Having no Phillies to watch last night, Jeff (my brother) and I scraped our funds together for a movie night. Having just $8.37 between us, we got two movies. Blade Trinity and The Aviator.

Stay tuned for reviews! I woke up at 5:30am yesterday, I fell asleep an hour into Blade Trinity (which was cool from what I saw) and was asleep for the whole night, so I don't know if Jeff put on The Aviator or not. I wanted to see that one. But now the Phillies are on again tonight, plus it's Friday. So we might be watching the game at Casey's or some other local drinking establishment :)

If the sum of the odors of a pile of clothes (or clothes in a closet) passes the sniff test, than any item of clothing in the whole is acceptable for wearing.

This is only a theory.

In Philly, you will not be able to smoke in bars or restaurants. Bars have 2 years to comply, and there will be exemptions for private clubs and stuff like that, but everyone else has to comply by the beginning of next year.

Thankfully, I live and party in the suburbs :) Well, I wonder if Conshohocken will be doing anything similar, although, it really doesn't matter that much, the Great American Pub already is 1/4 non-smoking. Everybody is in the non smoking room, so to be hip, you can't smoke (a little different from High School and typical peer pressure). I'm glad they are outlawing it. Whenever I get a slight urge to smoke in a bar, I just do it. There's no thinking, by the time I think I might want a cigarette, it's in my mouth and lit. So, having everything non-smoking will help me a bit. But again, the ban is only in the city for now, and not even now since bars, again, have 2 years to comply.

Source (registration required)

Now that I have the gmail accounts and domain names all registered, I can start to share them. I'm going to have some logos and images designed so I can be cooler. The names and email addresses are : (drum roll)

Caffeine Fueled
Digital Tattoo
Email Caffeine Fueled
Email Digital Tattoo

Being a non-schizophrenic and also not having all the time in the world, I will pretty much only be using one domain and email, and that will be caffeine fueled, since I am caffeine fueled. The other one was just too cool of a domain name to pass up. I had to get it, Mom, I had to. How cool is a "digital tattoo"?! I can't even grasp the concept. Of course, in that analogy I say a domain name is a digital tattoo.

So, if I get offers for the domain name, I'd consider selling it. It could be a good name for a graphics design company, or software, probably anything in computers. If that's the case, I can't hold back the dreams of an entrepreneur, and will practically give it away. I don't do this for money, do you see ads on here? :-P

I went to sign up for another gmail account today, and the default desired login name made me laugh...

I woke up today, without an alarm clock blaring in my ear, at 5:30am. Of course it's without an alarm clock in my ear because who in their right mind would set the alarm clock for 5:30 when they don't have to be up until 7?! I don't like it, although I do like it... I don't like it because I'm going to be really tired tonight by 9 or 10 pm, but I do like it because I can work on the web page :) I also like it because, if I want to, and it's still an option, I can lay down and set the alarm clock for 6:30, fall asleep for a good 40 minutes now, and still wake up way too early. I think I'll go with that option. Good night!

Yup, I still am listening to Cracker with every waking moment. 11:24 PM, Eurotrash Girl blares from my speakers. I put on my Cracker playlist about 3 hours ago. It was about 3 hours ago that I realized I have to go to the bathroom, however, I haven't moved. I'm writing the content management system part of this site because I got held up over the past few days with the calendar and photo album fixes, and other boring things like vacation and recording movies and playing guitar and buying stuff. No more, I promise. Back to writing software.

Besides the fact that this site just looks a bazillion times better in Mozilla or Firefox, Internet Explorer has been exploited again. This worm encrypts all of your files and places a ransom note on your computer that tells you to pay $200 to get the files unencrypted and usable again. Use Mozilla for Pete's sake. It's based on standards and it's well implemented. But always be careful when downloading a file, however, with IE you can install software on a client computer without having them download a file...

Here's a neat function I wrote as part of the photo album part of the site. It takes an image, a width and height, and an output image and creates a thumbnail with size "width by height". I will add that no part of this was with aid :-) Except for the Java 1.4.2 API Specification and a little brain power and some memory about how to scale geometric objects...

public void writeThumbnail(ImageInputStream iis,int w, int h, ImageOutputStream ios) throws Exception {

BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(iis);

BufferedImage tnail = null;

double sx,sy;
sx = ((double)w)/img.getWidth();
sy = ((double)h)/img.getHeight();

AffineTransform at = new AffineTransform();
at.setToScale(sx,sy);

AffineTransformOp xop = new AffineTransformOp(at,AffineTransformOp.TYPE_NEAREST_NEIGHBOR);

tnail = xop.createCompatibleDestImage(img,null);
tnail = xop.filter(img,tnail);

ImageIO.write(tnail,"JPEG",ios);

ios.close();
}

I should add that there is another function that takes two strings instead of Image streams, both full filenames. I could add one that takes just an input stream and output stream for both, not image input and output streams. That way you could potentially write a thumbnail over the internet :-P A practical example (I like practical) would be to enter a URL of an image on the internet and save a thumbnail of it on your computer.

[Update] Check out the much quicker load times on my album Trip to Lewes. If you've seen it before you'll know. The next step, per Doug's very angry suggestion, is to have some sort of easy image navigation system... We'll see if I want to do it.

[Final Update] I made the photo albums a little easier to navigate. I'm still stumped as to a good way to do it for this site. It goes along pretty well with how the rest of the site is laid out, so, I guess we'll hear from Doug about how I did :)

I don't like blogs, so I'm not going to call this a blog. It's partly to do with the word "blog"... it's a buzzword almost. Everyone's doing it. I've always tried to stay away from stuff that the masses are doing (except that one time in sixth grade when I had to get Reebok Pump sneakers). Look at the big picture of this. When you say "blog" you encapsulate EVERY site out there that has one to a few people's thoughts written in a format that always looks the same. Even down to the font. Of course, there are a lot of thoughts out there, but I'd rather read humorful ones... ones that are like mine, ones that smell nice, ones that talk about Philly sports and guitar and programming... this site isn't another blog. It's a personal site, but not a blog. There's more than a "log". This news part might be called a blog, since it is blog-like. I tend to look at things in terms of technology. In that way, there's no way that the whole site is a blog, blogs don't have s!@#! :) I put too much into the technology behind this site to just have it classified with around a billion other sites :) Now I know how people feel when they are stereotyped. I don't want my little site to be stereotyped!

Ok, I've vented. Thanks for listening. It's not a blog.

I can't get angry at someone too quickly, and I also can't stay angry at anyone for too long, especially if that someone or something shows that they are improving their behavior with respect to what made me angry.

The Phillies have my respect for now. Hopefully for a long time but probably until the next series against the Marlins. They played the former National League Champions, and took two out of three games. They played the second best team in the American League this year and took 2 out of three. Through six games you see most of your team's pitchers, and with the way this management does lineups, you've seen about 6 out of an infinite list of permutations of lineups. The games they won weren't in the greatest fashion, or with the greatest pitching (arguably, perhaps, except for yesterday when Cory Lidle threw a 6 hit 2 run complete game with 99 pitches), or with the greatest fielding. But they did win. Bobby Abreu's hitting streak started over, however, David Bell is up to 9 me thinks.

For the meantime, the Phillies are off of my "DO NOT BET FOR" list, and even off of my "BET AGAINST" list. I don't see them making my "BET FOR" list until they start sweeping teams like the Marlins and the Braves. So you should not expect them to be etched onto that one. Maybe they'll surprise me.

I ordered some things from Outpost last night (that's another story, my love affair with Outpost.com) which came today (see why I love them?) I got a new digital camera. It's neat, it records videos and has zoom unlike my other one which isn't very powerful at all.

The other thing I got was 1 GB of memory for my laptop. A huge upgrade from 512, it's the computer that does the most work for me. I thought it would be a nightmare replacing RAM in such a compact unit as a laptop. But, I found 2 manuals on hp.com, one for the lower memory module and one for the upper memory module, which I had to flip off the keyboard and get into the guts of it. I'd always be maxed out on memory after about an hour of using it... unacceptable. I work on that thing for about 5 hours at a time. I'm so used to it I could do everything on there blindfolded with my arms tied behind the chair. This is the more impacting purchase of the day. The camera is cool and everything, but just because I got a new camera doesn't mean I'll be using it more than the old one, except during the honeymoon period.

Also, we got a new couch for our living room, I'll take pictures of it with the new camera and put them up. I'll probably install the Canon software that came with the camera, until I get sick of it.

Have you seen the specs for the PS3?

PS3 Specs

Tell me you're not going to buy at least one of those.

Now read this one.

Nintendo Revolution Specs

I'll take out a loan if I have to, those two systems will be mine. The who-box? Oh, the XBox. Yeah, no way. Zatko said it best when he said
"yea i think xbox is gonna get pounced"

What kind of stupid name is the XBox 360? One sports guy said "we need to turn this team around 360 degrees" which he thought meant to go in the opposite direction. Turn 360 degrees and all you've accomplished is a little dizziness. I wonder why they call it 360 if they didn't mean a circle. It's the only 360 I can think of. On that note, I will again be showing no interest in the XBox. It's funny though, it's the least powerful one by far. The PS3 is just an amazing piece of machinery, and Nintendo has all the great Mario games and other franchises. There's no need for an XBox for me since I have a PC that plays games.

I never really refered to this site as a blog. I developed the first version way back in early 2001, even late 2000. I'm not sure when "blog" (short and mangled form of "Web Log") was originally coined, but I only started hearing the term last year. I guess this is a blog though. There are some "blogging technology" that it's missing, but I have more stuff than your average blog... downloads and photos being the major things. I could make it look more like a blog, but there's more to it. Most blogs usually blog about something specific. I've seen ones that are political blogs, music blogs, news blogs, techno blogs, etc. I lack the interest and expertise in any one specific topic to dedicate my blogging to just one topic. The approach I take is just talk about a ton of stuff, let the 1 to 2 people a day read it and criticize it, and post some music and photo albums. My website also lacks a cool (or weird) name. I've got some ideas floating around up there, but they are all based off of Cracker songs or are corny. Yes, corny. Or they are too topic specific. Like if I called my site "Philly Web Hacker", then people would come on here expecting to read about web hacking or something. So the name can't be a noun. Nouns are bad. So I need a good verb or adverb, maybe even an adjective, or a conjunction, or possibly a pronoun. e.g. ifandthe.com is a good one, but it's probably taken. Post your ideas...

[Update] On the topic of a new name, I think I have one. Tonight when I get home, I'm going to write it down on a piece of paper and stare at it for a few hours. That's how I always decide on something. A domain name is like a digital tattoo. You always have to make sure it's what you really want, it will be your mark on the giant body known as the web, but unlike a real tattoo, you can just let it expire.

Even Bobby Abreu couldn't win the game for the Phils tonight. Down 8-0 in the sixth, Bobby had a 3 run homer to make it 8-3. Chase Utley almost had a 2 run homer to make it 8-5, but there was fan interference, so it was a double. Bottom of the 9th inning, bases loaded, 2 outs, 8-4. Bobby steps up to the plate and strikes out on pretty much the nastiest curve balls I've ever witnessed. Nothing you could do about it. The key is to not let the other team score 8 runs so you don't have to hope for a miraculous comeback. One more loss closer to having the upper management fired :)

Another thought I had was that the Phillies fired Larry Bowa because they wanted someone who would be nicer to the players. You can get rid of the "mean" managers, but the fans aren't going to lighten up. Here in Philly, we are relentless. In an article today on Philly.com (Registration required), Mike Lieberthal (catcher) said he expects to be booed. Even the great homerun king Michael Jack Schmidt got booed in his day. We reward for great performances (ask anyone what they think of T.O. for catching 9 passes for 122 yards on a screw in the Super Bowl), and we definitely let you hear it if you screw up.

"The last couple of years it seemed like I was booed for bad performance," Lieberthal said with a laugh. "Now they just don't like me."

That's from the paper, credits to Jim Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

We pay for this stuff and we haven't seen a championship since 1983 with Dr. J and the Sixers. Someone win something :)