Author: Joe

Categories
Video Games

Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Super Smash Bros. BrawlWith it’s overall attention to detail, this game might have the most production value I’ve ever seen. There’s a ton of playable characters (35 I think) from all the games I grew up playing. Numerous characters from Mario Bros., Zelda, Metroid, Sonic, Fire Emblem, even good oldR.O.B. was a playable character.

Brawling with four characters is fast paced and fairly easy to pick up. The online play is very cool too, very little if any lag in the play. Tons of events and extras to keep you busy for a very long time. It is kinda cool in a 3rd grade way to collect the various trophies and stickers.

The single player Subspace Emissary is an impressive game in itself. It got tough towards the end. I beat it with one of my all time favorites, Luigi. It was very fitting that he got the final blow to save the day. There should be a holiday for him. The music like the entire game was very impressive. It’s easy to see that no expense was spared in making this, and it shows when you play it.

Categories
Sports

Mercer Madness Dodgeball Tournament

DodgeballThe first annual Mercer Madness Tournament is being held on April 12th. I’m in the process of assembling a team to participate is this monumental event. There’s four divisions being offered, looks like we’ll be participating in the Adult Open division.

I don’t think I’ve played dodgeball in probably 12 or more years, but I’ve seen the movie, and it didn’t seem too difficult. Now that I think about it, it’d be amazing if Chuck Norris was at this tournament like in the film. It would be a true honor to throw in Norris’ presence.

If you’re interested in playing or have an idea for a team name (haven’t thought on one quite yet) please let me know.

Categories
Development

WordPress Custom Fields

Found the Custom Fields feature of WordPress to be very useful. I’m using them on the posts on this site that have ratings. It’s pretty cool. I’ve also used custom fields for one of my clients so that they can easily embed videos into their blogs.

Setting up a custom field is real easy. Within the WordPress admin near the bottom of a Write Post or Edit Post screen is an option for Custom Fields. You can select from existing field names the enter a value for that custom field or you can type a new custom field name into the key field to create a new custom field. So, creating custom fields is pretty easy, but how do you now present that info?

WordPress offers a get_post_meta() function to work with the custom fields. Below is an example in PHP of using the get_post_meta() to display the contents of a custom field named video.

echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "video", true);

Three parameters are being passed to get_post_meta. The first is the ID of the current post, then the name of the custom field, and last is if you want to return a single string or an array.

Categories
Movies

Blood Diner

Blood DinerI’m not sure how or why, but I wound up watching many very bad B horror films this weekend. The one that really stood out amongst the crop was Blood Diner. Scott picked it from what was available On Demand, and we all just sat there and watched. Apparently the film was form 1987 and involves two brothers who open a diner and kill people in hopes of resurrecting an Egyptian goddess Shitaar. Oh yeah, under the guidance of their uncles’s brain that lives in a jar.

There was also a wrestler by the name of Little Jimmy Hitler. So as I’m sure this post makes no sense, the film made even less. This movie was horrible, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But the name Shitaar will forever be etched in the minds of those whom braved this film on that night. Looking for a really bad B horror film to laugh at then this gets the highest of recommendation.

Categories
Development

Adding a Row to a Google Docs Spreadsheet

I create a lot of web forms and like to share the data with those whom the form was created for. And while I was brushing my teeth the other morning I thought why not dump it straight to a Google Docs Spreadsheet, since most of the people I do this for are very familiar with working with a spreadsheet anyway.

Thanks to the Google Data Spreadsheets API this and many other features are possible. The site is well documented and the Zend Framework PHP client is a huge help. Luckily someone else had tried the same thing and documented it on his blog, so check that out as that was a tremendous help for me figuring out just how to do this.

Categories
Video Games

Super Metroid

Super MetroidDownloaded Super Metroid for the Virtual Console and have been playing that for a little bit. It was originally released in 1994 for the Super Nintendo and is considered to be one of the greatest games of all time. After playing through it I’d have to agree.

While the graphics and sound are very dated by todays standards, I was hooked on the game. Found myself spending many hours in hope of defeating Mother Brain. I never played this game when it was originally released, but glad I did now. Very impressive game, especially for when it came out.