View on a disturbed Mindscape...

Yes yes, I am terrible at sticking with one blog.

This time I have decided to basically run my own blog. This way I hope to have more control over the design and such. Also, I hope this blog will perform a bit better.

The blog is located at http://www.greftek.net/blog (or you go to http://blog.greftek.net/ and it will take you there as well)

Go there, and tell me what you think of it. :)

This night I was engaged in a discussion on the general discussions forum on the gaming community boards I run. This discussion and prior observations tickled my curiosity to the question in how far these kids really think in terms of building a future for themselves.

I've started a discussion on the boards, which I hope to get some response out of. I think it's an interesting discussion to have. I hope to get a better understanding of the mind set of these full time hard core gamers. I am rather curious about what will turn up.

In essence I would love to see where this group of your people is eventually headed. From some of the stories I have read over the years I cannot help but wonder if there is a subculture within the gaming community that will turn out to be a rather unproductive part of our western society. The really bad cases - I am talking kids dropping out of high school just to game - are the extremes that interest me most. One can only wonder how they will turn out and where they will be in ten years or so.

The discussion is posted on this forum. Feel free to read and join in. (registration required)

People have asked me repeatedly if I wouldn't mess 'nerding' around when being a project manager. I've reassured them that also having a hosting company together with a good friend I would not be left without things to nerd with. However to a certain degree I am starting to feel I will definitely miss the challenges that come with administrating such a large and complex infrastructure, even if only as a controller (although I do more than a controller should... it's in the nature of the nerd ;)).

Nevertheless there is a large part of me that wants to grow and expand. I feel the desire to stand on a higher level, overlook the problems more and orchestrating the solution. As my function right now I do get involved in some projects, but in its entirety I was too distracted by all the small chores I had to perform. In my new position I hope to be able to focus more on the big picture.

I hope in my future job there will be the room to quantify customer wishes into functionality, possibly making the functional design and be able to guide the process by effectively playing a lead role in the latest web release of ilse media. I ache to put that which I learnt years ago into practice and use this knowledge to bring those ideas that are floating around in this company, which I love dearly, to fruition.

Tomorrow will be weird. I will step into the office and I will find my second me. (again)

No, not a science fiction story but reality. Of course he's not me in sense of DNS strands but in function and such he is my second me. And some time from now he will be my successor.

I wrote before about me making a move for projects. Tomorrow will be the first step in that process and even though I won't do anything for or with projects yet it is still a very exciting milestone.

For privacy reasons (or exposing the true identity behind some more sinister handle he might have on the net ;)) I will not name him yet but he knows I am talking about him. :P We had some idle conversation over IM today (he was still enjoying the last moments of vacation while I was working) which is probably the first casual exchange we've had.

I must say I have a rather positive image of him as a person and fits well in what I think suits the job description, in skills as well as personality. As such I am rather excited to start working with him tomorrow. I feel these will be exciting times.

The last couple of days I've been coming to work to find some nitwit has parked his car on my parking spot. These parking spots are reserved for my company and this particular spot is reserved for me.

The company I work for (ilse media, check out their new house style!) pays per parking spot. So aside from it being really inconvenient for me, someone is freeloading at the expense of me and the company I work for.

Today the same car was on my spot again and I had enough. He can park on my spot as early as he want, but I assure you he won't be leaving whenever he wants:


See the set here

This morning I barely averted a traffic accident. It was raining off and on as I was driving along the jammed up freeway. As things started moving again I accelerated as well, only for the car in front of me making a rather abrupt stop.

I hit the break but due to the conditions on the road I just skidded onward. I finally stood still about 2 meters away from the car in front of me.

This situation took me by surprise. Sure it was raining a little and the roads looked wet, but not particularly slippery. Anyway, this shows why tailgating is a bad thing; if I hadn't kept my proper distance I would have lost another car and possibly something even more precious.

What a night I am having.

I was walking my dog loki and was waiting for the elevator. When the elevator came, a guy came out with a dog, not on a leash. The dog instantly flew at loki and started attacking viciously. I tried to get the dog off, but it kept coming after loki. The owner was fucking useless at trying to get the dog off.



Finally, I gave his dog a punch in the face (while it was biting loki's face) which finally seemed to convince him to stop. A rather risky thing to do, since he could have gone for my arm for all I know. At the same time the owner took a swing at me; a pathetic attempt since other than giving me a start it didn't leave much of an impression.

The guy then went off that he was the only one that touches his dog. On my turn I told him off that he should have had his goddamn dog on a leash. Whining something about him having a better grip on his dog than I did (yeah, that's why it was able to continue biting my dog) he sort of hurried off.

It's people like that I really hate. First of all, people should socialize their animal to behave around other animals and do discourage vicious behavior like that. And even if you have a dog that does not like some other dogs you make sure it's on a leash. Anyone that ignores that responsibility and then attacks me for breaking up the fight is a bad dog owner in my opinion.

I've built a nice little bit of PHP-code serves a different signature every time you refresh the page.

I came up with the idea when I wanted to make a new signature for my forum on CDG.net. I had collected some quotes in the past from myself (vain as it may seem) that I wanted to share. Unfortunately the amount of quotes made it hard to show all at once, which gave me the rotation idea.

The rotation idea on its own isn't new; I've had forum members (I believe Darkstorn) which had a similar set-up with images of WWII planes that cycled every time you viewed his posts. Being a coder I of course wrote my own 16 lines of code which did something similar.

Getting PHPBB to accept a php file as an image requires a little creativity. I solved that problem by adding a mod_rewrite rule to access the script whenever signature.jpg is requested.

To record the sequence I place a cookie with the sequence number and up the value with every hit. The problem with this is that the cookie comes from a '3rd party', which means a half-decent browser blocks it. In order to make this work I had to make a whole friggin' P3P privacy policy and implement it! Honestly, this was more than writing the code.

Anyway, here's the result:


I've also decided to expand this little script in the near future with a simple web-interface to add and remove images from the image cycle. It might seem meaningless but I just enjoy these simple and small projects, which just give me a break from the more complex problems I face every day.

This morning one of my co-workers was treated with a sight you don't see very often:

Google go boom

Like I said, we are rarely treated to such events, which makes them sort of fun to collect.

The last 'major' site that I caught dysfunctional was PHP:

PHP.net made a boo-boo

In which case it's even funnier, because not only is the site down but the problem is caused by an error in the php-code. ;)

Discovery needs to update its web site:

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Q: Many concerned fans, including Connie Games and Chris Baird, have heard rumors that you have been bitten by a very venomous snake and have died. Others worried that you had succumbed to a fatal crocodile bite. Are you OK?

A: I've never been bitten by a venomous snake, and I recently heard that I'd been killed. Ha ha! I've been killed by crocodiles, venomous snakes, spiders. I've even had a beetle crawl in my ear and kill me once. Nah! I'm here to tell you: Steve Irwin lives!

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Slightly outdated, me thinks...