Our Buffalo, NY tap water has this strange chemical smell during the last week or so. Just so you know its not me being paranoid, it is (e:terry) who pointed it out and he never smells anything.

The smell lingers after the water is gone and you can taste the smell in the shower vapor. It even has a bad aftertaste after brushing your teeth. The water filtration system int he kitch manages to remove the bad taste which means it is some sort of filterable chemical.

Anyone else have this problem? it is making me insane and no it is not the extra chlorine summer zebra muscle chlorine taste. It is something entirely new. I think I will bring it up at the block club meeting tonight and see if it is happening elsewhere.

Seriously, the full zoom is amazing. It zooms everything text and media. This means that finally, you can design for normal vision and vision impaired people can zoom for till they can see what they need to. These are th kind of changes that browsers should have implemented from the get go. It beats having all those custo reize text button on every site and lets every aspect of the page zoom. Heck I even zoom sometimes now when I want to concentrate on an area of the page.

On a mac you hold down command and + or command and -. NOt sure the ocmbo on a PC but you should definately try it with Firefox 3

Zoomed estrip on Safari - fucked up only text zooms


Zoomed estrip on Firefox 3 - everything zooms


It even remembers the zoom level when you return to the site you set it for.

The new firefox is great. You should get it

I wish I had something important to write about. Mostly, I have just been concentrating on work.

Now that the various lodgers are gone we have been slowly converting back to house mode. (e:matthew) is on this super pre July 4th Americana kick so the room is red white and blue.



Finally, the red couch I bought for (e:matthew) for his birthday - has a home.



The closet is still messy. I wonder if we should paint the drawers in the closet all red white and blue.



(e:mathew) and I headed down to Pearl Street Brewery last night to see (e:ladycroft) before she went back to Qatar. You can see pics on (e:metalpeter,44695)

It was great seeing her. 15 peeps showed up including (e:souternyankee) who I had not seen in so long and minus (e:imk2), who I had seen the day before . It was nice to catch up with everyone and Pearl street was beyond accomodating for us, making one big tables and even taking our pictures with a bunch of different cams. I wish I caught our waiters name because he was really one of the best waiters I ever had.


The Tenants
Afterwards, we stopped by the tenants to pick up the oh, so late rent. One of our tenants paid rent like 15 days late - in change - including pennies. I was fine with her being late because I am nice like that but havig to count out change including pennies is seriously ridiculous.



Not to mention that they never re-imbursed me for the fine we got for them not putting out the trash like she promised. She is movng out to south carolina in July. I think its time to let all those tenants go and just start over. That will give me time to redo the bathroom before new students move in, in the fall. Hell, maybe we can just sell it as I am so sick of dealing with students that can't pay rent on time.

I was just testing out the site on firefox 3 release candidate which I assume will be very much like the real firefox 3 being released this afternoon at 1PM and it is very much faster. The only thing that makes me sad is that some of my dev plugins don't work. I am sure they will work in time. Between Safari and Firefox upgrades - I vae no idea how IE is going to keep up with their crap browser and their hillbilly javascript engine.

I was using Google maps street view to drive down linwood when I noticed that it was made with flash/flex. So much for an all javascript solution. It makes me wonder why they just didn't use flash form the get go like yahoo maps. It seems like it would have been a much easier solution to maintain.

The Allentown Food Festival
I started the day with a much more aware trip to the Allentown Art Festival. I ate another Italian Sausage. Whoever runs the stand on the corner of Allen and Delaware has the best ones I think.

The Tree is Dying
The oldest tree is dying on Franklin. I wonder what will happen with it. I think it has some sort of disease because the few remaining leaves are starting to turn dead.




Father's Day
We followed that by another excellent meal cooked by my mother. We had lamb, omlettes and french toast. My father tried lamb gravy/juice instead of syrup on the toast and as a omlette topping. He called it the stroke special. Someday we will tell this story in the hospital.



Grill Supplies
We stopped at Home Depot to get a cover for an utensils for our new grill. I saw they have 24 hour propane for anyone else that needs it. Its pretty high tech. You slide you credit card through and the machine vends propane via unlocking locked lockers.


The Pear Tree
When we got home we hung out for in the backyard for a bit and I found that there in fact pears living in the tree. I wonder what happend to make it be this way.


The Liter Drama
As a preface to this, I wish you could understand how much garbage ends up on our lawn from random people. I just don't get why people think it is okay to just litter in the city. People seriously just open their cars doors and throw shit out the door or window. I have witnessed it myself a ton of times. At first I was gonna say I didn't think this happend so much in the suburbs but then I remembered, at my parents house in Kenmore - someone picks up there dog shit in plastic bags and throws it in the street so who knows. It makes my dad pretty much insane. He gets up early to watch for the people - I think he would shoot them if he had a gun, lol. Having a lot of trash outside our house from the church functions, I can understand how angry this makes people.

So I am in the kitchen, enjoying some of the tastiest cherries from Wegmans when (e:matthew) or (e:terry) is shouting that there is a fight out front on our neighbors lawn.

Story goes neighbor is outside flying a kite with family when the people littered on his lawn, neighbor asked them to pick it up, they refused, he opened the door of their car and put the litter back in. Fight ensued.

Unfortunately, the people involved were not the same color as my neighbor and other people around were getting drawn in as festival goers went by. I say unfortunately because it would have probably just ended quick with no real drama if there wasn't that other issue. It is amazing how fast it escalates into a race thing when race is involved.

I decided to call 911. I called because I feared if the wrong white or black people with fighting mentalities went by on their way back from the festival it would have escalated further into a ridiculous race riot over some litter.

The police came like 10 minutes later but at that point it was over. Maybe it was like 7 minutes. They took down the story and disapeared. They also said that in the future when you call 911 to just tell them to come because if you answer lots of questions, as I did - it just prolongs their arrival.

First of all, this is so damn funny:



Well, this was the type of weekend that memories and not pictures can contain. On Friday night at around 8PM (e:imk2) calls to see what I am doing. I say whatever she is doing - 3 hours later she comes over.

In the mean time my friend Chris from San Francisco unexpectedly came to visit. This all spelled crazy evening.

A little while later (e:imk2)'s ex boyfriend Greg came over, followed by his current roommate who he met on Craig's List. He had looked at the house on Linwood and said it was not so great, shame as its only $140,000 which is redic considering th elocation and that the house across the street is going for $650,000.

If anyone is looking for a cheaper Linwood property
that convert into some cool check it out. Here is the virtual tour of the ipreoprty:

Unfortunately, it is really cut up weird but what do you expect for $140,000 on that block.

So we spent most of the evening touring the different rooms of the 24. Its fun to just move around from room to room as they are different enough to feel like you went some where.

Unfortunately, (e:matthew) was feeling sick and just kind of slept through the whole evening.

At dawn, all of us went up on the roof to watch the sun come up on a cloudy day, lol. After that point it was time for bed time for me. I think everyone else kept drinking beer. I think Chris went to bed in the green room shortly after.

(e:imk2) and (e:terry) stayed up the entire night and went out to breakfast, etc. (e:Terry) looked like a freakin' zombie. Contrary to popular belief we are not the stay up all night partying types anymore.

So then (e:terry) went to bed at like 10:30am for the rest of the day and I got up at the same time. (e:imk2) continued on through the rest of the day:

First we watched the new South Park movie. Then we played on my laptop and surfed the internet from the porch until we decided it was time to go visit the Allentown Food Festival. I ate Italian sausage, a lobster and red pepper sandwich, some kettle corn and a taste of fried dough, yum. At least for me that is what it was. I mean I like Art and all but I am much more the type of person to buy supplies to make stuff or to by vintage stuff than new art. I did, however, really like the decorative eggs stand.

This is sadly these are only picture I have of the wild weekend.


This bitch in the white dress with black hair and pink side chunk of hair n the front was busy explaining to her oh so attractive friend how it is so sad that not one single attractive person lives in buffalo and that is the problem with it. I kept hoping she would fall and smash her face. Maybe it was just the lack of good sleep but she was annoying me a lot. I bet she never thought anyone even heard her.



That is (e:imk2)'s shoulder there in the white dress in the foreground and the only proof I have that we hung out this weekend.

Last thursday my mother and I started the day by trying to clean my grandmother's attic out. There was so much stuff that had to be divided in between piles of keepers, goodwill and garbage. We managed to sift through lots of stuff before it got to 90 degrees and we had to prepare for my Dad and Uncle's birthday party which started at 7PM.

Our floor guy finsihd the floor over there too. It looks a lot better than the crazy 50s rainbow fleck lineoleum that used to be there.




My grandmother had collected 3 boxes of bows. I wonder what kind of special event was just about to happen.





I didn't get any pictures of my Dad and Uncle's birthday accept this one at the new grill. I spent more of my time making sure that everything was working and that food was ready and dishes were clean. I think my mom or brother has more pics.





(e:twisted) - does your friend need this toaster

Someone had a really good night or a really bad night on Franklin

So I get a message from Artvoice today:

Basically, we've just about outgrown these T1s. Our traffic has been gradually increasing, and we're hitting near max bandwidth during peak times. Not only that, but we really want to start pushing on-line video... so 3mbits of bandwidth just isn't going to cut it. To top it off, our contract for the Ts is up anyway.

They are moving on to some crazy high intensity web stuff to revolutionize their site which requires them moving to a colocation facility that supports 100mbps connections with a TB of bandwidth. Wow, whatever that is, is going to be crazy intense.

What it means for me is that I could move to a co-location facility with a virtualized server (pronounced headache and drama) or move my dream baby server that we all purchased somewhere else.

Time warner has nothing to offer me.
Their best small business package is 7mbps down/768K up which is lame. I tested it and we go over that all day long. Not to mention it also costs $149.99. For the server, download speed isn't nearly as critical as upload speed. It didn't help that when I called the business line, they didn't know the phone was off the hook and spent about 10 minutes making fun of other customers in the background. Talk about stupid business model.

Verizon FiOS
Verizon has amazing deals but only with FiOS which is not available at my house yet. It seems like they only have in in the country and in select suburbs. The best they could do without FiOS was 1.5mb down/768k up using DSL. That wasn't going to cut it either.

Luckily, I know someone who live in FiOS land. The prices and speed for the business accounts are insane

$99.00 for 20mbps/5mbps
$139.00 for 20mbps/20mbps
$239.00 for 50mbps/20mbps

Those speeds almost sound like some magic future that I didn't believe could exist - at least not in that price range. I think the first account at $99.00 would be good for me.

The most I paid for estrip in the past was $49.00 per month but it was a lot slower connection and the headache of co-location hosting with support in India. I would rather die than live through that again. Seriously all the time I wasted would cost more money now.

So I talked to Verizon and they promised me if I put the account in my name but at my friend's house, then when it comes to my neighborhood I could just move the server there which is in fact my dream.

How are the other companies going to compete with Verizon now that FIOS is out? Is time warner just going to go out of business? I mean FIOS TV is also on its way or already out in some areas.