bobafred

The thing about winter weather in Atlanta is that all you really get is ice. And ice is not nice. It does make for some good photo ops, though.

So, I figured that this would be a great time for me to get out with the new camera and take some photos. On a side note, I have decided to scrap writing my own photo logic for the site and use Flickr. The reasons for this decision were: storage/bandwidth, easiness, they take PayPal, and I like the community feel of Flickr.

I wanted to take a few pictures of my car to start off. I have this pretty sweet Boba Fett sticker on my back window that I wanted to get covered in ice, but the ice was too think. So, I went to open the trunk to get the ice scraper, but was out of luck as it was iced completely shut. I pounded on the seams of the trunk to break up the ice, but that didn’t work too well and ended up hurting my hand so I stopped. The problem here was that I had already disengaged the latch to the trunk so when the ice melted it would probably just pop right open. Thankfully my Honda has fold down back seats so I figured I could just crawl in the trunk and push up from the inside to open’er up. Now I had to get in the front door which was also sheeted in ice. What a project this was becoming. Anyway, I finally got in the car and was able to outsmart mother nature and get the trunk open.

Continue this story with photos by visiting my Flickr Photostream.

I have been in training classes for 2 out of the last 3 weeks. My brain is pretty much mush when I get home for the day, so that would explain the lack of posts.

Here’s the thing. The company I work for has decided to move to SAP from our current mix of another ERP supplemented with custom development. This is probably a good idea as our parent company is already using SAP and our current systems probably wouldn’t be able to handle the expected growth without substantial work/money. As a result, I have to get trained. I will soon be a highly qualified ABAPer (ABAP being SAP’s programming language).

Training is an interesting beast. It’s hard to sit in the same room for an entire day and maintain a high enough level of interest to not daydream about what DVD I’ll be buying next week. I am learning a lot, though. And its a good thing, because I already have an assignment and a deadline with all this new stuff in it.

One thing I have determined from driving there and back again from training is that my CD changer should never really be without the Deftones. Their brand of moody rock is really what I need to get through Atlanta traffic and the occasional tollbooth. The official site is lacking right now, but word on the street is that we can expect a new release sometime in the first part of this year. Good news indeed.

I didn’t even make it a day before I broke my XHTML validation (I broke it on the second post from 01/16). The thing I am going to have to remember most is to escape the ‘&’ and other special characters (ie: <, >, etc).

Anyway, things are fixed now.

A few years ago Marvel decided to tell the backstory of one of my favorite comic book characters, Wolverine. The books, simply titled ‘Origin’, came out in the 2001 – 2002 timeframe. They were released on a sort of monthly basis (there were some delays along the way) and I bought all six of them at the time. I wanted to have them all in hand before I read them so I had to wait for almost a year to just get started. Then for some reason I never read them, until now.

Before I get into this, I should note that I am not a huge comic fan. I have my favorite characters and some books for them, but nothing I would call a collection.

I have to say that the artwork here is amazing. Some of the best that I have seen anywhere, let alone in a comic. It is anime-ish, but not too much so. The story is also very good. We learn about Wolverine’s childhood, family and friends, and the reasons that he turned into the man/animal that he is.

There were a few things that I didn’t like too much about the story, however. There was one part where some people were talking about him and saying, “He’s like a wolverine.” “Yeah, like a wolverine!!”. A little much. Also, the ending seemed a little rushed. I think that a lot of diehard comic fans were a little disappointed with this title, but even with a few complaints, I still really enjoyed it. And that’s all that matters.

Now it seems that a new book is about to come out (Marvel says its already out, Amazon and Barnes & Noble disagree), entitled Wolverine: The End. From what I can tell, Marvel has published a few ‘The End’ books for other characters and now its Logan’s turn. Its written by Paul Jenkins, who also did Origin, so hopefully it’ll be of equal quality. Mine’s on pre-order.

Well, it never fails. Every January for like the past 4 years I have gotten sick. Stupid January.

As part of my never ending quest for web programming standards compliance, I have successfully modified the site and Blogger template to be valid XHTML 1.0.

My first pass through validation landed me 244 errors. That was a lot. I was able to quickly get it down to sub-100 pretty painlessly. The last 40 or so proved to be a challenge with the last 4 occurring in the generated JavaScript for my hit counter. Apparently XHTML and JavaScript don’t like each other. The solution for this is to call an external .js file. Problem solved, validation complete.

I am now proudly displaying valid XHTML and CSS banners at the bottom of the page.