chadedge dot-com
personal blog related to technology, coding and publishing.
2012 and Comedy
0I don’t usually talk about comedy on this blog, mostly because I consider myself a “failed comedian with no intention of stopping.”
That said, I guess it’s about time for me to talk about how 2011 wrapped up and what’s in store for 2012.
I gotta admit, I had an amazing 2011 – when it comes to comedy. When it comes to life, 2011 was a shit-storm. I left a long-time job in an industry that I am still willing to bleed for every day; I have a much colder, lonely home due to two people taking time to explore happiness and sanity; I lost a relative. There were other things involved (health mostly), but I digress. On to the good stuff!
2011 saw me performing at a few clubs in Seattle and LA – all due to the good graces of (sorry, not gonna name-drop here) local and traveling comics that took a risk on me. I got to sit in awe of some heroes, meet some amazing new friends, get support (and heckled) from others, travel my ass off (whether performing or just getting out as much as possible) – and even get into an angry (yet funny) verbal exchange with a comic.
All said, 2011 was good to me for comedy, and set me up for 2012.
So 2012 has just started and I’m already focused like a mofo. I’m working my ass off to finish the first 200 pages of a book I hope to have out by the end of the year (either on a Seattle imprint or with some other writers, bundled together in one of those “sad, self-published” kinds of deals). I’m traveling in February and March, firstly to see some amazing comics and musicians but also to get my sad brand of self-deprecating humor into whatever club I can lie my way into. Sure, there’s opportunities and open doors everywhere (locally and in my favorite haunts elsewhere), but I have to push every chance I can get.
I’ve been accused (remember I mentioned the heated verbal exchange earlier?) of “pulling at the tits” of others in order to get exposure or a leg up. Honestly, it hurts a little to hear that I’m not talented and that I’m just riding off the sweat and good graces of others. In this industry, I see it all the time and so far nobody has looked at me sideways for their help – or worse, put me on a stage merely based on their own name. I feel the introductions I’ve gotten and the minute amount of stage time I’ve gotten so far has been at *the very least* due to others seeing something in me and *most likely* due to the fact that I’ve surrounded myself with an amazingly supportive and friendly bunch.
Hell, I’ve met people who have spent time with me that I never thought I’d even be able to get a ticket to their show ten years ago.
Nope. I still don't see the funny. Sorry.
2012, I’ve got a lot of personal work to do on myself (I’m spread too thin, I’m spending too much money, my relationship status confuses even Facebook, my health is in the shitter [puns!]), but I know I can do “it.” Whatever “it” is, I’m up for the challenge. I’ve got a bottle of water by my side, a budget set for the next two months, a nice calm evening planned for tomorrow, and plenty of toilet paper.
I hope I succeed at standup, and eventually writing (my true passion). If I don’t, oh well – it’s been an amazing ride so far. If nobody even remembers a single joke I’ll be happy that I got to bump shoulders and even sit in the audience of some amazing talent.
If I were truly funny, I’d have something to say at the end of this post, but if you’ve seen me perform you’d understand when I just end it with “…”
—
Oh, one more thing: After spending hundreds on the equipment, writing the scaffolding for 8 episodes, Dirt Laundry will be coming in the next couple of months, god willing. The hold-up has just been due to scheduling. I’ve recorded three episodes but they’re just me talking into a mic and that is so goddamned boring in a podcast!
Safari 5.1.2 first impression: fail
01 month ago
So I just updated to Safari 5.1.2, and once doing so (which causes a reboot, by the way – fail #1), I attempted to visit Amazon.com
As you can see from the screenshot comparison above, Safari failed miserably. So bad that I didn’t even attempt to continue my tests to other Web sites (fail on my part, I admit).
Has anyone else been hit with rendering issues in Safari since the update?
Update: After a few restarts of the machine, it looks like Safari is behaving now. It appears that stylesheets were not loading (although they were appearing in the document inspector and debugging tools as downloaded resources).
I’m chalking this up to a ‘maybe just a partial install occurred, and a reboot completed things.’
iPhone 4s vs iPhone4 vs iPhone3Gs (photos)
03 months ago
Testing out my iPhone4s vs iPhone4 vs iPhone3Gs camera quality.
Mind you, these photos have been reduced for the Web, so they won’t show the full 3mb, 2.8mb, 1.3mb quality, but this should be good enough to show you the very big difference in quality in a low-control test.
iPhone3Gs:
iPhone 3Gs (1536x2048)
iPhone4:
iPhone 4 (1936x2592)
iPhone4s:
iPhone 4s (2448x3264)
Oh, and one more thing: All 3 phones are running the latest iOS5.
PPS: Running iOS5 on my iPad (1st gen) works fine within apps, but closing an app and switching both take hella-long (looks like an animation issue from the OS: switching or closing an app causes a long delay and a slow animation of the app screen shrinking). Other than that, iOS plays nicely on all my iDevices.
PHP date/time problem: need help
04 months ago
Update: I got this working and will do my best to post the answers at a future date (puns!).
OK, here’s the deal:
In my employer’s database, we’re storing the currently logged-in user’s UTC offset in seconds (for instance, Pacific time offset is -25200 seconds from UTC).
I need to convert this offset into the following:
- TZID: (eg: “America/Los Angeles”)
- – Standard Time Settings:
- TZNAME (eg: “PST” for Pacific Standard)
- TZOFFSETTO (eg: “-0700″ for Pacific Standard)
- TZOFFSETFROM (eg: “-0800″ for Pacific Standard)
- – Daylight Time Settings:
- TZNAME (eg “PDT” for Pacific Daylight)
- TZOFFSETTO (eg: “-0800″ for Pacific Daylight)
- TZOFFSETFROM (eg: “-0700″ for Pacific Daylight)
All these settings have to be written out into an iCal export that we’re working on.
You see, the problem has been this: Members to our system add upcoming events, which are stored in the date/time entered by the adding member (eg: October 1, 2011 at 06:30PM — where the adding member is in PST).
Once the date/time has been entered, we’d like the time of 06:30 to appear in ANY other member’s iCal export, based on THAT member’s timezone (eg: if I set an event for 6:30PM and I wrote it using PST, a user in NYC should ALSO see 06:30PM in their exported calendar, not 09:30PM).
I know, the event time set by the adding member should be gospel, but the system doesn’t really work that way.
Currently, if you export a calendar from our system, the TZ[etc] in iCal is hard-coded to America/Los Angeles and that’s just plain wrong. Users with iCal are seeing “incorrect” (correct, actually) start times for events.
So far, I can use PHP’s built-in timezone_name_from_abbr('hst') or similar to get back what I need for the TZID. The TZNAME (“PDT”) is set by using $dt = new DateTime(); $dt->setTimezone(new DateTimeZone("America/Los Angeles"); $dt->format('T'); which would return “PDT” for a West Coast user.
That leaves the TZOFFSETFROM and TZOFFSETTO and TZNAME in the air for both Daylight savings AND Standard times (depending on which “we” happen to be currently on the server).
I am thinking, since I get back “-0700″ for the $dt->format('O'); when I run, couldn’t I just ADD an hour to that? Maybe I’m just too dumb to understand how to do that.
So, there’s my problem. I’m using a prebuilt method for generating the iCal calendar, and I’d like the offsets to no longer be hardcoded, but instead use the starting point of UTC offset (again, defaulting to -25200 seconds if in Pacific time).
Any ideas? I’m under a huge time crunch to get done what should be a simple task.
