So (e:joshua) [inlink]joshua,119[/inlink] before you have a heart attack that I am a serial soldier hater, I thought I would explain why I am partcularly outraged with (e:be).

My attack on (e:be)'s journal may have seemed like some random attack on some poor little solder boy who didn't know better and just wanted to defend his country. Well that is not the case. Maybe you don't rememeber be|brandon that used to be the dread locked, hippy granola, anti-war boy that worked at coop.

You may, however, remember him when he lived as a woman. You would know him because he wore the skankiest mini skirts and looked a lot like a prostitute. I disliked him back then because I felt as though he was making it harder on gay people by living like she did for what I perceived to be pure shock value. Then, after a while, I felt bad for her because I thought, oh man maybe he is really a woman trapped in a man's body and I tried to learn to not hate him. His newest metamorphosis just makes me sick.

I am outraged not by the choice of a human to defend their country but by the choice of that particular human to become a solider.

And just as (e:be) has the right to make the choice he did. I have the right to criticize him and call him out on his disturbing choice. In fact I think I have a particular responsibility to do so as I am the one providing him with the public vehicle to brag about his new killing power.

I don't want to feel repsonsibile for giving someone a voice who is choosing to kill people just to see what it feels like.

Here is his repsonse to my comment.

Damn, that's some harsh shit. I wouldn't call it ignorance, really. I know full well that I work for an organization that does "bad things." I went into it knowing that. How much did I know it though? I've been anti-war and government forever, but what did I really know of such things? I'm going through alearning experience here that may very well cost me my life. This I also am aware of. Really, as I believe
I've wrote, I'm fucking over myself -seeing how it feels to betray completely everything I thought I had that made me "me." It's not something that most sane people would do, but I'm into it for an aspect of the depths of human experience that would be otherwise impossible to, well, experience. This puppet theatre of world events is going to keep playing out no matter which side I'm on. The sacrifice I make now will allow me to be able to converse intelligently about things that
before I could only have opinions about.

This is reality. If it weren't me, it'd be someone else, and they could've just as easily been me. I have so little time on this planet, and I need to see from as many viewpoints, and learn as much as possible. So, here I am, spending some time finding out firsthand about part of society that people either love or hate. Myself, I don't love or hate. Life is too short.

And shit man, you may as well laugh, because that brain matter dance isn't likely to happen any time soon. I'm more of a minor wound type. However, should my head succumb to entropy before the rest of me, I would invite such revelry. Just try not to feel too sad, just appreciate the absurdity of corporeal existence.
Rock n' roll...

I have been lifting like mad and my body aches everywhere. I seriously feel thicker everywhere which is kind of exciting although I am not ready for pictures yet. I just wish I had continued working out from back when I started back in november and didn't stop for the months in between.

I have to say I do not know if it will be worth it over the longhaul as it takes up valuable evening programming time but I suppose a little moderation is in order in my life.

Sometimes I want to look like this. I got the chest hair part going, lol.


Today (e:enknot) and I were talking about how we are not just professional but also recreational programmers. Speaking of recreational programming, I was so thrilled with fixing the mobile post from email bug followed by solving the PPC 6700 jpeg corruption error all in my spare moments within the last 24 hours. I think tomorrow I plan on turning the corrupt jpeg fixer into a native mobile phone application. I have a feeling that it will be ueber addictive. If microsoft won't fix it, I will fix it for them - which is ridiculous.

I also started writing about my mobile phone soap opera on my new web site which is barely populated with data yet.

The PPC 6700 which runs Windows Mobile 5.0 is my first truly futuristisic phone. I had a sidekick, I had a blackberry, I had a Nokia 7710 but this phone blows the other ones away in tersm of features, network speed (~200-500kps), includes Wifi, bluetooth, keyboard, IR. It is amazing.



The only problem is that the 1.3 Megapixel camera produces faulty jpegs that have 16 extraneous bytes in their EXIF data. The unfortunately cause the photos to not work with many web sites which use open source Jpeg libraries to resize images. I heard they even have problems being viewed in gmail.

In order for the phone to be truly useful I had to be be able to take images from the phone and use them on my journal. So it was time to get out the old fashioned hex editor and begin experimenting with which bytes were the extraneous ones. Turns out it was a regular sequence right at the end of the EXIF data. The etxra string looks like this:

"x00x10x4Ax46x49x46x00x01x01x00x00x01x00x01x00x00"

I found that this string identifies the images as from the PPC 6700

"x41x70x61x63x68x65x00x48"

Unfortunately, the string is sometimes repeated but only the first one was extraneous, so you can't just doa blind search and replace. instead you have to just repalce the first one. here is some PHP code that would allow you to use these images as normal ones using GD. You an find a copy of this


<?php
function checkFixPPC6700($orig){
    //get the file contents
    $data = file_get_contents($orig);
    //if its a PPC 6700 image cut out the extraneous 16 bits
    if(strstr($data, "x41x70x61x63x68x65x00x48")){
        $bad_data = "x00x10x4Ax46x49x46x00x01x01x00x00x01x00x01x00x00";
        return substr_replace($data, "", strpos($data, $bad_data), strlen($bad_data));
    } else {
        //if not from a PPC 6700 return data unaltered
        return $data;
    }
        
}

$data = checkFixPPC6700('IMAGE_006452.jpg');
//$im = imagecreatefromstring($data);

if (($im = imagecreatefromstring($data)) !== false) {
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
imagejpeg($im);
}

?>

They have lots of old pics

I can't believe how few people paid attention to my journal about the clipboard reading flaw in IE. I have read about 3000 clipboards to use in my newest epoem for the epoetry symposium at UB. It is entitled, "Microsoft Security" with a refrain of get firefox, get firefox.

Welcome to the site new peeps. The latest one (e:dragonfire) wrote [inlink]dragonfire1024,1[/inlink] about the demolition of the first section of elmwood after forrest to put in a new hotel. It is so sad that a part of elmwood that I remember as being "the elmwoodstrip" as a kid is going to disappear. I signed the petition but I honestly have no hope anymore after the coop destroyed the old brick brid house to make their store. I figure it is just a matter of time.



Once that is done the Atwater hosue will come down. The sticky buns that used to come from the bakery in there was one of the original reasons I would skip school and ride the bus down elmwood. (e:iriesara), remember when you used to live there with the ghosts, lol.

[size=m]Allen Street[/size]
I seem to spend a lot of time standing on the corner of Allen and Franklin on the way home from work recently. Sometimes, I think I want to go to Cafe 59 but then I don't because for some reason it feels weird to go out alone. Does anyone rememeber when it used to be Java Temple?

I have a feeling a lot of prositutes stand near this corner here or around here by the way the people seem to drive by and stare over and over sometimes.

There is a nice tile floor there. I like to stare at it while I wait.



The sky was so beautiful yesterday. It is hard to tell in these last two photos I took before the battery died on my phone but it was the really nice orange, purple, blue combo. We were driving at like 30mph int he car so they didn't come out real nice but you can still see the clouds.





The Buffalo news article is coming out on Monday or Tuesday in the city section or possibly the front page accordig to the reporter. I am excited to see what they say about the site. The geek meet is also coming up in one week and I have to really start preparing my stuff. Luckily, tomorrow is presidents day and I have off.