I was writing a comment to congratulate (e:shawnr,280) on his landing of a great job at PBS in DC and it got me thinking about the BUffalo Brain Drain.

It is so sad that Buffalo is losing him though. Buffalo should be more sad than I am because he is truly one of the young people with a vision and capability to make a change and places like UB are so lame for not having jumped on that.

In fact all of the smartest people I know have left. Maybe I am an idiot for staying (selfish sidenote: the more of you that leave the better I look - if enough tech people leave, I can just lie and say I invented the internet).

(e:southernyankee), (e:ajay) , (e:hodown) , (e:haikuster) , (e:codypomeray) , (e:emilyjane) , (e:iriesara) , (e:emily) , (e:jesse) , (e:julie) (e:robin) have all already left - not to mention the fact that I have heard (e:nejiffer) , (e:ladycroft) , (e:jenks) and many others say they expect to work in other cities when they are finally done with their school/interns.

I have a feeling in ther end it will be carey, mike, jill, me, terry and matt- hopefully living on lincoln parkway.

Yummy, 4 boxes of really fancy dipped chocolate cookies in silver boxes arrived from (e:hodown) in NYC


I went to my cousins graduation party in East Aurora. Their house is no nice with lots of land. It is a log cabin that they built back in the 80s. I still can't imagine living that far from the city. As usual we played boccie ball.

Missing Image ;(

Met a guy who was a Roswell patient and got cured only recently - he loved Roswell.

Speaking of Roswell. I Marie Curie at Roswell when walking to the server room the other day. She looked somehow different than I expected.


The other day I went with (e:Matthew) and (e:terry) to southpark next to the botanical gardens on route 62 in Lackawanna.

A crazy bug we saw of a type I never saw before, at least I don't think so.


Here is (e:mattehw) taking a picture of it too.










Went to go see Indie Arie at Thursday in the Square. I believe it was even more crowded than Pat Benetar for those of you that were there. They even closed off the square part way through and shut down the subway so no more people could come and it couldn't run anyone over.. I got stuck behind the stage most of the evning.


(e:eknot) knew some woman who had a store that had a bathroom so I went to go pee but some 13 y/o drunk girl went in before me and messed the bathroom up really bad. It was yucktastic.


Afterwards, I saw (e:ladycroft) and (e:nejifer) and we walked over to my house which took a while but we got to go past the new mansion. At 10PM (e:theecarey) came over and she came with us and then out to dinner at Panos. Then (e:theecarey) and I planned our business super universe and get rich schemes till about 4am. Someday you will be say, "Hey I knew those bizzilionaires when they were just estrippers, before they bought Disney and Microsoft"

We signed our lives over to the new house. Apparently, the patriot act has something to do with buying a house too.

I updated the surebertCom library to add lots of new array functions and two new string ones.

strings: ltrim, rtrim, trim
arrays: drop, random, unique, combine, inject, substrCount, strstr, stristr, walk

I still haven't documented everything but strings and array methods are fully documented with examples. Same with sound, events, and ajax. Check it out if you are a javascripter.

The show at the baseball stadium is ultra nationalistic. They spent like 15 minutes announcing each part of the army and lighting off one firework for each.

::Download Flash Video::

The finale was a little better but still kind of blah, sorry about the blair witch effect at the beginning, it was windy.

::Download Flash Video::

The squirrel never made it across West Ferry. Maybe the car was going to fast?

I am sick today. I got a sore throat over the weekend and it hurt so much today that I have a pounding headache. I would honestly rather be at work programming instead of sitting here thinking I should be working on the written portion of my final thesis for grad school. I know this is a recurring story but it depresses me on so many levels. The worst of which is how I failed to arrive at my goal or how Buffalo failed me. The rest of this post is not so boring I swear.

I started reading some more of Howard Rheingold, "Smart mobs" in which he talks about mobile communities that have formed around the world and the effects they have on society. Lots of concentration is on mobile networks that help users share real time information. An example was a group of people in Scandanavia that all scammed the subway (I am not promoting this) by having a cell phone network that would alert the users where the train conductors were. When you saw one, you would send a message with the location of the conductor which would then be sent to the other users.

There are hundreds of examples in his book. One of the most famous mobile socialo networking groups is called upoc - it lets you create a mobierl social network that works similar to the tarin conductor example above. One of their most famous is a celebrity stalker mobiel network in NYC which send all the user sthe locations of NYC celebrites when other movbile users send those lcoations to the list. Exmaple, you see julia roberts at a restaurent and send a message everyone else gets it and rushes to her. Freaky and scary - i think.

The one thing I have hated about living in Buffalo is the lack of public willing to accept mobile internet. I really don't understand it at all. I provides the benefits of instant information access with benefits of social networks. Something as simple as being able to look up a recipe at the grocery store, or to record an event as it is happening.

Being horrified that I was a super failure by not being able to create a mobile network I decided to check out upoc communities that were centered around buffalo. There were not very many and the ones that were had few users and even fewer messages. The largest group was of course one that sent messages about the bufflao bills.

Even crazier is that there was a mobile user group for upstate NY - yes - all of upstate - Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, etc. It had only 44 users across hundreds of miles and these were the messages:
    
Jun 05 10:11PM     
Fr: cliffr39
dude chill out with the whorin 4 times in 3 hours is aggressive
Jun 05 10:05PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms here?
Jun 05 10:04PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms here?
Jun 05 7:49PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms under 30 here?
Jun 05 7:48PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms under 30 here?
Jun 04 4:05PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute single white moms under 30 here?
Jun 03 9:28PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any single white mom here in her 20s?

So maybe Buffalo just isn't ready for something like this. But why? That is a question I really just cannot answer. I really wanted to build a mobile empire, a temporary reality layered on top of the city, in which people shared their lives and and radically changed each others perception of local community. Instead we have a journaling community which shares many of the same benefits in terms of building community but has gotten all of these people stuck at their computer screens.

Although, the average user of estrip.org has not reached the level of mobility/portability that I desire, it has laid the foundation for a community which continues to grow and adopt new technologies as they become available and afforable - ultimately helping to make these technologies socially acceptable in a mobile technology unsavy town.

Ironically, I made plans from my phone in the chat to meet (e:joshua) and (e:libertad) right after this. Maybe it does work, but I am th emobile link, lol.

I gto an aemrgency call from (e:Terry) that his bike tire had popped while he was at the harbor. It was packed. There were literally no parking spots.



While I was there I saw ther replica of the nina - one of Christopher Columbus' ships. It was about the size of a large SUV. I hope that it was a not to scale replica. If it was to scale, I don't understand where the hell they slept. There is no way I would cross the Atlantic in that ship.



This is the kind of bike I wouldn't want to pop a tire on.

::Download Flash Video::

So I called the seller and explained that our landlord wanted us out by August 1st so that she could rent to students and that for that reason we want to stick as close as possible to the July 11th closing date. Luckily, he was goingg to look at a house today that he was going to put a deposit down on so it all might work out.

We really need to get in there before July is up. It is a long journey to destroy the dander.

Well, I am not surprised but my design got nixed. At first the person I talked to was thrilled but then they changed their mind because it would not be branded with the rest of their site - intentionally. Mind you this is a website on a promotional CD-ROM. Thank god for CSS, its only changing a stylesheet to switch designs.

Still think their idea is great, everyone should order cards from them this holiday season.

My final design.


Their final design.

The guy we are buying the house from informed us he has not found a place to live yet. What the fuck? He sigend a ocntract that we would clos eon July 1tth. If he didn't think that was psosible why didn't he negotiate before signing. The mortgage will be ready, the homeowners insurance is ready, we gave our 30day notice to our landlord and the stupid seller can't get his act together.

This is a windowsill in a bedroom



It's so annoying to me. I am getting very nervous about the situation because they are serious cat scummers and I need time beofre I can even live in the house. There house is coated in cat hair in the nastiest way you could imagine. It is necessary that I have plenty of time to clean it out during the warm months when the windows can be open. When measuring the other day at the house, I opened up a furnace vent and found a cat hair matt the size of about a basket ball. Everything is sick and disgusting liek that. The whole house has that nasty cat amonia smell. NOw I know you all know how much I hate cats, but even for a cat lover this house is pushing it.

The other thing is that these people have so much freakin stuff, that even if they find a place and move, it is going to take forever. This is really bad because I cannot live there while any of there stuff is there. I don't want them to leave anything. Not even a doormat. They simply have to go and all their crap too.

I mean who keeps a filthy litter box in the fucking dining room. It pretty much smells like the cats just piss on the rugs.

I though we would have plenty of summer time to tear out all the carpets and clean but now he is taking his time as the contract said the closing date is July 11th. Then he made it sound like he might be ready in september or something. I am so freakin angry about this right now.

He also took an old sink that matched the house and replaced it with a new modern one. He had to do it for his ailing mother who lives there but he made it sound like he was gonna tak ethe original sink with him. The laywer said he can't do that.

On another note, what is up with the weather today. It was basically snowing with hail, followed by sunny sky. I heard in Cheektowaga there was a tornado, it even flipped a truck



Hail

::Download Flash Video::

Followed by Sun

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I also have a cyst in my arm that hurts. I think I am falling apart.