And it all makes you want to scream

A little something from the late great Michael Jackson - Scream

I've been mapping out my past, a common enough task I think, and I've found there are many benefits. You gain a degree of self-learning, a clarification of your understanding of the past, an improvement of your appreciation of good memories and good poeple, and a great story.

There are dangers though: wallowing in self-pity, obsession on the past, renewed bitterness, over-attachment to this life, etc.

But perhaps the most repeated lesson I've found looking over my past is that things were never as bad as I thought they were, nor are they ever as good.

Looking at the past also helps put the present in perspective. I can say that my current life has been a bit rough at times (though not nearly as rough as the life of others mind you), but looking back I find it's amazing that my life is at least better than this period or that period, and so it's not that bad, and I ought to thank God that I got past those past crises because they were pretty damn bad.

Take for example my crisis of April/May 2008 - where I was almost certain I was going to fail a number of classes and need to take another semester (although in retrospect it may have been a good idea to take another semester and get a CS double-major, although who knows how that would have reshaped who I am today?)

Compared to that crisis, my feelings today are light and fluffy, and while I should not take my feelings to lightly (after all, like speed they can kill), it is a bit comforting that I got over that, it chastises my self-pity a bit, and it reminds me - life can suck sometimes, but it is still worth it. I look at that period and there's no way I can reconcile it with the idea I was secretly happy, no I was miserable, but there was still a beauty in that period of life, because I strove to live and live rightly and serve God in my life. Screw the misery, even the crises are beautiful.

And I got a little Facebook posting from that period to prove my point. As miserable and self-pitying that the posting is, I like to think it's a good piece of writing, and well worth looking back upon, or for those who have not read it, for the first time upon. Especially as the most major of the points are still valid, you can always trust God to get you through the bad times, and even when the thrill of life is gone, you still got to go on (and indeed move along):

So here's the posting which I after the fact labeled "Scream":

Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone

Little bit of Jack and Diane
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9tpKXFd8A

Of course the best thing that John Cougar Mellencamp has given us is this line from How I Met Your Mother (Aldrin Justice):

Barney: Tonight, just like John Mellencamp, I am going to get rid of the cougar once and for all.

If you don't get it watch the episode.

Anywho, I'd like to thank everyone who gave me birthday messages, it was a nice gesture. If it seems odd to not write this till now, well, my life has been a little bit of a crapstorm this last couple weeks. And now that I come to the end of this semester it seems everything is coming up failure, partial or completely, and even my successes seem to be interspliced with failure. And this has all left me pretty miserable.

If I had some time to relax and move away from that mindset, maybe that wouldn't matter so much, but I have more work to do, I have to clean up the mess I've been dealing with lately, I have to deal with potentially failing one or more classes, and this sucks. So life's not going to be enjoyable for a while now.

But life goes on. And one day, really one day, maybe in a month, maybe in two, someday probably not too far from now, I will be getting out of this crapstorm, or I will learn to deal with it. I have great faith that God will get me through all this, but I'm having trouble finding enjoyment in life anyways, and in worse case senario, and I need to deal with the aftermath of these failures and the reactions of my family to these matters, which will likely be as uncomfortable as the problems themselves, I might be living in a crapstorm till the end of the summer or beyond. But still life goes on, I'll have moments of happiness now and then, and someday life will get better. So life goes on.

Even if for now, the thrill of living is gone.

-- Fin --

So how thrilling is living now?
At times very much so, at times terrible. Are things getting better? Off and on, yes. Do I trust God for the future, I am trying to, and I think for the most part succeeding. And looking back, I can say all and all, things are not so bad, maybe not great, but, to paraphrase Hamlet:

In this sleep of life, what dreams may come?
And then in death too, what dreams might appear?

Anywho, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

How to turn a Facebook Friends List into a CSV

So here's a little something for some people who like to use things that are not nothing but rather are something, a how-to if you will, to translate a Facebook friends list into a CSV:

Facebook, it is designed to let you keep in contact with people.
Yet as most know it is not the end all of human interaction. Despite this
fact, the makers of Facebook have not made it easy to take the contact
information in Facebook and get it out.

However, where there is a will there is a way. Actually there are
many ways. Indeed there are many tools you could use for this purpose,
from the Facebook API to a Greasemonkey script. But when it comes to ad
hoc manipulation of random websites with a minimum of fuss, and perhaps
a little leeway timewise, my tool of choice is Firebug.

And thus here is a function one can put into the Firebug console and
then execute for gathering all the Facebook contact info from a My
Friends page into a CSV file (or actually a new window which can be
saved as a text file and will then become a CSV), which can be easily
imported to your email client or even phone.

NOTE: it's been a little while since I've worked on this code,
and there might be some flaws in it. No guarentee.

function fbcontactexport() {
    items = document.getElementsByClassName('UIObjectListing');
    datastr = "name, group1, group2, cellphone, landphone";
    for(i=0; i < items.length; i++) {
        datastr += "\n";
        names = items[i].getElementsByClassName('UIObjectListing_Title');
        if(names.length > 0) {
            datastr += names[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
        }
        datastr += ",";
        subtitle = items[i].getElementsByClassName('UIObjectListing_Subtitle')[0].childNodes;
        if(subtitle.length>0) {
            datastr += subtitle[0].nodeValue;
            datastr += ",";
        }
        else {
            datastr += ',,';
        }
        subtext = items[i].getElementsByClassName('UIObjectListing_Subtext')[0].childNodes;
        if(subtext.length > 0) {
            datastr += subtext[0].nodeValue;
            datastr += ",";
        }
        else {
            datastr += ',,';
        }
        cellNum = items[i].getElementsByClassName('FriendsPage_PhonebookCell');
        if(cellNum.length > 0) {
            datastr += cellNum[0].childNodes[1].nodeValue;
            datastr += ",";
        }
        else {
            datastr += ',,';
        }
        landNum = items[i].getElementsByClassName('FriendsPage_PhonebookLand');
        if(landNum.length>0) {
            datastr += landNum[0].childNodes[1].nodeValue;
        }
        else {
            datastr += ',';
        }
    }
    nwind = window.open();
    nwind.document.write(datastr);
    return datastr;
}

One limitation (or at least one big and notable one) though, this only gathers the contacts from a single page in your My Friends
list which, if you have several pages of Friends, means you'll have to
run this script several times. Could it be otherwise? Yes, yes it could.
There are more sophisticated tools as I mentioned (or rather more
appropriate tools as Firebug is amazingly sophisticated for its
primary purpose, that is debugging Javascript). It is likely possible
that a more powerful Firebug script could be written that'll open up
the new pages of friends lists and grab those pages, etc. But this is
a not bad function, and building it just about exceeded my interest in
the subject, so I'll leave it as is for now, or until curiosity strikes
me again like a hurricane.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand
rocks.

Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

Prithee, have thee heard of the Prism

I'm always caught in a bit of a dilemma upon my less serious posts, because I am Rand the Great and Glorious and thus deserve the treatment as such. But on the other hand, even the great and glorious can afford more scattered thoughts upon once and a while.

So then let me make a recommendation far removed from topics more normally dwelled upon. Often I have found myself with more than one account at a social networking site or the like and have been forced to choose which one to be logged in as at a certain time. The choice would infuriate me, and burn me to my soul. Sure I could use multiple browsers, but I like Firefox, and then I need to surf over to the site again. Seconds wasted, seconds!

However, now I find myself taking advantage of Firefox's Prism project. This project at its core, isolates a single webpage in a browser instance. At its most basic use, this is only slightly more useful than a bookmark. But there are some intriguing possibilities here. Firstly, you can put the links to the prism-ed site more places than a bookmarks menu, and more relevant to the previous paragraph, you can utilize the prism-ed site independently of other prism instances and of Firefox. Thus, you can be logged into TWO! instances of say Gmail or MySpace accounts at once TWO! TWO!

And while there are some cases where one is better than two, this is not one of them.

So Prism on Prism! Prism on!

Face it all up with the Facebook

I've been using Facebook for a while now, not since the beginning but since relatively early on, back when it was restricted to a limited number of colleges. I have to say I like it. It's a nice way to keep track of friends and you can always just look someone up some day and send them a message. All of my life I've worried about losing touch with friends so this is nice. Granted, this doesn't guarantee that I'll remember my friends and my friends will remember me, but it still is very nice.

However, I'm not found of the direction Facebook is heading in. All those complex applications and crap, most of it is just annoying and fills up the mini-feed with useless information. The only applications that are useful are the ones which are just for fun like the Zombies app or the Happy Hour app, but seriously stuff like the Questions app is just annoying since it tends to just pester people and stuff. I suppose ultimately I'll check out some more applications but I don't think I can ever really use Facebook as mySpace. I mean I use Facebook to keep in contact with friends, MySpace is for me more about networking and sharing ideas and videos and crap. But Facebook I guess wants all the prestige of being able to swallow mySpace and everything and so they'll keep adding crappy applications, ah whatever, I'll still probably use it anyways.