Categories
Movies

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Complete Series

He-Man and the Masters of the UniverseI have a new best $7.99 I’ve ever spent, and it was on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Complete Series. This isn’t the original series that aired in the early 80’s, which by the way was pretty awesome in itself. This was the series that aired on Cartoon Network 2002-04.

I’d never seen an episode before, but randomly had someone I follow on Twitter share a link on YouTube of how Skeletor lost his face. Upon watching that, I was figured I’d see if I could find some more of these episodes. The complete series of 40 episodes was on Amazon for only $6.99, so I figured why not and ordered it.

A recent week off from work and a decent blizzard led me to finally get around to watching this series. It was amazing. The stories were really great, and not just by cartoon standards. The detail that they paid to characters that my brothers and I used to play with over 25 years ago was amazing.

I wish all retellings of franchises were of this caliber. Skeletor and his evil warriors are depicted as the formidable and evil foes were depicted perfectly. Even obscure characters such as Stinkor and Fisto not only were featured, but given plenty of screen time. It was great recalling all these characters that I thought I had forgotten.

Highly recommended, I wish the series hadn’t ended at 40 episodes.

Categories
Video Games

Fallout New Vegas

Fallout New VegasYou know a game is really great when you’re sad to beat it. Fallout New Vegas was at times near addictive and I’m sure I put way too much of my time into it, but it was entertainment well spent. There’s just something fun about walking around a post apocalyptic world for me.

The many quests and story were excellent, however it was a bit buggy for console game. Freezing up, characters floating in the air, were fairly common. But apparently a patch that was just release the past week should resolve most of technical issues mentioned above. Despite these bugs, the game is still overall great.

I decided to side with Mr. House, so that was the route I took. I also took Cass and Rex as my companions towards the end. I had Boone for a while early on, but lost him somehow (a bug maybe?). There’s just so much to do in the game, there’s so many different ways the story can be played.

What a great game, thinking about picking up some of the additional downloadable content or maybe even playing it through again but taking a different path.

Categories
Adventure

Christmas 2010

Christmas this year was pretty low key. So much of the family had moved, passed away or just alienated themselves the past few years. But less people did mean much less drama, so that’s not such a bad thing I suppose.

Thanks to the magic of Skype, we were able to have my brother Anthony take part when we exchanged presents. The interent really has opened up some amazing communication possibilities, it was really cool.

Everybody seemed very pleased with what I’d gotten them, so that was great. It seems to get tougher every year to think of something to get my parents, feel like after so many years I’m starting to run out of possibilites at times.

Here’s a list of some of the really cool stuff I received:

  • Lego Hoth Wampa cave
  • mononucleosis (harmless this time!)
  • Mass Effect 2
  • Spectacular Spider-man volumes 6-8 on DVD
  • Mario & Luigi radio controlled karts
  • a few flannels and t-shirts
  • Fraggle Rock Christmas DVD
  • Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer DVD
Categories
Adventure

2010 Holiday Gift Exchange

2010 Holiday Gift ExchangeThe 4th annual Holiday Gift Exchange was held yesterday in the employee cafeteria. I thought it was a great time and another highly successful gift exchange. Slightly biased here I’m sure, but it’s the finest gift exchange at work.

I would like to thank all those who participated Especially those who went the extra mile bringing in food, drink, taking photos, or just assisting with the setup. A truly great team effort.

This was the furthest that the swap had gone, with several swaps after the initial mandatory round. A wide assortment of gift cards, swords, blankets, Buccaneer attire, and a shake weight just to name a few swapped hands. Well I don’t think the shake weight swapped hands, but most everything else seemed to at one point.

I wound with with the gift I happened to bring in. A foam sword, monkey (together forming a monkey sword) and a Target gift card.

Great strategy was exercised and all seemed to have a pretty good time. It’s great to have a good time with co-workers and look forward to next years.

Categories
Development

Make CKEditor match your site’s CSS in Drupal 6

I’ve been converting a pretty big site over to Drupal 6 recently and have been trying to get the CKEditor to very closely appear like the sites CSS styles. By default it was doing an ok job, but not good enough for how the site’s content managers would be working with it.

Through a bit of research I did find an excellent tutorial on the subject. This was a tremendous help and exactly what I was looking to do.

Just a few simple adjustments in the ckeditor.config.js was all it took.

First I just changed the value of:

config.bodyId = '';

Now the majority of my site’s styles were cascading onto the CKEditor. There were still some minor tweaking that needed to be done.

Adding a few lines using:

config.extraCss += "";

and I was all set. Now the CKEditor editor is displaying content almost identically than how it will actually appear on the site.

Categories
Books

Pro Drupal Development Second Edition

Pro Drupal DevelopmentI’ve been in the process of deciding whether or not to move atlantic.edu over to Drupal. While the online documentation and the various online sources of info are pretty solid, I really was looking for a concise resource that is aimed more towards the intermediate or advanced PHP developer.

Pro Dupal Development Second Edition has really been a great read for what I was looking for. It does an excellent job of breaking down the various modules, hooks, themes, nodes, blocks, etc. of Drupal. Drupal is very powerful, but at times I find it’s learning curve can be a bit on the steep side. This book really does an excellent job of explaining things from a developers perspective.

The Second Edition covers Drupal 6, which is what I will most likely initially be running. There is a Third Edition due out around this time that will cover Drupal 7 if that’s of more interest (and something I’ll probably end up getting eventually too).