MyVogonPoetry

Competitor

Brian — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:53:44 +0000

Just a note for myself to log when it happened… I found a competitor to the new site we’ve been working on and they are doing lots of things we have already planned. Competition’s good though - keeps you on your toes. (if you’re lost, don’t worrry - none of this will really make sense to anyone but me)

Flying to NY to be on TV!

Brian — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:55:06 +0000

In case you don’t follow my candy blog, I’m being flown to NY on Monday to be on TV as a Candy Expert! I was on TV once when I was a kid because I won a Pet Rock Race :)

Candy Addict on TV

Scored THREE $1 T-shirts from NerdyShirts

Brian — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:35:39 +0000

I happened to visit NerdyShirts tonight at just past midnight EST and saw they were having a $1 sale! I picked up two Don’t Hate The Player tees and one (misprint) Free Hugs tee. $3 plus $8 shipping so $11 total for three t-shirts! SWEET!

XPath tip for Hpricot - no tbody

Brian — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:07:18 +0000

When using a plugin in Firefox to get the XPath of an item, be aware that Firefox inserts tbody tags into the source. So, if you get an XPath like
/html/body/div[@id='content']/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/div/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[3]

Do a View Source in Firefox and see if the tbody tags are actually in the source or not. If not, remove the tbody tags in the XPath then the modified XPath will work with Hpricot.

Tags: Ruby, Hpricot, XPath

Candy Addict linked from BusinessWeek!

Brian — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:35:01 +0000

Wow. My candy blog was linked from BusinessWeek today!

Tags: geek, candy, business, business week

Geek Crafts

Brian — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:52:16 +0000

Haven’t fully finished tweaking the theme yet, but check out my latest site: GeekCrafts.com. I’ve got a great writer named Shayne that’s gonna be writing for it. We kick it off in earnest this weekend.

Tags: geek, craft, crafts, scifi, geeky, nerdy, nerd, diy, make

I got a PSP

Brian — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:59:43 +0000

I finally broke down and bought a nice used PSP today (even though I already have a GP2x). Fun fun!

How to get all links on a page with Hpricot

Brian — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:40:39 +0000

I couldn’t find a good simple explanation of this online, I had to look at some examples and figure it out so I thought I’d post this for myself and others. Here is how to get all links on a page using Hpricot:


  def get_links(doc)
    urls = []
    unfiltered_links = (doc/"a")
    unfiltered_links.each { |alink|
      urls < <  alink.attributes['href']
    }
    return urls
  end

Tags: ruby, Hpricot, programming, coding

New Compaq laptop and OfficeMax

Brian — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:20:23 +0000

On December 30, I bought a Compaq Presario F732NR laptop from Officemax for $549. My desktop had died a few months ago and I was tired of using my work laptop at home (it SUCKS). 3 days ago, I saw that it was now on sale at OfficeMax for $499. I took my receipt to OfficeMax on the 14th day after I bought it and they happily refunded $50 to me. I was amazed. No trouble, no problem. Just $50 back. (It’s $679.99 now) Thanks, OfficeMax!

So far, I am happy with the laptop, I just need to get rid of Vista…. I have found other people that successfully installed XP on it. I’ll probably make it a dual boot XP and linux machine.

Tags: Officemax, Compaq, customer service

Making a Mario “Grow Your Own Mushroom”

Brian — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 06:02:19 +0000

These should be so easy to make. I might try it this weekend. Would look great in my cube and would make a great gift.

Buy it at ThinkGeek (they are out of stock) or wait for my instructions to build your own :)

Tags: mario, mushroom, diy