Jay McGavren's Journal

Hey Jack Kerouac...

I know nothing about Jack Kerouac, but a commenter quoted him in a friend’s blog, and I found it compelling…

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”

.

Generics...

There’s a study group at work for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam; just finished leading the session for collections and generics. This is not because I have any particular expertise in the area; we just each take a turn writing a study guide and leading the discussion for each chapter.

Man, am I fried. Collections are fine, but declaring classes with parameterized types (need to make a DogList class that only takes Lists of Dogs, anyone?) was confusing to everyone at the table, not just me. Good thing we’re not likely to need any of this after the exam. .

Diana and Lenny have both been playing Viva Pinata nonstop, and I’ve got the nocturnal theme (accented by squeaky animal sounds) stuck in my head. Aaaagghh!Judy only stops by once a week or so, and has already expressed her personal hatred for the game.

Ouch...

$160 for the Chuck E Cheese party Saturday, plus $20 for a cake (which I didn’t really get to see before it was cut to pieces). Only 5 kids showed, but there were a ton of grown-ups. It was loud and chaotic and I had no idea where Lenny was half the time.

Fortunately Holly, Amanda, Bryan and Katrina all helped with watching the baby (who slept through most of it), writing down givers of gifts, making sure people had pizza, keeping tabs on kids, etc. so that Diana and I didn’t have to do much of anything. So except for the amount of cash we spent, it was a pretty positive experience.

Heck, the pizza even tasted decent. .

Movie ratings...

This was supposed to be a quick procedure, but stuff like this inexplicably didn’t work:

#DOESN'T WORK; retrieves the same page repeatedly.
25.times do |i|
	command = <<-EOF
		curl --cookie "my/cookies.txt" "http://www.netflix.com/MoviesYouveSeen?so=1&sc=0&lnkctr=ListSort_0&pageNum=#{i}" > #{i}.htm
	EOF
	puts command
	system(command)
end

At least parsing the pages did:

movies = {}
while line = gets
	title = $1 if line =~ %r|<div class="list-title">.*>(.*)</a>|
	movies[title] = $1 if line =~ %r|class=star alt="(d).d+ Stars">|
<p class="list-title">end
movies.keys.sort.each do |title|
	puts [title, movies[title]].join("t")
end

Once I looked everything over, there were a couple in there that simply didn’t make sense (but that reflected the ratings on the Netflix site). Either my mouse slipped, or Diana rated a couple. Anyway, here’s where my Netflix ratings stand as of now: