Clocks to the right of me

Well. I avoided caffeine for most of the day. I think I had one cup of coffee pretty early. I was a bit bad, though. About six hours ago, I had a candy bar, a small bag of potato chips and a 20 oz root beer. (I paying for that. sigh. My mouth won out over my stomach, but it wasn't a fair fight and now my stomach is taking revenge.)

I'm feeling a bit sleepy and my ability to concentrate has been dwindling. I guess I'll give bed a try. Tonight, though, I will keep that damn CPAP on!

I'll read, too. but I expect this will be one of those times when I read the same paragraph three or four times as I drift in and out of dozing.

Worked on the CI script tonight. I've created the gallery indexes. First thing tomorrow will be the script to get the photos into the database. Then TESTING. I need to test the edit function, the update function and all the various navigation functions for the admin scripts. Then I'll start testing the scripts I wrote for public display. (Must check that I gave a space for a picture caption in that.)

Cast meeting tonight. My head seems to have been screwed on correctly for this one. :) The banquet is two weeks from today (well, yesterday, now). Italian. It will be good. I'll volunteer to help with food. Must remember to tell Amy. (Hey Amy, I volunteer to help with food.)

Tomorrow, I hit up a few stores looking for new fishnets/garter combination things. I'll be able to find those (I think) in queen around here. But few places sell garter belts in big sizes. I've found several on-line stores, but it will cost a fortune to have them by Friday if I order on line. Bringing INTENTIONALITY to the game.... I will find some locally (or I'll just make a damn garter belt and buy queen size hose someplace.

I'll call a few places tomorrow before heading out.

Well.

I spent two hours trying to figure out why when I imported the names of 6,500 pictures into the database, it consistently stopped at 468 (or something like that). Frustrating at hell. I could do the inserts without a problem at an SQL command line, but my scriipt routinely made only 468 inserts.

Finally, while telling Aeire what was up, it dawned in me. I'm using one of MY routines for doing the insert. And the one I was using would not allow duplicate entries. Filling one column of a table with a picture name (set by the camera when the picture was taken) was showing "dulicates" all over the place. :) There are 468 unique names in all of the galleries. :)

Well, all is done (at least for the public access parts and for the admin editing parts. I do have to finish the gallery installation part, but that is trivial at this point.

It's a little slow, though. Enough to be a bit annoying. I think it will all get rebuilt with some of the common procedures installed in the database itself. I'm making way too many separate calls to the database.

I have all week to play with it. I'll not put the new stuff on line until I have a new gallery to create (next weekend). Maybe I'll be able to speed the puppy up quite a bit.

Now, I'm off to look for fishnets with a built-in garter belt.

Yeah. I know.

Ii understand the economic model retailers use. Even on line retailers.

Mainstream stores care mainstream stuff. Specialty stores care mainstream stuff for that specialty. Stores have to carry what will not only sell, but sell quickly. Idle inventory is expensive. Most retailers are operating on borrowed money. If the merchandise doesn't move, the finance charges eat into profit.

I understand.

That doesn't mean I have to like it. I don't buy much stuff. I buy almost no mainstream stuff. Consequently, when I do want to buy something, it is extremely difficult to find what ever it is.

I have to keep looking this week. I've already used up my first fall back plan. Time to get extra creative.

Interesting unconscious decisions

I've been watching closely what I've been eating and, more importantly, what the defaults are when I'm just grazing or involved in some routine eating. I've changed my tastes over the last several years. I didn't intend to, but I have.

Several years ago, I always drank coffee black without sugar. The only time I would add milk was to make bad coffee bearable or to cool it down. I would add sugar if the coffee was bitter enough. But doing so was a conscious decision each time. For the last year, maybe two, I've added creamer and sugar to every cup. I don't like it better that way, it's just become a habit for some reason.

I've noticed other things, too. In restaurants (diners and coffee shops), I go for the menu item that is the most food for the money. The Denny's Grand Slam Slugger, for instance. And I eat the whole thing. Must be 3000 calories for that one meal. And I don't even like it that much.

I'm not "on a diet." I'm not on a weight loss program. I'm losing weight because I'm paying attention to my food choices and I'm not eating when my body isn't interested. I've dropped 20 pounds in 2 months.

This has been a good exercise. Partly because I'm losing weight (my knees will thank me), but partly because I'm more and more conscious about other areas of my life. Areas where I've slowly adopted some default ways of being without paying attention. And there are a lot of them!

Well, back to coding. Why work at this time of night? Because I can tune out the audio from The Simpsons playing on the other computer in this room.

Scripts are done.

Not tested for creating the gallery. I suppose I could test that by faking a gallery.... I guess I'll do that. I have to write a little html form for gallery creation, but that's a gimme.

I'll spend a bit of time tonight doing a bit of research about stored procedures in postgresql. Ive done it before, but it's been awhile. And I'm going to look at another issue.

I chose to not use the OIDs as uniquifiers. Instead, I'm letting the postgresql assign a sequence number to everything that gets inserted. Then I'm using those numbers to maintain relationships between tuples in different tables.

The problem is this. When I insert a new tuple in the database, the response, if successful is the OID. All well and good, but I need information from the database. So, I insert a new gallery then query the database to get the sequence number and another bit the database calculates. That is two calls. Bad. Slow. Bad. I think stored procedures will help, but there has to be a different solution. ... Hmmm. I think there is.

Right now, if the admin user is editing the galleries and selects a given image to add to the front page rotation, I'm making 6 calls to the database. That is FIVE too many. sigh. I'll refine it.

I have one general purpose procedure called gallery_info. It makes two calls to the database and creates three variables: namelist, gal and pic.

The namelist is a sorted tcl list of all the image names in a given gallery;
gal is an array that has the gallery data: gallery_id, show_name, show_date,
thumb, visible, gallery_dir, when_date, hour;
And pic is an array that contains info for each picture: caption visible picture_id front_page.

That is a lot of information I am fetching for each entry into the script.

Well, it's a first cut. :) It will be fun and good practice to refine it.

I just noticed

That the game I've been playing has a little counter at the bottom. It took me awhile to notice it. I would not have seen it at all if it weren't equipped with a "tool tip."

It tell me how many games I've played.

I'm... embarrassed.

As I go off to bed

My thoughts are on my hair. Those little buggers are driving me crazy. It is entirely possible that after Rocky of Friday, the hair I've been patiently growing on my head will once again be sent to the locker room. :)

I might even experiment with the Whoopi look. :)