Jay McGavren’s Journal

Club Dread opens Friday. It’s from Broken Lizard, the people that did Super Troopers. Go see it!

http://www.clubdread.com/

I finally got off my butt and set up an RSS reader. Behold:

http://spook.myserver.org/text/news.htm

Slashdot, Roger Ebert, Dave Barry, CNN, MegaTokyo, and *you* (yup, all LiveJournals have RSS feeds), all summarized on one page, with links to the original articles/posts. It’ll be a few hours old by the time you see it; I still need to set it up as a scheduled task to keep it fresh.

Say, Eric, I notice that both PostNuke (MoMaMag) and Invision Power Board (MoMaBBS) have RSS capability if you install the right versions/modules…

Like most geeks, I’m often called upon to solve technical problems by my co-workers. But this one’s new… I just had someone ask me to explain the “there are only 10 types of people: those who understand binary, and those who don’t” joke. :P

“2D? How can they do Zelda in *2D*?”
-Diana, upon learning of the NES and SNES Zelda games

Diana’s been playing the hell out of Zelda: Wind Waker. And she’s asked me to burn her an MP3 CD with some downtempo so she can listen while she does homework.

Yeah, she’s a keeper. :)

A recent conversation turned to weird acronyms we use only at work or school, and I realized I had an insanely large number…

ACU: Automated Channel Update
AGU: Automatic GDS Update
AMF: ASCII Message Format
BRD: Business Requirements Document
CRS: Central Reservation System
DTE: Data Transfer Express
FDD: Functional Design Document
GDS: Global Distribution System
HOD: Hotel Operational Description
PFF: Positional Flat File
PRINUP: PRoperty INformation UPdate
SMP: Screen Management Program
SOP: Standard Operating Procedure
SWAD: System Works As Designed
SWAG: Scientific Wild-Ass Guess
TDD: Technical Design Document
TPE: Transaction Processing Environment

…and that’s just what I could think of off the top of my head. :P

I recently titled a document “Sabre HOD PFF FDD”. I kid you not.

Anyone else have any they’d like to share?

Wrote a couple quick scripts to let me store the names and command lines of all my Windows shortcuts in a plain text file, then (re)generate the shortcut files on the fly. It let me convert all my Web shortcuts from opening in Internet Explorer to opening in Mozilla/Firebird with one quick search and replace. Not bad.

Now, what else do I need to move to a centralized text file?

I’m getting a little tired of trying to figure out the difference between what people say they want and what they actually want… My project manager talks on and on about how we must leave no line of code unturned in our reverse engineering. A week later he pulls me aside and says I’m going into too much detail in my documentation. :P

I wasted a lot less effort when the only engineer I had to please was myself…

Animal Planet: The Most Extreme is pretty cool. They had a marathon Sunday, and we flipped back and forth between that and the Super Bowl (to see the commercials). They pick a theme (most extreme venom, most extreme appendages) and then choose bizarre animals (or commonly known animals with bizarre traits) that follow it. The narrator is cheesy, but you can see a lot of cool critters you probably haven’t before.

Looks like I’ll be voting for Clark in the primary. I won’t mind if Kerry wins, though.