As a self-titled teevee aficionado, the time would eventually come when I would need a nice, big TV. I used to rely on a TV that was on loan from a friend, but she reclaimed it a few weeks ago, and my HTPC has been rather lonely ever since.

To fill the void left by the recently departed 37″ LCD, I bought a 42″ Panasonic Plasma. The P42ST30. I was originally going to get a P46S30 (the non-3D, 46″ version of the P42ST30), but after doing quite a bit of research on the matter it turns out that Panasonic puts higher quality display panels on their 3D TVs. I have no desire for 3D movies, but I do like my picture quality.

I like picture quality so much that I’m following the burn-in suggestions of some TV gurus. Basically, I’m running a specific set of slides for 100 hours to burn the plasma in evenly. When the TV is new, the plasma is a lot more active then it will be for the rest of its life. This burn-in process tries to curb any parts of the panel aging more rapidly in this crucial time period.

Unfortunately, I now have to stare at a very nice TV for the next 100 hours while it only displays solid colors. I did sneak in 5 minutes of The Dark Knight before starting the burn-in—it was amazing. I can’t wait to see what the picture looks like after I calibrate it.

Here’s a rather dull picture of the new TV. Ignore the crappy image quality. I have a custom back plate on my iPhone which quickly filled the lens up with dust and dirt. I also plan on getting a proper media center going when I move in the fall.

When I was a young and jobless programmer, I had the desire to create everything from scratch. Instead of relying on frameworks and blogging software, I was determined to reinvent the wheel. This behavior usually led to development cycles that quickly spun out of control and became much larger than the original goal.

Fast-forward half a decade. I was hired for my first web development job, and the job coerced me into my first framework, Zend Framework. I transitioned—albeit begrudgingly. Initially, I realized the business sense in using frameworks to speed up the development cycle. Especially when they come at the low, low price of free. But for a while I still convinced myself that frameworks were somehow bad—as if using one would be cheating.

About two weeks or so ago I was working on a personal project in my usual fashion when I found myself constantly muttering, “if this were Zend, I could simply…” It kind of dawned on me at that moment that frameworks really do make life easier. And that’s all on top of the improved security and (sometimes) performance they can bring to your projects.

What does it all mean? Well, that was my rather long-winded (and introspective) way of saying my blog is now powered by WordPress. I was honestly surprised at how easy it was to turn my old web design into a WordPress theme. This theme still may be a little rough around the edges, but it’s not half bad considering I both installed WordPress and created this theme in an afternoon.

HTML5 Logo

During the transition to WordPress, I found my website’s lack of browser compatibility rather disturbing. Running on the bleeding edge has its drawbacks—namely the bleeding part. Thanks to Microsoft brilliantly ignoring any HTML tags it doesn’t recognize, IE7 was entirely broken on my old website. There are some nice JavaScript hacks being put together to make IE compatible with HTML5, but they’re just that—hacks. Plus, I’m only using HTML5 for the semantic sugar. I have no legitimate reason to stick to HTML5 while its support is in its infancy.

In addition to stripping out HTML5 in its entirety, I scaled back my use of CSS3. Namely, my gratuitous use of the child combinators. They made my HTML code a lot cleaner, but it came at a rather large compatibility cost. I still use border rounding and transitions, but those don’t lead to a broken page if the browser doesn’t understand them.

I’m going to wrap this whole thing up by promising to put this WordPress to use by actually adding content. We’ll see how far that promise goes. Because I’ve never made a promise like that before.

I fixed a small problem with BlakeTV that caused TV shows in a positive timezone *cough* Dr. Who *cough* to not format properly. Now silly Brit shows won’t air every day.

On a related note, I’m planning on tackling BlakeTV one of these days. Update the backend, add new features, etc. Possibly even move it off to its own domain name. I’ll probably start that project after finals.

Until then, BlakeTV should operate fine for the time being.

(Wait… Does anyone else think it’s weird that Dr. Who, a show about time travel and such, was giving me time zone issues?)

As you may (or may not) be able to tell, I have redesigned my website. Again. If I were a counting man, that would make this website number thirty-two. 32? That’s a lot.

Unlike my older redesigns, I also went through and completely redesigned the backend software to my website. Using the things I’ve learned in my short time professionally developing websites, I’ve vastly improved the usability and security of my website/blog/beast. Security was a large improvement over my last website. Although, it’s easy to improve over something with the security of a bead door. While working with websites on a daily basis, I learned to love parameterized SQL statements. I’m using PDO, and I’m using parameterized statements everywhere that gets passed variables—even variables from my own database. I’ve also overhauled the accounts backend used for the admin panel. While I don’t have a user system (yet), I applied newer cryptography functions to the passwords hashed in the database. I also make use of salts now.

Security isn’t the only thing I’ve improved in my website. I’ve also re-made the template from the ground up using HTML5 and CSS3. Chrome, Safari and Firefox work for the most part. Internet Explorer 8 and below work—but not very well. I may tweak the design here in the future to make it a more pleasant experience in IE8 and below, but that’s not very high on my to-do list. Especially since Internet Explorer 9 is out now, and it’s actually not that bad. I’ll still stick to Chrome though. I’ve noticed that Firefox has a very small issue. Submit buttons are 2 pixels taller than they are in every other browser. I even tried to explicitly set the height, and Firefox still wasn’t feeling up to snuff.

On a related note, my older blog entries were hastily tossed into the new database. They don’t work very well with the new template. I may fix that. Or not. They still function.

I still have a few things to fix up before I move on to blogging about useless completely useful things. Namely, the tagging system needs to be optimized. (Using LIKE to find tags is slow and just plain silly.)

I still can’t decide on the title yet, but the product is near completion: BlakeTV (or BlakeHarleyTv or BlakeHarley(Tv) or whatever). I welcome anyone and everyone to give it a try.

What is BlakeTV? I’m glad you asked! BlakeTV is a website that allows you to follow your favorite TV shows, so you never miss an episode. Simply create an account and add TV shows to your watchlist.

I’m still working on adding a few features, but the basic concept is in complete working order. Later this week I will finish the feed system. I’m also planning on adding some social features in the near future (sharing lists and shows, etc) in addition to further notification systems (email, SMS, etc).

tv.blakeharley.com

Rather then continue to study for my finals, I’m going to do something productive like… dumping random YouTube videos.

And suddenly my attention is somewhere else.

It’s official. The next Elder Scrolls game is Skyrim and slated for a November 11, 2011 release. Can’t wait.

Update: It turns out that Skyrim will continue to use the Gamebryo engine. Suddenly, my excitement has decreased fivefold.

Update #2: Looks like the internet speculation was wrong. Bethesda will be using a brand-new engine. My excitement has suddenly increased twelvefold.

Team Fortress 2 had quite an amazing update today. In the case they remove the update or you’re too lazy to click the link, today’s update changes include:

- Updated some files, for no reason whatsoever