Jimmy Mac's is leaving!! Jimmy Mac's is one of my favorite restaurants in Buffalo. It has fueled many of the calories that were required to create this site. I am sad to see them go. Here is the artcle

Here is an excerpt:
A restaurant that has openly defied the state's smoking ban is now for sale.

Owner Rick Naylon is asking $125,000 for Jimmy Mac's, a restaurant with a bar at 555 Elmwood Ave. E.K. Henderson Assoc., a company in which Naylon has a minority ownership interest, would retain ownership of the building. The restaurant's equipment and other assets are for sale.

"Jimmy Mac's is for sale," Naylon said. "But because of all the pending legal actions, I'm really not in a position to discuss the sale at any length."

I went to see (e:maidencateyes) in second life today. I figured it is time I finish up my second life independent study from last year. I went to go get all of my scripts and take some screen captures for my paper/web page about it and then I got distracted trying to post this journal entry from second life. It works it you are reading this but its not the easiest way to work. It's actually easier to just leave second life and post.

Here is the object i scriptted to let me post from secondlife. It is a handsign witha picture of (e:maidencateye) journal on it. I atcually hate second life. I am so sick of looking at it. It gives me the feeling that you have when you wake up in the middle of the night and can't move your arms or legs cause they fell asleep.

I am trying to work on more efficient interfaces that give information at command rather than during each load cycle. For example, I used to have the weather box, it just took up more screen space and loaded an uneccessary number of times. Each time you changed pages it would have to load in the XML weather data, that wasn't really changing each time. I could have made it check for its last check and only check once an hour, but in that case it would still have to load into the display on each refresh of the page, which is annoying.

I finally came up witha great idea to combat this problem. At first I thought I could make a command box but then I realized I could integrate the command box with the chat. At this point there are only two commands for non admin users.

[size=m]Chat Commands[/size]
weather - type the word weather into the chat by itself and I will answer with the current weather conditions, temp, humidity, and a link to an extended weather forecast.

peeps - I respond with the number of peeps online and their usernames so that you don't have to click on the link in the top twelve list. This was (e:maidencateyes) idea!

More to come soon . . .

I was working on finding a fast, free weather feed for the site and realized, why not turn to the government." So I found that the government has tons of free information in xml format, which is really convenient.

While perusing through the various weather data, I found a FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions section regarding tropical storms. Mind you this is on a real government site funded by our tax dollars. It just shows what an inappropriate response americans take toward any sort of threat if this qualifies as a frequently asked question.

The Frequently Asked Question is:
Subject: C5C Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

You can find the answer in case you arn't sure.

For those of you that are too lazy, here is an little excerpt, it is mucho entertaining.

. . .for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane . . .

I decided to realize my dream of enabling further mobile phone functions for the site via the WAP broswers on most cell phones. This all goes back to when I lived in Arizona in 2001. I received my usual computer programming magazine that had a special artilel about WAP and the future of mobile computing. It was my dream to get involved but I never had time, by the time I had the time and skill to work it, the sidekick came out and i moved onto that.

Now I realize that the rest of the world still has WAP browsers and so I would like to allow them to use the site over their phones.

The site is almost 100% functional on the t-mobile sidekick but the extension to WAP browser is a really great addition. Currently, at elmwoodstrip.com/wap you can view who is online, the last 12 entries by user - title, and by clicking on the entries you can read the full entries which are currenly not stripped properly of excess crap like formatting tags. However, Ii only had an hour and a half to work on this and I have to get going. Check it out.

If anyone who is rich and generous would like to support the continued development of the mobile features of elmwoodstrip.com, please donate for the software required for development. The cell phone emulator software that I need for development costs ~ 249 pounds, it can be found here . The software allows me to test the page on various cell-pone models online without having to own the actual phones which would cost a fortune. Feel free to simply buy a license and send me t he software!!

Does anyone know of any grants I could apply for to cover costs like this? I am offering to give up tons of my free time to offer services to the public but having useful ideas is limiting when I don't have the cash flow to make them happen. Alternatively, I could pick up another job but then the site development would would be on the back burner because of lack of time. It's a vicous circle.