Don't you hate it when you are reading a book, and get distracted half way through a page. When you get back to reading, you don't know where you stopped reading and end up reading most of the page again? Well, here's an idea that is brilliant, I must say. Instead of this stereotype of a page fitting as much as it can on there to cause the reader much heartache and frustration, just have one word on each page. Sure, books would seem a lot thicker and could possibly take up many physical binds of pages, the reader will not get lost. Well, unless you have problems finishing reading a word. But let's face it, if you can't read a word by taking one glance at it, you have some problems. I stopped "sounding out" words long ago :) Unless it's a technical word in Biology or Medicine, of course.

I call on all publishers to implement these changes for the millions of frustrated readers out there, whether they read newspapers, books, magazines, or any number of print media out there. And take out pictures for Pete's sake. If they're worth a thousand words, just write the words. Pictures are for people without imagination, and are shortcuts for non-creative writers. Descriptive, poetic text is a dying art.

I will be implementing these changes on my website immediately.

For the meantime, the Phillies are now tied for last place with the Marlins, and are 1.5 games behind the Nationals. The division is volatile. A win yesterday and we would have been in first place. We lost. It's tight. My heart can't take it. Check out the pictures in my album.

In other news, I now have an air conditioner in my bedroom, so it won't be a billion degrees in there anymore. It was steamy. With the temperature around 92 and the humidity at around 110%, it gets a bit harsh on the sweat glands. Even through the thunderstorm we had, which was apparently (by my guess) caused by the world not being used to 110% humidity... that's usually unheard of, except in these parts. So Mother Nature tried to make us feel like the world was ending. That was quite a thunderstorm. It shook the house and it rained a lot.

In yet other news, I now have a cool domain name. I've narrowed it down to one, it's ahead by a half-a-length, with a few others pulling in closely, but it's predicted by industry predicters that this domain name will win, or will at least be a website in the future. It's a neat domain name, no doubt. It's a .org, and the .com counterpart was already taken, and the owner was asking for $2,250, like I have $2k+ to spend on words... actually, not even words plural, just a WORD. $2k+ for one single word, that, when by itself makes no sense. The internet is going to hell. I'll tell you the domain name later :)

In yet other breaking news, I will start to have a weekly feature on here, for one week. Then it will turn into a bi-weekly, and eventually a random thing, then inevitably a never again. Tune in!

I'm going downstairs in the A/C.

I will be at the Phillies / Diamondbacks game today at 1:35. It's a business person's special. Perfect timing that summer decided to roll in here in Philadelphia. It'll be going up to 92 today, which Arizoners scoff at, but I know an Arizoner who grew up in Philly, and he said he'd much rather have the humidity-less heat of Arizona than the can't-breath heat of Philly. Of all things brutal, this is the brutalest (word?).

Our A/C went on yesterday for the first time. At the game today, I'll be consuming liquids the whole time. I might miss half of the game due to bathroom breaks. I have my camera with me so I'll be sure to get pictures of phenomena as they occur.

[Update] I just got my ticket from my coworker. I'll be in Section 145! That's homerun territory!

I'm second and third guessing my domain name decisions... I have too many ideas for names. There's not one thing that, I feel, can aptly describe what my site is about. Especially when it's all done, except for the content. The content will never be finished :) When I get some cool recording equipment, I'll eventually have some good tunes on here, although "Show Off" in my music downloads is pretty good.

I just keep typing stuff into Network Solutions' text thingy there, and seeing what names are available, and at the end I'll email myself the list. Today I compiled a list of around 30 domain names. I think I really like one of them though. Maybe. We'll see tomorrow.

I'll get around to it. But quick fact for the day... "Vader" is close to the German word for "Father". It's "Vater". Also, it's pretty close to the German word for "Water", which really isn't that close, but that's "Wasser". 'W' is pronounced like a "V" and "V" is pronounced like an "F". So "Vater" is pronounced (with the other German pronounced stuff) like "Fotter", and "Wasser" is pronounced "Vosser". As you can see, Darth Vader is actually dirty water or "Dark Water". That's a cool name for a villain. The other one, "Dark Father", that just doesn't make sense at all, if you've seen the movies.

Anyway, you can try to stump Darth Vader by going here. Those games amaze me, but I stumped him on "screwdriver". What an idiot.

The Aviator is a good movie. I'm not going to spoil anything about it, but, "The way of the future... the way of the future... The WAY of the FUTURE"... Anyway, watch it, you'll understand :) I liked it a lot. It's not only about planes, Howard Hughes was a genius, one of those geniuses (genii?) that is insane. Completely insane. Inherits money from his parents who were in the drill bits business and uses it to do all this neat stuff. It's a quality flick. I have to come up with a rating system of my own, but for now I'll go with the highly overused rating of 4 out of 4, and the highly overused rating system of "stars". I'll think of something else to use.

On the topic of insane people, don't you like those movies? I thought "Secret Window" was a good depiction of insanity... as well as "Fight Club", and of course "A Beautiful Mind". Anything where someone sees things that aren't there (besides ghosts) is a good flick in my mind. I just like those. "The Sixth Sense" is a good flick but it doesn't fall in that category. Name some other movies where people see stuff that isn't there, by reason of insanity, or just movies that are about insane people. Also, I like movies about really smart people ("Catch Me If You Can","Pirates of Silicon Valley", et al.). Quite a weird fascination I have going on, I might say.

I turned back on the gaming PC for reasons other than listening to music while I program. I started playing Guild Wars. I've never been able to get into any MMORPGs, but really the only other one I've tried was Final Fantasy XI. I couldn't get out of the starting town in that one. Guild Wars is incredibly simple to get into. Its main selling factor, though, besides the beautiful graphics, is that it's free to play online! You still have to pay a hefty starter up price of $50 USD to own the software, but I managed to afford that. The cool thing about it is it can be a standard role playing game, but you can also opt to join up with people hanging around. There are a few cool gameplay elements, and it's definitely worth your and my time. Right now I'm trying to save up the god-awful amount you need to buy square fur. They're unbelievably expensive, but after that I can get some major upgrades to my armor. w00t. Rate my geekness below. (Usually I only play games that are less detrimental to your coolness, like shooters and real time strategy games, as well as sports and Mario games)

You know the things...

"Copy these questions into a new email, answer the questions, and forward it to 10 people and something will pop up on your screen."

Forget about the "believing that something will pop up on your screen" bit... that's just plain gullable. So those things where you answer questions about yourself, they're actually gaining new life, except not in "forwards" of emails, where there was once a mass conspiracy about what happened with those and where they came from... i.e. companies would start them, send them to people, those people would forward them, etc etc etc, and if one branch of the email eventually made it back to the originators, they'd have like 9 gazillion email addresses that they could spam profusely. Now these marketing companies just spider the internet for email addresses, which is probably more successful.

Anyway, so these "forwards" have grown into a culture of sorts. They are answered and plastered on web pages, in forums, and anywhere on the internet where people who are not editors for a major company-that-needs-editors can post. They're email-less, so spammers are not that happy about it. However, these are much more desireable than the email forwarded version. Stemming from my "Freedom to Ignore" Act in the Bill of Rights, it's a lot easier to ignore a post on the internet than one that's stuffed down your throat in an email inbox.

So I have no problems with them. I won't do any though, they are not my cup of tea. I don't think anyone cares what the last 5 movies I watched were, or my last girlfriend's name, or whatever, I can't think of anything funnier than what they actually ask you :)

Or at least get discounts on their cars like their employees do!

Source...

Remember to check out these musicians.

Stanley Jordan
Louis Johnson who doesn't have a web page.

I saw these guys on a Jazz TV Channel yesterday. Louis Johnson plays an unbelievable slap bass funky style, and Stanley Jordan uses both hands to play notes on a guitar, and sometimes two guitars at a time (one hand on each ;-) ). It really just blew me away.

In a digital handbasket.

Have you ever gone to Blogspot and just clicked "next blog" for an hour? Well, this brings upon some enlightening thoughts about where the internet is going. Every other site is spam. Every third site is some young kid who uses sentences like "ive bin bz lol and work sux lol and my cat dide lol". Once every 10 clicks or so you'll find a nice, intelligible person who writes in proper English (or almost, like me), complete sentences, and has something meaningful to say. The rest of the sites are in some other language, so I have no say on them.

There are numerous sites out there that let people have a website and write thoughts on it. That's all good and dandy. But it's like a guy at the beach wearing a speedo, when you know that guy shouldn't be wearing a speedo, and no one will tell him that he shouldn't be wearing one. So, it's not against the law, but it's not pleasant for anyone... His daughter won't even be on the same beach as him, the wife is hiding under an umbrella, pretending to be asleep and/or reading a book, you know the scene.

I have nothing against free speech, free press, free anything. There are consistently low quality performances in all walks of life. Some movies suck, video games, books, tv shows, the Phillies, etc. Some are expressions of emotion, like a "blog" would be. There are also those on the extreme opposite end of that spectrum. Like, for one thing, the Eagles rule. Also, Plato's books rule, and I'm sure there's a good video game out there somewhere.

Obviously, I don't have to view those websites, and that's the other freedom granted in Free Press, Free Speech, and everything else free. The freedom to ignore. God Bless America.

OK, so while the Internet isn't going to hell from all the n00bs out there posting incoherent ramblings using long-ass sentences consisting of words of no more than 4 characters in length, it's still going to hell.

So, I'm going to look for a domain name to purchase to park this site at, and I try like a hundred different things that might closely resemble something that I would be proud to have as a domain name. I search the WHOIS database like nobody's business, finding all these domain names taken. I have to investigate, right? I visit the first domain name, and it's a "GoDaddy" site. The next one is a "Register.com" site. This happened for about 10 different domain names and at least 4 different registrar sites (like Network Solutions also). So many people, or "abstracts" even, own so many domain names. Luckily I was able to get the ones I wanted because of a cleverly inserted hyphen :) I say abstracts because these people buy domain names, and then try to get a sucker to buy it from them for at least 10 times what they paid. This just sucks for the future of the internet. It only costs $35 (max) a year to keep a domain name and not use it. Domain names are allowed to be pretty long (you can pretty much find the history of the internet on this site), so there are infinite, or close to it, permutations of domain names. I'd hate to know someone at an newly established domain name 20 years from now. Hey what's your website? Oh, it's www.mydomainnameissolongbecausethestupidpeople
inyourdayboughtupallthedomainnamesandididnothaveabazilliondollarstobuytheoneiwanted.com

Great. So, how do I email you? It's bob@my... no, I'm not going to type it again. That wasted 5 minutes already.

Other reasons the internet is going to hell...

Spam is too obvious. Worms are too obvious... Virii is a cool word, but it's still too obvious. Fraud... too obvious. Porn even... what else is bad with the internet?

I'm not a lawyer, but open source is good. Knowledge sharing is good. Being able to easily find something that you're looking for is great. With the internet growing at a rate that it is (google is now indexing 8 BILLION+ websites, just a few years ago it was at 2-3 billion), there won't be any tools capable of searching the internet and bringing back relevant results. I searched for my name, and figuring I'm searching for my name, it should return my website. I got to the 7th page before I gave up. One of these days there will need to be artificial intelligence of the human kind to be able to search the internet. Not that AI is bad (unless you think the Matrix is real :) ), but it's HARD! I'm no genius, but I worked with AI in college. VERY interesting subject. Mind boggling, even. Exciting. Fascinating. It's awesome. But anyways, back to the internet...

One thing that comes to my mind when I hear the words "The internet is going to hell", is the obvious notion of compatibility. Sharing information between sites can now be done in a thousand ways, as long as those sites share their methods of sharing information. Let me list them... SOAP through Web Services, plain XML, RSS, ATOM, XMLRPC, RPC, Remoting, and anything else that someone may want to program. Granted, the WWW Consortium is trying to get a grasp on all of these methods, almost none of them are standardized through them. The happy internet is the standardized internet. Imagine, if google, instead of just reading all of the HTML through a website url, can just ask a website "Yo, what's your deal?!" and the website can respond back "Dude, I am a guitar shop, here are my wares." And google says "Awesome, Jason Connell was searching for guitars the other day, he wanted a new stratocaster, I'll email this to him right away. He found one for $500 but judging by your prices, he's gonna crap his pants. In fact, let's just place the order now, shall we? I have his credit card and mailing address..." Without standardization in server methods and in browsers, we won't even come close to that point :)

So, that was my very compelling argument on why the internet is going to hell. I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment below.

A while ago I bought a QuickTime Pro license. I wanted to make the movies smaller so I could not have to worry about going on for 3 minutes and having people download a movie all day long. I had formatted and reinstalled Windows after I bought it, and I couldn't find the registration key for a while, but I found it. So there are 2 new movies up there for your viewing and listening pleasure, and they are all a lot smaller than they would be without the magic of Apple software. View the movies here.

[Update] I've simplified (but not beautified) the process of downloading. You will be prompted with a link after you click download, so that way you can right click and save it instead of opening the file in the browser. Also, I've added a file size to each download so you get an idea of how much free time I have... oh and how long it'll take you to download.

But I work in the city

Netscape 8 is out now. I'm set in my ways with the Mozilla Suite, but I'll give my initial reactions on Netscape 8 anyway. From what I've read, it can use Mozilla's rendering engine (which is Netscape's, it's called Gecko) or IE's rendering engine which, from what I know, doesn't have a cool name (Do any of Microsoft's products?? Longhorn, Whistler, Yukon, ... No, none of them have cool code names, and all of their product names suck). So judging from this style of compatibility solution, I wouldn't use it. From what I can tell, Microsoft doesn't have the security background as some people may think, they also piss people off.

I don't think a hybrid solution will work. Ahh, here's a nice piece of crap information. Take the tour of Netscape 8, go into "Security", click the right arrow 2 or 3 times... you'll find that the browser will render safe sites using "the Internet Explorer method" for "maximum compatibility"... Oh man, Netscape's hit the bottom, they're now kissing Microsoft's butt. First off, Mozilla is the "standards compliant" browser, however, most web developers write their Javascript and HTML to pretty much only work in IE. ECMAScript (JavaScript's other name) was invented at Netscape and later taken and seriously altered by Microsoft, so now there are two versions. You can learn about Javascript here.

In conclusion, Netscape 8 uses IE so it inherits all of its flaws with respects to standards compliancy. Eventually, IE will need to conform to these standards, but it will still have the security flaws. Mozilla or FireFox are based on these standards, which make web developing not as complex as it used to be, back when the browser market share was a tight battle between Netscape and Microsoft, coinciding Windows 98 which came with IE4 and Microsoft's version of ECMAScript. Mozilla based code doesn't even know what an "ActiveX" object is, so it gains a TON of security advantages there. It's the safe way to browse the web on a Windows machine.