Diary of The Tech Hippie

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Upcoming posts/hectic work trip!
2008-03-09 04:48:00
Well I was supposed to go down to Kansas City on thursday night and be back friday evening... well, I just got back (saturday night). Good news is the problem is resolved, bad news is my brain's fried and I'm exhausted. So.. give me a couple days and you'll have some new content to peruse.Next up: thoughts on minimum wageAfter that: a comparison of the creation story of Genesis with ScienceStay tuned.. much more after the break!
More About: Work , Trip , Posts , Upcoming , Hectic

NIN: Ghosts I-IV
2008-03-03 03:48:00
Nine Inch Nails has come out of nowhere with the new self-released Ghosts I-IV. From their website:Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I - IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I - IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.Not only that, but it's only $5 to download and $10 for the CD's! This just goes to show how unnecessary record companies are in this day and age. In addition, they provide the 1st album "Ghosts I" in glorious DRM-free mp3 format completely FREE! Not only is the music amazing, but the statement their making in the music world is as well.Check it out!Update: It seems they've also released "Ghosts I" as a torrent on ThePirateBay! Which is good because it appears their official website is having some issues at the moment.

Encaustic Wax Painting
2008-03-02 03:09:00
Well, my mother found out about encaustic wax painting and let my girlfriend try it out. Result? Some amazing abstract art. Check out the preview below, and be sure to check out the full version, and support her art by checking out her deviantart page!
More About: Painting

Scraping websites with Ruby and FireBug
2008-02-29 06:27:00
If you've done any web development you'll know that there are many times when you may want to grab info from another website and use it on yours. We could, of course, just copy the data from their website and paste it into ours. But, what do you do when there is a very large amount of data, or the data changes frequently, or both? You screen-scrape.Now, there are many options available in many different web (or CGI) languages, and I've tried quite a few.. I've even written my own screen-scraping classes in PHP. Well that class has been thrown into the archives once I discovered the HPRICOT library for Ruby .HPRICOT is a very slick XHTML/XML parsing class. Just throw the data at it and you've got a fully searchable object to parse from. So, let's take a look at how we load data into HPRICOT.require 'rubygems'require 'open-uri'require 'hpricot'url = "http://example.com/index.htm"doc = Hpricot(open(url))Pretty simple huh? Yup. Very. Now comes the fun part. If you d...
More About: Websites

Introduction to The Tech Hippie
2008-02-29 06:12:00
Okay, so I don't want to pen some long self-indulgent autobiography. I'll simply give a brief synopsis of what I think may be interesting for you, the reader, as well as the standard info.The Stats: - Age: 23 years old- Gender: Male- Location: South-Central NebraskaThe Interests:- Tech nology- Arts (literature, film, music, visual art)- Gaming (console, pc, cards)- PhilosophyThe Work:- Dental Technology Integrator- CO2 Laser Service Manager- Web ProgrammerSome other major points to cover would be that I am almost entirely self-taught. I have taken some college classes (beginning at age 12), but I've never finished a degree. I am also a recovering Methamphetamine addict (5 1/2 years clean). I have a wonderful girlfriend whom I've been living with for just over a year now. She's a very talented artist. Check out her DeviantArt page!So, that should cover the main points. I hate trying to describe myself on websites since, no matter how hard I try, it always seems self-indulg...
More About: Introduction