Self-Indulgent Monster

Well, no, that’s my wife using her Sidekick. She’s really more of an equal partner than a sidekick. Here she is, six months pregnant, supposedly relaxing on vacation, but instead she’s trying her best to understand my fascination with gadgets and technology. Normally, she’d have a $20 phone with a single “call” button on it. No bells, whistles, menus, dials, or memory. Instead, she’s got this gadget with a full qwerty keyboard that does e-mail, 3 flavors of instant messaging, SMS, browsing… the works. Why? Because she’s trying to “get” me and the things I do in my career. What an amazing woman — carrying my baby and my phone.

The funny thing about this picture is that she tries to pretend to be a Luddite. She’s always telling me to get off the computer or yelling at me for playing with my phone. She wouldn’t even have a Twitter or Facebook account if I hadn’t walked her through the process step-by-step. But then she’s the one who starts to sweat when she goes too long without TV or a phone. She insisted I take a break from technology on this vacation, and here she is getting frustrated because she has no signal in the middle of a gorgeous park.

Well, you gotta love her. She brings some balance to my life. Otherwise, I probably would never step away from my computer. Now, at least, I watch a little bit of TV, too.

This is much like the tool I made for the People Networks editors in the last post, but only one random hottie out of all the Greatest Hits. I definitely have some ideas for improving speed for this one, too. I also need to tweak a bit to make all images fit within a maximum width.

With the sunset of pixnay.com, the profiles showing up here are the only remaining feed items cached on the site. No new profiles will show up, and I’ll probably need to take down what’s here. Sorry guys, but it just doesn’t make sense to display a feed from a dead site.

Grab another random hottie.

The Pixnay.com feed has been removed.

Grab another.

Here’s a quick script I whipped up for the People Networks editorial staff. It uses the feed that Pixnay provides, but organizes and pretties them up for a quick scan of the latest big winners. The editors were using this for a while to scan for members to use in promotions, People Connection photo galleries, then later for Bebo photo galleries.

Here’s a feed of Pixnay’s hottest women by age group and scoring period. Click any image to jump to a profile and play. Warning!!! Slow!!! Up to 2520 images will load. I apparently still need to fine tune my feed parser, since there are a couple of glitches in the output.

Update: This was killing my server, so I improved it, then eventually just took it out. But you can still view the Pixnay Greatest Hits one at a time, randomly, in my next post here.

< ?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.silkworms.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=imageblock.External&g2_blocks=randomImage&g2_show=fullSize&g2_maxSize=520&g2_linkTarget=_blank');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
echo curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

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