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.