Weekly goals unmet:

Getting to sleep earlier during weeknights. I paid for it yesterday, as I had wanted to go to Diablo for 80's night but had to pass as I was on the verge of coming down with something and needed to opt for sleep instead, passing out on my couch ~ 9:45PM. Last weekend when I had attend to lots of non-fun chores, I told myself that I'd make it up to myself this weekend. Well, I blew it during this week and as most fun things in Buffalo seem to happen on fridays, I've shot myself in the foot. I'll try to turn this negative into a positive, and take it as an example of why I need to save up my good health on the weekdays to spend on the weekends.

So next week, when it's 11:30 at night and I'm currently in the process of teaching myself Ruby on Rails while simulataneously using wikipedia to figure out the correlation between the ages of major impact craters and mass extinctions while simultaneously seeing if I have any new Myspace messages while simultaneously trying to figure out whether the cute girl from Colden on the internet dating site would really be interested in me, I will be able to use what I learned this weekend to put everything down and turn in early.


Weekly goals met:

I managed to go a whole week eating a healthy lunch at work instead of going for fast food on my break. For five consecutive days, I ate a peanut butter sandwich with natural (i.e. less sugar) peanut butter on whole wheat bread and had a crisp braeburn apple for dessert. This whole thing started both as me trying to get better about regularizing my life as well as my doctor's insistance that triglycerides (aka "The Family Curse" aka "Cholesterol Death by Jolly Rancher" ) needed to go way down. I actually followed this same basic lunch pattern in high school and reaped all of the health benefits from it then, but I fell out of the habit in college via freshman 15. My haiku yesterday was about my biggest challenge yet: having to sit in my cubicle and stay good while I had to smell my coworkers indulging in their take-out. I prevailed, so yay me!

They order chinese.
Though Moo goo gai pan's tasty
I'll hold like a wall.

When I finish my long "stop estrip from crashing on Safari" journey, I'll probably write a long post about it with all the stupid details. But for the time being, I'll probably use this journal to keep track of how far long I am.

Step 1 Summary

Yesterday, I fired up my powerbook in a fresh reboot and ran only Safari with e-strip loaded on it without having visited any prior sites. I left the machine to sit there idly the entire day I was at work. When I came home and turned on the monitor, I see a crash dialog.

From this experiment, I can most likely conclude that there's nothing special I have to do, such as being in the middle of a post or writing a comment, for Safari to crash on (e:strip). And this is great, which means that there's a lot less slightly different iterations of things I'm going to have to test to get the crashes to happen.

Step 2 will being fashioning a simple, estrip only web browser with webkit, the underpinnings of Safari, and that browser to estrip and leaving it and seeing if it crashes. If it doesn't crash, then that likely means there's some problem with the Safari executable itself and the webkit libraries it uses are okay, although I think that is pretty unlikely.

Another message of interest from an admirer of the silicon variety, this time from match.com

"Here it is possible to write everyone about yourself much, but I think the person it is possible to learn well only then when you will communicate to him some time!"

She looks like Jennifer Aniston but she talks like Borat. I'd have thought the Russian hackers would have spent the extra ruples for some content that almost resembles passable english. If I got a message titled "I need big strong man to pull plow" I could at least give them a few brownie points for humor.

To expand on (e:metalpeter)'s theme of the day...

If she likes homemade mojitos
And gettin' caught in the rain
If she roots for the Sabres
But is okay with the 'Canes
If she likes Saturday lunches, at the India Gate
Then she's likely the woman that I'd probably date.

Just random pieces of doggerel floating through my mind. Move along, nothing to see here...

My old college bud (e:lizabeth) suggested I change my Myspace user picture to one of her suggestion since she thought the current one was hideous. I heeded her advince, and today I received a myspace message from some interested girl, or at least someone purporting to be female (I'll give (e:lizabeth) 10 secs to gloat and tell me "I told you it needed changing" before I go on...one..two..three) Here's the basic gist of the message.

"Hey sexy!

I saw you on myspace in the men's section....blah blah blah...

blah-blah-blah...Long walks on the beach..blah-blah-blah..I'm honest, funnier than Jerry Seinfeld...blah-blah-blah...piña coladas and getting caught in the rain...blah-blah-blah...I'm attractive, spunky...blah-blah-blah...on the rebound after serious relationship...blah-blah-blah...I don't have a myspace account and I'm just using a friend's, so instead e-mail me at random_email@whatever.com

I'll be checking for your nice message!"

Now, I would never look a gift horse in the mouth, and I think I'm at enough time after my breakup that I'd like to start dating other people again. And it would be such an ego boost if a simple picture change were to cause such a sea change. I want to believe, I reallly do. However...

This myspace message seems a bit fishy. Having done the whole match.com thing (which (e:vincent) told me would be a waste of money and he was pretty much right), most of the people mailing me out of the blue were women (at least purporting to be women) in russia who sent overly flattering messages that were so obviously some kind of spam scam. And in those telltale spam messages, there was always the same "cut through all the red tape and e-mail me immediately" reqeusts (can we say e-mail address harvesting?). While the message I received today did actually originate (supposedly) from the account of a myspace user who supposedly lived in Buffalo (whose picture was pretty hot, if it was an actual person), who in the heck actually uses their hot friend's myspace account to message other people? Wouldn't it have made more sense to get their own account? And more importantly, English-speakers' e-mail usually does not refer to a responding message as a "nice message". It almost sounds like a phrase adapted from some foreign language where the use of the world "nice" would be less tacky.

I don't want to be embarrased enough to actual fall for a scam. We've all had the one first time where we encountered our first phishing message, where we nearly gave our credit card to someone who wasn't eBay. I surmounted that point long ago and I'm adequately jaded by ten years of using the Internet. However, at the same time I'm embarrased to seemingly look like I'm not an optimist. Could friends of hot Buffalo myspace chicks actually throw themselves at me? Sure, why not! What's wrong with that?

I guess I'll do what I do best--pocrastinate. Usually anyone who spams myspace gets their account deactivated within several days of me getting the message. If the account's still there is several days, I'll pursue this matter a little more closely.

- First off, an addendum. Yesterday was easter, and as I didn't have anything better to do (insert Chinese restaurant joke here) I took advantage of the lull in traffic at the Elmwood & Marion intersection to snap a few photos for my project. Like the madman that I am, I rushed out into the middle of the street between traffic light changes and tried to get the best shots I could while not being run over. However, I didn't refer to the original photograph for reference like I should have, so after all my hard work and risk-taking, the distance was still all wrong and the overlay won't work. The small piece of Marion in the original isn't in the target. I really should use the stitching feature of my digital camera on the next pass.

Original:



Target:



- For some reason, Safari has been crashing on estrip for months. I think it has to do with a new userpic appearing when someone new logs in. At some point, I really should set up a packet sniffer or something and check it out further.

- BEGIN BORING PROGRAMMING PARAGRAPH (skip if bored by programming stuff)

Yesterday, I decided attempted to learn Ruby on Rails. After spending several hours trying to learn the stuff, I decided to pretty much give the technology a write-off, as I was about ready to throw my computer and the book I just bought clean out the window. A while ago, I started writing my own blogging application based on XML that I could have eventually rolled into a full-fledged MVC web application environment. I am seriously kicking myself now for having not finished it. I am so dissatisfied with everything out there. You know, come to think of it, I'll probably continue trying to learn Ruby, just so I'll know what's going on if I ever see any example code for anything general that uses it, and just because I'm so freakin' thorough and don't like to leave unfinished what I've started. I'm just a masochist like that.

END BORING PROGRAMMING PARAGRAPH

- I've also started looking at houses a little bit more. I'm really not sure whether I want to buy one, as I've considered moving back home to North Carolina near my family someday, or possibly moving somewhere else to a different job. But I keep thinking that I'm sinking 8k a year into rent that I could be putting into equity.

I really like the whole "Elmwood Village" area, and I'd like to stay within walking distance to Spot. I'd actually like a house on Richmond, but aside from being kinda pricey for someone in my income bracket, they would cost a bitch to heat (no insulation and high ceilings) and every house on the street is so huge because it's designed for tenants to live in the upper half. I really don't want to be a landlord or have large heating bills, and unfortunately most of the houses in the Elmwood-Richmond band (for lack of better terminology) require you to endure both if you own them.

So far, the best fit for me seems to be the northern buffalo/kenmore area, which is actually where I was driving around this weekend looking at the houses for sale. That area seems to have a decent number of homes that are small enough to keep sanely heated/cleaned by one person and would keep my mortgage somewhere near to what I'm currently paying for rent.

Another day or so, and I can eat regular bread again instead of matzoh. At least according to my religion. According to my triglycerides and my doctor, regular bread will always be chametz.

So I'm back from the Bedouin Soundclash show at the Icon. It was the first time that I've actually been to the Icon, and the building was far bigger than I had imagined it, though somehow I managed to pass it several times before realizing that it was the nondescript blue building on Ellicott.

The main act was really good, and had a lot of good energy going on. The audience was pretty enthusiastic, and there was a pretty good turnout (~200, maybe). The live show definitely lived up to what I heard on the CD. I can't wait for the next album.



I managed to snap one photo, with my mediocre new Nokia 6102i phone I got for $90 at the compusa clearance sale (had I gotten an nokia E62, there wouldn't be a picture at all, so the quality could have been worse--as in nonexistant).

I spent tonight going out and doing something instead of uselessly wasting my evenings in the idle pursuits I usually engage in. That's got to count for something.

Today Bedouin Soundclash comes to the Icon. I am so psyched about this because their CD is perhaps the most incredibly fucking good CD that I've bought in years. While I've never seen them live, I'd imagine they'd be pretty good in front of an audience. I will try my damnedest to make it to that show.

My last post, I mentioned something I didn't like about Buffalo (the pizza). This post I dedicate to something I do like about Buffalo--radio stations. NC doesn't have anything like 92.9 Jack or the 107.7 Lake (at least last time I was there), and back home is way too far south to get the Canadian radio that I'm finding myself more and more addicted to during my drives to work. I dig an environment rich in classic rock and interesting music with "new country" and religious stations few and far between, and I'm certainly getting that up here.

In a recap on yesterdays activities, I also went to a passover seder at Temple Beth Zion on Delaware with (e:museumchick). It was a lot of fun, though my long held ideas about what constitutes a traditional passover song have been thoroughly undermined.

Today, I hit up Casa di Pizza two get two slices of the last truly enjoyable bready thing I'll get to have for the next eight days. Once pesach starts, it'll be no more bread and eight days of a boring dry cracker that reminds me of the fact that my ancestors had to high-tail it out of Egypt.

To go off on a tangent, it's kinda of strange that in a city with so many pizza joints like Buffalo it's so hard to find a place where a single person can sit down and quickly get an individual slice of pizza with exactly what they want on it that hasn't been sitting in a warmer for 12 hours and do so without involving wait staff. It's like you're expected to buy an entire pie if you want it your way, and you're usually expected to bring it home. If I had a dime for every time I've gone into a place wanting a slice of plain-cheese non-pork pizza only to be told "sorry, there's only what we have in the warmer", I'd have a lot of dimes. It's actually one of my biggest gripes about living in Buffalo. There are a very few places I've found in Buffalo that meet all my criteria, but they're few and far between.

Back home in civilization North Carolina, we had lots of locally owned (i.e. not Sbarro) places that filled in the function of fast-food restaurants where you could reasonably go out on a lunch break and get a slice that had whatever you wanted on it, and it was always shoved into the oven and served piping hot.

As I can't get what I want up here, I don't eat pizza too often, save for the once a month at the Buffalo PHP meetup at Casa di Pizza. This is probably a good thing, given my family history of cholesterol problems. But it's ironic that when I visit back home, the thing that I want more than anything is not biscuits or sweet tea, but pizza.