If you come across any tagging weirdness tonight, don't worry about it, it'll be fixed during the nightly updates. Turns out I foobar'd the GameSpot tags before I left for vacation. Nothing like making all the tags go to the development database rather than the live one. :( So the outage you all just experienced on GameSpot was the fix to bring all that data back into the proper live database. What a pita... embarrasing too. I haven't screwed up something this bad in... well, sooner than I'd like to admit. ;) Of course, that's why I have the forum signature that I do.

Okay, I've spent the last 3 days sick.  Coughing, sneezing, and feeling like crud.  All because my brother-in-law was never taught to cover his mouth when he coughs.  He had this cold first and no matter how many times I asked him, nay, demanded from him, to cover his mouth, he never did.

Come on people!  Its not that hard!  If you're sick, cover your mouth.  Don't spread your germs to the rest of us. 

/sigh.  That's my rant for the day.

BTW, my vacation was a lot of fun except for that.  I luckily got to see Catalina Island the day before it was engulfed in flames.  Kind of crazy... 

Woohoo!  Vacation!  Yippee!

I'm off after today for a 10 day vacation.  Its a long trip so I'll probably be more stressed out and tired after the trip than I am now, but it'll be worth it.  ;)

I'm leaving early Saturday morning and heading south (I live in the SF Bay area) to the Paso Robles area for lunch and wine tasting.  I got the okay from my wife to buy a case or two of wine from Eberle.  The last shipment include a kick ass Zinfadel and their ever popular Barbera.  Kick ass!   Then that night we're going to some play that my Father in-law got tickets for.  I don't remember the name, but I know he was excited about going to it.  Should be fun.

Sunday is my wife's birthday so we're going to Disney Land for the day.  We haven't been there since the first summer we met 3 years ago.  And then we only went to California Adventure (lame).  This should be a lot more fun.

Monday we're headed to Long Beach to catch a 4 night California/Baja coast cruise aboard the Monarch of the Sea.  We're travelling with my dad, step-mom, her family, my brother and his fiance. The cruise is going to take us to take us to San Diego, Catalina Islands, and Ensenada Mexico.  I think we're going to go to the San Diego Zoo, the naval shipyards in San Diego, kayaking around Catalina, and an ATV tour of Mexican wine country.  Of course, I don't know how well wine tasting and ATVs are going to mix.  I hope my life insurance is paid up.  :P  We get back Friday and are staying with the in-laws again.

Saturday is a wedding for one of our friends.  It just happened to be good luck that we were already in town.  I can only deal with so much driving to So Cal.

And of course we need to stay there for mother's day on Sunday.  Yes, mother's day is Sunday May 13th in the US.  Don't forget to get your mom something nice.  ;)  To score bonus points, get you friend's mom something too.  If its a friend of the opposite sex, it might just get you that date you've been wanting.  hehe.  :)

As you can see, one heck of a busy week.  I'll be back in the office bright and early Monday May 14th.  Err... maybe not bright and early, but not exactly late either.   Have a nice week while I'm gone.

So I finally broke down and bought a new 2007 Toyota Tacoma Access Cab truck. Here's a pic of a similar truck some random person took and posted on Flickr.

I must have borrowed a buddy's truck at least 4 or 5 times this year. As I was pondering how to ask him to borrow it again on Saturday morning my wife talked me into just buying one. I don't really know how I ended up justifying it in my head, but I did. :) And now I can't say I can't run to the store for her after work because I don't have a car. That just won't fly anymore. I'll have to come up with a new excuse to not run errands. ;)

Once I take some of my own pictures, I'll finally setup a "garage" over on Boompa.com. I've been meaning to do that with the hybrid for a while, but that car just feels old to me now.

I don't know how many of you out there are Sopranos fans, but I sure am. I'm totally excited about today's user chat about this season. Its sure to be a blast. Yes, I know this is a bit of lame advertising, but I really am excited about this chat.  I watch it religiously with my wife.  Its the only show that I don't rely on TiVo to watch; I gotta get it live.  :P  

As many of you probably already know, the tiny mce WYSIWYG editor has launched on TV.com.  I have to apologize for the frequent and highly annoying JavaScript errors that occurred as a direct result of that.  We obviously didn't test it as thoroughly as we should have.  :(  That being said..."It's LIVE!  Woohoo!"  :P

The feature set for the WYSIWYG editor on TV.com is the same as on GameSpot (see New GameSpot WYSIWYG Editor blog entry).  I hope everyone likes it.

P.S. I've heard that the copy/paste from Word isn't working as well as it did a few days ago.  I'm comparing a few of our 'fixes' and trying to figure out which one broke the copy/paste.  I'm pretty sure I know which one so hopefully this will be fixed in a couple of days. 

A bit of cross-posting from the GameSpot Site Enhancements Forum:

As some of you may have noticed, there is now a new WYSIWYG editor for GameSpot. We received a lot of positive feedback about this editor from FilmSpot so now we're rolling it out here.

A couple of major features that you should like, there are more, but that will be part of today's 'announcement':

1) There is a paste but for Word documents. This button will take the text you copied from Word and format it closer to the html rules we have. While its not perfect, its pretty darn good. Ctrl-V (for Windows users) works automatically in IE and okay in FireFox. Yes, no more FireFox warnings.

2) It works 'pretty good' for Safari and Opera. Not everything works in Safari and Opera, but I believe we've hidden the features that don't and got rid of the warning messages. If you have problems with these browsers, let us know in the tech support forum.

3) It fixes a lot of the malformed html errors. In other words, you should get fewer messages about your HTML not being well-formed.

4) Spell check works better. The spell check feature works faster and with better results.

5) Search and Replace. Name says it all. Personally, I love this feature as I'm always making the same typo over and over.

Like I said, there's more, but you'll have to wait for the official announcement later today to get the whole list.

FYI, I've disabled comments on this blog entry. Please go to the Site Enhancements thread to post your feedback. Thanks.

I'd normally post this as a review over on FilmSpot, but since I saw a pre-screening and the movie hasn't been released yet I can't. :( Stupid logic checks for valid data. :P Anyway, here's my review:


I didn't really like it. The biggest problem I had with the movie was that it was done before, anyone else seen Most Wanted? Also, the ending scene was very similar to the ending scene of The Departed which was kind of disappointing. It reminded me of the movies from the 80s with Arnold, Stallone, Segal and Van Dam. They get shot up, recover the next day, and take out a million bad guys.

In summary, it was totally unoriginal. :( There were however a few scenes with good one liners, "I'm gonna take a hit of nitrous now and pass out. Good luck." and "Sir, well, I don't feel embarrassed. A force recon marine scout sniper disarmed me three weeks out the academy. If anything, I feel lucky to be alive."

/sigh. Of course I only went and saw it because I got a couple of free passes. It pretty much met my expectations. :(

Its amazing what a difference can be made in page load times by using proper caching techniques.  As many of you have probably noticed, TV.com has had some performance problems recently.  Especially in the profile pages!  We made some changes today that reduced the number of queries run on your TV.com profile page by half.  Some users have had their profile page load time drop from 10 seconds down to 2!

And what difference do you see on the page?  Nothing.  Just better use of caching techniques so that we can load data faster for you. 

Unfortunately, some profile pages still take forever to load.  Over the next week I'll be spending a bit of time each day optimizing the TV.com profile pages.  If your profile doesn't load quickly now, have faith that we're working on it and it will soon.  If your TV.com profile page takes > 10 seconds on average to load, I want to hear about it!  Please send me a PM and I'll look into why its so slow.

Well, avatar uploads and sizes have now been updated on all 4 sites.  Finally!  I spent a few minutes today setting my banner and avatar to the same everywhere.  Now you'll know me by sight.  Unless someone rips it off.  Thanks again to Snide for making the banner for me so many moons ago.  :)