Ending in failure

When I heard the other day that Circuit City was going out of business, I knew I had to get there quick or else my $25 gift card would become worthless. So I went the local Circuit City on Saturday, the day after the announcement. It was pretty busy there, which was probably unusual. I think the last time I had been to a Circuit City was when I bought my portable CD player in 2001.

It was a small store, and stuff was flying off the shelves at reduced prices pretty quick, but I hung around a while to see what I might want. The digital photo frames looked like a pretty cool thing to have, but my gift card wouldn't go far for any of them except the one with the 1-inch screen. Also, I have a hard enough time deciding what one picture to put in a frame, let alone 400.

I decided to get a 7.5-GiB SanDisk Cruzer Micro flash drive. The $25 covered about half of it, but I figured it was better than getting a smaller one that I'll want to replace a few years later. This thing should last a while. I also got it because I could put it on my keychain. I already have guitar picks, a flashlight, and a Swiss army knife, so why not include the geek's most valuable tool?

I've already copied over some PDFs of books that I haven't finished (or started) reading, and I plan to install GIMP Portable on it as well. That's for when I'm at work and I need to do image editing on a computer that doesn't have Photoshop. Or maybe I'll just use it whenever I'd use Photoshop. That's not a bad idea either.

While I was waiting for the bus on the way back from Circuit City, I wondered why there wasn't a service to find out where your bus was by sending a text message. UF Student Government pays a company called TransLoc to provide this bus tracking applet that shows some of the city buses on a real-time map. There are also "alternate [sic] access methods" for people with mobile phones and the visually impaired. These lo-fi sites textually describe the location of each bus.

Bingo, I thought. I can send text messages to e-mail addresses. My web host offers an e-mail-to-POST feature. I could write a script to receive the POST values, get the relevant data from the text-only web site, and e-mail information back to the requesting phone, which will receive the locations of the buses in a text message.

And that is what I have been doing this weekend. I actually got it working before I went to bed on Saturday night, but I've spent the remaining time implementing a queuing (man, I could not spell that) system and generally hardening the whole thing against spam and other potential attacks. And since this service would be getting (a small amount of) data from TransLoc's site, I thought I should ask for their permission before letting people have a go at it. I've first asked the city bus service and my student senator if they could help me make my case to TransLoc. I've got to be on the safe side or risk having the plug pulled on The World of Stuff.

What else? Oh yeah. It's the last night of George W. Bush's presidency. On this occasion, I have some special links.

Remember when Bushisms were popular? The BBC looks back on some of the verbal missteps of the "misunderestimated" president.

From Harper's: a retrospective of the Bush era by the numbers.

And if you have a lot of time, here's a list of every article about George W. Bush from The Onion: "Other histories of the Bush years will doubtless be more factual, but none will ever be truer." (Via J-Walk Blog)

I hope Bush pays for his crimes, but since that won't happen, I fear that people in the future will gloss over the horrible things he's responsible for. Never forget.

On a more positive note: if you don't happen to have a TV around at noon tomorrow, here's a large list of sites where you can watch Barack Obama's inauguration online. (Via The Presurfer)