Journaling on estrip is free and easy. get started today

Last Visit 2024-03-16 17:05:41 |Start Date 2003-07-07 03:39:31 |Comments 5,617 |Entries 6,438 |Images 14,748 |Sounds 119 |SWF 21 |Videos 322 |Mobl 2,935 |Theme |

Category: buffalo

10/13/08 10:48 - 62ºF - ID#46082

My Letter to the Mayor

The corner of Franklin and Linwood by my house is ridiculously dangerous. Its so weird that intersection is in the middle of a city, does not even have a sidewalk on the southside. You guys who have walked downtown from our house have all seen how crazy that corner is, especially at nighttime. I wonder when they decided to make the street curvy like that. Both sides Franklin and North Pearl are curvy.

image

Dear Sir,
I am writing to express my concern for the safety of pedestrians at the corner of North and Franklin. I own the house at 24 Linwood, the first house on Linwood after the intsersection and have witnessed many near accidents as pedestrians, including myself, attempt to cross the street. The southside next to the park is especially dangerous because it does not even have a sidewalk. It is so strange, right in the middle of the city, to have a busy intersection with no sidewalk and just a dirt path along a stretch of it. When you add to the mix the extreme traffic from rush hour or that many drunken drivers head home from Allentown and Downtown bars via Franklin->Linwood, the confusing corner becomes even more of a danger.

I encourage you to please include the final stage of funding for the Franklin, North, Linwood Intersection project in the 2009 Capital Budget.

Thank you for your time,
Paul Visco



print add/read comments

Permalink: My_Letter_to_the_Mayor.html
Words: 239
Location: Buffalo, NY


10/11/08 09:44 - ID#46069 pmobl

Bathtub


I freakin love the bathtub in the back bathroom but I hate the shower
connector faucet. It is so relaxing to take a bath. If you javent
taken one in a long time, you should try it. The heigt of our tub
gives you that wild west bathing in a bath bucket feeling.

So back to the faucet. It's an ugly, dripping piece of crap. I
stopped at home depot and bargain outlet to try and find a nicer
replacement but neither sells bathtub facets sans shower. At home
depot the guy acted like I was crazy to even ask. I guess no one has
just rubs minus shower anymore.

The rejuvination catalog has fancy ones but they are like $300-700+
and I want to spend like $100.
image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Bathtub.html
Words: 132
Location: Buffalo, NY


10/11/08 09:18 - ID#46068 pmobl

Pretty Yellow flowers


I had no idea that these plain grey looking leaves would make such
pretty yellow flowers in our garden.
image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Pretty_Yellow_flowers.html
Words: 23
Location: Buffalo, NY


Category: housing

10/11/08 06:35 - 70ºF - ID#46065

Housing Costs in Buffalo?

I am so confused about the housing market. My friend bought a house of the lower west side for $137,000 that was like $20,000 last year before it "got its hair did". I thought those flip days were over.

I thought housing prices were slipping. Then I was looking at Zillow to see if our house's estimated value had change. In fact it had. The value went up a lot. Our house is now estimated at $279,000 a good $100,000 more than we bought it for. I guess that was a good investment. I mean I put some money in, but nothing like that. Imagine if it had a new exterior paint job and new roof. I don't think this value will hold when the depression starts but I really have no interest in selling or moving. Its proximity to my job is worth well over $100,000 - especially over a lifetime in travel costs saved.

The creepy part is how did they know we went form 3 bathrooms to 2 bathrooms. I used to say 3.

image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Housing_Costs_in_Buffalo_.html
Words: 171
Location: Buffalo, NY


10/11/08 06:09 - ID#46064 pmobl

Shove a sponge in it?


Okay, I totally don't know anything about women's menstrual cycles but
putting sea sponges up there seems crazy. I mean, I get that dioxin
is bad and tampons are bad. That unbleached cotton is safer and that
you probably should try and not lose a multitude of tampons up there,
like one of my friends - you know who you are. But this borders on
totally strange to me and they are $15. Maybe you just rinse and
repeat.

Then again, I was in the feelrite buying ear candles- so maybe it's
not that strange.
image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Shove_a_sponge_in_it_.html
Words: 99
Location: Buffalo, NY


Category: programming

10/11/08 02:38 - 48ºF - ID#46055

Surebert Flash Player 10 Uploads Fixed

Well, after working like 24 hours staright, I have upgraded surebert toolkit a bunch and released a flash player 10 compliant javascript accessible multi file upload way ahead of everyone else . I have to hurry an intergrate it into all my projects before people start moving en massse to flash player ten and no one can upload multifiles anymore.

I am much happier with the new version and I learned a lot. Like how much MXML application suck for tiny things. The smallest I could get it as an MXML application was about 150k which is so freakin lame considering it is just a bttton. I didn't even think to look at the size until I was done and I was so pissed. There was no way I was going to add a 150k button to pages.

So I scapped where I was at and build one form scratch as and Actionscript 3 project in Flex and used the flash drawing API to draw the button states etc. Its nice with an actionscript project you can really get the project size so tiny. I ended up managing to get it all under 10K which is a lot more reasonable. You can style everything bou tthe button from javascript and all the event handlers are the same as the old surebert multifile uploader ones so implementation should be easy. I commented the javascript API but no so much the flex code. The Javascript is here and assumes you are using the surebert toolkit although you could adapt it to run on anything else. Anyways, the flex code is here if you are interested

image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Surebert_Flash_Player_10_Uploads_Fixed.html
Words: 295
Location: Buffalo, NY


Category: religion

10/10/08 11:43 - 52ºF - ID#46054

Religulous

I went with (e:imk2) and faben to go see Religulous. It wasn't that exciting because I share mostly the same views and there was little new information. I think for some people it would be more interesting.

The only thing that kind of shocked me was that the Jesus story isn't unique. Apparently, it is also the same store as Horus and some other previous god-men.

In the end, the movie just confirmed my belief that I am terrified of muslims and christians alike and that jews are also scary but there aren't a lot of them - so not so much. Who knew there were so few of them? I guess there are a lot more if you count the christians as religious decendents.

According to the Jewish Agency, as of 2007 there were 13.2 million Jews worldwide; 5.3 million in Israel, 5.3 million in the United States, and the remainder distributed in communities of varying sizes around the world; this represents 0.2% of the current estimated world population.


print add/read comments

Permalink: Religulous.html
Words: 179
Location: Buffalo, NY


Category: food

10/09/08 01:41 - ID#46018

Wasabi Sushi Bar On Elmwood

As Kunis was under construction, see last journal, we decided to try Wasab on Elmwoodi. The lunch special was delicious and was $11.95 which is pretty priceworthy considering what it consisted of. Notice the size of the saashimi peices, the largest peices of sashimi I have ever had. I think I prefer their lunch special to Kunis.

image

image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Wasabi_Sushi_Bar_On_Elmwood.html
Words: 64
Location: Buffalo, NY


Category: food

10/09/08 01:05 - ID#46016 pmobl

Not kunis

(e:enknot) and I tried to go to Kunis for lunch but they are reconfiguring with a sushi bar and interior seating.

image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Not_kunis.html
Words: 27
Location: Buffalo, NY


Category: programming

10/07/08 10:37 - 50ºF - ID#45984

Adobe and Safari I hate you tonight

Spent a lot of today working with one of my new co-workers James. He seems like a fun guy. Apparently, he read my journal. I suggested he start one of his own. If you are reading this, start one.

On another note, I can't believe I am still at work. I am trying to finish this video uploading site for a contest they are hosting. Unfortunately, the magic that is my surebert multi file unloader is about to die as Flash Player 10 changed the way you can call the FileReference browse method and calling it from javascript is no longer an option. They want it to have a flash interface. Adobe says it makes it safer, I say it just makes it flashier and makes me mad.

I plan on creating a new multi file uploader widget based on my previous work but I won't have time tonight and they needed a solution now. I decided to just use traditional file uploads seeing as they are only uploading one file.

Cool enough, but sadly you don't get the progress which is really the fun part of the surebert uploader. Luckily, there is a php extension that allows you not only track how much of the file has been uploaded but how long it expects to take, the current speed, etc. Its really so easy and you can quickly get the data back via json. You add an extra random ID attribute to your form and it uses that as a key to track the file upload. Then you can make requests back to the server to get updates on the time remaining, etc. You make the requests via ajax which is really simple and great.

Sadly, after testing in IE6 and firefox and everything working, I tested it in Safari which refuses to receive ajax responses after it has initiated a file upload. I send them, it just won't process any responses. I hate you safari. Seriously, its always you that has to make everything fucked up.

Anyways, so I re-factored and ended up going with an iframe solution as safari was happy with that and so were the other browsers. Its cool to get an estimated finish time.

image
image
print add/read comments

Permalink: Adobe_and_Safari_I_hate_you_tonight.html
Words: 386
Location: Buffalo, NY


Search

Chatter

New Site Wide Comments

joe said to joe
Never send a man to do a grandma's job...

sina said to sina
yes thank you!
Well, since 2018 I am living in France, I have finished my second master of science,...

paul said to sina
Nice to hear from you!! Hope everything is going great....

paul said to twisted
Hello from the east coast! It took me so long to see this, it might as well have arrived in a lette...