Hey weekend dwellers! Time for the bi-century Friday update! This week, I started looking for a house, got pre-approved for a mortgage so they can know my range, and spent about 21 hours going through house listings, daydreaming about living there based off of 4 100x100 pixel images, allowing my imagination to run rampant. One house only had a 100x100 picture of the front, and in the back I imagined a giant waterslide and pool, and kind of a small theme park named Jasonland where you can buy cinnamon twists and ice cream, soda, beer, and tickets for the rides. I know when I see that house I'm going to be terribly disappointed.

There are a lot of nice houses for sale in my town. It should be fun.

I've gained a new nickname, but I'm not sure how I got it since I was RIPPED that night :) Rastaman J or something, since I have been known to lose myself to some reggae once in a while :) Plus they had this band there that did my favorite music styles... reggae and blues. Beer + favorite music + girls = @#$%@#$!#@!^#$%*%^$%^^#$%#$@#$@# WASTED DANCING FOOL!!! HAHA it's fun.

Nothing going on this weekend except more drinking, possibly some video games, and hopefully some celebrating Flyers' victories all weekend since they lost last night :(

Awesome week. On St. Patty's Day, went to Mara and Billy's apartment with a case of Harp beer (yummy, it was the first I've had of them), stayed there until around 7:30 waiting for Billy's sister with a bunch of people, pounding beers and joking around. Great times. Then went to see Blackthorn at the aforementioned Irish festival. There were a lot of Miller Lite kiosks set up... I mean, a lot. Like 30. In this huge clubhouse. We were already blitzed by the time we got there so the next 5-??? beers were just fuel on the fire. I felt great though. Irish music, lots of people there (I heard 1500 tickets were sold), a ride home, tons of beer, hardly any recollection. The things legendary nights are made of.

The next two days were allotted recovery days. I needed them too.

I had asked off Thursday and Friday, and being a contractor, I'm not given any vacation like regular employers are, but I can take days off and / or be sick, just like regular employees. Even take a 3 month vacation if I wanted to. I just don't get paid :p Mara calls me up on Thursday night after my parents had taken me out for dinner. She's like "Hey, I have a lot of left over beer, wanna come over and help me finish?" They had to work the next day too! We stayed up until 1am, drinking and playing @#%^hole, at which I am a master. I went from @#%^hole to president in one hand, after being @#%^hole the whole night. Then kept presidency for the last two hands, before we ran out of beer :-P I was like, "You guys are out of beer, I'm leaving ;-)"

Friday night was a great time too. My friend Anthony, who has a few years on me, was born 3/24, as opposed to the date of gods, 3/23. So close, Anthony... better luck next time. He had an e-vite going... meet down town, get wasted, watch NCAA basketball... lots of girls! I've not been known to pass up such invites... err, e-vites, rather. Good times had by all. It was a bit crowded until the Villanova / Boston College game ended in 'Nova's favor. In overtime. One of the bathrooms flooded, I asked the bouncer if we were gonna drown. Good times.

And the award goes to:

For most times kissed: Friday night... don't ask
For best/most vibe put out: Friday night. I just stood at the corner of the bar and put out the vibe (ala Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber), which was the reason for the first award :)
For most trashed I've ever been without actually blacking out and/or passing out: Definitely St. Patty's Day
For quietest night that was still a f@#%@#ing blast: My birthday at Mara and Billy's
For the best dance performance: St. Patty's Day, by a long shot. I don't remember much and there was Irish music there. I do remember one time this girl came up to me and told me to calm down!
For most embarassing moment: I'm never embarassed :) I'm sure I do things that would embarass my friends, though. They'll have to weigh in :-P
For best time: I don't know, different factors weigh in differently. I had different types of the best time each of the three nights. It ROCKED :-D

Lesson learned: Drinking should be done in moderation if you only want to get moderately hammered.

Today I turn the ripe old age of three cubed.

Brief history of life since college:

Worked, partied, unemployed for a few months there, worked more, partied, made some trips to places like Cleveland and Delaware and Rochester, worked, had a few girlfriends in there, did some side work, wrote some software, learned some things, lived in a few places, worked at a few places, met a lot of people, made a few friends, then BAM I'm three cubed.

Although, I can only hope the rest of my life goes that slow. I know one day I'll wake up and be four cubed! So, today I ask, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm four cubed?" That's how John and Paul really wanted the lyrics to go.

This part of the year is always the worst, health-wise. Last week, St. Patrick's Day, then six days later, my birthday. I'll be in downtown Philly this Friday... 19th & Chestnut. Supposedly they're going to have $3 SoCo & Lime. Should be rediculous, but it will definitely make me feel like death for the rest of the weekend. It took me until Monday to recover from St. Patty's Day, I'm sure this will be three cubed times worse.

Ahh, St. Patrick's Day. On a Friday. When does that ever happen?!?

I was going to bring in my flask filled with Irish Whiskey and go to town during work, but decided against it because I'd be going to the bathroom all day :-P Honestly, I don't have a flask or Irish Whiskey, so I fibbed. But you know what I mean.

We're having an Irish dress contest in work. I wore blue jeans and a blue shirt. I was going to get a green jeff cap and an orange beard (my beard grows in orange for some reason anyway...), but I ran out of time. It won't be the first time I don't win something :)

During St. Patty's Day, I'm always reminded of the time that I had the chance to spend a month in Ireland. For work no less. I ended up not going because they wanted to bring back the other guy who was already there. Scott, a good friend of mine... the bastard. So I didn't go.

I'm bringing my camera tonight. I want the world to see what the Irish beer garden is. Holy crap I can't wait! Plus, listening to Blackthorn is always the best. It's music that you can't help but just go crazy to. I remember the first time I saw them. I was like "Ummm... yeah." But the NEXT time... hoo boy. I've seen them a ton of times; twice sober. The one time they played at a big park near us, and the other time at the high school. I don't recommend seeing them sober.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Go Flyers!! This is gonna rock.

I disabled the polls for now since apparently a computer program has been voting. And I've been getting random comments that are obviously attempts at spam, which might also be done with a computer program. Or it could be someone I know trying to fool me into thinking a computer program is doing it. If that's the case.. STOP!!

Not to mention spam mail. They found me. I had jumped ship on hotmail because I was getting loads of spam. Last night, I empty my gmail spam folder and go to bed. Around eight hours later, I check gmail... 31 new spam messages, all with the raunchiest, most disgusting titles. I'm going to put in a request to gmail to have an option to hide the fact that I have new spam mail. I don't need to know it's there.

Report to Gmail

Another spam story! This one was by me. I was writing this program in work that would send an email from command line because apparently Microsoft doesn't have one built into their SMTP server... you have to have Exchange Server installed. But, it was to go along with "Performance Monitor" (perfmon.exe), as an action to take as part of an alert. Well, I tried to get it to work, and it just wasn't working. (My program was working, but it wasn't getting called by the performance monitor action... and NOTHING works when it's not running :p). I had it set up to email me and my coworker who works out of North Carolina, checking a system performance metric every 20 seconds. But, the metric was like "When CPU usage is over 2 percent", which is like all the time. So basically, if it had worked, we'd be getting emails every 20 seconds. But it DIDN'T work! So, I went home, blah blah blah, came in this morning, opened email, and found 4000 new emails!! Apparently the server restarted last night and that was what it needed to work. We were cracking up about it!

The end of February is here! Which can only mean two things...

1. Damn February is short!
2. My birthday's coming up!!

So hop on over to your local video game / electronics / clothes / car / house store and pick me out something! I accept money as well. 4 to 5 bucks digits would work. More news coming about that later.

stringed.org has been updated again. What's up there is the result of my latest efforts, where I started it over, wrote some new controls for it, fell asleep and drueled all over it, etc. The "Remove" functionality doesn't work, I've yet to find the best way to do it. There are some kludges in the software, but none that were avoidable. So that sucks. I can offer a huge explanation about that but I have other things to attend to.

As you can tell from the site, there are a few very confusing things going on. First off, this might be the most confusing form ever. But that's ok. It'll really be used mostly for this sort of thing. And it won't be too confusing with only one child form (just a book form for author) as opposed to any number (books have chapters, so that's a form, and there could be an infinite amount of inputs on the screen... this won't ever happen for me).

It's not done though. I still have a few things planned for it, but it's really close. I can't see the rest of the site taking much more than a few weeks. I have to get to work on my "Salzburg" game so I'm the first to market. Not that I'm making money on it, but it just shows originality to employers if you're the first to market an original and creative idea. Then I can get jobs anywhere :)

Word.

The second most Irish city in America!

We're awesome.

It's very, very young. Basically, last night, I went from being able to only add a new "Author" to being able to edit and delete them, as well as detect that a book has an "Author", and when editing a book, to show a list of authors to choose who wrote that book. Feel free to try it out. There will be bugs for a long, long time, and I've noticed quite a few on those two simple objects, so just bare with me.

There are quite a few object types that I need to support in order to be able to convert this website over to the new system. First thing's first, though. Naming the software! Considering the fact that it's using the same exact version of "dumb" as this website, and the whole front end is built using information collected from "dumb", it's only right that it be called "dumb web" (read about it here).

So far, the development is progressing nicely. I hit a few speed bumps last night, but just glided over them and now it's just a matter of supporting more object types. Right now, you can see that "Foreign Keys" are supported (if you know your database talk), as well as strings (like Author name and Book title), and another type of string that I'll just call a "long string" (or "text" to the db folk), which is tested with a biography on the Author object. Other object types to support would be dates, files, many to many lists (like news can be in many categories), one to many lists (a poll's answers are entered in a list), and a potentially long list of others. It should be fun, and will probably never be done.

Check out the site here. I prefer that everyone access it without the "www." in front, because it just looks cooler, but the non-cool way is still supported... for now :-P

It was awesome! Here's a report.

Friday, went home, ordered pizza, played an NHL 2k6 tournament with my brother and his friends, and WHOOPED ASS. During my off time (96.4 percent of this weekend) I was writing software for stringed.org, and got somewhere with it. I got my hair cut. I watched football. I drank coffee. Flyers played on Saturday (won 2-1 vs. the Penguins). Some guy (a coworker) beeped at me today because my headlights were on as I was walking away from my car into work.

I'm so awesome at NHL 2k6. At least vs. my brother and his friends. I lost one game to Bean's friend Drew, and I apparently don't take losing too well, because the next game I was ahead 8-0 at the end of the 2nd period! I won 9-3 as Drew took out his goalie looking to score 5 goals in the last minute and a half. Then me and Bean played an extended tournament final on Saturday, best of 7, and I won 4-3. OK, it was only best of 7 because I hate losing, and kept saying "Best of X" where X is the next odd number after Bean jumped up to win the previous one. I am a sore loser, but it's only because I'm awesome and I will win most of the time. :)

The Flyers' game on Saturday was on NBC instead of its usual spot on Comcast Sportsnet or Channel 57 (UPN). I hate NBC games. It's only the announcers. On the other two channels, we have great announcers. Jim Jackson, Gary Dornhoeirififfer (no idea), and Coatesy (like, coat-sey). They know about the Flyers, who's great, certain players' tendencies, what they do well, etc. Watching that game on NBC was the worst experience watching a Flyers game EVER. Those guys are complete idiots. They probably have never played hockey in their lives, for one thing. Also, everyone in the NHL world who is not a fan of the Flyers gets word of this player on the Penguins named "Sidney Crosby", and they just want to make out with him. You could tell that they were expecting the Penguins to win, just because they had Sidney Crosby. After they said his name everytime, I swore I could hear them kneel down in honor of him. All they kept saying was "Crosby's out there now" or "Crosby is excellent" or "Man, I love Crosby" or "Can I have Crosby's children?". At one point, Jeff had switched channels, and it had been a few minutes, so I asked "Yo, is the Sidney Crosby show back on yet?" Also, showing the complete lack of Flyers knowledge of the announcers, they say towards the end of the game "Michal Hanzus has had an excellent defensive game." If they had seen one game, they would know that he plays an excellent defensive game EVERY game. He's a forward, but he's still incredible. Another thing about these f#@%$!#! as#!$@oles is that they don't pronounce anyone's name right. Jim Jackson is great at this. He seems to have studied different languages so he knows how to pronounce "Radivojevic" and "Desjardins", and other tough names.

Getting told that my headlights are on is nothing new to me. My car seems to be the only one that keeps its headlights on for a few seconds after I lock it up as I'm walking away from it. I've owned it for over 3 years now (-3 months while it was being repaired after the accident), and I always get told that if people are there to see it. I do tell them that they'll go off, and I thank them for letting me know, but have they never seen a car that keeps its headlights on for a few seconds? They're daytime lamps so they're always on when the car's on.

[Update] Here's an idea of how big Crosby is in the NHL... the Pittsburgh newspaper (Post-Gazette) has a section on their website called Crosby Watch

Haha!! I read an article, the "At 14, Scout sold on Crosby" one, just for material to post on here. I found this:

"Two, three guys in the corner, and he always pops out with the puck. From the waist down, his legs must be unbelievable."

He hopes that it's not all that's unbelievable below his waste.

[jason@linux 1-jtccom]# cd albums
[jason@linux albums]# ls
jason
[jason@linux albums]# cd jason
[jason@linux jason]# ls
album1 album11 album13 album15 album2 album4 album6 album8
album10 album12 album14 album16 album3 album5 album7 album9
[jason@linux jason]# cd album14
[jason@linux album14]# ls
[jason@linux album14]# cd ..
[jason@linux jason]# cd album15
[jason@linux album15]# ls
bikekick.jpg fable001.jpg fable002.jpg fable003.jpg
bikekick_t.jpg fable001_t.jpg fable002_t.jpg fable003_t.jpg
[jason@linux album15]# echo w00t!!!
-bash: !: event not found

I found the images and downloads that make this whole website the most boringest in the entire internet!!! At least I don't have to redo everything! Man, that just made my day. GO FLYERS!!!

They aren't back up yet, I'm downloading everything now, and soon will put all the crap in their proper folders.

[Update ... 12:22 AM] Everything has been restored! Woohoo!! Download away

This update of the web server has been a giant f@^#@ing migraine... Tomcat will just delete stuff. And for some reason, there's no events showing up in the calendar, but that's probably my fault. (Actually, I paused to look at the code, yup, it's my fault... you might not even notice since I'm updating it right now). And I'm not sure when my host does backups, but I'll ask them for a copy. But, to make sure that I don't lose everything if this happens again, I'm running a daily cron task (WTF is this?) which will backup that directory into a new directory. Of course, if the whole hard drive goes bad, then it's a whole different problem. Well, hopefully they give me a copy from sometime before Saturday :)

[The next morning] I'm on an incredibly small amount of sleep today. That has to do with Civilization 4 and I can't remember what I did after that to stay up as late as I did. Civ, as it's called, is the best game ever. I have a few posts on it going back since it came out in late October. It's amazing that I've ever left the house since it came out. With an introduction like this, "Sid Meier�s Civilization is a turn-based strategy game that challenges players to build and expand an empire, throughout all of human history, and become the most powerful ruler in the world.", how can you not get f!#^@ing addicted?! I heard someone once say that cigarettes are more addicting than heroin, but Civ is more addicting than anything I've ever known. I seriously need help! Good thing there's a help group (shout out to NAOT) out there! If ever a game needed one...

There's a new song up (Christmas Blues), and a lot of the songs have been restored, but not much of anything else. Still waiting on the hosting company to let me know if they have a backup. For Pete's sake, it's been 7 hours and still no contact! I'm kidding, they rock.

First, the good news. The website is running on a brand new webserver (Tomcat 5.5.12), and using a brand new Java (Java 5), the web apps are no longer owned by the super user on the system (however, you can't run a server on port 80 [http] on Linux without being root, so it's still runs under root), and all the web apps are now in their own, separate from Tomcat, folder. I found /usr/local/webs to be a convenient place to put everything. This makes future upgrades to Tomcat a lot easier. It all still works, as you can see by reading this... I just had to take about a day to update it :( It sucked.

Now, the bad news. By a slip of the finger, I deleted my whole website and had to rewrite everything. Ok, maybe not. I'm not *that* bad :) But, stuff was deleted. Namely, my pictures and downloads. Fear not, I have backups. But, I have to put them in the right folders, and I have different stuff on different systems (songs have recently been staying on my Mac Mini rather than being copied into a central location, so I have songs on two systems), and images, well, I hope I have backups of them. Actually, I probably do, but it will probably be easier to delete them from the database and reload them because the software on this website takes care of a lot of stuff, like making thumbnails and putting them in their respective directories. That sucks. Does anyone know if Linux has a "Recycle Bin" or "Trash" place where deleted files go? I tried using debugfs but it didn't show any recently deleted files :( They're probably somewhere but the f#@$!$!@ if I know...

Happy New Year, I'm getting blitzed tonight.

Apparently, the Java Calendar object's "roll" function doesn't work as I'd expected! Until it's fixed, the month showing under January 2006 is December 2006! Woops. I looked at the code and it would obviously only roll the month value, but you'd think if it was January rolling back one month, it would roll back the year as well?! Oh well. It'll be fixed whenever I upload it...

Subtitled: Guess what I bought yesterday?!?

I know I should be saving (I think I have a post on the subject as far back as... oh yeah, yesterday), but that money's in a different account, the "Do Not Spend" account... but if there's money in my "Bills, Life Support and/or Devious Pleasures" account, that S@%@#1 doesn't stand a chance. Not even in my most glory filled moment of resistance to the evils of temptation would have I been able to resist the technologically marvelous beauty of what is known as the PlayStation Portable (PSP).

And, thanks to the neighbor with the unsecured wireless router with SSID of "linksys" (you know who you are) for letting me download the update to it with no problems :)

(Actually, I think it's my cool neighbors, Tom and Lisa. Thanks guys!)

It's different for me when I look at my savings account online and see *only* credits, and no debits. I'm trying to save a bunch of money this year, which will be one of my New Year's Resolutions, but I figured, why wait until then? Some of my other New Year's Resolutions are to play video games more often, to make time for more programming, to cut down and possibly quit smoking, and of course, to work out and lose some of my excess weight. I want a mountain bike.

Anyway, I like earning free money, and watching this interest stuff accumulate is fun. Right now I'm earning $0.18 a month. When I get enough saved up, I'm opening a money market account, then the free money will really start pouring in. That's not for at least 2 months though. There's a minimum amount required to open one at my bank, and I'm about 40% of the way there. Should be fun.

Happy New Year!

Yesterday I was just about the sickest that I've ever been. I was awake for a total of 4 hours between 1 am yesterday and around 7:40 this morning. I couldn't move. I had a hard time moving this morning too, but I managed.

I was able to get a gift for my Mom. Thanks for your help ;-) I asked my Dad for help, and he came up with something decent. I went up to Boscov's (Shout out to Zatko) and got a bottle of perfume. I went there on Friday, the 23rd. Traffic wasn't all that bad at 4 PM (work let out early). At the Granite Run Mall, Boscov's is attached to the mall, but has its own entrances (like most big stores attached to malls), so I parked near it, found the spot that sold the perfume I needed, paid for it, took a walk around the first floor of the mall, and left. It was my best experience going Christmas shopping that late. I've gone to the Springfield Mall on Christmas Eve, and I would not recommend it.