I almost never eat at chain places. Those of you that know me, know that 98% of the time you can find me eating at some restaurant within two miles of my house. Part of it is lazyness but a major part of it is that the elmwood area offers so many good restaurants which in turn offer a wide variety of foods from American to Turkish and Pizza to fine dining.

However, today I saw the pizza hut ad for some chessy bites pizza and I am obsessed with having it. (e:mike) and I decided it was ana emergency and got righ ton the case. I visited the pizza hut site and believe it or not you can order online. Just not at our location, argh. I was even more excited for the order onlien potential. I wish I had carreid through with my takeout online site busienss plan but at least I have health care now.

So, it's on its way. Yummy freakin tastic.

I realized today that I haven't had a cigarette since the beginning of January. That is a pretty long time for me. I think it is finally quits. That anti-smoking commerial where they squeeze out the guys aorta mixed with working at Roswell was the final winning combo for beating the demon. How can something so toxic feel so good. The only time I really crave them anymore is when I see them on television or in the movies.

On Sunday (e:liloh), (e:terry), (e:matthew), Dave and I went to go see Brokeback Mountain. They smoked a lot. At some points the movie was kind of slow but it was definately a good movie overall and gave a lot of perspective to what it is like to have parts of your your life censored. It's sad that it takes a fictional story to make people realize that that kind of stuff happens.





I still have a hard time concentratin at the movies. I just cannot get over the one way, single track media epxerience. After about ten minutes I start to get figety. I just am not used to being on the receving end of media creation without being able to do lots of other stuff like program, or design at the same time. SOmehow though, I can't stop thinking about their sad story.

We finally managed to join the BAC. We met with a trainer person and I said my goal is to get more muscle. I thought about it after and how the people that were most musclar in high school are the heavier in a not muscle way now. I though should I really bother t trick my metabolism into building mass. What is going to happen when I am done working out. Will it still be in the gain, gain, gain mode. I am doing it anyways. Three nights a week starting thursday. I signed my nam eon the dotted line,





Afterward we went with Sang to Korea House. The little side dishes of flavor are so fun but my main dish was sickening.



Well I ordered raw shredded beef on vegtables and rice but what I got was a giant blob of raw ground beef covered with a freakin raw egg. I draw the line at raw egg. I tried eating the beef around the egg but it all had so much raw egg on it.



I ended up just brining it home. I figure it will make a great hamburger. If I have worms I know where they came from.

So yesterday I was bashing forums [inlink]paul,4156[/inlink] and today I was at howardforums to look and see if they had any updated info about firmware for my cellphone. While I was there I looked at a post about the difference between the tmobile version of my phone and the sprint one.

Someone asked, which is better GSM(tmobile) or EVDO (sprint)? One answer came like this. On eline response with about 15 lines about the War. Is that ever necessaray, I think if I built a better forum application one liners would only be allowed as comments and quotes would just be banned. Maybe a link to user baout the info where they could find it and that would be it. If that was the case you would not have to click through 35 pages to find about 10 lines of meaningful information.



I think the answer is a programmatic solution. I am going to write code that eats phpBB and other popular forums and distills them into tiny infomration pages minus userpics, minus quotes, minus animated gifs and minus style.

This one is even weirder They have a link for everything they do. Click the link to see it. Do they really need a itunes user link? Here is the site that makes the stupid bars.

I love squid and I love my phone. This is what happens when they mix.


I am addicted to fresh squeezed orange juice. I had three glases today. maybe $10.00 is an excessive orange juice bill.


So all the money I used to spend on partying and going out, I just spend on food nowadays.

Discuss is coming along very well. I actually integrated with estrip by changing only like three lines of code. The userbase system for it is totally modular so that t can work with any system that has user logins and keeps track of email addresses.

I am so tired from working on the site time issue till like 8am. You have no idea what it is like to read through 10,000 forums of crap to get to one obscure reference to something that might help but which inevitably does not.

Worst feeling: Remote rebooting a machien that you are barely on speaking terms with and hoping that the machine comes back to life after a remote reboot - even if it's not fixed - because it's locked in a basement far away from you and its the middle of the night.

[size=m]Forums[/size]
They are about 90% wasted whitespace, animated gifs , quotes of previously quoted quotes of previously quoted quotes, and personal quotes and song lyrics tacked onto a minimal amount of information.

I really hate those forums where the last post has every other post quoted and inside of it.

What should have happend is that 80% of responses should have simply been comments on the original post and there should be one central document. Much more liek a wiki.

Like when some asks a serious question and then the first four pages of responses on a forum are just one word repsonses saying, "no idea" or "word up" it is insane. Especiallys seeing as most forum/message software is so poorly deisgned that each one word response recieves a userpic, seventy five buttons of some nature, a userpic a date stamp, a location, an some sort of animated gif.

Here we have an example one response that says "bosssss" ironically in response to one post that said "word" and it takes up the whole screen. It is a perfect exmaple of when a forum is not needed. They could have just had some way to comment on the original data posted.



[size=m]Tangent: IE for Mac Dies[/size]
I was so satisfied when I found out that Microsoft has offically discontinued that piece of shit browser to the point where you can't even download it anymore. I got to put up a message for the rideforroswell site. It was the most satisfying moment of my web programming design career.

I am going to write a poem about what it feels like to search forums till 8am.

[size=m]Disgruntled Forum Victim[/size]
google, yahoo
search, search, search,
read, next page
You suck, no you suck, no you suck
read, next page
(Your) a noobie. (know you're) a noobie, remember that simpsons episode,
read, next page
don't you know it is you are a noobie,
twelve more pages of grammer about not the topic

reboot, wait, reboot, wait
reboot, wait, reboot, wait

next, next, next. skip to last
tanget, way to many pretty colors of higlighted an quoted irrevlevent text
maybe I missed it on page 47
read, previous page,
animated gif, twelve page useless quote, animated gif
read, previous page,
fancy javascript that crashes the whole page to diplay a dancing banana
read, previous page
recap of the first three pages
back to where you started
animated gif
next forum

reboot, wait, reboot, wait
reboot, wait, reboot, wait

search, search, search
read, next page
My computer is the best, (know) my computer is the best, no my computer is the best
not again
read, next page
Animated gif
read, next page

reboot, wait, reboot, wait
reboot, wait, reboot, wait

Next forum, search but it's broken
quote in a quote in a quote in a quote, in a quote, in a quote to say it is in fact newbie
10,000 pages read,
the contents of one tiny pamplet distilled
maximized inefficiency
die forums, fucking die

So you may ask how I eventually solved it. Well I tried every possible boot option for dealing with time and power on linux and eventuall clock=pit worked.

What can the story behind this be?



I found a link to my High School reunions photo gallery Everyone looks so much larger than I remember. I specifically remember being jealous of how sporty these guys were. I guess times have changed.

socker, socker




Even Chris B got fat? Maybe it's just a weird angle - swim team

I spent the day doing a million different programming tasks at work then during my break I did some design. They bought me the new Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash so it seems like there may be some designing afterall.

My discuss program looks a lot better with a skin on it. There are already two themes. This is the brown one. I have been looking for something to do in brown and purple and this is it, I guess.





I promise I will release it for beta testing soon. First I need to put the finishing touches on it. Basically it is like a group email/document editor - chat program where you can upload attachments for everyone to look and keep track of changes. When the dicussion is compelete. E.g. the document has been fully edited and agreed upon, is it exported and removed from the system.

The system is not a repository for the info but more like a tool to create a document for a group of people without having to rely on lots of emails. Plus instad of having to send all the attachments all over the place, the people come to them,

Yesterday I day I had to move some data to a computer that was not networked to the web. It had been a long time since I had experienced that. Usually I just use my phone to reach out the the web when the computer can't do it by itself, so basically I have been like a walking network access point for years now. I didn't have my phone with me and so I tried to use an ipod shuffle to move the data and for some reason the computer would not accept it as drive. It just never popped up. We actually tried two different ones.



I could have burned a CD but we are talking about 1K of data. It was so tiny I could have just printed it out and typed it back in. It was about 1 page of text. Then one of my coworkers suggested a floppy. I had totally forgotten that they existed - have you young peeps even ever seen one? I remember punching holes in the big ones. Well not the really big ones but the 5 and 1/4 ones.

Anyways it worked and was really fast considering it was a 1k transfer. I think it was really 4k in the end because eof the file structure. Long live the floppy, lol.



On another note, have you noticed more places are moving toward the automated cashier. I hate that. Who wants that. Obviously not the consumer and obviously not the people who want jobs. I think there is no reason I should have to check myself out when I am buying their product. Have Americans because so "Automated" they can't even handle a simple sales transaction with a human. Home depot has them now.

Remember a while back I was ranting [inlink]paul,4123[/inlink] about some local design company that I thought did the most horrible web designs . Well I ended up having a meeting with Mr. Flynn himself today and he really does have no sense of web style. Seems like a nice guy but just look at this



It has enough faded white to make me feel like I am in heaven or that I left my computer out in the sun too long. Yuck and the drop shadow is out of control. If I had him as a student I would have given this design an F- .

I wish they would have let me just design and program The Ride For Roswell Site instead of just "draping" his tacky photshop skins over my quality content adminsitration/editing system. The Ride For Roswell Site suggests nothing about a bicycle race accept the new "Intro To Digital Media Art/Look Mommy I Can use Photoshop To Make A Collage" splash graphic.

At one point he actually suggested that I stick a big bright yellow star across the "splash page." He had printed out a photoshop doc to show me what a big yellow star looks like. It was horrific.

During the whole thing I never let on that I was a designer. I just pretended to be a clueless programmer with no opinion because I knew that if we discussed it I was going to start laughing. This is the only reason I want to finish my thesis. So when this issue comes up I can say that I am a "Master of Fine Arts."

On another note yet still, the new chat was a huge sucess. Yeah for SQLite. I am going to convert much of my life to it. The new discuss application is based on it. You can play with it soon.

Google has an extraordinary amount of information about its users. It logs all the searches made on it and stores this information indefinitely. Because every computer has a unique IP (internet protocol) address, every visit to every website can be traced back to the computer making it - a fact which is well known in geek circles but remarkably under-publicised outside them. (Shi Tao, the Chinese journalist, was given 10 years in jail last April for "leaking state secrets" after Yahoo! in Hong Kong handed over information linking his IP address and his e-mail to the Chinese authorities.) Users of Google's Gmail service, who are already having their e-mails scanned to place targeted ads, have given the company their identity, a full record of all their searches and copies of all their e-mails, stored indefinitely. Users of Google's Toolbar are inadvertently giving the company a list of not just all their searches but also of every single website they visit. And, as the lawsuit makes clear, all this information is potentially vulnerable to subpoena.
Quoted from: Big Google is watching you - Sunday Times - Times Online

I have said this for so long.