This is a list of things I like about Halloween and October in general:

1. The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. My dad gave me a copy of this book when I was younger and I try to read it once a year. It’s atmospheric, a little bit creepy, and very well illustrated.
2. Scary movie marathons on TV. October is the best month for Lovecraft, Cenobites, and John Carpenter’s magnificent rock guitar solos. Srsly – he scored In the Mouth of Madness and throughout the movie you can hear him shredding in epic fashion.
3. The word Samhain. Quite possibly the most Halloween-y word ever. You basically just tack it on to any word you can think of you’ve generated a band name, movie title, fantasy locale, or sci-fi character. Check this out: “Dude, I love the part in Samhain’s Holiday 2 where Pete Samhain goes to Samhain Gorge and that Toothbrush of Samhain song comes in. I totally saw them play Meadowbrook! (speaker air guitars a wicked ToS lick)”
4. This picture my wife took of me in a Halloween mask. It’s like a Mardi Gras version of the doctor’s mask from Assassin’s Creed II  - which is in turn a Hollywood version of the beak doctor from the Middle Ages.
5. It’s a great college football month – unless you happen to be a Wolverine in the RichRod era. Which I am. Ok, scratch this one, we’ll just go with four things.

In other news, the finance tool is still progressing nicely. Version 1.4.1 was released today and features expense searchability and date-based filters to limit the amount of data you see at one time. It’s still only marginally useful when compared to “real” finance tracking tools, but it’s been a great project and with a few more features it should actually be useful for my wife and I.

Here’s a screenshot of the main screen:

As project cycles go, this one appears to have some staying power. I’ve definitely passed through Phase 1 (OMFGthisissoexciting) and Phase 2 (WTFhowdoesthiswork?), and I’m solidly in Phase 3 (The Grind). One of the most exciting things was the fact that I look a few weeks off (to play Castlevania: Lords of Shadow) and I was able to get back into development quickly without having to re-learn too much.

Also, I decided to bit the bullet and design some of the GUI interfaces with a tool called wxGlade, which is like a GUI for your GUIs. With it you can create and connect wxPython graphical interfaces without having to write Python code from scratch or tweak layout components manually. wxGlade provides most of the basic wxPython controls and a “self-explanatory” (quotes intended) interface for organizing them into dialoges, frames, etc… Once you’re done it will generate code that can be integrated into an existing app. In theory you can generate entire GUI programs from wxGlade, but I found several features either missing or obfuscated to the point that they appeared to be missing. In any case, it generated a much nicer new expense dialog. See for yourself:

vs.

Umm… yeah, mine looks like total crap and wxGlade earns it’s keep. The problem is you can’t quite specify *everything*, so I always end up having to hand-edit the generated code – generally a big fat bad idea. I guess provided you don’t have to make too many tweaks to the GUI, you should be ok. I’ll spin through some of the other hideous dialogs over time and see if I can’t make them a little bit prettier.

The end – happy Halloween!

…Sex & The City 2 suuuucked.

About a month ago, my wife and I flew out to Boston to visit some good friends and see the city for the first time. Specifically, we visited my college roomate from Freshman, Junior, and Senior years and his charming and massively fun new fiancée. We haven’t been on such a pleasant trip in a long time and the city was wonderful – we’ll definitely be back. You can find some images at my wife’s site, Shadow&Soul Photo.

During this trip we had the misfortune of having some free-time align perfectly with the showtime for Sex & The City 2, which we saw, and which everyone in the group hated. The two-plus hour run time allowed for plenty of private thoughts such as: Is Kim Cattrall intentionally tanking her lines? Could this movie be any more offensive to Muslim peoples? Is Paul  falling asleep or having an aneurysm? Why am I not watching Predators, Splice, Avatar: The Last Airbender, etc… any of those must be better than this drivel!

(note: apparently karma caught up with Avatar: The Last Airbender and forced it to repay some cosmic debt for not casting any Asian actors by totally sucking. The opening weekend take was just over 40 million, and since Paramount sunk a total of 280 million into producing and marketing the film, I would call that “a loss”.)

I guess the point is I haven’t seen a great  movie in the theater in a long long time. I liked Iron Man II, but it wasn’t great. I liked Clash of the Titans in a campy monster-pr0n kind of way, but it *definitely* wasn’t great  (Also, the guy behind me shouting “Release the Kraken!” every 5 minutes didn’t help. Listen up, nimrod: there’s only one Kraken and he doesn’t get released right away because nobody would be able to stop him and he would destroy the city like Lizzie from Rampage and that wouldn’t be a very good start to Perseus’ journey now would it?). I remember thinking the Lord of the Rings movies were something special in the theater, and because I’m a comic book kinda guy I was equally impressed with V for Vendetta. Even 300 was pretty amazing the first time through. Lately though, no dice…. I’ll report back if I manage to buck this trend.

In other news I got a new job about a month ago and it has afforded me some much needed after work free time. In order to plug this free time leak I’ve spun up several projects – old and new:

1. Re-learning my once epic piano repertoire. My wife has mandated that I start with Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major Opus 9, Number 2. We’re probably going to have a dinner party and I’ll play it for some guests to give me some performance-like event to shoot for. I’m excited about this because it’s been a very long time since I’ve legitimately played any piano. I have a complete set of the International Library of Music piano compositions, and I have a whole binder full of things I performed when I was taking lessons…. so I’m good on  the music front.

2. I’ve dusted off my Fin-ally project and I’m going to try and get that rolling again. I have a few goals here: get better at Python, be less dumb about relational database schema, get even more familiar with Mercurial, and finally make something my wife and I can use to track our ridiculous video game/clothing/makeup/comic book habits. By the way, not all of those items apply to both members of the Sisco household. For example, Rachel doesn’t read comic books.

My friend Tim has been kind enough to point out all the things I’m doing wrong/poorly with my current database schema, so I’m going to start with that.  The Fin-ally Google Code page is active again, too – with a brand spanking new Mercurial repo and some updated tooling documentation.

By the way – conversion with complete history from Subversion to Mercurial was much simpler than originally anticipated but the online buzz and commentary about this process was fairly complicated for some reason. At the end of the day, all you have to do is enable the Mercurial “convert” command in your .hgrc file and then execute the convert command as such:

hg convert <SVN repo path> <local directory>

3. I have contracted my wife to create a new Realvelour.com banner image/colorscheme because I don’t really like the default one any more. That should be done sometime in mid to late August – so look out for that update!

Fin!