Here's some details and pictures:

http://davidstockton.com/wordpress/?p=20

Some time tomorrow, I will be a daddy for the second time.

About three weeks ago, my wife and daughter stopped by my work to go to lunch with me. On the way back to drop me off, the gas pedal dropped to the floor and the car lost power and the engine went to back to idling speeds. I was able to get it to go a little bit (like 4 or 5 feet) by pushing the gas pedal down and then when I let off, I would get a little bit of power. I had to turn a corner and go up a hill and the little power I was getting wasn't enough to get it up the hill, so I had to get out and push the car by myself up the hill into a parking lot.

I called and got the car towed. The next day they said the problem was caused by the mass air flow sensor being screwed up ($470). Towing was $96.50. The car was at 89899 miles, so I told them to go ahead and do the 90,000 mile maintenance ($532.86). They also found that two tie rod ends needed replacing ($390.92) because the wheels could move a little bit without the steering wheel turning. While they were replacing the tie rod ends, they found all the struts were leaking and wanted to replace those (~$600). So with everything they were planning on doing it was looking at about $2400 + tax. When I picked it up they ended up charging just under $2300. It drove like it did about 6 or 7 years ago, lots of power, etc. Very nice.

Cut to Tuesday (2 days ago). My wife goes to the store that night to pick some stuff up and when she comes back tells me that something is wrong with the car. I take it out for a test drive and the car is shaking at idle and low speeds and during my 2-3 mile drive, the check engine light goes on. The smell of gas is very prevalent as well. So she drops me off at work with my car yesterday and I call to make an appointment for the car. At this point the car has 90010.4 miles on it. So we drive it over to the dealer to drop it off last night (it was quite cold) and the gas smell is now combined with exhaust smell and I had to drive there with all the windows down so I didn't pass out or throw up. When I stopped at a light I noticed that everything was foggy looking behind me. When I got there to drop the car off, I asked my wife if the vehicle was smoking and she said it was.

So now the car is there, again, awaiting more work. I really hope this time is something they screwed up on and will be free to fix.

This afternoon (about 30 minutes ago) I got the call from the mechanic. Apparently the car's brains shorted out and it was holding the injector open and just washing the cylinder with fuel. So that explains the smoking, the lack of power, and the smell of gas.

A new computer is going to be $506.51 and take 7-9 days to get here. Yay for me.

I am in need of some help. I'm trying to make a regular expression to parse a chunk of text but I am not having much luck. Mainly because a lot of the text may be optional.

The text may look like this:

Message . . . . : Object Q000006003 in COLOSYS02 type *USRQ deleted.

It could look like this:

From user . . . . . . . . . : QSYS
  Message . . . . : Subsystem is ending controlled.

It could even look like this:

Message . . . . : Job ended abnormally.
  Cause . . . . . : A SIGTERM signal was received for the job. The action for the signal was to terminate the job.

Or like this:

Message . . . . : Job 818753/ONEWORLD/JDENET_K ended on 06/22/05 at 15:53:39; 18 seconds used; end code 30 .
  Cause . . . . . : Job 818753/ONEWORLD/JDENET_K completed on 06/22/05 at 15:53:39 after it used 18 seconds processing unit time. The job had ending code 30. The job ended after 1 routing steps with a secondary ending code of 0. The job ending codes and their meanings are as follows: 0 - The job completed normally. 10 - The job completed normally during controlled ending or controlled subsystem ending. 20 - The job exceeded end severity (ENDSEV job attribute). 30 - The job ended abnormally. 40 - The job ended before becoming active. 50 - The job ended while the job was active. 60 - The subsystem ended abnormally while the job was active. 70 - The system ended abnormally while the job was active. 80 - The job ended (ENDJOBABN command). 90 - The job was forced to end after the time limit ended (ENDJOBABN command). Recovery . . . : For more information, see the Work Management topic in the Information Center, http://www.ibm.com/eserver/iseries/infocenter.

The formatting is not exactly as shown, but slashdot is !helpfully reformating some parts of the ecode tag. The main issue is I need to parse out each of the fields (From User, Message, Cause, Recovery, etc.). These fields may or may not show up in a particular message. This particular message type seems to have the fewest of these types of things to parse. Others that I need to do will have many more with all sorts of gotchas to look out for.

I'd really like to use regex for this since it seems to make things a lot simpler. The other option which seems to involve lots of strpos and substr calls is much uglier (uglier than regex's HA).

I've been trying to play with optional groups, non-greedy matching, etc. but not having a lot of luck. Any help would be much appreciated.

Oh yeah, this is PHP, so I don't have sed or other perl stuff available.

Thank you.

Today I was looking through my Amazon gold box offers and got this: Crytonomicon 2. After not much digging I also found a link to Cryptonomicon 3. Has anyone heard anything about these? The descriptions seem to be the same for all 3 books, and it doesn't appear to have anything to do with The Baroque Cycle books. If anyone knows anything about this, I'd appreciate it. Mr. Stephenson's site is pretty useless as far as finding out this sort of information and I wasn't able to find anything referring to the two new books (not yet released) on google.

Thanks.

Since I'm not getting hired to do photoshop work by just sitting on my butt and doing nothing I've decided to start my own series of cross-over ad campaigns. My first is for the Gilette Venus product. You can see it here. As always, clicking the small version goes to a full-size version. Please let me know what you think.

Venus isn't just for women now. Or at least that is the idea.

Thank you to all of you who replied in the last journal and said that you still read this stuff I write. That was nice.

I'm not expecting many or any replies to this one, but if there is someone out there who is reading this and has been playing with PythonChallenge and has reached past level 18, I would appreciate some help. I have been stumped for about 5 or 6 weeks (not really trying all that hard, but not having any new ideas to try out).

So anyway, if anyone's gotten past this particular level, help would be much appreciated.

Since I am not sure anyone actually reads this journal any more, I'll try once again to get someone to comment on something.

I recently ran across (recently as in less than 10 minutes ago) this movie site while looking through del.icio.us at work because there's nothing to do.

Anyway, there's one video I found of one of the players in the game saying that there's a misconception that quadriplegics can't move their arms. My understanding was that it was paraplegics who can move their arms and quadriplegics are paralyzed from the neck down. I took at the google dictionary link for both paraplegic and quadriplegic and it seems to agree with what I thought.

My question is, is there some case or circumstance where the guy in the video (who is seen cruising in the Murderball chair, palming and throwing a volleyball) would be considered a quadriplegic? Has the designation of level of paralysis changed?

Over the last 13 months since I got gmail, I've found that the spam filter has been adequate. It started off in the not-so-great category, then improved to the almost-never-misses group, and stays there with an occasianal week of screwing up and letting obvious spam through. The good thing is that very very few emails that weren't spam have ever been trapped as spam.

Fairly recently (last few weeks I think), gmail started putting little blurbs at the top of the email instead of the ads down the side. A lot of times these were blog type article links if I was just looking at a mail index, or perhaps a sponsored link if I were in an email.

Normally if I am in the spam folder, it showed some kind of a recipe involving the SPAM meat-like product. Today the only remaining spam marked as unread was something offering a visa credit card. (I should note that my normal procedure is to go into the spam folder, scan the unread emails for non-spams, have it select all unread emails and mark them as read. When there's only one spam, it's fast to click the spam to set it to unread than to select the unread, and mark unread.)

So anyway, it was the only spam, so I click it to open it and mark it read (image loading is blocked so they have no idea I opened it), and I happened to see what google had placed along the top. It wasn't a SPAM recipe, it was an offer for an unsecured Visa card, so in essence, google spammed me in my own spam folder.

Recently, SCOTUS judge Souter (and others) approved a bill that would allow businesses to take over land owned by private individuals if the business would provide more tax revenue than the homeowner did.

A commercial developer is trying to get approval to build a hotel at the present location of Justice David Souter's house. HA!

Link is here

Too funny.

What.... the.... ?!?!

I look in the mirror today at work while washing me hands. My right side... like .5 inches lower sideburns than the left side. I, literally, did not catch myself from saying "WTF!" in the middle of work (I said nothing because talking in the men's room is just strange).

That's right, talking. The men's room is the place to go in, do your business and leave*. Don't have a conversation in there. Especially don't have a cell phone conversation. Don't make a call, don't receive a call, and don't continue talking on the phone while you're heading in there.

First off, your aim isn't that great, and with one less hand and less than half the attention given, it's no wonder the floor is wet all day long.

Secondly, if you are in the restroom, let's say sitting, obviously aim is not an issue, so there's got to be another reason.

I'd like to be that reason. I don't want people to talk to me on the phone whilst they are pooping, and I'm sure most people don't either. If you come into the restroom and plop yourself down and start using the phone (either because you called someone or someone called you), if I am sitting in there too, I am going to do my best to embarrass you by making all sorts of sounds in the next stall. I will try to be as flatulent as possible, even resorting to making fart sounds if I have to. I will force things out causing all manner of splashing and gurling sounds. The restroom echos. If they didn't already realize you were talking to them in the restroom by now, they may suggest you go to the doctor and get something checked out.

If I don't know you, I may** even say things like "Water sure is cold today, huh?" to which you should reply "And deep too."

I swear... I'm gonna shave my sideburns evenly one of these days... (Thanks for FK for the topic and some of these words).

* If you happen to bring in reading material, please don't leave it in the restroom and if you're going to do that sort of thing anyway, please don't share the reading material with your coworkers afterwards or put it on your desk, or worse, theirs, etc. That's just nasty.
** I will not say these things because that would fall under talking in the men's room.

So yesterday I decided to get a notebook computer and long story short ended up choosing the HP zv6015us from CompUSA. They were low on some advertised model so they were taking $250 off and then still offering the rebates, so it would be $949. It's supposed to be and Athlon 64 - 3500+ with 1GB RAM, 100GB HD, dual layer DVD+/-RW and an ATI x200m I think. Anyway, I am noticing that everywhere I look on this computer it says zv6000, not zv6015us. The BIOS says zv6000, the badge on the notebook (top right of keyboard), etc. I want to know if I got the right machine or if they gave me the wrong one?

Does anyone know if it should say 6015 on the notebook, or will the 6xxx all say zv6000?

Thank you guys very much.

I have called and cancelled my xbox live subscription as of about 3 minutes ago. It was due for renewal tomorrow and I don't have enough time to spend with it right now to justify the small amount of time I do play with it. I believe the yearly subscription works out to about 17 cents / day, but with how little I used it I think it was more like $3-5 / hour.

I'll be back on in a few months, I'm sure, but for now I am taking a break from it. From what the CSR said, I can not get my gamertag back as they hold them forever. Silly policy I think, but whatever. It was a lot of fun playing with the people I've met here. A Lunatic View, MC Hampster, neenee3, Kai Technolust, and redhunter. Thank you all. It was much more fun to play with you guys (and girl) than to pay $5/hour to be called a "fag" by a 13-year-old.

Anyway, I'll be sure to let you all know when I get back online there.

Thanks again.

WARNING: Frog is anatomically correct (for not a frog) and doesn't wear pants. Frog weiner exists on other side of link.

You can see it here if you'd like to.

The pic there links to a full size (6.3MP, 3MB) version.

Hope you like it.