I had a meeitng with the graphic design team at my work today. They have a webpage they want put on an interactive CD. I think they have this preconception that a programmer can't possibly have a clue about graphic design.

The one worker explained the image size in inches and the other commented, "You will have to talk to Paul in pixels."

Can you believe that turkey spam cost $2.19. I find that hard to believe. It means that a can of turkey spam cost about the same as than buying a similar amount of turkey breast at the deli. That means that some poeple must just like it.

The thought of it kind of makes me sick. It reminds me of this one time I thought it would be fun to eat armyt rations. I am not sure where I got them from but I think I had expired diced turkey in a black pouch. It was really bad, since then i am a little scared of processed turkey.



What about fast franks seems fresh to you?

The new backup system is more more sophisticated and can store an unlimited amount of text. The problem is that right now the stored copy does not go away when you publish and prompts you to restore when you get back to your journal. This only happens for those of you with flash 8.

So if you publish your journal and come back and it asks do you want to restrore from the saved copy, you can hit cancel. I will fix this tonght as it should automatically clear after you publish By hitting cancel it deletes the temporary backup text from memory.

Friday night we hung out with (e:shawnr), his wife Sarah, (e:lilho), (e:thesimeon) and ate at India Gate. The evening got pretty crazy and I ended up buying hotghosts.com - more on that soon.



(e:shawnr) brought over his Nintendo DS - playing it was fun.

::Download Flash Video::

I ended up having a long weekend of family events. On Saturday, (e:matthew)'s mother had a birthday party at her cabin near chataqua and on Sunday it was father's day at my parents.

I did a lot of surebertCom's documentation in the car on the way down to the cabin. 90 degrees with a hot laptop on my lap. I think that constitutes extreme programming.



Here is a little video of the cabin area, (e:matthew)'s grandma and the fire pit.

::Download Flash Video::

They found this well on the property. It was a fun evening although everyone was a little crazy drunk while I had to be the designated driver.



This morning (e:terry) and I spend several hours cutting the bushes and gardening at our rental property. We probably would have done more if (e:matthew) had joined us.





We paid $5600 to paint the freakin house. You think they could have matched the top of the window sill.



For father's day at my parents we played Win, Lose or Draw. I am sure I hate that game. I enjoy drawing and guessing. That is why I like pictionary. But Win, Lose, or Draw sucks. One of the phrases was "Don't try crossing the river until you know if you can tread the tide." How do you draw that?

::Download Flash Video::

The answer was "stag party"

Juneteenth - I didn't make it to the Juneteenth festival this year. I had really wanted to go before all the family parties popped up for the weekend. I figure now that I plan on living in Buffalo the rest of my life, I will have plenty more chances, although I guess every year it will be (e:matthew)'s mother's birthday and father's day. To bad there were two shooting events at it. I think that is exactly what scares away people from visiting the event. Did anyone end up going and take pics? Here is a quote from the Buffalo News:

Price said, "More people from other walks of life and ethnic backgrounds are coming to feel this festival is for everybody. They're starting to feel very comfortable, just like we do when we go to the Italian Festival or Allentown - we feel like we are a part of it."

The festival was not without its problems, however. Gunshots were fired in two separate incidents Saturday. The first occurred about 2:30 p.m., when a city youth fired a gun above a crowd. No one was hurt, and police identified the shooter as Pierre Martin, 19, of Buffalo. He was charged with menacing and possession of a weapon.

Between 6 and 7 p.m., two teenage males were shot on the west side of the park wading pool. One was struck in the hand; the other in the buttocks, police said. Both were brought to Erie County Medical Center. Felicia Stanley of Buffalo was working the New Testament Revival Church Tent at the edge of the pool when the shots were fired. While she said she was concerned for her sons, the aftermath led her to feel frustration over the violence.

Today I got a message from a new member on the site, (e:janeokafor) with some questions. I figured I would just answer it here.

Paul I will like to know you more as in where are you from and the kind of work you do?

I grew up in Kenmore, NY. (MAP TO: 309 TREMONT AVENUE)

It is Buffalo first suburb right at the North edge of the city. I attended Roosevelt, Kenmore Middle, and Kenmore West. As a young adult, my favorite hobbies were hiking and raving. By the time I was 18, I was ready to leave Buffalo the first chance I got. I actually hated it here and thought I would never come back. Not because I didn't love my friends or family but because I thought there was no hope for getting a cool job and I really wanted to see other warmer places.

I immediately attended Winthrop College in South Carolina for a year at Winthrop and studied zoology. I went there because we were visiting South Carolina when I was applying for school and I though, oh it is warm here.

I thought I was going to be a tortoise doctor but I couldn't deal with dissecting any more animals and ended up becomming vegan. Three fetal pig dissections and I had had it. I started studying German Language and got a scholarship to go to Flenburg, Germany for a year. It is a small town in Schleswig Holstein. I loved living there and had the best time learning German.

When it was time to come home, Winthrop had dropped there German program and I had to find a new shcool. They hadn't told me until I got there, so my parents and I had driven from Buffalo to South Carolina and then had to come back. It was too late for me to go to school in Buffalo, so I took a year off and worked as a temp at various horrible jobs including a day as a tech guy at a fatcory where they burned formaldyhyde to make other chemicals. You got to love Niagara Falls. I continued studying German on my own and applied for school at Northern Arizona Univeristy where a friend of mine from Winthrop was going to school. Amy Adams, I wonder where she is now?

While there I got really into computers and programming while working as a lab assistant in the Language Learning Center under the direction of Bernd Conrad It was a great combination of learning German and learning about computers. I mean I had had a lifetime of computer exposure and programmed my Commodore 64 as a kid, but it was my first attempt as an adult. I became obssessed with programming and computer graphics.

Soon I met (e:terry) at NAU. I was determined to go back to Germany, so he and I packed up and left for Germany in 2000 and stayed in Jena, Germany at the Frederick Schiller University. I took a class on language software development and really thought that was going to be in my future.

When I graduated and we got home to buffalo I had no money. I saw a job in the paper for a Multimedia Assistant at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. I ended up landing the job and it pretty much ruined me financially, working for about $16,000/year at a school where the student paid more than $20,000/year for school. I would teach a class for about $2,700.

I also became an Adjunct Professor of 3D modeling and web programming.

Somewhere in here (e:twisted) came into my life.

My boss at Canisius told me to get my MFA so that I could apply to be a full-time staff member. I started working on my MFA in 2003 at the University of BUffalo. There I studied Virtual Reality at first. I was really excited with it because it combined 3D modeling with web and networking. Unfortunately, it seemed to generally inaccessible to the public to make it very interesting for long. I initially had envisioned it as a great tool for language learning as it would allow a sort of tele-immersion.

In 2001, I met (e:matthew) and he and (e:terry) and I became a triple and still are today.

I quickly switched to my focus to web programming and found it was my favorite thing in the world. In 2003, I founded elmwoodstrip.com as my thesis project. It continued to grow a lot and at the same time allowed me a stage to test all kinds of new code out with a large audience. It also broaded my social horizons considerably by allowing me to create my own tool for social networking.

It also started me documenting just about all of my life. At this point I have written over 2000 journals and uploaded over 300 media files. If you really want to know everything that happend in between, you can read my journal. I docuemnt just about everything I do that is of any interest and even things that aren't ;) I became especially addicted to the web when I combined it with my multitude of cell phones - the latest one, a sprint PPC 6700, records mobile video and has huge bandwidth e.g. (e:paul,4434)

When it came time for Canisius to hire a full time professor I still wasn't finished with my MFA. I didn't get the job which I think was for the better looking back on it. When I foung out they hired some guy who didn't even have an MFA, I was really quite devastated.

Then one of my favorite students brought in an article in a classified ad for a position at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. The job sounded like a perfect match. I applied and never expected anything to come out of it because although I am an excellent programmer with lots of experience, I had no computer science degree.

I brought in lots of code samples and talked to them about my previous work. It worked because I got the job. I love my job so much. Working at Roswell has been amazing. The project vary all the time. Th elast thing I designed was a web based image manipulation and annotation program for the dermatology department. It was a replacement for the polaroid/manilla folder system they used to use.

Now I am working on an online employee evaluation system and the have taken over development of the intranet. One of the biggest focuses of my recent work has been an extensive clientside javascript library that will be used by the other team members in order to standardize our javascript and add many convenient widgets to our UIs.

The job pays me enough that I could buy a mansion (e:paul,4343) , well at least, in Buffalo. So I think I will probably end up being here forever, unless someone offers me more than 100,000 a year and moves me.

In 2006, artvoice began hosting our server, which has made it possible to greatly expand the previous constraints on the size and bandwidth of the site. I would like to expand the mobile usage of the site. There is a an xhtml mini mirror for easy access on web capable cell phones. The problem is that Buffalo, NY is only slowly moving towards the mobile web. This month I added mobile video to the journals. I hope that part of the site grows exponentially in the near future.

This is my portoflio but kind of outdated a bit

So hopefully that answers your questions.

About the Ghosts
In response to (e:shawn):273 I dreamed about ghosts all night long. In my dream the radio tower fell on our house and it disturbed the ghosts. Ironically, they lived in the closet and were black and white. In the dream (e:terry) refused to stop playign warcraft to come see them and (e:matthew) wouldn't believ me. Tehy gave me the choice of going into the closet and becomming one of them or them coming out, but then we would have to house them. I had them come out, they turned color and suddenly we went from a threesome to a ssixsome. It was one of the longest dreams I had in my life I think. I rememeber trying to tell my mother, who knows I am an athiest, that I now believe in ghosts and that they are coming over for dinner and she will have to cool for them, lol.