Virgin pumpkin carving

Both Lou and I were virgins.. to pumpkin carving at least!

So tonight we popped our cherries. Together we each carved our very first pumpkins, and i've decided to post the fruits of our labor!

We were both surprised at how quick, easy, and not at all messy the process was. Honestly we both chose very simple designs, and next year we plan to do something much more difficult.

Here are our most awesome pumpkins:

First up is my pumpkin above.


Then Loui's classic design above


Loui posing with his extra head!!



Me.. cuddling with mine on the floor.

Besides various costume issues this year, I'd say it's been a most interesting Halloween!

BFN

Happy Random Costume day!

The title of today's blog comes courtesy of my friend Brian H. Quite frankly I think it sums up today the best!

Today I was supposed to come to work in my costume, but in the end I chickened out :(

My costume in the end looked quite a bit too military.. the only thing really showing that it was from Stargate Atlantis was the patches on my sleeves! Even though I work on the site, I am pretty sure most people here wouldn't have understood, and would have thought I dressed up as a security guard (which is what I was mistaken for last weekend while wearing the costume).

I will put it on tonight once I get home, and take some pictures, so you too, can enjoy my security guard costume *sigh* If only I could get my hands on the pattern for the jacket they currently wear on the show! Either that, or find a good tailor to create a pattern from a photo.

Back to creating a tool to manage features on MGM HD. Currently it's done automatically, except I have to go in and alter the code everytime they put a movie waaaaaay outside the primetime slot. Awesome! Now someone is going to be personally responsible for managing it (not me).

BFN

Google Adsense now up on Stargate!

It's barely 10.30am Monday morning, and I have already achieved so much!

I ate a delicious bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich (gave half to my boss.. better for my butt) followed by received the "you're approved" email from google.

Since I'd run through setting up google ads (I test all such fun things by adding them to my own sites, you'll notice google ads further down the side on this blog for example) it was pretty simple to zoom through, and setup the code.

We already had an interim ad running in a leaderboard space on Stargate, so in it went!

Imagine our surprise, when the first ad to appear was for an RPG game.. really?? RPG.. that's all they have related to Stargate? Second ad we got was.. Queer as Folk jewelry?!?! Wow.. finally the third refresh yielded an ad for Angel. Finally a TV show in the Scifi genre. After that the ads were ringtones, more RPG, more Queer as Folk jewelry. I hope once people realise we are advertising on the site, they will bid for space on it. That would be neat!

This morning I checked into our Amazon Associated account, and was pleased as punch to see we'd made money over the weekend!

I'd say that's a success, and nothing broke, so I'm glad we went live on a Friday afternoon after all.

Traffic was soso this morning, I was late to pick up James, but nothing dramatic. Ran two miles again this morning, faster again, with my shiny new running shoes (My last pair developed holes).

BFN

Amazon buy links at mgm.com

Something good happened last week! After much back and forth over bank accounts, authorizations, email account setups that seemed to take forever (really long.. I think 3 weeks?) yesterday finally was the culmination of all that effort.

It only took me about an hour to write the code to put in the pages (I followed the instructions someone had kindly provided at DevShed.com), a couple more hours to test and improve, then on a Friday afternoon (worst time on the planet to go live) we pushed it live!

Although it doesn't seem like a very noteworthy moment.. it marks the turning point for our group, when we actually start making money! We don't think it will be much, but it is a lot better than simply sending people to Best Buy, from whom we get no profit share at all.

In the near future I hope to also add Amazon UnBox buy links to our catalog, especially for the Stargate Franchise although I think they will probably be linked someplace else first...

Just this last week we had a major outage. One microsite went down in the outage, as did one section on Stargate.mgm.com. It doesn't sound that major, but it had the potential to take down a lot more than that! We learned from the incident that we need to implement a failover plan not only for the hardware the databases sit on, but also the file storage package on which the data actually sits. To be honest we thought it already HAD such a failover. Turns out we were wrong. I hate "learning" things through serious outages, but it had the advantage of moving it to the top of our priority list.

Picture: My traffic fun..

BFN!

My very own logo.

The time has come, where I now have my own logo. My very own! My twitter name is kangamoo, and I use that "nic" in lots of places, so the very gifted designer here at work (James) has made me my very own.

I even have a smaller version for an icon:

Woot!

BFN

Stargate Atlantis renewed for season 5!

We just got the press release saying Stargate Atlantis has been renewed for a new season!

YAY!

Quote from Press release:

"SCI FI is proud to bring Atlantis back for another season," said Mark Stern, Executive Vice President, Original Programming for SCI FI. "Atlantis truly came out from under the shadow of its sister series this year and proved that it’s a hit in its own right. With this season’s exciting new characters and vibrant storylines, Atlantis also shows every sign of matching its sibling’s longevity."

"All of us at MGM are pleased to be extending the Stargate legacy with 20 new original episodes of Stargate Atlantis for our friends at SCI FI," said Charles E. Cohen, Senior Executive Vice President Finance and Corporate Development, MGM. "Viewers the world over clamor for exciting new stories of space exploration, distant civilizations and the marvels of technology, all of which continue to be delivered by Stargate Atlantis."

BFN

Browser testing..

http://browsershots.org/ is very neat!

I checked this morning to be sure that my code worked on mgmhd.com. Had to switch out the featured movies. It didn't work. Oh well! I've fixed it now. Nothing better to do on a Sunday morning!

BFN

MGM HD and it's feed

I should say, MGM HD and it's lack of feed? As much as I like taking a pretty picture of a schedule, and having to retype it, and format to upload into the database, then go through and correct all the typos (or plain wrong titles) to make sure my fuzzy titles matching logic works and the titles actually appear on the schedule... I can't wait to get the feed!

Looks like it will be further away now than originally anticipated, so I am steeling myself to entering another day at a time for the schedule.

I shouldn't gripe.. but we have so many other things planned. We're still only half way through the enourmous conversion of the old DB structure to my new design. The design was completed, signed off, and the new databases created back in June! Not to mention all the updates and revisions we have for the Stargate sites.

I have my fingers crossed for a new season of Stargate, but partially because one of the higher ups noticed the extra effort I was putting towards the project, oh.. and all the posters in my cube *grin* and suggested I might go up to Vancouver to see if I could find some more content for the site or something like that. Woot! I'd even buy my own ticket ;)!

So.. in the meantime.. let me retype this schedule.

BFN

MGM HD.. what day is it? wait.. what time is it?

MGM HD site creation has certainly been an interesting experience. From what I understand the feedback on the TV Channel itself has been overwhelmingly positive. Which is great for us, because it means we're dealing with TPTB while they are in a good mood.

I can honestly say I never ever read a TV guide in my life. I don't know why, I just never needed to know when my shows are on, because I always had the power of advertising to let me know, and now my cable box tells me what's on when.
I thought someone had made a mistake, and messed up the "dates" on the excel spreadsheet I got, which had laid out (in a way no one could possibly script to get the data out of it) that each "day" starts at 6am, and goes through until 5.59am the following day.

Apparently that's how it's done in TV Guides, and TV Stations. Silly me to think that 12am marks the start of a new day! This has created tons of problems for me creating the schedule. As on the feed and schedule.. the date is correct literally, and the time is also correct. This means two things. I have to constantly be checking to make sure that today really is today.. it really is today if it's after 6am. Before 6am, I have to reset all the variable like it's yesterday.

My head hurts.. seriously my code has turned to complete spaghetti.. it's almost incomprehensible that I can't use plain regular old dates.. I have to always be checking the time to work out if it's really today or not.

The other snafu created by this crazy system is getting them out of the database in the right order, for the right "day". My query ended up like this:

select * from schedule where (air_date='".$now_date."' and air_time >='600') or (air_date='".$tomorrow_date."' and air_time < '600') order by air_date, air_time

Lovely aint it?

It's live, it appears to work, now I just have to wait and see what happens at the end of the month, and the end of the year. Lets hope I got all those calculations right!

BFN

Tabula Rasa - Commando!

Love the way my character looks in Tabula Rasa..

MGM HD is feedless

At least for the time being, there is no feed for MGM HD. How was I to make a website with a schedule without a schedule??

Yikes.. I basically took a layout of the schedule, and created a version that I could import sans feed. I had to write a new version of all the pages, to process a title as the key. A title is not a very good key, for tons of reasons, but mostly because people tend to misspell things, to use different punctuation, or to just plain get the title wrong.
I spent a large time yesterday going through and "fixing" all the title names. FUN!!

It's done.. I have to go over it again with the printed schedules I brought home, but for the most part my code worked!! I shouldn't sound to surprised.. but I am ;)

Today's task was to get the search working. This can mean many things, and because I am again working with no spec, and no direction.. I've made it up. The search just submits via get directly to mgm.com. I assume this is what it's supposed to do, but I could be wrong.. it's happened before!

I heard from a friend that I've not spoken to in year this last week! Am excited to be back in contact, and hopefully will see him next time I go home.

well.. BFN!

Ratings for Stargate Atlantis Season 4 Eps 1

Finally a result is in, and I didn't win our pool over the rating for the season premiere episode of SGA. As reported at gateworld.net, it's a 1.2.

http://gateworld.net/news/2007/10/season_four_premieres_with_1.2_r.shtml

My guess was a 1.7 which turns out to be far off, but is super sad, because how it does in the ratings in the next two more eps (or one more) will determine if the show is renewed.

*le sigh*

BFN

Stargate is not over

We were supposed to spend all of September making updates and changes for the Stargate website. October 1st there was a meeting with TPTB and looks like we'll be focusing on it for at least another couple months.

Means our other projects, and most of my "goals" for this year (to get my bonus) won't come to fruition. That makes me super duper sad. Oh well! I do happen to like the Stargate franchise tons, so I will at least get to implement some of the ideas I have to improve the sites.

All the scripts and tools are done for MGM HD, now we just await the mysterious "feed" which we won't see until the day it goes live (or perhaps after!!)... Love developing blind!

Today I will be creating a function to go through the synopsis of each episode, and find the character and actor names, and surround them with links directly to each character page. FANCY! Well not really.

BFN

ps. I'd like to say, I am not responsible for Team Stargate.. but sorry to those who couldn't pick their province in the first week, that was my fault *blush*. I'd also like to point out that that "game" on the site wasn't us either.. third party marketing fluff.