Checksum Arcanius

While looking at my site today, I realized that it is way too blue. I’m gonna have to do something about that. But, as the procrastinator’s creed goes, why do something today that you can do just as easily tomorrow?

I almost upgraded to WordPress 1.5 today, at the sugestion of Erik. Unfortunately, too much has changed to make transition a simple process, so I quikly backtracked almost all the way – I ended up with 1.2.1, 0.0.1 larger than I had before.

As a way to relax a little after some intense roboticizing, and in preperation for more intense roboticizing tomorrow and Sunday, I rented the movie Cellular, in hopes that it would be a mostly mindless fun flick. My hopes were fulfilled and I enjoyed the movie a good deal (though it insn’t anything I’m gonna watch again soon). It required only mild suspension of belief, and it mixed a fun plot with enough action and emotional displays to keep me interested. Overall, a good movie for vegging out at the end of the week.

This morning, I went to bed at about 6:00 am after staying up to finish up the Chairman’s Award submission before the deadline at 9:01 pm tonight. The good news is that I actually did finish it. On the other hand, I don’t know how much sense I make at 6:00 am, so I’ll probably have to go back and edit it today But at least that is considerably easier than writing the entire thing tonight, with the deadline quickly approaching.

A little while back, I noticed that I was beginning to get some trackback spam. At the time, I thought it odd that the trackbacks didn’t actually show up as comments – yet I recieved the email as if they had been posted. It truns out that, beause the initial trackbacks I was getting were from poker places, they had in fact gone into the moderation queue (although WordPress did not inform me on this). Secondly, the spammers seem to have refined their techniques, as a couple of trackback comment spams actually made their way into comments on the blog. They have of course been utterly eradicated, long before google or even msn bots could have picked them up, but now I have to make a decision between learning how trackbacks work so I can implement some sort of more intellegent anti-trackback-spam scheme, or simply disabling trackbacks altgether. I don’t want to have to resort to the later techniques, but real trackbacks are not all that common for me, so its not out of the question.

No, I didn’t fall off the end of the earth… Instead, I have been below the radar due to the upcoming FIRST Robotics Competition deadlines. Along with Tim and Cheuk, I have done a lot of work on the TRC website, preparing to win (hopefully) its third sraight Best Website award. Since the site is written in ColdFusion, I have started to learn a little more about the Macromedia product. Its fairly easy to pick up on the basics, and already I have implemented foward-looking event queries (it’s a little bit of a hack, but it should work through the end of the year, and it will never be worse than it was before, when it only showed events on the current day), a more intelligent “What FIRST means to me” cutoff point (before it was hard limited to 500 characters; now it searches for the end of a sentence that occurs after 200 characters), and a new banner that most people, including me, are not entirely pleased with (suggestions are welome – but before February 22nd, please).

So go take a look and let me know what you think.

I planned this post last week, after my second successful geocaching expedition, but in a fit of blogger’s block, I was unable to convert it into a post. So now it comes today, after my third successful and fun geocaching expedition. This time the location was Woodinville, the target was a multi-cache on the Burke-Gilman trail. Along for the fun this time was a member of the fairer sex, a fellow BCC student and adventurer named Vanessa. After finding the cache at the fourth tree, we ate lunch at a nice Mexican place and then called it an afternoon. Overall, quite an enjoyable experience.