When life moves faster than your blog...
So much happens in life and I can't get to writting about it. It's a curse.
So look forward to the following entries coming soon: How Many Computer Programmers Does It Take To Change a Tire?, Funny Software License Agreement, Project 22, and Internet Fruit: The "How much is inside?" Series.
Only 5 days left to get a cleaner colon!
Hurry and get this
Colon Cleanser from eBay!
"Are you tired, stressed, feeling weak, drowsy, constant bad breath, arthritis, always sick, unclear thinking, liver spots, and skin blemishes. This may be your answer. Dutch International presents EXTREME COLON CLEANSER"
Sweet Spiderman Desktops
Get 'em right here folks! That's right, get your
Spiderman Desktops!
NOTE: Activision removed the page with the great looking Spiderman desktop wallpapers... I will try and find if they exist anywhere else and link to them... sorry for the hassle.
Audit of 2001's Christmas Gifts
I guestimate the total value of all the gifts (minus the ones I self bought) at
$680. Not bad at all. My whole Christmas experience was a good one. We spent time with family and friends over the weekend, and had safe travels as we went to three different side's of our family on Christmas Day. I didn't have too hard of a time finding gifts for the people I shopped for. I only had one problem and that was that
Amazon.com was late with one gift. But I gave it to my wife today and she loved it. I do have to give Amazon.com props though, because even though the gift was late, it was a
CD that three other music chains didn't carry and said that they could not even special order it for me. So thank you Mr. Bezos!
Test your connection speed
This is a
cool little app to tell you how fast your connection to the internet is. I got a rating of
168. No wait,
170. Oh wait, ok now it's
164. Close enough. [via
darin]
Speaking of Evil
How about
killing some pedestrians while at work today? Hint: Use your mouse, not keyboard to control the car.
How evil are you?
According to an
Evil Test I am 36% evil, or "borderline evil".
I could go either way. I have sinned quite a bit but I still have a bit of room for error. My life is a tug of war between good and evil. That's what it says about me. For some reason this reminds me of the scene in Austin Powers where Seth Green's character Scott says that he wants to be a Veterinarian, and Dr. Evil responds asking, "An evil vet?".
I used to work with a guy who would always claim that he was "evil". It drove me nuts.
Think you can eat a tablespoon of pure cinnamon?
I did.
While at lunch today
Mike said he'd buy my lunch if I could eat a tablespoon of cinnamon without coughing or spitting any of it up, and without the aid of any type of fluid. And you know when a free lunch is at stake I am going to except the challenge.
The quick version of this story is that I last about 5 seconds before a mushroom cloud of cinnamon blew out of my nose and I went into a frenzy of coughing and spitting it all outta my mouth. To make the situation even worse, the cinnamon in my nasal passages caused my nose to to start bleeding. Luckily
Steve brought me some water to help me wash down the remaining cinnamon.
Joel caught several photos of the whole deal, here are just a few:
New! Mike just posted a
web page dedicated to today's events. Enjoy.
I just did something dumb
Pictures will be coming soon.
Puppets of Pop
We all had a good laugh in our office today while visiting this gem of a web site:
Puppets of Pop. The best part is the
Correspondence section where they e-mailed back and forth with the webmasters of fan sites for the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and Britney Spears.
Feel Free To Super Size
Today at work we each got our Christmas Bonus. All I have to say is that when I got the extra check, I looked at the amount and asked my boss if this was an adjustment from an error in my paycheck. He thought I was joking. And then
I thought
he was joking when he told me it was my Christmas Bonus. But then I saw it even said Christmas Bonus on the stub. S'all good tho. Buddy
Mike hasn't even been with the company long enough to get a bonus,
ouch!
Redux
For the record, a search on
Amazon.com of the word "redux" only returns one movie with the word in it's title, and that movie is
Apocalypse Now Redux. Which did have a theatrical release and wasn't just on DVD. In your face girls!
Two Christmas Parties In One Day
We just got home from a Christmas Party at our good friend's The Smith (web site coming soon I hear). The guys played
Counter Strike while the girls did their thing. Then we did a White Elephant gift exchange where I got a
Scantron form (No. 2 pencil not included) and my wife got a cool book called
Do Penguins Have Knees which contains questions and answers to things like "Why is 'peanuts' listed as an ingredient in 'Plain M&Ms'?" (Note: the name has changed from 'Plain' to 'Milk Chocolate'). Other gifts: Marbles, Eatable Underwear, Body Paint, Snow globe, a CD of Christmas Rap songs, G.I. Joe home video
in Spanish, etc. Then we played a game of Charades where in I did
much better than last year when I just stood silent for 60 seconds.
The other Christmas Party was a luncheon this afternoon my company's corporate office. We had a Secret Santa gift exchange where I got one of my favorites movies,
Run Lola Run. I guess I can take that off my
wish list. I also got attacked by the gift I gave which was some
Victoria's Secret body spray. The girl I gave it to sprayed me two or three times with it, and she didn't even know I was the one that gave it to her. The lunch was really good with beef and pork ribs that just fell off the bone. Yum yum.
Crazy thing is, this isn't even the 'Official Company Christmas Party'. The 'Official' one is tomorrow night at some fancy hotel where we are supposed to dress all fancy. But thing is, I also have our Church Christmas party tomorrow night, and my wife and I have obligations to be there. So I have let my co-workers down and will not be attending the Company event. And supposedly this looks bad to the people high up in the ranks at corporate office. As I hear it they take missing this thing as a slap in the face. Understandably so, since this is the biggest thing they do each year for their employees.
My wife is somewhat bothered by the fact that tonight I mentioned that maybe we should make an effort to attend the work thing tomorrow after our Church thing. I told her how Mike had mentioned that parties like this can "help your career". Point being, she's upset because she told me the same thing a month ago when I first told her that I wasn't going to go to the Company Party, and I apparently didn't care when it came from her, but now I react when Mike tells me. She's also upset because this is gonna be a fancy dinner and she wants to attend those types of things.
And with having an 8 week old child, it might be hard to attend the fancy party. Luckily we have some great friends who have put out the offer to watch him for a few hours. Actually, we have had many offers for people to baby-sit for even long periods of time. Thanks.
I wish I could reach my camera
Right now my baby son is sleeping on me as I work on the computer. He is on the edge of the desk with his legs hanging over and his butt on the bottom of my keyboard just barely away from pressing down the spacebar. He's leaning over and resting his head on my chest.
I love my baby boy.
ColdFusion 5®
With all this talk about my new web server, I have forgotten to pay homage to the key component of whole sha-bang,
Macromedia's ColdFusion 5®. ColdFusion is the engine that sits on top of the web server and processes the web pages before they are returned to the user. ColdFusion interacts with databases to retrieve and store information, and can also be used to do simple tasks such as display the current date on a web page. It also allows web pages to include other web pages, so code templates can be written once, and reused over and over again.
I have used ColdFusion since 1997 now, and have has such success with it that I joined my long time friend and
Price.com co-founder
Michael Buffington as his technical editor in the book he authored,
ColdFusion 5® Developers Guide. It's an advance level book explaining in some great detail how to take advantage of ColdFusion to speed-up your development time on small to large scale projects. I recommend it, especially if you are interested in developing your application using MS SQL Server as your database server since the book leans to totally take advantage to how ColdFusion interacts with SQL Server's stored procedures.
My greatest accomplishment (yes, even greater than Price.com in my eyes),
eBoreds.com, will be returning soon. It's a community web site that at the time it was running was dedicated to punks as an open forum where they could speak freely, create profiles that were one-of-a-kind, post short stories they had written, create custom photo albums, and link to their favorite places on the net. eBoreds even had a cool motto:
Be who you want. Say what you want. Oh yea! Private messaging was also a feature on the website. The site has almost been closed for 2 years now. I was forced to shut it down when I lost a hosting agreement. Running all these personal sites and not making a profit from them, I never paid for them to be hosted, so when I didn't have a connection for free hosting, I would just pull the sites. Sorry for all the people who I left in the dark when their haven on the web just one day instantly disappeared.
I have a lot on the backburner as well, like a completely different community web site I have in the works:
Protagony.com. It will all get done in due time, I am more interested in watching my son grow up than in anything else in this world.
One more thing before I head out. I'd like to make note to anyone in the ColdFusion community that may think I am abandoning our beloved technology by dropping the default .cfm file extensions on my web pages for the more common and mundane .htm extension. My goal was not to mask the technology I favor, but to create a more common environment to the end user. I feel that more people understand that .htm and .html are web pages, just as .com is a website address. You may think that people don't pay attention, or don't care; You may be right. True story: My sister-in-law recently asked for my wife's e-mail address and I told her wifesname@personaldomain.com. And her sister's response was, "That's it? There's no @juno.com or @aol.com?" I said, "Yep. That's it." And she said, "Really!? I thought they all had to have that?" So that right there proves to me that people get into a mindset of what defines and e-mail address, and that would transfer over to what defines a page site address.
I wonder if crazy URL parameters ever made anyone go into a seizure?
Dual Athlon Server is Running
Yes. It's final. My new web server (Dual
Athlon MP 1600's with a GIG-a-RAM) is up a running. I have gladly dropped running Microsoft's SQL Server 7 & IIS and now I am running my sites on
mySQL and
Apache. I love
Microsoft, but I didn't like running software I didn't own.
Apache is quite nice, and I would say that I prefer it over ISS. I even like editing the web site configurations via a text file. The only problem is that I don't know every possible setting available to me, so there might be tweaks and what-not that I would perform if only knew about them.
mySQL isn't as good as MS SQL Server. But it's free. The next version of mySQL is set to include some features that I would use, such as stored proceedures. But some of the SQL syntax varies between the two servers, and I have yet to find the mySQL syntax to run some of the queries I have been using. So currently I have to have the comments page offline (Not that it ever got used much). Hopefully I will be able to get it back up soon.
Regardless of all that the new server is blazin' fast. It could be the dual Athlons, Apache, mySQL, or the fact that now my sites are no longer on a shared box, but whatever... I like it.
DCBDWF
Mike and
Carrie are coming over for dinner and Survivor tonight. Hope Mike doesn't have his funny hat on tonight... I don't want a repeat of
last time.
KPMG. Because it's trendy.
Everyone... hurry... quick... link to
KPMG.
"Why?", you ask. Because they
don't like it.
So does the whole world want to Segway into the future?
I woke up this morning and while pouring myself a bowl of Corn Pops my brain clicked, "Isn't the 'It' going to be
unveiled this morning!?" The
question of what the 'It' even was has been a mystery for the past year or so, and on a lot of people's minds as of late.
So I turned on the Tele and wouldn't you know it, but the darn thing was on at that very moment! To learn exactly what it is you can visit the official
Segway website (Segway is the official product name, where 'It' or 'Ginger' was the projects codename).
The best review I've seen of the Segway and it's creator Dean Kamen is available at
Time.com. They even have a nice
Flash Review of the Segway's Guts.
I think the thing is cool and one day might be quite popular. I immediately wanted to own one, but after a review of my life I don't know if it would even fit my lifestyle, but I imagine there are many that it would fit their lifestyles. I would of definitely of loved to have a Segway when I recently vacationed in NYC. Getting around town would have been so much easier, and the Segway looks like it could totally of been ridden on the subway.
They look damn cool. I think I would own one. I might even adjust my life so owning one is practical. Even though the current design uses the handles for functionality making the Segway look like a scooter, I'd wager that in the future the design could be modified to have no handles and be just a small platform you stand on, similar to a skateboard. The more I think about it the cooler it gets.
I'd want mine to go faster than the 12 MPH that the Segway website reports. When either 1) faster models are available, or 2) people release info on how to mod your Segway to go faster, that will be the deciding factor of if I buy one (assuming the price is reasonable and I still got a good job). Right now, my current ride from home to work would take
about an hour.
Kazaa and my very own webserver
It's been about a week since I've written anything here. I've been busy. Doing what? I dunno. This past week I have been buying components to put together my personal web server. It's a dual Athlon MP 1600 server and I am quite please with the idea of finally having a dedication web server to myself.
I've also been busy downloading movies. Yep, whole movies. The quality isn't the best, but we're talking about movies that are still in the theatres! For free! My wife and I recently enjoyed
Shallow Hal (I love
Jack Black). We don't really have a problem paying to go see a movie, but with a 6 week old baby boy it's not as easy to get out to the multiplex these days. So for the convienece we just watch the movies at home. I want actors I like (like JB,
Owen and
Luke Wilson, etc.) to continue to be in movies, so I we continue to rent movies (we just rented two movies last night even with close to 10 movies that I have downloaded and haven't watched yet). And plus we will go to the movie theatre when possible because we personally love the experience.
The movies are all available from my new favorite file trading program
Kazaa, which has gotten some
pressure lately for the files being traded.
Amazingly enough I haven't been playing my GameCube much lately. This past week I had two night planed out to game with some friends of mine. One night (Wednesday), 15 minutes before my bud
Nate got to my house I get a call from another friend Ed asking if I could help him move a couch from his old apartment to his new. Even though I had plans I said "yes" for a few reasons
a) I wasn't able to help him move the majority of his stuff the previous Saturday and I felt I owed him some help
b) I figured I could convience Nate to go with, and with the two of us a couch could be moved in no time and we'd be playing the GameCube quickly
c) I'm a sucker.
So Nate is down with helping a brother out and we met up with Ed at his work. He has a full blown moving truck and discloses that we got 2 couches, a bed, and some other stuff to move. Thoughts in my head, "Not a big deal. We'll get this moved and it will be done with." So then we arrive at his old apartment. Good news: More people there to help out. Bad news: More stuff to move than previously disclosed. In addition we now have and extra bed, and about a full living room full of kitchen ware, toys, clothes, blankets, CD's and other misc stuff that are all not in boxes. So Ed has about 3 strikes against him right now in my book.
In the end: The move was completed and Nate gamed while I worked on my new web server.
Next night (Thursday), Nate, James, and Dave all came over. I again worked on my new web server. Nate did most of the GameCube playing, and James and Dave talked about
Iron Maiden and
AC/DC. Nate did help me put the heatsink and fans on my two CPUs which I haven't done in a long long time. Thanks.
