http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/index/ Blog of the self-proclaimed genius, Jeffery Bennett en meandmybadself@gmail.com Copyright 2009 2009-11-17T19:37:56-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/a_hit/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/a_hit/#When:19:37:56Z As an effort to record the more memorable things going on, I thought I’d toss this little doo dad up. I was biking down to my final day of jury duty (for a guy who punched a loud public cellphone talker in the face), and was crossing an intersection, when a Prius cut two lanes left and ran into the front of my bike, causing me to eat its front quarter panel. Embarrassed, I picked up myself and my bike, and hobbled over to the side of the road. By this time, the Prius driver was two blocks away. I limped to jury duty, and sat in silence for three hours. When I got back to my office, I wrote the following Craigslist ad (with my good friend, Ryan’s help): http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/1288922120.html Fast forward to October 7th, when I received an email from my friend Lalit: Jeff, Jay Leno just read your missed connection from Craigslist. You are sure to find her now, would love to buy tickets to your coffee brawl. The video he mentions is available here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/100880/the-jay-leno-show-craigslist-ads#s-p2-st-i1 So, for all you aspiring writers out there wondering how to get their foot in the door with Jay Leno, I hope this post helps you find your way. 2009-11-17T19:37:56-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/getting_flash_to_see_the_proper_webcam/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/getting_flash_to_see_the_proper_webcam/#When:03:30:35Z Having trouble using your Mac webcam w/ Flash sites?  Macs are notorious for selecting the wrong camera on behalf of the user. Ensure you’ve got the latest Flash player, and the proper webcam selected in your Flash Player settings. Right-click the screen, choose Settings: Then, click on the little webcam and choose USB Video Class Video: 2009-05-28T03:30:35-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/betamaxmas_recap/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/betamaxmas_recap/#When:04:56:04Z Much like the Super Nintendo was a sweet Christmas gift in 1992, the traffic and feedback for BetamaXmas was pretty awesome. To date, it’s spit out 340,000 pages to 210,000 unique users, 9,000 of which returned more than once. How it works I add a video to my 80’s Christmas holiday playlist on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EE193C2FEDC59D2F An hourly cron job uses the YouTube data API to snag my playlist. If any videos have been added since the last time the cronjob ran, it adds it to my database (The TV Guide). This adds the video to the XML running the site: http://betamaxmas.com/getPlaylist.php Another cron job checks to see if any videos have been pulled from YouTube and marks them as deleted from the TV Guide. The TV Guide The site works on a system that shows everyone the same TV Guide at the same time. So, if you’re watching Have Yourself a Very Winslow Christmas, you can tell a friend across the country, and it’s on at the same time for them. I thought this reinforced the old style of television watching, where you were at the mercy of the networks. This effect is created by creating a timestamp on the XML telling us what time the server thinks it is. Flash does the modulus of that time against the time of a channel, which gives us the current show in the channel. Some cool things I learned about along the way. The YouTube Chromeless player When traffic started getting a little more frequent, so did the Amazon S3 bill. Senore Baio suggested I look into the Chromeless player for hosting directly off of YouTube, which saved me a mint. Reinvigorate Reinvigorate rocks. They’ve got wonderfully stylized reports, and best of all, realtime traffic reports. They also have a sweet little app called Snoop that runs and notifies you when someone is visiting the site, and the referring site. Here’s a screencap: Facebook and Stumbleupon throw a shitload of traffic. Mark and Garrett rock. Coverage The Onion’s Tolerability Index (above Shatner’s show, mind you) New York Magazine’s Vulture section. Digg Comedy Central 2009-05-14T04:56:04-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/housemate_bill_notification/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/housemate_bill_notification/#When:06:21:53Z I live with two housemates, and am the main recipient of the bills. After receiving months of email bills that required reading / math / forwarding, I wrote up a quick PHP script that: - checks IMAP email for bills - finds the dollar amount due in the email - divides the amount due by the number of housemates - emails housemates with amount due I run it as a cron script every half hour. bills.php_.zip 2009-03-14T06:21:53-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/poker_cheatsheet/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/poker_cheatsheet/#When:06:02:37Z We had a small poker game, and found it was helpful in the later hours to have a quick reference guide for Texas Hold Em’. It shows hand order, steps through the dealing process, and orients the dealer / big blind / small blind / first bet. http://me.meandmybadself.com/images/uploads/pokercheatsheet.pdf 2009-03-14T06:02:37-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/its_beginning_to_look_a_lot_like_betamaxmas/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/its_beginning_to_look_a_lot_like_betamaxmas/#When:16:51:29Z Happy Holidays, everyone. To celebrate, I’ve created a time portal back to December 1988 at http://betamaxmas.com So, go and check it out, as I’m making a list, and checking it twice, and I know where you sleep. Thanks to Eddy Tofslie, Nick and Lucas First day’s stats: First day stats for BetaMaXMas Digg: http://digg.com/television/Have_A_Very_BetaMaXMas 2008-12-05T16:51:29-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/imap2sms/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/imap2sms/#When:05:09:11Z Prior to purchasing the iPhoneBoredomKiller, I needed a way to get important emails sent to my phone. So, I whipped up a quick script to do just that. IMAP2SMS will log into an IMAP account (like GMail) and look for unread, unflagged emails. When found, it strips all the HTML out, flags it (so it won’t send you the same message twice) and delivers it to your cellphone. Set this up using a cron job, to run every 10 minutes or so. Naturally, SMS charges still exist, so be wary if you have a cap on your SMS’s per month. IMAP2SMS 2008-10-27T05:09:11-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/sortdedupercoder/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/sortdedupercoder/#When:04:16:24Z Being a sweaty, heavy-breathing nerd, I’ve found many occasions when I had a list of items and said to myself, “Sweaty, heavy-breathing nerd, you should sort / dedupe / url encode or url decode this string.” I would commonly start to do it by hand only to get distracted halfway through and start moonwalking with my fingers on my desk But today, I actually got up off my fingers and spent the 10 minutes building this, my opus, the thing i call the sortdedupercoder 2008-10-21T04:16:24-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/flashcamp/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/flashcamp/#When:22:17:13Z So, my boy Mike Nathanson and I wore our brains on our sleeves at Flashcamp this weekend. We dreamed up a sweet idea of listening to stock prices, which we dubbed MoneyTalks. It uses the new SampleDataEvent in Flash Player 10 to create sounds dynamically, which we map onto the value of a stock. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but our app made Photoshop look like Minesweeper. Sample videos of stock prices from Oct 06 - 10: Google Microsoft Yahoo Microsoft v Yahoo These bad daddies require the Flash Player 10 beta: Demo Source 2008-10-12T22:17:13-08:00 http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/stripey_iphone_wallpaper/ http://me.meandmybadself.com/index.php/site/stripey_iphone_wallpaper/#When:06:47:56Z Stripey wallpaper 2008-09-28T06:47:56-08:00