Sometimes, the tiniest of things can bring a programmer to her knees. The most infamous of such tiny things is a single missing semicolon to indicate the end of a statement. Leave a single semicolon out of your code (depending on the language) and the entire affair will not work. And you're left to hunt for the missing semicolon in what could be hundreds, maybe thousands of lines of code.
In my case, my undoing came at the hands of the following escape character: \\s.
I wanted to add an improvement to my Hidden Edit extension (the improvement is in place so you'll want to update it if you're using it) to remove the line break tags that precede the "edited on" line. In the original version of my extension, I left those line breaks in, leaving some whitespace below every edited comment. It was ugly. The edit wasn't completely "hidden" as the extension claimed it would be, because the extra whitespace at the end of a comment was a dead giveaway.
I had thought that to put into my regular expression <br>\\n<br>\\n would remedy the problem. But after figuratively walking into a wall over and over again for at least an hour, I discovered that, apparently, there's some kind of weird non-printing character between the <br> and the newline character.
I tried, for a long time, to figure out how to match that character in the regular expression. I even identified the Unicode encoding of that character. But this information proved useless in the end.
If I had only known that the weird non-printing character falls under the category of "any Unicode whitespace character", i.e. a character matched by \\s, I would not have lost an hour or more of my life. I only discovered this particular escape character when I happened to glance at my JavaScript: The Definitive Guide in my desperation. And that is the story of how \\s brought me to my knees.
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I listened yesterday (or so) to Fleetwood Mac's double-album Tusk. I like it so much that I'm going to write another boring song-by-song commentary of it. Even worse with this being a DOUBLE album. I encourage you to look it over even if you've never heard the album, because I don't think you really need to have heard the album for it to be interesting. In addition to some information about ME, there are some potentially fascinating facts in there, and I tried to write it well. (If for nothing else, read it for my "oh snap"-worthy comment about Sisters of the Moon.)
I really love Tusk, so much. Weird and experimental, and none the worse for it. The weirdness is what makes it so great, really. Lindsey may have kind of wrested control from his bandmates to make it, but in trying to go in absolutely the opposite direction from Rumours, he really did an outstanding job and again it shows his amazing talent. Not being a music reviewer (I honestly know laughably little about music and therefore have no place making judgements in a realm I know next to nothing about) that's about all I can think to say on the album as a whole.
Actually something that really gets me hot about Tusk is Stevie's voice on it. Their tour for Rumours was crazy, which isn't surprising, because they were going crazy with their incredible, unexpected success and the millions of dollars being introduced to their pockets. And Stevie basically PUNISHED her voice on that tour, so much so that her voice literally dropped an octave. People may joke about Stevie's voice but, well, she's put it through a lot. It later dropped another octave thanks to her heavy smoking (which she quit doing some years ago, and has hopefully not started back up since). Her voice was sounding pretty frazzled for a while there, especially on what she considers her worst solo album, Street Angel, released in '94 during what were perhaps some of the worst days of her infamous post-cocaine addiction to tranquilizers. But in recent years she's been treating her voice a lot better and she's trained it back to sounding pretty good (or at least I think so).
But her voice on Tusk is, to me, the most beautiful it ever sounded. There's something about the sound of it, the way she uses it, and the emotion she puts behind it... for me it's gripping. Not to mention really sexy. Damn. It has this wounded fragileness to it while still sounding strong, powerful. When I typed this, the song I was listening to was Lindsey singing, but at that moment, just thinking about Stevie's voice was giving me simultaneous butterflies and chills.
But anyway, here you go, my take on Tusk, song-by-song.
In my case, my undoing came at the hands of the following escape character: \\s.
I wanted to add an improvement to my Hidden Edit extension (the improvement is in place so you'll want to update it if you're using it) to remove the line break tags that precede the "edited on" line. In the original version of my extension, I left those line breaks in, leaving some whitespace below every edited comment. It was ugly. The edit wasn't completely "hidden" as the extension claimed it would be, because the extra whitespace at the end of a comment was a dead giveaway.
I had thought that to put into my regular expression <br>\\n<br>\\n would remedy the problem. But after figuratively walking into a wall over and over again for at least an hour, I discovered that, apparently, there's some kind of weird non-printing character between the <br> and the newline character.
I tried, for a long time, to figure out how to match that character in the regular expression. I even identified the Unicode encoding of that character. But this information proved useless in the end.
If I had only known that the weird non-printing character falls under the category of "any Unicode whitespace character", i.e. a character matched by \\s, I would not have lost an hour or more of my life. I only discovered this particular escape character when I happened to glance at my JavaScript: The Definitive Guide in my desperation. And that is the story of how \\s brought me to my knees.
========
I listened yesterday (or so) to Fleetwood Mac's double-album Tusk. I like it so much that I'm going to write another boring song-by-song commentary of it. Even worse with this being a DOUBLE album. I encourage you to look it over even if you've never heard the album, because I don't think you really need to have heard the album for it to be interesting. In addition to some information about ME, there are some potentially fascinating facts in there, and I tried to write it well. (If for nothing else, read it for my "oh snap"-worthy comment about Sisters of the Moon.)
I really love Tusk, so much. Weird and experimental, and none the worse for it. The weirdness is what makes it so great, really. Lindsey may have kind of wrested control from his bandmates to make it, but in trying to go in absolutely the opposite direction from Rumours, he really did an outstanding job and again it shows his amazing talent. Not being a music reviewer (I honestly know laughably little about music and therefore have no place making judgements in a realm I know next to nothing about) that's about all I can think to say on the album as a whole.
Actually something that really gets me hot about Tusk is Stevie's voice on it. Their tour for Rumours was crazy, which isn't surprising, because they were going crazy with their incredible, unexpected success and the millions of dollars being introduced to their pockets. And Stevie basically PUNISHED her voice on that tour, so much so that her voice literally dropped an octave. People may joke about Stevie's voice but, well, she's put it through a lot. It later dropped another octave thanks to her heavy smoking (which she quit doing some years ago, and has hopefully not started back up since). Her voice was sounding pretty frazzled for a while there, especially on what she considers her worst solo album, Street Angel, released in '94 during what were perhaps some of the worst days of her infamous post-cocaine addiction to tranquilizers. But in recent years she's been treating her voice a lot better and she's trained it back to sounding pretty good (or at least I think so).
But her voice on Tusk is, to me, the most beautiful it ever sounded. There's something about the sound of it, the way she uses it, and the emotion she puts behind it... for me it's gripping. Not to mention really sexy. Damn. It has this wounded fragileness to it while still sounding strong, powerful. When I typed this, the song I was listening to was Lindsey singing, but at that moment, just thinking about Stevie's voice was giving me simultaneous butterflies and chills.
But anyway, here you go, my take on Tusk, song-by-song.
It's supposed to, though, some of the lyrics are taken directly from the other song. This "version" is not cruel and angry like its twin. Although there are some lines about a woman (who we can safely assume is Stevie), he's not bashing her as much as in the other song, and overall it's a bit more introspective on Lindsey's part. "The dream of a lifetime/the year gone mad", stuff like that.
I enjoyed writing this. I think I may do it yet again for other Fleetwood Mac/Stevie solo albums. And perhaps other albums by other bands, though I think it's safe to say that although it had been at least a year or two since I actually listened to them, and although I've gotten into other bands since then (not many), I think Fleetwood Mac/Stevie is the act I know the most about and about which I have the most to say. But I may do a little bit of commentary on Sophie 
VIEW 17 of 17 COMMENTS
snottlebocket:
you are the semicolon to my statement baby 
snottlebocket:
this makes me wish i knew any girls who would actually understand that.