Late night update

I just got back from a session of gaming at my friends Carmen and Graeme's new house. They finished building the place a few months ago, and it looks fantastic. I used to work for Carmen when I was going to UVic - my first co-op job was with her, and she ended up keeping me on part-time throughout a good chunk of my time at UVic. I was really lucky to get hired by Carmen, not only because of everything I learned when I was working with her, but because she gave me a lot of opportunities, was an awesome boss, and is still a person that I'm really glad to be able to call a friend. I don't think you can say that too often about people that you work with.

Actually, maybe I'm wrong or just lucky, because I happen to work with an extremely cool group of people, and enjoy hanging out with them during and after work. I work with Graeme now (he's one of the partners for my company), and so I still get to see him now and then, though not as much as I'd like, as we don't work on the same project team, and it's not as easy to relax and have fun at work when you're on a five minute break from your work as it is when you're battling as adversaries in a thrilling game of ELFENLAND (disclaimer: elfenland does not have in any way anything to do with elves, and cannot be held responsible for persons drawing the conclusion that there are elves involved).

Anyhow, I mostly wanted to throw this entry in here so that I could keep track of what I have planned to do over the weekend. I love having a bunch of things to get done over the weekend - it keeps me motivated, gives me a sense of accomplishment at the end of Sunday, and keeps my mind working.

• Check out the squash tournament at Victoria Squash Club

My squash club is having a tournament - I'd mentioned in one of my last entries that one of my goals for squash this year was to have participated in at least two tournaments by this time next year. However, I just don't feel like I'm quite ready to start that yet, and additionally, as this tournament is a fundraiser, you have to pay an extra ten to fifty cents every time you hit the ball out. I'm only just starting to properly learn how to make soft high shots, and I'd say about fifty percent of my attempts end up being out, so this tournament would cost me about seventy-five dollars to play in. Just a little bit too rich for my blood.

• Implement linked DVD items in the manifest application

My friend Amr at work borrowed my manifest code, because he wanted the same functionality. He pointed out to me that one of the things that is missing is the ability to link various movies to the same single piece of media. For example, if I want to have Teen Wolf Part 1 and 2 as seperate entries, I'd essentially have to loan them out twice - one for each movie (since they're both on the same disc, if someone borrows one, they bother the other). Ideally, I'd like to implement the ability to link movies together, so that once you've linked an item, you can loan any one of the parts out and have them all marked as loaned out (as well as have the history marked as loaned out for all of them). Additional functionality will include showing items that share a link with an item when viewing the history, and providing a link to those items from the history (this is all stuff that most users don't see).

I still have to put some thought into how I want to design this feature - there's a couple of snags that could catch me in the future if I'm not careful (I've seen this happen all too many times). However, hopefully I can have this ready to go by Sunday evening

• Begin coding the music section of the manifest

I'm not happy enough with just movies and TV shows, I'd also like to code in support for showing music files. Since music files are typically all saved on a hard-drive, it shouldn't be too hard to read the drive and immediately store all of the entries that are currently present. Then I can have those displayed if I want. I already have something similar to this on my music stream (which allows me to listen to my mp3s from any computer connected to the internet, sort of like my own personal internet radio station), so I'm not sure how far this idea will go. We'll have to see about this one.

• Buy a new CD Wallet

Nothing major here, I just like keeping everything organized and it's time I got a new CD wallet

• See if I can create a transparent tool bar for Windows XP

I have Winamp set up so that it is always on top and stays at the top middle of my screen. In addition to that, it's only visible when I hover my mouse over it (the rest of the time it is only ten percent transparent). I find this incredibly useful - I always have access to it without having to search for an icon at the bottom of the screen, click it, then move my mouse back to wherever winamp opened up. I'd like to get more of this kind of functionality set up on my desktop - it sounds dumb, but it's really quite efficient, and I love making things more efficient.

I know that Windows allows you to create custom toolbars with whatever you want in them, and I'd like to do something like that, but have it hover on the left middle side of my screen, and become opaque only when I hover over it. If making this work requires installing another program, I'd be willing to do that, provided it's not going to eat up tons of my memory. If anyone knows off-hand of an easy way to accomplish this, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll post my results when I've got it working.

That about covers things up. I have at least two more entries that are coming, both of them related to poker. Graham has started posting his thoughts on poker games as well, and as he plays with me, that might provide a semi-balanced view of how things are working out, if anyone actually cares. I don't care whether you care or not, I'm going to write about it either way. I've also fixed the last dance video I created, with Shaun's help (thanks again Shaun) using VirtualDub. The links I provided in my entries have been updated, and now the video is only 3.5MB in size, instead of 35. If anyone needs functionality to edit videos, I highly recommend VirtualDub. It's free and easy. If anyone has questions about editing videos, I highly recommend Shaun. He's not free, but he's definitely cheap and easy.