/**
* Function to maximize the text size based on a given text string and width
*
* returns the calculated text size
*/
function SetMaxFontSize($text, $maxWidth, $step = 1, $fontMin = 1) {

	// prevent stupidity
	if ($maxWidth < 0) {
		$maxWidth = 1;
	}

	if ($step < 0) {
		$step = 1;
	}

	if ($fontMin < 0) {
		$fontMin = 1;
	}

	$fontSize = $fontMin;
	$text_width = 1;
	while($text_width < $maxWidth) {

		$this->SetFontSize($fontSize);
		$text_width=$this->GetStringWidth($text);
		$fontSize += $step;  // larger step is faster, smaller step is more accurate
	}

	$fontSize -= ($step * 2); // this is the biggest you can get without going over
	$this->SetFontSize($fontSize);

	return $fontSize;
}

Here’s how I’m calling it in my PDF-generating script.

	// you have to set the font first (at least once someplace in the script), or else FPDF throws an error
	$pdf->SetFont($fontName,'',1);
	// make the text as big as possible without overflowing
	$pdf->SetMaxFontSize($text, BOX_WIDTH, 2, 1);

The third and fourth parameters in the function are the step size (larger step is faster, smaller step is more accurate) and the beginning font size value. They’re both optional.

Hope this helps someone!

Am I the only one who’s not really impressed with it?

Don’t get me wrong — the technology rocks; it’s an easy way to get non-standard, licensed web fonts into your site. No, my beef is with the fonts themselves.

To my non-typographically-expert eye, half of them are indistinguishable from current web-safe fonts (e.g. Nobile and Vollkorn). Why bother making the user download a font that looks like something that they’ve already got on their system?

Another 40% look like crap, at least on my PC. They have way too many jagged edges to be used on a live web site. (I’ve looked at the page in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari — they’re all about the same.)

The remaining couple of fonts are pretty good: I’ve already used Lobster as a choice for creating customized Match The Memory games, and I predict that we’ll see a lot of blogs with headlines set in Yanone Kaffeesatz and Reenie Beanie soon.

I realize that the existence of a project like this would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when type foundries would have completely freaked out at the thought of their cash-cow fonts being accessible from a web site. I understand that these fonts are probably just the beginning, that they’re working on adding more and better typefaces as they bring on board more type designers.

But I say, “Okay first try, but hurry it up already!” The selection of fonts that’s online through GFD right now just isn’t that impressive.

But a trip to Draper on Saturday afternoon changed all that.  We planned to hit IKEA for some free kids’ food, then stop by Karl Malone Toyota so that Sarah could check out the MPV, get a feel for what it’s really like inside and out.   After we exploited Swedish hospitality and looked for a dresser, we headed to the car dealership.  The kid who helped us was really green on the job, but Audrey and Nathan had fun riding around the lot on a golf cart with us.

We saw the one MPV that they had, and it was really dirty.  In addition to general grubbiness and crumbs, there were also fast food drink cups and other large garbage all over the place.  The sales-boy said they’d just gotten it in a couple of days ago and hadn’t had a chance to get it cleaned yet, but I was astounded that they’d show it to a potential customer in that state.  It really turned us off the MPV in general, as well as the dealership itself.

Then we saw the Toyota Sienna.   This particular one was a gold 2000 model (which had the older boxier body style) with an upgraded LXE package (including leather seats and a 6-disc CD changer) and an after-market DVD player with a huge 15.4-inch screen.  We drove it around the parking lot, didn’t even take it out on the road, and thought it was nice.

By this time, the rookie salesman had been joined by a middle-aged guy named Mike.  He could tell that the we liked the Sienna, and asked how much we were looking to spend.  We insisted that we weren’t ready to buy yet, we just wanted to check out the cars and be on our way.  But Mike asked if he could get us a really good price, could we make a deal today?

We should have just walked away, but instead we followed him inside to check out the pricing.  Their starting price was $11,000, but upon my insistence, Mike looked up the Kelley Blue Book price, which came back as $9,900.  (In “Excellent” condition, which this van certainly was not.  There were a few interior scuff marks and missing pieces, paint all over one of the rear captain’s chairs, minor things that you’d expect in a 10-year-old car, but which prevented it from being completely perfect.)  Sarah was still unsure about driving the van because it was larger than she wanted, and she really didn’t want to get a car that didn’t have remote keyless entry like her current car.  It also had 120,000 miles on the odometer.  (The salesmen refuted this by saying it was a Toyota, so it would run “forever”.)  We talked Mike down to $7,900 based on all of those things, which he called a “smokin’ price”.  (When I tried to go lower than that, he said that would be a “smokin’ illegal substances price”.  Ha. ha. ha.  Not.)

We continued doubting ourselves, and saying that we weren’t ready to buy, and Mike kept saying they really wanted to make a deal and trying to guilt us by saying, “You told me if we could get you a good price, we could make a deal today.”  Really high pressure.  Again, we should have walked, but we kept listening to Mike’s pitch.  Finally we told ourselves that we were eventually going to buy a minivan anyway, and it would probably be a Sienna, and we’d probably end up spending more than that on it anyway, so why not.

We told Mike yes, we had a deal, and waited while they drew up the paperwork and had the car detailed.  Meanwhile we called our parents to tell them the news, and while everyone seemed excited about the car, Sarah’s mom Judy reminded us to get the CarFax report on the vehicle to make sure that it hadn’t been really messed up in an accident sometime.  When they did give us the report, we saw that it had been in a crash last fall.  Again, we could have walked away at this point, not having signed anything yet, but we didn’t.

Once we finally got through all the financial details and signed the contract, we brought the kids out to the parking lot and got ready to take it home — to drive it out of the parking lot for the first time.  By this time, it was after 9:00 pm and we were all very ready to get going.  But when we fired it up, we found that the DVD player had a disc stuck in it — Snow Buddies.  No matter what the salesmen did, they couldn’t get that disc out.  It also took us several minutes to get the sound to work — syncing the FM transmitter in the DVD player with the radio in the car.  I was tired, and we just got out of there.  But when I was driving home (listening to a really inane movie that the kids were enjoying — “The dog can talk!” exclaimed Nathan), I noticed that accelerating the car or turning on the blinker made a weird hum in the audio from the DVD player, like it was tied into the electrical system but whoever installed it didn’t do a very good job.

We got home and fell into bed, and the next day started looking into what we’d really gotten ourselves into.  We looked up similar Siennas at other Utah dealers and found one with 40,000 fewer miles that listed for the same $7,900 that we’d settled on with Mike (meaning that was the other guys’ starting point, and that we’d be able to talk them down substantially).  Mike had claimed that we were practically stealing the car from them, but there were plenty of other similar cars in that price range.

Sarah had concerns about the 120-point inspection that had supposedly been done on the car.  One of the tires was really low, and if their service department couldn’t fill up a tire, how could we trust that they’d done the inspection right too?  By this time we were feeling some serious buyers’ remorse.  I even felt that if they would take back the car and get us out of the deal, I wanted them to do so.  (But we looked it up — there’s not a law in Utah that says they have to do that.)

Sarah had to go back up to the dealership on Monday to drop off our down payment, and she addressed some of our concerns with Mike and the service team.  Their techs opened up the DVD player and got the cursed disc out, and the buzzing in the audio went away.  No, they would not take back the car — we were stuck with it.

In the end, we got a pretty good car at a pretty good price.  We shouldn’t have gone into the dealership unprepared like we were, as opposed to when we bought the Matrix — we knew exactly what we wanted, we knew how much it should cost us, and we were ready to buy before we walked in the door.  We shouldn’t have bought this car without thinking it over more, sleeping on the decision and praying about it, but the deal turned out all right.  Sarah still wants to have her remote control door-opener, but she found a place in Provo that will sell us the kit and install it for us for $150 instead of the $475 that the dealership quoted us.

Now we’re trying to sell my 1996 Mazda 626, which has been a very good car for our family since I got it 7 1/2 years ago.  If anyone’s interested in getting a reliable car for less than a thousand dollars, let me know.  [Update 2 hours later:  Sarah just sold the car to the first person who called about it, so if you wanted it, you're out of luck!]

I have a reward for all those who’ve made it this far in the Sienna Saga — a bit of education and a bit of entertainment.

The education: understand how car dealerships work and how you can be an informed buyer (unlike us in this case).  The whole time we were at the dealership, I was reminded of an article I’d once read on Edmunds.com, where the writer goes undercover as a car salesman, then writes about all the nasty tricks and backroom dealings that go on to maximize their profits and commissions at the expense of the customer.  The whole article is very eye-opening, but I’d especially recommend the last section where he talks about specific car-buying recommendations.  I re-read it after we bought the Sienna, and I wished I had done so before we went to the dealership, especially the guidelines about shopping around.  Live and learn.

The entertainment: an amusing video about the Sienna.  It’s still a great car, even if we didn’t have the great buying experience at the dealership that we would have liked.

But since I’ve started using WordPress in other applications, I knew that I wanted to use it for my blog here too. There are just too many cool features that have already been developed by the WP community that I would never get around to coding on my own.  So I’ve moved all of the posts from my old blog to a WordPress install, and I’m in the process of bringing over the old comments too.  (One casualty was the blog entries in Spanish. I hardly ever bothered to write in it anyway.  Lo siento, amigos venezolanos y mexicanos.)

–

Did I trick you into thinking this would be a motivational post about following the Gospel of Jesus Christ?  Sorry.  I like being clever with words.

You get to play with the four main Simpsons family members, who each have their own fun special super-hero abilities: Bart becomes Bart-Man with a grappling hook, glider cape and slingshot; Lisa has mystical Buddhist powers that include levitating large objects and striking enemies down with lightning; Homer can turn into a ball and roll around slamming into stuff; and Marge has a megaphone with the ability to make ordinary citizens become her very own mob, ready to do her bidding.

This is a very large game, bigger than any I’ve played before on the Wii. The premise is basically, “Let’s take every video game cliche that’s ever been done to death, and have the Simpsons lampoon it while they’re going through it.”   So you get clever parodies of all kinds of games, from Donkey Kong to EverQuest to Medal of Honor.

Throughout the game, the designers make good use of the whole world of the show and its huge supporting cast. There are references to all eras of the show’s run, but with the addition of clever lines and animation created specifically for the game. I liked hearing the real Simpsons character voices spout random lines related to what I was doing in the game, whether that was a main character like Homer or Bart, or a bad guy like Comic Book Guy or Moe. (Oddly, I saw Kelsey Grammar’s name in the credits, but Sideshow Bob was nowhere to be found. Maybe his part got cut from the Wii version.)

The game is pretty tricky for a casual player like myself, and I relied heavily on walkthroughs on the Internet to get through it. (Something that the Simpsons make fun of in the game itself.) That dependence kind of bit me in the butt on the level where the Simpsons meet their creator, since the version I was playing was completely different from anything I found online (even for walkthroughs that claimed to be for the Wii).

I also thought that the Lard Lad level was too hard — I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to beat that one. My favorite level was “Grand Theft Scratchy” where Marge’s mob has to clean up a slum to make things look nice.

Overall, I had a lot of fun playing the Simpsons Game while we rented it, and I could have spent a lot more time picking up all of the collectibles in each level (i.e. Homer has to find 5 Duff bottle caps in a specific level to earn the Duff Beer that goes along with the level). If I had a lot more time to play, I would consider buying this game to keep going at it. As it is though, my family comes first, and they didn’t really like the game — it was way too hard for all of them, including Sarah. So it was a good one-time rental for me, but not a buy. My final score for The Simpsons Game : 9/10

We got it home and played for a while with the Wii Balance Board, which was a nice little addition.   Sarah would finish a course, then I’d try to do the same one in a better time than she did, and vice versa.   (This was the only pseudo-multiplayer action we found, even though the game claims that you can “Play with three other people on the same map as you race to the finish line”.)

The next day, I spent several hours going through the story levels and eventually beating the game on “easy”.   (You have to use the Wiimote for these levels.)   There really isn’t much story to speak of, something about an ant and a Golden Sunflower… it’s really just window-dressing on the concept of rolling the marble through the obstacle course.   There were several different worlds to explore, each with a few minor variations in graphics but nothing hugely different in terms of gameplay. There were easy levels and more challenging levels, a little something for every kind of player.

Sarah only played a couple of times, and over the five days that we had the rental, I didn’t even start it up on two of them.   Overall, this was a good rent, but it’s not a game that I would really consider renting a second time or purchasing.   I played what I needed to play, I mostly enjoyed myself while I was doing it, and I’m done.

My final score for Marble Saga Kororinpa : 6/10

The kids liked watching me play, and Audrey was even able to do some of the games in multi-player mode.   High scores give you tickets, which you use to purchase new games to play.   My first run-through the game seemed rather repetitive and took less than an hour, but then I realized that there were more mini-games to unlock and have fun with.

The Toy Story characters and storylines were a fun addition that made the game more interesting than a similar carnival game that we rented last year. The one annoyance I had with the characters was that some of the voices weren’t done by the original actors — Tom Hanks has better stuff to do than record lines for some Wii game? Ridiculous!

The games are grouped by theme, like Bo Peep’s nature tent and Woody’s western area.   My favorites were Buzz Lightyear’s space place and the Army guys’ military zone.

Overall, this was a good rental, but I don’t think it’s one that we’ll be adding to our Wii collection.   My final score for Toy Story Mania : 7/10

I kept getting conflicting information about whether that was even possible and how to go about it.   I also got the following error several times: Model “Foo” is not associated with model “order” — it thought I was trying to sub-contain “order” into Foo->Bar.   I eventually figured out that I had one too many parenthesis on the contain conditions (i.e. which Bars to get).   This is what I ended up with that worked correctly.

$this->Foo->contain(array(
	'Bar' => array(
		'conditions' => 'Bar.publish_date <= "'.date("Y-m-d H:i:s",time()).'"', // only get the bars that have been published
		'order' => 'Bar.publish_date asc' // sort bars by pubdate
	),
));
$foo = $this->Foo->findbyId($foo_id); // or whatever other kind of find you need

Hope this helps someone in the future!

I mention this because, this morning, I am about to start a job with my fourth company since Audrey was born four years ago.   (Heck, since Nathan was born two years ago!)   The number is even higher if you count changes in management and/or name (i.e. Clear Channel sold ABC 4 to Newport Television; Rocky Mountain Printing was bought out by Printech Plus and became RM Plus, both of which are now being sold to FC Printing / Advantage Mailing; and E-Harbor changed its name to Marketecture.)

My new position is doing web development (surprise!) for a company called Sound Concepts.   I have worked with them as one of RMP’s biggest print-on-demand clients and I always thought it would be cool to work with them full-time instead.   Just days after I got laid off from E-Harbor, my contact with Sound Concepts approached me about the possibility of coming to work for them, and I jumped at the chance.   My salary will be better than at any of the other places I’ve worked, and there’s the added bonus of having their headquarters literally a mile and a half from our house here in American Fork.

I hope that I’ll have a little more longevity with Sound Concepts than I have had with other jobs recently.   Maybe Baby #3 (due in September, if you missed the announcement!) will be able to look back at his/her life and say, “My dad has only had one job since I was born.”   Wish me luck!

Our Wii rental for this month is Lego Rock Band, a fun entry in the never-ending parade of Guitar Hero and Rock Band clones.   This one had enough humor and cool songs to differentiate it from many of those games, but in the end, it’s still pretty derivative.

The story mode was pretty cool.   I liked that there were challenges that were related to the specific songs we were playing.   (For example, in the haunted house, we had to get rid of a bunch of ghosts by playing, what else, “Ghostbusters.”)   In the three days that we had the game, I got about halfway through the story, so I didn’t get to buy a jet or go into space. The challenges and rewards were spaced very nicely to keep me coming back to get the next cool thing, whether that’s a new vehicle or new place to play or new song.

I can play the guitar all day long, but Sarah got tired of that quickly.   She did enjoy singing along with my playing, something she hasn’t been able to do on our Guitar Hero III.   Some of the songs are a little odd for singing though — you hear them on the radio and they’re cool, but you don’t really think about the lyrics.   When it comes time for you to actually sing these words, you’re thinking to yourself, “What a weird song!”

I think this is a rent rather than a buy, since my brother already owns it (and a million others like it).   If we ever get a hankering for plastic-guitar fun that isn’t satisfied by GH3, we can go play Rock Band with him.

My final score for Lego Rock Band: 7/10