We went to Rachel's Birthday party last night. Rachel is really fun, I truly miss her but somehow we almost never end up hanging out. Before, on our end, it was cause we were trying to avoid shawn as he was "bad for our health" but now there is no reason other than laziness and difficulty in breaking out of our normal social patterns. Hopefully that will change once she starts a journal and read about her life all the time! Rachel, if you are reading this - thanks fr deciding to start one I am really excited to read it.

It was nice to see people who I havent seen in a long time. One of them was someone who I happend to stop being friend with on bad terms. But that was liek 7 years ago. Jessica, if you are reading this, it was Christian.

Well, he seemed pretty relaxed compared to how I remembered him. I didn't have much to say. Apparently, he joined the coast guard and was in school at Buffalo State for high school education richtung Social Studies. Well, I have so many problems with the idea of people who I considered intelligent joining the military but had no interest in starting any so of political discussion, as me and Terry had decided to make it a no-political debate evening. Usually everything we end up doing leads to some sort of political debate and we were just going to chillax (yes I has appropriated that word from "Hodown" <- the orginator)

Rachel told me that while he was doing his tour of duty at West Point that he met this German girl and then brought her with him, back to buffalo. Terry, Matt and I had had her as a waitress at the Indian place on elmwood. I remmeber saying she seems pretty cool, and wondering what she is doing in Buffalo. How small a world is it that Christian brought her here!

Oh well, they were cute together. Somehow she kind of reminded me of Ms. Gerber, but more personable.

I spoke with Dawn for the longest time, she is great as usual. I don't mean great like happy, but great to see. I always have fun talking with her. She told me about how she came to the realization that she was a bitch and it made her happy. I think, more power to her. She would really get along with my brother. Her sister also joined the army. That was also totally surprising, I mean I do not knwo anyone in the armed forces besides one of my students. I figure that everyones life must have either gotten really bad or their parents made them do it. The other alternative, that it was for school money, makes me sick. That is the veilest thing that you can do. I mean think about it, you are saying that you might possibly kill innocent civilians in order to pay for school. That is seriously shaking hand with the devil. If you look carefully at the picture below you can see the reflection of the devil in the coast card placard.



I talked to Kristin Neinhaus too, who I also really like. She is just a honest, caring type of person but I guess before I got there someone was telling her the ebay underwear story so I was kind of embarassed while talking to her which made it slightly awkward. Too bad I felt I had more to say.

Terry, Holly, and TK got a little out of control, especially Terry but he was funny so it worked out. Rachel said he was singing drunk, which was cute so it was ok. My old friends probably think my new friends are insane but whatever, I have always been a crazy one and I got to try fondue for the first time.

If I think of my other old friends, they are all as crazy as me. Especially Sara R- the closest thing I ever had to a sister.

I love Holly, that all I have to say about that - well maybe a little more. She makes every situation dealable. I hope she doesn't thinkk that we ar ebrigning her life down. I am personally going to freak when she is in Europe, if she goes. I don't ever want to part with her, especially after we discovered that w
e are both bad at email. I would say well we
co
ul

d ju
st keep i
n contact via our journals, but Holly is bad at that too sometimes. We are just going to have to follow her around.

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My project worked out. Unfortunately, I spent so much time working on the virtual Amy Goodman that by the time the real one came around I had passed out. I guess thats life. Terry ended up going and told me all about it.


I think Amy came out quite well although I didn't get to see her in person so now I can never be totally sure.


In my video animation Amy Goodman gets interviewed for our web site. Then she meets the liberal superheroine Liberty. She is kind of like a liberal, sexy female version of the hulk. I am thinking of continuing the saga here on elmwoodstrip.com.


I was really impressed with the reflectivity on the microhphone during sunset on my FireGL X1 256mb graphics card. It really beats the Nvidia Quadro 700 128Mb Go card hands down. All in all i am glad that my project ended up having a sociio-political relevance. The video will eventually end up here. Right now I have to recompress it for Quicktime instead of Windows Media Player and maybe even refilm in daylight. The freakin' sun went down in Secondlife just as I started to film, how weird is that. So the bottom pictur eis nice an dclear during sunset but the video is quite dark.

Here are some live quotes from the signs at the Bush protest. Huge turnout - many more pictures and text updates to come. Come on down.

"I wasn't using my civil liberties anyways. Two terms for Bush."

"One in washington, one in prison one humanity, one struggle free speach zone?"

"Let's bomb texas, they have oil too"

"Regime change starts at home"

"Got rights?"

"One humanity, one struggler."

"Who would jesus bomb?"

"A snare drum that says "death walks behind you" osama bin ashcroft

"We don't need big brother. Stop US war crimes."

---

This is what CNN says his visit was about. We heard from sources inside the speech that it was mostly Police and law inforcement officiers in the crowd.

They are provisions that:

1. Allow sneak-and-peek searches to permit law enforcement agencies to surreptitiously enter a premises for evidence and inform terrorism suspects later.

1. Give law enforcement agencies the ability to obtain library records on demand for terrorism investigations.

Bush disagrees that the provisions go too far.

"The terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and the Congress must give law enforcement all the tools necessary to protect the American people," Bush said Monday.

He is demanding that Congress make the law's provisions permanent.

My secondLife movie project starring Amy Goodman and the statue of Liberty is driving me crazy. Everything is ready but the video capture part is sucking for me. I hope that it works out. I guess I could just consider not getting an A for once. But if I get a B I might as well get an F.



I am just sticking my eye here a year later cause i found it while finding the pic that was missing from this journal.

Here is a rundown for some of the (e:strip) v1.5 updates. Its not a huge change from v1.4 to v1.5 but there are some great improvements.

1. The (e:strip) logo at the top of the banne ris a link back to the elmwood journal/home page.

2. There is a new "QuickUpdate" button on the journals directly under the user's pictures. By clicking on it you bring up a pop up box which allows you to quickly add a journal entry wihtout having to access the more ocmplicated update page.

3. The traditional update page still accessed by the write button at the top, has had many upgrades. You now can update and delelte multiple journals at a time. This saves lots of time. I have also mmoved the uploaded images library to a separate window in order to speed up load time when doing text-only updates.

Here is a to the Richard Stallman MP3 about the development of the GNU/Linux and opensource movements.

Where has paul been lately, what's going on? I have been searching for a cell phone. I have never wanted one before but now as they are getting more powerful I would like to start developing applications for them. In order to do that I would like to have a real one to test on.

Unfortunately, no service would offer me a no voice service but unlimited internet service. At first T-mobile agreed but then the manager said no. Which sucks. I really want to have wireless internet access via a bluetooth cell phone. Believe it or not, verizon does not offer bluetooth cell phones. Their phones seem to be really behind the times.

And T-mobile has the phones I want but not the service I am looking for. Basically, it means that you will not see cell phone features for (e:strip) yet. I was really hoping to allow people to update and read their journals via cellphones. But although, I have an emulator I could use for development, I will not be very motivated till I have a phone.

I seriously, cannot afford a phone for $39.00 a month, whn I know I would only make like 4 phone calls with it per month.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I am really busy with my final projects so I have no idea how much celebrating I will get in over thi sbreak, but my mother invited us over for Thanksgiving and i please contact me and I will try to get it worked out. It will definately be a tasty meal.

If you having any problems with the site, please email me - version 1.5 will be coming out sometime in mid december iwth lots of improvements.

So this is what happens when you get too close to your avatars head in seocndlife. You can see that you avatar has no brain.

Do you think that it means its also has no soul?

I finally got my voice recorder, the one that is going to change my life in way yet known to me. It is realy all I dreamed of. On the politically correct front, I moved the super comp on over to linux. So I had to say goodbye to some of my favorite programs, like Cinema 4D. Luckily maya runs of Linux and there is a freeware 3D app called blender. The whole purpose was to start a server, so some neat things will happen soon I hope.

The one thing that sucks about Linux is the Mp3 browsing apps. I want something just like iTunes. Unfrotunately, there isn't. Right now I am using Yammi, which I had to compile for Suse 8.2. Its better than nothign but still not my favorite. I also got icecast 2 to compile and work via oddcast with xmms to broadcast the radio station. I think it will go back on air this week. Hopefully, with better shows.