It’s 1 AM. I have dog walking duty in the morning before work… 6 AM. If I stop now, I can get 5 hours of sleep. I do this more frequently now. I’ve been toying with this Blogger and custom templates. It’s turning out quite nicely. I’ve learned a couple new techniques in Illustrator as a result. I still haven’t worked on my actuall site yet (home page, content management, photos, etc). That will come next.

…and I sleep

Well. I must say, work is keeping me busy. I started fooling around with the Google API a couple of days ago and have that pretty much down pat. It started simple enough then quickly turned a little more sophisticated. At first I was just parsing the XML/SOAP message returned by the API with ASP and MSXML2. Then I found out that using response converts the XML output from Google to UTF-16 instead of UTF-8. This wouldn’t be an issue if the XML returned contained standard characters. It took me quite some time to figure this out. Some searches would return fine and dandy while others would cause the script to crash (with little error information).

This is where XSL/XSLT comes in. This is making things a whole lot easier. It does all the work for me…instead of having search through ParentNodes/ChildNodes and such with ASP. Now all the ASP code does is read in the XML and XSL files then transforms them into HTML ready for output.

Files

google.xsl

XSL stylesheet
used to translate the SOAP/XML response to readable HTML. You’ll need a browser
that can read valid XML (like Mozilla or
Internet Exploder 5.x) to see this file.

google.asp
This is the ASP script used to parse the XML/XSL
files and transform them into HTML output.

Last night Christina and I (along with a couple friends) went to The Dresden Room in Hollywood. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because this is the same bar that was in the movie Swingers. What a fascinating place. If you’ve never been there, I highly recommend going. There’s no cover charge, you can vallet for $3.50 (or less) and you can listen to one of the older lounge acts in L.A. Marty & Elaine have been performing cover songs in this bar since the early 80s and are quite entertaining. They have to be in thier late 60s / early 70s by now but they can still belt out Stayin’ Alive like nobody’s business. Elaine gets a little crazy on the electric keyboard from time to time and really pumps up the crowd. Speaking of which, the crowd in this joint is really diverse (age, ethnicity, sexual prefs, etc) so you’ll never feel out of place.

I think we’re going to have to go back for a second visit soon… it was a lot of fun.

There has been some turmoil at work lately. Most of which hasn’t really involved me. Well, I can’t really say it’s turmoil, but in the past month several people have left (either by choice, or by other means). The survivors have been assured that this department is safe and that there is no need to worry.

So, up until now, I have been pretty much unaffected by things…except now I’m learning that I may have to move to a different dept. Which isn’t really a big deal, but when I first heard about it, I was under the impression that I had a choice in the matter. Apparently, I don’t.

Oh, well. I don’t care at this point. Just keep the paychecks coming.

-r