Month: February 2005

Well, it’s Saturday and I’m hanging out in JavaNet. Surprise surprise. What makes today’s JavaNet excursion post-worthy is the fact that I’m sitting in a brand new location… directly under some local artist’s sculpture. It’s a sort of found-art/trash-art hanging face, with a wide open mouth, elongated nose piece, and a chain link goatee. Really interesting. Really cool. I’m proud to sit underneath it. The one exception to it’s coolness is that I’m pretty sure that it’s throwing up on me… at a frequency of about every ten minutes. Yeah, every ten minutes or so, I feel crud fall from its direction and land on my head. I look up at it and I’m pretty sure that I see it stifling a sinister chuckle. I told the dude sitting next to me that, “I think this sculpture is throwing up on me.” He smiled, nodded, and slid his chair a few inches away. I guess that I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to sit next to the target of art puke either.

Ok… I’m back. Did you even notice that I was gone?

Anyway, I just made the move from iPowerWeb to Lunarpages. Why? Well, duh! Check out the slick front page at Lunarpages:

Compare it to the drab iPowerWeb home page, and I think my reasoning will become obvious:

I don’t know about you guys, but I choose my web hosting company solely on the coolness of their home page. I mean, that’s what’s important, right? Who cares about all of those lame stats and numbers. 12% Uptime this, 7000 FTP accounts that… lame! Just give me a cool flash demo on a high tech home page, and I’m sold! Hook, line, and sinker.

The real reason for the switch was because iPowerWeb was sticking to their offer that I signed on with from two years ago… even though their current hosting package is twice as good for the same price. That, and I wanted to take advantage of Lunarpages’ add-on domain hosting thingy (along with a few other technical thingies). We’ll see how it goes. It’s the same price for more thingies… so what have I got to lose?

Hey y’all.

First of all, sorry about the absence of posts lately. It seems that I’ve got a lot on my plate these days. School and work are wearing me down. But, I love teaching! And work… well that’s a different story. I only have to suffer through another few months though. And then I’m off to graduate school! Yippee! A wise man once said (oh… you know who you are), “Grad school is the snooze button on the alarm clock of life.” I hope that he’s right. No no… I know that grad school is going to be a ton of work. Perhaps even a shit-ton. Yep, a metric shit-ton. That’s a lot of work.

In other news, my little sister is moving to Georgia tomorrow. It really hasn’t sunk in yet. My little sister isn’t allowed to move away. This is all wrong. Wrong wrong wrong! Of course, I’m allowed to move away. But she’s not. And, to top it all off, she’s taking my puppy away from me! Well… I guess it’s her puppy. But still…

Last thing… sambot.com may be a bit wonky over the next week or so. I’m about to change hosting companies. I wish that I could be more specific about the timing… but the interweb is an unpredictable place where time and space have no meaning. Everything will be the same when I come back online. I promise.

End transmission…

That’s right. You heard me. Now, click here to gratify your rage.

Also…

The other night, at the show, I found some thought-provoking art on the walls of the Men’s Room. Of course, I whipped out my trusty camera phone and snapped a few lo-res shots. I sent them to the Graffiti Paparazzi… a great and truly inventive blog. He posted them. This one was very Valentine’s Day appropriate. The other is a bit more political.

This Valentine’s Day will be spent listening to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate. The festivities will conclude with a dramatic suicide performed by yours truly. That is all.

Ok, ok… there will be no climactically suicidal end to my long 26 years of life… tonight anyway. However, I will be listening to Leonard Cohen all day long in preparation for this evening’s performance at The Elevens in Northampton. They are hosting a Leonard Cohen Tribute thingy. It should be depressingly swell. If you decide to show up, please stop by and say “hi.” You’ll find me in the darkest corner of the club. I’ll be sobbing uncontrollably…

I just finished up one of the most satisfying lunches that I have ever had. In fact, it was so satisfying that I simply must blog about it.

First of all, I’d like to say that I hit all four food groups full-throttle. Let’s see…
1) Dehydrated. Check!
2) Frozen. Check!
3) Carbonated. Check!
4) Pill Form. Check!
Yep. I got all of ’em.

Lunch consisted of a frozen burrito, dehydrated ramen soup cup, root beer, and a multi-vitamin. If that doesn’t power me to go, I don’t know what will.

Today, I found that the Homestar Runner peeps made a trailer for a movie based on their Peasant’s Quest game. It’s really well done and really funny. I’d suggest that you watch it, whether you’ve played the game or not. However, much of the humor is taken straight from the game… so it helps to have played.

Need some background? Ok. A while back, the geniuses over at homestarrunner.com (the creators of Strongbad Emails) released an old school styled flash game called Peasant’s Quest. The game was like the games that Sierra once put out… on like 23 floppy disks per game. Remember Space Quest and King’s Quest? It was like the early versions of those. Essentially, you would move your character around a crude pixelated world with the arrow keys and then type simple commands for him to perform. Like “climb ladder” or “take sandwich” or “throw baby.” Peasant’s Quest is very much like that. The basic storyline is that you, a peasant named Rather Dashing, find your thatched roof hut BURNINATED! You go on a revenge styled quest to kill the evil menace, TROGDOR (a big “S” shaped dragon responsible for the burninating of your hut). It is tons of fun… in fact, I think that it is the only video game that has been able to capture my attention since Tetris. It is pretty intense too. It took me about two days at work to beat the game… and I think that I actually needed to download a walkthrough to finish it! Pathetic… I know.

If you’re new to all this Homestar Runner stuff (what!? do you live in a cave… with a 56k modem!?), I’d recommend watching this, and then definitely watching this (which highlights the origins of TROGDOR, THE BURNINATOR!).

I have two more links that I’d like to share. Why? Because, damn it, I can’t bring myself to do any actual work today. (Who are you calling a slacker?)

The first link is quite funny… especially if you are, are trying, or have tried to do the blogging thing. The article is titled How To Start Your Very Own Blog In Fifty-One Easy Steps! It walks you through the beginning steps of blogging… the true beginning steps of blogging. None of this sugar-coated “blogging is easy and fun!” crap. This is the real deal. Give it a read… and while you’re there, read the rest of Kuro5hin. A good blog and well worth your time… at least, well worth my time… my time isn’t worth much…

The second link is for the let’s-get-down-to-business side of your personality. This little application, called 1-Click Answers, is so useful that it’s making me dizzy (oh, wait… that’s probably the Percocet). This utility allows the user to select any word in any application and get instant information about it. Yes yes, I know. That’s more or less what the internet does. But this little gem is accurate and fast and thorough. In one swift key command, I can select the word information from the text that I had typed above, and get the word’s dictionary entry, thesaurus entry, wikipedia, translations, legal info, technology info, etc… It’s really sweet. Go get it. It’s a free download and available for Mac, Windows, and as a Firefox plugin. (Oh… you can also go to the website and type the word in there and get the same results… but where’s the fun in that?)

Click here to see the most bizarre and nightmarish commercial that you’ve ever seen. Kana Hakkliha? Sure… why not. This video came from a page of Estonian TV commercials from the 80’s (I discovered this link while reading ~stevenf‘s blog).

Whoa… let’s move to Estonia. Where the f is Estonia?

UPDATE: ~stevenf is running a little remix competition with this commercial. If you got skillz (and iMovie) give it a go!

This morning, at 9:15 a.m., I had all four of my wisdom teeth yanked unwillingly from my skull. Surprisingly enough, the entire endeavor was mostly uneventful. I was knocked out for the procedure. I remember the nurse jabbing the intravenous into a vein… she mentioned that I have “easy veins.” I asked what makes them so easy. She said that they are popping out and not moving around. I think that I tried to say something clever like, “Well, I told them to behave…” but, I probably just started to drool and trailed off into unconsciousness. The next thing that I remember is sitting on my sister’s couch and defending myself from some hardcore puppy lovin’ (my sister’s puppy is the cutest thing in the world, but she loves with her teeth).

Like I said, I don’t remember much. According to the reports (a.k.a. what my sister tells me), I was insistent on thanking every one of the staff members at the oral surgery place as we left. Apparently, it was imperative that I thank everyone in the waiting room too. Ah drugs… is there anything they can’t do?

Speaking about drugs, I just popped the first of about ten Percocets that they were nice enough to prescribe for me. We’ll see how that goes. If it goes well, I’ll probably be inspired to post a bit later… and I know you are looking forward to that.

Oh… I almost forgot. They let me keep my teeth! The gross thing is that they didn’t even clean them off. It’s like they went straight from my bloody jaw into a little plastic baggy. Doesn’t that seem odd? Wouldn’t this be considered biohazard? Oh well. I’m just stoked that they let me keep them. I can’t wait to turn them into a necklace… and one day give it to my true love. Am I smooth or what?

The Percs are kicking in. Which means that it’s definitely time for me to go.