Website of Jason Connell

Precursory Maintenance

2009-04-11T09:55:31Z

Precursory Maintenance: Yelling expletives at a problem before going about fixing it. It usually makes the problem 80% easier to fix.

PSN Account

2008-10-18T04:00:28Z

I've had the PS3 for a year now, I finally got around to signing up on the website.

One from the archives

2008-10-01T23:00:51Z

Ever notice this phenomenon:
Friday mornings usually, there will be a clear passing lane on the left side, and yet there will be a line of around 10 cars driving 50 mph in the right lane??

I call this phenomenon : Hung Over

Originally Added 7/11/2003 9:22:54 AM (I still have that database and website code... I can import the database soon for browsing)

Another gem, posted July 7th, 2004. It was about the dude at the bank being way too friendly and always wanting to talk to me. This was Bank of America (or Fleet, at the time) in Wayne, PA.

"He then has to shake your hand on the way out, saying "Thanks for stopping in!" Like, I'm gonna keep the check in my pocket and never deposit it."

God this is brilliant:
Recursion
I recurse like a sailor
Added 12/29/2004 5:18:32 PM

The Best Diet Ever

2008-09-02T22:00:56Z

Not. For the past 3 months I've been on somewhat of a diet, but for the past 3 weeks, I really started pursuing "thinness". My goal is to be at 170, or lose 30 pounds, by the time I reach the age of 30. I think it can be done, and I've put a lot of money into making sure I can do it. First I bought a blender. The BlendTec Total Blender. It was expensive but it really works like all those videos of that guy blending iPhones say it works. I bought a digital scale. I bought a lot of fruits which I'll do every two or so weeks. And I bought a lot of granola, which will get me through the morning and will be half of my dinner every day. So far I've seen a steady decrease in my weight on my new scale. Here's my plan:

Eat not a lot of calories a day. A granola bar, a salad for lunch, a granola bar and a small dinner every day. Those granola bars are 150 calories and they fill me up for a good four hours.

Work out a few times a day. Since I still smoke (another part of my weight loss plan), I can't do 30 or 40 pushup or pullup sets every two hours. In fact, I can still only do about 4 pullups in one set! I'm getting a lot stronger though. 10 pushups right now is my max. Take the dog for a brisk walk and do 10 pushups right afterwards. Then watch tv for a bit, go upstairs and do my normal amount of pullups.

From Thursday of last week up til Monday morning, I was losing a pound a day! Then Labor Day happened and I gained 2 pounds! I had a hamburger, a hot dog, some corn, and lots of chips and salsa with cream cheese. But after a short nap (it was the most I've eaten in 3 weeks, I was tired!), I did 10 pushups. Then got my hair cut.

If you want to try this diet out, it's open source! Eat a Kashi GoLean bar with coffee, half and half, and sugar (I won't make any sacrifices regarding coffee!). This is also delicious since coffee and chocolate are brilliant together. For lunch get a small chicken Caesar salad (don't skimp! Dressing, cheese, bread crumbs). For dinner, have a turkey sandwich on one slice of 12 grain bread cut in half and another Kashi. Basically, I could give a flying f%#@ what food tastes like, or how varied my meals are. Really, I don't care. They're just something to get us through the day, not part of the day.

Workout schedule: When I wake up, I do my pullups and get a shower and go to work. At work, run up stairs and walk briskly to go pick up your salad. Usually I get a diet iced tea with lunch. When I get home from work I spread out the workout like I mentioned above. Walk in the door, pullups. Rest for 20-30, pushups. Before bed I do 10 upbeat pushups and my regular pullups (I try not to mention more than once how many of these I can do right now :) It's embarrassing), although I might do less because I just did 10 exhausting pushups. And of course take the dog for a brisk walk. It's good to get a fast dog.

That's it! Before I really started this, I was at 210 in mid June before Jamaica. Thursday when I got the scale I weighed in at 198. Monday morning I was at 193.5. Then I gained 2 pounds at the barbecue! Oh well, as long as I stick to the workout.

The real method behind my madness is to not have to work out too briskly and let my lack of previous binge eating (I would never eat between meals or eat fast food or anything really junky, but I would eat a lot...) replaced by very light but satisfying eating lose the pounds for me. It's really a mix of the two. Since I smoke I wouldn't have the breath right now to work out enough to lose the weight if I kept on my normal eating habits. That's really all I have been trying to say :) Enjoy.

Fantasy Football Team 2008

2008-08-21T23:00:24Z

Here's the rundown

Maurice Jones-Drew RB JAC
Wes Welker WR NE
Brandon Jacobs RB NYG
Jay Cutler QB DEN
Eagles DEF PHI
Anthony Gonzalez WR IND
Todd Heap TE BAL
Jon Kitna QB DET
Niel Rackers K ARI
Isaac Bruce WR SF
Chester Taylor RB MIN
Owen Daniels TE HOU
Eddie Royal WR DEN
Leon Washington RB NYJ
Raiders DEF OAK
John Kasay K CAR

I had 8th pick, I kept Eagles D so it moved up from 6th to 5th round. If I keep them again, it's a 1st round. The draft was a good time as usual, just very frustrating to sit there and wait for your pick to come up. Picking is fun though, and the last few rounds fly, even though I still did pretty good in those last four to five rounds. I'm happy with my draft. Barring injuries, suspensions, and under-performance, it should represent a good chunk of my team at the end of the season.

Jamaica Trip: The Flights

2008-07-16T20:05:12Z

It may have been a previously little known fact, but I am terrified of flying. The last time I was on a plane was when I was three and I thought it was a ride. Because you usually have no concept of the world when you're little. I thought maybe Disney World was at the airport and we just flew around for a little bit and landed, then went into the park. I remember about 5 seconds of this flight, leaning over my brother Scott and looking down out the window.

When I knew I was flying to Jamaica, I was nervous for a little while. About two weeks before, I talked to my Mom who works for our doctor, about possibly getting something to settle my nerves for the flight. We made an appointment and the doctor gave me some Xanax (can't wait to see what kind of traffic I get with that name on here). I told him I needed just 4, with his description of "take 1-2 every four hours". He gave me 10. I left for the airport from my parents' house (my Dad drove), at about 4 in the morning and got there at about 4:30.

There was a short line, and Mike and Amanda, Amanda, Becky, and parents and other family were in line ahead of some other people. I said hi and went to the back. I showed my passport and driver's license and got my ticket and headed to security.

This is where I totally screwed up! I had worn shorts with zippers in them, I had my phone and ipod in my pockets, my wallet has metal on it, I have a chain on my neck. Short version, I had to get swept with the wand and padded down while Mike waited for me, laughing at me. Secondly, they took my iPod and phone and put them in what I can only describe as a dog water bowl. After I was done getting swept, I asked the guy where my iPod and phone were, and he said "go check with your friend, he may have picked it up". Nope, I told him. I was like WTF. When I asked Mike about it he was like WTF. But he had it up at the desk. Thank God! I couldn't deal without music and just Xanax. They did spot one threat on me and he had to deal with it. At the last minute of packing, I was frantically going around throwing stuff in my carry-on that I might need, including a big squeeze bottle of sun tan lotion. I read the warnings that the travel agent sent, including "no liquids over 3oz" but totally forgot. He said "you're not allowed to have this", I said "take it". Get me the f#@$ out of here!

Waiting at the gate was fun. I had popped a Xanax about 30 minutes before, waiting til I got on the plane to take my second one. It's like a drunk feeling. At this point I had put the pills in my carry-on... whoops. This turned out fine though. As the plane boarded, I was just trying to do what the people in front of me were doing since it was my first time. I didn't want to hold anyone up as I got to my seat, so I just threw my bag, and the pills, in the overhead, and sat down to get out of the way as quickly as possible. I was on the window seat, which was great for my claustrophobia! It's mild. I sat and waited for takeoff.

Taking off went without a hitch. As the plane was getting ready to leave, I put my headphones and some Bob Marley on, the stewardess came by and said no. Damn. Takeoff with no tunes. Brutal. So I just got my camera ready and snapped some shots and a video of takeoff. At about 7:40 in the morning, this was an awesome sight! The only thing that really worried me was we were heading up and suddenly went DOWN a few feet. My throat quickly made some room for my heart and stomach and anything else that wanted to go up there. I was a little nervous. Hurry up and hit 37,000 feet!

I managed to fall asleep for a little while after we passed Virginia. The whole flight was estimated to take 3 hours and 5 minutes. This was after about 45 minutes or so. I forget at this point, plus I was on Xanax :) We hit some very gentle turbulence, where the seatbelt signs would turn on. It really didn't bother me. I fell asleep kinda looking out the window at the land. When I woke up probably 2 hours later, we were over WATER! I was like WHERE THE F#@% AM I?!?! I got nervous for a little while, and the Xanax had worn off. The captain came on shortly after and said we had just passed over Cuba, and the next land we'll see is Jamaica! Sweet!

Landing was freaking awesome. We were flying South, obviously, and the airport at Montego Bay faces west to east. We took this huge turn left and that is just about the freakiest thing ever. It just kept turning. Please stop turning or we'll be upside down soon. It finally flattened out and we went down for a very smooth landing, which I also video taped. Very smooth and the captain certainly knows what he is doing.

The way back to Philadelphia was a blur. Our flight had been delayed 2.5 hours. During this time, I popped a Xanax, spent $15 at the bar, popped another one, ended up sitting next to a very nice Jamaican girl going to Philly, I fell asleep leaning against the seat in front of me listening to classical music, woke up with my legs very tense and not feeling good at all. I woke up because the girl in front of me moved her seat up... WTF I'm sleeping here! Since my legs were so tense, I bit half a pill and tried to relax. The 2.5 pills did the trick. Along with the drinks. I got to my parents house and fell asleep in a few minutes. Next up, Jamaica Mon!

Jamaica Trip: The food

2008-07-06T15:00:01Z

At Sandals Grande Ocho Rios, you are treated to a number of different restaurants with different specialties. They are open at slightly different times for all those important meals of the day. The food, with a few notable exceptions from people who didn't like their FREE desserts, was exceptional. (Technically it's not free, but you know what I mean).

My roommate and I were early risers, waking up most days by 7. I woke up for an hour usually at around 4am every day. I would wake up, look at the clock, and it was 4am. It was odd, but really the only time I could connect to the internet with no problems. Breakfast wouldn't start until 7:30, so of course by this point we're starving, because to get a timely dinner in on the previous night, you'd have get there 15 minutes before the restaurant you wanted to go to opened. Breakfast at 7:30 was less of an issue. We'd get there and there'd be maybe 10-20 people total, and it's a buffet, so you just grab a plate and in about 5 minutes you have a delicious meal, coffee, and water sitting in front of you.

The buffet breakfast was pretty amazing. While Ryan, my roommate, would get lots of fruit and two omelettes, I would just get everything that interested me. Chicken for breakfast? Why not. They always had bacon, sausage, some form of potato (hash browns, home fries, etc), and two domes at the buffet would be different every day. I always got pineapple and another fruit. The water there was delicious and ice cold. And the first day I asked the waiter if the coffee they were serving us was "Blue Mountain" and he said "Yeah Mon!" I think they just cater to your wishes and tell you what you want to hear. It was delicious though. We'd then go back to the room for an hour or so then meet up with everyone at the pool or beach for another hour or two. Then came lunch.

Lunch was pretty good most times. We would still mostly go to the buffet since it was quick and pretty good. I forget if we tried a non-buffet lunch. I'm sure we did, but I forget at this point. Lunch is when the buffet had a ton of different salads, like tuna salad, chicken Caesar, different pasta salads. One day they had Jerk Chicken which is a specialty dish of Jamaica. I was talking to Casper, the wedding photographer, and I just said "This jerk chicken and pork that they have in the resort is bullshit, huh?" He was like "Yah Mon". You could pick up real jerk at the various jerk centres and stores that they have along the highway between the airport and the resort. I didn't try any real jerk. That's a shame. After lunch we'd go to the pool again and start drinking usually. The pool is where it's at.

Thankfully for the casual dress code at the resort, you would just have to pack a pair of shorts if you didn't want to go back to your room to change for dinner. And it was amazing. Amazingly slow. If you went to a sit down and served dinner there, you could expect to just sit there for two hours and talk to everyone. Courses would come out every 30 minutes or so, and you'd eat it in about 2 minutes. This is what the appetizers looked like. Although delicious, you can tell they're very very small. Which is fine, because 3 - 4 small courses add up to a decent meal. The place that picture was taken was called the Reef Terrace or Terrace Reef. Something like that. I got Jerk Beef. It was delicious and the plate was square. They are all artistic about their meals, something you would see in places where a single meal is like $30 and up. And you're sitting there in your shorts, sandals and a t-shirt most times. It's really relaxing.

One time, we ate so early and were drinking so much that we were starved. We swam in the pool and hot tub all night, and at 9:30 or so, a stand near the pool opened up. It had nachos, pizza, and other delicious hand foods. I got nachos with sour cream, guacamole, jalapeno peppers, and salsa. Two plates. I was hungry.

The one place we ate it was required to dress up. And by dress up, I mean no shorts. Of course, I didn't pack anything in terms of nice clothes except my one red golf shirt, so I would have been SOL if it weren't for the tuxedo rentals! I used the white pants, my red golf shirt, and my sneakers, and passed the excruciating judgment that was placed on me as I walked in the place. It was a 100% improvisation and it worked pretty damn well. When Zatko gets back, he'll put up some decent pictures of it. He had also not packed any pants and was forced down the same road I was. Apparently Amanda had him pack half a suitcase of towels and towels were provided at every pool and in your shower, it turned out. That was one thing that I forgot and it turned out OK.

That about does it for the food. Obviously, there's not a lot of adjectives to use when describing food. I forget what I ate specifically but can tell you I was never disappointed. It was good. That's about all I can say, you have to go there yourselves :)

And so my photography hobby begins...

2008-07-06T01:55:34Z

While in Jamaica, I noticed how much fun Mike and Jared were having with their DSLR cameras, and I wanted to get in on the action. I will be keeping a log here for just that purpose, and uploading the photos I take to Flickr and displaying them here with the details of the photo. I've been reading up on some things, but also bought a book to help me out. I got a Nikon D40 with the default load-out, an 8GB memory card, a bag for it, and the book which is on exposure. I'll probably read around the web as well and maybe try out some trial versions of professional photo software like Aperture from Apple or Lightroom from Adobe. Jared uses Lightroom, Mike uses iPhoto which is a basic photo application. Aperture is cheaper than Lightroom but only available on a Mac which is perfect since I use one :) But I'll try them out. It should be fun. I've been into photography for a while but never really fed my interests.

I did have a camera in 4th or 5th grade, though. A really old one. I went to Notre Dame and took a photo of the gold dome they have and it turned out really good, like a post card. They also had these giant sand dunes that I took a few pictures of. We had the big red van back then. That was fun.

So I'm giving it another whirl. We'll see how it turns out. Hopefully better than my drawing experiment a year or so ago :)

Back from Jamaica!

2008-07-03T20:25:49Z

I'll be making a series of posts, but the first one is about scuba diving. Enjoy!

I was a bit nervous about it. Heading to the pool for the training, I was like I'm gonna drown. But they make you swim 8 laps around the pool without touching the side or bottom, and that pretty much got rid of the nervous feeling and made me exhausted instead :) Then you watch a video that teaches you some of the things that you will need to do. After that they suit you up, put you in the pool, then you try breathing underwater. That was crazy!

Of course, there are about 10 tricks that you need to know to stay alive while 40 feet below. The guy, Pablo, a Jamaican, taught you three of the ones that we'll need for a short, 30 minute excursion underwater. They were how to clear your mask if it gets filled with water, how to put your mouth piece back in if it gets knocked out or you lose it, and the last was how to equalize your pressure in your ears so you can go down 40 feet and feel perfectly comfortable. Then in the pool, they teach you this and Pablo watches each person as they do it at least twice perfectly. After that, Pablo made us swim from the shallow end to the deep end in a circle as long as we wanted, and practice equalizing our pressure. I swam in the pool for about 10-15 minutes, practicing these different techniques.

When we went on the dive, I was nervous again. They put an anchor in the water, you grab onto the rope and head down slowly, equalizing as you go, every 3-4 feet or so. It was very slow. You get down there, then go into what's called a "scuba chain", locking arms with everyone. This was uncomfortable since you're just kneeing there waiting for everyone, and when you're not moving, the bubbles you blow out just go in your face and you can't see anything. Then we went off to the reefs. So many colorful fishes and the water was beautiful. The one guy was taking pictures, and we managed to get one with the three of us that went down there. Overall it was an incredible time and I can't wait to do it again :D

I'll be posting that picture as soon as I get it from Zatko. In the meantime, check out the images as they get uploaded from the people that went. We have a Flikr group called "Zatko Wedding".

Heading to Jamaica!

2008-06-24T19:00:54Z

Zatko, Amanda, Jared, Kris, and some other dudes and gals, including parents, are going down to Jamaica tomorrow at 7:25 AM! We'll be arriving somewhere where a bus can take us to Sandals at Ocho Rios by bus presumably. We'll probably be at our hotel by 1pm hopefully. I have to be at the airport at about 4:30am officially, but might be getting there by 5am. There will be an butt ass ton of pictures when I get back. Probably on my facebook profile and I'll link them here. I'm long overdue for a vacation. Peace.

Eclipse bombed on me

2008-06-20T00:00:43Z

Thankfully, I was able to find the answer to my problem in German! Here is the forum I read. I found a lot of English speaking topics with the error message I was getting, but they were having slightly different problems. Basically, I renamed the file in the ".safetable" folder, reimported my project, and everything's fine. Weird. Good thing, too, I've been getting tons of comment spam on my pictures because I haven't implemented my anti-spam mechanism on there. I will employ the same method I use here.

Spore Creature Creator!!

2008-06-17T19:00:42Z

I currently have the free trial but I created some awesome creatures already. I don't know what this thing is but they showed some html to paste into my website, so I'm doing it.

Visit Spore.com

I'll have some pictures up soon. Can't wait for this game :)

Age verification is dumb

2008-06-17T00:10:45Z

How many times do you go to watch a video on a site that's not porn and it asks you for your date of birth? There's plenty of videos out there that do that... video games are the ones that annoy me the most. Especially since the sites that I watch videos on, I am registered for and my date of birth is stored with my profile. Sometimes it's just a 3 box combo of month, day and year where you have to type, other times it's 3 drop down boxes where what is automatically selected is January 1, 2004. Other times it's 3 drop downs for month day and year but no default date is selected. On GameTrailers.com, these are the least annoying. They don't have verification code built in so you can just press "OK" and it'll let you watch the video without selecting anything. On the ones with the 3 drop downs where January 1 2004 is automatically selected, I just drop the year down to 1980 or earlier, even though 1990 will suffice now (jeez, people born in 1980 are already 28). The only ones that get my real date of birth are the text box variations where it's easy to type. Seriously, the drop downs gotta go.

These are so dumb and annoying. But I guess you gotta be responsible. Annoyingly responsible to those who could watch R rated movies for 12 years now. To those who can buy anything where an age restriction is in place. To those of us who could almost run for president of the USA (35 is the minimum if I recall correctly). The only thing I can't buy, age-wise, is a house in my parents' community because you have to be 55 or older.

But I guess you gotta be responsible. You definitely want to make it a good warning that you should be of X years (13 for PG-13, 17 for R, etc) before you watch the movie, play the game, drink the beer, etc. But of those, I think it's only actually illegal to drink if you're not old enough. Still, those sites should save your birthday as a cookie or something so you don't have to enter it 120 times. That can't be used to track anything that they wouldn't already know or could even get any information from... how many people were born on March 23, 1979? Well, I guess, how many people were born on March 23, 1979 in the IP range that I use? Probably far less. But still. Hold onto my date of birth or make it so if I just press "OK" I get to watch it anyway :) I like that bug.

New Server!

2008-06-12T19:00:19Z

This new server is about 4 times more powerful than my previous server, but for the same price. I will now definitely be putting lots of new stuff up on here to get the full use out of it. I have my subversion server running off of it, and again, an open invitation to anyone who wants all the free awesome code they can handle :P

Be wary of hosting companies installing MySQL for you. They might install the latest version of it (5.x), but in my.cnf specify that it should use the old password hashing method, the insecure one used before MySQL 4.1. This old method only generates a hash 16 bytes long, whereas the new one is 41 bytes (with a leading *). I did notice it but didn't think anything of it until I tried to login to my website here to post a new item. I had just finished getting all of my passwords for my websites input too. This required looking in the config file that I read to connect to the database to get the current password out, then running "grant all privileges on database.* to 'user'@'localhost' identified by 'password'" for each one. Ridiculous. I think I got them all right on the second go, I didn't feel like reading in the config files again. This site works, and so does Jim and Kate's site (which is awful and is long overdue for an upgrade). Vacre Tei works too. Stringed.org might work but not all of the name servers are pointed correctly yet, so I can't see it. It might work for you, it worked at the office.

Also, if you get "Can't connect to MySQL" and it's running, chances are it isn't allowing networking. I just commented out those two lines (old-passwords and skip-networking) and if I got all the passwords right, everything should work fine. Overall, the transition from the old server went without a hitch, but was a pain in the ass. Here's the breakdown:

Zip up the websites on May 24 and promise not to upload any new files because then they'd also have to be pushed over.

Zip up the databases and promise not to make any new posts or anything.

Zip up tomcat since I don't want to have to reconfigure it

Download them (the size of jasontconnell.com gzipped up is currently over 600 MB)

Upload everything to the new server.

Extract everything where it belongs.

Update the MySQL passwords

Set JAVA_HOME

Hope it works

There were some other steps in there and perhaps at a later date I will be willing to tell them, but that's the gist of it. Enjoy!

Fixed my event class

2008-06-07T12:00:23Z

Here's the updated code which should work all the time.

var EventList = new Array();
var g_eventIndex = 0;

function Event(obj, type){
	if (obj._eventIndex){
		if (EventList[obj._eventIndex][type]) return;
	}
	else
		obj._eventIndex = g_eventIndex++;
	
	if (typeof(EventList[obj._eventIndex]) == "undefined")
		EventList[obj._eventIndex] = new Array();
	
	EventList[obj._eventIndex][type] = true;
	this.handlers = new Array();
	this.type = type;
	this.obj = obj;
	this.obj._event = new Array();
	this.obj._event[type] = this;
	
	if (typeof(this.obj.addCustomEvent) != "function"){
		this.obj.addCustomEvent = function(type, fn){
			if (typeof(fn) == "function"){
				this._event[type].handlers.push(fn);
				return true;
			}
			return false;
		}
	}
	
	this.raise = function(sender, args){
		for(var i = 0; i < this.handlers.length; i++){
			this.handlers[i](sender, args);
		}
	}
}

// addEvent(obj, "event", func);


function addEvent(obj, evType, fn, useCapture){
  if (typeof(obj._eventIndex) == "number" && EventList[obj._eventIndex][evType] && obj.addCustomEvent){
	var r = obj.addCustomEvent(evType, fn);
	return r;
  }
  else if (obj.addEventListener){
    obj.addEventListener(evType, fn, useCapture);
    return true;
  } else if (obj.attachEvent){
    var r = obj.attachEvent("on"+evType, fn);
    return r;
  } else {
    alert("Handler could not be attached");
  }
}

Now it will handle events of the same name in different objects. I just didn't want to have to come up with different names for events in different objects that did nearly the exact same thing.

I was reading a bit on the internets about how people do this type of thing. I read a post on Yahoo! that said the YUI event handling mechanism is "only 2KB". This is 55 lines with liberal white spacing. The thing about computer science is that sure, there might be something out there that does what you need it to do, and you can get it for free, but it's gonna do tons of other stuff that you really don't need. Not yet anyway. Same goes for software in general. If you need a simple photo editor, you're not gonna pay $600 for Photoshop when iPhoto will do (part of a $79 package with tons of other neat software, which also is overkill if you don't need that other stuff). So, if I need something very specialized, small, and easy to use, I'll write it. If you need this as well, feel free to use mine directly or for knowledge. It's not big or special, but will be used as part of a big and special project :) That will come soon.

More awesome free code!

2008-05-29T23:00:56Z

I just have to ask that you send $5 to me via email. Thanks.

It turns out that I needed a way to raise events in my pager from the last post. Like when the page changed, I wanted to display "Page 3 of 5 (9 elements)" (for my test size of 2 elements per page (not likely to happen)). But also, for future reference, if say, to save on load times, only load X pages, we'll call it 5, at a time, so 10 elements, so then when they got to page 4 or 5, the non-pager code can load 10 more elements asynchronously, and call refresh on the pager to update the page count etc. Here's the event object:

var EventList = new Array();

function Event(obj, type){
	if (EventList[type]) return;
	EventList[type] = true;
	this.handlers = new Array();
	this.type = type;
	this.obj = obj;
	this.obj._event = new Array();
	this.obj._event[type] = this;
	
	if (typeof(this.obj.addCustomEvent) != "function"){
		this.obj.addCustomEvent = function(type, fn){
			if (typeof(fn) == "function"){
				this._event[type].handlers.push(fn);
				return true;
			}
			return false;
		}
	}
	
	this.raise = function(sender, args){
		for(var i = 0; i < this.handlers.length; i++){
			this.handlers[i](sender, args);
		}
	}
}

// addEvent(obj, "event", func);


function addEvent(obj, evType, fn, useCapture){
  if (EventList[evType] && obj.addCustomEvent){
	var r = obj.addCustomEvent(evType, fn);
        return r;
  }
  else if (obj.addEventListener){
    obj.addEventListener(evType, fn, useCapture);
    return true;
  } else if (obj.attachEvent){
    var r = obj.attachEvent("on"+evType, fn);
    return r;
  } else {
    alert("Handler could not be attached");
  }
}

Yup, it only handles on event per object right now. That's easily remedied if I use something other than "obj._event". Like this.obj._event = new Array(); this.obj._event[type] = this;. Will do that soon. UPDATE: Fixed that, and used the EventList array to keep track of custom events, and modified the addEvent function to use that and see if it's a custom event first. This way, if I add custom events to a "div" html element, it will work, whereas before it would have evaluated one of the other ones (attachEvent or addEventListener) before it would have added the event where I wanted it. UPDATE 2: Damn, that still has a shortcoming. To be fixed later, like Tuesday. I'm booked this weekend. If you can point out the shortcoming, I'll give YOU $5 :P A hint would be that you don't have to worry about "click" events, only custom events... but damn near everything has a "click" event.

Notice that I modified the "addEvent" function that I shamelessly stole from QuirksMode.org to check if the object that we're adding the event to has an "addCustomEvent" function on it. If it does, call it, which is added to the object when it creates a new event. This is how the pager uses it:

function Pager(){
	this.init = function(divid){
...
		this.textspan = null;
		
		this.onPageChanged = new Event(this, "pageChanged");
		addEvent(this, "pageChanged", this.internalOnPageChanged);
		this.initialized = true;
	}
...

	this.pageChanged = function(pageNumber){
		//  change page functionality here...
		
		this.onPageChanged.raise(this, { page : this.currentPage, pages: this.pageCount, total: this.elementCount});
	}

...

	this.internalOnPageChanged = function(pager, args){
		if (pager.textspan){
			clearChildren(pager.textspan);
			pager.textspan.appendChild(document.createTextNode("Page " + (args.page+1) + " of " + args.pages + " (" + args.total + " elements)"));
		}
	}

I removed unnecessary code but you get the idea. As always, I found code online to do it, but it was too complicated (KISS = Keep it simple stupid). If I have to add to it I will but it doesn't have to solve all of my problems right now. In my html page that is apart from the pager, I add another handler for "pageChanged" to just test it out. Integrating it seamlessly with the "addEvent" function is crucial, so now I just use the same exact syntax for every event, whether it's custom or not. So this works perfectly:

		addEvent(window, "load", loaded);
		var pager = new Pager();
		

		
		function loaded(){
			pager.init("pager");
			addEvent(pager, "pageChanged", pagerPageChanged);
			loadNotes();
		}
		
		function pagerPageChanged(p, args){
			var i = args.page;
			//alert("page changed : " + args.page + " of " + args.pages + " pages, " + args.total + " elements in all");
		}

That's from "index.html" because I don't need any kind of server side scripting language with my new Ajax framework. And it's loading data, saving data, deleting data, even will begin to authenticate users soon, on the server. This keeps the custom code on the server down to 0 lines. Yup, no lines of Java pertaining to a "Notes" application (basic and without user authentication or authorization). I like writing Java but this will make things quicker :) When I incorporate YUI! into it, it'll even be beautiful. Ahh, until that day.

Sunburned and brain fried

2008-05-28T01:00:51Z

I wrote a javascript pager tonight. It'll be in use on my new Javascript front end, hopefully coming here soon. It's all AJAX-y. I like it. Here's the code:

function Pager(){
	this.init = function(divid){
		this.div = document.getElementById(divid);
		this.divToPage = document.getElementById(this.div.getAttribute("divtopage"));
		this.pageSize = parseInt(this.div.getAttribute("pageSize"));
		this.elementCount = this.divToPage.childNodes.length;
		this.currentPage = (params(divid+"_page") != null ? parseInt(params(divid+"_page")) : 0);
		this.pageCount = this.elementCount == 0 ? 0 : Math.ceil(this.pageSize / this.elementCount);
		this.initialized = true;
	}
	
	this.refresh = function(){
		if (this.initialized){
			this.elementCount = this.divToPage.childNodes.length;
			this.pageCount = this.pageSize == 0 ? 20 : Math.ceil(this.elementCount/this.pageSize);
			if (this.elementCount < this.pageSize){
				this.div.style.display = "none";
			}
			else {
				this.div.style.display = "block";
				clearChildren(this.div);
				this.showPager();
			}
		}
	}
	
	this.showPager = function(){
		var firstlink = new PagerLink("<<< first", this, function() { this.pageChanged(0); });
		var nextlink = new PagerLink("next >>", this, function() { this.pageChanged(this.pager.currentPage+1); }) ;
		var prevlink = new PagerLink("<< prev", this, function() { this.pageChanged(this.pager.currentPage-1); }) ;
		var lastlink = new PagerLink("last >>>", this, function() { this.pageChanged(this.pager.pageCount); });
				
		var pagelinks = Array();
		for (var i = 0; i < this.pageCount; i++){
			var pl = new PagerLink("" + (i+1), this, function(){ this.pageChanged(this.pageIndex); });
			pl.setPageIndex(i);
			pagelinks.push(pl);
		}
		
		if (this.pageCount > 10) this.div.appendChild(firstlink.link);
		
		this.div.appendChild(prevlink.link);
		for (var i = 0; i < pagelinks.length; i++){
			this.div.appendChild(pagelinks[i].link);
		}
		this.div.appendChild(nextlink.link);
		
		if (this.pageCount > 10) this.div.appendChild(lastlink.link);
		
		this.pageChanged(this.currentPage);
	}
	
	this.pageChanged = function(pageNumber){
		if (pageNumber >= this.pageCount) pageNumber = this.pageCount-1;
		if (pageNumber < 0) pageNumber = 0;
		
		var pageRange = [pageNumber*this.pageSize, (pageNumber+1)*this.pageSize];
		for (var i = 0; i < this.elementCount; i++){
			if (i >= pageRange[0] && i < pageRange[1]){
				this.divToPage.childNodes[i].style.display = "block";
			}
			else this.divToPage.childNodes[i].style.display = "none";
		}
		this.currentPage = pageNumber;
	}
}

function PagerLink(text, pager, clickEvent){
	this.link = getLink(text, clickEvent);
	this.pager = pager;
	this.text = text;
	this.link.pager = pager;
	this.link.pageIndex = -1; // for page number links
	
	this.link.pageChanged = function(pageNumber){
		this.pager.pageChanged(pageNumber);
	}
	
	this.setPageIndex = function(i){
		this.link.pageIndex = i;
	}


}

It's used like this:

		addEvent(window, "load", loaded);
		var pager = new Pager();
		
		function loaded(){
			pager.init("pager");
                }

You initialize the pager with the id of the element you want to hold the pager links.

<div id="pager" divtopage="existingNotes" pageSize="2">
	
	</div>

Then when you add or remove elements from the element you are paging (I hard-coded a div), you refresh the pager, in case the number of pages has changed:

	function saveNote(){
			var note = getNote();
			saveObject(note, noteSaved);
		}

function noteSaved(note){
			appendNote(note);
			clearForm();
			
			pager.refresh();
		}
		function deleteNote(note){
			if (confirm("Are you sure you want to delete the note '" + note.Title + "'?")){
				deleteObject(note, noteDeleted);
				clearForm();
			}
		}
		function noteDeleted(note){
			removeNote(note.NoteId);
			
			pager.refresh();
		}

The code I'm writing uses AJAX, JSON and regular old javascript to talk to my ORM. So I can call stuff like "deleteObject" and it'll create the XML (parsing XML on the server is easier than parsing JSON) to make the call, call it, and get back a response. It's super simplistic right now, there's nothing returned except for some easy things.

The pager uses some common functions that have to be linked somewhere (which were either shamelessly stolen from quirksmode.org or I wrote them myself)

Array.prototype.clear = function(){
	while (this.length >= 1){
		this.shift();
	}
}

function addEvent(obj, evType, fn, useCapture){
  if (obj.addEventListener){
    obj.addEventListener(evType, fn, useCapture);
    return true;
  } else if (obj.attachEvent){
    var r = obj.attachEvent("on"+evType, fn);
    return r;
  } else {
    alert("Handler could not be attached");
  }
}

function clearChildren(node){
	while ( node.childNodes.length >= 1 )
    {
        node.removeChild( node.firstChild );       
    }
}

function params(name){
	var qs = document.location.search;
	if (qs && qs.length > 1){
		var start = qs.indexOf(name);
		var end = start != -1 ? (qs.indexOf("&", start) != -1 ? qs.indexOf("&", start) : qs.length) : -1;
		if (start != -1 && end != -1){
			var value = unescape(qs.substring(start+1+name.length, end));
			return value;
		}
		else return null;
	}
	else return null;
	
}

function getLink(text, clickEvent){
	var jsl = document.createElement("a");
	jsl.setAttribute("href", "javascript:void(0)");
	if (text) jsl.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text));
	if (clickEvent) addEvent(jsl, "click", clickEvent);
	return jsl;
}

Subversion server up

2008-05-25T02:00:44Z

If you want access, let me know, I'll create you an account and let you access all the code on all of my websites! There's lots of neat stuff up there.

Subversion is a code versioning system that is heavily used by developers on teams who want to keep their source code in a single place, let people edit or view it, and keep versions of it. Branches are often made when projects are going to be upgraded from, for example, 1.0 to 2.0. The 1.0 branch is kept so that any bugs that come up for 1.0 users can be fixed without them having to upgrade to 2.0. Patching is also very easy with a good versioning system. There are many reasons to use them, and hardly any not to.

But why am I using one? Frankly because I had to set up a Subversion server at work (svn for short), so I knew somewhat how to do it. Also, because it's a good backup system. Like, hmm, this code used to work, I wonder what I did. Then I can just look back at the history of a file and see what changed, and revert back to what worked. Also, for backup, if I ever want to work on it anywhere, I can, because it's on my server that's on the internet 24/7 with the same IP address. Also if something were to happen to my computer and I haven't backed up recently, I'm screwed.

I've set up SVN about 5 times now, so I'm pretty much an expert. One thing that I am not an expert at is the authz file. The other stuff is simple though. Here's a rundown:

yum install subversion (or apt-get install subversion or emerge subversion) (or download it and run the exe or dmg on Windows or Mac)

svnadmin create /var/data/svndata

edit the configuration
vi /var/data/svndata/conf/svnserve.conf

edit the passwd file (add your user)
echo "jason = jason123" > /var/data/svndata/conf/passwd

(I actually haven't tested that exact syntax... it may put it on the same line as a commented line, which wouldn't work)

svnserve -d -r /var/data/svndata

This will create the repository and start the server daemon.

Then you can test it out.

svn mkdir svn://localhost/dev

It might ask you for a username and password then hopefully spit out the message

Committed Revision 1.

Then you can use your favorite code editor plugin for svn and start sharing! Simple as that.

More dog sickness

2008-05-20T20:00:01Z

Kodie had diarrhea so I took her to the vet. She seems fine now. I can hear her from here banging on her bowl for food and she didn't eat when she was sick. That's her way of telling me something's not right. And banging on her bowl is her way of telling me "I'm effing hungry you ignorant clod!"

She got a haircut while she was there too. They gave her the "lion cut". She's had it before, and I wanted to take a picture of her when she had it because it's F#@$#@ing hilarious! Not just how she looks, but because her hair is so short, she freaks out because she's not used to feeling her tail on her back. Her tail curls up. I have to remember to take a picture.

Today I figured out Logic Express

2008-05-17T15:15:21Z

And to some degree, Mac OS X. I record with an audio interface (Yamaha GO46) through FireWire. This required no setup in a Mac at first. I upgraded to Leopard and probably got an update to Logic Express 8 that I just said, OK install it. This caused some problems.

One of the next times I went to record, I got no sound on monitoring. It would record, but I couldn't record another track with no feedback. So my next few recorded songs were single tracks. Until I really wanted to record more than one track, this was fine. I then had to check the internets for an answer.

Some forums were like "Create an aggregate device in the Audio MIDI Setup tool." I was like, yeah. I tried this but had no idea what the implications were. I found an Apple article that basically solved all of my problems. So I set up my aggregate device, set my audio interface as the first device and the 'clock', and set my built-in output as the second device. Worked like a champ... until I tried to "bounce" the songs I was recording.

The way I had it set up, inputs 1-4 and outputs 1-6 were the audio interface, and outputs 7-8 were built in output. So, I could hear everything as I was recording, but now I couldn't get any sound when I bounced to mp3. This is because the default bounce method bounces outputs 1-2. I had to bounce 7-8, my built-in outputs. Anyway, I have to go babysit. Here's the songs I recorded recently.

Jamaica, I'm excited for my trip.
Improva. I was calling this one "Improv in A" but shortened it.

The check is in the mail

2008-05-11T23:00:45Z

I always feel like I accomplished something when I pay bills, so I have to write a post about it. But this time is extra special.

One check, which happened to be almost precisely covered by a combination of two checks I received recently, including my tax refund and a refund for homeowners insurance, with $8 remaining after the fact, will guarantee a great time for me and Zatko and a bunch of our friends, Zatko's fiancee Amanda, her friends, some family, and loads of unsuspecting resort occupants, as we embark on our trip to Jamaica!!! Zatko and Amanda are getting married down there.

It's at the end of June, we'll be departing Philadelphia on my Dad's birthday, June 25th, and heading back on July 2nd. I figure I'll take off the 3rd as well and be back in work that following Monday, since July 4th falls on a Friday. Woohoo. I'll use jet lag as an excuse even though Jamaica is in the same time zone. Not much to say about it now, though. I will have TONS of pictures and stories when we get back. I really can't wait.

I also mailed in some checks for things like mortgage and the oil bill, and mailed in my latest netflix movies, two John Grisham movies and a documentary. Good stuff. I have to get to mailing them in quicker so I can actually not waste all that money.

The postage price goes up tomorrow so I just put two $0.41 stamps on each envelope. The trip payment and the mortgage are close to due so I don't want them coming back to me.

Mother's Day was nice, even though the Flyers lost again. Not sure how the Phillies did but we watched for a while. It was 4-3 Giants last I saw. Then the golfer we were cheering for (Goydos) lost to Sergio Garcia in the playoff. I had to have some happy news to write about.

On the eve of Philadelphia vs. Pittsburgh

2008-05-09T01:00:44Z

I watch this movie:

It's a good one. It ends with "Flyers win the Stanley Cup!! Flyers win the Stanley Cup!!" But it has a lot of great Philly sports moments, like the 93 NL East Championship, Eagle's in '04 beating the Falcons to go to the Super Bowl, Dr. J's tomahawk dunk or whatever. It was made before the Phils won the NL East last year. Then it has a lot of bad moments... Lindros going down to Scott Stevens, Mitch Williams and the Phils losing the World Series in '93, shots of McNabb (although some good ones when he was athletic), and a bunch of other crap. But it ends on the best moments, and it gets me hyped up for the game. So much that it's 1am and I can't fall asleep.

The Flyers look great so far, and I hope they can keep it up.

GTA IV is soulless fun

2008-05-06T11:00:57Z

GTA IV is all over the news because you can:

Drive Drunk
Shoot Cops
Score with Women
Go to strip clubs
Cause complete chaos and have the cops forget about you a few minutes later
Of course, steal cars
And, hit monstrous jumps

There are a bunch of groups that are going after the game, like MADD, who has turned from an anti drunk-driving group into a prohibitionist group trying to get alcohol banned again. Good luck with that.

There's also other people addressing the violence.

Any of those things I mentioned above, you would not be able to survive in real life. It's what makes it a game. In other games I've also ran through burning buildings and lived to tell about it, or have taken thousands of bullets and all I have to do is find cover and I'm fine. One time in GTA IV I drove my car off of a 80 foot drop straight down. The car flipped numerous times and wound up hitting a pole straight on. I didn't even lose any health.

People need to lighten up, but damn that game's fun. And I wasn't driving like a maniac after I played for a few hours. I just drive the way I normally do. In fact, I have a difficult time "escaping" reality in that I don't just go running over pedestrians or shooting people. I try to find one car and stick with it as long as I can. I don't even like to get into accidents where all I do is side swipe someone. Sometimes you can't help it though and it will turn out to be some hilarious death of some poor sucker who just happened to be between your car and some pole or wall at the most inopportune of times.

It is soulless fun and it takes some really screwed up minds to come away affected by it, more than just dreaming about it. I've played Railroads! for hours, which is the least violent game ever, and I've dreamed about it. If you have no imagination, then you obviously can't think this kind of stuff up to keep your idle mind entertained. If you have video games, you don't need an imagination to have fun (unless they're the really old games that expected you to still use your imagination). However, if you look at games as *practice*, then you're screwed up.

Tonight I called God an asshole

2008-04-21T00:40:50Z

That's right. My brother Scott and I were talking about the shit our family's been through, and he said "When I get to heaven there's gonna be some words between God and me." Then he did a pretend dialogue, and said "You know what, God..." and I interjected, and said "You're an asshole". HA. It was funny.

A crooked habit of credit card companies

2008-04-21T00:00:06Z

I have been paying my credit cards religiously. Like 200-300 a month, just to get the balance down. I went from around $2,000 a year ago to finally getting it nearly paid off this year. I have a recurring $100 charge going to the one credit card for my dedicated server on which this website is hosted (among others). However, I missed a payment last month. For which I was charged $40! WTF. That's all I got to say.

However, my student loan, which is still asking for $10,000, doesn't mind this practice. If I pay $200, I don't have to pay next month, since it is about $100 a month (less than that, but no less than $90). In fact, it warns me that I'm paying more than the required minimum amount. Credit cards got to shape up. WTF.

What kind of world do we live in when...

2008-04-16T23:25:14Z

You can get Short Circuit for $4.99?!? That's AWESOME! Of course, knowing my luck in movies, it'll be on all next month on HBO or something.

Also, Amazon might finally not lose lots of money on my Amazon Prime account. I just ordered tons of stuff... glasses for the kitchen since they all seemed to have disappeared recently... movies... silverware since most of them have also disappeared... napkin holder. It said it's all shipping in one package. ?? Yeah, we'll see. One shipment from one warehouse, definitely, but one package would be hard to believe.

I watched the debate in Philadelphia tonight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I thought I liked Obama better even though almost everyone who they interviewed after the debate said Clinton did better. They had a focus group of college students, and talked to them after the debate, and they said Hillary did better. I would have to disagree that she did better. But I can't say any of them did bad. I just felt like Barack was more comfortable up there, actually making eye contact with the person he was talking with. Debates are funny though. The first person who talks loses. If it's a debate between two people of the same party, you'll hear "Well, I agree with most of the points blah makes, but here's where we can approve on that." Basically, whoever gets in the last word. They'll never 100% agree. You'll never hear Obama say "Wow, I think Hillary has a great way to fix the blah problem in this country and I have nothing to add." You'll never hear short answers. You'll never hear an answer directly related to the question asked. I just laugh. I'm voting for Nader anyway...

Trying some new stuff

2008-04-15T16:00:38Z

Ramones (1st LP) [Remaster] - CD
The Ramones

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols - CD
The Sex Pistols

American Beauty [Digipak] - CD
Grateful Dead

Dire Straits (1st LP) [Remaster] - CD
Dire Straits

Giant Steps - CD
John Coltrane

Beautiful Ballads & Love Songs - CD
Miles Davis

16 Biggest Hits - CD
Roy Orbison

JR.com had a $7 cd sale. I looked through everything, but there was some other good stuff that I decided not to get.

Is it hypocritical of me?

2008-04-10T22:00:43Z

I am a software developer, but I will not buy most of the software that I use. Don't worry, I don't steal it. But I find that there's tons of software out there that's "free" but also good. I'm not talking about "Lite" versions of software, or "Shareware" trial versions that you can hack to never have to register / buy... I'm talking about FREE SOFTWARE that the authors wrote out of the kindness of their heart (and a huge curiosity and desperate search for knowledge) that they put on websites somewhere, put the code out there, and said "Here. Enjoy."

I know I couldn't have a job right now if all software was free. But custom development is another story. If someone needs an online scheduling system, then I (we) will write them one. I'm sure they could find one online and tweak it, but that's usually a shot in the dark. There's also somewhat of a difference between working out of curiosity and working to put food on the table. I've done an online scheduling system, it wouldn't be fun or illuminating since I've already done it.

The thing with software is that if you're making it for fun or out of curiosity, the cost of reproducing it today is so cheap. The same thing everyone's figuring out about music and movies. You produce it once, and everyone in the world can have a copy if you can get it to them. It's kind of crappy that we all still have to pay $0.99 per song at most places we can get digital music. Some software, however, can cost millions of dollars to produce, and these should charge hefty sums. But if you're just doing it out of curiosity and to learn something new, putting it on the web, even just code in html or something, gives that knowledge to everyone who happens to come across it. Then they can be inspired to try something new with it, and if they learn something out of it, they would share it with you since you sparked their interest and gave them that initial knowledge to light that fire under their bums.

Software today is generally in good shape this way. There are sites dedicated to sharing code (sourceforge.net to name one). There are sites set up to provide legal assistance to those looking to open source their code in a way that if someone uses it, they can't sue them if it goes bad. These licenses generally also state that if the next person makes changes, (s)he's free to either send the changes back to the original author to improve that software, or put his or her changes up on their own website and pass it on to people under the same license (free and open source). You don't see this type of stuff in business, only in SCIENCE. Science is the pursuit of knowledge. That's what it's all about baby.

New Patio and Kodie

2008-04-06T08:00:30Z

My brothers and I have been working on the new patio for my house. Yesterday we laid the brick. I have video of the process. Contrary to the video, I wasn't standing around the whole time :P I actually moved about 350 bricks from the sidewalk to the patio, at about 25 bricks per barrel load, probably 50 pounds a pop. Here's the Kodie head tilt video:

My living room's a mess, and I'm not cleaning it until later today since we're not done for the weekend yet.

And here's the patio video so far. Next we'll be working on the lawn, putting in trees and a rock garden, and getting rid of all the grass and replacing it with mulch or rock or something.

I have to say, thank you to my brothers, Pat, Bean, and Scott, for their help / doing it all :)

I also have to say, I am glad that Google is around to upload my videos to for free and embed them in my website. And to Apple for iMovie '08, and Sony for the 30 GB HDD on my camera, and USB hookup, so I can record crap without worrying about tape and digitizing. Thanks.

Today I got Vista

2008-04-03T19:00:16Z

I was at the "Heroes Happen Here" launch event for Visual Studio 2008 and a bunch of other software that still lags behind open source offerings. I knew we were getting free software (Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows 2008) but I didn't know we were getting Vista. It was a pleasant surprise because now when games start coming out that only work on Vista, I'm ready and don't have to spend $400. And that's all I have to say about that. Thanks Microsoft!

It was generally a good time. Four of us from work. We got there and registered with 40 minutes left to go until the first event, so we headed out to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch. It's across the street from where the event was hosted, at 12th and Market (Marriot). Mark lost his sunglasses so went back to get them while we went to the market. We ended up going to Famous Frank's near the Beer Garden, and then ate at the Beer Garden. You have to buy beer in order to eat there, which we did. Mark doesn't drink, so I said if he gets accosted about having to buy beer, I suggested he just buy one, put it in front of him, and I'll drink it. He didn't, but a couple got thrown out before he got there because they weren't boozin.

We left and went to the first show, which we were late for. It was my friend and former coworker, Danilo Diaz, giving the first developer track talk. After that, we got our free software, checked in with the second talk, and left after 10 minutes because it was general crap.

During the first talk, it was stuff that all of us have done already. The only interesting feature about 2008 and .NET 3.5 is Lambda expressions (which I'm not even really impressed with), and they weren't even covered. Way to go Dan :P We were talking through a lot of it. When he showed the Javascript debugger in Visual Studio 2008, everyone cheered, and I said, kinda loud, "Firebug!!". Some dudes behind me laughed. I was texting a coworker stuck back at the office, checking if I could get internet on my iPod, and just generally being a jackass. I was there for the free shit. We learned nothing new. Everything that was covered, one of the four of us have already done, and it's just like "Oh, yeah, look at this code in source safe, and here's some other hints about it." I don't know one person who (besides my Java friends :P) hasn't done ASP.NET AJAX and used UpdatePanels. It certainly didn't need all that time to go over it.

Oh well, Danilo works at Microsoft now, and I've never been impressed with their code examples or presentations, so I guess that just comes with the territory. Do they say "Keep it short and don't cover interesting stuff" ? I don't know, there might have been people there that haven't seen that stuff. Who knows. Maybe I'm just at a very technologically advanced company. That could very well be it, but I can't understand, then, why I've been doing PHP for the past two months :)

Other than that it was a good time. It helps when you're like best friends with the people you work with.

Thanks for Vista, suckers.

The Internet: So good, yet so so bad

2008-04-02T01:00:44Z

Oh internets, how I hate thee.

Some days I would just be better off without it. With all the blatant lies and corruption going on, I would love to just stay away. I should. Case in point, OOXML standardization in ISO. Just google "OOXML ISO". Also, I can't stand whiny HD-DVD fans complaining about Blu-ray winning the HD format war. More on that later. Some sites I hate include ZDNet... that's about it.

However, there's some oh so goodness to it. Like xkcd. I'm not gonna link or mention my favorite sites, but some are Amazon, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and iTunes science podcast directory.

Ok, onto my ZDNet-hate-HD-DVD-Blu-ray-hate rant. So, this dude on ZDNet works at Microsoft and posts to that site. Is complaining about Blu-ray today, or whenever, that "the more expensive format won". But then he goes on to call blu-ray "more future proof". I've caught this dude on so many contradictions like this, it just makes me angry. Of course, he never responds to my posts, and he keeps making asinine statements and I keep responding and he keeps ignoring, it's just a frustrating mess. Of course, "more future proof" means less expensive in the long run. It just points to the quality of worker they have there working at Microsoft.

Of course, the non-Microsoft world has its shining stars too. Like the writers of PHP. It's ridiculous. For instance, today I wanted to find the first paragraph in an HTML string, and I'm fairly familiar with regular expressions, so I checked the syntax on how to match a string to a regex and get the matches (groups in any other regular expression library terminology) out of it. This is easy: /<p>(.*?)</p>/g. But not in PHP.


$matches = array();
preg_match_all("/<p>(.*?)</p>/", $htmlString, $matches);

OK, looks easy. $matches will then have an array of matches. But that's where it gets tricky. The fourth parameter is optional, and it's called "flags". Read the "flags" part here.

PREG_PATTERN_ORDER - Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of full pattern matches, $matches[1] is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on.

PREG_SET_ORDER - Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of first set of matches, $matches[1] is an array of second set of matches, and so on.

PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE - If this flag is passed, for every occurring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the value of matches in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset into subject at offset 1.

Yes, the "matches" array will be different for every flag. In Java, this looks (half-hearted with no syntax check) like this:


Pattern p = Pattern.compile("/<p>(.*?)</p>/");
Matches matches = p.match(htmlString);
for (Match m : matches){
   m.group(1); // always contains the first set of parentheses in the regular expression.
}

I'm tired so I have to finish writing another time. Tune in for part two soon!

I like that old time rock & roll

2008-03-30T20:55:11Z

I just bought two "compilation" albums that should keep me occupied for a couple of days.

Eddie Cochran
Buddy Holly

Greatest hits or whatever. I get the morning shift in work, of music. We throw on tunes and rock. Friday I put on the Beastie Boys "License to Ill", and previous installments included Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns n' Roses, Blind Melon, and I forget what else. It's a good time. Time to mix it up with some 50s rock.

We make a cute couple

2008-03-30T15:00:01Z

Don't we?

For the past two days my brothers and I have been working on my lawn. It's exhausting. It'll be awesome when it's done. I'll have pictures up in about a month.

I have an affinity for science

2008-03-25T01:25:31Z

This has been apparent since I started learning about science, besides biology. I'm up the latest I've been up for the past month or so. It's 2 AM. Bear with me.

I was always also pretty good at math. No genius, but kind of quick to catch on. This was displayed in first grade when I was moved from the B class to the A class in Math. I was 6. This also was evident when instead of learning long division the way the teachers would teach it, I taught myself a way to do it without writing even a quarter as much as the teacher's method. I taught this to a kid in the class who was having problem doing it, and he got in trouble because he didn't "do all the math". But it gave right answers. I never got in trouble.

Then after about 8 years of video games (Nintendo and Sega Genesis mainly), by the time I was 14, I knew that I wanted to make video games, but didn't know what to learn to be able to do that. In the meantime, I was still in first track math, getting 95s or so without trying much, acing Geometry and Trig, doing good in calculus. When I was a junior, I had to start thinking about college, and had no idea what I wanted to do besides make video games, which I hadn't researched at all.

So, instead, I was doing good in chemistry and generally enjoying it, so in my Junior year, I wanted to be a chemist. The next year, I learned physics, was really good at it, and highly enjoyed it. Although, I was only in 2nd track physics. So I wanted to be a physicist. Either of these two would have been a disaster, I think, compared to what I did end up taking.

In college, still looking to fill that gaping void, I took a few physics classes, including astronomy. Today, I still can't get enough physics. With the advent of the internet, and podcasts, I listen to all things physics and astronomy, including Astronomy Cast. But not only podcasts. Audiobooks are like 4 hours long. I have 18.7 hours worth, including three Stephen Hawking books, and one by the Dalai Lama, which is called "The Universe in a Single Atom", which is just a history of his studies and learnings from various minds in theoretical physics.

The only things is I'm not smart enough to come up with my own theories or even begin to understand some of the more complex theories out there. There's not math in those books, though, just theories or almost proven theories, but no math to back them up. Which is fine, I'd be completely lost since I haven't had a math course in years. The way they explain it is good. The current Astronomy Cast is "What shape is the Universe?" I just get so completely lost thinking about it. You might be able to come up with any shape as long as you can come up with a bit of evidence to prove it. I can say, "When you step away from the universe and look at it, it spells 'Jason'".

And talking about 11 parallel universes. A universe that is always expanding. And every object in space, every other galaxy we see is moving away from us, but we're not in the center. There is no center. And is it finite?

The big bang. How when the universe "started", it started as a point with a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion grams per square centimeter or whatever. My one theory is this... I imagine multiple big bangs in the past, but each time, the universe collapsed on itself. So there's no way to know just how old the universe is because each time it started over. Time started over. Einstein, move over :)

If you think about that, multiple big bangs, but this universe is always expanding now... it means that in the past big bangs there was more mass in the universe that gravity made it eventually come back together. After billions and billions of years. But what happened to that mass that now it's expanding with no collapse in sight? I don't know that there's no collapse in sight, though. If the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is slowing down, then it will collapse again. Of course I don't know that this isn't already a theory since I don't read or listen enough, and anything that Hawking doesn't discuss has since been ignored. But I'll take credit for it :)

Just wrapping my head around those ideas; the infiniteness of the universe, the shape, the center. How instead of Newton's theory of gravity where objects PULL other objects to them, instead there's wells created in space. How nothing in space travels in a straight line, not even light, since it gets warped by these divots in space created by mass. It might keep me up later thinking about it, but I wouldn't venture to call myself even an amateur theoretical physicist, maybe not even a hobbyist, I just want to understand. But Astronomy Cast says some of it is the most difficult ideas to understand. Well, I love a challenge.

Amazon.com Market

2008-03-20T10:00:33Z

Sometimes I'll add an item to my amazon.com cart, only to end up leaving it there for months.

When I added that MicroSD card for my phone, it was like $30. Buy!

Now, Jaws on the other hand... Damnit, I missed the $9.99 price.

Another item, I think it was Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, just reached below $6 earlier this morning. Might have to hop on that one.

Barack Obama called today

2008-03-15T15:00:12Z

Actually, some intern working for his campaign in Delaware County, PA, who's never met him, etc, telling me that in order to vote for Barack Obama during the Primary on April 22nd or whenever it is, I have to register as Democratic, instead of whatever I'm listed as (Independent or Other I think they said)... (Actually, I specifically remember I put "Unaffiliated" thinking no one would bug me, but it's a swing position, so everyone bugs you. Oh well, better to not lie to everyone than just say I have no affiliations to imaginary parties :) Not to offend anyone, I just don't take politics very seriously...) So, they said I would have to "register as democrat" in order to "vote for Obama" because that's what every unaffiliated person does, but that I could "change back later".

First off, I don't get that rule. If everyone knows which way you're voting, what the hell's the point of voting, other than getting off the couch and heading to the polling station. Oh, yeah, there they can hand you fliers and tell you that you've picked the wrong side like a jackass. I agree with the whole voting thing and democracy, but I like to not be bugged. I know there's an election coming up in November (who hasn't seen Hilary and Barack on TV in the past year?).

Oh yeah, so, chances are I'll vote democratic, but I'm not voting at the primary, if I have to change my affiliation. I picked that for a reason. Make people think they have to work for my vote. I'd rather not even have to care about politics, but there's just a lot of crap wrong with the world, and my little vote can make a difference! Unless I pick the wrong guy... (or girl)

Two new songs, Kodie looks funny

2008-03-13T22:00:25Z

These two new songs could be said to be written for Kodie, since one was before I went to pick her up at the Vet, and the second one when I got her home and all fed (2 full cans of soft meaty dog food!).

The first one, a Mother Fing Jam in G, can be downloaded here. It shows why I love my new found experience of fingerpicking, and also hammering on two notes at the same time with two different fingers on two very different strings. You just have to put on headphones and listen to it to tell where I'm talking about. Otherwise, it's just I hear a rhythm in my head and play along.

The second one, Long Jam, here, starts off finding a rhythm to play along with, then plays around in D for a while.

Kodie got her whole bottom row of teeth pulled :( The front though, none of her big teeth. These looked real bad in the past week or so, and I noticed two of them, at least, were really loose. So they're all gone. She's fine though. They said in a few weeks, if I want I can go back to the hard food, if Kodie will eat that stuff still! I gave her some soft food, and it was like meat with gravy. Two full cans, and she just ate it up. She was starving so we'll see how she is tomorrow. If she's still excited about getting food, then I actually have to learn how to portion it for her! Usually when the bowl's empty I fill it and it won't be empty for about a day or so. She's very good about eating that food because she doesn't like it :) It's only when necessary. But I bet I could keep filling her bowl up with this soft, meaty, gravy covered food and she'll just keep eating it.

I watched the HBO show "In Treatment" tonight and really liked it. I was like "I should probably watch that show, it's on a couch, and there's no room for bad acting, so it's probably excellent or really shitty". Then as I was thinking that, it came on. It was probably an "On Next" thing. It's on HBO. It was excellent, I must say. Might watch it some more.

Dogs are the best

2008-03-12T21:00:19Z

I was sick Monday and Tuesday, but when I went downstairs after two days of bed ridden disgustingness, I noticed my dog wasn't eating anything, hadn't eaten for two days. While I would have been flattered if she stopped eating because I was sick, I know they're smarter than that :P I tried to give her her favorite treat and she turned it down.

Today (Wed the 12th) I was fine on maybe taking one more day off to fully recover, but I had to get the dog to the Vet, and I might as well go to work after that. I was feeling like total garbage up until about 2:30, though, and then from about 3:15 onto the end of the day. Took Kodie to the Vet at 9 or shortly after, was in work by 9:45. I missed the phone calls from the Vet because this is how delirious I was all day: we're in sort of a lunch meeting at work, and I'm like "Hmm, if my phone goes off... blah blah, should I check to see if it's on? Nah it's fine"... 2:30 rolls around and I'm like "Man, they still haven't called me..." The office closes at 3 and opens again at 6. I check my pockets... no phone! No idea. It was in the car. I may have even been delirious about Kodie not eating for 2 days since I was totally out of it for 1. But just her energy level, it was soooo low, and if you know Kodie, you know she's nothing but energy most of the time. You *can* calm her down, but usually she does much more stupid and funny things when she's all crazy :)

It's like, of course Vets can say "Oh we have to check for everything" and charge you for it all... but it's not even that expensive. But you can tell that Kodie has some bad teeth and might not be eating because it hurts her. But the Vet's gonna do blood tests, spool tests, all this stuff, might as well. And you can't say "I think it's just because of her teeth", even though in the end you may be right... because us lay people don't know.

I know I can't say that because in my profession, it is also best to be thorough. I know sometimes I can see the answer WAAAY before I even begin looking into code, lots of times I can tell you the exact file the problem is in, and almost never can I tell you what line it's on. Sometimes I boggle my own mind on how quick I come across some of these answers.

Just that it's probably way less expensive to find a problem with your pet relatively soon after a scheduled appointment so you don't have to get all the tests again :)

She'll be fine though. She may never be able to eat hard food again, but I'm sure the Vet will tell me what kind of food to give her. They called me at like 7 and said I could pick her up after giving me the lowdown on her condition and how none of the tests they've done led to anything (no kidding!?). They said I can take her home or leave her overnight because she has another thing tomorrow. Leave her overnight?! Yeah right. They tell me she can't eat any food, even though I took her there because she hadn't eaten any food for two days. Plus, the lady doctor assistant was like "I gave her some of the i/d food (some sort of dietary food for dogs), and she ate it right up" And I was like "That's good! Was it soft?" And she's like "Yeah, it was soft". But I get Kodie home and they gave me this 3/4 full tin of that food and told me not to feed her because she's having a procedure done tomorrow to her teeth. I'm like "Ok. No problem"... Yeah right. She's gotta be starving, so I give her almost all of the can of food. There's hardly any left :) But now she seems real good. She had so much energy tonight out with the neighbor's dog, it was great :)

Acid3: Embarassing Browser Makers Everywhere

2008-03-05T23:00:33Z

Did you take Acid3 with your browser?

My FireFox 3 beta 3 scores 61 out of 100. The best reported was Opera 9.5 at 65. The cofounder of Opera was a designer of CSS or something. Acid3 was more of a Javascript + CSS test, whereas Acid2 was strictly CSS. FireFox 3 beta 3 passes that easily.

Microsoft's IE6 doesn't fare well. I think it got 7 out of 100. IE7 is probably way better? Nope. 12. Linux based browsers like Konquerer scored in the mid 50s.

I read a comment somewhere, probably Slashdot, that said these tests aren't to see if it's a good browser, but more to push the browser makers so that developers can use the things that they test for and take for granted that a wide variety of users will be able to support them. That should make a lot of developers happy. Except for Microsoft! They just got done making sure their latest version of IE, 8, which is in beta, passes the Acid2 test. That's where free software owns. Release cycles based on business fiscal schedules are no good for anyone.

Sorry for the Atom Spam

2008-03-03T23:50:37Z

There's probably two subscribers to my feed, and one of them yelled at me :p But Google Reader should be back to business now, shortly after showing 400+ new items from this website. Atom has an ID that it uses, and Google Reader apparently keeps track of your read items by that ID and doesn't care about the date at all, evidently. So, new items showed up back to the beginning of this website.

So, will there be 400+ new items every time I post? No. It has all those IDs now, which are new and changed, and unless I change them, they won't show up again.

I can't just write a post apologizing though. I have to talk about the new cool thing that I'm working on here at home. I've talked about it before but apparently, wasn't able to carry through with it. Reasons were mainly that my laptop proved to be way to slow after the initial "wow" factor of installing Ubuntu. (My reaction now would be more "Wow, FreeBSD on a ThinkPad RULES!") The thing I'm talking about is my seamless integration between front end Javascript and backend Java. I wrote about it here. But I've made a few changes.

First, instead of the backend generating XML, it'll just read XML and spit out results in JSON. I'm kind of partial to that technology because of the name... it just kicks ass. I got my first foray into JSON last week at work. Initially, our backend PHP was just returning a few things, like 3, for the front end Javascript to parse and spit into HTML on the website. What the final requirements called for was way more complex, and I didn't want to have to come up with some naming scheme, because it would just get so ugly. Some things were related to each other but not to everything. It would be something like this:

"What is my name?:Jason,Steve,Albert:Jason:True: Jason,80%:Steve,5%,Albert:15%,2000,Elite"

This is like a quiz or trivia, where the question was "What is my name?", the possible answers "Jason,Steve,Albert" comma separated, the correct answer "Jason", whether that person got it write "True", and finally the percentages that other people guessed, the total points for that user "2000", and their ranking "Elite". And that's not even all of it. It has to include the next question, and all of those possible answers. Painful. So instead, this is what it looks like:

{
"LastQuestion" : {
   "Text" : "What is my name?",
    etc
},
"User" : {
    "Points" : "2000",
    etc
},
"AnswerPercentages" : {
    "Jason" : "80",
    etc
}
}

Much easier to maintain, much easier to read, much MUCH easier for the front end to parse! This can be parsed like this... assume your callback function is called "callback" and is passed whatever is returned from the server, e.g. the JSON code above:

function callback(data){
    var obj = eval(data);
    alert(obj.LastQuestion.Text); // will alert "What is my name?"
}

Yup, it's that easy.

Next affair... I'll need, and will build over time, a large Javascript library for building out websites with the data returned from the server. Tables, forms, etc. This will generally be a pain in the ass and is attributed to me delaying this project for as long as possible. Ugh.

If I get tired of that, then something's gotta give, and I'll either stop this crazy experiment or go crazy writing Javascript for hours and hours. Thank God for FireBug.

More code for your convenience

2008-03-02T03:00:47Z

I had this log file from my server that's just been sitting there collecting errors for about 2 years. It got pretty big, upwards of 60 MB. So, I wrote this program to break it into chunks. I looked over the FreeBSD documentation to see if there's a program that just reads the last few KB or so. I was getting no output on my new "Browse By Month" code, and when I wrote this program, I was able to split the file into chunks of about 976 KB each (1,000,000 bytes).

package filebreaker;

import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.BufferedOutputStream;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;

public class FileBreaker {
	public static void main(String []args){
		String dir = "/usr/home/jason/Downloads/";
		String filename = dir + "catalina.out";
		int chunk = 1000000;
		
		try {
			BufferedInputStream fs = new BufferedInputStream( new FileInputStream(filename) );
			BufferedOutputStream os = null;
			int itr = 0;
			byte []buf = new byte[chunk];
			int status = 0;
			while (status != -1){
				status = fs.read(buf, 0, chunk);
				String chunkFilename = dir + "/out/catalina-" + itr + ".txt";
				os = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(chunkFilename));
				os.write(buf);
				os.flush();
				os.close();			
				itr++;
			}
			fs.close();
		}
		catch (Exception e){
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
}

I found out the error. I'm using Java 1.6.0 on my local machine, and have yet to install it on my server. I used a method (Calendar.getDisplayName(int, int, Locale)) that wasn't part of Java 1.5.0, which is running on my server. DOH!

I also now like putting code on my website since I have new css for handling <code /> tags. It looks like this:

code {
	display: block;
	overflow: auto;
	width: 600px;
	white-space: pre;
}

code br {
	display: none;
}

:D My text formatter takes line breaks and replaces them with "<br />", and I wanted code to be preformatted so I don't have to replace tabs with spaces, and also I didn't have to check if I was inside a "code" tag and not insert <br /> for line breaks. It's just a very convenient way to handle it that might look like crap in another browser that's not FireFox. I'll add lots more code now :)

Hello URL Rewriting!

2008-03-02T00:25:00Z

After about an hour of programming, I have my URLs in a search engine friendly format! This has many other benefits as well:

For instance, I don't have to know the ID of the news I want to link to, just the title. So, I can make a link to a news item I have previously written by typing in the title in a format that it expects. For the news item titled "The Guitar Player", the link will be "the-guitar-player". Click here to test.

Also, if I want, I can modify my "text writer" component in JSF, to search for strings like "[[The Guitar Player]]", and to write out the url, namely "/news/the-guitar-player". Or I'd have to make it "[[News|The Guitar Player]]" if I want to add more dynamic linking, say for photos, downloads, comments, etc. This is much like a Wiki works. It can be a "news wiki" or a "wiki blog" or something ridiculous like that.

Also, after I save this, it will probably write out all of the news in my atom.xml file... it might take a while, there'll be 454 news items! That's ok though. I'll probably have to delegate that task to a new thread, so I can get to adding more news right away.

Categories are changed for rewriting purposes. "Labels" have not been updated yet. I have to make a new page because a "Label" object can pertain to Downloads and Pictures, so I have to list results for each, or modify the URL rewrite filter to accept "/picture/label/me" and "/download/label/music" to list pictures of me and my music downloads, respectively.

I don't run Apache HTTPD, so I had to write the URL rewriter all in Java for Tomcat. It wasn't too bad. Regular Expressions are neat.

The meat:

String url = ((HttpServletRequest)req).getRequestURL().toString().replace(HttpUtil.getBaseUrl((HttpServletRequest)req), "");
		
if (rewriteConfig.ignoreUrl(url)){
	chain.doFilter(req, resp);
}
else {
	String location = rewriteConfig.getLocation(url);
	String rewriteUrl = rewriteConfig.getUrl(location, url.replaceAll("/" + location + "/", ""));

	if (rewriteUrl != null){
		RequestDispatcher dispatcher = req.getRequestDispatcher(rewriteUrl);
		dispatcher.forward(req, resp); // forward the request
	}
	else {
		chain.doFilter(req, resp);
	}
}

url is the requestUrl stripped of the host. This is so I can make it work on dev (http://localhost:8080/jtccom) and production (http://www.jasontconnell.com/).

This filter is called for every request, so I have an "ignore" map set up. This tests if the URL contains a ".", since every rewritten url will only contain numbers, letters, and the occasional "/" or "-". This is a HashMap for quick lookups. So, it won't attempt to rewrite calls to "/js/someFile.js".

The "location" part of the request is "/x/", so for news it will be "/news/". The location is "news". This is so I only have to loop through rewrite patterns for news, not for everything.

The pattern is written as "([0-9a-z-]+)/?" so if I pass in the whole URL (without the host), "/news/my-news-title", it won't match, so that's what the next line does, removes "/news/" so it's just "my-news-title". The getURL function returns the rewritten URL, so like "/news.jsf?title=my-news-title". I created a new unique column for News, and my "DaoWeb" interface has a "ChangeListener" property, so if I create a news or change it's title, it updates the "TitleKey" in this case. Pictures are just forwarded by their picture id for now, so
"/picture/23" as an example.

Coming soon: News by date span! /news/2008 for all news in 2008. /news/2008/03 for all news in March 2008! /news/2008/03/23 for all news on my birthday this year!!

Tune in for more updates. I'm cranking now, and Java is like riding a bike. I also fixed a few bugs.

Lightnin' Hopkins

2008-02-25T00:00:26Z

I worked from home on Friday, so I had to VPN into the network and log onto my computer with Remote Desktop. A (at first) horrible downside to this is that I couldn't access my iTunes library on the Mac. My new $100 headphones' cord isn't long enough to reach my desk, and there's no room for it on the desk, and I sure as hell can't play music out of the tiny laptop speakers. So, I decided to log onto Pandora and listen to some of my "Bob Marley" radio station. After a little while, I wanted to change it up so I put on my "Cracker" radio, which yielded some interesting music. After that, I made a new radio station. I wanted to listen to some blues. I just typed in Robert Johnson and let Pandora handle the rest. Was that a great move.

I'm listening to some greats that I've heard before and like, but nothing's really blowing me away. So I'm getting lots of work done :) Next thing I know, this version of "Catfish Blues" comes on. All acoustic guitar, and the thing is distorting my speakers (or so I thought). It's slow, guitar and singer, and the guitar is just amazing. I flip over to my browser that's running Pandora, and see that it's a Texas bluesman named Lightnin' Hopkins. I mark him with a "thumbs up", and keep listening. A few songs pass, again, none blowing me away. Then this other song comes on and I have the same reaction... f$@#%ing awesome guitar. Flip over to Pandora... Lightnin' Hopkins again. This happened like 4 times. This is over 2 hours. So today I bought some Sam Hopkins.

The album that Catfish Blues is on is called "Blues in My Bottle". I'm on the 2nd song right now... so far awesome. There's quite a deal on iTunes if you're a fan of blues. Lightnin' Hopkins "The Complete Aladdin Recordings", 1946-1949, 43 songs, $10. "Blues in My Bottle" is all just guitar and singing. Amazing guitar. Buy it.

Laptop Configured

2008-02-23T01:00:56Z

Sound works, development environment set up (including eclipse, java, tomcat, mysql, mysql dbs and users [tables and data are automagic]), can't disable the "tapping" on the touchpad yet.

I got the development environment set up after some troubles where I forgot that I depend on some JARs being in the tomcat/common/lib folder, and don't copy them over. Doh. This stuff is all manual.

I had to configure my /boot/loader.conf to load the driver for my sound card (snd_hda), I've been messing around in the same file to see if I can load a 'synaptics' touchpad driver, or enable support, but I don't think I have a synaptics touchpad driver. FreeBSD reports it as a Generic PS/2 mouse otherwise.

I need to disable tapping! When you go to edit a Java file and accidentally move your cursor to the spot where you didn't want to edit at, it's so annoying. However, I did notice that this touch pad IS freakin tiny, and I hardly touch it by accident. That's good.

Scrolling would be nice to have. That's a hardware issue though, no scroll "wheel". I looked around, and with moused options, you can emulate 3 buttons (I have two I think) and enable scroll with a combination of the middle mouse button (in my case both pressed) and moving on the mouse pad. This would be tough. Kinda like pressing CTRL +N+U+<+O+/ Good luck. I'm gonna write a program that says "To uninstall this software, press CTRL +N+U+<+O+/ within the next 2 seconds." Oh, you messed up. Try it for 1 minute and your hand will hurt :)

The ThinkPad T61 that I got comes with a fingerprint reader, and apparently someone made it work on Gentoo, of course, the OS I had on here for a while and couldn't do anything with. I betcha now I could though. I'm not retarded when it comes to setting up a Linux / Unix laptop anymore.

You'll notice I now have a cool "RSS" link in the address bar if you're using a modern browser, like FireFox 2.0.0.11 or 3 beta 3 like I am.

I'm heading up the mountains tomorrow. Might go skiing, might just hang out and drink :) We'll see. I was asked to bring my guitar, but I only have my huge amp now! It's awesome though.

Ahh, Video Game Addiction

2008-02-18T23:00:07Z

AIM IM with ZatkoZatko: 25 hours
Zatko: won by space race
Zatko: it was total annilation though
Me: jesus
Me: year?
Zatko: like 2045
Me: my last big victory was a space race in 1957 on warlord
Zatko: nice
Me: 13000+ points, abraham lincoln
Zatko: how are points calculated
Me: no idea
Zatko: i annilated everyone but 2 countries
Zatko: i was at war most of the game
Zatko: which is why it took so long
Zatko: i found the option to turn off battle animations on hour 24
Me: but if you hover your mouse over your name, you can see how your points are broken down... population, technology, land, wonders
Me: yeah, i turned them off recently
Zatko: yea, big time saver
Zatko: every turn was taking like 15 minutes
Me: and it'll tell you what your score will be if you won on that turn
Zatko: i wonder if nuking people helps that score
Me: i don't think it hurts
Zatko: i nuked the shit out of the indians
Me: haha
Zatko: i was clearly winning, but my lead kept diminishing
Zatko: the indians were trending up on me
Zatko: apparently the nukes made them go broke
Zatko: what a game
Me: it's great huh
Zatko: that sins game is gonna be the same thing
Zatko: dude my whole 3 day weekend can be summararized by civ4
Me: haha
Me: addicted once again
Zatko: yea, majorly addicting
Zatko: i was dreaming about it at night
Me: yup, been there
Zatko: i'd wake up at 5 in the morning, clenching my fist and cursing the russians
Me: once i play Pain on the ps3 for a whole day, and i'd dream about throwing mimes into glass
Me: haha
Zatko: ha, the mime game
Zatko: well i'm out
Zatko: maybe for next weekend i'll get sins
Me: aight, i might start up a game
Me: k, i can get it
Me: i'll just get it like i did with gears of war and wait for you to get it
Me: i bought that game months ago
Zatko: yea, that'll probably be some good coop action with that
Zatko: later
Me: later
Zatko: has gone offline.

Laptop Shopping...

2008-02-18T00:00:19Z

Blows monkey snot (or insert your own, more vulgar version of "sucks" here). When you're going to look at a store instead of online, of course you have to deal with salespeople who know less about laptops than you do. You can't tell them exactly what you're going to be using it for, because it won't help them decide what model you need, and you already have in mind that you want a "business" laptop. Not something for games, or something with eighteen card readers on it. Definitely not something that comes preinstalled with Windows Vista.

I'm trying to tell the guy, "I don't need HDMI, card readers, Bluetooth, photo album software, MS Office, built in web cam... I have a Mac" :D I just need a good CPU, a fast hard drive, and decent amount of RAM. Wireless is optional. Before I let him in on the little secret that I know a slow mother f@#%@$ing hard drive when I see it, he was trying to push 4800 RPM drives on me.

When he was trying to sell me anti-virus software and MS Office, I sorta just smiled at him and said "I won't be running Windows", in a smart ass type of way that only a true geek can do.

What I ended up with was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (as "business" as it gets, and what I have been eyeing online for weeks), with a 14.1" screen (which is running at 1280x800 on Gnome on my FreeBSD, so I'm fine with it), 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM (but I put in another GB when I got it home), a 100GB 7200 RPM hard drive, and an NVidia basic video card, and tons of ThinkPad goodness (which means nothing!). Minimal but is absolutely awesome. It's 5.3 lbs. It kicks the f%#@ out of my previous laptop's ass. So fast.

Compare to my other laptop (which I'm fuzzy on now):
1.5 GHz single core Centrino, I upped it to 1GB ram, 4800 RPM 60GB hard drive, ATI video card.

A hard drive's speed will make or break productivity in programming. I also just needed an upgrade in CPU speed, and RAM never hurts :)

There's just one thing though that I wish I had noticed about this laptop before I bought it, but I think I can deal with it. Most laptops today have a touch version of a mouse's "scroll wheel" on their pads. My previous laptop has it. This one doesn't :( I can use page up / down, or go old school and use the scroll bar. I'm used to it though, since I had Gentoo Linux on my other laptop for so long, nothing f%@#$ing worked anyway :)

So, I'm installing FreeBSD, getting my development environment set up, and will be creating features for this website, and new websites and software in the near future.

The Guitar Player

2008-02-16T00:00:16Z

I threw out any attempts to act like a musician on this latest song (and I got rid of most of the buzzing! Thanks Todd, I just moved the amp away from the laptop and network of wires by my bed and it took care of most of it... the ground trick will probably take care of the rest, so if it gets unbearable, that's what I'll do). Instead of being crafty, I just decided to wail on my Gretsch. The rhythm guitar is still top notch though :) It's a slow blues back beat with some hard clean soloing. You'll hear the Gretsch's signature piece of hardware, the Bigsby (TM) somewhere in there. Keep an ear open for it. I don't really put it at a hugely inventive or creative spot, I just throw it in there on a G chord :P (it's at 1:03).

It's here... the filename is "SoBad.mp3" but I didn't come up with the name of the song until after I uploaded it and my laziness rivals any in history. So after you download it, just rename the file to "TheGuitarPlayer.mp3", which of course is named that after I attempted to be a musician for a few songs, instead of a guitar player... being a musician is hard, but I've been playing guitar for almost 13 years now. Even though I still suck... :(

More upbeat stuff coming soon

2008-02-15T00:00:19Z

I like rap and stuff with good beats that can make you dance. My next few songs will be like that. My favorite thing about guitar is its percussion. Particularly about my Gretsch going through the Blues Deluxe and my microphone to my computer etc. I love the sound of it. Before I start recording, I usually sit there for a good hour with my eyes closed just listening to the output of the microphone through my headphones. It just sounds so f#%@#$ing good. Compared to my old way of recording, you hardly got any percussive variations no matter how much you tried. Now, just hammer on that B and roll a bass line in E, and it just sounds incredible. No more old way for me!

Also a word on guitar. Again. I noticed that when someone who doesn't play guitar listens to my song from last week (here), they usually judge it based on my soloing ability. Whereas when I listen to it (over and over for hours), I listen to it for the rhythm guitar. Just a thing I noticed when my coworker, the smercenary, and I were on our way back to the office after a client meeting in Exton, and we had to take a back way because it was around 5pm and the Schuylkill Express was jam packed. I decided to put on Jimi Hendrix' "BBC Sessions", a two disk album, which got us through, and "Driving South" made me easily do 90. I didn't know the area that he was taking me, and we were coming up on a turn and he almost missed telling me to take it, and he said "I almost missed the turn there because Jimi's guitar playing is so f%@$ing good." It was just rhythm playing :P Scott's a musician too. But I typically love Jimi's rhythm playing too.

When I practice, lately, I'm practicing my rhythm, so my soloing skill has been declining. I don't wonder if it's because I'm getting better at rhythm that I tend to favorite it and practice it more, getting even better in the process. It's my favorite whether I suck at it or not.

In totally unrelated, totally geeky news, I saw an article about a moon on slashdot that was tagged with the most hilarious tag ever: thatsnomoonitsagasstation. Be sure to read the article.

New Song

2008-02-14T02:00:44Z

I actually recorded this over the weekend. I wasn't going for a melody, since I really don't do that in most songs. I usually just try to screw around over the chord progression, oftentimes forgetting what chord I was playing at a certain part of the song. Especially when it gets a little complex like this song. It's called Sexy :) Happy Valentine's Day!

(I know, I have to fix that buzzing in the background...)

Firefox 3 beta 3 is top notch

2008-02-13T00:00:20Z

I had beta 2 installed for a while, and scrolling certain websites was a bit slow. Today the update was released, and it's a whole new browser. It looks a lot different, it's fast, and the last thing I have to check is if it stops working after a while like beta 2 did. But I mean, a while as in a few days. Check out the release notes here.

Rocking It "Flat Style"

2008-02-08T23:00:33Z

Means I went after work to the Flat Rock Saloon with my coworkers. I tried to sell the motto to the bouncer :D He liked it.

Finally, The Audio Interface Arrives

2008-02-08T08:00:30Z

Hooked it up and played around with everything for a few hours last night. It's crazy how sensitive that mic is. I could play my guitar with my amp off and the mic picked it up a few feet away and facing the other direction (it's a flat mic where one side really has the recording capability).

The headphones I got are way better than the laptop speakers :P But I didn't want the output getting picked up again by the mic, so it was good that I got them, plus these are great headphones. Crazy thing about the mic sensitivity... I could hear clear as day when I used the computer, like clicking the button or typing. First I thought that it was a mouse clicking sound effect in Logic Express, until I clicked around outside of that program.

I threw together a quick test song for your listening pleasure. I used a total of one chord! It's all based around an E or somewhere in the vicinity. Check it out here. It's great that my guitar and amp sound so good through all the equipment I bought! Couldn't be happier. Can't wait to record more!

Open Source is so inexpensive

2008-02-02T18:45:07Z

Keeping with my 'money' theme from the last few posts, here we have something on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. Not including donations, I've paid $0 for all of the software on my other laptop, and it does everything.

Now, I've been thinking about doing something drastic. Since I installed Ubuntu Linux, my development time on that laptop has actually diminished about 100%. I haven't done any development on it. This is because it's so f@#$@#ing slow. I do a lot of ANT builds and they just take forever. The drastic thing I've been thinking of is upgrading my laptop to a new one. Preferably a Lenovo ThinkPad or something. Customizing one of those for a Linux installation (everything except picking Linux, since they only offer Vista Home Basic) is a lot cheaper than configuring it for even Vista Home Basic. All I need is 2GHz Core 2 Duo (the minimum CPU option), 1GB RAM (although I've been bumping it up to 2GB in the "Customize" section), 1Gbps LAN, and integrated graphics. I could opt to have Wireless, but that's extra. It's not that expensive, although I can't afford it now.

So, instead of getting a beefier laptop to run a slow operating system (Gentoo ran super fast on the same exact old crappy laptop), I was looking into some other operating system that's just as powerful and fast as Gentoo, but not the hardest thing to set up. In my search, I decided to go with something that I've been eyeing ever since I got into free software. FreeBSD.

Having this Mac, and having nothing to work on when I got a side job doing .NET with SQL Server for one of the local schools (Episcopal Academy, which isn't exactly 'one of the local schools'), and the Mac being Intel, I found out about that program called "Parallels", which can run virtual machines of multiple operating systems. I have a Windows one installed for all of that development I did for EA, and I have an Ubuntu Linux one for when I tried it out (much like now) before I installed it on my laptop. So, I did the same thing with FreeBSD. I think I'm going to give it a shot on the laptop.

It's a lot easier than Gentoo, that's a plus. It's as well documented as Gentoo (just visit freebsd.org and see for yourself), it's *almost* as fast as Gentoo, and it runs Gnome. The only thing that I was wondering was "Will it run everything?" Yes it will.

FreeBSD is Unix, not Linux. While they are similar in some areas, there's others where they are just very very different. Like, FreeBSD and Linux use different threading models, which Sun depends on in its Linux implementation of Java and Sun does not provide a native implementation of Java for FreeBSD, yet. However, you can get "Linux compatibility mode" running on FreeBSD which will make the Linux implementation work on FreeBSD. The down side of that is that FreeBSD has to build the source for Java to install it, and the source is released under an incompatible license. So, when you install it, it fails, and asks you to download certain files before it can continue. And still, after you do that, you're contractually obligated (through the license) to NOT distribute the resulting built Java binaries. It's weird. There is hope, though, as most believe that Java 7 (it's at 6 right now) will be released under the GPL, since Sun completely open sourced Java recently.

So, I'll give FreeBSD a shot, and if it doesn't work out, then I'll download and try out another one!

Interesting side story. FreeBSD offers its ISOs in "torrent" format. I've known what BitTorrent was since about 7 years ago, but never got into it. It's a giant legal mess since it's also used to distribute "pirated" material. But there are very legal, morally good ways of using BitTorrent. Anyway, I downloaded it through that (a BitTorrent client called "Transmission" for Mac, also free open source software), and it's just neat seeing all the people you're downloading the same file from simultaneously. It's really brilliant software, BitTorrent is.

In light of the MS - Yahoo! News

2008-02-01T15:00:08Z

Me: i'm gonna have to ditch my yahoo im account
Me: you have to get me on AIM or google talk
Jared (on AIM): hello
Me: for some reason i thought you only had a yahoo account
Jared: nope, i have gmail, yahoo, aim
Me: i have no one else on my friend's list in yahoo :P
Jared: hahaha
Jared: you're my only yahoo account too!!
Me: good, i can get rid of that account
Me: hahaahah
Me: man, we shoulda just said something years ago

Everything is almost here

2008-01-29T19:00:41Z

I'm just missing the audio interface now. I have everything else. I got an email from the seller of the interface that they will get it in stock in 3-5 days, so that blows. I'm gonna have to complain to someone about that. Amazon.com said it was in stock. At least the place is close, so that when it does get to their store, it will definitely be here the next day.

I already installed Logic Express 8 and today it was updated over the internets. The mic is sitting on my bed, the mic cable on top of my amp, the mic boom stand leaning against my wall next to all of my guitars, the headphones also on my bed. They are awesome headphones though, I should use them a lot.

When I get home, I play guitar. Today the Flyers are on, so I only played for an hour, but I can easily play until I go to bed. And I'm not playing anything I already know, and I'm also not playing songs that have been written. I'm just experimenting. Like, hmm... if I finger pick the bass note then pluck the bottom three with my fingers in order... that sounds alri... but if I try to finger pick different bass notes simultaneously with playing the fingers, it doesn't sound that great but it's awesome practice that'll get me pretty good at finger picking. Plus I might find some new sounds out of it.

That's all, Flyers are on.

Everything is so expensive

2008-01-22T23:00:30Z

I thought I was done with the expensive stuff following my guitar and amplifier purchases. Not so. I couldn't be happier with those two though. The guitar plays so, so nicely, it's made me better; with just how easy it plays. And the amplifier couldn't sound better. Unfortunately, lately I've been getting around to playing too late that I can't turn it up, since I live in a row house :P

But with a great guitar, and awesome amplifier, I've been playing more regardless of what time I play. This, naturally, gets you warmed up. When I'm all done playing all the stuff I know, which happened within the first thirty minutes of when I got my new guitar, the only thing I can do is try to learn other stuff. So, I've been playing, improving, improv, jazz, and blues, and now I want to record!

The last purchase consists of a Yamaha Go46 FireWire recording interface, a Sennheiser guitar microphone and headphones (don't want echo recorded from the computer through the mic and into the computer again), a boom microphone stand, microphone cable, and Logic Express 8. These are costly items, but I was able to save a bunch going through Amazon.com, as I usually am able to do. They'll all be here before the weekend, but I'll be heading up to Zatko's this weekend to play video games, so I won't be able to record anything until Sunday or so. Maybe look for stuff then. If not, the latest will probably be Tuesday.

But, part of my improving has been playing chords that I've never played before. Like, the C# maj dim (usually diminished chords are noted with a ^o, but I don't know how that's going to look :P ), which goes nicely in between a D9 and a Bm. Then trying to come up with solos between those chords is always a challenge, and I'll know if I can do it once I start recording some background music to solo over. There's always a chicken and egg scenario.

Like, for instance (and this is BRUTAL), I want to start copying all of my DVDs to a hard drive, but I need a computer with a ton of space. I might as well throw Linux on there and also do my development on it as well, so it should be a pretty powerful machine with like 2 TB of space (that's 2000 gigabytes). Of course, then to watch them on a TV, I'd get an Apple TV. But, to really get the most out of that, I'd need to get an HDTV, preferably the 40" Sony Bravia that I've been eyeing. And if I'm going HD, then I have to upgrade my cable plan to get HD channels.

Brutal, I tell ya. F@%#@$ing brutal.

This made me laugh

2008-01-21T11:00:54Z

It's interesting, the role that the RIAA believes they play

"It's commonly known as piracy, but it's a too benign term that doesn't even begin to adequately describe the toll that music theft takes on the many artists, songwriters, musicians, record label employees and others whose hard work and great talent make music possible."

Including "record label employees" along with the implication of music not existing without them is just absurd. I can't imagine buying a guitar and not being able to make somewhat arranged sounds of different tones and percussive intensities without the RIAA.

Cool old stuff

2008-01-21T00:00:36Z

On Saturday, we had to go over our grandmom's house and empty it out so they can sell it. They moved in there in December of 1966, and lived there until my grandmom's untimely death in 2007. My grandfather had passed over the summer of 96. They've saved tons of stuff in their 83 (Pop-pop) and 86 ("Nanny") years. Clearing all that stuff out was a history lesson, as well as a lot of good memories.

Pop-pop had a close-knit group of friends, and he was actually the last one of all of them to go. They were all drinkers and cigar smokers. He had actually built a bar in his basement, decorated with posters and little gag things he'd gathered over the years. He was the musician in the family, and he also had a piano down there, and he'd play and sing, all from memory. He sang for us a few times. A lot of the stuff he collected was just hilarious little things, maybe a little bit bigger than a post card, but with hilarious sayings. Like the one, which is definitely my favorite... no drawings, just some text: "Put it off until tomorrow, you've made enough mistakes for one day" !! That's just marvelous.

Of course, there were plenty of newspaper clippings, and whole newspapers. One from 1970, which looking through it, I found ads for technicians wanted to go over to Vietnam to assist. A newspaper from 1963, which headlined "Kennedy Shot to Death", and one from 1969, "MAN WALKS ON THE MOON". Yes, actual papers, some almost 40 years old, others a bit older. Yellow with age, but the ink on them still brightly showing historical events. Steve was going to take them and get them framed, and let the kids take them to school when they study about those things. Kira's eight now, so she's learning history (or will be soon) and other fun stuff.

There were a ton of unopened bottles of stuff by the bar. Wines, liquors, carbonated water. My Dad was like "should we keep these", and my brother and uncle were like "I don't think they're good anymore." And I said "there's only one way to find out." Scott got a kick out of that :) Also, in the back, there were cans of beer unopened. A pounder can of Foster's... we couldn't tell what year it was from, but it was definitely really old. They just don't make cans like that anymore, and you could tell it was really old too, because of the tab that came off, rather than pushing it in like today's aluminum cans. I dumped that one out, and it just didn't look too appetizing. Foggy, disgusting, old beer. I remember my dad had cans like that, where the tab comes off, but that was back in the late eighties.

After about four hours of work, we almost got the whole house empty. There were eight of us working. The front of the house was lined with garbage, as was the entire side of the house. It'll definitely take the garbage truck two or three visits, but we're not even done yet. We were allowed to take anything we wanted, because there is just a ton of history there, and anything that can't be considered trash could be considered treasure. I got two things out of it. Pop-pop had a collection of canes, but I really don't remember him using one. Ever. There was this cool one that I decided I needed. I'll never use it either, but canes are sweet. Also, there was this old coffee mug that was with the bar. Hand made similar to that of pottery. And in a kiln. Glazed or whatever. I'm bringing it into work with me. Work complains that I use too big a mug, and this one probably holds a little bit less. Plus it's brown, so it can't be stained :D

After all of that, we all went to the Ivy Inn, drank, played shuffleboard. I had some awesome shots.

Expensive investments require expensive investments

2008-01-09T01:00:35Z

Damnit. When I bought my guitar for a pretty penny, I thought I could compliment it with a new cheap amplifier. This isn't the case at all! The amp I got sounds like ass (a Hartke 60c or something), which probably isn't the manufacturer's fault at all. It was reboxed and even cheaper than a new one. But an amp that cheap can't sound good, that's all. It was only $160! That's really cheap for a 12" combo tube amp. It only had one tube, a preamp tube.

Now for the new amp. Fender Blues Deluxe! That's right, baby. 5 tubes. 12 inch speaker. Warm bluesy tone. I've read reviews and watched videos. And from talking with my coworker all the time, Fender tube amps are really the way to go. It's not a Twin Reverb or even a Hot Rod Deluxe, and definitely not a Blues Deville (which I've actually owned in High School), or any of those really expensive amps, but it's tweed, and it has tubes, and I couldn't turn up my 4x10 inch Blues Deville past 2.5 (it went up to 12) to enjoy it. Except for the time I played outdoors at our school concert, or in the auditorium, I turned it up to 4 I think. Ooh. I can't imagine turning it all the way up. Plus something like that is just way too big. I remember having a hell of a time carrying that thing around to gigs. It was like 60 pounds, easily.

And a Blues Deville is probably worth $900, and that was for my $400 Epiphone Casino to sound better. I didn't buy it, it was a Christmas present when I was 17 or so, and of course, my Uncle Butch worked at a guitar store (he is an amazing guitarist too), so he probably got 40% off. I ended up giving that amp to my cousin, Bill, who plays and sings at his church, and writes tons of original music. And that Epiphone Casino is a story in and of itself.

I was at the local guitar shop, Todaro's, on Lansdowne Ave one day, and they had this Casino in there. I looked at it, saw the price tag ($400??!?!), and decided to have them hold it for me, and I could pick it up that Saturday. Turns out, it was only three months old, and the previous owner just decided to quit playing. Came with the case and everything. Somehow, I had over $400 in my bank account, which was amazing since I was 16 or 17 at the time (before Christmas and the amp, obviously), and I've hardly had that much money in the bank since.

Check out the new amp here. I'm also looking to invest in some recording equipment, including a microphone, an interface for my Mac (there's actually quite a few that include inputs for mics and 1/4" standard input jacks, which connect to the Mac through FireWire, and of course, the main reason for getting it, higher quality, 24bit recording), and a "Boom" microphone stand, so I can set it up in front of the amp, or adjust it and have it in front of my face. After that purchase, look for tons of junk songs to show up on this website :)

After some looking, this is probably the audio interface that I'll get. Edirol FA66 24 Bit 96kHz. It does six tracks, but if you use only four, which I will, it records at 24 bit, 192khz. That's getting into iTunes Plus, high quality sound :P I don't know what lossless is considered... probably around 1mhz or at least 512khz. The class called "Science of Sound" in college was one that I wanted to take, but was full when I tried to sign up for it. So, ask one of the jerks who signed up for that class ahead of me, if you're that curious. Or just Wikipedia it :P

2008 Predictions and Resolutions

2008-01-02T20:00:17Z

I have seen a lot of 2008 predictions in the areas of business and technology, so I thought I'd add some that I was disappointed to not see.

#1. There will be a huge boost of business in the area of personal defensive equipment against big cats. Due to the zoo mauling a few weeks ago by a tiger (lion? forget), this will be estimated as a major threat that could happen to anyone anywhere. Marketers will try to push this on anybody who just lives in the same city a zoo is located. Items will include a steak hook that can be worn on the back with sirloin steaks that should be changed every four weeks. Also, a big ball of yarn with sedatives soaked in should be the second top selling item.

#2. Cricket will overtake baseball as the popular "innings" and "runs" based game in the USA. Look for major league franchises to start popping up in major cities throughout the country by around March. Philadelphia will have a team, called "The Philadelphia Phickets" which many Philadelphians will just call "f%@# its", which wouldn't be unheard of with the popularity of the acronym for "First Union Center" before it changed to the Wachovia Center, raising its popularity tremendously in Philly. Also, MLB All Stars like Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins will become addicts to the wicket and the 'silly point' and ultimately switch professions.

#3. 30s and 40s style blues will be the thing in 2008. Young kids and old will throw in their Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker albums, some will learn guitar, some will learn harp, all will learn soul, and we'll see around 300 new bands all performing Mississippi River Delta blues into a can recorded onto a phonograph. Eight track digital recording will see a huge dip in profits. As will any electricity based recording equipment and even instruments. Old acoustic guitars are the new gold.

#4. The internet will show its age. People will find a new way to communicate... speaking. Merchants will find a new way to hawk their wares... mainly I see door to door sales (with sales men or women knocking on your door to sell you things and let you try them out before buying) as the main means of income this year. This will inevitably force people to places they haven't been in a long time: outdoors, in order to avoid all of the interruptions during their personal communication time. This will lead to the next method of sale: markets. Also, as a side effect, people will stand by merchant booths and tell you what they think of products that they are selling. This will lead to a kind of "social networking" as I like to call it. People will say "Hey, do you want to be my friend?" Then they will exchange pictures and addresses, and each are welcome to stop by any time. As long as you're not one of those door to door salespeople, you are welcome. To show other people who they're friends with, they'll have a bulletin board of their friends' pictures, along with their addresses and interests, which will no doubt lead to some extra trips to their house by the salespeople, if they are deemed to be in the target market.

So now for some resolutions. Yeah, I never follow them. But this year, I won't either. So, I can basically set any goal and be guaranteed it won't be met.

#1. Make a million dollars. This is pretty easy. I just have to work six to eight jobs simultaneously. Actually, closer to 14 but I figure the interest I can gain from all the extra dough might be enough to put me over the edge.

#2. Make a million friends. If I do this, I can probably ask each of them to give me a dollar and then I'll have two in the bag.

#3. Make a million songs. If I do #2 and make a song about each of them, I can charge them each a dollar for their song so they feel like they're getting something for their money, accomplishing these first three at once.

#4. Make a million enemies. Let's see, I can do #2, make a song for each of them, charge them each a dollar and tell each one of them after they paid me that I gave everyone else their song for free. Then call them a sucker and laugh at them.

#5. Start a war. Do the first three, then make a million enemies that weren't once or are my friends, and start nasty rumors about both sides. My friend Jim once got arrested for inciting a riot, this would definitely win bragging rights.

#6. Travel to outer space. With a million dollars I'm sure I can hook up with one of those X Prize teams and book a flight.

#7. Quit drinking. Ok, that one's ridiculous.

So, pretty reasonable. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Amber Alert

2007-12-26T23:00:43Z

Tonight, my brother Scott and I were watching Transformers on Demand and there was an Amber Alert on the Emergency Broadcast System. Haven't seen anything on any websites and we went right back to watching the movie since we can't help. It happened at 7pm, I got to Scott's house at around quarter of, and we were watching the Sixers and playing with Danny and Megan. The alert didn't come on until 9pm. Plus it happened about 7 or 8 miles from us. Two kids, a 3 year old girl and a 6 year old boy, in a car when it was stolen. I don't want to be prying and definitely not scrutinizing, but I hope that the criminals stole the car for just the car, and do the right thing, and not anything stupid. We discussed it for a few minutes, hoping for the best, after the alert stopped. What else can we do?

Merry Christmas etc

2007-12-25T11:00:50Z

Today, I got a pair of really comfortable slippers that can also be worn outside, so I don't have to put my shoes on to take Kodie out. Also, I got a sweater, a zipper up sweater, a manger scene for my house because I have no Christmas decorations, and I made a funny today! I was getting my hair cut (Christmas present!) by my Mom, and she says that my brother Pat has turned into an ironing maniac! I said "That's ironic" :P You love it.

Today we're going to the 12:00 mass at St. Bernadette's, the school I went to all my life, until High School... which, it turned out, taught me nothing. Then my Mom's family is having something way up in the Warminster part of the country. Should be a good time. My parents are driving me so I can drink all I want. w00t.

I got my brother Pat, for a Pollyanna gift, a money clip. It's a nice one that has a diamond on it. I gave him the bag with it in it, and he read it with a big question mark on the end, like "Jeweler's?!??" I said "It's your bling" having no knowledge of what bling is :P It's sharp looking.

I also got floss, Scott gave me $50 and a 12 pack of Pepsi for a Pollyanna gift, I got a $20 gift card to Wawa, a zipper down hoodie sweatshirt (awesome), and socks, a belt... I forget everything else, but it was a productive Christmas as always. Of course, I bought myself the Gretsch earlier this month :)

Merry Christmas!

The Gretsch is Fabulous

2007-12-06T23:00:04Z

It's got a hell of a tone to it, but any guitar really sounds great brand new. What really separates the great one from the shitty ones is how they sound after a year of abuse. I'm a big fan of Brian Setzer, and he's what turned me onto Gretsch. Of course, his Gretsch is almost 50 years old, made in 1959. I don't know how much longer he has with that thing, because as we all know, wood is not the most durable piece of material. It warps and bends, cracks, splits, splinters.

Anyway, I wasn't planning on learning any Brian Setzer (Stray Cats) songs only because I thought they'd be too hard. There are some tabs out there on the 'net, but on no sites that you'd want to visit (not on Windows with IE anyway), but I figured since I have the Mac and Firefox, I'd be fine checking them out. So I learned Stray Cat Strut all the way through in about 30 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to learn it that quickly, considering how long I've taken to learn comparatively simple songs. I'm talking solos, chorus, verses, everything. Intro, outtro. Bridge. However, relative to all Stray Cats songs, that song's pretty easy to learn. Next up... Sexy and 17. That song is my favorite.

I tried the rockabilly picking again, this time without thinking (because no brain makes that a difficult task)... SO much easier!! I can pick the bottom strings with my index, middle and ring fingers, and pluck the top two strings with my thumb. The pinky is worthless. Actually, I did it so much, that right now I'm typing so fast and not making any mistakes. I can type so fast, I could probably fill this post with a whole bunch of boring stuff. I won't though.

GOOD NEWS! Jim and Kate, in England, had a DAUGHTER!! LillyAnn (one or two words, and/or one or two 'L's, I'm not sure, but you get the idea)!! Welcome to this world, LillyAnn, make yourself at home. I will be her godfather!! Woohoo!! I'll probably get assloads of pictures of her tomorrow. And I'll take some of my guitar.

Last news... I ordered an amplifier. Hartke GT60c 1x12 tube amp. Should be sweet.

Gretsch Update

2007-12-05T00:00:20Z

No guitar yet. When I ordered it, I was so excited and forgot to get it shipped to my work. I have been kicking myself all day. Well, ever since I ordered it even. But especially today because they tried to ship it. I called Fedex and they said I can have them hold it for me to pick it up, but the hours of operation at the warehouse that it's at tonight are only from 8 to 5. Of course, I called at like 6:30. So, as of the time of this post, I'll have it in 8 hours. I'll bring it into work, they'll appreciate it. Two other known musicians, and at that place, that's 30% musicianship. I'm going to wake up early no matter what time I get to bed, I'm excited to see this thing. So pictures tomorrow (or later today technically).

Should be da bomb. I've gotten the basic fingerpicking down so that's good, time to move onto some more advanced stuff. I will probably make a trip to the local music shop this weekend and see if I can pick up a cheap version of the amps that I've been eyeing on Samash.com.

Of course, I don't have to learn to fingerpick just to own this guitar. I don't have to learn anything. I just want to expand my horizons.

All I know is...

2007-12-04T04:00:09Z

I tried to play my guitar picking it rockabilly style, and my brain fell out.

Not that I'm horrible.

I never really got good with fingerpicking though, so I have to learn that first. Then I have to get the thing down where you do the bass line with your pick and melody with your other three fingers. But, anyway, how about that Internet and its invaluable resources. You can really learn whatever you want. Hopefully there's a brain replacement video out there somewhere.

Today is the day my Gretsch gets here.

I hate politics

2007-12-01T04:00:23Z

I found it hilarious when I read this:

As news of the hostage-taking spread, candidates from across the political spectrum put aside rivalries. Democrat Barack Obama, who has been trading sharp barbs with the New York senator, called Clinton to offer support.

Republican Mitt Romney, who has also been taking shots at Clinton, asked his staff to lock all his field offices and be on alert for suspicious individuals. "Our thoughts and prayers are with those involved in the situation in New Hampshire," Romney said in a statement early in the day.

First, it's like every other candidate wishes something like this would happen to another candidate so they can get good publicity out of showing their support, while the candidate it happened to appears weak. I can imagine Obama getting off the phone with the PR rep or an advisor, saying "call Hillary and offer your support". Then he gets off the phone with Hillary and immediately calls all of the local media. Or his PR advisor.

And the next thing that made me laugh was Mitt Romney locking his offices and looking out for suspicious people. When I first read that, I was like "Who the f@#$ is Mitt Romney?!"

I told Kate that I alternate the party I vote for every four years, so this year I'm going Republican.

My New Guitar

2007-11-30T15:00:36Z

That's a Gretsch G5120 in Black. I'll probably swap out the cheap pickups for some TV Jones "TV Classic" or "Power'Tron" pickups, which are standard nowadays on Gretsch guitars, but were one of the things cut when they put this guitar together to cut the price. It's a good starter Gretsch, but I can't sacrifice sound quality. Perhaps later I'll go with a Nashville, but I know I'm definitely getting one or more of their solid bodies, like the Corvette. Goddamn they can design a guitar. Beautiful.

A little history about TV Jones pickups: They went into a '59 Gretsch, whose pickups are called "Filter'Tron", fully analyzed all the electronics, and made their TV Classic after it. They seem like a sweet company, plus they have an upgrade guide made specifically for the guitar I got, the Electromatic. That's here. I'll probably keep in the original humbuckers for at least a little while though. Pictures of mine to come soon!

Quitting Smoking, Take 734

2007-11-29T19:00:30Z

Still going strong from Sunday at around 3pm. Still fighting off monster urges at the pace of about 3 daily. Usually in the morning, sometimes right after lunch or not until about an hour before it's time to leave work (usually because I'm antsy just to get out of there too), and usually one as I'm going to bed.

They are monster urges, like the song "What I Got" by Sublime, I'm gonna die if I don't get a cigarette. These are monster in every sense of the word. I tried with just willpower and mind diversion (thinking of something else), but the nerves in my body still say "Will you just go get a f@#%ing pack of smokes already, a@#%hole?" No, f@#%#@er! :P I don't like my body so you'd think I'd fill it with bad stuff like cigarettes, but I'm not smoking just to spite it. Mofo.

Craving a cigarette is brutal. You can't concentrate, sit still, or really think about anything else. When you're thirsty, really thirsty, you have to get a drink right now. You notice, "Goddamn I'm thirsty", and rather than trying to think of something else or ignore the need, you just go get water. It's the same when you're addicted to smoking. Only slightly worse for you.

It's really the hardest thing to do ever. Even if you manage to quit, you'll remember how good it was to smoke. I know a guy who smoked for 20 years, that quit 30 years ago and still has dreams about smoking. That's my fate, probably. It's so good, but my will power is pretty good this time. My thinking (and I would recommend this thinking to anyone) is that if I smoke now, I'll feel really good but then I'll be smoking again and will feel like crap in a few days. And if I keep off of them, I'll feel really good for a long time, but a slightly different kind of good. I can't smoke anymore, either. I never feel like doing anything. It blows.

During those monster urges, I'll hold off on doing anything about them for a bit because I like feeling my heart beating really hard, begging for a cigarette :P Then, I'll just breath really deep for a while, and if it's not gone then I know it's a monster urge. So then I'll pop in a nicotine lozenge. I can't even describe how bad nicotine urges are, so you just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to keep this up. I'm going to the Eagles game on Sunday, maybe I'll be off of the lozenges and not craving cigs at all, and can drink and not smoke all day long :) That would be the best. Wish me luck!

What's a gamer to do

2007-11-28T00:00:30Z

It's been a few weeks since my last confession. McNabb sucks. I watched a documentary called "Maxed Out" that I think should be part of High School education (of course, it'll never be if the banks still have all the money). I bought about 8 games in the past two weeks and have spent the most time playing Civilization IV. Can't help it. I'm finally quitting smoking. Tonight, after two days, I've had major urges, but unlike previous attempts in the past month or so where I just went out and bought smokes, I haven't caved and still haven't popped in a nicotine pill to rid the craving. But I'm not craving anymore. That's a step. Still can't drink and not smoke, so no drinking for me anymore. Maybe I'll exercise. I was at the St. Joe's game tonight. They played Ball State, and on average, everyone on St. Joe's was about 6 inches taller than the guy they were defending. Ball State was a small team, but they looked really good. Small, quick, of course, good shooters, great passers, pesky defenders. St. Joe's won though, coach Martelli learned a few tricks from watching me on the playground. You're welcome. That and god damn his team can shoot three pointers. 74 points total, about 54 from 3 pointers, and around 6 from two pointers, the rest free throws. Gotta check the stats, but that can't be too far off. Here's Ball State's coverage. And SJU's.

Weird

2007-10-30T17:00:25Z

I got this external hard drive to use with Mac OS X Leopard so I could use "Time Machine". I'm in fear of losing my music and stuff. I tried connecting the drive. It found it right away, but when I went to set it as my backup drive for Time Machine, the disk utility included with Mac OS wasn't able to format it. Hoping it wasn't a bad drive, I plugged it into my Windows machine and successfully formatted it with NTFS. Weird, too, was that after that, I was able to connect it to my Mac, and presumably read/write from/to it (but I didn't try, but it definitely showed up as a drive on my desktop). I tried again to use it for Time Machine, and again it failed. Until today, when I got home for work, I was dead set on getting a new drive and using the TB drive for my Windows backups.

I had this idea that 1 TB was too big for it? Yeah, I was skeptical about my own thinking on that one as well. But anyway, I tried to partition the drive using the same disk utility in Mac OS. It successfully partitioned it into two drives, basically splitting the drive in half. After that, I was able to use it with Time Machine. Not wanting only 500 GB for daily backups of my 160 GB Mac drive, I tried to erase it and format it again. It worked! So now I have a full TB for backups of my Mac. I'll just get another external drive if I really need Windows backups, but there's really no cool (maybe good, but certainly not cool) software out there to do it. Maybe this will help someone. The drive I have is a USB 2.0 Western Digital "My Book" at 1TB. There's another model that has firewire, but USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire 400 (but I think FireWire 800, which this MacBook Pro also has, is faster than anything out there). Peace.

I'll post a picture or two of Time Machine in action soon, but there's TONS of pictures out there, so don't wait on me.

Bye Bye Music

2007-10-29T00:00:03Z

I just deleted over 200 songs from my iTunes library. Like I said I was going to do a few weeks ago, in preparation for my iPod touch, I followed through and a lot of songs that weren't apart of any album (at least not that I ever owned :P ) are now gone. Getting rid of those stupid blank albums is big. Plus I found some more music. Listen to these groups:

Spoon
The Beautiful Girls

Texas and Australia. Yeah, they're not anything like each other, but they fill certain voids in my life. Spoon is really good and I just bought four of their albums blindly. Listened to them on the way to Delaware. A coworker backed up my decision... I asked "Ever heard of the band called 'Spoon'", and he said "Of Course!" He has about 500 GB of music, and typically a pretty good taste (he's got an original vinyl Jimi Hendrix "Axis Bold As Love" under his desk at work, along with a ton of others. I trust his musical taste :P And The Beautiful Girls was one that iTunes recommended to me for buying G. Love and Special Sauce's "Philadelphonic". Usually, for buying a G Love album, it would recommend Jack Johnson or some Jack Johnson sound alike. Personally, I have no problem with Jack Johnson, but his music isn't as bluesy or R&B as G. Love, which is why I love G. Love. So, I was skeptical when iTunes recommended another album based on a G. Love purchase. But these guys seem to be the real deal. Surfers from Australia (I'm guessing... 10% of the population down there surfs) who sound just different enough from G. Love to like them. But the Jack Johnson sound grows old on me. Gotsta rock. Because after I listen to G. Love, I'll put on Beastie Boys to keep me going. JJ might have good melodies, but I can't sing at work. I can nod my head violently though :)

Ipod touch is great

2007-10-27T00:00:16Z

not only does it play my music, but I'm able to hijack some neighbor's internet on the back porch of my parent's condo in Delaware and make posts to my website. I'm drinking. It's fun. Quitting smoking is hard. Tomorrow I'm making a surf video of my two brothers, Scott and Pat. I just drank ash I think. But I'll import it to my Mac, cut it up with iLife 08, put music behind it, and hopefully have a pretty sweet video I can share with the world, or more! I'm getting pretty proficient at typing with this thing. I am drunk too! Or, more like, I av dtunj top!!! Hehe

Wednesdayarily Post

2007-10-24T18:00:36Z

The house is now mine. Parties galore in coming weeks. My rate lowered and no PMI. 'Tis a beautiful thing.

An even bigger week

2007-10-17T02:40:32Z

So, some big weeks lately... This week:

Monday: Paid off my car on Friday and got the title on today!

Tuesday: Received second iPod Touch that I didn't order, and assumed I'm on some sort of iPod touch weekly subscription, for only $400 a week! I sent it back. (It was Amazon's fault, not Apple's :P )

The rest of the week... I will finally be buying my house! My parents sold their house and move on Halloween. They are hiring movers.

My keyboard's kinda screwed up because soda was spilled on it (not me!!). The keys were really sticky, so I pulled a bunch of them off and wiped behind them with a wet paper towel, but my "I" key will never be the same (although it works fine, it just sticks up a little more than the others), and my "0" (zero) key (and hence, my "close parentheses" key) makes some weird noise when pressed.

This month and next are big months for gamers:

Crysis Collector's Edition DVD-ROM with Bonus! PC Pre-Release
Ships 11/13/07 $59.99
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men with Bonus! PC Pre-Release
Ships 11/20/07 $49.99
Sim City Societies with Bonus! PC Pre-Release
Ships 11/13/07 $49.99
Super Mario Galaxy Wii Pre-Release
Ships 11/12/07 $49.99
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune PS3 Pre-Release
Ships 11/20/07 $59.99
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure Wii Pre-Release
Ships 10/23/07 $39.99

That's my shopping cart at EB games.

This Friday will be the first time all of us from work head out to the bar since we hired a bunch of new people, including me! We're gonna get wasted.

I'm 3-3 in Fantasy Football this year, winning the last game by 2 points! Tony Gonzalez had a huge game, and Muhsin Muhammad has finally started scoring for me. My team stinks, though. It will be miraculous if I finish over .500. I only had 76 points, and really only got points from those two and the Eagles D. No one else contributes. This week I play my brother Scott. He'll be at the Eagles game so I'll have to call him and tell him I'm whooping his ass.

I joined Netflix finally. It's gonna be a great way to finally watch all those movies I haven't seen yet.

I'm also trying to quit smoking. It's rough, and I know drinking will make it really hard, but the trick would be to go back to quitting after a long night of drinking with a few smokes here or there. Drinking in Philly is a lot easier than in the suburbs.

This post has a little of everything.

posted from my iPod touch

2007-10-10T21:00:57Z

This is a post from my ipod touch it has 16 GB of space and about 9 used up. The iTunes wifi music store is sweet. Enjoy your non iPod touches, suckers!!! I also got Stephen Colbert's book. Should be awesome

Mets fans love the Phillies

2007-09-29T00:00:09Z

Taken directly and without shame or regret from metsblog.com

Comment by Johnny B.
2007-09-28 23:11:08

Too late ? the Brewers are dead. Have y?all finally let it sink in? Jimmy Rollins was right. The Phillies really ARE the team to beat.
Log in to Reply
Comment by Lets_Go_Mets
2007-09-28 23:13:05

Rollins walked the walk. Give him credit. He deserves the NL MVP.
(Comments wont nest below this level)
Comment by Trumpzilla
2007-09-28 23:22:55

Jose Reyes comes off just awful by comparison. Rollins is gonna be MVP and Reyes is getting booed off the field in the 7th

Time for some house cleaning

2007-09-11T22:00:41Z

Since I am getting an iPod touch with "Cover Flow", I need to clean up all of my albums that don't have album art. It just won't be pretty. Either I'm going to delete all the songs that don't have albums (or albums that don't have cover art that can be found), or I can just suck it up.

Considering I have only 16 GB (compared to my current 20), and all the album art will be transfered (as opposed to now with my black and white screen iPod), I'll need more room for album art, and it wouldn't hurt getting more room for lots more music. I just got my order from Amazon.com. Here's the inventory:

Nirvana - In Utero
Nirvana - Nevermind
Cracker - Greenland
Cracker - Countrysides
Busta Rhymes - Anarchy
Busta Rhymes - The Big Bang
Busta Rhymes - Genesis
Busta Rhymes - It Ain't Safe No More
Busta Rhymes - When Disaster Strikes

and I have one more coming... Busta Rhymes - The Coming. Should be sweet. Yes, if you're keeping track, that's country to grunge to rock to rap. I like to keep my passengers guessing. (Oh, you like country... :( "I got that head nod shit that make you break your neck"... OH, you like gangsta rap?! "I'm so happy, cause today I found my friends, they're in my head. I'm so ugly that's OK cause so are you"... OH you like... a little of everything I guess). I love having James Taylor come on, then the Beastie Boys, then maybe Bob Marley, The Gorillaz, Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, etc, etc, etc. Something different every time.

Big Week!

2007-09-07T22:00:45Z

Let's see. First thing is my new putter came. I'm golfing with it tomorrow. Next, I ordered a bunch of CDs from Amazon (namely some Cracker that I didn't own yet, Nirvana that I once owned about 13 years ago, and Busta Rhymes, which I've never owned), and an electric shaver. It's the Braun 360 Complete with the self cleaning thing. I'm lazy and don't like wet shaving anymore.

Another thing is I ordered an iPod touch! 16 GB. So I'll be able to have all of my music on there still, plus room for about 7GB more, and more battery power, which is the big thing for me. I've wanted a new iPod for a while, and luckily I waited long enough for this beauty. Today, I was the only one in our room at work after 2:30, and I wanted to blast Beastie Boys for the remainder of the day. I went to plug in my iPod to the speakers, and after about 3 minutes of play, it died. I'm pretty sure there's no battery capacity left. I tried to borrow a coworker's USB adapter but it wouldn't charge. I think this model only charges through Firewire, not USB. Another HUGE thing about the new iPod is the interface. Mine shows just a list of Artists or whatever I select, and I can only shuffle all of the songs. Today I wanted to shuffle all the Beastie Boys songs I have, and I couldn't. I'm not sure if I can do that on the new one, but I know you can shuffle songs in an album, so I'm just hoping you can with an artist.

One last big thing. On Wednesday, my employer offered me a full time position as a Sr. Web Developer (really, a Sr. Developer who does a bit of web development and a lot of other development, like our code generator, multithreaded apps, database stuff, etc). I was contracting there for about 10 months over the past year. It's a job I really like, so I'm thrilled.

Fantasy Football Week 1 Day 1

2007-09-07T00:00:32Z

As I was working tonight, I had my fantasy league up in another window and was watching. New Orleans and Indianapolis (in particular Indianapolis) put up a ton of points. In our league, between New Orleans scoring a 55 yard touchdown (although I don't think anyone has IND defense), Manning, Harrison, Wayne, McAllister, Bush, Colston, and Addai, there were a ton of points scored. We'll see what happens on Sunday and Monday. My team looks pretty good compared to "Pud's" team with 3 injury reports (the red crosses), with 2 questionable for Week 1.

Golf Rocks

2007-09-03T01:00:03Z

Zatko and I went golfing today at Flying Hills golf course in Reading, PA. It was a close match throughout, but I ended up losing by 4 strokes, 87 - 91. It's my putting. My drives were out of this world. I had a slight draw on some, making them just look gorgeous. One I hit 260 yards. Although it was downhill, it was a par 5 and it left me with only 190 yards to go. A 3 iron struck well, with a little luck, got me to the front fringe where I chipped an 8 iron and damn near sunk it for Eagle. I parred the hole, though, because I'm the worst putter ever.

I have to get that down. I hit maybe 1 bad drive up until the 17th hole, then hit two consecutive bad drives (with a mulligan). Luckily I found one and didn't have to hit the ball I had to drop. I got a 6 on that hole. If my putting was on, I would have shot 81. Seriously. If all the holes I three putted, I two putted instead, I would have 81 easily. Either I have to get closer to the pin on my approach, or I have to get better at putting. But, first thing's first, my putter sucks. I looked tonight on the website of Dick's Sporting Goods, and I picked out this one. Should be awesome. My current one has about a 2 millimeter line to line up your putt with, and my eyes just aren't that good.

Funny story... Zatko ended up about 4 feet in front of a sign that stood about 18 inches tall, and was a weak metal, kinda the thickness of a license plate. He only had to go about 40 yards, so the shot would likely get right up and the sign shouldn't come into play. I still said, "Do you want me to move the sign?" He's like "There's no f#@#$%ing way that I'm going to hit it." So I said "Alright." And I was thinking "Just watch your balls when it comes flying back at you :P" Sure enough, CLANK!! I laughed, and he took a mulligan.

I was looking around Dick's site more, out of curiosity. Oooh, Callaway Irons with Graphite Shaft, $599. Damn. I have a set I bought for $400 used. Titleists. 2-PW. The only thing that ever lets me down is my swing, and it wasn't happening that often today. I was all over that flag. Not really, but I was hitting them good.

One thing on clubs, though. I haven't ever used a big headed driver. I don't think less of anyone who does :P But I won't use one. I'll stick with my old, normal sized Callaway Big Bertha driver. Also, I get comfortable with a set of clubs and they're all I need. So I won't get a new set for a long time. What usually causes me to get a new set is if I lose one (either to breaking or leaving it on a course somewhere), or I try another club and manage to hit it better. In this case, ignorance is bliss. If I don't ever hit another set of irons, I have no idea what I'm missing, and therefore don't have to spend $600. Same with a driver. I'm terribly happy with my driver, especially after today. You know you're doing good when your friend calls you an A-hole for putting your drive in the perfect location for the hole. Not only putting it there, but saying, before you hit it, "I should probably put it right there", pointing in the exact direction where you eventually hit it. That's why I'll never get another driver either. When I'm not doing well, it's my own damn fault.

Putters, on the other hand... I'm comfortable with lining up a drive and an iron shot. Even a chip where you set the ball up behind your feet and your feet are aiming way to the left, I know exactly where it's going to go. Of course, picking the right direction on a green is tough. This is a tough game. But I never got comfortable lining up a putt. I need that new putter, and I need to try to play every other weekend. I want to get really good, and that's the only equipment I need.

Before that, I needed a wedge with a high loft. Last week, I put a ball 4 feet 8 inches from the pin and won closest to the pin out of like whatever 8 times 18 is. It was a shotgun start, two foresomes a hole. Lots of people. I won. I picked out a 56 degree sand wedge to fill this need. Absolutely, I didn't go into one sand trap today. Although, this course didn't have many, and I can only remember one time when either of us went in. Zatko got right out of that pickle though with a great shot. I could probably talk about golf all day. Especially after a relatively good round. When I get that putting thing down... well, I'll stop.

My Fantasy Football Draft

2007-08-30T23:00:53Z

I participated in my first "live" draft last night. The first "live" one because the first one I did was over the internet. This one was at Stork's house and 14 of us piled in to take part in the madness. They had a draft board, all the players on sheets by position, each on a sticker to put on the draft board, all color coded. The four Connell brothers in the draft all ended up in the same conference, which ended up being called (by my suggestion) the CFC. It was originally AFC and NFC, so now it's AFC and CFC. After about four and a half hours of sweating, smoking, and waiting, here is what my initial lineup looks like:

1. Shaun Alexander - RB
2. Chad Johnson - WR
3. Philip Rivers - QB
4. Tony Gonzalez - TE
5. Eagles Defense

After the first five picks, not a ton of notables were left, so here's the remaining 11, in no particular order.

Jeff Garcia - QB obviously
Cadillac Williams - RB
DeShaun Foster - RB
Santana Moss - WR
Muhsin Muhammad - WR
Marty Booker - WR
Jacoby Jones - WR
Owen Daniels - TE
Matt Stover - K
John Kasay - K
Buccaneers Defense

Phils Sweep Mets

2007-08-30T17:00:32Z

Move to 2 back of NL East lead.

Shipped

2007-08-20T17:00:42Z

BioShock GameStop Exclusive Limited Edition 1 Shipped

Golf soon

2007-08-17T09:00:57Z

Michael wrote:
Hey fellas. How does everyone's schedule look over the next week or so
for some golf. It has been too long.

Sent from my iPhone

Jared Blitzstein to Michael, me

9:29 am (20 minutes ago)
I think I'm cool next weekend (8/25 8/26).

Sent from my Macbook Pro

Jason Connell to Jared, Michael

I'm golfing friday, but I can also go on the weekend.

Sent from Windo~~~%@#%@#~~@#%~ Windows has encountered a fatal flaw and will now reboot.

Ubuntu After a Weekend

2007-07-23T01:00:38Z

So, I've played around with Ubuntu a bit this weekend. Here is my brief rundown:

1. I have access to a lot more of my computer with it installed without having to do anything really, which rocks. Touch pad (the horizontal scroll thing I mentioned before), wireless networking, and sound mainly. I had a problem in Eclipse where if I tapped the touch pad it would paste whatever I had in my clipboard to whatever file I was viewing at the time. A lot of errant clips got into Java files, and I'd get errors on compile and was like "PC LOAD LETTER?!?!" I'd find it and wonder what it was doing there... eventually I found out the touch pad caused it. I downloaded qsynaptics (since all touch pads really use the Synaptics touch pad), and disabled tapping. qsynaptics is a program that basically modifies the touch pad part of your Xorg.conf file in Linux. It solved the problem. I don't use tapping anyway.

2. I've noticed it's a lot slower than Gentoo was running on the same exact machine. I looked up some speed hacks and tried them out. Most of them were for program loadup times and boot times, speeding up internet access by disabling IPv6, etc. It seems my hard drive is a lot slower. I took pride in Linux against Windows because when I ran Gentoo, the ANT script that would take 20-25 seconds to run on Windows now only took 4-9 seconds. I forget what file system I had on Gentoo, but I know the latest Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) which I have installed, uses ext3. There's a lot of extra data, apparently, that gets written with each file, and my ANT script is all about copying files.

3. I am helplessly devoted and accustomed to my MacBook Pro. After using Ubuntu for two days, which is also supposed to be the most user friendly Linux (from my experience it is way easier than Gentoo), the Mac just blows it away still. I should try getting my development environment moved over to the Mac, but Java on the Mac is weird. I haven't delved down that road yet, whereas I know exactly what I'm doing when I get a development environment set up on Linux.

4. I tried getting a Windows share (SMB) set up on Ubuntu so I could occasionally log in an copy files or whatever. I set it up to where the Mac and my Windows PC could see the computer on the network, but they couldn't connect to the shared folder on Ubuntu. That kind of matters, actually, because I want to get a server set up with loads of HDD space so I can have all of my gobs of data on there instead of on a computer where I only view those files. I don't need to store every file I have distributed over all the computers I have. I'd like to have my music, movies, and a backup of code, maybe a webserver also, running on a server with a free and good operating system.

5. You learn a lot about Linux when you don't run it in root all the time. I had to set up Gentoo, like I said it was like building a house, compared to Ubuntu which is like a fully furnished modern house that you can just move in to. And there's this one part where you have to modify the script that runs when a new user is created, to copy files into their home directory for default settings and whatnot. I could just never get it right. So, I always ran as root. On Ubuntu though, it sets you up to have an account that's not root. You still have root access with the "su" or "sudo" commands when you need it. But you find out more about how security works in Linux. What folders you wouldn't normally have access to (basically, everything except your Home folder), what those other two numbers mean in "chmod 777 filename". All I know is if the first number is 7, and the other two aren't, and root owns the file.. you can't do shit with it. Actually, it's simple. 1 is read, 2 is write, 4 is execute. Or something like that. So if you have all of them, it's 7, or just read is 1, etc. And you notice that it probably took a lot of time to either a) make as many programs not require root or b) catalog which ones need root. Windows hasn't done this until Vista, which it doesn't even do a good job of from what I hear. I'm holding off on Vista until it's absolutely necessary or I can do without it until the next version. Depends what games require Vista, basically.

Probably the answer to my speed-up prayers is a new laptop. But I'd get another desktop before a new laptop, since I can build a desktop, and I can put all those hard drives in it and store all my data. Relatively cheaply too. Time for bed.

Development Underway on Ubuntu!

2007-07-23T00:40:21Z

I've added a new feature this weekend. It would have only taken me about a half hour, but I encountered some major problems on the way. In my ORM system which I call "Dumb", table aliases were previously generated a stupid way. If a table referenced another table, and the two tables were possibly at the long end of a list of joins, it would generate table aliases something like this:

User_UserId_Bio_BioId.BioId

which would be joined from a table with an alias something like this:

User_UserId

This seemed to have worked well for a while amazingly. However, when I tried to build my latest addition, I ran into problems because my User table was being referenced towards the tail end of two different branches in the so-called "join hierarchy". Through much trials and tribulations, I eventually ended up creating a class called "JoinHierarchy" so I could get consistent and unique table aliases. I created a thing called "NewsPicture" which basically links a News item (what you're reading) to a Picture. There's also a "NewsDownload" so I can list downloads as well. Here's what NewsPicture and its join hierarchy looks like:

NewsPicture [PictureId, NewsId, Sequence (for ordering)]
PictureId -> Picture -> PictureAlbum -> User -> Bio
NewsId -> News -> User -> Bio

So as you can see, User and Bio were being joined twice but under the same alias, so MySQL has a problem with that, as well as any database management system out there. Now, each object that can potentially be saved to the database has its own join hierarchy that you can just call up whenever you need a table alias or to get all the joined fields or join statements (including left joins if something could potentially allow null). Take a look at the images and downloads below!! I'll just throw in some random ones this time.

Development Environment Set up on Ubuntu

2007-07-21T15:00:36Z

Wow, Ubuntu rules

2007-07-21T10:00:22Z

It's funny to me, I've always downloaded the latest ISO of Ubuntu Linux, but have never installed it. Frankly because I don't have any blank CDs lying around. So, last night, I fired up Parallels and installed an ISO I had on my Mac, gave it a quick run through, and made the decision to install it on my other laptop which was currently running Gentoo Linux. Jared recently said he was digging Linux working alongside his Mac. He installed Ubuntu, so I figured I'd finally give it a shot. I was just afraid of losing work, but really I didn't get back into it, so it wasn't necessary that I switched operating systems.

Chances are you might not even have heard of Linux (a free open source operating system which competes with Windows, just in case you haven't heard of it), let alone Gentoo Linux, but if you were to install Gentoo Linux, it's like the super user's version of Linux. Say if you were buying a house, Gentoo would be a real fixer upper, and you could even use the analogy of it being all the raw materials and you have to put it together. Basically, I installed it on this laptop and the laptop was crippled for about 3 years (ever since I got the blasted Windows off of it). No sound, no wireless networking, my mouse pad wouldn't work right, and it took about a month to get a screen resolution that I was happy with. Ubuntu on the other hand is like a fully furnished, beautiful, modern house. You just move in and you can start living.

I installed it and fired up a game of Company of Heroes (against only 2 experts and a hard this time on Seine River). It was done before I finished the game in 41 minutes, which I would have hoped anyway. I whomped some ass in the game by the way.

When I backed up my Gentoo stuff, I have this script that I use that sets up a mount to my shared backup drive on my gaming PC with Windows XP SP 2. To do that, you have to use the smbmount command which, once you learn it, is very easy. Then you can browse to the folder that you mounted the Windows share on the gaming PC to, and just start copying files. The thing about Linux, though, is that it is easy once you learn it. But there is that learning curve, and lots of "man" pages that are pretty cryptic, and you have to figure out which options you need, how to format them, and all that other stuff. I don't mind it because I like a challenge.

Getting the files back after I installed Ubuntu, though, was as easy as going to "Places", selecting "Network", going through "Windows Network", opening up my work group, and opening up my Windows PC, "Voodoo2k7". I can then just copy files from there. If I want, which I probably will, I can use the smbmount command to set up a mount point, mount it to /mnt/voodoo, and go into the command line so I can copy stuff using "sudo" into protected directories, like "/usr/local/", since I haven't found a visual "sudo" program on it yet.

The other thing I noticed a short while ago... There's sort of a network button in the top right. I click on it, and it shows me all of the local wireless access points available! Wireless works with no setup on Ubuntu!! That's marvelous. I could have 5 wireless devices running now. In case you missed it, they are : MacBookPro, this Ubuntu laptop, PSP, PS3 (yup, I got one), and the Wii. It's a 802.11n router, so it can handle it. Ubuntu shows the signal strength of it as a sliver away from 100%, but definitely over 90%.

As soon as I restarted it from Gentoo with the Ubuntu disk in, I noticed that it instantly recognized the onboard sound and speakers. It played that nice little Ubuntu, African style introduction chime. I was like "F@#%@ YES!! UBUNTU ROCKS!!!" As soon as I got to a website that expanded beyond the visible bounds of the screen, I tried my mouse pad. It worked. I had spent MONTHS... maybe a couple of hours... trying to get this thing to work on Gentoo. I definitely spent a weekend, actually. Google "set up synaptics mouse pad on Gentoo Linux", and hit up any of the articles returned. You will see it's not easy. The "horizontal scroll" thing was what I couldn't get to work. The mouse pad worked fine otherwise.

I should have installed Ubuntu a long time ago. It wouldn't have ruled out getting a MacBook Pro, though (which is almost paid off, coincidentally), but I would have had a much better experience using Linux, and I might not have stopped using it hardcore in September. Gentoo was way beyond my capacity. I will miss "emerge" though :) Portage was nice, but Ubuntu has a whole graphical software update service. I say, if you're not using Windows for games, throw a Ubuntu disk in the drive and reboot. You won't be disappointed.

My favorite thing about having devices (weird side note... Firefox has a built in spell checker, and it underlined in dotted red, "favorite"... I switched it to "favourite" and it doesn't show any red line. I might have installed the wrong language! Although Ubuntu is maintained in South Africa or something).. oh yeah, so my favoUrite thing about having multiple devices is naming them. My PS3 is named "VoodooPS3", my PSP is similarly named "VoodooPSP", my Windows PC is named "Voodoo2k7" which was mentioned previously. My Mac doesn't have that naming appeal, and shows up on the network as "jasontconnell_s" or something. When I had Gentoo installed on this computer, I named it "gentoovoodoo". I bet you can probably guess what this computer is named... but I'll tell you anyway. "Voodoobuntu"!! Unfortunately, I've retired two computers, the original "Voodoo" computer, and my liquid cooled "LCVoodoo". Oh well.

I may never go back to the Windows Way

2007-07-20T20:50:47Z

Parallels has pleasantly surprised me by not requiring me to use Windows keys in Windows to accomplish stuff. No longer do I have to press "CTRL+C" to copy something, or "CTRL-V" to paste it somewhere. Now it accepts that I am helplessly used to doing things the Mac way, with "Command+C" and "Command+V" accomplishing these two tasks in Windows. Marvelous.

Oh wait... I just tried to do a few things that seemed to be Windows only. "Command+Space" would be what is used for "IntelliSense" in "SharpDevelop" on Windows, but it opened up my Spotlight. Gotta use "CTRL+Space" for that. Oh well. There's a few others.

This sucks

2007-07-18T19:40:26Z

Talk about a few horrible months. However, things are starting to look up. My connection between my MacBook Pro and my Windows PC used to be horrible after I updated my Mac to enable 802.11n, which I had to pay $2 for. My MacBook Pro has all my music on it since I run iTunes and stuff. But the Windows PC, having games and stuff to play on it, has the good speakers. I'd try to play music on the PC, and it would play about 2 seconds and then rebuffer for a longer time than it actually played. SO slow, and no way to listen to music. Today, I switched from WPA-PSK to WPA2-PSK on the router, and voila! Shit's fine.

Hmm, other bad stuff that's happened to me since the worst day of my family's life, June 2nd. Let's see. My car died partially, but thankfully for the quick aide of a neighbor senior master mechanic, it's back up and running. My DVD player won't turn on anymore. That totally sucks because the speakers are awesome and I go surround sound from my TV with it. I didn't get my paycheck from Friday until today. Meanwhile, I was broke. I'm supposed to be paying bills and stuff, and I have no money. Today the fire alarms, which Jeff had taken the care to install all connected, so if something is burning in the basement, the one right above your head in your bedroom goes off too. Today, I smelled what I was sure was urine in the one that was the culprit for all of them going off. I'm sure it was a mouse. They're taking over the world. I threw that alarm out, but I can get another one on Amazon.com, so I'll do that too. But they were going off for about an hour before I figured it out. It sucked, I was deaf for about 20 minutes. My amp died too.

After what I've been through, I'd love for something to be easy and not frustrating as f@#%@#$. F@#%@##. I hope everyone else is having a good time.

Report from Afghanistan

2007-06-02T08:30:30Z

My best friend Jim wrote me from Afghanistan yesterday. He's stationed there temporarily from England, where his wife Kate is going nuts alone! I chat with her nearly every day to keep her calm and sane.

The weather isn't terrible... freezing cold at night, nuclear hot during the day, instant sunburn type shit. We are 5000 above sea level here so the cold is colder and the hot is hotter here. It's nasty, the sun actually hurts when it's on your skin for more than about 5 minutes.
Plus we are taking Malaria pills that say "Avoid direct sunlight, causes skin to be extremely sensitive." Why is that the first time the medication has ever been right.

Damn. So basically we have a bunch of vampires out there in the desert, trying to avoid getting their blood sucked by mosquitoes.

The missile attacks are pretty fucking weird man. I literally felt that one rattle my ribcage that's how close it was. A few of my buddies were eating and the thing literally went over their head, they heard the whistle.

They've had sporadic attacks from unknown Taliban emplacements. One missile attack landed 100 yards away.

I asked who's there with him, and how well guarded is the place. From a previous email, I knew they were surrounded by a town that was anti-Taliban. Here's what he said about that:

Every branch except the Coast Guard is here. Every single person that wears a military uniform carries a gun at all times, loaded. A full out assault on this base is a flat out impossibility. We are all armed, even when we sit to eat and go to the shower. It's nuts. Plus there are a load of other countries here and they are all armed to the teeth as well.

And here's a no brainer:

I just got a new camera in the mail today so I have started taking pictures. I'm gonna have some good pictures when I get back, and some sweet videos. Hey, do you want a Flag that's been flown over a war zone? We can fly them and they make these cool certificates and frame it all up and whatnot. Don't worry about buyting it, I'll get one for you if you got somewhere you'd like to hang it.

Hell yeah I want a United States flag that's been flown in a warzone with a certificate.

I launched a jet yesterday that killed 24 Taliban motherfuckers. I got to watch the video and these poor bastards never stood a chance.

Ahh Technology. Jim's a crew chief who takes care of the jet and gives it the go ahead for whether it should fly or not. No decision goes past him. He also recently was promoted to Staff Sargent.

In a war zone, there's a certain limit about how long you can be indisposed. Either in the shower or bathroom, really. Sleeping can be instantly disturbed with a approximately placed missile launch, so really you're only indisposed in the shower or bathroom. Plus I guess out in the desert there's some water rationing going on...

And the three minute shower thing.... you get in, get wet, turn off water, apply soap and shampoo etc, rinse, get out. Not fun, I can't wait to get in a shower for like an hour and a half. anyways, gotta run, I'm at work. I will catch you later bro.

I told him I tried taking a three minute shower. I have yet to succeed. More to come later I'm sure.

Adventure games are where it's at lately

2007-05-08T01:00:55Z

Outside of binge sessions of Company of Heroes (best game ever) I've been looking for something to relax and play. Something with a story, puzzles, where I can put my feet up and my heart rate doesn't go out of control. I'm not sure if I was looking for that or if I started playing some adventure games lately and have just been enjoying the experience to think that it's what I needed before. Either way, they're good times.

A few quick notable ones then I'm watching "The Good Shepherd" while I try to fall asleep. It all started when I looked at my Grim Fandango disk, and decided I didn't want to get into something really long right now. This was a few weeks ago. As some may know, I'm a subscriber to Gamespot.com, and they've been reviewing these games over the past year that have looked different but I thought they might be like Ratchet & Clank or whatever that game is called on the PS2. But then I watched a gameplay video and realized that "Sam And Max" is indeed an adventure game. So I bought the first season for $35. Six episodes in all. I played the first 4 over a weekend, and the next one a few days later, and the last one is now available for download. These are short games because they're just episodes. Each about 3-4 hours long if you don't cheat. Sometimes I have to though. The reason I'm not downloading the last episode right now is because I'm playing another game. The Longest Journey.

The Longest Journey is cool. It's a full adventure game as opposed to episodes like Sam and Max. You start out and there's truly nothing that you *have* to do right away. You are in the future, living in Venice as an art student. You have two weeks before you have to get your painting done for the show. It's an interesting story so far. I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I also got the sequel for when I beat it. Should be good times.

Adventure games are very hard though, for me. I sometimes don't examine every nook and cranny, and so sometimes they're harder than they should be, because some puzzle might be obvious if I just checked a drawer and found some item that would make it so. Some of the puzzles just seem downright impossible though. I have to open up a walkthrough to help out on some parts. It's brutal. A lot of the puzzles I figure out though. An example of one that I didn't figure out was in The Longest Journey, you talk to the land lady and she found a ring of yours. You go outside and there's this machine, and on it is a severed wire. Just saying that now, though, you'd be like "Use the ring to connect the two ends of the wire, dumbass!!" But it doesn't even enter my mind. Some people maybe, not me. I guess I'm not creative or imaginative. Who knows. It's a testament to the variety and creativity found in Adventure games though. You never see the same puzzle.

I picked the wrong handheld!!

2007-05-03T19:30:18Z

DOH! I recently began to question my wisdom when looking at the best games for the two common hand held gaming systems on the market. I have the Sony PSP which has games like Tiger Woods and Virtua Tennis. The other one is the Nintendo DS. It of course has two screens, hence the "DS" for "Dual Screen". And one is a touch screen.

I was checking out the list of the best games, obviously sorted by rating descending. Out of the top 10 or so games for each system, I found myself wanting more from the DS and already having all the ones I'd want on the PSP. That blows. I'm not going to get a DS soon because I don't really have the time for either anyway. But I chose the wrong one or I am in the wrong profession and should have been able to buy both and determine for myself which one is better. This way would likely be the best way. Oh well. That would surely be a luxury item and I can't buy luxury items now. Only after I have tons of loot saved for a house.

Speaking of luxury items... I'd love to have a file server running on Linux or Mac (preferably something cheap to set up), with tons of space on it, like a terabyte or two. For one thing, I'd love to be able to import all of my DVDs and store them on there, and of course have all of my music on there. Then buy an AppleTV and have my Mac reference all of these things in iTunes. Then of course be able to watch any movie I own with a click of a button on either my TV or my Mac. That would be ideal. I've researched ways to import DVD into a format that iTunes and AppleTV can understand. It's possible but the legality is questionable. They're my movies though, and as long as I keep the disks I should be fine. Although the MPAA and RIAA want to make it as difficult as possible to do that, so Apple really isn't allowed to provide the means, I have to find a hack.

I have to do it some time

2007-04-27T20:50:51Z

When I entered this venture to quit smoking, I didn't also decide to quit drinking. So today, Friday the 27th of April, I'm doing the final disassociation of smoking with activities where I'd smoke while I was doing them. Tonight, I'll be drinking my face off.

I might not make it all night without heavily craving a cigarette, but all I know is the Phillies are playing and I have tons of beer left over from when I went to the Phillies game 2 weeks ago.

I'm sure I'll end up smoking tonight at some point, but it takes practice. If I have beer left still tomorrow, I'll dedicate another night to practicing this hard to master skill. I'm four beers into it right now. I had two after work at the bar across the street from the office, and two since I've been home. I don't care if I have a few, but getting as many beers into it before I really crave one is my goal. That way I can push my limits, and later be like "Well, I can only have a case before I start craving a cigarette... so when I start getting to that point, make me stop drinking."

Phillies take up all my time

2007-04-27T00:00:24Z

I didn't watch today, but whenever the Phils are on I get nothing done. I managed to break out the PSP and play Tiger Woods '07 with the Phillies on. That game has a lot of times that it takes a few seconds to load so I'm more watching the Phillies and shooting 59s secondly.

I ordered clothes the other day and they'll be arriving sporadically. They shipped from 4 different places. I got one package. I noticed the other day I don't have any clothes. I also noticed that the clothes in my drawer stay in my drawer... pretty much since I moved in here 3 years ago. So I wanted to get them cleared out like Tuesday, but the Phillies have been playing at 7:05, like clockwork. I get home at 6 or so, eat or play a video game, then watch the Phillies until 10pm or so. During which nothing gets done except some cheering and other intense fan activities. Then I try to go to bed, but the neighbors' kids and my brother are in bed so I can't do anything that requires listening to loud music, like cleaning or going through clothes and throwing them in a trashbag (they will be dropped off at a good-will collection point soon). I finally fall asleep at 1 or so.

Jeff took out a home equity loan to get some work done. So far we have new windows in the front and back of the house, and we're getting a new bathroom. This week is the bathroom work, until Monday. So, I haven't been able to use the toilet, shower, shave, or anything. We have nothing but a tub with no faucets or any kind of plumbing in the whole bathroom. The sink is in Jeff's room, the toilet is in the basement. It will be done by Monday. A week in all.

Tonight I was over my parents' house because it was Monday when I last had a full shower. I've cleaned my hair twice, washed my face and hands every day, behind the ears too, and used deodorant. I haven't received any complaints from the coworkers, and Jeff and I are recovering smokers so we really can't smell too well still, at least not ourselves. I can definitely smell and taste way better than when I smoked though. I took a shower at my parents' house and it was marvelous. It sucked too because on Tuesday morning, the first of the days where I'd have to go a full day without showering, I woke up at like 5:30 and was like "Man, a shower's gonna be great today!" I remembered then that I wouldn't be able to shower! It was one of those days where it was hot during the night even, and I was feeling sticky. A shower would have really hit the spot. Oh well.

Another thing about no sink is you can't shave. By this morning I had the full Koy Detmer neck beard going. Tonight I got a haircut and shaved.

Two weeks ago on Saturday my friends and I went to the Phillies game. I was coordinator, so I had to buy all the tickets, be there first, supply some beer and food, and collect money and act like I was da bomb. That last part is easy. I had 16 tickets. Zatko and I got there at like 12:40. I probably would have been perfectly fine hanging out with just us two and maybe some girls all day. We were having a good time. Everyone else showed up, fashionably late, at like 2 o'clock. The game started at 3:55. I had about 6 beers before the game, and only one or two after that. I smoked a few, but it's just because I lack any kind of inhibitions or self restraint after 4+ beers. I haven't smoked since. We went to McFadden's afterwards and there were about a million people there. Later Jared vomited on his car :) We all had a great time I think. I'd go again. Good night.

That's what I need...

2007-04-18T16:00:26Z

Contrary to a few posts ago, I need something. A new iPod.

It just occurred to me today as I was listening to my iPod from about 1:50 until about 2:45, after being fully charged, and having the battery run out on me. I think I'll maybe just get a second one, rather than replace this one. The current one has one of those remotes that come with it that make it really easy to use in the car. I'm not sure if the new ones have anything like that. Because on the new ones, it's just the headphone jack, not that other thing next to the headphone jack like on mine. That's wicked useful.

This f@%@#$ing pisses me off

2007-04-14T04:00:51Z

So, at work, we're working on this site for this company, and it's built on this software called "CommunityServer", which can be found at communityserver.org . The thing that pisses me off isn't necessarily to do with that software package, but in software in general, but it's most relevant with that software right now, because it's what I'm using.

Anyway, so many factors end up determining if something is "visible" or not. For instance, in Community Server, it might be a certain "forum". So, a forum might not be visible if the user isn't logged in, if the user isn't in a certain role, if the forum is the private messages forum. Or, it could be an email address, and it's shown to users logged in who also show their email address, or not shown if no user is logged in, or shown to admin. Et Cetera. There's tons of different variables that might determine if something is shown or not. Which is not my problem. It becomes a problem when you inherit this huge software application, and you have to make something behave just like other stuff that's already on the site.

This can also determine other states of an object, like is it editable? Does it get this certain process applied to it, like if certain versions of it X months old should be deleted, can it be printed, does it have a history, can it be part of an RSS or Atom feed, does it have an image with it? Etc, etc, etc. Tons of other things that could all be generalized, and shouldn't have to be figured out in every single instance.

Alright, maybe their software is poorly designed. I never said it wasn't :) But what I'd love to be able to do is, basically, not have to do anything, as a developer, and have it act like other things like it, whatever it is. I don't want to have to specify that, when selecting it from the database, that the "IsPrivate" bit must be set to 0, and that the "IsDeleted" bit must be set to 0. These aren't necessarily the fields, but examples. Also, I don't want to have to specify that the user has to be in the group that the forum belongs to in order to see it.

When I write software, I make it as easy as I can to write later on down the road. There's two ways to go about software development. #1, get the job done, which is how 99% of software is designed / developed. #2 is then, get it done but make it easier to add / change / remove stuff later on down the road. Software is, in fact, never done. It is a fact, a truth, a tautology. There is always something to add that can make it better. But 99% of the software written out there is so finalized when version 1.0 is out the door. Making changes is, for all intents and purposes, a f@%@#$ing pain in the ass.

Forget that it's never documented. That I can deal with. I can read code like a PhD can read a children's book. Although, it's a lot harder to tell what something *is* versus what something *does*. If you were looking at an engine for a blender, but you know you might find the same type of engine in, say, an electrical drill. You can tell that it probably turns something very fast, but you don't know what it is from the high level. Until you see it in motion. So, the code, along with the running version of the application, I can figure it out. Although, I can still read code like a pro. I am a pro after all :P

Anyway, if there was a way to define behavior in an object, without having to specify and filter and code for every possible variation, my life would be a lot easier. The sad thing is, I can think of hundreds of ways, because my mind has been conditioned, through years of hating to write code, to come up with the simplest, most developer friendly solution possible. I'd create interfaces! Object Oriented Programming is the best. An interface for "this might be private", or "this should be filtered for a role", and "this could only pertain to certain users", and "this could be deleted", etc. You just tag your objects with these interfaces and voila! No code!! Your filter logic would be in your data access layer... "if (obj instanceof IDeletable) then don't get deleted ones." Of course, this application doesn't even make it possible for me to modify this without having to put in hundreds of hours of work into it, and that's simply not an option. Stupid software.

Anyway, time for bed. Got some errands to run before the game tomorrow!

Some neat sites on the web

2007-04-14T03:20:39Z

I am a big fan of Amazon.com. I will frequently buy movies or general life needs, like milk, on there. So, I got an email from them saying they've got this new awesome site up called "Askville". I'm like whatever... so I visit it, and there's all these people asking questions and other people answering them. It uses a reward system, kinda like my Vacre Tei site. You get these things called "Quest Coins" whenever you do stuff, like log in, answer a question, ask a question, rate an answer, and other stuff. However, the site that you can use "Quest Coins" on is not up yet. It's called "Questville". Vacre Tei used gold, and you create works of art and sell them...

One site that I saw absolutely no purpose for is twitter.com. It's like, you just say something, and a million people say something too, so whatever you say is immediately drowned out by the other million people saying something. I have no need for that since I find that the most annoyed I get is when I finally have something to say in a conversation, but everyone talks more than me and always get in their 10 "says" before I get in my one. Next thing I know we're 3 topics away in conversation from what I wanted to comment on when there's finally an opening for me to say something. So Twitter is pretty much garbage to me.

I'm still coming up with new technology that I will make a new website with. Unfortunately, that's all I can say at the moment on that.

I'm starting to use Google Notebook. It's neat. Although I think Basecamp or writeboard might more useful, but I'm pretty much committed to Google at this point. The one thing I hate about the web is that everything, before Google, that was useful at all, was all on different sites, with different logins, different URLs, and of course, different user experiences. The last one has come up in work quite a bit, because we're committed to bringing the best user experiences to our clients. But, with different companies, different user experiences are unavoidable, simply because everyone thinks differently. But, after a long while and many successes, there starts to be de facto standards. You have the same thing in first person shooters with movement being WASD and shooting being left click, jump usually being space, etc. You wouldn't want to be the jackass FPS maker that moves that crap around. Although, I was an "arrows" guy at the beginning of my FPS gaming life.

Notebook is neat though because of all the Javascript goodness going on. Also, it's easy to just type up a few notes, save it, and go on with your bad self. There's a plugin for Firefox, so you can have it a click away at the bottom of the browser, open it up, and type in a quick note. Another thing with the plugin is you can highlight some text on any website and click "Add to Google Notebook". I haven't tried this yet, but I'm sure as I use it more I'll find a use for it. The only thing I used it for was to remind myself of stuff that I needed to do or get for the Phillies game tomorrow. I haven't forgotten anything yet :) I'm sure it'll replace my "software ideas" in Google Docs! See, I'm totally "Googlized". No one else has tons of great apps accessible with one sign on.

That's about it. I'm largely difficult to please / impress when it comes to websites / anything / everything. It's not about the technology either, it's about how useful and easy to use it is.

I don't need anything else

2007-04-13T23:00:01Z

Actually, in the time it took to write that title, I thought of a few things that wouldn't kill me to have. Some notes:

1) I got a MacBook Pro: This thing's totally sweet, and I use it all the time at home. It's goddamn beautiful. I use it for music, movies, browsing the web, chatting, working, and damn near everything that you use a computer for. Except playing games and watching stupid content that was made for Windows, like WMVs.

2) I got a new gaming PC. It's got killer specs and I can play Rainbow Six Vegas totally maxed.

3) My car will be paid off in October, and it's still running pretty damn good. I love that thing. The radio's kicking, the acceleration rocks, all the windows work, and the trunk is still as comfortable as ever. When that thing's paid off, it'll be worth about $40 to anyone else, but $1,000,000 to me. No f%@$ing way is anyone getting that thing from me.

4) I could stand to get some clothes. I bought some jeans and some new socks online, and that's pretty convenient, but have you ever ordered clothes online? I was ready to basically eat $40 on these jeans if they didn't fit, because returning them wouldn't be fun. They fit pretty nicely. I have another pair coming, but I definitely need to get rid of the stuff I don't wear and buy a whole new wardrobe. Oh, and I ordered some socks.

5) I need a house. Every month my money goes to helping my brother's money earn money. Or something. I need a house so that I can own something that appreciates, instead of something with actual negative value, like my car. And definitely not rent.

6) I got a Wii. 'Nuff said. Super Paper Mario is da bomb.

7) Movies galore.

8) Music galore. 2200+ songs. I really have no interest in growing my music collection, although I'd definitely consider getting all of G Love's albums. I'm usually pretty satisfied with my music collection, and I never get sick of it.

9) I got 4 fluffy pillows.

10) I quit smoking.

11) Probably could use some lovin'

12) My voice is back baby. I can hit all the notes

13) Today's Friday the 13th

14) Tomorrow's the Phillies game, and I found my cooler, I bought a boombox, I am charging my camera battery, and I'll be picking up lots of beer and a 6 foot hoagie tomorrow. 15 other people, as in humans. Don't forget ice. We'll be way up in section 330. I can't forget the tickets, either. I made a playlist on my iPod called "Baseball game". It starts off with "Lively up yourself" by Bob Marley and ends with "I saw her standing there" by the Beatles. I have another song about a 17 year old girl on there. Can you guess it? I admit it's a bit obscene. (OMG hint!!!)

15) Running out of things to put here. I have a wallet...?

16) Oh yeah, so, I don't *need* anything else besides a house and some clothes. The house will open up tons of needs though.. like a fridge... some rugs.. paint... kitchen stuff... a maid... etc. But for now, I'm just leaving it as a house so as to not feel overwhelmed.

So, there you have it. I'm not going to bed but I'm definitely not typing anymore. I gots me some Super Paper Mario to play.

Two weeks since my last smoke

2007-04-12T09:20:14Z

It's getting a lot easier now. During the first week, I'd pretty much have to pop in a "Commit" for my drive into work to take care of the first two or whatever I'd have before I got to work. Sometimes I'd have a few if I woke up early. Two days ago, I had one towards the end of the day at work, and I didn't have my next one until around noon yesterday! It's easy, but also the nature of the "Commit" lozenge, and your inability to take it and drink or eat for about 35 minutes, I end up taking less of them because I'm pretty much always drinking something. I drink coffee like there's no tomorrow while I'm working. So, if I am to have one in the morning, it has to be during my drive in. My morning at work is all about drinking coffee, so my next chance to have one isn't until my soda or water with lunch is gone. Like 2 or 3pm. If I forget to take my morning one, it's because I didn't need it. Like, as if I'd ever forget to smoke... yeah right. I'll have one for my ride home, and after that, maybe two if I'm playing video games. The urge isn't that bad anymore, although Pat was over, leaving his cigarettes about, and sometimes I'd look over at them and my heart would start pounding, so I just went where they weren't. Until I can have a pack of cigarettes sitting in front of me and not be affected, I know I'm still either addicted or just in love with cigarettes :P I haven't made it this far since about 3 years ago.

Quote of the Day

2007-04-11T17:00:47Z

This quote doesn't make sense:

"Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person."
- Ethel Mumford

It's weird. Is knowledge something you can "know"? I don't think so. You know something, it's knowledge. But you don't know knowledge. I guess it's data. You know facts, lies, or other things. They make up knowledge. If you learn everything that someone else knows, e.g. their knowledge, you have acquired all of their knowledge, but you still don't know knowledge! I was wondering why that quote sounded weird to me. Oh well.

Railroads!

2007-04-03T07:00:23Z

I mentioned in my last post that Railroads! looks great on my new computer. Here are some screens in a game which I am totally dominating two computers. (In fact, I had bought them out YEARS [in game] ago!!) I'm playing on the "Mogul" difficulty which is where it starts to get hard.

In this one, you can see the train's reflection on the water. Also, notice my freaking cash!! $128 MILLION and I'm worth $194 million.

This one was taken a few minutes later and in game time about a year and a half later. Notice the cement holding the bridge, you can see into the water and see it go down to the bottom of the river.

On this one, the water has moved a bit and I have trains on the screen carrying tons of stuff. Well, one actually has no cargo.

This is where I started the game. You can see the relative location on the map screen. I actually started in Harrisburg. I noticed right away that Lancaster had a steel mill and York had an automobile factory. That's like, JACKPOT!! Cars are the most expensive cargo in most scenarios where they appear. I had two coal trains dumping off coal from two different mines to Lancaster, and a single train just loading up as much steel as it could carry to bring to York... very short distance. The next problem was shipping the cars. The only city at the early stages of the game that demanded cars was Washington DC, which, on the map, is the bottom-left-most city. It cost a pretty penny to get down there. But you can see, I bought the Automobile factory in York (which is why it's blue), and it had made $2.8 million. So it was well worth it.

Great game in terms of beauty and fun. Definitely playing again tonight :D

[Update] I just finished the game and, after my career in the rail business, I decided to run for president. That basically means that you played the best you could play. Of course, that's where the game ends. You can still play but you don't run for president :( That would be awesome.

Going strong after three days

2007-04-03T03:25:24Z

It's actually five days with a slight lapse (one smoke) three days ago...

Part of the trick to quitting smoking is that you need to disassociate stuff that you used to smoke a lot while doing. For me it's most things besides going to church or sleeping. Disassociation takes a lot of doing everything that you smoked during, doing it more often and longer than you did when you smoked, and doing it without smoking. The first of the disassociation process for me was video games.

This weekend Beaner and I played the Wii pretty much all weekend. It was indeed another "Wiikend". Tanks on Wii Play is awesome. We pretty much played three games on Wii Play the whole time, which were Tanks, Shooting Gallery, and the one where you have to find Miis. I'm not sure what it's called. Bean made a Mii, too, which looks a lot like him.

Besides the Wii, I played a lot of STALKER, Rainbow Six Vegas, Company of Heroes, and Sid Meier's Railroads! The latter game was played the most because I bumped up the difficulty from where I'm used to playing, and I bumped up the graphics to 1280x1024 with anti-aliasing on. It looked f@%#@$ing beautiful. It's a slow paced game where smoking would be easiest. You're not always doing something with the keyboard and mouse. You'll set up a route and wait until you're able to make enough money off of it to set up more routes. It's a good financial strategy game. Lots of time to sit back and smoke, which is what made it all the more worthwhile to play it a lot.

Did I mention that my new computer is a goddamn beast?! I think it actually runs cooler than my liquid cooled PC. And I'm telling you, Company of Heroes never looked so good. I have it maxed, but the thing that makes the biggest difference is having the effects maxed. So when my rifle guys are shooting their Browning Automatic Rifles, they kick up dust next to the German soldiers they are shooting at. Or when I drop a howitzer artillery strike on an enemy base, the dirt, concrete, and dudes that it hits all go flying. And I'm so damn good. Zatko and I played a multiplayer game at about 12:30 am Sunday on Seine River Docks. It was him, me and a hard computer vs. an expert, a hard, and a normal computer. Zatko was backed into his corner sucking his thumb, while I was trying to make forward progress the whole time. :) It was a brutal match, but I finally broke through the computer's defenses across from me, and eventually made my way through to the other computers. All without smoking. The only bad thing about online multiplayer is that you can't tell which computer is which. Meaning, I would love to know if I had at least the hard computer across from me. Zatko and I were split with the hard computer between us, and the hard computer wasn't doing anything. So he had a good opponent across from him. I know the CPU player across from me was getting help from someone, so it's not like I couldn't take out a medium. The expert was definitely helping. Anyway, after an hour and twelve minutes, the match was over and we emerged victorious.

Rainbow Six Vegas is a fun game, and it also looks terrific. I had started it on the old computer, but decided that I wanted to go through it from the beginning when I got the new computer up. Well worth it. The combat in it is fun. First person, or even third person, shooters haven't really innovated in terms of combat. I can name a handful... FEAR, Max Payne (1 & 2), Brothers in Arms, and Rainbow Six Vegas.

In FEAR, it was just incredible. I have to install that again. Running up to a dude in slow motion and bashing him across the face with your gun could never be equaled in any game. Or throwing a proximity mine then switching to slo-mo and watching it jump up and explode at eye level with enemy. In Max Payne, again with slow motion, diving and watching all the bullets fly was great. Max Payne 2 introduced a more interactive environment with physics, which became apparent from the start when you shot a dude into a tray full of medical supplies in the hospital and watched it all fly all over the place in slow motion. Brothers in Arms had a less interactive environment than both of those games, and no slow motion, but still it was very innovative. You couldn't kill a guy unless you suppressed and flanked. You could sometimes score a lucky shot, but you had to use the situational awareness (pause and view from above the battlefield) to find the best place to suppress from and the quickest path to flank. Each map was like a puzzle. The third one in that series is sure to be a blast, with a more interactive environment (built on Unreal Engine 3, with destroyable buildings and the like).

I just noticed I'm missing some movies. Sometimes my movies will make their way downstairs. I like to watch them on my MacBook Pro, so the best ones are usually in my bedroom. But sometimes my brothers will take them downstairs where they'll pile up until I collect them. Tonight I collected about 30 of them and brought them back upstairs. That's like half of my collection. But I know that I'm missing some, like Minority Report. I should really keep a better catalog... but once I buy a house, it'll be easier to keep track, since I also have some movies in Jeff's room, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'll collect them tomorrow. I'll probably end up buying Delicious Library... if there's a way to export it to some format that can be put onto a website easily. That would be a great use of a webservice... send an image with a barcode and get back the details of whatever it is you scanned. Or just a website with an exportable format where you upload images of the barcode (or ISBN for books) and it adds it to your library. The new applications will not be run on my computer, which is what Google has figured out. There's no need for anything but computational intensive applications, or just stuff that you can't do on the web, to be running on my computer. Figure it out, already, stupid internet. I'm out.

Quitting Smoking

2007-04-01T01:55:05Z

Part 1045:

I decided on Wednesday that I would seek the help of pharmaceutical assistance in my attempt to quit smoking this time. So far, it's working pretty good. I've had just one since Wednesday, but that one has not deterred me in my efforts. I had it Friday night. It was great.

However, not smoking is better. I've been playing video games all day today, during which I would normally resemble a chimney. The one I had yesterday was because Pat left his smokes on the couch when he went out to his car. I have no will power. This is my problem.

No will power but a way to combat it. If I just stay inside and not go anywhere where cigarettes are sold, I can keep off of them for another few days. Although, I did have to go to WaWa today. I ordered Chinese food, hoping they would let me put it on my credit card since I had no cash. This was not the case, and I said "F@#%@". I'd have to go into WaWa, see tons of cigarettes, and not buy any. Mission accomplished! The dude in front of me and the girl behind me bought smokes. I didn't buy any. Jason : 1, Smoking : 1 (since I had one Friday)...

Aside from no willpower, I have no concept of moderation in anything I do. Coffee, pepsi, music, drinking, smoking, etc. In fact, I'll only drink when I can get wasted, and have no problem not drinking any other time. I can't have just one.

But the willpower thing ends once I have no need for or interest in something. So, when I'm no longer addicted, not smoking will not be a problem. Just like I can not go into a bar at 8:30 in the morning. It's easy if you have no desire.

I spent the day playing video games and eating about 4 "Commit" lozenges. I don't keep track, but that's OK. I never kept track of how many cigarettes I smoked either, but this stuff, all I can really get are major cavities! Oh well. I think I'll go brush my teeth.

A lot of people eat a lot more when they're trying to quit smoking. I'm sure if you go cold turkey, you're likely to balloon. Thankfully, I'm not going cold turkey since I know I can't do it that way. Hopefully in a few months, I'll have to ween myself off of Commits and have a huge dentist bill. But I probably won't change my weight. If anything, I'll lose some because I'll be playing the Wii a lot, working out to channel some aggression, and overall just whoopin' some ass.

Wish me luck in my endeavors.

Not holding off on PC anymore

2007-03-22T01:55:56Z

In fact, it's downstairs. I finished the sidework and decided to just order it. Here's what I ended up buying.

1) New keyboard! I'm typing on it right now. It's an Apple Keyboard. No one makes a good plain keyboard anymore. Apple and I share the same philosophy on a lot of things, and a good plain keyboard is one of them. It's gonna take some getting used to though, since this thing is so small compared to my other one which sucked. It had about 80 extra keys, for volume, sleeping the computer, starting certain programs, and a bunch of other crap that I didn't use ever. Not once. Hopefully it's good for games. I'll probably try that out before I go to bed.

2) Don't you hate when you order from one online store, and your order ships from two different places? That's what happened here. I ordered 9 things from newegg.com and 7 of them shipped from New Jersey. Good thing I didn't pay extra for shipping! The other two packages shipped from California! That's fine, but the New Jersey packages got here today, and the CA ones were still in CA last I checked.

3) What I ordered: 2GB ram, 320 GB HDD (SATA-II), EVGA Geforce 8800 GTS w/640 MB RAM (a beast), Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo running at 2.4 GHz, ASUS motherboard with dual GB ethernet and a whole lot of extra goodies (2 graphics slots! 4 DIMMS!!), Huge case with a fan on the top and side as well as the normal places, power suppy, cpu cooler, and some thermal compound. That's 9.

4) What shipped from CA: Power supply and cpu cooler. This makes it impossible for me to put it together tonight. I could but I also got a game for my Wii called "Elebits", which I played for about 8 minutes and later learned that an hour and a half had passed.

5) Upgradeability. My current computer is not upgradeable, which is what I said in a previous post. This computer... Here are the things I can upgrade:

--- Extra memory. Right now I'll have 2 GB and it has two more DIMMs for another 2GB! Won't be doing that for another year or two.

--- New CPU. The motherboard I got can support up to 1066 MHz FSB, and up to Intel Quad Core! Probably as long as they're Socket 775 or whatever, I'll be able to upgrade quite a bit on the CPU. Won't have to for a long while though.

--- Video card. As well as just flat out upgrading the video card when new ones come out which work on PCI express 16x, I can get a second one! There's not a lot of room in there, and I plan on putting a sound card and a physics card in there. There are enough slots of for them, but the fan on the video card covers a ton of shit. If I have two in there, it's hard to imagine what kind of room, if any, I'll have for other crap.

This keyboard is nice. Only thing is that my wrists are more in a carpel tunnel position than with the other one, but I never type this much on the gaming PC! I'm just typing it on here this time to get a feel for the keyboard. It's quiet. And white. Nothing goes with anything anymore. When I strip the parts out of my old gaming PC and put it in the new one, it'll have a black DVD drive sticking out of a silver case... oh well. I'm not playing a game tonight, it's time for bed.

In other news.. whenever I try to preorder a video game off of Amazon.com, it always gets delayed. I cancelled it and placed the order on ebgames.com and it shipped a few hours later. Of course, it's STALKER, which should be fun. The graphics won't be that great, as I suspected, since they haven't upgraded them in about 2 years, but still, graphics 2 years ago were pretty good. You still got dynamic lighting and physics. I can't wait to play that. Hopefully the power supply and cpu cooler get here soon.

I almost could just throw my power supply in the new PC, and use the fan that came with the CPU for keeping it cool, and if the game comes tomorrow and doesn't run too well on this PC, I will certainly do that. The fan that came with it has to work, but the fan I bought is going to run cooler and quieter, which is why it's $30. Anyways, now it's time for bed. This keyboard rocks.

Build a gaming PC guide

2007-03-19T10:00:14Z

This is really just a checklist for me. Let me know if I forgot anything!

You'll need:
Motherboard
CPU
RAM
Video Card
Hard drive(s)
Sound Card
Network, although usually built into mobo nowadays
Keyboard and Mouse
Speakers
Monitor
CD Rom (DVD recommended)
Power Supply
Case

Stripping from another computer that you plan on replacing is usually a good idea, so you don't need to get everything and can save some money, especially if those parts really haven't seen significant technological advance since you bought them.

I am stripping:
DVD ROM
Mouse
Speakers
2nd hard drive
Sound card
Monitor

Make a checklist of what you plan to upgrade on the 2nd go, usually within a couple of months down the road.

I will, in the not so distant future, upgrade:
To dual 22" LCD displays and ditch my 19" CRT

Next, make a checklist of what you plan on upgrading further on down the road, like a year or two.

In a year or so, I will be upgrading:
Sound card to latest Dolby surround and EAX
Speakers to support latest Dolby surround (7 speakers or whatever it is now)
RAM
Possibly a 2nd video card because SLI is awesome.

Find the parts on a trusted website, like newegg.com, outpost.com, or tigerdirect.com. Place order. Wait.

When the boxes arrive, it'll be like Christmas and your birthday for the last 20 years of your life, all in one day. Now comes the best part. Building the beast.

Sloppily take out all the parts and throw them in a pile on the floor, making sure to remove the static guard from each piece, and allowing your dog and/or wool blankets to run over them a few times. Carefully place your mobo on the screw mounts in your case and screw it in. Connect the CPU, RAM, HDDs, Graphics and Sound Cards, and any other cards you won't need because this is a f@#%@$ing gaming machine. Connecting the pin connectors for the case is always the worst, and I just find out where the power switch and LEDs are and connect them, completely ignoring everything else. Who needs a reset button, or an HDD indicator? Certainly not me. Strap the power supply unit (PSU) up in there. Put your HDD and DVD rom drives in there before you start connecting them to the mobo. Connect the power cables to these components, and finally, plug in the power to the mobo.

Close the cover on your case, hopefully making it look like what it did before you took it off, but this is not important. Actually, the more f@#%@ed up it looks, the better. This is a goddamn gaming PC. Cut yourself and throw some of your blood on there, or if you can't be wicked l33t, just find a red marker. Glue with red sprinkles, red #40 food dye in a highly viscous liquid like shampoo, and ketchup all make convincing substitutes.

Connect your monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers and network cable. If you have wireless built into the motherboard like some are offering these days, one of those steps can be skipped. If you have a bluetooth mobo and bluetooth keyboard and mouse, then a few more can be skipped.

Finally, plug the power into the PSU in the back of your case.

Hopefully all went as planned, and when you turn it on, you can immediately begin installing Windows XP (don't get Vista until all old games are supported, like Duke Nukem and Doom). Reboot. Install updated drivers. Reboot. Install the updates from 2002 to SP2. Reboot. Install SP2. Reboot. Install all updates from SP2 to current. Reboot. Note, you may have to reboot a few times for each set of updates. Install DirectX 10. Reboot. Install a game. Play!

You are finished.

Some notes on installation:
The CPU fan does not want to go on. Ever. But don't put too much pressure on the motherboard, especially if it's bending due to the position of the screw mounts. You might want to put the CPU and fan on before you put them in the case.

HDD masters and slaves are a pain. Get SATA HDD drives and an IDE DVD drive if you can. This will prevent much confusion. Get a big HDD (200+ GB) because you don't want to have to uninstall games to fit more on there. You only want to have to uninstall games because the game you are uninstalling happens to suck, or you got totally noobed online and can't bare to even look at the icon on your desktop. The uninstalling games because there's no room thing happens to me every time I get a new game. I have only 80GB and about 5GB left now that I uninstalled a few games that I won't be playing for a while.

Some other recommendations: 2GB ram is good for now. Dual core [insert brand name here] are good, and over 2 GHz is awesome. 700W PSU should be good for all upgrades over the next 2-4 years. Since DirectX 10 is out, get a DirectX 10 video card. Hopefully MS doesn't totally f@#%@ us over and upgrade to DirectX 11 before 2010. Sound cards built on Dolby 5 are great. 5 speaker stereo surround... who in their right mind would *need* more than that? You can save some money this way. I'm keeping my card which is 4 years old now, and my speakers which are 2 years old. Gigabit ethernet is the only way to go now.

Holding off on new PC for now

2007-03-19T09:00:36Z

Depending on whichever one happens first:
#1) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. performs crappy on my system. The minimum requirements are much steeper since the last time I checked.

#2) My MacBook Pro has been paid off. Which isn't really easy for me to gauge since I buy music and TV Shows off of iTunes with that same credit card.

#3) I become a millionaire soon

#4) The bank errs in my favor and I collect $200 (or more).

#5) My computer dies

#6) I accidentally place the order.

Hopefully at least three of those things happen before Wednesday.

Time to upgrade the PC

2007-03-18T00:00:41Z

I hate the fact that I'm contemplating this, but it has deemed itself necessary. I built my current PC two years ago, and I still think it's a beast. Until I try to play the latest first person shooters. I tried to combat this by not playing them, but lately, I really just want to play.

I have the parts to an uberleet PC sitting in my shopping cart over at TigerDirect. I even cut down some unnecessary parts that I can get later (sound card, monitor, dvd drive, extra hard drive), and it's at $2100! Granted, this one's twice the PC I have. Here's a rundown of what I have vs. what's in the cart, and I'll try to make it as boring as possible.

Current PC: AMD 64 FX 53, 2GB RAM, 80GB SATA, 250GB IDE, NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra w/256MB, SoundBlaster Audigy something or other, and the real kicker, it's liquid cooled! This makes for difficult situations.

Dream PC: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, 4GB RAM, 320GB SATA-II times 2, NVidia Geforce 8800 GTX w/768MB, SoundBlaster Audigy something or other, and NOT liquid cooled. Also, dual 22" LCD displays (Sceptre makes a good monitor that I'd definitely get).

Problem with Liquid Cooled PCs
No, they don't leak. Actually, it did, but this won't happen generally. The case that's pictured isn't the current one. Yup, I had to drop $400 on a new case with built in liquid cooling. Long story short, I also had to get a new motherboard because I fried it (not from the leak). Read that story, it's worth it, I promise. The major problem with liquid cooling is that you buy coolers for each component that you want to cool, so if a new video card that you want isn't the same shape as your old one, you have to buy a new cooler, which then means you have to drain your whole system, re-cut tubes, re-tube it all, refill the water, etc. Major pain in the ass.

Long story
My current PC was no longer upgradeable when I built it, for reasons other than me avoiding having to go through the liquid cooling upgrade hell. You see, right when Halflife 2 came out, I was ill-impressed with the performance I was getting on my old PC (AMD 3200+, Geforce 5900 Ultra). I went ahead and ordered the 6800 Ultra for the old motherboard, and AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) was what it supported. A few weeks later, craving even more performance (and coincidentally frequently overheating the old PC), I went and bought the current PC knowing I couldn't alienate my new $600 AGP graphics card. So, right when I bought the 6800 Ultra in AGP flavor, I was f!#%@ed.

For a while there, after I bought the Wii at the end of December, I almost had myself convinced that I already have the best PC games, and any new Wii games plus what I already have on PC should suffice just fine. I mean, really.

Boring list coming up. Awesome games installed right now are:
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (doesn't perform well...), Neverwinter Nights 2 (performs fine), Fallout, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (fine), Dawn of War + Winter Assault Expansion, Company of Heroes, Civilization IV, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Sid Meier's Railroads!, Rise of Nations, and "Steam" with Halflife 2, Episode 1, Day of Defeat Source, Counterstrike Source, etc. More of a DOD guy myself

I dabble in all genres. My favorite, though, is "Real Time Strategy games made by Relic". Dawn of War and Company of Heroes are my two all time favorites of that genre ;-) And I was into Homeworld briefly.

As much as I tried to forget about the potentially great games coming out, I am a paid subscriber to GameSpot, and I have about 30 games in my watched games list. This little tool on that website ensures that you will never forget. I get emails every day, and the two games that I have to go look at right when I get the email are S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (I know, it's a pain to type too), and BioShock. And you can't leave out Spore or Crysis. While Stalker will probably run fine on my current PC, BioShock and Crysis sure as hell won't. Stalker ships this week!! I've been watching that game for about three years now. It's one of those games that I won't believe I'm playing (kinda like Duke Nukem Forever). I already preordered it on Amazon.com.

So, while Stalker was being made over the past 3+ years, of course they've been upgrading it to work with the latest hardware and such, but they claim that it will run on any hardware that supports DirectX 9. I find it hard to believe that it won't run like a f@%#ing champ on my current PC, but why risk it? All I have to do is press "Submit". Justifiable? How about my birthday's on Friday :D

Interest sucks/rules

2007-03-08T00:00:12Z

Sucks:
Mortgage (estimated):$887/month (not a $320,000 loan)

Rules:
Interest Earned This Month: $ 0.91
Interest Paid Year to Date: $ 3.57

I opened that account on 5 Jan.

Guest Contributor on PlexNex.com

2007-02-26T00:00:02Z

I will be guest contributing on PlexNex.com (the Complexion Connexion). To start, I put up the post I made yesterday about my haircut. Look for more exclusive posts (which I'll probably link to from here) in the coming weeks and months. Also, the site has two more guest contributors so far, so be sure to read their posts as well. Ben from SolidOffice.org, and Solveig from OpenOffice.blogs.com and GetOpenOffice.org. As you can see here, we demand attention. Now attend to us. Sam is the Senior Editor and will be posting stuff that I and others find interesting, which is why I visited the site in the first place. I'm sure it'll start picking up steam.

Your safest bet would be to just visit it every day and send an email to all of your friends and relatives to tell them where you are going, in case you get lost.

Sam wants to make the site a very highly visited site. Imagine that... something I write might be read by (hmm, zero * infinity is still zero... we'll call it a hundred) a hundred times more people than read my site. That's exciting.

Some topics I plan on covering are baseball, software patents (my new passion), stories where you don't have to know my whole history (like yesterday's), and whatever else happens to pop up in my mind.

Don't worry, there'll still be stuff on this site. Like, all the stuff that I don't want lots of different people seeing. You know, the shit posts. It'll be a good time. Just as long as you visit plexnex.com 8x daily, I don't care what my site stats look like :)

28 next month, Mom still cuts my hair

2007-02-25T00:00:44Z

I know, it's pathetic, but when all I do is get it buzzed, there's no reason to pay anyone to do it, especially when my Mom spent all that money on the equipment, and has been cutting hair for years! I would still have her cut it if I was looking for a particular style, back when that sort of thing was important to me. Luckily, I worked at a job that basically had a mirror for an elevator, so I'd be looking at myself on the way up, and thinking "Man, I look ridiculous with longer hair..." A day I will never regret.

So, Philly, this afternoon, gets a mild dusting of snow, probably like 2 inches. Worse, though, is afterwards, it starts to rain, but it's still only 29 degrees Fahrenheit. Mom calls and asks if I'd like to have dinner over there. Pork chops, yummy. I check the fridge, and quickly respond with "I'm hellathere."

I'm driving over, and of course none of the roads are in any kind of shape to be driving on. I head down this one hill and I felt like I might as well have been riding on top of the car in mittens and a scarf, hoping my brother doesn't white wash me when I get to the bottom. Like in the old days of sledding at the elementary school, or the even older days on Llanerch Country Club where a little bit of momentum would drop you into the water hazard in the middle of the 8th fairway. The final road to the house off of the main road consists of 3 stop signs right before inclines on back roads. I'm sure any cops would realize why I didn't even give a slight pause as I zipped past all of them.

We eat, Mom cuts my hair (I look fantastic, BTW), and after two hours and an old Country Crock container full of leftovers from the OTHER night (I actually have no idea when it's from, but it looks delicious), I head out to my car to go home. I should have spent at least some time to clear my wiper blades from ice. I had them so clear for the ride over that they'd allow for full visibility with a single go. When I got in my car and the heated seats started kicking in, I just figured I could get home fine with the limited amount of traffic that should be out on the street.

Turns out I was right... barely any cars were on the road. But that didn't mean that I could see at all. With each wiper motion, the road became a distorted image, and my windshield, a kaleidoscope. One with less colors, mainly black and white, and instead of amazement, fear. The tricky part was pulling into my alley against traffic. There were 3 cars (or rather, blobs of white on a black background) back to back that I had to wait for to pass me before I could pull in. If there was a car behind them with their headlights off, pure disaster would surely follow. That wasn't the case. I made it home safe and didn't even have to change my pants.

Buying movies on iTunes

2007-02-25T00:00:37Z

I have to be careful. Luckily there's not a million movies that I haven't seen, or don't already have, that are on iTunes movie store. There's not a huge quality selection of movies either. But I did buy one today. "The Sum of All Fears". I am currently pondering whether to buy another one, "The Prestige". Earlier this week, I bought two "Multi-Passes", for "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report". Of course, this week they were both off, but luckily I got the episodes from Thursday of the week before. This week, the 15 episodes that the multipasses bought me will begin. I also bought an hour special by Dave Chappelle, entitled "For What It's Worth". The literature on it says "one of comedy?s hottest stars, takes his trademark humor before a live audience with a new, uncensored, no-holds barred comedy special." It's hilarious. I've watched it twice.

Any reserve that I previously had to buying movies on iTunes has been taken away because Apple is releasing the Apple TV this month. Not like I'll get it right now, but if I find that I want to watch them on the TV downstairs, I have a way. It'll just cost me $300 more. So I am more open to that option. I don't want to have to spend $300 more, so only in the direst of circumstances will I consider it. But I have to be careful not to just buy movies for the sake of buying them, because they are then locked into this house, or wherever my MacBook Pro and Apple TV happen to be.

Speaking of money, that reminds me, I have to finish the changes to my client's website... tomorrow is a good a day as any to do that. I think I'll buy "The Prestige", pour myself some ice water, and take a nap. Then watch "O Brother, Where Art Thou", which happens to be the DVD in my drive :D F#$%ing incredible movie. Night.

If I don't like something, I let it be known

2007-02-22T00:00:05Z

I can imagine a lot of things I don't like. The smell of crap, certain food, cheap coffee and most light beers, stuff like that. I haven't really not liked a lot of people in my lifetime. You'd have to really bug me. However, I don't discriminate between something that I don't like and get paid to do, and everything else. If I don't like something, no matter WHAT, I let people know.

I have certain ways of portraying my dislike for everything. If there's a stink of crap in the air, I'll either leave or spray something. I don't buy cheap coffee or light beer, and I don't buy or eat food that I don't like.

In contrast, if I love something, I indulge. Music, people, certain foods (although I have been getting just salad for lunch lately), movies, programming, everything. If I love it I will try to get as much exposure to it as I can. I've been listening to ONLY Bob Marley for about 3 months straight now. See my music post (search music for title in the filter above) for examples.

I can't imagine another way of expressing dislike. It may come up in conversation or something, and you can say "I hate crap." But really, if you smelled crap, you wouldn't just say "I hate crap" and then continue to breath in the fumes. If you don't like something, the only way to take action against it is, well, to take action against it.

There is a tough situation in there though. If you don't like something, but that something really loves you. Like, I might not like a certain person but they'll really like me. Conversely, I might like smoking and coffee, but that stuff is bad for me. This makes for bad situations.

I can't imagine how many people are in a job that they don't like. I couldn't imagine being in a job that I didn't like. You get paid for it, it takes up your whole day, you have to go against your desires and inhibitions and go to bed early in order to be on time for it, you get bossed around (unless you're the boss), you have to deal with people that are sometimes less fortunate in the intellect department, and best of all, you're stuck there until something better comes along. I don't know how to deal with a job that I don't like, except by showing that I don't like it. Acting like you would when you open a bathroom door and you are overwhelmed with crap. "OH GOD THAT WREAKS!!"

So, to my surprise, the way that I show I don't like stuff is not the way to show that I don't like a job. Apparently, you are lucky to be there. You should express your gratitude for having a job that you don't like by going against your instinctive knee-jerk reaction of displaying dislike for a job. And God forbid you do anything other than work for 2 minutes and your boss sees you not working.

Some other things you might not know about me. I'm not the best. I'll explain. I don't look down on people. Some people might show me that their idiots sometimes, but if they're in a position that requires not being an idiot, then I'll accept that they might only sometimes show idiocy. Likewise, I'm not the worst. I don't see people as being better than me. Ever. That's not to say that I'm as good as anybody in everything. That's just the simple, God given fact that "All People Are Created Equal." I hold this truth to be self evident. So, to insinuate that you're better than anyone, because that someone made a mistake (or 11), is saying that you're perfect. Ok, Perfecty McPerfect. So, when a boss shows disrespect to me, I in turn show disrespect to them. Their TITLE in a JOB at a COMPANY might say to them that they are better than me, but that's a joke. If I ever use my professional status in a stupid job as an excuse to disrespect anyone, please shoot me in the f%!#$ing temple.

One other thing, because of this, a side effect is not necessarily giving a rat's ass of what anybody thinks of me.

Remember the thing about not liking something that likes you? I didn't like this job but my boss really liked me in the job. So, in effect, my job like me. This was a tough situation, as I've said, and one that likely drew out the time that I was there. Due to other circumstances outside of my control, I was also obligated to be there longer than I wanted. Not obligated because it was my job, though. For the same reasons I'm not obligated to breath in crap and drink shitty coffee.

So, overall, the moral of this story is that I'm done with bad jobs as soon as I start them and find out that it's a job I don't like. This will prevent many headaches in the future. If it's bearable, then it's bearable. If it's a bad job, I'm f@#%@#$ing out of there.

I'm getting sh%@faced this weekend. New job starts on Monday.

Phils Opening Day

2007-02-21T00:00:24Z

Can't f@%@#$ing WAIT

2007-02-21T00:00:16Z

I'm not as literariterically proficient as some people, but I do know some words and make up others. I'm not the best (closer to the worst) at expressing my excitement in real life, and probably one of the best in expressing excitement in writing (on account that I can add more exclamation points than anyone). But, sitting here, I can't hold back excitement either in real life or in fake. The f@%@#$ing Phillies ARE IN SPRING TRAINING!!

I know this has been the case for a few days now, but it's finally sunk in. Things don't sink in quick for me. I can learn anything pretty quickly, but feeling something takes a while. It takes a constant reiteration of knowledge.

When the paper starts putting up articles like this one, and starts mentioning names like Utley, Howard, Rollins, Victorino, and to some extent Burrell (cringe), and the players start talking about their roles and their ability to win, it helps to ignite the excitement, and ... well, I just can't f@%@$ing wait for the season to start.

The Phillies haven't really been my favorite Philadelphia team ever. Although, in '93, I didn't miss a game. It was that kind of energy at the beginning of the season where I couldn't help but watch the first game of the season, all the way to the last game of the World Series. This year I'm sure won't be much different. But, lately, baseball has picked up steam and quickly became my favorite game to watch. Sure, we have the Eagles and football, but this year I really couldn't wait for the Phillies to start, even as Garcia and the crew were marching through the end of the season and into the playoffs. I definitely enjoyed watching and rooting for the Eagles, but in the back of my mind, I wanted to watch some baseball. And this year's Phillies team is awesome. We WILL see some October baseball in this town finally. You heard it here first.

I've believed, ever since the big trades last year, the Phillies would have been in the World Series if they had that team from the beginning of the season. Now they have that team. Now we just have to enjoy every minute of it.

Pain and Suffering

2007-02-19T00:00:43Z

2 Days filled with lots of Wii Tennis, some boxing, lots of bowling, and tons of other Wii games is a great exercise. I can't lift my arms up. Zatko, Jared, and I were all at Zatko's house, playing the Wii for literally all day on Saturday with no real breaks. Zatko and I continued on Sunday with a fierce competition in Tennis and Bowling. Bowling is my main sport, and golf is the second one. I haven't played enough Tennis to really compete... something I've taken note of for the next trip. I went pro last night on my own Wii in Tennis. That game's exhausting. We only played two bouts in Boxing since we knew if we were to do more, we'd be useless for a few days, instead of just one. Good thing.

Some quotes from the day (not exact quotes...):

Zatko: "You should team up with a computer player" (in Tennis)
Me: "Nah"
Zatko: "Oh yeah, you might get teamed up with a jackass"
Me: "I already have a jackass on my team" (meaning me)

(had to be there I guess)

Jared in an email:"Hopefully my new lazy throw I'm developing will help."

I read that as
"Hopefully my stolen style from the god of Wii Bowling, Jason Connell, which I will copy and call my own and copyright it, will get me to even half the skill level of Jason and hopefully cause no physical pain, which will help deal with the mental anguish I will experience due to not coming up with the technique on my own."

Next time will be even more fun... lots of new Wii games coming out in March.

No video. Although for our boxing match, I had the idea to face each other and box. Double boxing!! Like, my other idea to bring a Wii Sports Golf out onto a golf course and play that and golf at the same time. Although, Wii Sports Golf only has 9 holes on one course :( They have to release updates to that one...

OOXML will fail miserably

2007-02-17T00:00:50Z

Or, at least it should. It will reveal a serious flaw in international standards if that thing succeeds. The basis for my argument is that everyone who opposes it are smart people with no other reason to do so other than the specification is an atrocity. I've literally spent the whole night reading objections to it (simply because advocates for it are few and far between, and also sound like complete morons to me). Here are some links.

Groklaw (which I'm reading more and more every day, written by someone who claims no knowledge of the technical side of the debate, and who seems to side only with the law [not a particular company... a non-biased view])
Rob Weir (an IBM guy who just seems really smart to me)
Miguel de Icaza (who makes no argument at all for OOXML based on how ridiculous the whole thing is)
John Carroll (a Microsoftie who is just blowing his employer... err... his employer's horn.)

This is where it gets interesting. Carroll, in a "blog" post , ignoring all the technical diarrhea that is the OOXML spec (ECMA 367), posts a link to an article by Miguel de Icaza (an open source guy working for Novell which recently inked a deal with Microsoft), about why the OOXML spec should become a standard. Carroll thinks he'll win over MS-haters / Open Source (OSS) advocates because he's posting an OSS person's view on the subject which happens to coincide with his view. So, I start commenting on that post about logical inconsistencies inside of that document, as well as technical concerns I have about OOXML in general, to discredit anything anybody has to say in support of OOXML. On a quest that began after I started posting, I continued reading (I started earlier in work, but had to go home) a document on Groklaw.net that contained all of the objections to OOXML becoming an ISO standard.

When I finished that document, I still needed more ammo. I searched the web, as I had promised to do in a comment on Carroll's post, for pro-OOXML arguments. I couldn't find any on a technical basis besides that it supports old .doc formats all the way back to Word 5 (for which a simple converter could be written to upgrade all docs to the new standard...). So I gave up searching. I did come across a few non-MS employee articles that were pro OOXML, but they well... read for yourself (which, like all Microsoft articles I've read, miss the point ENTIRELY on "CHOICE"). After that waste of time, I somehow wound up on Slashdot.org, reading the comments by those readers (largely anti-OOXML) the same MS letter to IBM that James O'Neill's thing mentions. One of them posted a link to a funny article by Rob Weir. So I immediately liked him. After reading that, I decided to read more of what he had to say. Which is when I came across THIS!! As you can tell, it completely rips Miguel de Icaza's argument a new %@#$hole!! Read the comments on that one too. Miguel is the first to comment, asking Rob if he had ever written any software for OpenOffice.org (the frontrunner on the implementation side of ODF (there are many), the competing standard (yes, already an ISO standard) to MS' OOXML), or if he's just an Armchair General. Later down the page, Rob responds with this comment, which basically says "I am qualified to make that statement, dumbass."

Here's where advocates for OOXML miss the point on CHOICE. When ODF people speak of choice, they speak about different applications being able to operate with each other (interoperate). Meaning, if I save a file using this program on this operating system, I can later open it with this other program on this other operating system. Right now there are a lot (OpenOffice, KOffice, StarOffice, Corel, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and a few independent apps) that can read and write ODF. Alternative, right now, there is one program that can read and write OOXML, and it was released 1/30/07 (Microsoft Office 2007). Funny timing, by the way, as OOXML went into ISO "fast track" approval on 1/05/07. So they didn't even have a working application to display it. I digress. So there's a difference in opinion of what "choice" actually is. However, when the average user wants to save an image file from their digital camera, should their camera care what operating system they're using, or what photo editing application they have installed? Likewise, there are a few "standards" for image formats. JPEG is highly used for photos because it can contain more colors to the less-lossy (pixel quality wise) but less colors overall GIF format. It has been argued though that OOXML is duplicating much of the same functionality as ODF, whereas JPEG and GIF are very different in their purposes (GIF is much better for small images and transparency, and JPG for high quality compression of larger images... however, both might soon be deemed obsolete by PNG which covers transparency and a good, near-lossless compression algorithm). In the objections document posted earlier, the final note offers an alternative solution. That Microsoft extend the ODF format with any of their functionality that isn't covered in ODF. This is clearly a good solution, since the base functionality is in ODF, is implemented in many standards, and is a good building block. This is what anti-OOXML people would welcome with open arms. Not a year through standardization on a spec that took 12+ years to fully develop!! ODF took 4 years to ISO standardization. 1 year would be ridiculous.

Quality night of reading overall :) Next, there are these gems...

Here are some letters to INCITS (International Committee for Information Technology Standards)...

Some of these letters from the opposition are the same, but all of the letters FOR OOXML are sent as a "joint letter signed by these 20 members of this committee that has 'Microsoft' in the title". To get a joint letter signed, I'd walk around an office and say "Yo, sign this... it's to get free pizza every Friday." There are three letters attached (in the one from "George LaVenture - International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (IAMCP)"), each from different offices, each signed by 15+ people (but I can't see the signatures for some reason). All of those letters are the same exact thing, and they make no merits on the technical side. Which is fine, I guess. There are many arguments that either would stand up on technical merits. Although, developing an application that uses OOXML would be an absolute nightmare. The spec is 6000+ pages long. The only argument on the Microsoft side that ODF can't claim (not legally anyway :P ) is that there are billions of documents in old formats that this "document format" can support. As I said, write a CONVERTER.

John Hardin's letter makes the claim that if OOXML were to pass as an ISO standard, the reputations of ISO and ANSI standards organizations would be severely damaged. And that "they will be seen as open to manipulation by sufficiently large companies." In no way do we want that to happen. That would be like the US Patent Office! We don't want that situation repeated in standards organizations.

Another post I read somewhere says that if OOXML passes through ISO standardization, it could be the most costly mistake EVER. (Ahh, found the link here)

It's funny that the only people pushing for it are MS people, MS advocates, and some politicians who are paid by Microsoft, whereas the ODF crowd is many many good companies and lots of brilliant people. It leads one (not me certainly) to the conclusion that people who support Microsoft in this area are complete morons, will never be writing the software to support OOXML, or that they're on MS' payroll (either as an employee or accepting donations through politics). Every Microsoft post I've read is a last ditch effort that practically concedes victory to ODF. Not to mention the lies that they tell themselves (e.g. For ISO adoption, 103 companies vote, only 19 opposed on the first round, so they tell themselves and their employees that "We're almost there!!", when, in fact, 16 of those 19 countries that opposed make up HALF of the vote that MATTERS in the final vote, 5 months away!! SUCKERS!!). Just keep telling yourselves that.

Anyway, this was kind of a review of all the reading I did tonight, with no real guiding purpose or goal. Ok, I had a guiding purpose, basically to vent about how bad OOXML is technically, and that's confirmed by no technical merits from anyone that supports it. And, likewise, to convince anyone who reads this to read all the articles and documents I link to, and to convince them of my opinion... like all opinion writers :P The whole thing's probably way too long and filled with typos, but luckily I can only see the last 8 lines I wrote :P I'm going to bed. It's the Wiikend!!!

First Wiikend

2007-02-16T00:00:55Z

Mike, Jared and I each have the Wii, but the limited online play (it's a Wii... you're supposed to have people there) means that we have to actually be in the same house with each other to really get the full effect. We can say "Yo, you can't beat my high score in bowling of 258", but it's just not as fun. So, we'll all be at Zatko's house this "wiikend", competing in many events. I'm sure I'll have some video. I'm gonna kick some f@#%@ing ass!!!

I'm amazed

2007-02-14T00:00:49Z

I have a collection of domain names. Yes, I collect them. Sometimes I'm amazed what's available. Like, when I registered stringed.org, and oftheworldunite.org (which can be a great domain name, if you use stuff like hackers.oftheworldunite.org or stupidpeople.oftheworldunite.org).

Yesterday I had a thought. A simple thought. I had asked Tom about mortgages and financial stuff (way before yesterday). He gave me an answer, but I had an answer in my head already, and it was the same answer, but it didn't come out the same :) Basically, what he was telling me was in the technical terms, and correct by all means. But someone who didn't know about finance and mortgages would have no idea what he was saying. Like me.

A lot of times though, I come across problems where the answer can be explained in very simple, non-technical terms, where anyone can understand. Of course, I've been devoting my time to learning, understanding, and making part of my vocabulary, computer science terms. Very technical. I can't really explain them in non-technical terms. However, with every other area in life, I have no idea except what I'm able to logically deduce by myself, in my head. And these are always in very simple terms. So welcome to my domain name collection, simpleterms.org.

I plan on using all of them, but I take a long time to get around to making something for them, so I may seem like just a collector and a domain-name-hoarder, but I do plan on getting around to using all of them. Unlike the .com variant of that domain name. Which someone basically threw some ads on there, and you can buy it but it will be for about 80x markup. Stupid internet.

Web 2.0 isn't so without a new file upload

2007-02-09T00:00:49Z

In writing a web application, I've always found it a pain that no matter how advanced of an interface you try to make, the file upload mechanism is so archaic. This functionality is built into every web browser. It's a text box with a "browse..." button next to it. Upgrading this functionality is the last step, probably, in getting to Web 2.0.

When writing a news post or anything of the sort, where you can include images inline, personally, with my software, I'd have to upload the images before I even attempt to write the news. One way around this is to be able to drag an image from a folder on your computer inline to the document. This works but not as expected. The image shows for you because the URL of that image is pointing to the file on YOUR computer. If you were to save that news and review it, it would look great to anyone who viewed it from your computer, but to anyone else, they'd see the big X placeholders for missing images.

I've read a technical article on including the actual content of the image inside the "src" attribute of the "img" tag. It's the bytes encoded in base64. That makes download times pretty big for an HTML website. This behavior isn't available in the previous example, because javascript can't read the contents of a file on the computer, an that would be the only way you could achieve it in real time. Another downside is that images encoded this way only work in Mozilla and possibly a few other browser, definitely not anything Microsoft based.

Another option would be to upgrade the standard. The W3 standard about how files are uploaded to a website. If I could drag an image, like my example of editing a news post, from a folder on my computer into the text of the news, and have a way that it automatically, and asynchronously, uploads that file to the website, and instead displaying the one on my computer, it displays, after a short delay, the one that's physically located on the server... for lack of a better term, that'd be @#%#@$ sweet. Technically, that would take some pretty complex changes.

Technically, I imagine the only way to accomplish this feat is allowing access to the contents of that file in Javascript. Not to say that when you download a website, Javascript in the website can just access any file on your computer, but when you drag a file onto the web page, a Javascript event is called with the contents (and other specs) of that file. This is a client feature, it would have to be implemented in Javascript. So that cuts out any browsers that a) don't support Javascript, and b) don't have an asynchronous way to make requests to a server (the 'AJ' in "Ajax").

For all I know, the W3 is working on something like this. Right now, there's no way to get this functionality, aside from writing a client app wholly separated from your website code. This is a pain because what do you write it in? With the heterogeneous environment of client computers... there's Java, but still, the whole idea of having to write an app to achieve this functionality is a bad idea, and the way websites do it right now is flawed.

There's nothing Web 2.0 about file uploads today. Any app where you have to upload files to achieve any kind of goal for content will never feel like a desktop application until files can be dragged/dropped in real time. Or pasted for that matter. I'll take anything.

It's been hyped

2007-02-07T00:00:00Z

But I never tried installing Windows on my Mac before. I bought Parallels and entered the name of the VM, my name, and my Windows product key. Clicked "OK" or something, and moments later, I had Windows installed. Parallels is a neat program, I didn't have to do anything after that to install it, it probably got all my settings from the Mac and used that for certain Windows settings (Timezone, etc). It was sweet. So now I can use it to make money :)

I have a project to do with a local school. I needed Windows, SQL Server, and Visual Studio .NET 2003. Luckily, I bought no new software for this. I own 2 copies of Windows (one is still installed on a computer that I haven't turned on in about 8 months, and one on my gaming computer which is running all the time...), I borrowed SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition, and I am using ICSharpCode's SharpDevelop, which is pretty neat. And Open Source. e.g. Free.

I did all the original work while working for a company about 3 years ago now. I tried to instill some better programming practices in them while I was there, but alas, it's been a pain to relearn how to use all the code. It's coming along though.

Lunch Work Poem by Jason Connell

2007-01-30T00:00:51Z

"I have my cell phone and a full tank of gas.
I can meet you for lunch or whatever works best.
If it all goes as planned, we'll have a f@%#@ing blast.
Then go back to work and fall asleep at our desk."

The first two lines were in an actual email from me to Laura and Audrea at HCMI. I noticed they were very poetic, so I added to it :) It's like the best poem ever.

Fired up the trusty ol' Linux Laptop

2007-01-25T00:00:47Z

Working on something exciting. Everything I wrote in Java, I'm going to convert it to Javascript! That's right. They will communicate to each other through XML/HTTP calls. It will be done in a few steps.

1) Get them talking.
---This involves having objects in JS that correspond to all my objects in Java. Also, a communication protocol, through XML, including updates, deletes, gets, and custom methods.
2) Automate it.
---This involves wrapping each thing in JS functions, like "update(myObj, callback);" which will generate all the XML and make the call, calling the callback function when it returns. Callback will have to have a few parameters, like error message, if it succeeded, etc.
3) Develop custom controls in JS / HTML (Dynamic HTML) for common types (labels, files, to be determined).

4) ???

5) Profit!!

All in all, it shouldn't be too difficult. The Java part was hard. I've been hacking javascript for about a year straight now. I have to say it's my favorite.

There are a few problems with this method that will hopefully be addressed...

1) Security: People who know my XML scheme and the place that accepts it could just write something that posts to the method with the right format of XML and do disastrous things. I have an idea for this, and it will be done before any site that uses this goes up.

2) Search engines won't see it: With everything being dynamic, there's no content on the page when a search engine browses to the site. There's some placeholder html where everything will go, but no content. Unless I have the atom feeds or some meta data in the html.

3) State saving: I will need a system for generating query string parameters based on the values on the page, and also, when someone goes to that page with those values in the query string, it'll load the page how they remember it. This might be tough, or it could be easy.

I think that's about it. Wish me luck, it should be done before Web 3.0 comes out :D

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me

2007-01-23T00:00:28Z

Today I conducted my first two phone interviews. You know the ones where you're calling them and they're trying to impress you so THEY can get a job? Yeah. Talk about a power trip. Of course, they have to respect you, or you're like "Hey, f@#%@ you buddy!" It's just funny. Later, I thought, "Man, they'd act different if they knew I stay in my PJs until 5pm on Saturdays, or if they knew I sit at home during the spring, on the couch, and watch the Phillies every day. Or if they knew my room was a mess."

Ridiculous Colbert Quote

2007-01-17T00:00:37Z

I decided yesterday, at 11:30PM, instead of finishing up watching a show on the Science Channel called "The Sun", to turn on the Colbert Report. It was a decent show, but during one of the commercials, it was him touting his upcoming show, on Thursday, when he will have Bill O'Reilly on. Bean and I were watching, and he said:

"This is it, after this it's all downhill, unless Jesus takes me up on my offer to host the Apocalypse"

HAHAHA! We were rolling.

Curb Your Enthusiasm Marathon

2007-01-13T00:00:33Z

Hanging out until football starts, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm since 11:45am today. Great show. I bought my brother the first five seasons for Christmas, *expecting* him to bring it over to watch :) Man I'm smart. He's said it's the greatest gift ever. It is absolutely hilarious. I watch it and almost immediately realize why he doesn't play himself on Seinfeld, and instead Jason Alexander plays him... him and Seinfeld sound exactly the same at times. If you close your eyes, you almost think it's Seinfeld. It's brilliant though. Today we're watching Season 5. I've only seen 2 seasons out of the five. I plan on doing the same thing tomorrow.

Parents try Wii, have a blast

2007-01-05T00:00:58Z

They also did the "Power Throws" Bowling mini-game (training). It was a heated competition that rivals what I expect of the Eagles - Giants on Sunday.

Thoughts on Side Work

2007-01-03T00:00:58Z

I have no problem with side work, meaning, the extra money. Today I was chatting with a friend, and this is what I told him :)

[17:35] jasontconnell: i'm working tonight... i hate saying i'll do work at home because then i'm stuck working at home :)

[17:36] jasontconnell: wish you could say you'll work, not work, but also get work done, and then get paid for it

[17:36] jasontconnell: but the whole getting work done without working part is pretty tricky...

Yes, that part I haven't quite figured out. Another thing is that I like working on stuff, but when it starts cutting into my Wii time, it just gets offensive.

Yesterday I got a Wii!

2006-12-30T00:00:32Z

I've been working on getting my entertainment system set up how I wanted it lately. Got the wireless router and the HDTV all set up. Just yesterday, I decided to go and check if the local game store had a Wii in stock. I go there, pick out a PC game that I've been eyeing for a few weeks (Rainbow Six Vegas), and head up to the counter. I ask, "Do you guys have a Wii?" And the guy says "Yeah, we just got a few in!" I'm like "Really?" Without asking, he heads back and gets it for me. I say, I'm gonna see what other games I might want, so don't ring it up yet. He asks "Well, everyone and their mother bought Zelda with the Wii, did you plan on getting that one?" I said hellz yes. So I go and look at what other games they have. I didn't really see anything that I remember loving from my subscription to the gaming website, so I just got Zelda and the Wii, and also Rainbow Six Vegas. Throw in the $40 store warranty (I get a new one if anything happens), and this was quite a hefty purchase. But well worth it! I got a workout playing Wii Sports, and I rock at bowling. In Zelda, I've made it to a respectable place after just 3 hours over the span of two days. I do already hold a professional rank in bowling though, so that's where my time has been mainly going :D Tennis is fun, I won my first baseball game earlier today (got whooped every other game), and boxing is a major workout. I suck at golf, but that's fun as well. I can't wait to see what innovative ways to use the "Wiimote" that game companies come up with. It'll be fun. Anyway, here are some pictures of me, Mii, and the Wii!

Deadline for Last Year's Resolutions Coming Up

2006-12-27T00:00:43Z

In 4 days, any resolutions that you didn't complete last year will have to be "rollover resolutions". And if that's the case, you just feel like crap. You're like "Damnit, I should have gone to Africa like 6 months ago." And trying to squeeze in a 40-pound-in-four-days diet is pretty excruciating.

Luckily, my resolutions from last year only take a few days to complete. Like, getting and keeping my room clean. I'm on break now but I've been at it for like 2 hours. Yes, it's a f@#%@#$ing mess. Imagine if every piece of mail you got for about 18 months you just threw on your dresser instead of throwing in the trash. Then add in the deprecated hardware like old KVM switches, old video cards, etc, thrown into that mix, then also imagine boxes that you planned on throwing out a year ago, but they could also make good tables for other crap. Also, throw tons of stuff, like laptops, cd cases, other boxes, on the other side of your queen sized bed. Next, have two computer cases that won't ever be used again somewhere in your room. Throw in an already full closet, and make this room about 8 feet by 16 feet with a queen bed, bookshelf, computer desk, dresser, laundry basket, guitar and amp, and a computer chair. Yes, it is rather hard to move.

Thankfully, it'll be fully clean before the New Year if I go at it pretty diligently. Like, 2-3 hours a day. It's easy, I have off this week, and throw in some coffee, throw on some Bob Marley, have a few trash bags, etc, and I'm well on my way. It already looks like you could put an extra bed in here. Anyway, that's what I'm up to. Other things that I have to do is join a gym OR get a mountain bike, but those might be rollover resolutions. Whatever :P Other resolutions include never being late for work. It's not like I was though, but after a while I might start showing up 15-30 minutes late, just like in Office Space. Hmm, what else? I have ideas for software that I have to get done, and I haven't written any Java in 6 months at least. I have to get back into that, definitely.

I'm afraid resolutions are like wishes, where if I tell every one of them, I won't get any of them done. The other secret ones are the important ones, so I'm not gonna say.

Serenity is awesome

2006-12-25T00:00:22Z

I watched it for the first time a week ago, and I have to say, if anyone in the world were to get me it for Christmas, they would immediately be my best friend. Also, I can never have enough Bob Marley, even if there are duplicate songs (just not duplicate albums). I love "Concrete Jungle" and "War" lately.

But with Serenity, it's one of those movies... i.e. a movie... so you expect it to start to get stupid or boring, or looking for parts of it that you would not like to watch again, and that would make you think it sucks, plus it was based on a TV series that tanked. So you're like "Alright, when is it gonna suck... Come on, any second now.." And the credits start to roll at the end, and you're like "Wow, it didn't suck. Not even a little bit." Unlike recent blockbusters like The DaVinci Code (They just could never escape), War of the Worlds (That little girl and the insane dude in the basement of that house ruin it for me. Can't watch it again), and practically every movie.. they just have parts that make them unwatchable after the first time. There are a select few though... I have a few, like Contact. That movie never sucks. Plus it puts me to sleep like a baby when I don't plan on watching it all the way through.

People have to make better movies. Of course, I'm about the least impressed person ever. Nothing affects me. In effect, everything sucks. Not that I could do it better, but why does everything have to suck?! Alright, time to head over the parents' place for more Christmas Festivities.

Merry Christmas etc

2006-12-24T00:00:54Z

That's the new politically correct way to wish someone nothing but good times and good fortune during the time between Dec 24 to Jan 2. Copyright 2006 Jason Connell, of course.

I am off this week. And on Jan 2, I start a brand new job. I will probably be hanging out with Jim and Kate all week. It's gonna rock. I may need to eventually go out and get new clothes because this new job is one of those business casual places, and all I've been wearing to work for the past year or so is jeans with holes in them, T-shirts, sneakers, and the like. I like those places, but I know I'm going to like this new place also. Just like I loved working at Aramark even though I had to shave every day. That's the worst. Especially since I've devoted myself to making myself as low maintenance as possible lately.

For instance, I don't have to brush my hair anymore, since I've just about no hair. I've been looking at how one might never have to brush their teeth again, as well as shower. I'm sure it's possible through genetic manipulation, like how they make seedless watermelons. Of course, that won't benefit me :) There'd have to also be a supplement to help out those whose genetic code is already written... Stupid hard coded stuff... God should have made that configurable.

Proudly presenting...

2006-12-16T00:00:27Z

NOAT's proudly presented entry into the Gingerbread House contest in Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada...

Yes, it's wired for the internet.

Ahh, making a mockery of everyone's hard work and talent is always entertaining. Other people actually tried, and theirs just aren't as good... to me anyway. Fantastic job NAOT!

Classic

Christmas Shopping 94.2% done

2006-12-14T00:00:28Z

So close. Tonight I ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon.com and J&R Music World. Christmas is funny... You almost always know what you're going to get, you just have to wait until Christmas to get it. For instance...

My Mom likes to make sure that stuff she buys actually fits before she gives it to us. So, I tried on one of my Christmas presents last week.

I mentioned to my Dad that he should get an iPod, and he confirmed that he'd like one for when he works out. So, I said "Well, don't buy it, Santa might bring you one." So my Dad knows what he's getting.

Zatko's girlfriend told him she ordered a Wii, but days later, way after it was already supposed to have been there, I ask... "How's the Wii?!" He says "I don't have it yet." Well, the exact words are below in the Quote of the Year post. It seemed suspicious, but then he told me his girlfriend probably hid it and decided to give it to him for Christmas instead. So I called him a sucker.

However, my bro-.... errr... Pollyanna.... has NO IDEA what he's getting. Heh. I can say "My brother is my pollyanna" since I have 5. Brothers, not pollyannas. It's awesomely hilariously funny.

And, of course, my Mom has no idea what she's getting from me, for the simple logical fact that I have no idea what I'm getting her. I searched the internet far and wide with no luck yet. I think I only got to page 2 anyway. Definitely didn't make a dent.

Amazon said buy it, so I did

2006-12-12T00:00:15Z

I was watching this item on Amazon.com for about 4 days now, and it was fairly expensive, but not expensive compared to other items of the same type. Then, Amazon.com said to itself "If we lower the price, this dude's gonna buy this thing." And you know how websites talk to themselves, right? Through AJAX. It's common knowledge. So, the website heard this from itself, and said "F@#% it, let's lower the price and get rid of this item, we'll still make a fortune off of it." So, after a few moments, I log in and check my cart, and it always alerts you of price changes of items in your cart since the last time you checked. It said "The price of that thing you need and want has lowered to a price where you might think you are stealing it from us." And I said "Where in the hell is the checkout box?!" Seconds later, it was purchased, and shipped overnight for a total of $3.99 extra. That's my Amazon Prime membership at work again. That is, again, Amazon making me think that I'm stealing. I should go to confession. It shipped tonight, it should be here tomorrow.

Oh, by the way, it's the HDTV that is a prerequisite for the Wii and PS3! 26" 1300x768, HDMI, ATSC tuner built in. Got good reviews, but again, I don't need the best TV ever, it's replacing a 16" TV. Now I have to buy Christmas presents...

Spam in a fortnight

2006-12-12T00:00:08Z

I haven't emptied my spam folder in about 2 weeks.

Quote of the Year, w00t

2006-12-11T00:00:35Z

Zatko55: actually i don't have it. i just told you i had it to make you jealous

Me: didn't work sucker

Me: every night i pretend I'm playing the Wii when I go and have my brother pitch wiffle balls to me and I have a wiffle ball bat. it's very convincing that I'm actually playing the Wii, but really I'm just playing baseball :(

All you hear like that from now on are just cheap imitations.

Embracing more future stuff

2006-12-09T00:00:13Z

Today, I'm going to make it even more of my routine to not use Office software that needs to be installed on my computer. To kick this off, today I created an online spreadsheet at Google Docs. I find it to be very convenient for my purpose, which is updating a client on the hours that I've worked on the current project. I added them as a "viewer" of the spreadsheet, and it's golden. Only problem was that it doesn't currently support Safari, the default browser on the Mac, so I had to install Firefox. Which is fine by me, except that I have two browsers installed. Oh well.

Also, I'll be using the word processor found at that site. That can be convenient for getting my ideas into English format, which could then be shared with anyone, but more importantly, I don't have to use the excuse "Oh, that document is on my computer at home... sorry." It also happens to be a great place to keep my resume.

Only thing is "Lock-In". We all hate it. Buy a song on iTunes and you can only play it on Apple stuff and with your account (lest you strip DRM from it). Buy a PS3 game and you can only play it on PS3s. Buy a car and you can only drive it on the road and within the limits of the law. That kind of stuff. It sucks. But oh well. As long as I can export it. That would be a good idea for Apple too. To be able to "export" purchased songs into another form of DRM, if you were to switch. It goes the other way as well. Buy songs on xyz, export to Apple format. Just recently, the cell phone companies allowed you to carry over your phone number to another provider, this wouldn't be much different (not technically, of course). Freedom is great.

First part of future in home

2006-12-07T00:00:34Z

The future is upon me. I got the wireless router last night, hooked it up, got WPA security working, and hooked my Mac up to it. It works. It supposedly transfers at 300 Mbps, which is 3x faster than 100 base T... without wires! That's crazy. I hooked my PSP up to it with no problems, downloaded the new update released yesterday in record time, and that rocked. This paves the way for the PS3 and Wii, which both have wireless. Before any of those, though, I have to get an HDTV. Not a big one though. If I can find 23" or 26", it's enough. It will replace a 16" TV.

Busy Weekend

2006-12-02T00:00:25Z

Today I had a side job to go to. It was fun. Some of the worst written code I've ever seen. It could lead to more, if I do a good job.

Tomorrow, there is a gathering at Jim's parents' house, which of course means that Jim and Kate are back from Japan!! After three years. And Seamus is coming to America!! He hasn't been here yet! That's crazy-whack-funky. They will be going to the UK really soon though, within the month. Of course, while they're here, I will probably be drunk the whole time. I'm definitely looking forward to that.

With my extra income from the day's hard work, I ordered a wireless router, which couldn't come fast enough. I'm starting to embrace the future a little. I now have 3 things that use wireless (2 laptops and a PSP), and will eventually have no less than 5 things, when I get the PS3 and Wii. Beaner will be connecting to the router with his Mac as well, so there could be 5 things connected at any one time. Mainly, I'm getting it because I don't want to use my neighbor's with my Mac (as I've stated before), and the wire I have for my Mac is about 5 feet long, and it has to use up most of that length travelling from where my router is, around my desk, and onto my bed, where when I finally get to use it, I have to leave the Mac in one single spot, can't lean back on my chair comfortably and use it, etc, etc. It's a "wireless-N" router, meaning it's got 3 antennas and support for the future 802.11n I guess. Good times.

Post for the sake of posting

2006-11-25T00:00:41Z

Yes, I haven't a thing to say. Black Friday came and went, and I bought nothing. Thanksgiving was at my brother Scott's house. It was a good time. I was thinking of buying a wireless access point for the house so I could use my Mac and PSP without logging on to my neighbor's wireless internet. That's not as bad as if I had no internet at all and used theirs. Partially because it costs them nothing extra, but I should really get my own, especially since I've bought songs off of iTunes and paid bills using the wireless... it's definitely not them I'm worried about snooping in on my transactions, and it wouldn't really matter anyway since the encryption on transactions between my computer and the server is strong, so snoopers will only get garbage (public key encryption...). I've been playing some games lately, like Day of Defeat : Source, which is a good time usually. Also just got back into Company of Heroes. I was playing Neverwinter Nights 2 for a while there. I'll get back into it. I never stay into any one game for too long. I have no PS3 or Wii yet. I plan on getting the PS3 first though. After Christmas. Well after Christmas. Like, March. 2008. We'll see. The Mac is my primary debt right now...

I was looking into possible new cars. My Monte Carlo SS is still good, but I just want to change it up, as always. I was looking into another American car company, this time Ford. The Fusion looks like a nice ride. I'm digging silver with black interior, no matter which car I get. That's sexy. Back when I bought the Monte Carlo, the other option I had was a Passat... silver with black interior. I like that combo a lot. I'd say my two favorite colors are, in fact, black and silver. And when I shop for clothes, or get dressed in the morning, I'd look for some combo of the two, but also with clothing, I don't mind a nice dark or navy blue. Hence my website being silver. I know a black interior will be like a stove in the summer, but as long as I look cool.

I think I'm gonna program. I need a nice brain exercise.

Latin is fun

2006-11-14T00:00:53Z

"Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes"

..."Or you can use Google" :)

The latin part was in someone's email signature. Look it up.

"Zune" comes out tomorrow

2006-11-13T00:00:51Z

I think I'm going to buy a new iPod to celebrate.

I sent that to about 320 people, I was so proud.

Photo Booth Fun!!

2006-11-09T00:00:07Z

If you don't have a MacBook (or a Pro version), you're missing out on tons of fun. Even if you don't do this after the first week. Check it out.

I'll probably stop in a few days, but I've never laughed so hard from software included with a computer before, ever. Ever. (Not even from laughing at the software, which I often do when I install Windows :P )

Also, here's another screenshot. I connect to my Mac from Linux. I have "Gimp" installed on Linux, and it's a killer photo editing app (much like Photoshop but free-er). I use iPhoto on the Mac also, which is great for batch-resizing, organizing, importing, etc. But if I need to do advanced stuff like what I haven't figured out how to do in iPhoto yet, there's always the Linux backup :)

Pictures up

2006-11-08T00:00:45Z

Just search for label "mac" or "mbp" in the Pictures section. You should find at least 6 of them.

This post comes to you from

2006-11-08T00:00:39Z

My Mac. w to the mother f@%@#ing 00t.

It's so beautiful.

It's in the Great State of Pennsylvania

2006-11-08T00:00:20Z

Nov 8, 2006 8:06 AM On FedEx vehicle for delivery PHILADELPHIA, PA.

I'm actually sick today, not just waiting for my Mac. It's convenient, but I hate missing work. Another Saturday will be in order. w00t.

MacBook Pro update

2006-11-07T00:00:13Z

My Mac has arrived at Anchorage, Alaska, after a long voyage from Shanghai, China. Soon, it will be in the actual USA. Yes, Alaska is more of a state than Connecticut, but it's not considered part of the "Continental" United States. So therefore, it's worthless to me. And I don't even like crab that much. Actually, I sorta consider it part of the "Continental" USA because it's on the same land mass. Not like that other place with all the surfers, and pretty soon, judging from a recent science show I watched, not that other state with a lot of surfers and the govenator. That would be funny, because Apple is located in that other state. I'm probably offending everyone, but we all know that PA is the best state, because it's the only one. The only real one ;-)

Of course, it could be argued that your "State" is "decent" if the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States both originated there. I mean, talk about monumental documents that define a state.

I forget US postal abbreviations sometimes

2006-11-06T00:00:19Z

I got an email today that my MacBook Pro had shipped. I took a brief glance at it and got the impression that it had shipped from either "Canada" or "Connecticut", so it shouldn't be too long. Later in the day I wanted to get a better idea of when I can expect it, since I'll be either taking off of work early or getting in late. I look again without reading the name of the city that it shipped from, but I do notice that the last entry in the ship-log was one 11/06/06 at 10:25 pm. It then hit me that today was 11/06 and it was not yet 10:25 pm. It was almost noon. So I look again at where it shipped from... f@#%@ing Shanghai, CHINA. "CN" was used, and I later remembered that Connecticut, as insignificant as it is (I mean, cripes, they don't even have an Apple warehouse!! They might as well not even exist), has never gone by "CN", but "CT". I knew that, but assumption and lack of coffee/brains made me think it was shipping from this continent, so I just threw Connecticut in my brain and left it at that. But I'm positive it'll be here by the 8th or 9th. I had a slight panic attack because if it had shipped from Connecticut, I have a deadline tomorrow, and I wouldn't have been able to be home for the delivery. Anyway, I'll keep making posts about its progress around the world.

It's ashame they banned smoking

2006-11-05T00:00:15Z

In Philadelphia bars I mean. Last night, we went to an undisclosed location somewhere in Philly, near where I work, and obviously, you couldn't smoke in there. I don't have a problem with it except for this: You never used to be able to smell a fart in a bar. Last night, someone had something wrong with their gastrointestinal tract or something, and they were at the table next to us. It STUNK. Before, I'd just light up a smoke and all would be forgotten, but there, there was nothing to hide the stench, and you just had to f@#%@ing inhale it. I asked someone we were with "Would you rather smell ASS or SMOKE?" And she answered smoke, and her being a non-smoker, that pretty much answers that question for all non-smokers to me. So, way to go Philly lawmakers. Now we have to smell ASS all day.

Working Today

2006-11-04T00:00:06Z

Have to help pay for certain recent purchases (see previous post...) I can't wait til that thing gets here.

Basically what I plan on using it for was everything that I used my Mac Mini for (until it blew up), which is like watching my X-Files DVDs at night to fall asleep to (as well as any movie I have), recording music on there using Garage Band, keeping my photo collection, editing movies from my digital camera (I have a Quick Time Pro 7 license that's currently not being used), browsing the internet, chatting, and getting started with Ruby and Rails.

So basically my other two computers currently in commission will only be tasked with one responsibility each. Actually, the Linux Laptop will be my primary Java programming machine as it is now, and the gaming PC will no longer have any software installed on it other than games, but that's also my large capacity storage machine, since it's the only one I can actually add hard drives to, seeing as the other ones are laptops. It's got about 330 GB of HDD space. Right now it holds my music collection, all the backups of everything I've ever done with computers (including my original websites, both in ASP and Perl! They're a blast from the past), and tons of other random stuff like images and screenshots from college. The new Mac will have 160 GB of HDD space, so I might have to get a dedicated backup drive to put in the gaming PC.

It's funny too, because most people are all about having multiple monitors for a PC, as it leads to higher productivity since you can read a spec on one screen and program on another. Everybody at work has multiple monitors. I fear that I'll need to do that at home if I get used to it, so I'm the only one in work that has a lone monitor. That and my current video card setup can't support more than one. It could get expensive, since right now I'm using a 19" Sony that I bought for 350 bucks a few years ago, and it works marvelous for my purposes. I'd much rather have multiple PCs than multiple monitors. A network leads me to be very productive. A KVM switch is wonderful. It's all about how quick you are on the computer. I can switch between computers in a bat of an eyelash, depending on the KVM switch.

Although nowadays with multiple cores in CPUs (my first multi-core CPU will be the Mac), you can easily run two computation-intensive apps at the same time. But still I'd much rather have two multi-core computers, and KVM between them in order to get shit done :D

It's on the way

2006-11-02T00:00:09Z

MBPRO 15/2.16 CTO
2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM-2x1GB
160GB Serial ATA Drive@5400rpm
SuperDrive 6X
15" Widescreen Display
BkLit Keyboard/Mac OS
Country Kit

That is one fine piece of machinery, right there.

Happy Halloween!!

2006-10-31T00:00:13Z

My brother and I already bought loads of candy for about 3 lucky kids out there who'll get one Reese's Piece each, and the rest are for us. KitKat, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (my favorite), f#@%ing Reese's Sticks, other Reese's peanut butter and chocolate mixtures (best invention EVER), Snickers, Twix, etc, etc, etc. Loads of candy bars who are getting free advertising.

Also, I put up a comic in honor of this special day, over at Addicted Comics. Don't forget to fall in love with that site and send me secret love letters every day. If you can't read the words, just right click and view the image by itself. They're usually in the form of..

http://www.addictedcomics.com/files/addicted000#.JPG

where # is the episode number. I think the second one is lowercase "jpg" instead of uppercase. I can only keep things consistent for so long.

Sometimes I get crazy bot comments

2006-10-30T00:00:56Z

Like for online casinos. But no more.

However, "people" will still be able to add comments with no problem. It's sort of a "CAPTCHA" (search google for "Turing Test") design, but without the images. My site's not big enough to make actual "people"'s lives a pain, so this will just get rid of the most low tech comment bots.

I've been playing with the idea, as simple as it is, for a while now, trying to figure out if there's a better way to determine if the "thing" posting a comment on my site is actually a "person", and not a bot. I'm sure this method will be hacked, and I'm sure I'll have to write some more complex solution, but for right now, it'll get rid of them. Unless they already have that work around. We'll see. Great thing about them being "bots" is that I could even post the code and they'd have no idea :P

And the ultra-super-best thing about it is it doesn't reveal itself as an error. There won't be any error message, it'll just say "OMG GREAT COMMENTZ!!"! and go to the home page, so if the bot doesn't verify that the comment has actually been posted, the author of the bot will have no idea, and be like "w00t, more free advertising of my uber awesome casino site... man, that jasontconnell is such a sucker."

New Site

2006-10-29T00:00:57Z

I started a new site and I'm going to link it here, even though I said I wouldn't tell anyone about it. I'm just too impatient. It's not for young audiences, which is why I didn't plan on linking it here in the first place, since this isite is so f#$@ing clean. Anyway, it's an online comic with characters that have no names or history for that matter... pretty much whenever you read one you won't be lost. You can view the latest at www.addictedcomics.com. It'll be fun, and cover just about everything under the sun.

I make a lot of posts after midnight

2006-10-20T00:00:53Z

And I mean, RIGHT after midnight.

Here's what the last few items of news look like if I select just NewsDate from mysql...

| 2006-08-29 00:00:19 |
| 2006-08-30 00:00:11 |
| 2006-09-05 00:00:41 |
| 2006-09-07 00:00:43 |
| 2006-09-08 00:00:13 |
| 2006-09-08 00:00:46 |
| 2006-09-10 00:00:03 |
| 2006-09-23 00:00:22 |
| 2006-10-05 00:00:53 |
| 2006-10-07 00:00:07 |
| 2006-10-10 00:00:40 |
| 2006-10-11 00:00:29 |
| 2006-10-16 00:00:19 |
| 2006-10-16 00:00:19 |
| 2006-10-17 00:00:22 |
| 2006-10-17 00:00:27 |
| 2006-10-19 00:00:11 |
| 2006-10-20 00:00:33 |

Don't ask me, I just write the sh@#%.

Actually, I know exactly why. Time didn't matter before I had the feed, but now all my items are showing up as "12 AM" and I hadn't the foggiest. Well, I had an idea, but it needs to be fixed, that's all. Time is of the essense.

Atom feed up

2006-10-20T00:00:45Z

Just plug in http://www.jasontconnell.com/atom.xml into your feed reader. I'm not sure what version it is (versioning apparently got out of control since the 0.3 version of last year), but it should be "1.0". Maybe. If your feed reader doesn't read Atom, then throw it away and get a new one, because it's w3 baby.

Happy Birthday Kira!

2006-10-19T00:00:11Z

Kira, my neice, turned 7 today! I headed over to my parents house today after work because we had a little party for her, and they were all going to see the Monsters Inc on Ice at 7pm. We colored, drew Halloween stuff, and ate cupcakes and brownies after dinner. Then I came home and napped while watching game 7 of the NLCS, which is still on and in the 7th inning.

New Word

2006-10-17T00:00:27Z

Multifantaskular -
adj. Describes someone who gets many things done in a short amount of time.
Use: That dude can program, write up specs, design a database and provide UML at the same time, he's multifantaskular.

© 2006 Jason Connell

So I'm finally writing a feed

2006-10-17T00:00:22Z

I plan on using just "Atom" as it is the W3 standard. As you can see here:

public class AtomSource {
	private AtomCategory category;
	private AtomPerson contributor;
	private AtomGenerator generator;
	private AtomUri icon;
	private AtomUri id;
	private AtomLink link;
	private AtomUri logo;
	private AtomDefaultText rights;
	private AtomDefaultText subtitle;
	private AtomDefaultText title;
	private AtomDate updated;
}

Implementation to follow, and I'll have a link up of the feed and some readers, although I highly suggest Google Reader. I'm just implementing the bare minimum to be valid and readable by Atom readers because I have more important crap to do.

Wiiiiiiiii!!!!!

2006-10-16T00:00:19Z

I know how to save the world

2006-10-16T00:00:19Z

World world = WorldFactory.getWorld("Earth");

I have the world... now all I need to do is save it. Is the world capable of saving itself? Can it be as simple as

world.Save();

??

I don't think so. I need a World Saver.

WorldSaver savior = new WorldSaver();
savior.setNeedsSaving("Everything");
savior.setPriority(10);

Now I have the world saver. We just need to save our world.

savior.save(world);

Phew!! Just in time too, the s@#$ was about to hit the fan.

I have some money now

2006-10-11T00:00:29Z

Woohoo! Had to take care of some things right away, like last month's car payment, other bills, video games that came out or are coming out next week, etc, but I still got some left. So I'm having a contest! Just kidding. That would be fun.

Actually, I'm starting on a new web project!! This one will be t3h sweetz0r. I'm not telling anyone, either, so it'll get no visitors for like a year, until people start linking it showing the funny things that are on there. In order to do this, I must own or upgrade a few things. #1, a scanner. I have one in my basement but it's like 200 pounds and made of wood. #2, a sense of humor. I have one downstairs but it's old and weighs 200 pounds, and doesn't work all that well sometimes, and other times drastically misunderstood. #3, artistic ability, some paper and magic markers or art pencils, an outline pen (black ink used to make comics that you find in the paper or a comic book), because I have none of any of those. #4, inspiration, which I can get just by observing the goings-on around me. #5, a MacBook Pro! They're just beautiful. Bean got a MacBook, and he can go online using our neighbor's wireless and check fantasy football scores from in front of the TV. Errr.. Pat does that actually.

So, it's time to create and to entertain.

I need a quote thing

2006-10-10T00:00:40Z

Until then...

"if i didn't know any better, i'd'a thought a bunch of retarded monkeys worked on .NET 1.0 - 1.1"

"those retarded monkeys now just write examples of 2.0 stuff on the internet"

From a whole chat with my friend Seth, complaining about how useless and stupid .NET 1.0 - 1.1 was, and how useless the examples of everything in 2.0 is now. It took me 6 hours to get this thing I'm working on now to work (no thanks to the internet), and Seth said he looked for weeks and couldn't find anything on his problem.

Holy Hell

2006-10-07T00:00:07Z

Went to dinner, for Tom's birthday, with the gang last night, then over to Casey's which is 3 blocks away from my house, basically an open invitation to get obliterated. I'm disappointed with myself, because on the walk home, I was still able to stay on the left sidewalk with no problems, and I made it home without once passing out for an hour in someone's driveway.

Gia probably has a million photos from the night, I'll try to snag some. She can keep the ones with the ass (me dancing or whatever) and with the ass!! This girl was sitting at the bar on the enclosed porch, had the whole inside bar as her audience, and her shirt and pants went into such a configuration that half of her ass was sticking out. We probably should have told her, but looking back, who got hurt here? Nobody.

I was overly stuffed the whole damn night from our dinner at JB Dawson's. Holy crap that was a lot of f@#%^ing food. That's the worst. It's not bad usually, when you can just lay back and watch the Phillies on an overly full stomach, but when you have to walk around, dance, talk to people, come up with funny things, etc, and pile a lot of beer on top of all that sh@#%, then it becomes a bit of a chore. It was delicious though.

Highlights from the night:
J-Bomb
Gia and Michelle dancing with me was fun, and made me look like I was a stud. I don't have to worry about people thinking that I don't know what I'm doing, dancing-wise, because I rock the mother f23%#ing casba at that. But to make them think I'm a stud is something I'll gladly do.

Tom's new picture on myspace. Myspace stalking. Thankfully, NOT leaving messages on myspace last night.

Alphabetical I in order speak

2006-10-05T00:00:53Z

I came up with that today. It can be something you say just to make people think you're weird, or funny, or both. As with any other saying I come up with, you must use the copyright information if you use it... e.g. "Alphabetical I in order speak. 2006 Connell Copyright Jason. w00t."

Also, a funny thing from work today. Rob and I were meeting three others at the lunch place, and we were in the left turning lane (Rob was driving), and this SEPTA bus coming from the other way was half way in our lane. We were talking about football, and as the bus drew closer, I slowed my words like "T.... O.... is .... gonna.... " and it passed by. I stopped what I was saying and said "Sorry, my life just flashed before my eyes." And Rob goes "Well, you'd probably be fine but I'd be screwed." To which I said "Your life just flashed before my eyes." HAHA.

Work's going good. It's like when I leave in the morning, I don't feel like I'm going to "work" per se, just going to hang out with a bunch of guys and girls who are my age and are cool and funny, and I happen to program there. But we have toys too.

Just Four Connell Brothers Representing Today

2006-09-23T00:00:22Z

While we would love to get the whole fan-damily down to the Phillies game today, only four of six brothers will be there. Scott, Jeff, Me, and Pat. That's a recipe for disaster, still. We'll be getting there between 11 and 11:30, and the game starts at 1:20 PM. However many Connell brothers go, there's always a chance for a 100% violent removal from the stadium. Either from something that we're all doing wrong, or if one of us gets kicked out, the others will quickly become the judge and jury, prove the guilty party's innocence with violent resolve, and thus be kicked out on their own right. There are only a limited number of chances to see them in the wild, in their natural habitat, doing completely crazy sh@%, it should surely not disappoint this time, simply because it never ever does :)

After the game, it's block party time!! Lots more drinking, celebrating a Phillies' win (or mourning a loss), talking about Howard's home run last night, and hopefully one today, and loads of laughing, live music, and love!! Ok, that sounds Woodstock'ish. Loads of laughing, live music, being wasted, and having a great time! That's better. Tune in tomorrow (God help the internet if I decide to make a post tonight!) for an update on random recollections and hopefully some actual occurrences during the day, and possibly in the order of which they happened, and if all goes well, it won't be memories from other times or lives mixed in with today's story.

Football Season Starts Today!!!!

2006-09-10T00:00:03Z

Also, the Phillies play at 1pm!! Today could be the greatest day ever. I'm watching the games over at my brother Scott's. I was there last night too, we watched Penn State (Nikki, my sister-in-law, graduated from Penn State and is a fan for life), but they got romped by Notre Dame. I played with my neice, Meghan, and my nephew Danny. Danny did his "E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!" chant. He's 3, so it comes out like "E-L-G EAGLES!!!" It's the cutest thing.

Some people watch the preseason games. I could care less. I'm a huge Phillies fan right now. One time during preseason, they both played at like 7 o'clock one Thursday night, and I didn't turn on the Eagles, not even once, until the Phillies were over. They could make the playoffs, and in baseball, anything can happen after that. A lot of World Series winners have been Wild Card teams. Boston '04 was one... So anything can happen. But baseball will be in the background today. It's f@#%@ing football season!!!

I went golfing with my Dad yesterday. I was out until around 1:30 am on Friday. I was completely bombed. My Dad told me to meet him at their house at 8 am. But instead, plans changed a bit. My Dad tried to call me and I didn't answer. So he came over at 7:55! I woke up right away, got dressed, got some stuff together, brushed my teeth, put the stupid dog in her crate, and met my Dad outside. At this point, I realized how hung over I was. Oh man, golf was not going to be fun today. I had a monster headache for the first 7-8 holes. I wasn't even functional until the 5th or 6th hole, and by the end of the round, I tried to think back to the beginning of the round, and it seemed like a lifetime ago. Being just the two of us, the starter tried to pair us up with this couple, but they didn't want to because they were there celebrating their anniversary or something. God bless 'em. So we got paired with these two guys, probably mid to late 50s. Friendly guys. Of course, you're supposed to be friendly to the people you get paired with, it's a friendly game. Not being functional, I was like "Hi.". I didn't say much other than cracking a joke, like about a bunker that they both got stuck in, saying "You could spend a lifetime in there." It was a brutal, brutal bunker with steep sides. The one guy almost had to go out sideways.

After an advil that my Dad had, a cheeseburger after nine, and a f2#%@ing sh@#%load of water, I felt much better. I was back to myself :P At this point, I explained that I was out celebrating the night before because I got a new job, and was probably still wasted when I started the round! They understood :) One of them actually offered me work since he found out I was a programmer! I gave him my info so we should be in touch.

I had this shot on "the humpback hole" at Paxon Hollow. I drove way left and couldn't get to the green, so I chipped out to the edge of the fairway, around 140 yards away. I took out my 7 iron, knowing it was the exact club I needed. I hit it, and it was beautiful. It bounced, and again, and rolled up and settled right behind the cup, 2 feet away. The two guys I was with cheered and clapped, I took a bow. It was awesome.

The funniest thing about this story, though, is that I scored better on the front nine than I did on the back. And by 9 whole strokes! The back is harder, but still... I was totally out of it for the front nine, shooting a 44! I thank water and food for my miraculous front nine.

Miracles and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

2006-09-08T00:00:46Z

Observe exhibits A and B:

Immediately I thought "Stupid forwards..." right?

I got that email from my Dad at 1:17 PM as indicated by Gmail. Within the hour (2pm), I got a call from my recruiter, Audrea, that I got the job. I called my Dad and told him that I got it, and he asked "Did you get my email?" I said "Oh yeah, but I didn't send it to anyone..." And he said "I know, I did, and something good happened to me within the hour. You called telling me you got the job."

How about that?! Don't worry, I still won't forward them. It didn't work because of sending it to 2342352 people. The question is, of course, are you the type of person that sees things as coincidence, or do you believe in miracles? Sorry, that was blatant theft from the movie "Signs". I'm definitely not saying that there isn't a higher power at work here (in fact, there most definitely was!). Just that I don't believe in forwards! They're the same source of "Send this to as many people as you can, and Bill Gates will send you a check for a bazillion dollars."

Also, there was this little joke going around between my recruiters (Laura and Audrea) and I. One time I had eaten only toast for two days straight, so I emailed saying

"I probably need to find something soon, since I am now in a "save money" mode, and have been living on toast for 2 days!"

They had vowed to find me a job :) Every once in a while, the joke would be replenished with new material. Hilarity ensued. I won, no lie, $1.65 on the nickel slots in Atlantic City and bragged that I splurged and got jelly! Livin' it up, indeed. So, they promised me a treat if I get the job (other than, of course, getting the job). While filling out the papers, I had a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread! It was gourmet. Thank you Laura and Audrea!

If you need a job, definitely email me and I'll direct you to them. Their company is called "JCPW", short for, obviously, "Jason Connell's Personal Workforce". Their website is ehcmi.com, which has a different name, but it'll be changed soon. I got lost driving to their office because I couldn't find it under the new name, then realized that they probably didn't update the directory at the entrance to the parking lot yet. They gotta get on that.

I report to work on Monday. Finally!

I'm waiting for the call

2006-09-08T00:00:13Z

I feel like Beavis and Butthead. That time when there's nothing on TV until many hours later, and they have to find stuff to do to kill the time. "Hey Butthead, I think I have to throw up..." "Cool, that should like, take some time."

I've been working out, playing video games, watching more comedy, playing guitar, etc. I'm running out of stuff to do. I could get in my car and drive around, but that costs gas, e.g. money. I could play more guitar but my finger's about to fall off. I could hit golf balls out front, but that could cost lots of money. I'm golfing tomorrow with my Dad, that should be fun. We're going to Paxon Hollow where I once shot a 41. Err, on the back nine. I had like 4 birdies in a row. Missed 2 putts on 18, else I would have shot 39. Motherf@#$@#$@#. Til tomorrow.

I woke up today and felt like death due to the fact that I've smoked like 4 packs of cigarettes in 2 days. And I hadn't worked out since Monday. I had to work out, it expands my lung capacity if something like that happens. And I have to find something else to do besides sit and drink coffee and smoke.

I could watch TV, but that's boring. I've already seen the first 4 "SportsRise"'s and "SportsCenter"'s on Comcast and ESPN respectively. I have "Syriana" and both times I've watched it, I paused it to go to the bathroom or something, and never got back to watching it. So, as it stands, that movie makes no sense to me. I guess I should see the end eventually. Not today though, I have the attention span of a goldfish. I might work out again, that's about the only beneficial thing I can do, besides program more, but see my note on my temporary ADD in the previous sentence about why that's impossible.

Guitar's fun though. I've been playing more Jimi, learning how he does some stuff that makes his songs sound like no others. I like his Blues album best. I love "Once I had a Woman", and "Bleeding Heart", and "Born Under a Bad Sign". When I first heard them, I had a sliver of an idea of the notes he was playing, but now as I play more and try to immitate, it's becoming more clear. He's just a genius.

Video games are frustrating right now. They're much better enjoyed after a long day of work.

I laugh at the titles of the messages that land in spam in my gmail account.

I'm gonna take a shower.

[Update] It's weird. I got the job WOOHOO!!! But the weird thing.. I'll explain later. Gotta go fill out paperwork and stuff.

Today I needed comedy

2006-09-07T00:00:43Z

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning (3:30 I think) again, and I've just been stressed out. Digital cable was tuned to "HBO Comedy" (Beaner had watched some show on there, then watched a free "On Demand" Donnie Darko, but fell asleep to it) which I usually find useless and a waste of money, but right when I was in the process of waking up, but still in that asleep phase, I heard something that made me laugh. This standup show came on that was taped in 1990, and it was this guy called "Blake" something. I watched it and it felt good to laugh. So I went to HBO on demand to see if they had any standup shows, and of course they did. Chris Rock was on there, I watched it and laughed. Then there was a Robert Wuhl special which was on history, but it was classic and funny, but only 29 minutes long. At this time, it was around 5:30 am. They also had Dane Cook's "Vicious Circle". That made me laugh as well. It felt good.

I was just pissed and nervous and anxious. Pissed because I took my car to the dealership to get inspected. I learned the hard way. They won't let anything go. This was a bill for $1300. They wouldn't bill me, so that pissed me off. They need payment then and there. Nervous because I had a job interview today, which went pretty well I think. We'll see. Anxious because I'm just an anxious person. My anxiety gets me up at 3:30 AM then keeps me up because I'm anxious, wondering if I got enough sleep to not yawn at the interview. It's a chicken and the egg thing.

As I sit and listen to Jimi

2006-09-05T00:00:41Z

It's 6am and I couldn't sleep last night. Ryan Howard hit his 53rd homer of the season, Chase Utley his 25th to win it in 10th innings, I did manage to settle down for a decent nap of like 4 hours until midnight. After that, I've been too excited to sleep. I have a job interview at a company that I really want to work at.

Besides being a creative small company which has impressed me in the past, as I've seen their work long ago, in a location that is totally awesome, 8 miles away, and me having lots in common with the guy I phone interviewed with last week... if you take all that out, it will still be an awesome place to work. Well, actually, if you take all that out... hmm. Anyway, all those things are a part of it, so it makes it an incredibly appealing job at a time when I've been unemployed for 2 months, having turned down a job where I would have been miserable, without a lick of fear or certainty for the future.

"No fear?" you ask? Yes, no fear, baby. Somehow, I've always managed. Struggled but managed. Being a contractor, the only thing that's set in stone is that you'll be unemployed after a few months. So you can just try to save up enough to get you to the next job. It makes saving for a house a pain (not House of Pain). You jump around jobs a lot (get it?! Jump Around?!? I'm hilarious). But that has an upside, if you do what you're supposed to do there. You meet a lot of people and they are generally willing to give you a positive reference for your next job. There's another benefit to contracting. You get to test the waters of a lot of places. If you don't see it fitting your lifestyle or just generally don't like the work, then you can leave, and the best part is there's no hard feelings! No burnt bridges. It just makes it difficult, during a break, to make Ends meet (another joke!! In this case, it's Everlast, not House of Pain. I'm on fire today).

However, if and when I find that place, where I love the work, love the people, the size is just right, and everything I consider secondary is beneficial, like location, hours, flexibility, pay, route to work (must pass at least one Dunkin Donuts and Wawa), parking, lack of office politics, extracurricular activities, etc... when I find that place, I'm gonna try my ass off to stay there. This might be the place. More on that later.

I'm gonna be one bada#% mother f@#%er!

2006-08-30T00:00:11Z

Right now, I'm addicted to the pain and stiffness the morning after a good workout. I'm not really doing a professional workout, like, I'm only doing situps and pushups for the past few weeks. But the idea is to just lose some weight, not necessarily sculpt anything right now. Although, I can feel that I'm a lot stronger, more windful, less stressed, and more healthy in general.

After a few more weeks of pushing my limit and pain every day, I think I'll be a badass motherf@#%er. Today, even, some guy came to turn our electricity off (we're two days late... PECO are a bunch of bastards), and I popped my head out the window and he was still there. I said "Hey, we paid this morning." I told him how much. He said "Alright, let me call and see if it's ok that I turn it back on." So I went down there with two gigantic guns. He looked at me, held back some tears, and said "I'll turn it back on, we won't tell them." This guy was a big dude too. He feared my presence. He figured I could probably power an entire city with kinetic energy from one of my fists.

Ok, maybe I'm not that strong yet :P He was a nice guy too, so that might have something to do with it. Also, probably because I begged him to turn it back on and not whoop my ass. Plus my coffee would get cold. He saved us money. So thank you nice Mr. PECO worker. So, if you try that stunt again, when I'm strong enough, I'll remember this and only whoop your ass a little.

I'm f#@%ing bored

2006-08-29T00:00:58Z

That's when I know it's time to get back to work. I've been jobless for just over two months now. Let's review what I've been doing during the days.

For the first 3 weeks or so, I was heavy into programming.

For the next 4 weeks or so, I played video games mainly.

For the last week, I've been playing my guitar a lot, looking for a job, emailing people, planning parties 3 months in advance, emailing again just to make sure they read my first email, actually leaving messages on myspace for people, planning on getting my car inspected since it has 3 days before it's due, playing my guitar more, reveling at the size of my blisters on my fingers since I haven't played that hard in months, avoiding video games and programming like it was my job, dreading another day of the same thing. I need to f@#%@ing work, and not just for the money. Why did I wake up so early? Do I only need 5 hours of sleep now? That would rock, sleeping sucks. I should write more software.

Oh, and this is the worst, as it had been stricken from my mind as soon as I thought of it and I needed hypnosis to bring it back... I considered doing Pilates (no idea of that spelling). That's the exercise thing. I'll stick to my situps and pushups, thanks, it's already working wonders. That and living on toast helps. I don't have a scale, but I've lost about a half of an inch from my cheeks. At least I think that's from working out, it could be the fact that I don't smile lately since I'm bored to tears, so my face just looks thinner. Plus I shaved my head. It looks awesome, ask anyone. I'll take a picture though, since I could probably submit only a headshot to Playboy and they'd put it in as the centerfold, g@#damn it I'm beautiful. HAHA I kill me. Anyway, keep an eye out for fabricat... err... fabulous tales of gainful employment, and hopefully a happy Episode Two to my dream last night. Feel free to psychoanalyze that one.

[Update] Here's a new picture of me, notice how f@%#ing bored I am

I also uploaded some other pictures lying around on my digital camera, like this one, which happens to be bad-ASS

There's no "photoshopping", since I can't afford that program, only ones like The GIMP, which is like PhotoShop, but requires much less money than the entire GNP of a small country.

Also, this one, which proves that I got a hole in one on Tiger Woods 06 for the PSP.

It was the 8th hole, I believe. However, this picture is no longer that important since I made another hole in one and saved the replay! I f@#%ing rock at that game. You can view video of my second hole in one by visiting Downloads and searching for downloads under the label "psp".

Here's a couple of pictures of the kids:

[Update #2] Truth be told, may it be a bit disturbing, my Mom came over for a short visit (she came bearing gifts!!! I got new socks!!!), and she said I'm a hottie. Now it's official, ladies. Of course, she thought the gorilla that is my Dad was attractive about 40 years ago, so I may be reading more into that than I should...

This is what I dream about

2006-08-29T00:00:09Z

I had to get this on "paper" since I just woke up and it's still fresh in my brain.

Ok, so someone sells me a CD store for $10,000. I have a few employees. It's an old type of store with a back room, on a corner, with a blacktop area between the store and the next house, and a front yard. It's really a house converted to a CD store. Of course, the logic in buying a CD store right now with digital music being so popular hardly exists, but I did it. I sleep there, probably since it's a house type thing. The first day goes by, there's people lined up outside on the blacktop ready to get in and buy music or coffee, which I sell both of. I talk to my cute blonde employee, and we went over how to order more stock, and tell her my strategy will be to find out what sells best, buy any CD that we sold out of, and buy a steadily decreasing rate of the top 20 brand new albums, by popularity... so like 20 of the most popular band's newest album, down to 5 of the 20th popular band's newest. So we're set on that. I walk around the store, and notice I have TONS of CDs, laid out in boxes on fold-out tables, sorted by genre, the alphabetically, with a "rare" section. I remember thinking "Was the $10,000 a one time deal or do I have to pay it again next month?? If so, I'm F@%#ED!!" The store, which I don't know the name of, is winding down, and for some reason, I'm beat and leave it to two of my employees to close it down. In dreams, I don't sleep, so instantly I'm awake and it's morning. I walk out and start brewing up some coffee, and I notice the front door (which is one of two front doors, this one leads out to the lawn, the other to the blacktop, and they're right across from each other) is WIDE open. I hoped someone decided to show up early. A horror sweeps over me, and I look at the first table I can get my eyes on... my store, in the beginning of its first full day of being mine... was robbed completely blind. Every CD is gone, but bless the robber's heart, he didn't take one drop of coffee, and left every other coffee related item. I see a Scotch taped message on the wall that simply says "Thanx!" with a skull type smily face drawn on it in blue marker on "college ruled" paper. The day fast forwards to lunch, where I pay for the food that was ordered by my employees without my approval, but it's stromboli, so I really don't care. My rastafarian/Jamaican employee ask me if I got the change. I did see some money lying on the lawn, and wondered if that's what he was referring to. Then I find out what happened. My one employee (I have 3) takes me aside and says "Dude, I'm so sorry about leaving the door open. Jenny (my other employee who I talked with about stocking the place earlier) kept talking to me as I was leaving, 4 times, she wouldn't leave me alone, and when I left, I was sure it was closed and locked." But, I was more upset about not having a CD in stock, being a CD store and all, and having customers come in and say that we don't have any CDs.

Then I woke up. Weird, huh?

Good Luck Charm

2006-08-24T00:00:29Z

I realized this the other day, and it lacks any realistic explanation. I haven't watched a Phillies game that ended in a Phillies loss in many, many months. The last game I went to, they got their asses handed to them, which was like June 17th or something. Then their was the All Star break, and the trades. It could be that the team is just a whole new team (which is true), but then explain this...

If I happen to turn on the game in session, it will be tied or a close game, but as I'm watching, the Phillies will break out and score a lot. The other day, I turn on the game. It's in the 4th inning, 0-0. Phillies break it open with 4 runs. That's like every time I catch a game not from the beginning. Last night, I turn on the game going into the top of the 9th. The Cubs just hit a home run to go 1-1, but I missed it. Howard had homered earlier to reach 44 on the season. I watch and the Phillies win. Of course, I don't believe in circumstances like that. It is all just coincidence. But it's eirie (is that spelled right?).

Like, down the shore (in Delaware), Steve and I got done watching a movie and turned on the Phils. They won after it was a close game, with them losing at first. I missed a game that Saturday, and they lost. They went 6-4 on the home stand, and I saw only the wins, and wasn't at my TV for the other times. This is a 10 game road trip they're on now, and I've seen most of each of the games, they're 3-0 so far. They play today at 2pm. I might have jinxed them, if there is such a thing, or I'll be further delusioned into thinking I'm good luck if they win. Of course, I want them to win. Maybe I'll go down at like 2:40 and watch, to see if they score runs only when I'm watching. That would be crazy whack funky.

Weird Dreams and Propaganda

2006-08-24T00:00:21Z

I had this weird dream after I fell asleep watching the replay of the Phillies game last night. It was around 12 midnight when I finally zonked out. If you've never watched a Phillies game, you still might have heard of Harry Kalas. He's the Phillies' TV and radio voice. Well, he's getting old, and his vision is fading, as well as his memory. Sometimes he'll botch calls like if a ball is caught at the wall or if it goes out and the guy there tries to catch it but it's obviously way out of reach of him, he'll report the opposite of what happened. This dream was along those lines. Basically, it was a ground ball up the third base line with nobody on base, and Harry Kalas reported it as a two run homer. I was like "WTF?".

I turned on CNN after waking up this morning, and caught a majority of "In The footsteps of Bin Laden", which is an interesting, two-sided show. It ended with me feeling rather informed about where bin Laden might be, why he "hates America", why al Qaeda was formed, and all this other stuff that will cause the FBI and CIA to beeline to this website and flag it as "terroristic". Anyway, it was over, and Anderson Cooper is on the screen, informing me of the next time the show will be on. Of course, the bad part of it was, he was basically calling bin Laden a slew of names that I wouldn't say around my neices or nephews. So, I realized I didn't like news shows telling me what to think of these people. If they realized that intelligent people watch their shows, then they should assume that most people can come to their own conclusions, and they just need all the facts in order to do this, and that's why we watch the news. Telling us that Osama bin Laden is evil is not a fact, that's an opinion. It might be a widespread opinion, but it's an opinion, and one that most people would find to be "right", which doesn't necessarily make it fact.

I bought "Munich" with my limited funds, and I've watched it three times. It's a good flick. Anyway, there's this part where the dude who plays the Incredible Hulk is in Germany trying to find answers, and he comes across this German frauline, and she's a Philosopher. She comments from a work entitled "The Philosophy of Right" I think, by some philosoph. I immediately became intrigued. I haven't researched it, but I'm sure it's a real work. Now I have to read it. Because what's right to someone is completely wrong to someone else, and therefore couldn't possibly be recorded in history books as "fact". Of course, we record it as fact, and therefore it's propaganda.

Yes, the show "In the Footsteps of Bin Laden" is also propaganda. But there are a lot of facts in it, but we see just the facts about al Qaeda attacking US interests, and the US retaliating and weakening al Qaeda interests like their safe harbor in Afghanistan, the Taliban. Facts that try to sculpt a conclusion, in this case that al Qaeda is doing what they do just because they felt like it... with no motivation. The show brushes aside the fact that the US has held military posts in Saudi Arabia, Islam's holy land, for many years. This would be like going and taking a dump on an altar in a church. Because of oil, of course. They may be right. All they want is for the US to leave their land, which may be impossible without an alternative source of fuel. It just so happens that the biggest source of oil also happens to be a desert filled with people of another religion, and that religion's holy land. They'd drill for oil under Rome or Jerusalem if they knew there was a well there.

Oh well. Time for coffee. I'm not on bin Laden's side here, just saying that propaganda sucks, we are smart people, most of the time, and we don't need opinions of news reporters to shape our own opinions. It's weird how the two topics of this post intermingle. I like to watch a sporting event where the announcer is rooting for the same team I am, but I can't watch a news show where they are rooting for or against anyone. I don't know... does that seem weird?

This thing still works?!

2006-08-13T00:00:25Z

It's been a while since I've been at a computer... I went down to Delaware on Wednesday and didn't get back until today, Sunday or something, 13 Aug 06 @ 10:20 PM. My "Check Engine" light came on during the 1.5 hour ride home, which serves me right... I haven't done anything to that car but put 8000 miles on it since my last oil change. I'm taking it in this week. I need it to last me a while. It smells funny.

I went golfing with my Dad and my brother Steve on Thursday. I sucked. It was funny. I blame the course. See, the fairway was pristine, and so unbelievably soft. I'd take a regular swing at it and take out a divot the size of my foot each time (I'm a size 12). This wasn't good because I wasn't planning on it, and my ball would go half the distance I would have expected. I bought a new golf bag. The label read "$99.95" and I paid "$99.95" for it, thanks to Delaware's tax laws leading to a lack of sales tax. I saved $6 compared to buying it in PA. PA could learn something from Delaware... like.... hmmm.... no sales tax might be the only thing. Although, I think their liquor regulations might also be a bit light compared to PA, like they could sell beer in gas stations, but I don't know for sure.

My trip down was exciting. I decided to go Route 9 which runs along the bay. I wrongly assumed that there'd be civilization down that road, and I'd be able to get gas on it. Boy was that a mistake. I went on "E" with a corn field on the right of me, a bay on the left, and hadn't passed anything, not a telephone pole, or a street light, or even a f@#%@$@#ing stop sign in 10 miles. I was pretty sure I would not make it to golf the next day at this point. I kept going, passed a random farm house here and there, then when I'd been on E for about 10 minutes, I decided that I would die if I didn't just turn right in search of civilization. Luckily, about 2 miles up the road was the quaint little town of Smyrna, Delaware. I passed a bar on the way and was so tempted to go in, but decided against it because it was cut out of a corn field, I swear to God. There were 3 pickup trucks in the parking lot. I'm a city boy, I would be either laughed or kicked out of that bar. Anyway, found Smyrna, got gas, got on Rt. 1 and said F@#%$ 9. 9 sucked. I travel at night, in case you're wondering. It was about 9:40 PM when I found civilization. I had gone 40 miles down a lonely and dark country road and about 20 of them on E. It was an adventure, and if I had it to do all over again, I would have done the same thing.

Nothing like spending the weekend with Kira, Caden and Ethan, too. They're so cute. Today we went to the arcade and fun place... rides and stuff. And on the beach. During one 10 minute stint, I was in charge of Caden. He's four. I point to this one ride, and asked him if he wanted to go on it. I hadn't seen it in motion, but it looked like a normal kiddie ride; one that goes in endless circles and relatively low speeds... very predictable and boring. He goes on, in a car all by himself, and this thing takes off. It's not the Himalayas or something, but it's like that in that it changes elevation while it goes in a circle. It's moving pretty fast, and I'm watching Caden for tears, and hoping his parents didn't see what I did! Phew, it's coming to a stop... wait a second, the operator says something about "reverse"!! Oh f@#$@!! It goes at the same exact speed in reverse. This time, I'm panicking. However, no sign of tears or parents made me relax a bit. The ride stopped... finally. He comes off, and we go find Patty who's with the other kids. I'm like "I'm sorry, I put him on that ride not knowing what it was like." At which point Caden interjects with "That was THE BEST!!!" HAHA!! Huge sigh of relief. But Caden, if no one else, could handle that ride, and he's been on a rollercoaster with his dad, my brother, Steve. Thinking back, he was absolutely bored to tears on the other kiddie rides.

Not much else happened. I'm still looking for a job, but that will be coming to an end soon. I lost only a few hours being down in Delaware for four days though, so that's pretty good.

The News sucks

2006-08-02T00:00:11Z

It only takes me about 5 minutes of watching CNN to hate it and pretty much every news show. First, there's the incidents in Lebonon which I'm OK with watching. But then, they talk about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitist remarks, which he apologized for, leave it alone, and his DUI. Then they say his blood alcohol level was .12, and in California, the legal limit is .08. From my "alcohol" class in college (I did actually take an alcohol class... hoo boy, there's a good story to do with that too), they said that .08 is like drinking two beers and hitting the road. So .12, from math, is only 1 more beer. It's the law, and he rightfully got a DUI because of that, and that's not my issue. I know I get buzzed if it's been a while and I drink three beers in an hour or so, but comon... people are still pretty much capable of anything, and in some cases more capable of other things, after three beers. I speak of course of Beirut (AKA beer pong). CNN brought it up like it was a huge deal, and that Mel Gibson is now a lesser person, like "We can all now laugh at Mel Gibson when on coffee break." I'm not particularly fond of Mel, I'm more attacking peoples' attitudes towards someone who makes a mistake then I am defending Mr. Gibson. Give it up, Perfecty O'Perfect.

Sometimes I love TV though. Yesterday on Comcast SportsNet, on the show Daily News Live, was Charles Barkley. He's a great interview. Comcast should release that interview on DVD, and any other interview with him. He was my favorite player growing up. In fact, in third grade, I guess for my 9th birthday, I invited him to my party. I was the talk of the whole school, since I told one person that Charles Barkley might show up. I had hookups, since my Dad went to school with John Nash, then GM of the Sixers. Sir Charles couldn't make it, I'm afraid to say, but in the side door of the house, my brother noticed the door had been held open by something. We never use it but it's on the street, so easily accessible to delivery trucks and whatnot. To help you further imagine, the house is on a corner, but the front door is not on the street that the address is listed as, that door is the side door. Anyway, he checked it and it was a box addressed to me!! Charles Barkley, via John Nash, had sent me an personal autographed Sixers basketball ("To Jason Charles Barkely"), a note from Charles, and a bunch of assorted Sixers stickers. I don't know what happened to the rest, but the basketball is currently on top of our Philadelphia sports dedicated entertainment center, along with a Chase Utley bobblehead, a Donovan McNabb bobblehead, an Allen Iverson bobblehead, and I think Peter Forsberg represents the Flyers. I'd have to go check, but I'm too comfy. Anyway, I wish I'd kept the note. Oh well. Some of the stickers made their way onto various spots around the house, like the insides of closet doors (because who ever paints there!?). Definitely an exciting time, and now Charles Barkley will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame! That thing just shot up in value, but you don't ever, ever sell it because it's Charles Barkley for Pete's sake!! Oh, and it's to me... another "Jason" just wouldn't get the same satisfaction out of it.

The only channel I watch regularly now is the History Channel. I love Modern Marvels, Mega Disasters, and their special on the American Revolution, among a ton of other shows. I will watch Mail Call... hell, I watch anything on that channel. I used to be a Discovery / Learning Channel guy, and the History Channel is from the same blood, but I just find that THC has more of the stuff I'm interested in... all the time. And their paid programming doesn't kick on until 4am, which is huge for me during my time off :)

I used to hate rollercoasters

2006-07-21T00:00:11Z

Long story short... my mom brought me on "Runaway Train" in Disney World when I was 3 (which I don't remember, and didn't cause my fear of rollercoasters), I didn't go on another rollercoaster until I was 20 or so, and even then I was forced, so really I still didn't like them. Then I didn't go on another one until today! I was still a little nervous, but since I've been on them before (and practically the same ones, being it's the same park [Dorney Park in Allentown]), I knew I could take it... after I've had some coffee.

I know, I know. "What a panzy!". STFU!! The thing that always scared me were the screamers. Actually, if a car went down the main drop and no one screamed, I told myself that they were too terrified to scream at all, and I definitely wasn't going on that rollercoaster! I got used to sitting and waiting for my brothers and parents, out by the exit of the ride. Later I would find out that you have to scream, lest your stomach will exit your body through your mouth, or so it felt.

Well today, being in great company (shout out GG, TG and Neysa!!), I sorta was forced again, but it wasn't a third party doing the forcing. I just said "I'm going on rollercoasters today and it's gonna f@%@#ing rock. F#@$@ did I just say that?!?!" I was still incredibly uneasy about the first ride, which happened to be "Hydra: The Revenge". If you've never been... be! You start out, go down about a 3 inch slope, and you're going about 5MPH, then all the sudden you're upside down! At 5MPH! It's Dorney Park's way of getting a little extra on top of the price of admission. When I got off the ride I noticed a dime on my seat. One of the lucky ones that didn't land into the net below the initial twist. After that, the next 4 or so coasters were easy. We went on that then Lazer, then went back to the free fall (I can't do that..) since Neysa was arriving then. Neysa and Gia did the free fall. This is how that went:

GG: How long do they usually keep you up here before dropping you?
Neysa: Usually not too long
.0001 seconds later WHOOSH
All aboard the free fall: AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Eventually we made our way over to the Lazer again, and then the Comet (or whatever the wooden rollercoaster is called). Then we were determined to go on Steel Force. A mile later, we found the entrance. It's about 5 feet from the Lazer and Comet, but Tom didn't have his GPS with him. We found the Swan boats though.

At this point, it was about 300 degrees, and any water we had would evaporate as soon as it hit our lips. We had to do the log flume. Waiting in line, Gia and I were planning and scheming... "How can we do this? Do they allow 4 people on the boats?" ... "I think so!" ... "Oh look, they have 4 people!" ... "Oh but two of them are little kids"... "Ah there's one with 4 'bigger' people."... "Sweet! So we'll go shortest to tallest from front to back."... "Awesome, sounds like a plan!" The next flume comes, I hop in the back like I'm supposed to, being the tallest. Gia hops in right in front of me. Apparently, our brilliant plan wasn't communicated properly to Tom and Neysa since the chain was closed with them behind it, waiting for the next flume. Damnit! That was a good time though, I got soaked! I got soaked but not from the big drop.

Next, it was back to the Hydra for some more donations to the Dorney Park Feed the Workers Fund. They cleaned up on that ride. The next plan was for everyone to get their bathing suits on, except me of course... and head into the water park. Walking up in that direction, we noticed a ride that we hadn't yet donated to. It was "Talon", like an eagle, and you hang from the track, instead of riding on it.

Now having no fear, I was like "We have to ride that." Two volunteers, Neysa and Gia. Sweet. I sat in the middle. Neysa is an admitted screamer, Gia has a pretty strong set of lungs, but I was the loudest!! That ride was INSANE. The main thing about it is, from where we sat, towards the middle of the line, you can't see the track! Not even a little bit. So you have no idea what's coming. We were doing twists, corkscrews, and anything else that lunatic rollercoaster designers could throw at us. We started on an inverse loop (a loop, but you're on the bottom of the track since your feet hang down), and at the top, you twist. I screamed "What the F@#%@ was that?!?!" Gia will try to tell you other things I said, but she's lying :)

Phew. Long day! Well, that was only "a good portion" of it. We still had the water park to attend to! We entered, and Neysa said "I want to go on that". Everyone kept walking, I stopped and went in and we went on this inner tube / tube ride. First, I was fully clothed. Tan shorts (not a bathing suit), brown leather sandals, shirt. Luckily, I had emptied my pockets in the locker. We get to the top, and knowing that I rode in with Tom, and he has leather seats, I have to stay sorta dry. Basically, I can't submerge fully. Neysa goes into the tube and I heard her screaming for the whole minute before they let me in. I sit in the tube and I'm soaked, but still not fully submerged. My ass is though :) The guy says "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to remove your sandals and hold on to them." Ok, fine. I lay them on my chest, and he gives me the "GO!!" signal. Now I find out why Neysa was screaming the whole time, other than her shameless admittance to being a screamer. Inside the tube is pitch black. There were no incredible surprises though, like 20 foot drops straight down or anything. Just a bunch of turns. I noticed that I've grown a lot since the last time I was on an inner tube, and if I sit the way I want to, my butt drags along, slowing me down to a crawl. This was unacceptable. So, I had to adjust my sitting style, by pushing my legs out and getting my ass off the ground! This would prove to be my downfall. After about a hundred turns in pitch black darkness, a light started to emerge about 30 feet away and a few feet below me. This is it, I thought. Time to stay dry! Sure thing, my tube hits the water in the pool and doesn't move, I fly off the tube and go completely under the water, now officially submerged. My sandals floated away like debris from a torpedoed cargo ship, evidence that something awful has happened here. I came up from the water and some little kid yelled "Dude that was AWESOME!!" Neysa's climbing out of the pool, looking back and laughing. It was surely a site! I am laughing now thinking back on it.

We went into the lazy river, but Tom, Gia and the other dude were waiting about 30 people ahead in line. It would be the last we would see of them. Neysa and I did one loop in the river, then hit the slides. They did 4 loops! Of course we didn't know that until we were leaving. Gia you should have come with us :) Later, our excuse was that we would climb to the top of different rides to see if we could see them anywhere. Obviously, we had to get down, so we just went down the slide rather than back down the steps :) We actually did end up seeing them from the top of the last ride we went on!

So, those were highlights from the day at Dorney Park. Good times everyone :) Let's do it again soon!

Vacre Tei Up and Running

2006-07-20T00:00:29Z

To those people who responded "Hell will freeze over" to my "When my web game comes out, ..." poll a few weeks ago, I hope you have your mittens on! The temperature is dropping where you are! ;-)

Anyway, it's up. Just visit vacretei.org, register and wait! See, you have to wait if you register directly at the site. It builds suspense. Also, when you're inactive, you give the people who are playing a way to get more gold. When they run out, they can choose to activate the next person waiting. That might be you! To know for sure, you can log in, as an inactive user, and see how many people are ahead of you. If it says zero, then you won't have to wait long, depending on how many people are playing.

Visit it and read everything. I'm putting together a FAQ, based on questions that I have received one time. I'll also be writing answers to questions that haven't been asked yet, but that I can foresee people asking or wanting an answer to without having to ask. This will help people get around my style of website development. I'm no interface designer people! I write backend, server code. It's miraculous that the game is not a console app. That would be fun...

vt:>list
vt-- listing works
Photograph by Voodoo, 23 gold  (id = 1)
Photograph by cotraveler, 25 gold  (id = 2)
vt:>buy 2
buying work by cotraveler for 25 gold
you now have 65 gold, bank has 20305 gold
vt:>show 2
showing work 2
[ you own this work ]

(opening image viewer in background ... )
(image sent to client)

success.

vt:>end
logging out
Good bye!

So, be grateful. I'll be adding more. I have some strategic elements in there, but I want to add a ton. Not so it becomes confusing, but so that people can do what they really want to do. I have no ads on the site, I never planned on making any money on it, ever. Well, there was one time when I thought that people could get more gold by wiring actual money for me... like $1 gets 500 gold, but I then remembered that I don't want people to have to pay for this.

So sign up already!

Hello Ruby Universe

2006-07-15T00:00:26Z

The last two days I jumped into Ruby. It's a programming language. It's pretty easy to use, although I have to get used to it since I went like 3 hours yesterday without being able to do anything! But it's just different.

I wrote a solution to the dining philosophers problem (it shows threading and synchronizing access to data using mutual exclusion in Ruby), which you can find if you go to my downloads and search for the label "ruby". Its output looks like this:

Socrates is thinking...
>>>p=Socrates:s=thinking:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=Utensil:to_r=Utensil
Plato is dining...
>>>p=Plato:s=dining:lh=Utensil:rh=Utensil:to_l=None:to_r=None
CC is thinking...
>>>p=CC:s=wants:thinking:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=None:to_r=Utensil
DD is thinking...
>>>p=DD:s=thinking:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=Utensil:to_r=Utensil
EE is thinking...
>>>p=EE:s=wants:thinking:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=Utensil:to_r=Utensil

It'll loop indefinitely. The philosophers will decide whether they want to think or dine, and then they'll do it if they can! See, there's 5 philosophers at the table, and only 5 utensils, one between each of them. So, only two can be eating at the same time, but two will only be eating at the same time if they're not right next to each other, and two want to eat at the same time.

Here's another loop. It shows what happens when a philosopher wants to eat but can't:

Socrates is dining...
>>>p=Socrates:s=dining:lh=Utensil:rh=Utensil:to_l=None:to_r=None
Plato is thinking...
>>>p=Plato:s=thinking:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=None:to_r=Utensil
CC is dining...
>>>p=CC:s=dining:lh=Utensil:rh=Utensil:to_l=None:to_r=None
DD wants to eat but can't (CC has Utensil <--> EE has None)
>>>p=DD:s=wants:dining:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=None:to_r=Utensil
EE wants to eat but can't (DD has None <--> Socrates has Utensil)
>>>p=EE:s=wants:dining:lh=None:rh=None:to_l=Utensil:to_r=None

Download ruby at ruby-lang and a whole bunch of other places if you want to play with it. It's a pretty decent language so far.

Configuration proxies are a beautiful thing

2006-07-12T00:00:14Z

Don't ask me what that means, I have no idea. I just came up with it. Proxy seemed like a good term, but I'll explain how it works, and why they were necessary.

I wanted to have filters on "dumbweb" (Read about dumbweb here). You know, the software running over at stringed.org... Well, filters are a configurable item. Just read this to learn all about them. "dumbweb" is a completely separate project, and you can't go writing very specific filter configuration parsing code in there. But, you would want dumbweb to be able to use filters in such a way that it's easy to configure, in the same config file where you define dumbweb. Hence the need for "configuration proxies".

Basically, now, in my dumbweb configuration xml, I can just write what would be in the filter configuration file but into the dumbweb configuration for the data item (i.e. "Picture") and a filter will show up for that item on the list page. Here's the xml

  <form className="jtccom.domain.data.pictures.Picture" name="Picture" listed="true">
    <filter helpIcon="/images/helpicon.jpg">
      <fields>
        <field label="Album" name="PictureAlbumId" helpText="This is LONG overdue!!" />
        <field label="Labels" name="Labels" helpText="Search Labels" />
        <field label="# of Labels" name="Count(PictureId):PictureLabel" helpText="Find pictures with or without labels." />
      </fields>
    </filter>
    <operations>
      <operation name="edit" />
      <operation name="delete" />
      <operation name="add" />
      <operation name="view" />
    </operations>
  </form>

And basically what you see is the same as the filters on the Pictures, News and Downloads pages, only as a part of dumbweb. And those are configuration proxies. Configuration specifications that are used in the system but not in the current system, but the current system can... not load, but support or use the system that the proxy defines. So, dumb web configurations don't read the filter xml at all! It's read by the dumb filter system! It's neat. We can call this Configuration version 3. Read more about Configuration version 2 here, and that article links to version 1 if you're that interested.

Labels too big, had to do something...

2006-07-10T00:00:12Z

First, here's the problem:

When you "subfilter" labels, all of them are returned and there's like a thousand of them.

Second, here's the solution:

And check out all this DOM scripting to accomplish that!

Pictures Labeled!!

2006-07-09T00:00:31Z

This is different from the last one. I went through, for about 4 hours, painstakingly labeling each and every picture. It led me to a few conclusions:

1.) I take too many damn pictures of the same thing. I guess taking them isn't bad, but I don't have to upload 40 pictures of the Phillies game I went to a year ago. Then every picture gets the same labels "philadelphia, sports, phillies". It was very boring doing that.

2.) There has to be an easier way to label stuff.

3.) Labeling stuff sucks. I'm glad I'm done.

Also, I went ahead and got rid of download categories and replaced them with labels.

Labels are a centralized thing. If I create a label called "ducks" for example (there are pictures under that label!), then that label will show up as a choice for downloads and for pictures (and later news), whether or not there are downloads labeled "ducks" or pictures labeled "ducks". When you search the filter in downloads for labels like "duck" then "ducks" will show up. This will lead me to develop something cool in the future. Like, search a label and list anything that has that label, whether it's a download or a picture or an X or a Y. It will be pluggable.

If you want to see how I input labels, search pictures for the label "labels". Also you can search for "java" and "dev". Those two will give you a bunch, whereas "labels" will give you the four screens I took of "dumb web" and how it handles labels.

Pictures have labels

2006-07-08T00:00:47Z

I decided to make everything have labels, and pictures are the first to be converted. There's more work to be done, but use the filter for most of your label needs. In fact, with the filter, there's really no more work to be done... I don't know, I'll probably think of something. So, now I have to go and add labels to all of my pictures... 226 of them.

But it took about a day to get the labels up, only because my data list that shows the pictures always goes back to the first record after I save a picture. It's pageable, and the first page was easy :) But after that, it goes back to the first page, so I have to keep track of what page the picture was on that I just added labels to. So I had to fix that. Now it'll keep go back to the last page you were on. That makes life easier. But isn't that what software development is supposed to do?

I've been hacking away at this site and my shared stuff (dumb, dumbweb, filter, etc, etc, etc) that I use on all my websites ever since I told my work that I won't be coming in anymore. Well, I actually just turned down the position offered to me, which was to do with VBScript, which I can't do. Not because I don't know it... it would just be a huge change in how I think when I program. If a language doesn't support standard object oriented features, then I'm f@#%@ed. I have a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

The other day I went to a User group meeting for Philly on Rails. I don't use rails or ruby, but I might start soon. Zatko said he'll play Dawn of War with me if I learn ruby and rails, so I have to since that's the best game ever, and I haven't played multiplayer yet. Actually, we have to play first then I'll learn Ruby. Jared went too. We were the bomb.

New Filter Features!!

2006-07-07T00:00:55Z

First, notice the "Possible count" on the bottom right.

Then filter by this text exactly : Cigarettes and Carrot Juice

Then notice what it says. Cool huh?

Then, notice the help icon! I know they don't look great, I'm a n00b when it comes to CSS and DHTML. Plus, I hate Internet Explorer because I use the w3.org specs and they never work on IE. So, if you use IE, there's no support. Download a real browser.

But you're not a real programmer if you don't support IE!!

I'm a lazy programmer, as I've said many, many times. It might work... I did some standard checks, but haven't tested it. I'm on Linux and a Mac. No IE.

So that's it. I could go on explaining what I did but I'm not terribly proud of the count stuff. I did it and couldn't help but think I hacked it together. It's just not beautiful yet.

This year's trip to Lewes, DE

2006-07-04T00:00:41Z

Awesome. I left around 7pm on Sunday night. As I pointed out before, my tape adapter(s) for my iPod is/are broken. I had no coffee, and no smokes, so I had to make three stops on the way. It would have been two but the stupid drug store I stopped at didn't have tape adapters... well, unless I wanted to pay $40 and also purchase a portable CD player that I would probably throw in the garbage on the way out of the store. I didn't want to do that. So, I got smokes at the first drug store. Luckily, directly down the road, on the way to Dunkin Donuts, there's a competing drug store that does much better business. I stopped there. They had it but it was locked up in the audio glass. I got the girl, who has been working there for three days, to come unlock it for me. She had no idea. I helped her though. $10. And it's a nice one too! My car would have spit out the other ones at least 6 times on the way to Lewes (a 2 hour trip) but it didn't spit this one out at all.

So, I made my way to Dunkin Donuts and got a huge coffee and left for Delaware.

As what always happens when I leave the house, it started to rain. Like, terrential downpour. I'm on 95, heading south, and I can't see a damn thing. I can't find my glasses either. I keep them around for such an occasion. It's getting dark out, and my windshield wipers just can't keep up with the rain and water from the cars in front of me hitting the windshield. I just kept an eye on the car's tail lights in front of me, since it was all I could see, and was well on my way. Almost. Having literally no view of anything except tail lights, I missed the exit. By like 20 miles. I damn near made it to Maryland before realizing it. SOB!! It's one of those weird things where I figured 95 South heads SOUTH, but here it twists west on route to Maryland before heading south through Baltimore. I figured I was fine just trucking along. Oh well. I got there at 10:30, also, since the traffic was thick due to no one being able to see anything but the tail lights in front of them. If an alien race came along and looked like tail lights, we all would have followed them into the bottom of a lake somewhere. Or to their space ship.

When I got to my parents' spaceship... I mean... condo in Lewes, everyone was ready for bed. Jeff and Bean came back and brought ice cream, ate it, then watched tv until they dozed off. They were surfing all day, that's one of the most exhausting activities anyone can partake in. I tried, it's much too intense. When everyone went to bed, I figured I better try also. I went into the bedroom, grabbed a book (The Bleachers by John Grisham), and would read it until I fell asleep. Problem is, I didn't fall asleep! I started it after watching a movie and a few shows, probably around 1:30 - 2:00. I finished the book at 5 in the morning! I might be tired the next day for golf.

I was tired for golf. Although I had about 6 hours of sleep, it was about 130 F and humid. The sun was beating down. We had carts luckily. The course we went to was normally a 9 hole course, but it was under construction, so there were only 7 holes available. We played around once and then played 4 more for 11 total. I played pretty well. It came down to me vs. my Dad again, and he won because I choked. I can't beat him ever! It was good, though, because I started off pulling the ball to the left. When that happens, I usually quit because I never have a way to cure it. But it was different yesterday. I figured out what causes me to pull the ball, and I fixed it by the 3rd hole. Then it was on.

This one hole was a ripoff. The hole was shortened, due to construction, from about 400 yards, to... I swear to God... 80 yards. The green was awful. I took out a pitching wedge and totally skied this thing. About 4 minutes later, it came down onto the green. I figured it would just plop and stick, but this thing bounced like it hit concrete and flew over the green. I was like "You bastard".

Later, we all sat on the back porch and I played guitar and everyone sang. Good times.

It's up!!

2006-07-02T00:00:45Z

Thanks to my host working on Sundays (shout out Nexpoint), the game is up! Just visit Vacre Tei and sign up. Make sure to read the about and privacy policy things at the bottom first.

w00t.

That rocks. Of course, as I'm uploading the site, I have new ideas for it. Damnit. Good ideas too. I'll get to them, no rush.

Game Named

2006-07-02T00:00:33Z

I've decided to name my game "Vacre Tei Market". Weird huh? I was losing sleep, not eating, searching google intensively, trying to think of a name. Then it just came to me. If you've ever seen "Sneakers", then you know where I got that name from... "SETEC Astronomy" was a jumble, where words are formed from all the letters in the initial word. I forget if there's a scientific name for it. Anyway, you can tell, probably, that the original word was "Creative". This sounds pretty cool. Like German. It's pronounced "Vokker Tie", as if it were German. I haven't checked if it's an actual word or phrase that means something really bad or not. I don't think of those things until after I register the domain name "vacretei.org". Why would I? Anyway, when the domain moves over and I get back from Delaware, the game will go into beta. If you want in, just shoot me an email.

July w00t!

2006-07-01T00:00:42Z

I always love July because of no special reason... other than June afternoons make me sleepy. You got me, I'm just quoting a Cracker song, kinda. But they do make me sleepy.

"Hey June, why'd you have to come, why'd you have to come around, so soon? I wasn't ready for all this nature. The terrible green green grass, and afternoons that make me sleepy."

I miss my iPod. Well, I have it in my glove compartment, but I don't have a tape adapter anymore. I mean, I have two, but neither work. I experimented with one because it was making too much noise and always got popped out by my car's tape deck complaining about "Clean Tape" or something. Like, WTF, there is no tape. It's just reading off of the metal thing at the top. And now it's missing all of its insides... and the tape deck pops it out immediately, saying "Check Tape". I wish it would just play it. It's the only thing I hate about my car. I have a CD player too, but I depend on my iPod.

When I don't listen to music that I love for a long time, I get very angry. You should see me, I'm always pissed off. My neighbor's six year old daughter asked me to play catch and I'm like "What for?!! Catch sucks. You just throw it back and forth, accomplishing nothing... don't ever ask me anything ever again." :D I'm kidding, I told her I'd play, and we did... but you could imagine if I could possibly get that angry.

I almost ran over a guy on a bike the other day. It almost wasn't my fault. A car was in front of me turning left, and they went, and I was checking left and moved up. I stopped. And I noticed that I had to move quick in order to make it before this huge line of cars coming would delay my arrival time by at least 2 minutes, and I just can't wait that long. So I was still looking left. I started going, and looked, and this bike was right in front of me, so I gunned it right and JUST missed his back tire!! He saw it, and was all angry and yelled "JERKOFF!!" I'm like, dude, did I hit you? No. I missed him by an inch or so, but close only counts in horseshoes and grenades, so he should have just not said anything, or he should have said "Woah, nice driving dude!" Of course, I was out of it, hung over... it was on my way back from watching the food channel over Billy's all day after drinking all night at the Dave concert. So, it wasn't exactly my fault because he should have noticed my head only looking left :D Jerkoff.

Tonight, I went to happy hour at the Boathouse in Malvern. It was my last appearance with the company I worked for. I turned down the full time position they offered me because I would be miserable working in the technology with which I would be working. Some people from work were there, including Hitomi, who I worked with at a previous job. That job together was hell, but everyone there was awesome. Most of the people on my MySpace friends list were from that job. It was awesome. We'd drink every f@#$ing Friday! And A LOT! Sometimes, we couldn't wait til Friday night, so we'd head out at lunch, and some other times we couldn't wait until Friday at all! Anyway, we were party animals. So, the new coworkers were a new experience for me. It was my last day there and the first time I'd hung out with any of them. They weren't party animals. Oh well.

Hitomi and I went to Ruby Tuesdays afterwards. That was funny. We go in there and she's freezing, so I give her my shirt. Then, we order coffee. We order soup (brocoli and cheese) and an appetizer, like a four way sampler which has chicken, mozzarella sticks, some other thing and some more chicken. On top of that I ordered a burger with fries. After the soup and appetizer, I was done. The waiter brought out my burger and I was like "I can't even take a bite of this, can I have a box to take it home in?!" The only thing that was eaten off that plate was a pickle that Hitomi swiped from me. It looks delicious though :)

Not much else going on... I'll be down the shore in Lewes Delaware (there's a photo album from last year's trip in my photos section) from Sunday to Tuesday. Hell, I could stay down for a few weeks if I wanted to, but I have to find a job soon... that sucks. I wanted to possibly take a trip. Just head out across the country with my laptop, my guitar, and my digital camera. I have some extra money in my cushion of my car, so I could do it. I should.

Dave Concert

2006-06-29T00:00:12Z

A Dave concert is one of those things that need no explanation. If you're going to a Dave concert, you're obviously seeing Dave Matthews. I went the other night. We got RIPPED.

The usual suspects, Mara, Billy, Jen and I. Drinking in the parking lot from around 6:30 (I forget honestly) until around 7:30 (again, no idea). We pounded a case of Molson Canadians in that time. It rained a few times. Mara and Billy were already drinking since 2pm. We go into the concert and found a nice spot on the lawn. We stood the whole damn time.

I'm honestly not a fan of Dave Matthews, but I don't hate him, and he has the best drummer ever. Basically because when I was in college, everyone was a Dave fan. It was annoying. I decided to devote my time to Sublime. And to Cracker. Not everyone were fans of these two. Strive to be different is my motto. In fact, Mara commented on how I am different everytime she sees me! Different haircut, new look, facial hair. Kate talked to Mara and asked "What does Jason's hair look like now?" So, it pays off. Right now I have short hair, long sideburns, and a goatee. Two weeks ago, I had a beard and longer hair. Last week I just had the longer hair.

I remember being in the concert, and someone had one of those glow sticks, but it was red and about 8 inches long or something, and bent fairly easily. I grabbed it and put it in my mouth! I was making smily faces at the girls behind us, and in the dark it had to look freaky! Like, all you can see is this outline of a head and a huge smile. I was having a good time.

Sublime came on at the intermission. I love Sublime.

On top of all that, it was a blast. We each drank about 5 of those 20 oz lagers they serve at the Waterfront. If you've been you know what I mean. Wax paper cups. I may not be a fan of Dave Matthews but I love concerts and would go to every one. I've never turned down an invite :) The crowd at a DMB concert is a good, fun crowd.

The day after, aka Recovery Day. Hung out with Billy since I slept over their place. We watched the food network all day. He loves the food network. I don't mind it, those people make some amazing things. The one girl, Giada de Laurentiis... she's a hottie. I'm surprised I remembered how to spell her name, and I have no idea how to say it. And the guy on Food 911 has some major skillz. He goes into peoples' houses, uses their tools, and still makes awesome stuff. Today he made steak, and I now have a few more tips to add to my arsenal of steak making (currently two items : 'Marinade', 'Grill to medium / medium rare'). Of course, watching cooking shows all day and being hung over makes you starving. So we ate hot dogs. Then I got home and ordered a stromboli and some hot wings and took a nap. I'm recovered.

What about a music log?

2006-06-26T00:00:43Z

Beaner came over yesterday to record some music on my Mac Mini. He had a microphone and a 300 W mixer, and his acoustic guitar. When he was done, he left everything on my bed. Instead of doing what I wanted to (or supposed to) do, I picked up the guitar and started recording stuff. It sounds pretty good, the mic picks it up decently. But during all this, I wondered "What about a music log?"

You hear of all new types of web logs ("blogs") coming out... Video logs, photo logs, podcasts, etc. What about writing a song each week?

I know a band called "They Might Be Giants", they're fairly famous. I can't find the article right now, but a record producer or a friend challenged them to record a song about every city they visited on tour. So it's possible.

I just think it would be fun, if I could sing, to record a song that's like a podcast. It would be challenging, which would make it more fun.

What would be cooler, though, is if my site had a "jingle".

Problems with Dumb

2006-06-25T00:00:37Z

All fixed.

First, it's common to want to do this...

Select * from Table1 join Table2 on Table1.ID = Table2.Table1ID where Table2.Something = whatever.

That now works in dumb by doing simply the following:

Table1 t = new Table1();
Table2 t2 = new Table2();
t2.setSomething(whatever);
t.setTable2(t2);

engine.load(t);

So it'll select everything from Table1 where a certain condition on Table2 is true. Like, selecting polls where a poll answer contains 'The'. Of course, this works in filters because the filter is actually generating its own SQL. Saving that object was never a problem, that's been a part of dumb since the old days, over a year ago.

Another problem I had... it's very common to have a table like this:

table UserFriend {
   userId int not null,
   friendId int not null,
   constraint foreign key userId references (User) userId,
   constraint foreign key friendId references (User) userId
}

Two fields are references to the same table. Before, my generated sql code would pretty much only work if no table was joined more than once, either from the same initial table, or later on down the joined road. Now, I can have any number of references to the same table either in the initial table or down the road. It all works now. It's beautiful.

Anyway, I'm still chugging away at the... oh wait, that last game update was the last one.

Last Game Status Update

2006-06-24T00:00:39Z

Because I don't feel like doing them anymore. If you want to know, just ask me. Or subscribe to the newsletter...

The thing's almost done. When you have a document called "CWG_Status.odt", it of course means you're using the OpenDocument format, but also means that you are reminding yourself of what you still have to add. And when that file goes from 10.4 KB to 8.3 KB, it means your almost done! So, I poke a little fun at ODF for its size... so what? The price is just right ($0.00). It's fast enough for me. Anyways. Right now I have 9 lines of stuff that still needs to be added. One will be addressed after the initial version goes live. I know, it can't be considered "Finished" until it's actually "Finished" but, name one piece of software where the creator had no more ideas for new stuff to add after it was "finished". It's the great thing about my job, I just work and work and work, and my boss will ask "Are you finished?!" and I'll reply "Software is never finished..." And it's like eternal job security with no ship date.

That's funny though, because you can finish a work of art. Like, a song, or a painting, or a photograph. With art, though, it's like, you reach a point where you consider it done, and then you take stuff away. Especially in sculpting. They haul in a huge chunk of marble for Michaelangelo and he says "I'm done! I just have to cut some marble away now."

At some point in the last 3 years, I've learned to see computer science as more art than science, though. A program can be beautiful. It can be elegant. You can show it to other people and they may or may not (usually not) see the beauty in it. It's a messy process. I'm not talking about the user interface either. I'm talking about the code. The design. The implementation. The very little code that does a lot. The abstraction. The sweet, sweet pleasure of everything running correctly.

So the game is almost done. It's looking beautiful... not in the sense of how you probably think of beauty, but in the sense described above. The code is beautiful. The interface is not beautiful, at all. Well, it kinda looks like this site, only less gray, and more non-colorish. Here's my motto:

Function, then beauty

It makes life easier. Get it to work, then make it aesthetically appealing. That's down the road though, since this isn't like a 3D game or something. It's a web game. With an incredibly lazy creator.

There's more logic in this game than anything I've programmed in the last 3 years. Well, I guess that's an exaggerated statement. There's certainly a lot of logic in dumb and it's web counterpart. I guess I can say, there's more logic in this application than any other application I've ever done. Meaning, something specific, like this website, or other websites I've done, even in work. Underlying systems aren't applications, they're tools to help make application development easier, and that includes dumb and dumb web. And the security system, and my menu system which still holds its own. So this adds a level of complexity that I wouldn't normally find in an application, but not one that I'm not capable of handling. Basically, here's what goes on with my other applications...

select data from the database
show it

show a form
input data to the database

With dumb and JSF, there was literally no work do be done here. I can't say what's going on now, only because it's too complex and it would give away my great ideas.

I look forward to releasing this game on the web for the 4 people in the world that will enjoy it. Should be within the next week or so. w00t!

I have 'arm syndrome'

2006-06-23T00:00:50Z

It's sorta like "carpal tunnel syndrome" only it doesn't happen in the carpal area. It's in my freaking forearm. But it's from the same sort of hazard... (no not that you pervert)... creating awesome software. At least in my case. I never got carpal tunnel from programming stuff that sucks. Like, I never got it programming a "Hello, World" program. And I never got it from writing a paper in college, the only time, besides this website, that I ever used the English language in my life. Nope, I don't talk in English either. It's English-ish. Not like I have a second language, but I really don't even have a first.

Deprived of the Simple Pleasures

2006-06-23T00:00:14Z

Entering the software development work force, you have some expectations. Money, a cubicle all to yourself, your own computer in your cube, some stationery, a phone, a shelf or some desk drawers... all of which I pretty much got with all my jobs so far... well, the one I had to sit at a fold out table outside a cube farm, but that was it (Don't believe me? I have proof). At every job I had, except that same one where I sat at a table, people had nameplates on the outside of their cubes. I was never offered one. But today, I bring you good news.

Hidden deep inside my work's package of a bazillion papers that I have to fill out in order to work here is a "Nameplate Requisition Form". w00t!

Nameplate Requisition Form
Your name how you would like it to appear:
_____Wootzor von Leetenhax0r_____
Do you work in a cubicle or an office?
____Hell____

I've been deprived for all these years of something that everyone gets, of course I'm gonna be all immature about it... Michael Jackson went through the same thing.

Staying up late tonight!

2006-06-21T00:00:30Z

The Prey demo comes out tonight at midnight.

Damn I'm bored.

If only I didn't live near Philly which I wouldn't trade for anything. It comes out at 9pm in California...

This just in!! As I was typing up this blurb, the HR from my company came by and said they are hiring me full time. So now I have a job...

Back to Prey. Actually, that 9pm in California is lucky for me, because when Half-Life 2 came out, it came out at midnight Pacific Time... which of course means 3 AM here. I took off for that game though. Not like I'm really interested right now in Prey, but it should have some cool things:

a) Great graphics. It's built on the Doom 3 engine I think
b) ... umm... Did I mention the graphics should rock?!
c) It's built on the Doom 3 engine... supposedly.

I really can't say much, I'm not a fan of science fiction shooters anymore. I hate when they give you weapons, basically, that don't exist. That's just my opinion. Doom 3 was fun though. I absolutely LOVED F.E.A.R. due to the weapons and everything else in that game. Everything rocked. Best game ever.

Anyway, I look forward to running some high def graphics on my computer tonight. Before that I'll be playing some more Dawn of War. I'll comment on the work situation tomorrow... three posts in one day was my limit set forth by the FCC.

Game synonyms

2006-06-21T00:00:10Z

Funny what comes up under "game" as synonyms on thesaurus.com.

Definition: entertainment
Synonyms: adventure, amusement, athletics, bingo, business, distraction, diversion, enterprise, festivity, follow-the-leader, frolic, fun, jest, joke, lark, line, merriment, merrymaking, nothing game, occupation, pastime, piddly, plan, play, proceeding, pursuit, recreation, romp, scheme, sport, sports, undertaking

So, that's all work is? A game? Jesus, if only I'd've found this out sooner...

12 Hour response guarantee yet to be broken

2006-06-21T00:00:03Z

Close call on this one though

Gmail says 11 hours ago though, but obviously, it was within milliseconds of turning to 12.

Picture Filter Added

2006-06-20T00:00:24Z

Also, you've probably noticed the news categories on the left of the main page are gone

(<---- psst... over there)

This is due to the filter destroying this page and taking up all the landscape, and no need to list categories anymore since you can just filter by them, and Todd wanted to know when I replied to his comment in "The end of the world".

So, now my website seems VERY busy. I want to add more crap...

I started to reply to Todd, then had to go to work, saved the text in a file on my MacMini, went to work, came home a few hours later, then the Phillies were playing the Yankees and our fearless genius leader, Charlie Manuel, had set the lineup so Abreu and Howard were sitting and Chase Utley was playing first... it was something I had to see... they won!! Amazing. I was being sarcastic about Charlie being a genius. Oh, and I watched game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and was cheering for Edmonton so that probably doomed them, since Carolina won the Stanley Cup, those b@#tards. So, I had to work on that stuff after those games. Now it's like 2am and I have to go to bed. So, probably tomorrow Todd :)

Out of curiosity, due to the fact that when my web game comes out, it will require probably tons of disk space, I checked the amount of space left on my hard drive on this server. It's an 80 GB drive. There are a few websites on it, and one with lots of images, and this one has lots of images, and there is a lot of data in my databases, and of course Linux and software like Java, Tomcat, GNU tools, etc, etc, etc. Lots of stuff. There are three partitions, and one's not a file system (maybe it's a backup?). Here's what the "df" command in Linux returns. I was like "SWEET!"

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             75790304   4175216  67765112   6% /
/dev/hda1               101089      9324     86546  10% /boot
none                    252864         0    252864   0% /dev/shm

Basically, I'm using 4 Gigabytes for all this junk. Well, you can add it up. The boot partition has a 101 MB partition, which is nothing compared to the 67 GBs I have left on hda2 (Linux doesn't use C: or D: like Windows. HDA is the first hard drive, and 1 or 2 [3,4,5, etc] refer to the partition). In other words, I have plenty of f@#%ing room.

Improved Filter

2006-06-19T00:00:13Z

You can thank Zatko for this one. Since I only test this on my laptop so far, my mouse pad is directly accessible from my keyboard without much effort. So, on my laptop I am much quicker. You can refer to the post entitled "Hell" (use the filter, silly!) to see how much I hate how people go between their keyboard and mouse, when they can just use the keyboard all the time. So, generally, on a laptop, I don't have a problem with using the mouse moreso than on a desktop, since it's so close. And naturally, I totally forgot about keyboard accessibility when designing the filter.

So Zatko says "I would recommend using a form post instead of that link. i kept typing stuff and pushing enter and nothing was happening."

Touche. As this implies, great programmers think alike and hate using the mouse when they've already got two hands on the keyboard.

So, I've scripted up some script-y JavaScript. It now checks if you press enter on the form. Due to incredible programming ( ... in onkeypress, return false in a child control ... ), it will process the subfilter, where you search for News Categories on this site, and not process the filter, when pressing enter on a subfilter's text box. But, when you check an item in the result and press enter, it'll process the filter. It's quick and responsive like that.

However, I'm not sure it's 100% valid. I've noticed in the html reference for the FORM element, that s@#% doesn't have an "onkeypress" attribute. So, instead I used the good old fashioned "document.forms['formId'].onkeypress = funcKeypress;" method of doing it, instead of "<form onkeypress='(some javascript code)'>". Function pointers are always an excellent way of doing things. I searched for the second one, and the only sites I could find are *SHOCK* Microsoft web development sites like ASP and ASP.NET forums. I'm just not sure if Mozilla is allowing it in Quirks Mode or if it's an actual event on the form object. Who knows. It works, but that just doesn't seem good enough for me. Oh, and I have no idea if it works in any Microsoft related technology, since I've only tested it on my Linux and Mac computers... The gaming computer is the only Windows one up, and I'm not sure it's fit to be browsing in IE, and I don't install any software on it besides games :)

So, it's a lot simpler to use, thanks to me being down to 3/4ths of the number of computers I'm used to having, and the one being the one I spend most of my time browsing the internet on, and of course, to Zatko.

Yesterday's Phillies Game

2006-06-18T00:00:11Z

We went to the Phillies game yesterday. They got romped by the Devil Rays. Our seats were in Section 104, Row 10. If you watch a replay of the game, a dude on the other team hit a home run to the exact same seat I was sitting in. Only, it was a little higher. It hit my f@#$@#ing finger!! Which I said to everyone about 10 times really loud. But, the dude behind me got it and immediately threw it back. I almost had it. Damnit! It's incredible when a baseball is coming right at you at like 3129 miles per hour and you're WASTED. I watched it and was like "That's outta here..." Then I'm like "Wait a second, I'm in right field... and it's coming right at me!!" So I stood up, put my hand out, and the sheer speed of the ball probably made me pull it down a little, due to the fear of having a broken hand or some other crap like that. Before Aaron Rowand made his courageous, nose destroying catch, he got hit by a pitch on the back of his hand. They showed it on TV and it was nasty. A huge black and blue mark. I didn't want that. I don't think that popped in my head then though. All that popped in my head was "That's moving pretty fast."

Other than that it was a great time! We had beer, and we had these neighbors at our tailgate party who had Jack Daniels and some rum. They gave me some rum, like a fifth of a red plastic cup of it. DMart had his sister there and his sister's friend... of course, they were at our neighbor's the whole time, drinking heavily, since they were almost, but not quite yet, 21. It was a mess, but it didn't detract from my good time. JY, SG and I were tossing the football around, doing spectacular one handed catches. Not to show off, but I didn't want to put my beer down :)

Then we went to McFadden's after the game. I sorta know a bartender there, she was my mortgage agent when I was looking at houses. I got a free beer from her. [General bar events and chats with girls... etc].

Good times. We're all going to Dorney Park soon too, so that should be fun.

Website of Jason Connell

Precursory Maintenance

PSN Account

One from the archives

The Best Diet Ever

Fantasy Football Team 2008

Jamaica Trip: The Flights

Jamaica Trip: The food

And so my photography hobby begins...

Back from Jamaica!

Heading to Jamaica!

Eclipse bombed on me

Spore Creature Creator!!

Age verification is dumb

New Server!

Fixed my event class

More awesome free code!

Sunburned and brain fried

Subversion server up

More dog sickness

Today I figured out Logic Express

The check is in the mail

More Flyers Posts!

On the eve of Philadelphia vs. Pittsburgh

GTA IV is soulless fun

Tonight I called God an asshole

A crooked habit of credit card companies

What kind of world do we live in when...

Trying some new stuff

Is it hypocritical of me?

New Patio and Kodie

Today I got Vista

The Internet: So good, yet so so bad

I like that old time rock & roll

We make a cute couple

I have an affinity for science

Amazon.com Market

Barack Obama called today

Two new songs, Kodie looks funny

Dogs are the best

Acid3: Embarassing Browser Makers Everywhere

Sorry for the Atom Spam

More code for your convenience

Hello URL Rewriting!

Lightnin' Hopkins

Laptop Configured

Ahh, Video Game Addiction

Laptop Shopping...

The Guitar Player

More upbeat stuff coming soon

New Song

Firefox 3 beta 3 is top notch

Rocking It "Flat Style"

Finally, The Audio Interface Arrives

Open Source is so inexpensive

In light of the MS - Yahoo! News

Everything is almost here

Everything is so expensive

This made me laugh

Cool old stuff

Expensive investments require expensive investments

2008 Predictions and Resolutions

Amber Alert

Merry Christmas etc

The Gretsch is Fabulous

Gretsch Update

All I know is...

I hate politics

My New Guitar

Quitting Smoking, Take 734

What's a gamer to do

Weird

Bye Bye Music

Ipod touch is great

Wednesdayarily Post

An even bigger week

posted from my iPod touch

Mets fans love the Phillies

Time for some house cleaning

Big Week!