I have been so busy learning as much as I can about linux and video conversion. Luckily, I have lots of experience with ffmpeg, unfortunately, I could not get it to compile with all the codecs I wanted. Now it is all working and my journal can go back to normal.

I took all these pictures and videos this weekend.

I finally cooked the bacon wrapped filet mignon that (e:hodown) sent me for christmas. I didn't have an oven before.


It was my mother's birthday this weekend. We went out to left bank for lunch and then bought deserts from Dolci. I never knew a cake could be so rich, both flavor wise and cost wise.

Yummy Left Bank Sunday Brunch








Cakes from Dolci on elmwood


We got her flowers on elmwood at the flower shoppe next to Acropolis.


Mike Visco at his mother's birthday.

::Download Flash Video::

She wanted to see the decorator showhouse, so after Brunch we headed on over there. I was jealous of the staircase, otherwise, I like my house better.





I am so jealous of their slate roof. I wish I had one so bad.


The pigeon protectors look pretty neat iced over.






My keyboard is so worn out from programming. Just look at the spacebar, it is really time for a new computer.


Here is (e:terry) in his element, playing warcraft. It's been so long I can't remember the time BWC - that it Before Warcraft.


Some point during the last two weeks (e:flacidness) came to visit. It was fun but for some reason I don't have a picture of his full face. See (e:lilho) 's journal for more pics from the visit.

Warning: This is a fucked up story involving dream based sex and drugs.

Last night I had the craziest dream that we had bought this beach front property in California where there was the shambles of some brick house and a concrete foundation and a lot of overgrowth. We decided to have a party and invite our hundred of friends who all showed up but most of the guests I didn't know - which isn't too weird for my life.

Somehow it turned into some crazy drug party where everyone was on some crazy new drug that I had nothing to do with and they all started having sex outside. This was weird because for some reason I didn't know anyone anymore, and well it was outside at my new house. I was a little embarrassed so I decided to wander over around the neighbors house and see if they were okay with the scene.

The neighbor turned out to be a hot a mechanic who wasn't wearing any pants but was covered in mud. I assumed by his appearance that he had already been at the party and didn't care so I started to go toward the other neighbors house. The other neighbor was a rapper having a rap party. I know that sounds stupid but I swear that is how it went. The girls from the rapper party started having sex with my nerdy friends.

I also noticed the people at my party had made some sort of weird letter m shape on the brick wall of the house. It looked like this. SIDENOTE: Why does no one else draw diagrams on their journal. Its so easy just click the draw button in your publish box.


After drawing it now I realized that the shape was kind of like the word "me" although in the dream the e part was a little smaller. The people at the rap party asked me if I could get any dabs. I was like what the fuck are dabs and this really hot black girl but with bad skin opened my hand and dropped a bunch of tiny powdery brown microdot sized pills in my hand. The only other thing she said was "A little dab will do you."

So I run through the mounds of people fucking on the lawn in order to go inside and tell matt and terry about the dabs at the same time trying to not break them up in my sweaty hands. I was afraid I would not be able to measure out doses if they all broke down. At this point everyone was on dabs accept me and my friends. I held all like 20 of them in my hand but when I got to the shambles of house, (e:matthew) and (e:terry) had redone the kitchen and matt discovered this old fashioned iron cooking stove behind a wall. He wouldn't stop talking about how great the stove was. He was so happy with it, but I realized when I opened it that it was all made of crumbling asbestos tiles on the inside. I had accidentally started a fire with it trying to cover up the asbestos with fabric and the asbestos started crumbling all over. I still had the dabs in my hand but they were also starting to crumble. I wanted to just throw them out at that point because I was sure they were contaminated with asbestos but everyone appeared to be having so much fun. Before I could decide either way I woke up in real life grinding my teeth so hard. Weird.

Wow, so I am really am going to San Francisco for another conference. I got the confirmation email about it today.

I am going to hang out with (e:twisted) and (e:hodown) is going to meet me there. I tried to get (e:matthew) and (e:terry) to go but terry couldn't get the time off and matthew wouldn't go without him. I was going to fly back with twisted on her way to Italy and stay in New York with (e:hodown) but she hadn't been to San Francisco so we made the plans for her to go there.

It sounds like it could be fun and the conference itself sounds much more promising than the last one. I promise myself not to eat only sushi while I am there.

I really hated macs before. I mean I had so many of them and had to work on them for years. The last one I owned was a Powerbook Titanium that (e:terry) spilled a 40oz of beer into. It was a tragic end to my mac ownership.

Today, however, one of my co-workers had a macbook pro that not only dual booted windows and os x, but also could run windows and windows apps natively within os x using something called parallel

Now, just like (e:enknot,79) I am totally obsessed with it.



I am sold now. It would be the best of all worlds because I think I could run OSX, mac, and linux all on the one laptop. Seems like a web developers dream machine. Plus it has a 256MB graphics card so I could still do 3d modeling. I have been wanting to make new icons for my applications for a while, but the 3D workstation is unfortunately now the estrip server at artvoice.

The only thing about it, is that it is certainly very hot and certainly heavy. It also comes with an ati graphics card and I really preferred Nvidia. The last two laptops had ati and I find nvidia ones are just better.

Infrared -
I am also obsessed with infrared cameras. Did you know that if you take traditional camera film and develop it without taking pictures, you can use it afterwards as a filter to filter out regular light but allow infrared through. The ends of developed film also are the same kind of black filter material.

I am really considering purchasing a thermal imaging camera but they are so damn expensive. I think if I buy one I could always sell it on ebay.

I am working on this employee evaluation web application at work. It is my least favorite project since I have been here because I do not have control over the database ;( I mean it has some fun parts but a lot of it is trying to figure out what these 26, 3-4 page paper forms intended in the first place.

I don't like that no one normalized any of the data on the paper forms. Lots of the stuff on the forms is redundant or doesn't make sense anymore when the system is moved to an online one.

I really think it would have been much better if someone in Human Resources had written these forms from the perspective that they are no longer on paper.

Examine the following instructions:

Select the rating which most accurately describes the employee's performance on each factor, and check the appropriate box. If the employee's performance is not exactly described by one of the definitions under a factor, select from all ratings, the one which best describes the employee's performance.

In this case the user is only provided with 5 check boxes (Outstanding->Needs Improvement) on both the paper and electronic form versions. So "select the rating" and "check the appropriate box" are kind of redundant. Then sentence two basically re-iterates sentence one.