Axodys

Central Valley 54, Cheney 44
*Ferris 51, Lewis and Clark 40*
Mt. Spokane 47, Clarkston 38
West Valley 75, North Central 58
Mead 57, Rogers 48
East Valley 56, Shadle Park 52

“Ferris boys takes control in 4th quarter to beat LC”:http://spokesmanreview.com/sports/topstory.asp?ID=47380 in annual Rubber Chicken game. Saxons win Chuck as well!

Gonzaga Prep 55, University 51

“Murphy musters big 3-pointer as Gonzaga Prep rallies past Titans”:http://spokesmanreview.com/sports/topstory.asp?ID=47090

It was a fairly entertaining game to watch. University didn’t play well for the first time in several games and G-Prep made the game closer than it should have been by missing quite a few free throws in the second half.

The rest of the league plays their games tonight with the annual Rubber Chicken Game at the Spokane Arena between Ferris and Lewis & Clark heading up the league line up.

It’s been snowing pretty solid here in Spokane for the last 18 hours or so and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be letting up any time soon. Forecasts are pointing towards snowfall through the beginning of next week, which seems incredibly excessive. I broke out the snow shovel last night and cleared our driveway, but this morning we had another four inches. Rather than surrender to this new assault, I decided to have another go before I left for work and cleared about 3/4’s of our painfully large driveway (that turning loop is great until you have to shovel it off). I’m definitely going to have to get our snow blower fired up this weekend if this weather continues. Our driveway is just too big to have to keep up with using a shovel if you’re experiencing continuous snowfall.

“West Valley’s speed too much for Wildcats”:http://spokesmanreview.com/sports/story.asp?ID=46681

West Valley 44, Mt. Spokane 41
Gonzaga Prep 77, North Central 76 (OT)
Cheney 61, Lewis and Clark 54
*Ferris 77, East Valley 66*
University 67, Rogers 45
Shadle Park 45, Mead 43
Central Valley 53, Clarkston 46

I’m really liking the “NetNewsWire Pro b10 beta”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/whatsnew/netnewswire20.php that came out at the end of last month. There are a lot of little refinements to the interface that make it a real pleasure to use and it’s ability to interface seemlessly with “Cocoalicious”:http://www.scifihifi.com/cocoalicious/ makes adding links to “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us (and my sidebar link log) totally painless. Today I realized that if I switched to the Daring Status Bar view I could actually operate in the three horizontal pane mode on my measely 12″ screen and be quite happy with the result. If I drill down to a link and open a web page the news items pane acts just like a tabbed web page and goes behind the active tab. Needless to say I use NNWP for at least half my general browsing needs just because it’s so handy.

Of course interface isn’t the only area where improvement has been made. The new beta also supports rss feed enclosures and can interface with iTunes, so that means I don’t need an additional application to deal with podcasts feeds. Not only is this is a great addition, but the way it integrates into the interface is incredibly elegant. Hat’s off to Brent for his continuing hard work and superior interface design aesthetic!

I did a bunch of searching online for a Pivot snippet that would allow me to incorporate my del.icio.us links into my sidebar, but I didn’t specifically find what I was looking for. I did stumble upon magpie, an open source php library that makes working with rss feeds in php remarkably painless. I also found some generic sample code for using magpie with a del.icio.us feed. This looked pretty promising so I decided to install the module in my extensions folder and see if I could cobble together a simple snippet that did what I wanted.

I installed the module and put together a simple snippet function, but it failed to work properly. Actually that’s a bit of an understatement; once I removed all my inadvertant syntax errors and went to rebuild my front page incorporating the [[delicious]] tag, Pivot displayed an error page complaining about some kind of duplicate debug setting. It suddenly occurred to me that Pivot might already incorporate the magpie library. I tossed out my little snippet attempt and did some poking around in the Pivot source code. Sure enough, Pivot already incorporates magpie and more importantly provided an [rss] tag that did everything I wanted to do. Doh! Oh well, I learned a little bit more about php and Pivot then I knew before and I figured out what I needed to do.

Here’s how I set up the tag: [rss:http://del.icio.us/rss/axodys:15:<a href="%link%" title="%description%">%title%</a><br /><br />] Note that the actual tag requires the standard double square brackets. I haven’t figured out a way to escape those out within an entry in Pivot yet so I went with singles.

I’ve seen a number of lists of movies watched in 2004 on other weblogs and I think it might be interesting to keep closer track this year of my viewing habits. Actual movie watching in the theater has decreased dramatically for Mary and I over the last two years with the addition of two dogs and now an infant, but we recently upgraded our cable package so there’s more stuff to watch then ever on tv.

So far this year I’ve watched *Turner and Hooch*, +*Rudy*+ and *True Lies*. I’m going to use “David Golding’s”:http://pah2.buzzword.com/2004/12/28#a1403 recommendation notation system because I think it’s clever (and easy to do in textile): -not recommended-, ok, *recommended*, +*highly recommended*+.

There are several movies out in the theater right now that I’d really like to go see, but I’m not sure when I’m going to get to. Here are three off the top of my head: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and The Incredibles.

Well, my 10 days off from work have just about come to an end. It was a nice break, but also a surprising amount of work helping Mary care for Eawyn, our 3 month old daughter. It was great to spend a lot more time with both of them, but infant care is tiring!

At work I expect to be doing a lot of office clean up, equipment moving, and general spring semester preparation, but we’ll see how it goes.

I downloaded a few “Pivot”:http://pivotlog.net weblog templates this afternoon and spent a little time fiddling around with them. I especially like the “kubrick theme”:http://www.pivotstyles.net/demo/21/ at “pivotstyle.net”:http://pivotstyle.net, but I’ll want to do some color tweaking if I go with it. The kubrick theme definitely seems like a good starting point though and there are quite a few other nice templates on that site if you’re looking for some good weblog design ideas to borrow.

Besides thinking about Axodys’ basic design changes I’ve also started to customize the sidebars on the front page. No more cheesey default messages thank you very much. I really need to print out the page with all of the template tags that Pivot supports too so that I can clean things up and put them in the format I want. Additionally, one small project I’d like to incorporate is using my “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us account for my sidebar link dump list. I’ll have to see if someone has already come up with a Pivot extension for that. Fun stuff.

Well, I’ve switched over to Pivot and am in the process of getting everything configured, etc. I’ve got all my old entries imported, but there’s a lot of category stuff to straighten out before they start showing up. That’s going to have to wait until sometime tomorrow however, as I have to take care of Eawyn now.

Happy New Year!