Not having a functioning televsion, I have not watched TV in a long time - years with the occasional at my parents or a bar moments. I get all of my local news from our local papers, word of mouth, and ths site. When I was first making the site, I thought we would be like a local newspaper, but that hasn't happpens quite yet. On a tangest that reminds me that I am thinking of adding our own police blotter than it much better than the real one, where we report crimes ourselves.

By depending on these sources it leaves me completely in the dark about the suburbs and county issues and I question if that's bad or if I am freeing myself up to think about other things instead who had a house file in Alden or what Amish people are doing in their rumspringa (must come from herumspringen). I figure if they are ever important enough, th einformation will trickle down to me through the many other mediums.

Well anyhow, while watching TV today with nonna [search]Nonna[/search] I noticed how the local news is totally sensationalist. Everything is super dramatic including their oh so frosted hair styles. I wonder if images of frosted hair will look the same as 80's one foot high bangs do, looking back now.

So the point, there was this story of what really looks like (e:matthew) standing on our roof at the 567 with the elmwoodstrip.com sign light on. I think we should pose a mock up photo of it tonight just to be funny. Even the blue hoody!



Here is the story: Just before 1:00 AM Wednesday morning, officers got a call about a domestic situation on Esser Avenue in Buffalo's Riverside Section.

For about two hours, neighbors watched as 32 year old Douglas Rogers paced the roof, smoked a cigarette and drank out of a coffee mug. But he also lashed out, and threw stuff at police and neighbors below.

Neighbor Debra Smith said, "He was throwing shingles off the roof and throwing bricks all over the place and hitting cop cars one after the other."

Cops confirm at least one police cruiser was hit with a brick or shingle. But officials say it wasn't until Rogers told police he had weapons, that officers called in other law enforcement teams.

Of course they made the whole thing out to be like police standoff with terrorists. At least that was the attitude you got from the sensationalist news version. I love how someone said "He was throwing shingles off the roof and throwing bricks all over the place and hitting cop cars one after the other." yet the police only confirmed one case of this.

He was for sure just an angry drunk guy, fighting with his wife and then felt cornered, so he climbed up on the house.

The tech side of it all. So I wanted to put a link to the video which became problematic as they have it all hidden in these really convoluted javascripts. I ended up sniffing the streaming packet as it come over to our computer. Then when I went to get it, I realzied I had found the entire news cast in high resolution includeing the commercials and everything in a nice 49MB package. Definately better than satellite reception. But my question is who watches this and why is it there and on akamai.

Here is a
to the whole show in streaming Windows Media Format, sorry mac users, I don't think you can see this one but it's not my fault, blame news channel 4

The story in question is somewhere around the middle of the newscast and you can fast forward I believe. I love when the newscaster says that is our big story i
n buffalo for the day even though a B
uf
falo soldier was critcally wounded today in Iraq.

If anything it is nice to have a document of what is was like in Buffalo on Aug 3, 2004. I will add it to my digital scrapbook.

I love expedia's description of elmwood.

[size=m]Elmwood Strip[/size]
This funky street overflows with possibilities: fine art, aromatherapy, piercings and pizza.

On another note, what happend to Steve Kurtz? [search]steve kurtz[/search] At one time it was the rage of the town, now I hear nothing.

(e:mike) I feel bad about your post-separation anxiety with your car [inlink]mike,225[/inlink]. My only hope is that you find my gameboy advance in there before you junk it or something. I think I left it in there, complete with flash cartridge and Warioware, the other night when we went with (e:terry) and (e:matthew) to Gabriel's gate



Here is a link to there guestbook. I guess they really do have the best wings in Buffalo. I should have just ordered them while we were there. I wish I would just bust out the epeeps restaurant review section.

For those of you that do not know the warioware game for gba, (e:shawnr) suggested it to me and it is by the the best game for short attention spans on the go. I played until I beat it and I don't even really like video games. In the game you play a million 2 second games that have no real instructions.







You just try and figure each one out as you go and by the time you get it, its on to the next game.

I contacted (e:sqb) about his thoughts on advertsing and he suggested that we contact the The West Side Times to see if they could review the site. So I wrote to them to see about it.

I really need to write a new site description. I agree with (e:liz) that the one on the flyer is a little to esoteric.

Here is a picture I drew of satan performing miracles. According to the ghetto preacher we were listening to on the radio as we returned from Zoar Valley, "satan often does this to trick people." The preacher also said that it is dangerous to go to college because they teach you to by an athiest. He said that is why the most "intelligent" people are really fools.



Luckily, I heard him yesterday and promptly dropped out of the MFA program at UB. God forgive me, for I am educated.

I just found an email from my friend Ronnie in my inbox. Ronnie was one of Terry and I's best friends when we lived in Flagstaff, Arizona where we orginally met. She still lives in Phoenix . Ronnie also went to Germany for a while and stayed with us for about a month. I really miss her.

In the email she sent a picture of one of our favorite hangouts. A volcano in the middle of the desert just north of Flgagstaff and just south of the Grand Canyon.



Here I am at the same Volcano in 2000.



It is really an awesome place where this volcano exploded out of the desert floor and the lava froze into these crazy spires. I really miss it there.

What is up with these simultaneous posts both Robin at I at 16:10 and Chris and Keith at 14:41. Dare I say blog jinx? It is like mini zeitgeists.

I just realized that you guys have no way to save your journals to anything, which is really weird. Everybody is writing and writing and I guess you can save each entry individually but there is no way to save a month or your entire journal. So I figure I will implement that next. I mean it is your journal, and your life, you need a way to save it efficiently.

So now the question becomes, what format do you want? Text format seems to be eternal but it is missing images. I think PDF's are also good, but the server we are using doesn't have the PDF libraries for PHP installed. Another possibility is that it save them as a static webpage with images and then zip the whole thing like a web archive. XHTML readers will be around forever. I could even just use XML files but do you guys know what to do with those.

Maybe, I could just make multiple options. Any ideas? My favorites are to save them as static web sites or PDFs. On another note, why does nobody use the A/V profiler foudn in your control panel with the mic icon.

Dinner at the Vietnamese Restaurant
Today, I went to dinner with (e:terry) and (e:matthew) at the vietnamese restaurant across from Casa di Pizza on elmwood near West Utica. They have some of the best food I have ever eaten and it's really inexpensive. For $1.75, they have this really strong coffee with sweetend condensed milk, I suggest all of you try out.

Writing Books
At dinner (e:terry) told me that a book consists of around 30,000 words. This was in reference to the new statistics. As of this journal entry, I have written about 93,800 words, or about 3 books. It's amazing how much I've had to say about my life and the development of this site during the last year. Maybe, I will keep a database of the rest of my life. That's the nice thing about it being my own project. I can always port the data here or there and take the information with me into my various other projects.

So what did I actually accomplish today.?
I spent the rest of today working on the site as usual. I seems pretty crazy that I have put more than a years worth of work into this project. I learn so much everyday. It's starting to be really fun because it's at a much higer level of development than had though it could be. If it were a video game I would be on level 17 and have 13 more levels to go before I beat the end guy.

After refining and refining, it becomes increasingly quick and easy to add new features and content. It's amazing how many things share the same functions too. I remember when i first started back in March of 2003 everythign was so linear. Thankfully, those days of long rows of confusing code are almost totally gone, everything is modular and reusable now. Its much more fun this way, and it definatly makes coding much more error free.

I fixed some design glitches with some messed up div widths. I finally decided to fix the email update system, and in turn, the confirmation email system. It now sends confirmation emails sucessfuly to yahoo, hotmail, and aol. Although I did notice it takes the longest for them to arrive at an AOL address.

I also fixed the startup sound drama. The start-up sound only plays once per visit now which was the original intention. I made it so that I could leave audio notes about updates and upcomming events. Unfortunately, I could just never use it before because it plyed several times and anything longer than 1 second was annoying. Fixing it was not hard, I just needed to do some little javascript function. It just wasn't the most important thing on the list. Now it is standardized into a nice little function and keeps track of itself properly.

Most importantly though, I fixed the inlink system. I now gives you the same functionality as your regular journal update box and detects if the inlink window is already open when you click on a second inlink. The second inlink is just added to the bottom of the journal, instead of replacing your journal with the second inlink like it used to. I can't tell you how many journal entries I lost to this glitch, I hope none of you had the same problem, although I am sure some people did.

I think next I am going to work on more flash stuff and some style box update so you can stylize your text some more.

Too boring for (e:terry)
I feel really bad that I have become too boring for (e:terry) . I don't really know what to do anymore, because I am so bored of going out drinking, etc and nobody has any ideas what to do, I always end up programming which inevitably makes him angry. I hope someday we can resolve this before he kills me.

Computer Linguistics
While javascripting for the inlinks and some email stuff, I thought a lot about how all of the computer languages are so related. Now, with my thorough background in PHP is much easier approaching javascript. It gave e the same warm feeling I had when i would fi
nd a french word in german. There are just so
m
any things that are fundamentally similar and ,of course, lots of differences of course. I wonder if there are computer ueber-geeks who are computer linguist and study the morphology of this. If not, I want to be one. Maybe I could some how turn this into a PHD.

Those of you that know me well, know that I tend to shave like three times a year. Well, today was one of them. Unfortunately, I forgot that I have had a beard / moustache for so long that it blocked the sun from tanning my face there. Tomorrow is supposed to by sunny so I hope it will get tan like the rest of my face.



On another note, I finished fixing the email update beta program. If anyone else is interested in receiving journal updates via email, please feel free to contact me!

You can turn them on and off using the # control panel.