Headers Already Sent

Winter has really set in this past week. Despite not having to leave the house until 9.15 every day I’ve still had to scrape ice off my car, which has consistently made me late for work. You would have thought I’d of adjusted my time accordingly, but apparently not.

On Monday morning my Grandad passed away which means next Monday I have a funeral to go to. There’s only so long you can hold out against multiple cancers, and luckily that wasn’t very long in his case. It’s terrible to see someone suffer (and to suffer yourself) so thankfully it was all over quite fast. A quick escape from this life is something that one should be thankful for. RIP Grandad, you will be missed.

Making light of a bad situation, I get a few days off work next week! I think I might go and see some uni buddies in Canterbury while I’m home. I planned to come back and see everyone more than I have (in 3 months I’ve only visited once), but between Laura, projects, family and various other things It’s hard to find the time. In Brighton this weekend, hopefully the weather will out hold. Cold sunny days I can deal with, cold wet dismal days I cannot.

So there it is. Got a busy few days ahead of me, lets just hope they’re not too depressing…

This evening I joined twitter and immediately got mobile support and facebook integration going. Having a central place for all my status updates is great, and the fact I can update on the move is amazing too. However, I wanted this integrated with my website so people can go to mikelaming.com/status and see what I’m doing. I wrote a little bit of PHP to get the desired effect, and if anyone else wants to do the same, here’s the code. Enjoy! (This could be rewritten to use SAX which would be faster, but DOM is so easy)

<?php

$data = file_get_contents(”http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/mikelaming.xml?count=20″);

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($data);

$status = array();

$main = $doc->getElementsByTagName(”status”);
foreach($main as $sub)
{
$temp = $sub->getElementsByTagName(”text”);
$status[] = $temp->item(0)->nodeValue;
}

for($i = 0; $i < count($status); $i++)
{
if($i == 0)
{
echo(”<h2>My Current Status</h2>”);
}
else if($i == 1)
{
echo(”<h2>Older…</h2>”);
}

echo(”<p>”.$status[$i].”</p>”);
}

?>

Obviously replace my username ‘mikelaming’ with yours.

UPDATE: You can see what I’ve done with this here.

I can’t remember who said it, but the quote seems appropriate nevertheless. The front page of the BBC website today reports:

Obesity “not individuals’ fault”

Individuals are not to blame for the obesity crisis and the government must act, a major report concludes.

This follows a piece a few days ago stating “Obesity ‘as bad as climate risk”‘. Talk about sensationalist…

Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

…were absolutely amazing! My lovely girlfriend surprised me with tickets Friday afternoon so yesterday we traveled up to London, checked into a hotel, grabbed a Maccy Dees and walked over to the Arena.

I’d never really listened to much Symphony X despite being a big DT fan, but I was very impressed. They put on one hell of a show and really got the crowd pumped.

Dream Theater were awesome, but what else would you expect? I must confess to not having bought the new album which I think they played a bit of, so I couldn’t sing / air drum along to everything. They played some classics though, namely Strange Deja Vu and As I am, plus the medley towards the end was brilliant.

Overall, great fun. The atmosphere at Wembley was charged and when they come back I’m definitely up for seeing them again.

(I might add some pictures to this if I ever get them off Lauras camera.)

A few weeks have passed since the last update, mainly because I’m in one of those “plodding” stages of the year. The weeks pass, the days gradually grow shorter/wetter/colder and I get locked into a routine which fortunately makes the time zip by (a routine which normally involves copious amounts of beer) but leaves me with nothing exciting to report on (apart from drunken beer antics, but lets not go there).

Last weekend I was down in Brighton seeing Laura. Weather wise it was a nice weekend, shame we didn’t get out the house and experience it. We had planned to go to the beach and soak it up, but lazyness really got the better of us. When it’s past noon the day’s really already over, right? Might as well stay in bed and sleep some more. The week before that I headed down to Canterbury to catch the second weekend of the new term. As enjoyable as it was it made me realise that I don’t miss being away from uni as much as I thought I did. It’s probably reassuring knowing I enjoy the world of work seeing as I have another 45 years or so of it left.

On the projects side, things are moving a lot slower than I would like, but they are certainly exciting. Aiming for an end of the month Yardsnap release which is going to be difficult and will eat up a few weekends, but it should be worth it in the end. Really really need to get my personal site up and running - “Coming soon”, as sexy as it is, doesn’t really inspire…

Other things are still moving. All is good.

/m