Zatko, Amanda, Jared, Kris, and some other dudes and gals, including parents, are going down to Jamaica tomorrow at 7:25 AM! We'll be arriving somewhere where a bus can take us to Sandals at Ocho Rios by bus presumably. We'll probably be at our hotel by 1pm hopefully. I have to be at the airport at about 4:30am officially, but might be getting there by 5am. There will be an butt ass ton of pictures when I get back. Probably on my facebook profile and I'll link them here. I'm long overdue for a vacation. Peace.

Don't we?

For the past two days my brothers and I have been working on my lawn. It's exhausting. It'll be awesome when it's done. I'll have pictures up in about a month.

These two new songs could be said to be written for Kodie, since one was before I went to pick her up at the Vet, and the second one when I got her home and all fed (2 full cans of soft meaty dog food!).

The first one, a Mother Fing Jam in G, can be downloaded here. It shows why I love my new found experience of fingerpicking, and also hammering on two notes at the same time with two different fingers on two very different strings. You just have to put on headphones and listen to it to tell where I'm talking about. Otherwise, it's just I hear a rhythm in my head and play along.

The second one, Long Jam, here, starts off finding a rhythm to play along with, then plays around in D for a while.

Kodie got her whole bottom row of teeth pulled :( The front though, none of her big teeth. These looked real bad in the past week or so, and I noticed two of them, at least, were really loose. So they're all gone. She's fine though. They said in a few weeks, if I want I can go back to the hard food, if Kodie will eat that stuff still! I gave her some soft food, and it was like meat with gravy. Two full cans, and she just ate it up. She was starving so we'll see how she is tomorrow. If she's still excited about getting food, then I actually have to learn how to portion it for her! Usually when the bowl's empty I fill it and it won't be empty for about a day or so. She's very good about eating that food because she doesn't like it :) It's only when necessary. But I bet I could keep filling her bowl up with this soft, meaty, gravy covered food and she'll just keep eating it.

I watched the HBO show "In Treatment" tonight and really liked it. I was like "I should probably watch that show, it's on a couch, and there's no room for bad acting, so it's probably excellent or really shitty". Then as I was thinking that, it came on. It was probably an "On Next" thing. It's on HBO. It was excellent, I must say. Might watch it some more.

I was sick Monday and Tuesday, but when I went downstairs after two days of bed ridden disgustingness, I noticed my dog wasn't eating anything, hadn't eaten for two days. While I would have been flattered if she stopped eating because I was sick, I know they're smarter than that :P I tried to give her her favorite treat and she turned it down.

Today (Wed the 12th) I was fine on maybe taking one more day off to fully recover, but I had to get the dog to the Vet, and I might as well go to work after that. I was feeling like total garbage up until about 2:30, though, and then from about 3:15 onto the end of the day. Took Kodie to the Vet at 9 or shortly after, was in work by 9:45. I missed the phone calls from the Vet because this is how delirious I was all day: we're in sort of a lunch meeting at work, and I'm like "Hmm, if my phone goes off... blah blah, should I check to see if it's on? Nah it's fine"... 2:30 rolls around and I'm like "Man, they still haven't called me..." The office closes at 3 and opens again at 6. I check my pockets... no phone! No idea. It was in the car. I may have even been delirious about Kodie not eating for 2 days since I was totally out of it for 1. But just her energy level, it was soooo low, and if you know Kodie, you know she's nothing but energy most of the time. You *can* calm her down, but usually she does much more stupid and funny things when she's all crazy :)

It's like, of course Vets can say "Oh we have to check for everything" and charge you for it all... but it's not even that expensive. But you can tell that Kodie has some bad teeth and might not be eating because it hurts her. But the Vet's gonna do blood tests, spool tests, all this stuff, might as well. And you can't say "I think it's just because of her teeth", even though in the end you may be right... because us lay people don't know.

I know I can't say that because in my profession, it is also best to be thorough. I know sometimes I can see the answer WAAAY before I even begin looking into code, lots of times I can tell you the exact file the problem is in, and almost never can I tell you what line it's on. Sometimes I boggle my own mind on how quick I come across some of these answers.

Just that it's probably way less expensive to find a problem with your pet relatively soon after a scheduled appointment so you don't have to get all the tests again :)

She'll be fine though. She may never be able to eat hard food again, but I'm sure the Vet will tell me what kind of food to give her. They called me at like 7 and said I could pick her up after giving me the lowdown on her condition and how none of the tests they've done led to anything (no kidding!?). They said I can take her home or leave her overnight because she has another thing tomorrow. Leave her overnight?! Yeah right. They tell me she can't eat any food, even though I took her there because she hadn't eaten any food for two days. Plus, the lady doctor assistant was like "I gave her some of the i/d food (some sort of dietary food for dogs), and she ate it right up" And I was like "That's good! Was it soft?" And she's like "Yeah, it was soft". But I get Kodie home and they gave me this 3/4 full tin of that food and told me not to feed her because she's having a procedure done tomorrow to her teeth. I'm like "Ok. No problem"... Yeah right. She's gotta be starving, so I give her almost all of the can of food. There's hardly any left :) But now she seems real good. She had so much energy tonight out with the neighbor's dog, it was great :)

There's probably two subscribers to my feed, and one of them yelled at me :p But Google Reader should be back to business now, shortly after showing 400+ new items from this website. Atom has an ID that it uses, and Google Reader apparently keeps track of your read items by that ID and doesn't care about the date at all, evidently. So, new items showed up back to the beginning of this website.

So, will there be 400+ new items every time I post? No. It has all those IDs now, which are new and changed, and unless I change them, they won't show up again.

I can't just write a post apologizing though. I have to talk about the new cool thing that I'm working on here at home. I've talked about it before but apparently, wasn't able to carry through with it. Reasons were mainly that my laptop proved to be way to slow after the initial "wow" factor of installing Ubuntu. (My reaction now would be more "Wow, FreeBSD on a ThinkPad RULES!") The thing I'm talking about is my seamless integration between front end Javascript and backend Java. I wrote about it here. But I've made a few changes.

First, instead of the backend generating XML, it'll just read XML and spit out results in JSON. I'm kind of partial to that technology because of the name... it just kicks ass. I got my first foray into JSON last week at work. Initially, our backend PHP was just returning a few things, like 3, for the front end Javascript to parse and spit into HTML on the website. What the final requirements called for was way more complex, and I didn't want to have to come up with some naming scheme, because it would just get so ugly. Some things were related to each other but not to everything. It would be something like this:

"What is my name?:Jason,Steve,Albert:Jason:True: Jason,80%:Steve,5%,Albert:15%,2000,Elite"

This is like a quiz or trivia, where the question was "What is my name?", the possible answers "Jason,Steve,Albert" comma separated, the correct answer "Jason", whether that person got it write "True", and finally the percentages that other people guessed, the total points for that user "2000", and their ranking "Elite". And that's not even all of it. It has to include the next question, and all of those possible answers. Painful. So instead, this is what it looks like:

{
"LastQuestion" : {
"Text" : "What is my name?",
etc
},
"User" : {
"Points" : "2000",
etc
},
"AnswerPercentages" : {
"Jason" : "80",
etc
}
}

Much easier to maintain, much easier to read, much MUCH easier for the front end to parse! This can be parsed like this... assume your callback function is called "callback" and is passed whatever is returned from the server, e.g. the JSON code above:

function callback(data){
var obj = eval(data);
alert(obj.LastQuestion.Text); // will alert "What is my name?"
}

Yup, it's that easy.

Next affair... I'll need, and will build over time, a large Javascript library for building out websites with the data returned from the server. Tables, forms, etc. This will generally be a pain in the ass and is attributed to me delaying this project for as long as possible. Ugh.

If I get tired of that, then something's gotta give, and I'll either stop this crazy experiment or go crazy writing Javascript for hours and hours. Thank God for FireBug.

After about an hour of programming, I have my URLs in a search engine friendly format! This has many other benefits as well:

For instance, I don't have to know the ID of the news I want to link to, just the title. So, I can make a link to a news item I have previously written by typing in the title in a format that it expects. For the news item titled "The Guitar Player", the link will be "the-guitar-player". Click here to test.

Also, if I want, I can modify my "text writer" component in JSF, to search for strings like "[[The Guitar Player]]", and to write out the url, namely "/news/the-guitar-player". Or I'd have to make it "[[News|The Guitar Player]]" if I want to add more dynamic linking, say for photos, downloads, comments, etc. This is much like a Wiki works. It can be a "news wiki" or a "wiki blog" or something ridiculous like that.

Also, after I save this, it will probably write out all of the news in my atom.xml file... it might take a while, there'll be 454 news items! That's ok though. I'll probably have to delegate that task to a new thread, so I can get to adding more news right away.

Categories are changed for rewriting purposes. "Labels" have not been updated yet. I have to make a new page because a "Label" object can pertain to Downloads and Pictures, so I have to list results for each, or modify the URL rewrite filter to accept "/picture/label/me" and "/download/label/music" to list pictures of me and my music downloads, respectively.

I don't run Apache HTTPD, so I had to write the URL rewriter all in Java for Tomcat. It wasn't too bad. Regular Expressions are neat.

The meat:

String url = ((HttpServletRequest)req).getRequestURL().toString().replace(HttpUtil.getBaseUrl((HttpServletRequest)req), "");

if (rewriteConfig.ignoreUrl(url)){
chain.doFilter(req, resp);
}
else {
String location = rewriteConfig.getLocation(url);
String rewriteUrl = rewriteConfig.getUrl(location, url.replaceAll("/" + location + "/", ""));

if (rewriteUrl != null){
RequestDispatcher dispatcher = req.getRequestDispatcher(rewriteUrl);
dispatcher.forward(req, resp); // forward the request
}
else {
chain.doFilter(req, resp);
}
}

url is the requestUrl stripped of the host. This is so I can make it work on dev (http://localhost:8080/jtccom) and production (/).

This filter is called for every request, so I have an "ignore" map set up. This tests if the URL contains a ".", since every rewritten url will only contain numbers, letters, and the occasional "/" or "-". This is a HashMap for quick lookups. So, it won't attempt to rewrite calls to "/js/someFile.js".

The "location" part of the request is "/x/", so for news it will be "/news/". The location is "news". This is so I only have to loop through rewrite patterns for news, not for everything.

The pattern is written as "([0-9a-z-]+)/?" so if I pass in the whole URL (without the host), "/news/my-news-title", it won't match, so that's what the next line does, removes "/news/" so it's just "my-news-title". The getURL function returns the rewritten URL, so like "/news.jsf?title=my-news-title". I created a new unique column for News, and my "DaoWeb" interface has a "ChangeListener" property, so if I create a news or change it's title, it updates the "TitleKey" in this case. Pictures are just forwarded by their picture id for now, so
"/picture/23" as an example.

Coming soon: News by date span! /news/2008 for all news in 2008. /news/2008/03 for all news in March 2008! /news/2008/03/23 for all news on my birthday this year!!

Tune in for more updates. I'm cranking now, and Java is like riding a bike. I also fixed a few bugs.

I have seen a lot of 2008 predictions in the areas of business and technology, so I thought I'd add some that I was disappointed to not see.

#1. There will be a huge boost of business in the area of personal defensive equipment against big cats. Due to the zoo mauling a few weeks ago by a tiger (lion? forget), this will be estimated as a major threat that could happen to anyone anywhere. Marketers will try to push this on anybody who just lives in the same city a zoo is located. Items will include a steak hook that can be worn on the back with sirloin steaks that should be changed every four weeks. Also, a big ball of yarn with sedatives soaked in should be the second top selling item.

#2. Cricket will overtake baseball as the popular "innings" and "runs" based game in the USA. Look for major league franchises to start popping up in major cities throughout the country by around March. Philadelphia will have a team, called "The Philadelphia Phickets" which many Philadelphians will just call "f%@# its", which wouldn't be unheard of with the popularity of the acronym for "First Union Center" before it changed to the Wachovia Center, raising its popularity tremendously in Philly. Also, MLB All Stars like Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins will become addicts to the wicket and the 'silly point' and ultimately switch professions.

#3. 30s and 40s style blues will be the thing in 2008. Young kids and old will throw in their Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker albums, some will learn guitar, some will learn harp, all will learn soul, and we'll see around 300 new bands all performing Mississippi River Delta blues into a can recorded onto a phonograph. Eight track digital recording will see a huge dip in profits. As will any electricity based recording equipment and even instruments. Old acoustic guitars are the new gold.

#4. The internet will show its age. People will find a new way to communicate... speaking. Merchants will find a new way to hawk their wares... mainly I see door to door sales (with sales men or women knocking on your door to sell you things and let you try them out before buying) as the main means of income this year. This will inevitably force people to places they haven't been in a long time: outdoors, in order to avoid all of the interruptions during their personal communication time. This will lead to the next method of sale: markets. Also, as a side effect, people will stand by merchant booths and tell you what they think of products that they are selling. This will lead to a kind of "social networking" as I like to call it. People will say "Hey, do you want to be my friend?" Then they will exchange pictures and addresses, and each are welcome to stop by any time. As long as you're not one of those door to door salespeople, you are welcome. To show other people who they're friends with, they'll have a bulletin board of their friends' pictures, along with their addresses and interests, which will no doubt lead to some extra trips to their house by the salespeople, if they are deemed to be in the target market.

So now for some resolutions. Yeah, I never follow them. But this year, I won't either. So, I can basically set any goal and be guaranteed it won't be met.

#1. Make a million dollars. This is pretty easy. I just have to work six to eight jobs simultaneously. Actually, closer to 14 but I figure the interest I can gain from all the extra dough might be enough to put me over the edge.

#2. Make a million friends. If I do this, I can probably ask each of them to give me a dollar and then I'll have two in the bag.

#3. Make a million songs. If I do #2 and make a song about each of them, I can charge them each a dollar for their song so they feel like they're getting something for their money, accomplishing these first three at once.

#4. Make a million enemies. Let's see, I can do #2, make a song for each of them, charge them each a dollar and tell each one of them after they paid me that I gave everyone else their song for free. Then call them a sucker and laugh at them.

#5. Start a war. Do the first three, then make a million enemies that weren't once or are my friends, and start nasty rumors about both sides. My friend Jim once got arrested for inciting a riot, this would definitely win bragging rights.

#6. Travel to outer space. With a million dollars I'm sure I can hook up with one of those X Prize teams and book a flight.

#7. Quit drinking. Ok, that one's ridiculous.

So, pretty reasonable. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Let's see. First thing is my new putter came. I'm golfing with it tomorrow. Next, I ordered a bunch of CDs from Amazon (namely some Cracker that I didn't own yet, Nirvana that I once owned about 13 years ago, and Busta Rhymes, which I've never owned), and an electric shaver. It's the Braun 360 Complete with the self cleaning thing. I'm lazy and don't like wet shaving anymore.

Another thing is I ordered an iPod touch! 16 GB. So I'll be able to have all of my music on there still, plus room for about 7GB more, and more battery power, which is the big thing for me. I've wanted a new iPod for a while, and luckily I waited long enough for this beauty. Today, I was the only one in our room at work after 2:30, and I wanted to blast Beastie Boys for the remainder of the day. I went to plug in my iPod to the speakers, and after about 3 minutes of play, it died. I'm pretty sure there's no battery capacity left. I tried to borrow a coworker's USB adapter but it wouldn't charge. I think this model only charges through Firewire, not USB. Another HUGE thing about the new iPod is the interface. Mine shows just a list of Artists or whatever I select, and I can only shuffle all of the songs. Today I wanted to shuffle all the Beastie Boys songs I have, and I couldn't. I'm not sure if I can do that on the new one, but I know you can shuffle songs in an album, so I'm just hoping you can with an artist.

One last big thing. On Wednesday, my employer offered me a full time position as a Sr. Web Developer (really, a Sr. Developer who does a bit of web development and a lot of other development, like our code generator, multithreaded apps, database stuff, etc). I was contracting there for about 10 months over the past year. It's a job I really like, so I'm thrilled.

Talk about a few horrible months. However, things are starting to look up. My connection between my MacBook Pro and my Windows PC used to be horrible after I updated my Mac to enable 802.11n, which I had to pay $2 for. My MacBook Pro has all my music on it since I run iTunes and stuff. But the Windows PC, having games and stuff to play on it, has the good speakers. I'd try to play music on the PC, and it would play about 2 seconds and then rebuffer for a longer time than it actually played. SO slow, and no way to listen to music. Today, I switched from WPA-PSK to WPA2-PSK on the router, and voila! Shit's fine.

Hmm, other bad stuff that's happened to me since the worst day of my family's life, June 2nd. Let's see. My car died partially, but thankfully for the quick aide of a neighbor senior master mechanic, it's back up and running. My DVD player won't turn on anymore. That totally sucks because the speakers are awesome and I go surround sound from my TV with it. I didn't get my paycheck from Friday until today. Meanwhile, I was broke. I'm supposed to be paying bills and stuff, and I have no money. Today the fire alarms, which Jeff had taken the care to install all connected, so if something is burning in the basement, the one right above your head in your bedroom goes off too. Today, I smelled what I was sure was urine in the one that was the culprit for all of them going off. I'm sure it was a mouse. They're taking over the world. I threw that alarm out, but I can get another one on Amazon.com, so I'll do that too. But they were going off for about an hour before I figured it out. It sucked, I was deaf for about 20 minutes. My amp died too.

After what I've been through, I'd love for something to be easy and not frustrating as f@#%@#$. F@#%@##. I hope everyone else is having a good time.

Actually, in the time it took to write that title, I thought of a few things that wouldn't kill me to have. Some notes:

1) I got a MacBook Pro: This thing's totally sweet, and I use it all the time at home. It's goddamn beautiful. I use it for music, movies, browsing the web, chatting, working, and damn near everything that you use a computer for. Except playing games and watching stupid content that was made for Windows, like WMVs.

2) I got a new gaming PC. It's got killer specs and I can play Rainbow Six Vegas totally maxed.

3) My car will be paid off in October, and it's still running pretty damn good. I love that thing. The radio's kicking, the acceleration rocks, all the windows work, and the trunk is still as comfortable as ever. When that thing's paid off, it'll be worth about $40 to anyone else, but $1,000,000 to me. No f%@$ing way is anyone getting that thing from me.

4) I could stand to get some clothes. I bought some jeans and some new socks online, and that's pretty convenient, but have you ever ordered clothes online? I was ready to basically eat $40 on these jeans if they didn't fit, because returning them wouldn't be fun. They fit pretty nicely. I have another pair coming, but I definitely need to get rid of the stuff I don't wear and buy a whole new wardrobe. Oh, and I ordered some socks.

5) I need a house. Every month my money goes to helping my brother's money earn money. Or something. I need a house so that I can own something that appreciates, instead of something with actual negative value, like my car. And definitely not rent.

6) I got a Wii. 'Nuff said. Super Paper Mario is da bomb.

7) Movies galore.

8) Music galore. 2200+ songs. I really have no interest in growing my music collection, although I'd definitely consider getting all of G Love's albums. I'm usually pretty satisfied with my music collection, and I never get sick of it.

9) I got 4 fluffy pillows.

10) I quit smoking.

11) Probably could use some lovin'

12) My voice is back baby. I can hit all the notes

13) Today's Friday the 13th

14) Tomorrow's the Phillies game, and I found my cooler, I bought a boombox, I am charging my camera battery, and I'll be picking up lots of beer and a 6 foot hoagie tomorrow. 15 other people, as in humans. Don't forget ice. We'll be way up in section 330. I can't forget the tickets, either. I made a playlist on my iPod called "Baseball game". It starts off with "Lively up yourself" by Bob Marley and ends with "I saw her standing there" by the Beatles. I have another song about a 17 year old girl on there. Can you guess it? I admit it's a bit obscene. (OMG hint!!!)

15) Running out of things to put here. I have a wallet...?

16) Oh yeah, so, I don't *need* anything else besides a house and some clothes. The house will open up tons of needs though.. like a fridge... some rugs.. paint... kitchen stuff... a maid... etc. But for now, I'm just leaving it as a house so as to not feel overwhelmed.

So, there you have it. I'm not going to bed but I'm definitely not typing anymore. I gots me some Super Paper Mario to play.

In 4 days, any resolutions that you didn't complete last year will have to be "rollover resolutions". And if that's the case, you just feel like crap. You're like "Damnit, I should have gone to Africa like 6 months ago." And trying to squeeze in a 40-pound-in-four-days diet is pretty excruciating.

Luckily, my resolutions from last year only take a few days to complete. Like, getting and keeping my room clean. I'm on break now but I've been at it for like 2 hours. Yes, it's a f@#%@#$ing mess. Imagine if every piece of mail you got for about 18 months you just threw on your dresser instead of throwing in the trash. Then add in the deprecated hardware like old KVM switches, old video cards, etc, thrown into that mix, then also imagine boxes that you planned on throwing out a year ago, but they could also make good tables for other crap. Also, throw tons of stuff, like laptops, cd cases, other boxes, on the other side of your queen sized bed. Next, have two computer cases that won't ever be used again somewhere in your room. Throw in an already full closet, and make this room about 8 feet by 16 feet with a queen bed, bookshelf, computer desk, dresser, laundry basket, guitar and amp, and a computer chair. Yes, it is rather hard to move.

Thankfully, it'll be fully clean before the New Year if I go at it pretty diligently. Like, 2-3 hours a day. It's easy, I have off this week, and throw in some coffee, throw on some Bob Marley, have a few trash bags, etc, and I'm well on my way. It already looks like you could put an extra bed in here. Anyway, that's what I'm up to. Other things that I have to do is join a gym OR get a mountain bike, but those might be rollover resolutions. Whatever :P Other resolutions include never being late for work. It's not like I was though, but after a while I might start showing up 15-30 minutes late, just like in Office Space. Hmm, what else? I have ideas for software that I have to get done, and I haven't written any Java in 6 months at least. I have to get back into that, definitely.

I'm afraid resolutions are like wishes, where if I tell every one of them, I won't get any of them done. The other secret ones are the important ones, so I'm not gonna say.

Today I had a side job to go to. It was fun. Some of the worst written code I've ever seen. It could lead to more, if I do a good job.

Tomorrow, there is a gathering at Jim's parents' house, which of course means that Jim and Kate are back from Japan!! After three years. And Seamus is coming to America!! He hasn't been here yet! That's crazy-whack-funky. They will be going to the UK really soon though, within the month. Of course, while they're here, I will probably be drunk the whole time. I'm definitely looking forward to that.

With my extra income from the day's hard work, I ordered a wireless router, which couldn't come fast enough. I'm starting to embrace the future a little. I now have 3 things that use wireless (2 laptops and a PSP), and will eventually have no less than 5 things, when I get the PS3 and Wii. Beaner will be connecting to the router with his Mac as well, so there could be 5 things connected at any one time. Mainly, I'm getting it because I don't want to use my neighbor's with my Mac (as I've stated before), and the wire I have for my Mac is about 5 feet long, and it has to use up most of that length travelling from where my router is, around my desk, and onto my bed, where when I finally get to use it, I have to leave the Mac in one single spot, can't lean back on my chair comfortably and use it, etc, etc. It's a "wireless-N" router, meaning it's got 3 antennas and support for the future 802.11n I guess. Good times.

Yes, I haven't a thing to say. Black Friday came and went, and I bought nothing. Thanksgiving was at my brother Scott's house. It was a good time. I was thinking of buying a wireless access point for the house so I could use my Mac and PSP without logging on to my neighbor's wireless internet. That's not as bad as if I had no internet at all and used theirs. Partially because it costs them nothing extra, but I should really get my own, especially since I've bought songs off of iTunes and paid bills using the wireless... it's definitely not them I'm worried about snooping in on my transactions, and it wouldn't really matter anyway since the encryption on transactions between my computer and the server is strong, so snoopers will only get garbage (public key encryption...). I've been playing some games lately, like Day of Defeat : Source, which is a good time usually. Also just got back into Company of Heroes. I was playing Neverwinter Nights 2 for a while there. I'll get back into it. I never stay into any one game for too long. I have no PS3 or Wii yet. I plan on getting the PS3 first though. After Christmas. Well after Christmas. Like, March. 2008. We'll see. The Mac is my primary debt right now...

I was looking into possible new cars. My Monte Carlo SS is still good, but I just want to change it up, as always. I was looking into another American car company, this time Ford. The Fusion looks like a nice ride. I'm digging silver with black interior, no matter which car I get. That's sexy. Back when I bought the Monte Carlo, the other option I had was a Passat... silver with black interior. I like that combo a lot. I'd say my two favorite colors are, in fact, black and silver. And when I shop for clothes, or get dressed in the morning, I'd look for some combo of the two, but also with clothing, I don't mind a nice dark or navy blue. Hence my website being silver. I know a black interior will be like a stove in the summer, but as long as I look cool.

I think I'm gonna program. I need a nice brain exercise.

Have to help pay for certain recent purchases (see previous post...) I can't wait til that thing gets here.

Basically what I plan on using it for was everything that I used my Mac Mini for (until it blew up), which is like watching my X-Files DVDs at night to fall asleep to (as well as any movie I have), recording music on there using Garage Band, keeping my photo collection, editing movies from my digital camera (I have a Quick Time Pro 7 license that's currently not being used), browsing the internet, chatting, and getting started with Ruby and Rails.

So basically my other two computers currently in commission will only be tasked with one responsibility each. Actually, the Linux Laptop will be my primary Java programming machine as it is now, and the gaming PC will no longer have any software installed on it other than games, but that's also my large capacity storage machine, since it's the only one I can actually add hard drives to, seeing as the other ones are laptops. It's got about 330 GB of HDD space. Right now it holds my music collection, all the backups of everything I've ever done with computers (including my original websites, both in ASP and Perl! They're a blast from the past), and tons of other random stuff like images and screenshots from college. The new Mac will have 160 GB of HDD space, so I might have to get a dedicated backup drive to put in the gaming PC.

It's funny too, because most people are all about having multiple monitors for a PC, as it leads to higher productivity since you can read a spec on one screen and program on another. Everybody at work has multiple monitors. I fear that I'll need to do that at home if I get used to it, so I'm the only one in work that has a lone monitor. That and my current video card setup can't support more than one. It could get expensive, since right now I'm using a 19" Sony that I bought for 350 bucks a few years ago, and it works marvelous for my purposes. I'd much rather have multiple PCs than multiple monitors. A network leads me to be very productive. A KVM switch is wonderful. It's all about how quick you are on the computer. I can switch between computers in a bat of an eyelash, depending on the KVM switch.

Although nowadays with multiple cores in CPUs (my first multi-core CPU will be the Mac), you can easily run two computation-intensive apps at the same time. But still I'd much rather have two multi-core computers, and KVM between them in order to get shit done :D

My brother and I already bought loads of candy for about 3 lucky kids out there who'll get one Reese's Piece each, and the rest are for us. KitKat, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (my favorite), f#@%ing Reese's Sticks, other Reese's peanut butter and chocolate mixtures (best invention EVER), Snickers, Twix, etc, etc, etc. Loads of candy bars who are getting free advertising.

Also, I put up a comic in honor of this special day, over at Addicted Comics. Don't forget to fall in love with that site and send me secret love letters every day. If you can't read the words, just right click and view the image by itself. They're usually in the form of..

http://www.addictedcomics.com/files/addicted000#.JPG

where # is the episode number. I think the second one is lowercase "jpg" instead of uppercase. I can only keep things consistent for so long.