Frosty Mugs and Code Battles

Yay for long weekends! Double-yay for long weekends that cross the Canada-US border. It's nice to not have to go into work tomorrow, especially with the hours that I've been putting in lately.

So, what did I spend my weekend doing? Let's see.

First I finally managed to get Bioshock working to my satisfaction. It's still not perfect, there is still a slight bug in the audio, but it is much more tolerable now. In my searches for fixes to the problem, I found that there is apparently a known audio bug in the PC version and an update (patch) to fix it should be out shortly. Lets hope so. After all the struggle to get it working, I haven't really played it much. I'll probably start it up and put in an hour or so once I'm done with this post.

Next on the list was cleaning and laundry. Oh, so exciting, and yet so satisfying once done. Truthfully I did leave some laundry to be finished up tomorrow, but why not, I do after all have an extra day of weeekend :)

I must say that I am quite enjoying the frosty mugs that I have acquired. A frosty mug is a mug that contains some sort of freezable liquid within its walls. I suspect the ones I won now are merely filled with water, but those I had as a kid were likely something more sinister and toxic. I like my beverages as cold as they can be, and the perfect way to do this without watering them down with ice, is the frosty mug. We had a set of these when I was a kid, and just about every day when I came home from school I would go through a ritual that was practically down to a science. First add whatever the beverage of the day (usually juice of some sort) to the frosty mug, then stick the frosty mug back into the freezer for exactly an hour (which usually was equal to two cartoons). After an hour, the juice would have frozen around the outsides of the mug, with the center being wonderfully chilled juicyness. The next hour would be spent sipping the chilled juice as I shaved frozen juice off the side of the mug with a spoon, pure heaven.

I definitely enjoyed the frostyness of my drinks today as I fought the evil code-monsters trying to embed music into my blog. Not just any music mind you, but a playlist of my choosing. Also imperative was allowing anyone viewing the blog to pause, stop, or change tracks at will. My first attempt was using a flash-based mp3 player I found at MyFlashFetish.com. It allowed multiple Mp3 files, was compact and customizable to fit the page's color scheme, and scrolled the track titles. I was pretty happy with it until... it didnt work. Well, small correction, it worked fin on my main system, but not for others, after some testing I found it just wouldn't work with Firefox, nor with my laptop's IE7, even though it still worked just fine on my main system under the same browser. Oh well, no problem, I'll just find a media player that I know will work. After looking around, I settled on WMP. I figured out the coding to play from an online playlist so that I could line up multiple tracks, and even managed to get it colored to match the blog better. Then I tried Firefox and was shot down. See, that's what I like about IE, it is so forgiving to deprecated code, whereas Firfox balked at the simplicity of my embed tag. Ok, no problem, Google will surely help me find a bit of universal code to solve my woes! Finally, I managed to get it working, but can't skin it the way I can for IE, so it's a contrasting gray when viewed in Firefox (too bad Mozillanites!). Still, it works, and autoplays. Of course it doesn't show the track names the way I'd like but I can live with that. Hopefully people will hang around long enough to get to the various tracks that I have loaded into the playlist, but I suppose I can just change the playlist up from time to time too.

If you don't like what's playing, you can stop it or jump to the next track, it's all up to you.

Here's what's loaded in it to start:
1) Eminem vs. Dukes of Dixieland
2) Beatnic vs. Loitumé (Leekspin)
3) Dreadful Children - Pink Elephants on Parade

The Eminem mix is just plain fun, so far everyone I have played it for finds it quite amusing. Beatnic vx. Loitumé is an awesome breakbeat mix I found of the song some of you will recognize from leekspin.com. Dreadful Children is a punk/ska band from Seattle and their cover of PEOP is a lot of fun. You can find more tracks by the Dreadul Children on their MySpace page.

Now, I'm going to play a bit of Bioshock :)