Well, I love the fact that PHP has a built in function to handle CSV (comma seperated value) files. What I don’t like is the way that Windows handles quotations! When copying and pasting into any of the Office programs, Windows decides that you need Windows specific quotes, whether they be single or double. What does this mean? Well, when you try to output one of these quotes from the CSV you get a junk character thrown into your code!! This has got to be one of the most frustrating things I have ever run into and I can’t find an answer anywhere!

If you have any idea how to fix this, e-mail me at ssegraves [AT] alltel dot net.

I saw Shrek 2 last night and it surprised me. I figured it would be a lame sequel to the first one, wrong! It was hilarious! I would say it was 5x better than the original and it was definitely worth seeing. Antonio Banderas as the voice of “Puss in Boots” was perfect. This is one of the movies I will be buying on DVD, which is rare for me because I’m cheap… 😉

Right now I am focusing on a document exchange software at work. Basically, we want a group of users to be able to upload documents, put in descriptions for them, and allow the people below them to download the documents. Doesn’t sound too hard right? Well, it is because we have to keep the data transferred to a minimum, meaning, we do not want so much information flowing through the pipes as to kill the server.

The software that is running it is coming along fairly well, we have a few bugs that need to be worked out but other than that it runs like it should.

Shrek 2 came out yesterday and I was tempted to go see it at the drive in ($5 a person or $10 a carload) but decided I would rather see it in the theatre. So I will probably end up going to see it tonight. I am really hoping that my money isn’t wasted.

This whole town is empty, which is nice and annoying at the same time. It’s great because all of the crazy college drivers are gone (but the old folks still remain) but it’s really annoying that there aren’t people here to hang out with. The few things are there are left to do are watch movies, go to movies, go to the pool, or sit around. Other than that, nothing.

I had an interesting conversation tonight about public transportation and large cities. Houston is one of the very few large cities that does not have a good public transportation system and it really needs to be improved. I personally would go downtown more if there were an easier way than driving down there, trying to find a parking spot, and getting out. Yes, I know, we have Metro but it does not even come out to Sugar Land (a suburb of Houston) you have to drive to it which makes its usefulness limited. Places like Chicago, New York, D.C., Philadelphia, etc. have public transportation almost perfect. Now, it may have a few kinks in it every now and then but at least there is a way to move people from A to B in a scheduled, fairly trouble free environment.

So we sprung out and got a couple of new development toys at work. An Apple Power Mac G5 arrived yesterday. It is almost completely silent even with two processors running at 2Ghz, 1GB of RAM, and a Radeon 9800 Pro (drool). We also bought one of these. That has to be the most beautiful monitor ever. It is so crisp with its colors that it is unbelievable.

Well, if you were using Internet Explorer you probably noticed that you had to scroll down to get to any content. My first piece of advice should have been to download Mozilla Firefox but I decided that maybe fixing the problem would be a better idea.

I basically had a nested table row that was throwing everything off but it should be completely fixed now! Sorry for the confusion.

First off, Bush is doing things to help the economy along. Now, I am not going to say everything he has done has been the greatest of ideas but at least he’s trying. Kerry on the other hand, like Patrick points out here, is a brush off who is full of talk and no action.

Here Kerry is preaching about how bad the economy is and saying how he could improve it and yet, he cannot even show up for a vote to improve (even if just a little).

If you don’t know the whole story, I’ll quote the Washington Post. (The important parts are bolded)

“The Senate by a single vote rejected an election-year effort Tuesday to extend federal unemployment benefits.

Democrats tried to attach the benefit to a corporate tax bill. On a 59-40 vote in the GOP-controlled Senate, they fell just shy of the 60 votes needed to overcome objections that extending the benefits violated last year’s budget agreement.

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was the only senator who missed the vote. Kerry was campaigning Tuesday in Kentucky.

The amendment would have offered emergency federal unemployment benefits for six months, temporarily giving 13 weeks of extra assistance to people who exhaust their state benefits — typically 26 weeks.”

If Kerry was sincere about his stance on the economy he might have just showed up to vote, but no, he’s campaigning. Way to take care of the people Mr. Kerry.

I never look at this site in Internet Explorer but this morning I decided I would see what it looked like and saw that the ad on the left is breaking the page basically…

Well good news, I spent this morning working on a new design. I am not sure I am happy with it, but it may have to do for right now.

I have come to realize that I am truly no good at designing. I have a short attention span for it or something because

1. I get frustrated.
2. I don’t like what I see and give up

Part of this comes from my lacking knowledge of how to build CSS designs from scratch. I have grown so dependent on tables that when I try to move to complete CSS I screw something up and don’t really want to try fixing it.

I’ve been reading about some of the things that Microsoft and other computer companies want to do about the increasing amount of spam. One of the suggestions is paying for e-mail, as in a fee per each one sent. So basically there would be electronic stamps for e-mail, how long would it take before the price continually rose on that like it has on paper stamps?

I personally do not receive a ton of spam and the little I do get is usually filtered out by Mozilla Thunderbird. I do have a few ways of avoiding spam.

• Do not give out your e-mail address to every website you go to.

  This is probably the main reason people get spam. You go to a site, they ask for your e-mail, and you start getting spam. So how do you get around this? I have a dummy e-mail account just for such situations. There are also free disposable e-mail accounts available from sites like http://jetable.org and Mailinator.

• Don’t use the “Click me to unsubscribe” link.

  All these links usually do is report to the people that are spamming you that you are receiving the mail they are sending and to keep on sending it. Just ignore spam, trash it. Most e-mail programs have filters you can turn on to help fight spam.

Well that’s my $.02 for the day…

Simon has posted a nice little tidbit about Python and switch statements. You can read what he has to say here.