Wow, this is crazy cool. Mario meets kick-ass chanty Russian music. A must watch:

The Peoples Mario

As it turns out, the superposition of  baked goods, that is, whether they do or do not have a bite taken out of them, is unknown unless one observes the muffin in its box. The very act of observing the muffin changes its state into one of either bitten or unmolested.

If you must know, I almost won 10 bucks on the curiosity of coworkers until I got cute and brought quantum physics into the bet. It's a bit of a buzz kill.

I'm so close to having my bedroom complete, I can nearly taste it. This taste is somewhat like plaster and may not be especially good for me, but I enjoy the thought none the less. I get the feeling that my motley excuse for decor will actually start to make some headway if I keep my nose to the grindstone. It's been a long lazy road that I'm overjoyed it's finally nearing completion. My parents are coming to town and I want them to sleep at my place. This requires more than the hovel I currently call a bed room.

So the holidays are officially over. I think my gifts this year went over pretty well. Possibly not as many in the "win" column as last year, but I can still pride myself on giving people awsome gifts. I'm always suspect when people say they prefer the giving to the recieving but I really do. Seeing my little brother light up when he unpacked the 6 concentric boxes to find an ipod burried at the middle was pretty awsome. Maybe it's the hallmark of adulthood or something but I think I always preferred giving gifts. Maybe when one of my get rich (within a reasonable timeframe) schemes pays off, I'll just go around figuring out what people really want and giving it to them. I don't think a life like that would be wasted.

I think I'm going to start bringing a notebook around with me, or at least a tape recorder or something. I've been having these moments of literary abandon where I at least think of some interesting prose but I always end up forgetting it. More like building blocks if I every decided to write something formally, but I guess you need something on tap. They're usually never more than a string of thoughts locked together but I think they're paper worthy at least, (wheter or not they're literary is up to the reader I suppose).

I understand the topic of this post was questionable verbosity but unfortuantely my glasses just exploded again, so I think I'm going to call it a night after I finish listening to "Virtual Insanity" by Jamiroquai. That song is awsome, and the video is really neat (although, less cool when you realize it's the room that's moving and not the floor). G'night blackness of cyberspace...

I've been out shopping, I fought my way through the ravening mobs at that bastion of consumerism and arrived with a number of items I believe I can safely classify in the category of "Booty". All kidding aside, the mall is a mad house this time of year. I came to realize a while ago that thanksgiving is possibly the only "pure" holiday left. It isn't particularly monetized and isn't driven by corporate profit grabs. (Much as Christmas, Valentines, and Easter have become). People just seem to get together, eat way to much turkey, take a triptophen induced nap and generally enjoy the company of those who are close to them. I can appreciate it, but I also really enjoy the christmas cheer this time of year. Even though my feet ached, my arms were sore from carrying parcels and my bank card was warm from the friction of being swiped, I felt an odd sort of camraderie with my peers. Most of whom looked harried and had scars from battling other people for the latest Furby or Tickle-Me-Elmo. (By the way, I'm convinced both those toys are plotting some world level event, see: 8 days later)

I'm currently placing calls to friends and family to determine the most efficient present buying strategies for my loved ones. Life would be easier if I had easy access to Santa's elves. This may be a business opportunity to explore in the future. A database driven website to commune with Santa's diminutive spys may be just what the doctor ordered. I could hook it to google ad networks and make money from cross site linking and instant sales. (*Starts to think much harder about this idea.... I wonder what Santa's MSN is?*)

You might notice the headings of these news posts are rendered using a non standard font.

Previously this would have required that I pre-render all the headings using an image manipulation program and upload them as seperate and individual graphic files to the webserver. This is sub-optimal as it prevents the generation of fancy headers from database derived text. Being a web developer and not a graphic designer, I try to limit my time with photoshop to the bare minimum.

The headers on this page however are generated procedurally by PHP and the GD image library. Most of the credit for this goes to Stewart Rosenberger of http://www.stewartspeak.com.

His script utilizes Javascript to replace text entered in standard heading tags with post generated images.

The primary difference between my script and his, is that here, I generate the image purely in PHP by plugging the appropriate text into a PHP function. This gives me a much higher level of control over the headings as I can specify multiple font styles per page and am not limited to client side Javascript support issues. In effect, the client has no idea it's been duped.

I'll be posting a walkthrough with code to a new section in a short time. Further planned advancements are full output buffering support. This should let me use regular expressions to parse the output of a standard page and in effect, only require the end user of my code to utilize a few special directives in their CSS documents to flag the tag as an appropriate header.