Fred and Loathing on The Internet

I got that disease where you wake up in strange places drunk. -Principal Moss

2023-Jun-23

To be completely upfront dear readers, the updates I bring forth today are negative ones. This is the first official reduction in scale to the great big experiment that is fredlambuth.com. I tried to figure out how to get the calendar templating on the stats page to have the day numbers match their day of the week given the year-month being shown in the current served page. That didn’t happen. I jockeyed the hell out of the chatbots to give me a Jinja template for a solid hour with results that stagnated in no clear direction. I made the managerial decision to just cut the string days of the week up at the top of the calendar. That will be my Gordian’s Knot for a while.

If you were to read over the past few blog posts that I wrote in a flurry last weekend, spurred by a brief but powerful love affair with the chatbots- the public one and the microsoft extra thrown into the workplace package at my current employer’s client- you would note that I had pushed into my production code some stuff I wasn’t quite sure how it worked, but could confirm it did work by seeing the pages I wanted to see on my local_host development environment. I have taken the time to annotate the hell out of them in the hopes it would give me a eureka moment that triggers the solving of that day_of_the_week template issues. It didn’t. I did get a good look of the shit I pushed. I bet with a little messing around with that Calendar module in the standard library, I’ll be able to pass in some sort of variable. I’d rather solve it that way than learning Jinja magic.

I have the disco song by Maxine Nightingale stuck in my head lately. It’s the unofficial anthem to the movie Slap Shot. I had heard about this movie because of the violent reputation of the Canadian brothers characters in Wizard magazine in some article pitting fictional characters against one another. I saw it a few years ago on Paul Newman’s charm alone. What I did remember about it was their beer drinking style-cheap beer they pour over and over into small glasses- and the utterly bleak Rust Belt setting. That song is stuck in my head because I saw the first half of Slap Shot a few nights ago. It satisfies even more at my advanced age. Paul Newman’s character and the USA’s economy are both in question due to their age, but they both seem to pull out OK. Not great, but OK.

Oh, how about this. I do love Shannon & The Clams and would not cast aspersions because I think they have a hit that sounds like a previously written pop song. Who wouldn’t? They ultimately kinda sound the same. Anyways, the most popular song by Los Sinners on Spotify sounds remarkably like Ozma, a Shannon & The Clams hit.