hope I can sustain the amount of work I’ve been putting in to some of the projects as the things that are being coded are the moment are so awesome. I love when you are really fired up about a project, you have so much energy for it.

Oh, how did I manage to go 4 days without llamage? It’s crazy. Although there will probably be longer gaps over the summer. Still my EFT came through so I had a bit of money to see my through a quick session. Still no luck on the job front though, I managed to find another agency today but they said they weren’t registering anyone else at the moment. They did take my CV though. Not much hope there though.

Tonight is really the conclusion of everything for summer. Well, the season finale was Wendy House and I’m not going to say too much other than the fact that I am some kind of all-knowing deity (ok, I’ll say a bit more, there was sex, amongst other things, unfortunately not for yours truly) but anyway…

Tonight is the episode after the last episode really. Everyone is going home soon as this is the last chance I will see people (even though I thought that was Wendy House). I prefer this as Wendy House is too loud to say a proper goodbye and it’s nice to just hang out, it seems a better exit. I probably should have gone by now, will write more maybe later.

That said, I haven’t been writing much lately. Looking at my posts I have maintained a decent post count but I really haven’t felt like blogging much. Maybe it’s just because the days seem longer (as I’m not rushed off my feet at home) but I don’t feel like I have blogged much or had much to say. Which I probably haven’t given I have been doing less. But on the flip side, Particle Links has had loads of development on it :D.

Gary sent this to me. I feel it should be shared with the world.

Ash gets called a muppet

I’ve started a new blog over on WordPress.com named Creek Log. It’s going to be a blog of my Dawson’s Creek watching over the summer. I was just going to post it all on here but then I thought, with over a hundred episodes there is going to be a lot of posts to trawl through which aren’t going to be amazingly interesting so I thought it best to start a new one. One which was hosted so I wouldn’t have to maintain it. Hense the result.

I’ll probably talk about this more in the morning as I have a lot to say but I don’t really feel like talking right now.

So tonight was Wendy House. After a BBQ at home I went to Fonze’s and we travelled up to Sarann’s where we met everyone else and headed out shortly after 10:30. Wendy House was good at first but it didn’t have the greatest ending. At like 1 or something I started getting depressed so I got myself a coke and sat down. Then Evanescene – Going Under came on so I got up to scream my heart out to that. Didn’t help much though, I ended up freaking out and had to run out of Stylus for a breather. I decided to go into Hot Potatoes given it was the last one and tried to chill in there.

I couldn’t much though and finally decided I had to go home. I tried to say goodbye to as many people as I could find. Fonze had disappeared though, he may have gone home with Claire’s friends Kate (neither of which told anyone they were leaving if they did). I ended up running off to get the nightrider bus home. It takes the route of the 40 so I had a bit of a walk even after getting off it though.

So did I get my series finale? Well, certainly not the one I was hoping for. If Fonze and Kate did indeed go home together that could be seen as it but I think a far better angle is the whole Fonze disappearing thing and the whole unknowing of where he is. And the whole emoness of my situation also. I don’t know, I can’t deal with this now. I need to watch some DC.

I feel like I haven’t blogged for ages. In actual fact it has been less than 24 hours but it feels like I have been without a computer for like a week or something. It’s wierd how such a short space of time (I packed it up yesterday and now have it up and running again) can feel like so long.

Today when we went out I forgot my phone (well, it was charging so probably for the best) and I felt really cut off all day. It was wierd also because I keep it in my pocket which is where I put my hands and I’m generally holding on to it so I just felt strange not having it.

So tonight is Wendy House. Should be good although I’m really not in the mood for it and I hate it when that happens as you psychologically make yourself not enjoy it. I’m not missing Wendy though even if I am going to have a crap time. This will be the the last night out I attend before people flee for summer so it’s a shame not everyone is coming but most people will be around over summer anyway so as long as I see the people who are leaving it’s not too bad.

My plan until then is to unpack enough so I can get into my bed and then make use of said opportunity with some Dawson’s Creek.

Well, not technically. I’m actually at Sarann’s. But I moved all my stuff home this afternoon. It’s sad, my time at Bod is almost over. And given that I have my computer at home now I won’t have it at Bod tonight to play some emo music and cry about the memories I have there. Still, providing we don’t drink too much at Sophie’s I will have somewhat of a bottle of white rum to drown my sorrows.

All my stuff is home offically but still in all the boxes. I haven’t had time to do anything, even my computers aren’t setup! You know I haven’t had any time when my computers haven’t been set up. But I moved all my stuff out and rushed back to the Quilted Llama to hang out with Kieran, Michelle, Sarann, Drew and Maths Chris. And now I’m at Sarann’s blogging before we go to Sophie’s and then on to Wire. I don’t know when I will get chance to blog again as it’s going to be one big party ending with Wendy House tomorrow of course. So I’ll see what happens.