A Conflagration of Randomness

For years I’ve been contemplating making a image gallery on a site, but the effort is always too great and I don’t have a gigantic collection, but I’d like to share here a good bit of my photoshops.  We’ll start with my signatures.

So, most of these were made in photoshop, and the novice looking ones were towards the beginning.

When you meet someone new in college, you usually see them face-to-face, so you already know their gender and for the most part you know about how old they are from how they look and from the fact that they are in college.  Since I’ve been meeting a lot of new people, I was wondering, since the typical chatroom introduction, Age/Sex/Location (ASL), is not very suited for the college atmosphere, there must be an alternative that college students could use to get the important information out of a new person with a short acronym.  The acronym I came up with was “Y/M/D.” Now, granted that looks like a foreign date format, with year, month, and day, but that is not what it stands for.  Instead the Y is for year (well maybe it is a date format), the M is for Major, and the D is for dorm.

Year

When you meet someone new on campus you are always wondering what year of college are they in.  Are they a new freshmen? Or maybe they’re just lost because they’re a transfer student who’s really a Junior.  Knowing the year (Freshmen, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Graduate) of a person is very helpful in knowing how long you will know them (not long if they graduate in that semester), how much you can inform them about the campus or college life, and if they are datable….jk lol Knowing the year of a college student is definitely important.

Major

Definitely one of the first things you find out when you meet someone on campus is what they are majoring in.  This can tell you a great many things such if they have the same interests as you, how sociable they by the stereotypical party Business major or the studyholic engineer, and definitely what they want to do with their life.  Of course, if you’re like me with no idea what to do with my life, knowing my major might not help with that.

Dorm

If you plan on becoming good friends with this person and spending a lot of time with them, you must find out where they live.  You will not want to be in the smelly dorm, but of course you will want to be in the dorm with all the attractive girls (or guys if girls are reading this).  Also, knowing if the dorm is the farthest from campus or not is a good idea.  Many things can be affected by where the dorm is, especially if you need to go there at 7am to get the homework you left there the night before for your 8am class.

So next time you are in a Campus Forum, be prepared with your YMD

http://www.shaunbrown.com/inventions.htm

Usually when my clothes come out of the dryer either they don’t smell good because the dryer sheets were bad or they were in there too long and got a burnt smell.  So I have always had to line the inside of my clothes with some form of deodorant to make them smell decent.  But recently I got some Axe spray.  When I did my laundry the other day I decided to put my shirts in the drawer like usual, but as soon as I finished I sprayed some Axe into the drawer and quickly closed it.  This got me thinking about “Axe Bombing.” I have frequently heard complaints, particularly by girls, that if sprayed way too much, like some guys tend to do, the Axe smells awful.  I have often had this experience when I was forced to take Gym class in High School.  The area surrounding the Axe sprayer smells putrid for a few minutes.  So what if you used it on enemies? If some guy in the dorm down the hall were annoying you, playing music too loud or smoking outside your dorm, you could take a Axe can and, assuming you knew how hard and which way it landed, you could have the Axe can erupt in their room, making the whole room smell like a can full of Axe.  I assume this would work if you threw it out the window at the sidewalk at that annoying guy smoking right below your window. I was browsing the web right before I posted this to see what other ideas have been done with Axe, and low and behold, poeple have made Axe Bombs and shown videos on Youtube.  See below.

Youtube Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcYwbjVvj7I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng1TiaHevN8

How to Make that Annoying Guy with the Sub-woofer Shut-up

A while back I was having a discussion with a friend, who told me a story about a friend who we’ll call Fred.  Fred lived in a dorm like everyone else and just like everyone else, he had that annoying neighbor who always had his sub-woofer going with some kinda deep bass music.  Fred would try to fall asleep at night, at about 2 am like normal college students, but that darn sub-woofer still went on.  Fred finally got tired of this a few weeks into college and he was already starting to miss his home.  So the weekend he planned to leave to visit home, Fred borrowed a sub-woofer for his stereo (because Fred had thought about the annoyances his sub-woofer would cause dormmates before coming to college and not brought his) and found the resonating frequency of the dorm.  He then turn up the sub-woofer and his stereo to full volume and left for the weekend.  Alas, when he returned, he never heard that darn sub-woofer from his neighbor again.

[Update] And now you can buy axe toys:

I have launched a new website called Shop the Internet.  It is intended to be a valuable resource to consumers as it provides multiple shopping resources all on one site including several major retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy.

I was working on my new Drupal site, Shop the Internet, yesterday and I tried to insert a poll into a sidebar block that would ask the users which online shopping site did they prefer: Amazon, Bestbuy, Newegg, Target, or Walmart.  To test the poll I click Amazon and viola, it posted my vote.  Success!  Or so I thought…I was logged in to my admin panel in Firefox so I tried it in Internet Explorer.  When I refreshed the page, it said it was voted on and was showing the results.  So obviously the poll must have been more advanced than I thought, using IP address over cookies.  So again I tried it on Google Chrome and same thing.  Okay everything is fine.  So I go back to work with my site.  However after half an hour when my cache data was set to reset I decided to retest it and so I opened Internet Explorer and went to Shop the Internet…but now the poll was available to be voted on.  Of course I instantly realized this was because the caching of the poll was wrong, it was caching the poll and saving it as the cached version so that anyone who viewed it after I had voted on it would see the results only for another half an hour.  So I started my research on Google of course.

I searched for a bit, but no results and I was wondering if it were my fault that the poll was being cached.  But eventually I came upon a Drupal forum post http://drupal.org/node/523676 which gave a patch which is transcribed below:

diff -urp –strip-trailing-cr ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.install ./modules/poll/poll.install
— ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.install 2009-01-06 16:46:37.000000000 +0100
+++ ./modules/poll/poll.install 2009-07-18 22:29:37.000000000 +0200
@@ -130,3 +130,21 @@ function poll_schema() {
return $schema;
}

+/**
+ * @defgroup updates-6.x-extra Extra poll updates for 6.x
+ * @{
+ */
+
+/**
+ * Fix cache mode for “Most recent poll” block.
+ */
+function poll_update_6000() {
+ $ret = array();
+ $ret[] = update_sql(“UPDATE {blocks} SET cache = 2 WHERE module = ‘poll’ AND delta = ‘0′”);
+ return $ret;
+}
+
+/**
+ * @} End of “defgroup updates-6.x-extra”
+ * The next series of updates should start at 7000.
+ */
diff -urp –strip-trailing-cr ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.module ./modules/poll/poll.module
— ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.module 2008-12-18 16:46:20.000000000 +0100
+++ ./modules/poll/poll.module 2009-07-18 21:45:53.000000000 +0200
@@ -131,6 +131,7 @@ function poll_block($op = ‘list’, $delta
if (user_access(‘access content’)) {
if ($op == ‘list’) {
$blocks[0]['info'] = t(‘Most recent poll’);
+ $blocks[0]['cache'] = BLOCK_CACHE_PER_USER;
return $blocks;
}
else if ($op == ‘view’) {
@@ -776,6 +777,8 @@ function poll_cancel($form, &$form_state

// Subtract from the votes.
db_query(“UPDATE {poll_choices} SET chvotes = chvotes – 1 WHERE nid = %d AND chorder = %d”, $node->nid, $node->vote);
+
+ cache_clear_all();
}

/**

If this code looks strange to you you are not alone.  I was confused too.  I have patched files in linux before, but my webhost, Ixwebhosting, does not have access to ssh or the terminal in general so I was stuck.  This was an obvious bug and I could not fix it.  All I could find were links to how to convert a patch file to an exe on Windows, but first I have a linux server and also how would I have executed that anyway?  So I decided to do it the manual way, open the files and manually edit it.  Make sure you back up all original files before editing!

1. First open  ./modules/poll/poll.install and go to line 130
   Find

   function poll_schema() {
      return $schema;
    }

   and add after it

   function poll_update_6000() {
     $ret = array();
     $ret[] = update_sql("UPDATE {blocks} SET cache = 2 WHERE module = 'poll' AND delta = '0'");
     return $ret;
   }

2. Save and exit.  Next open  ./modules/poll/poll.module and go to line 131
   Find:

   if (user_access('access content')) {
        if ($op == 'list') {
          $blocks[0]['info'] = t('Most recent poll');
          return $blocks;
        }
        else if ($op == 'view') {

   and replace with:

   if (user_access('access content')) {
        if ($op == 'list') {
          $blocks[0]['info'] = t('Most recent poll');
         $blocks[0]['cache'] = BLOCK_CACHE_PER_USER;
          return $blocks;
        }
        else if ($op == 'view') {

3. In the same file go to line 777
   Find:

   function poll_cancel($form, &$form_state) {

     $node = node_load($form['#nid']);
     global $user;
     if ($user->uid) {

       db_query('DELETE FROM {poll_votes} WHERE nid = %d and uid = %d', $node->nid, $user->uid);
     }

     else {

       db_query("DELETE FROM {poll_votes} WHERE nid = %d and hostname = '%s'", $node->nid, ip_address());

     }
     // Subtract from the votes.

     db_query("UPDATE {poll_choices} SET chvotes = chvotes - 1 WHERE nid = %d AND chorder = %d", $node->nid, $node->vote);

   }

   and replace with:

   function poll_cancel($form, &$form_state
   
      // Subtract from the votes.
      db_query("UPDATE {poll_choices} SET chvotes = chvotes - 1 WHERE nid = %d AND chorder = %d", $node->nid, $node->vote);
      cache_clear_all();
    }

4. Save this file and upload.  Now the Poll block should work well.