So, all the information you want can be found on the Memphis in May website, and I’ll be emailing everybody soon with details on my discount. It will not be much, but considering that the single day price at the gate will be $25 this year, it’s better than in the past.

The band lineup is also available on their website, but if you’re not up for web navigation, here’s a direct link: (PDF)

Dates are May 5th, 6th, and 7th. There is one other good thing this year. In the past couple years, they always saved the best for last, as Mandy can testify to. This year, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Sunday’s lineup does have some quality bands, however, IMO, the best music is going to be on Friday and Saturday. Including B.B. King, who’s right at the top of Friday.

Anyway, come one, come all.

Edit: I sent out an email to several people with the details. If you didn’t get that email, and you want to come, email me for those details.

1. The Widgets Plugin does not like Windows. Since I run this site on a Windows box (edit: I did then, I don't anymore, and anyway, they have fixed this problem since then), it needed some tweaking to make it work. For those who want to know, the problem is in the sidebar_admin_setup() function in widgets.php. More info on this problem is in the comments of this post.
2. Text boxes are extremely useful when converting from your existing customized webpage to a widgets based one, as you can simply cut and paste chunks of HTML into them and voila, you've got a sidebar widget. However, there's not a lot of text widgets available. If you need more text widgets, you will need to edit these functions: widget_text_setup(), widget_text_page(), and widget_text_register(). As it turned out, I didn't need but 4 text widgets because:
3. Despite how useful text boxes were for a quick migration, they were not enough.

It will search the lyrics of all the songs in iTunes for “bad words” and flag those tracks as Explicit by adding the word “Explicit” to the end of the comments in the track.

Now, I have no use for this personally, but I can see where some people might. One thing you will have to do in order to use it is to edit it and define what you consider to be a “bad word”. Just after halfway through the script, there’s a section that looks like this:

badword1|badword2|badword3

Change that to define everything you consider to be a bad word. To use George Carlin’s famous example: shit|piss|fuck|cunt|cocksucker|motherfucker|tits

Just add as many words as you like, then run it like all the rest of these iTunes Javascripts. It’s reasonably smart and won’t tag a track as Explicit if the word Explicit is already in the comments.

You could use this for Smart Playlists, to make “clean” playlists, or to make “not so clean” playlists. Whatever you like. You could do that without this script too, but this makes it a bit easier.

————

I created a new widget for my blog. It’s a simple little thing that shows stuff from my Google Calendar. You can find it as my “Upcoming Events” sidebar, bottom left. Okay, so it doesn’t have much there yet, I need to add stuff to the calendar.

Anyway, here’s a link to it: gcalendar

If anybody has any suggestions on improving it, I’d love to hear ‘em.

——–

Note: I’ve updated the widget to use Google’s Calendar API properly. But in order to do that, I had to modify Wordpress’s built in MagpieRSS functions rather heavily. So read the readme.txt file for installation instructions before attempting to use it. Failure to install correctly will break your blog. Heck, it might do that anyway. So read carefully.

I made a post on the guys blog about adding RSS feeds for the individual users, and to my surprise, he had it up and going the next morning. Very cool.

So naturally, I made a widget for it. You can see it in my ever-growing sidebars somewhere (bottom right, at the moment).

And so here it is: The Coastr Widget.

Update: Version 1.1 adds some code to handle the beer names and such properly, so it won’t cause validation errors on your blog anymore.

So if you use 30boxes and want a nice and simple Wordpress Widget for displaying events on your calendar, well, here you go: 30boxes Widget

This is, of course, a first stab at it only. I can and probably will add more functionality to it (like start and end dates). But that can wait until later. Right now I need BBQ!

It’s a modified portable cooler that is designed to hold, cool, and mix up to 16 bottles of beverages. Basically it pressurizes the bottles and uses that to pump the liqour out, which then goes into your drink. It therefore produces whatever drink you want on command. The mixer device is reprogrammable via a PC to put in your favorite mixed drinks, and the thing uses a CO2 tank to pump out the sweet, sweet candy.

Some pictures:

At $750, it’s a bit too expensive for my tastes. However, they offer a $550 DIY kit, which seems like it would be an excellent addition to a home bar.

The only reason I’m posting about it is that after I was done bottling, I tried some of the yeasty flat leftovers at the bottom of the keg. By god, that stuff was delicious. It’s going to be a quality beer. I just hope I didn’t screw up the carbonation like I think I did. I keep waiting to hear a loud popping sound from one of the bottles exploding. Fortunately, I use a cooler for the storage, so it won’t hurt anything if it does blow.

My next brew is going to be a Dopplebock. I’ve already got the ingredients, I just need to make bottle room. It looks to be a hell of a beverage, with three different kinds of malt extracts, a whole ounce of hops (instead of 1/4 ounce as per usual), and my first attempt at using liquid yeast. It also takes 6 months to bottle condition, so I’ll have it around October or November. But it’ll be about 9.2% ABV, so at least it’ll have a good kick to it.

To make it even more fun, my A/C and icemaker both chose this weekend to stop working for no appearant reason. So it was like 85 in my apartment all weekend. That tended to drive us outside and drink, though, so in that respect it wasn’t so bad. I’ve fixed the icemaker now, they’re fixing the A/C today.

Anyway, it was a good show. I enjoyed Cake and Blues Traveller a lot. Yellowcard was surprisingly good when they did a Weezer cover. I sat around the Blues Tent for a few hours on Sunday and enjoyed some beer and blues from several artists as well. Also ate a lot of BBQ. So it was good weekend in that respect. Beale Street was fun and had a lot of interesting characters. One dude we saw walking around dressed up as Gene Simmons ended up on the front page of the Sunday paper.

So it was fun. But I still need to find drugs.

Still props for Quagmire. Giggity.

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More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

< ?php
require_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss-functions.php');
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.exactscores.com/HockeyLivescoreRss.xml');
echo '
';
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
	if (preg_match('/^(No).*/i',$item['title']))
		echo '
	
'.$item['title'].'
';
}
echo '';
?>

$uglyscores = preg_split('/^(([^)]*))[^s]|s(([^)]*))[^s]/',
	$item['title'], -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

$i=1; // skip the first element
$scores = array();
while ($i
This gives us a nice array of elements that we can then reference by the key names. So we can use stuff like $scores[?Final?] and such.

So now that we don?t have to display everything, let?s put it all together. Here?s a combination of all of the above that outputs the two teams and the final score only:
< ?php
require_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss-functions.php');
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.exactscores.com/HockeyLivescoreRss.xml');
echo '
';
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
if (preg_match('/^(No).*/i',$item['title'])) {
	echo '
	
';
	$uglyscores = preg_split('/^(([^)]*))[^s]|s(([^)]*))[^s]/',
		$item['title'],-1,PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
	$i=1; // skip the first element
	$scores = array();
	while ($i';
	}
}
echo '';
?>

And there you have it. If you want to display different information, just modify the stuff in those echo lines towards the end.

The key is finding the RSS feed with the data you?re interested in. Once you have that, it?s usually fairly straightforward to parse it and redisplay it nicely.