Sunday... and "The Bat of Terror"

As usual, Katie and I headed over to courtyard coffee where her uncle Billy is starting a Calvary Chapel church. After the service we headed out to her Sha-sha's (Grandma's) house for lunch, where we had chicken and rice and home made strawberry short cake.

Midway through the shortcake, Billy looks up at the ceiling and says "Hey, there's a bat up there". He said it casually, like he was talking about an old friend. "Hey, there's my old friend Jim." Noone else was as casual about the situation, though. They heard "Holy crap! There's a disgusting little winged rodent on the ceiling!", and acted accordingly.

The little mongrel was completely oblivious to his impending demise. He sat up there, not moving, just being disgusting. Here's a picture of the little booger.

We all suggested different ideas, most of which involved throwing a sheet or a towel somewhere, blinding the bat.

The women wanted us to get rid of it, but not to hurt it. Katie's little brothers were sure they could come up with a way to achieve both. I didn't really care as long as the job got done.

Billy, Nathan, Patrick and I got together in the bat's room for a conference on the methodology we should use. Someone suggested looking it up online, another suggested calling a family friend who was knowledgeable about this type of thing (what a reputation to have), and I could swear the australian guy from Jurassic Park yelled "SHOOT HER!" from the back of the room. Maybe that was just in my mind.

Ultimately, we agreed on duct taping a pole-duster, sticky side out, and smacking the bat with it. Billy got the duster, which means that he was the smacker, and the bat of course, being the bat, was the smackee. I got the camera, and the game was afoot.

Here is the video. You can't see the bat very well, but it's a perfect representation of how ridiculous the whole affair was. Good times...

Well, the duct tape idea worked pretty well. He didn't get fully stuck to the duster the first time, so it took a second try to get him attached. So Billy pressed the duster against him a second time and flung him out the window, and this time he was stuck. He shook the stick a little bit and the bat came off and flew into the cover of a nearby tree, unharmed, but lacking a little bit of fuzz that remained on the duster's pole.

Katie will blog soon... was hindered by Movable Type 3.16 bug

Katie's joining the blogging community... for a test run. I've been badgering her about blogging for a while. Telling her about all the fame and fortune I've received by having my own blog. So she has finally agreed to give it a shot (probably because she got a new digital cam courtesy of me... a canon S500). I told her that if she likes blogging, I'll buy her a domain name and some hosting somewhere. Until that time, she can share my domain at katie.jojometal.com. She sounded excited about the idea so I went ahead and created the subdomain (thanks to liquidweb's cpanel which automates the process), and got to installing Movable Type 3.16.

I started setting everything up, ran the mt-load script and got all the db tables loaded and changed the mt.cfg file and all that garbage. So, I was ready to login for the first time and customize things a bit before I let her run amok.

Well, the repetitive login nightmare I had from my hosting change and previous movable type upgrade was back. I was forced to login each time I clicked any link in the admin page and couldn't see any images. So, quite confident, I looked at my mt.cfg file, only to find that I did have a trailing slash. So that wasn't the problem even though the symptoms were exactly the same.

After a good amount of searching, I found an article saying that Movable Type 3.16 had a bug which removes the trailing slash if you install it in the root directory of any domain (or subdomain). Well, I applied the patch, correcting two lines of code in the App.pm file and the login problem went away. However, I was still left with the missing images problem. (More info on this patch here. The minus sign indicates that you should replace this line with the line beginning with a plus).

I waded through a sea of craptacular information on subdomains and .htaccess files and tried quite a few things before I finally figured out what to do. Copy what I'd done before... it was that simple. In my .htaccess file I added the lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://katie.jojometal.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://katie.jojometal.com$ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

To tell you the truth, I have no idea what this does anymore, as I wrote the htaccess file originally back in November of last year. It looks like it just redirects any subdirectory of the subdomain to the correct folder. Anyways, it turns out that I'd done this for all other subdomains, so I could've just copied and pasted at the beginning and been done with it.

So, here's a quick guide for myself or anyone else when installing a new MT installation.

Upload.
CHMOD all cgi files to 755.
Change mt.cfg file.
Change db password file.
Upload db password and mt.cfg.
Run mt-load.cgi
If the installation is a subdomain, create subdomain and add the three lines in this post to the .htacces file
Login to mt.cgi...and hopefully that should be it.
Change Melody user to new username/pass.

MS Money's breakdown of my spending

I bought MS Money the other day to help me with keeping track of my expenses, take care of some of my bill payment, and to make me seem uber 1337. Well, ok, it's probably the most un-1337 thing I could do, but I bet my grandparents would be impressed... and that's the scale I usually use, since it's tilted in my favor.

Last week I realized that the next day my credit card payment was due. I figured, "Hey, it's 8:00, and my bill's not due until tomorrow, so I'll just pay it online and I'll be good to go." How silly of me. It turns out that it takes at least two days for payment to clear... no money is credited immediately. This is where things get good. I look at the site to see what my options are to avoid having a late payment, and I see that I can call and do an e-check payment, which will clear immediately.

I'm not sure why I couldn't do this online, or if I just overlooked it as a payment option, but I figured "What the heck... I'll do that." I go through the prompts, entering my digits and routing numbers and such, after which I find that this e-check process will allow my check to clear this very day.

It was such a magical, instantaneous payment process that the credit card company had to charge me an extra $15 dollars on top of my payment. I assume it's to cover the overhead of grinding pixies and unicorn horns to fuel their magical instant process that can't be achieved online in a similar, less expensive fashion.

After I made the payment, I cried for a little while, and then realized that this wasn't a good habit that I keep falling into - realizing the night before something is due that I better get on the ball. I made it through college just fine on that premise... writing many a term paper in a blurry haze of caffiene, google, and fatigue. However, unlike English professors, who are unable to distinguish utter poo from literary masterpieces, credit card companies make a monetary distinction between last minute payments and timely, pre-planned payments. I've been having too many untimely payments lately.

Anywho, this is why I bought MS Money. Oh, I could've bought quicken, but a quick feature comparison showed that for $20 someodd dollars less would get me MS Money with 2 years of online bill pay. So, for $23 bucks or so I bought MS Money.

I brought Money home and installed it the same night, then hooked up my online accounts and did a little categorization of expenses. Today, I updated all my accounts and looked at the little expense pie chart... Here are the results.

I realized a few things... that I spend way too much money eating out every day (since my boss no longer buys our lunch each day), and that entertainment costs should be cut down. I'm gonna try to start buying less expensive groceries, and making my lunch each day. Next, I'll tackle entertainment spending, though that's really important to me. I'll formulate an exact plan later and see if I can stick to it. I think MS Money has a feature that allows me to create a budget against my income per category... I'll try that probably.

Oh, and a last thing I see as I look again at the clothing expenses... I need new clothes. My budget for clothing has always been low, usually buying nice clothes only on sale and every few months. However, I've only got two pair of jeans that fit me (I really should cut back on those eating expenses) and the ones that do are deteriorating rapidly.

How to Perform Strong Man Stunts

How to Perform Strong Man Stunts. It's self explanatory... and you're going to be as surprised as I am that it was actually what the title implied. Oh, and it's worth a look just to see the pictures:).

Does that mean that those power team guys that came and preached to us at school... tearing phone books and doing other stuff were con-men?

First Bittorrent bust in the US?

According to boingboing, the US Department of Homeland Security (a division of Time Warner) conducted 10 different search and seizure operations this morning.

This morning, agents of the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed 10 search warrants across the United States against leading members of a technologically sophisticated P2P network known as Elite Torrents. Employing technology known as BitTorrent, the Elite Torrents network attracted more than 133,000 members and, in the last four months, allegedly facilitated the illegal distribution of more than 17,800 titles - including movies and software - which were downloaded 2.1 million times.

To John C. Richter and all my buddies in government here, thanks for keeping me safe. You're my heroes.

Read the full article, if you can stomach it.

Java Comparator class

The past few days have involved a lot of changes for me at work, in what I've been required to make my program do. The latest requirement involved making our system fit a schema developed by a third party.

In the process of designing the system, we've taken a good deal of things for granted. "We think it should be this way... why would *third party here* do it any other way?"... That type of thing. Well, it turns out this doesn't work too well. Even though a certain way of doing things may seem like the best way to you, another person/group may not see things the same way, or be able to do them that way.

We learned this the hard way. After designing most of our system to have our XML elements appear in any order we wish, we were advised that because the schema we have to adhere to uses xs:sequence to define the element order, we are forced to use that order.

Each bad situation seems to come with a little good in the mix though. Because of my mistake with the XML element ordering I had to find a way to organize data in a particular order. In searching for a solution I found that the Comparator class might do what I needed it to.

Here's how it works. Each time you add an object to a sortedMap or sortedSet it calls a compare() method which compares the objects in the the sorted collection to the object you're trying to insert. If the compare function returns a negative integer, the item you're inserting should go before the object you're comparing it to. If it returns 0, it's equal, and a positive integer means it should be placed after the object already in the list. Using these values, the sortedMap/Set's put/add function can determine an appropriate place for each object (key, since it's a Map) you insert.

In general, when you add an object to these sets they will be ordered according to the objects "Natural Order". Strings have a natural alphabetical order, and integers have their own also... other objects , the same.

If you don't want to use this natural ordering you can define a Comparator class with it's own Compare() method. In my case, I created a Comparator object, inside of which I assigned an integer value to each element in our XML schema. The lower the integer, the earlier the element should appear in the list. So, if an element gets added, it will look up that element in a list (in my case, actually a Hashtable), retrieve the integer value and subtract it from the position (index) of the element it's comparing against. If the result is negative, it should go before the object currently in the list... 0, equal... positive, after. It's a simple idea that fixed my problem right up.

I didn't really find anything on google about Non-natural String Ordering, so maybe my site will pop up with that search term now:). Anywho, maybe one day I'll sit down and write some example code, but while it's fresh on my brain, I think it's best not to write any code. It will probably match what's in our source too closely if any co-workers stumbled across this site.

Cracking WEP: Step by Step... with pep... in step

If you're looking for a way to get into your neighbor's collection of mp3's or dirty pictures, here's a great little article on how to crack WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy - Security for your wireless network).

Part 1, which I've linked to describes the initial setup you'll need for legal cracking, and Part 2 will familiarize you with a few of the others tools necessary to actually get in there and root around a little.

You'll find the tools and learn the skills necessary to do a little cracking if you so choose. However, you should probably try this on your own extra WLAN setup to avoid the prison time associated with uninvited access to other people's networks:).

With that said... have fun hacking your neighbors.

This Week in Tech: my first real podcast experience

In my early college days I discovered TechTV. It was a digital cable-only channel (in my area anyways) dedicated to bringing tech information to people like me. Sadly, I'm describing this channel in past tense.

Simpson's Law took effect. This law states that 86.54% (as of the latest study) of the products/items a Simpson family member is fond of will be cancelled, discontinued, imploded, or pillaged.

TechTV was effectively pillaged by the mongrels at G4. Early last year, as best I can remember, G4 Merged with TechTV to produce the demonic child of beelzebub that was G4TechTV. As with all other things good, G4 plundered the remains of TechTV, fired 90% of the staffers within three months and ruined The Screen Savers...but I'm not bitter or anything.

Back to the point of the post...The original TechTV network was worth a look simply for their flagship show, The Screen Savers. Well, the same folks who brought The Screen Savers to the masses are now doing a podcast called This Week In Tech. They talk about just what you think they would... from a show called This Week in Tech, the technology news of the previous week.

The show I'm listening to as I type covers E3, and google's new personalization features, along with taking a few recorded questions from callers (Star Wars/MPAA, The future of technology...etc). It's really just a good way to get tech info while I surf. It's much easier to listen to a podcast and get my nuggets of tech goodness whilst I surf than to watch a tv show I've recorded or try to multi-task and read a few different sites at once.

Give it a try if you're gonna be surfing for a while... if you're interested in gaming/technology/random tech goodness, I'm sure you'll like it.

Age of Empires III: The Destruction Of My Social Life

Sweet Mammy Jammy! Age of Empires 3 is under development, and will be released late this year. I saw the scribbled writing on the wall at gamestop the other day... it said Age of Empires 3, coming soon... and I nearly wet myself.

You see, late in High School my brother and I used to play this game religiously. I think it all started when Taylor took a trip to Sam's Club, which at the time was his personal heaven, and he ended up buying the game (Age of Empires II) with an additional strategy book. We installed it and played like we were possessed for an entire summer.

We would chat during the games, do a bit of smack talking, and then at the conclusion of each game we'd meet in the hallway or in one of our room's and ask "You wanna play again?". The answer was always yes.

Now, I'm hearing that Age of Empires 3 is coming out and after a quick googling I view the heavenly screenshots that Ensemble has provided. Have a giggity-gander.

Quite wonderful, No? I was completely blown away by the imagery.

I'll post more info as I find it... but as I understand it, the game is currently in demonstrations at the E3 Expo. I'll have to get some more goods on the game.

Parent to Child... wisdom inheritance

The idea for a post just hit me the other day when I was talking to a co-worker about how bad his credit history was in the 90's. He said "My Dad was great about handling money, but he never told me anything about it."

In the late 90's he ran up credit card debt and bought a car, which was later repossessed. This week, he's closing on a new house which he bought with no money down. A pretty amazing feat considering the shape his credit was in just a few years ago. What was more interesting to me was the fact that had his father sat him down every once in a while and talked about financial issues, he may not have ever run into these problems.

After we finished our conversation, I realized that this was almost the same conversation I'd had with my parents a week or so earlier. We were watching a TV show one night that featured a segment on how "Charm Schools", schools that teach manners and social etiquette, are seeing an explosion in popularity.

It's really disturbing that the family unit in the US seems to be breaking down. Parents are not passing down their experiences and knowledge to their children, children are more and more rebellious and family time is close to nothing within a lot of families.

I was lucky enough to have parents who have always made the effort to pass down their knowledge to us (my brother and I). They taught us manners, respect, and how to handle money.... or at least they did their best.

See, I'm of the opinion that parents should only make the effort to educate their kids properly on how to live. If their kids choose not to take their advice, it's not their fault and I don't necessarily think it's a reflection of their skills as parents. It's just that they've fulfilled their role, to be there as the child needs and to teach their children right from wrong.

Personally, I've made many choices that my parents would frown upon, and have done so on many, many occasions. Even in the financial area, after all the lectures on money and talks about budgeting and talk about how evil credit cards are until you've got a handle on your budget, I still messed up.

In college, I managed to get a single credit card and charge the limit and fail to pay payment after payment, even though the monthly minimum was $15. I was just stupid and now I'm paying for it. I've got some things I need to get to take the next steps into living life after college (i.e. car, home, wife), and I'm unable to use credit in the most basic way because of the way my credit was affected.

With talk of marriage and kids on the horizon, I intend to take some of these lessons I've learned and pass them on. My kids may not listen, and they probably won't if they're getting my genes, but I'm gonna do my best to make sure I do my part.

A quick post about Popeye's on Pines Rd. in Shreveport, LA

The people at Popeye's on Pines Rd. (Shreveport, LA) have their stuff together. They may not be the most organized, with yelling from front to back to pass orders, but they get the job done. Every time I go in there I get prompt, friendly service, which is hard to come by in fast food places, especially in Shreveport.

Most of the people who work Drive-thrus and counters at fast food restaurants here act like they're inconvenienced by customers. I've been to several places in town that just shove the food out the window without even turning to face me before shutting the window and walking off. This doesn't just bother me, it makes me mad.

I'm glad to see that there's a fast food chain in town that is consistently well managed and well behaved.

Donkey Konga Bongo Hardware Review

I realized that I forgot to talk about the controllers that are available for Donkey Konga 2. Instead of cramming more info into that last post about Donkey Konga, I figured a seperate one was in order.

I bought two different sets of Donkey Kongas yesterday, one sold by Nintendo and packaged with the original game, and another made by Pelican. You may have heard of pelican products before... they make all kinds of gaming accessories for the major consoles. They also suck. The nintendo gamecube controllers are the best I've used so far, and continuing this trend, the Nintendo congos are also far better than those sold by Pelican.

The pelican bongos advertise that they've got 10% more Bongo room, or some such nonsense, which might be good were they made as well as the nintendo pair. However, they're not. Within a few minutes of use, the right bongo on the pelican controller wasn't detecting hits as well. It seemed like whatever little button is under the skin of the bongo was contsantly depressed... and I don't mean sad. Also, the surface "skin" on top seems to be drawn much tighter than that of nintendo, giving less pressure feedback when you hit, also causing you to need to smack it harder to make sure it's recognized. You can play the nintendo bongos pretty darn lightly.

If you read my previous post on Donkey Konga, or are just thinkin about buying the game, go with the Nintendo controller. In a situation involving so many monkeys, I have to bring out the Happy Monkey Rating Scale to do this review justice...

Nintendo Bongos:

Donkey Konga 2

I'm not ashamed. I played Donkey Konga 2 until 1 O'clock last night... with three other people. Yeah, that's right, a kids game. I couldn't help myself though, the game looked fun, and as it turns out it actually was great fun.

I told Katie last weekend that I was going to buy it because Target was running the new game on sale (or at least had them in the sale paper) with the Bongos you use as controllers in the game. She sounded excited about it, so I figured that it could be our activity for one of the nights this weekend. So, yesterday after work I went and bought the Donkey Konga 2 game (with included Bongo) and also went to gamestop to see about an extra, possibly used, controller to play multiplayer.

We convinced Taylor and Sami to ditch their movie and play Donkey Konga instead, sight unseen. Surprisingly, they agreed to play. So, we headed over to Sami's apartment and played for the better part of 4 hours.

Here's the concept of the game. The Donkey Konga game contains songs, and surprisingly good songs, that you play along with by clapping, beating each drum or both drums at the same time. Icons will come across the screen from right to left and whenever they reach a circle in front of the little donkey kong character you hit the bongo, or clap. Which action you perform depends on the color or shaped of the icon.

For instance, if a Red circle comes across the screen, when it comes to your circle you hit the right bongo. If it were yellow, you'd hit the left bongo, if it were pink, you'd hit both at the same time... and if were star(ish) shaped you'd clap (the bongo has a mic embedded to detect claps). So, the challenge is to hit the right combination of bongo and claps at the right time, in sync with the music.

It would take a long time to go into all the different styles of games within donkey konga 2, but there are quite a few where you can play against another player, or play with up to four people in a "concert", or try to complete a series of songs without messing up too many times, which will cause your game to be over.

Katie, Sami, Taylor and I really enjoyed it. I even think Katie's little brother Patrick, despite what he said at the time, liked it. If you've got a gamecube, and can either rent the game, or could borrow it I'd highly recommend doing so. I'm not sure yet how long the novelty of playing the game will last, so I might not recommend buying it, but we'll see. It might be a good thing to play every once in a while when boredom strikes.

I think one of the reasons that we liked it so much was because we're always competitive with each other. We're able to enjoy just about anything with a point system because of the competition involved. So, if you don't have a competitive group of people to play with, you might not have as much fun as we did. I'd still recommend trying it though

Vacation Time Approaches

In early July I get a week's vacation, so the planning process has begun.

Originally, I suggested that we go on a Cruise, but Katie Nipped that in the bud. I told her I wanted to go somewhere with mountains, or maybe Yellowstone. Somewhere that has new experiences that I can't get anywhere else.

All the cities around here are the same, it seems like. Go shopping, go eat at good restaurants, go out and about at night. Well, I wanted to avoid that.

We'll see what happens, but for now I think we've settled on the idea of a semi-road trip. Maybe head to Dallas, go down to San Antonio, or Austin. Something like that.

I really wish there were some affordable mountaneous areas closer...*sigh*.

Anyway, I think that's the best solution for cost and time spent travelling. If anyone has any suggestions for where to go, post a comment.

Vermilion trip ... of wonderment.

Ahhh, Business trips... I love 'em. Free food. Fresh new rental car to play in. Hookers... Well, no hookers, but the business trips are still good.

This time around, Kristina and I went down to Vermilion Parish to their school board offices, which are located in a gorgeous old school from the 30's. It's about a 4 hour drive, straight down I-49 from here. We left at about 2 and arrived at about 6 at the Extended Stay .... More about that later...

On a side note, let me remind those readers who aren't familiar with Louisiana's geography that Abbeville is just South of Lafayette. This means that a short drive will land Abbevillians in Lafayette, a pretty large city in Louisiana. This is where we spent the first night, or the dinner portion.

Kristina and I drove over there to see what kind of restaurants they had to offer, and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of choices they had. Everything Shreveport had was there, and a lot more, I believe. So, we had plenty to choose from, but ultimately we settled on Macaroni Grill.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my company for allowing me to enjoy the delicious Pork Chops from Macaroni Grill in Lafayette. Thank you. They were wonderful.

If you have a Macaroni Grill in your area, leave immediately to go there for the pork chops. Don't put on pants, just go. Well, on second thought, put on pants... those legs are awfully pasty.

While in Macaroni grill, our waiter found out somehow that someone was having a birthday, so he belted out the birthday song in Italian to the birthday group. It was pretty impressive, and the waiter seemed happy with himself afterwards. Anywho, that's all that happened the first night.

This morning, I woke up, and headed out for our 8:30 meeting at the school board offices. The meeting was uneventful, and very long to be in the same seat without a break. However, we accomplished our goals, and were happy with the results of the meeting.

Afterward, Russ (their Technology Coordinator I believe) and Cindy (one of their staff who works with our software regularly) came to lunch with Kristina and I. Or maybe we went with them, I'm not sure how it worked really. We got somewhere, anyways. That somewhere we went was Dupuy's (Doopweez) in Abbeville... a short walk from the school board offices.

Apparently, they've been around since the late 1800's. Yeah, that's really old. However, the gumbo was pretty darn tasty and everyone seemed really impressed with the food they got there. The atmosphere was probably the best part though. You've got a small Louisiana town's people in there, Zydeco music playing, seafood being served all over the place and everyone's having a good time. It was nice.

We headed back at about 2:00 and arrived at about 6:00.

So, for the trip we were given a rental car, a Chrysler mini-van which was incredibly nice... considering it was a mini-van. It rode like a dream, had nice speakers, nice little features... and a decent sized engine. It was the best surprise of the trip.

Onto the hotel... it was nice. It wasn't perfect, but it was very nice. My only complaints, if you could even consider them real complaints, had to do with the lack of an iron in the rooms and the computer in the lobby being spyware ridden. Both of them are complaints based around the same idea... if you offer/advertise a service, make sure it works and is worth it.

The iron was available through the front desk staff. I got an iron and an ironing board, but the legs on the ironing board were about two inches long. Long enough to stand it up on a bed or something, but not long enough to do any kind of effective ironing. Secondly, the computer that was there was our means of finding directions, but almost every site was redirected, and the searches through google were all pointing to the lowest ranked results. It was ridiculous. Now, let me say that I'm glad they provided the services... BUT I think advertising a service, and then delivering in a cruddy fashion is worse than not having the service at all. Why advertise, internet access and iron service if neither is functional?

That's the story of the trip. If you ever get a chance to go down there, I think it'd be worth your time to drive down and visit the area. If you don't like the town, you've always got Lafayette.

Tomorrow's trip

Well, I'm off on another business trip tomorrow. This time, I'm headed down to Vermilion Parish, the home of the Black-bellied Plover bird.

I just made that up.

Nothing is in Vermilion as far as I know... but that's one of the reasons I'm gonna enjoy going. I need to find out whether it's a nice place or not. I figure you can't hate a place unless you've been there... unless it's Koosheram, Utah. I despise that city.

Kristina and I are gonna travel down there to investigate the need for a new program to add to our current suite of products. Hopefully, we'll be able to get all our questions answered without having to get physical with the elderly school teachers down there.

For some reason that reminded me of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sound board. "I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions, and I want to have them answered immediately!".

Anywho, I'm gonna stay in some hotel down there that I've never heard of, so I'll have to post about the trip when I get back. For now, I gotta get some sleep. I'm plum tuckered out.

The Car PC: a long time dream of mine

This money is burning a hole in my pocket. I've gone from starving college student to John D Rockefeller, Jr., or at least it seems that way after contrasting the two situations I've been in recently.

During the last three years of college I was able to work 10 hours a week (excluding summers, which were 20 hour weeks) at $7 an hour programming for the University. Now, I'm working full-time as a programmer where my first raise was more than the total amount of pay I recieved during a year working for Tech. Of course with an entry level programming job, I'm only making a beggar's fortune, but in comparison to my college days I'm doing fantastic.

Of course I've got things to spend my money on... like a girlfriend, school loans, car insurance, an engagement ring, and food. Even with those eating away at my wad of cash, I've still got something I've never had before... expendable income.

The latest and greatest fantasy I've envisioned involves a 8" touch screen LCD, a VIA EPIA mini-ATX computer integrated with my car stereo. I could have a detachable LCD screen (used more like an interactive remote than a simple display), controlling a PC in the car. I'm talking about a media center for my car.

I could play DVD's for passengers on trips to Monroe, or trips to Ruston. Instead of burning mp3 cd's for each trip, or occasion, I could simply create a new playlist. GPS navigation for my car would become an affordable option. If I wanted to get pimpish I could even hook up a ps2 or Xbox to the same monitor and have a mobile game station.

For anyone else who finds this appealing, I have a couple prices and sources for you.

• LCD Monitor: ~$300 (8" or so WITH touch screen) from LogicSupply.com
• VIA EPIA Motherboard: ~$200 from LogicSupply.com again (look elsewhere too)

These were the only two items I didn't really know a price range for or a source for off-hand. The rest of the items are normal computer parts. The only slightly unusual options involve the PSU and the Hard Drive. You can buy a special power supply for 12V batteries and you can also opt for a compactflash based hard drive to avoid wear on hard drives due to vibrations. I believe everything you'd need can be found on logicsupply.com.

I'm gonna explore the idea a little more and maybe save a little money over the next year or so to buy a system.

Hitler Baby?

I can't look at this picture without absolutely cracking up.

Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight

This headline came at exactly the right time.

Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight

Just yesterday Johnny, Taylor and I were reevaluating the "How many 5 year olds do you think you could beat up?" argument. When I was browsing through the links on fark today, I came across this headline, and looked at the story.

According to the story, within 12 minutes a Lion had killed 28 midgets at which point the fight was called. The fight was a product of the Cambodian Midget Fighters League, who had been challenged to have their whole company of fighters take on a lion, unarmed.

The cambodian government agreed on the condition that they were given 50% of the ticket sales and that no cameras were allowed inside.

As I read the story I thought of how ironic it was that the day after that conversation reappaeared this happened. I would post it, and talk about the mathematical conversion from lions to humans and midgets to 5 yr. olds. If we could determine the formula, we would surely be able to tell EXACTLY how many 5 year olds we could beat up.

Well, it turns out the story was a complete hoax. Being distracted with the 5 yr old argument, I never even questioned the validity of the story. It looked exactly like the BBC's news page and was well thought-out. I feel retarded.

Here's the original article, with modifications to indicate that it is not real.

It turns out that some guy at Yale posted this in order to try to convince one of his friends that he was correct in an argument over whether 40 unarmed midgets could overpower a lion.

It was created to 'settle' a dispute betwen a friend of mine in which he claimed that 40 weaponless midgets could defeat 1 lion in a hypothetical fight. Many of my other friends and I tried to convince him that the lion would definitely win, but he would not back down from his argument. After seeing another fake article posing as BBC about 'zombism' in Cambodia, I got the idea to make this fake news article to try and convince him for the final time. (Please 'Join the debate' at the bottom to express your opinion.)
-http://lionvs40midgets.tripod.com/

Another weekend over, and another family guy approaching

This weekend, as usual, was a good un.

Katie had to work on Saturday, so Friday night she stayed in Ruston to work on her papers (AKA watch TV all night instead of working on her papers). As much as I hated the fact that we wouldn't be able to hang out until Saturday afternoon after work, it meant I could hang out with Taylor and Sami Friday night.

Taylor and Sami and I got together to get some dinner and play some pool over at Maurice's on Youree. We talked mainly about what's going on with Sami's engagement, a little about Katie and myself, and about a few business idears I've had lately. I think everyone had a good time.

Saturday morning Johnny was in town with Natasha, his wife, while she took some sort of test. He and Taylor had talked about hanging out while he was in town. So, Taylor invited me to come along and hang out with Johnny while he was killing time. Krispy Kreme seemed like the best place to go that early in the morning, and it turned out to be a good idea, though the place was insanely busy. It provided a great venue for reevaluating the "how many 5 year olds can I beat up?" argument.

On a side note, I don't know what the big deal is with their donuts, but apparently it's a new phenomenon to the people of Shreveport. They tasted smooth, and sugary like a donut should, but I still think I prefer Southern Maid donuts.

Later that afternoon Katie and I went to Wal-mart and picked up some things for Mother's day. I got my mom a Rose arrangement, some Starbucks coffee, and a card. Katie got her mom all the same, though she bought her coffee at Target later that night.

After Wal-mart Katie, Taylor and I went over to Carrabba's again. We proceeded to stuff our faces with the finest food Shreveport has to offer (aside from Yeero! Yeero!). Taylor had the 10" inch pizza, and being a neophobic I got the Chicken Gratella, which Katie and I split. Once again, Carrabba's didn't let me down. It was delicious.

Today, Katie and I went to Billy and Emme's church at the coffee shop over by Sam's club. They're trying to start their own congregation and the man who owns that coffee shop was nice enough to let them hold services in their back room for a while. Of course they're looking for a new place, but for now it's kinda cozy in there.

After church, the Katie and I went our seperate ways to spend time with our Momses, but I saw her just a few minutes ago before she left town. Now, I'm sitting here working on my latest project... writing a blog assistant program in Java.

I'll probably talk more about it later, but the general idea is this: I have reoccuring header images and frequently used bits of HTML and text that I hate retyping each time. So, I figured that if I had a little program where I could store and recall all those image locations, HTML tidbits, and frequent links, I would be more likely to post. So, I'm working on getting that done, and releasing a version on the site for anyone else who wants it. It won't be dependant upon what blog you use and since it's in Java, it won't be OS specific, if I can help it.

Nintendo's provocative DS ads in Stuff Magazine.

I know that most of the people who read Stuff magazine are over the age of 13... though most of them probably don't ever act, or think as if they were. This is why the big hullaballoo over these ads being suggestive is ridiculous. I mean, they're suggestive, of course, but they're in a men's magazine. If you're worried about some kid stumbling across this ad, then you should probably be concerned about the pictorials contained elsewhere in the magazine.

The only other problem I can see is that the image Nintendo is portraying may seem contradictary to their current image. However, this is what companies have to do to stay afloat. They change their image, they market to different demographics. It happens all the time people, give it a rest.

Advertisements are always different according to the demographic of the medium they're in. That's what advertisers are trying to do, appeal to the demographic that the magazine subscribers/purchasers fall into.

People act like Nintendo shouldn't advertise in any other medium than lego blocks and cute little cartoony characters.

I think that they realize that they won't be able to compete effectively in the video game market unless they are able to target the 20+ year old market (read: people with large amounts of expendable income). Xbox and PS2 have already positioned themselves with edgier, more mature games, and they will want to do the same sooner or later. Maybe this ad is part of their plan to begin attracting those older people.

I don't see anything wrong with the ads, like I said. While I'm at the keyboard though, I'd like to give Nintendo a nice Attaboy. Your ad makes me happy.

Administrative Assistant's Day Present idea

I ran across this article while surfing through the links of a few local blogs.

The author talks about Administrative Assistant's Day (also called Secretary's Day and National Secretaries Day), and the present he got for one of his secretaries a few years ago on that holiday. It's an interesting idea. Here's an excerpt that sums up the article well:

Several years ago, I told my secretary she could fire one client, no questions asked. After she picked herself off the floor, she chose a client that surprised me. Turns out that this client, while perfectly cordial to me, was consistently rude to her on the phone and made inappropriate comments to her when he came into the office. I sent the client a nice letter telling him I would be unable to represent him any longer, and my secretary told me it was one of the best presents she had ever gotten.

I think this is one of the best ideas for a gift I've heard in a long time. What better gift could a boss give to a secretary, than removing a recurring annoyance (not caused by the boss:)). Anyway, it was a good idea, and I thought I'd share it here.

A few more lessons from work

After being at the new job for about three months now, I've been thinking about what I'd do differently, presented with the opportunity to go back.

Ask Questions: First off, to those people who are just getting out of college and going on the interview warpath, ask questions. For God's sake, ask questions.

Ask the interviewer about benefits. This isn't just a one sided arrangement here, wherein you should feel lucky that someone is giving you a place to work. You're devoting 8 hr.'s a day of work to them, and sometimes more. So, it's not like they're doing you a favor by hiring you. If you're confident in your abilities, act like it and treat the relationship as the business relationship that it is.

The biggest thing that I would do differently now, were I to go back, would be to ask more questions in the interview. My strategy in the interview was to ask personal questions of the interviewers, instead of asking a whole bunch of business related questions. I'd ask enough to show that I knew what I was talking about, and to show that I was interested in the work. After that though, no talk of money, no talk of benefits, just get to know the people.

Two things were supposed to come of this. One, I'd get to know the people I might be working with. I figured that I can do just about anything, given the time to learn, but finding a good group of people to work with would be the hard part. So, I'd spend time getting a feel for what the interviewers were like (since they'd be managing me most likely). Two, the questions would put me more at ease, because I'm more comfortable in a more personal situation.

Well, I ended up getting to know a little about the two interviewers, but there was no way that I'd be able to get any realistic impression of what they were about over our lunch. I should've asked more questions about the business. What kind of benefits? Do you use the companies' insurance plan? Turnover rate... all kinds of things that I would've better prepared me for the job.

Asking these questions would've led to the same decision in my case. This is only because I knew two people who worked there though. I was able to extract enough information from the two of them to make an informed decision... but without them, I would not have had the slightest idea of what my company was like.

The last thing I've been pondering lately is a bit of info a co-worker shared with me recently; that one of my bosses, also an interviewer, made the comment at their hiring meeting that I was the only person who wore a tie. This really caught me off guard, mainly because I was the only person that wore a tie, but also because this may have given me the edge I needed to get the job... even though I had an employee recommendation already.

Ollie Williams on Johnny's Fantasy Football Season's Outlook

We have a new feature in our Fantasy Football League this year that will allow each person to choose a rival. Johnny sent me a PM on the forum the other day asking if I wanted to be his rival in fantasy football. I agreed.

I thought "What better way to commemorate the launch of the new season of family guy and the upcoming fantasy football season than to have Ollie Williams deliver the first punch?"

Ollie, what's gonna happen to Johnny this season? (Click on Ollie *with volume up*)

Ok, thanks Ollie.

Flickr's Creative Commons Licensed Photo Browser

If you do a bit of web design, or any other type of design that typically includes pictures, you might try visiting Flickr's Creative Commons area on their site.

The pictures on the site are categorized by which type of license they use (i.e. Attribution, NonCommercial, etc.). See the picture below.

Edit: I can't find the original photographer above, and I'm supposed to give credit it turns out. I should've read more carefully... I'm still looking for them though.

It's nice to be able to have a large collection of pictures from good photographers that don't mind others using their photos. Finally, I can stop going to google images with a random keyword.