Sorry, been a while

So I haven't updated my blog in a while. It happens.

I wanted to post today about the wonderful world of mixing and matching, especially when it comes to food and drink. This weekend was such a hodge-podge of mixes it was interesting.

There is always the standby mix, that being the wonderful Jack and Coke. I drank quite a few Jack and Cokes this weekend.

Then there is the lovely mixed drink with Guinness. Half and Half (Harps and Guinness), Snakebite (Some wierd apple cider beer and Guinness, I wasn't a fan) and Stoutly Lagers (or Yuengling and Guinness) were all on the menu this weekend. I'd like to go back to that Irish pub and try a few of the others they had on tap (Such as the Dark Side of the Moon, Blue Moon and Guiness. And the old standby Pure Guinness or Guinness and Guinness :))

And mixed bags are not just limited to drinks. I couldn't decide yesterday if I wanted breakfast or lunch. See it was 11:30 or 11:45, which is usually lunch time but weekends are sometimes just a bit different. Not wanting to limit my palate with just one type of meal, I decided to combine them. I got a burger. With bacon. And a fried egg. Heartattack on a bun is what I like to call it. And it was awesome.

We got a dog!

Yes, that is our doggie. His name is Ender and he is a 3 month old puppy of uknown breed (but def. a mix.)

He is so cute and I know that were going to have a GREAT time bringing him up, loving him and training him. It'll be difficult in the begining, which is obvious, but I am really looking forward to all the experiences. I just hope I don't screw anything up :)

Ever get really excited and then come CRASHING back down to earth?

Happened to me today. I was perusing my favorite websites, the main one being my home page, http://www.myway.com, an absolutely free webportal with NO ADS on the front page. Great homepage, but I digress. I saw the following headline:

Police Probe 'Miracle Babies' Pastor

I unfortunately missed the A in the word, read it as an O. Thought maybe the police had found something offensive about Baby Geniuses 2. Alas it was not to be. That or the police HAVE found it offensive but still can't legally do anything about it.

I'm thinking we should firebomb the theaters. Molitov Cocktails anyone?

Forgot to post yesterday, today is rehash of Monday

Yeah, pretty much like the title said.

I was watching the Olympics last night and watched the Mens Individual Gymnastic event. Paul Hamm won the gold by 0.012 of a point. It was incredibly close. The look on his face when he was told he won the gold was absolutely priceless (cue MasterCard commercial here ... wait a minute, the Olympics are a VISA sponsored event, what's going on here? I call foul!) He didn't believe his coach/trainer guy when they told him.

Not to sound too sappy, but it was really a testament to never give up. He was in first place, got knocked to 12th and then battled back to win it (with an amazing high-bar routine, or so they tell me, I just noticed that he caught the bar and didn't fall down when he dismounted.)

Oh, yeah, I found out from Lacey that the trampoline is the third division of the olympics and was added in 2000. Isn't that interesting?

Check out my cool Medal Count

So I added an Olympic Medal Count to the sidebar of this page. It's kinda neat, you get to see who has all the medals and what type they are.

I dislike gymnastics but was pretty interested in what I was watching last night. The Mens team was going against the Romainian and Japanese team in a pretty fierce battle. It USA took silver, which is excellent since it was the first time since 1984 that they have taken medal and the first time since 1932 that they have taken a medal in a fully participated in game (remember that the USSR boycotted 1984.) Pretty exciting, actually.

Poker Night

Last night was a blast. We had a poker night. Aaron, Rob, Cole, Tim Morea, Lace and I played no limit Texas Hold'em with $10,000 chips. Blinds started at $100,200 and doubled every half hour. It was a lot of fun. I'm VERY interested in getting a weekly game going.

I'm envisioning something along the lines of a $5 buy in for $10,000 worth of chips. Winner take all (or we could do Winner takes 75% and second place 25% or something like that, that'd be cool too.)

Anyone who reads this blog (and there aren't many, I'm sure) let me know if you are interested. Comment on the format, comment on playing with actual money. It isn't a lot, but I'd be willing to forgo it if it mean more people would play.

Governer's Gay, news at 11

Remeber as I type this that I'm no Republican. I used to claim that I was an independant and still do belive that I would vote for whoever would do the best job but after the last four years, I'm leaning so far left that it isn't even funny.

McGreevey has pissed me off for a couple of reasons. I don't care that he's gay, and I'm glad that he's comfortable enough to come out and say it. I feel bad for his wife, but in all honestly, that doesn't bother me that much (and that's one of the main things that pisses off die-hard Republicans is that most of the country didn't CARE that Clinton cheated on his wife either.) But I do care when a guy in power uses that power and potentially puts me in danger or costs me money.

According to this article he put the guy he was having an affair with in some sort of position of power. A terrorism advisor or something, a postion the guy was supposedly not qualified to run. He also had some other shady dealings as mentioned at the bottom of the article.

But what really pisses me off is the political implications of WHEN he is resigning. Instead of resigning before Nov. 15 which would allow a special election to take place so that I can help choose who our governer is going to be, he has decided to wait until after that is no longer a possibility. So now my governer is going to be someone I didn't vote for and had no say for or against (again, didn't this just happen when Christie left, oh, well, I wasn't as into politics at the time.)

If he feels he has to resign, either because he's gay (which doesn't make any sense, but whatever) or because of the back-room dealings that he feels might become more public, that's his decision. But to wait JUST LONG ENOUGH to resign so that the people of the State of New Jersey have no say about thier governer is just wrong, in my not so informed opinion.

Whoa! Cool ass site!

http://www3.telus.net/jefmil/stairwaybackwards.htm

Very cool site. Takes popular songs and plays them backwards. Tries to find hidden meanings in them. Left up to the listener to see if they exist or not. Reading the lyrics along with the words, you may be able to trick your brain into believing they exist!

Go see Garden Sate if you get a chance. It's really funny and good.

Ahh, the memories

Am I allowed to be nostalgic at only 24 years of age? With Hot Topic and VH1 attempting to sell back my childhood (not to mention TV on DVD succeeding very well at that) I think I am.

I'm reading Wil Wheaton's first book (very short book called Dancing Barefoot) and he's remembering his high school and Wesley Crusher days.

It got me thinking. My parents and I had a weird conversation about something that happened in High School. I forget what it was about, but the weird part was when my Dad realized that it was between 6-9 YEARS ago that anything happened to me in High School. It was just a very strange occurence.

These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.

Nothing new and/or exciting to post about today. Really, I am that boring, so I will not keep you glued to your seats with my rant about Saved by the Bell.

Saved by the Bell has ZERO continuity in it. As far as I know, they have only ever attempted ONE to be continued episode. The best part about that? They didn't even continue it the next week. Nope, they had a showing IN BETWEEN the two parts of something that was completely unreleated. I understand that sometimes series get shown out of production order (it happens all the time, most of the time it isn't a big deal but sometimes it changes the tone of the show. Look at Clerks: The Animated Series. The bets joke in the second show was that they were doing a clip show from the first show. The problem?? They showed the second show FIRST on broadcast TV.)

Anyway, Zack and Kelly break up so that Kelly can date her boss Jeff (hmmm, anyone else seeing problems with this?) They break up at the Costume Dance (where Zack Attack is playing, a band that we have never heard of and I don't think ever reappear in the series, but I could be wrong with that.) They pop up the To Be Continued ... no problem. The next show? Zack and the gang get summer jobs at the beach club. Yeah, there was no continuity problem there.

Far be it for me to complain to much about Saved by the Bell, though. I still love the show, complete with its overacting, bad acting, stupid situations and all. Bring on more of my childhood. Knight Rider on DVD is a treat as well.

Favorite Web Comics

My list of favorite Web Comics. I promised them to you last week, so here they are!

Penny Arcade One of the best, and if you read Web Comics, you probably read PA. Very funny one about gaming and games in general. Has a tendency to go off on unfunny tangents, but bear with it, it will become funny again. Also has a tendency to be very vulgar, which is part of its funniness.

Player vs. Player also known as PVP This one revolves around a game magazine company. And they have a blue troll known as Skull who is pretty neat. Reading the archives is necessary to know what is going on.

User Friendly is a comic about a group of ISP technicians. It's pretty funny but can be hard to read sometimes because of the artwork.

Diesel Sweeties It's a comic about an ex-internet porn star and her robotic boyfriend. Lots of other characters. Indie Rock Pete is my favorite.

Wapsi Square is a pretty funny comic about nothing, really. It's kinda like Seinfeld. Follows a friendly bunch of people doing what they do.

Ctrl-Alt-Del is a new comic I've just started. It's funny, like PA and PVP in vien, and is about games and gamers. Even makes fun of itself in the begining because the Author knows he's in a saturated market, but is still pretty good.

And the only syndicated comic I'm reading right now, because they post it on the web AND have an RSS feed is Dilbert

That's it, I think. I'll let you know if I think of anymore.

I may be breaking a rule

Okay, I may be breaking a rule about blogging more than once a day, but you know what? It's my blog, I'll do what I damn please :).

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&date=2003-05-30 Funniset thing I've read in a while. Ctrl-alt-del is a VERY funny web comic. Speaking of web comics, I read quite a few. I'll post about that Monday :).

My new favorite website

Ever have a question as to what something is and you just don't know where to look? There's a good chance wikipedia.org will have it. They have a goal, and that is to have, in database form, the entire sum of human knowledge. It's an open source encyclopedia that is constantly evolving, changing and adding to. It's really neat.

The other day I heard the term of a series "Jumping the Shark" I've heard this before, but never knew where it came from. This may be common knowledge to some, but it wasn't to me, but thanks to wikipedia, I now know. In case you're curious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumped_the_shark. It's really a great site.

Work Rant

Okay, today I'm going to rant about Windows 2003 and Microsoft Visual Interdev. Please feel free not to read today.

I copied my new application onto a Microsoft Windows 2003 webserver that we have up and running. It didn't work right away so I had to go investigate as to why. Seems as though W3k3 wasn't processing a Server Side Include (SSI.) A little bit of research ... AHH W2k3 ships locked down by default, SSIs aren't processed. No biggie, I turn it on, still doesn't work. AN HOUR I spent searching googol to figure out what was going on. Finally figured it out, and it was nothing with the setup, it was setup fine. See, when VI copies a web application to a new server, it SOMETIMES renames default.asp to default.htm. WELL, for security reasons, .htm files aren't processed as scripts, and they shouldn't be. So the webserver didn't know I had an include file because it was just happy to serve up the .htm file with no problems.

Okay, I knew that was going to be a rant that no one was going to care about.

Ummm, well ... the Phillies won yesterday. Go Phils. Yeah, that is all.

Don't you just hate it when things don't go to plan?

I'm not a smart man. At least that's what I keep telling myself today as I am re-writing a lot of code I worked on the past couple of days. See, specs changed, and I SHOULD have seen the change coming but didn't now, I have more work to do. I hate deadline projects (yeah, so the deadline isn't for another 5-6 weeks, but still, I's looming above me like the grim reaper. And I'm not talking about the cool "Death" from Family Guy who goes to frat parties and tries to pick up chicks. It's not even the cool "Grim Reaper Dude" from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. What was I talking about again?)

Very fun night last night watching Hellboy. Maybe it's just me, but I've been noticing a trend recently between rising Nazi conspiracies in movies, books and entertainment in general. A book I read a while ago The Day After Tomorrow had it (P.S. this book has NOTHING to do with the movie of the same name. The movie was better.) Well maybe it was just those two things that happened within a week or two of each other that made me think about it and there isn't anything going on, but it sure did seem like it for a while. I wonder if the entertainment industry is running out of ideas. During the Cold War it was easy to make the Ruskies the bad guy, now who? I haven't seen it yet (but do own it :)) but The Sum of All Fears was supposedly had a terroristic threat, but maybe that type of thing still hits too close to home to be good for entertainment purposes. Maybe it's just easy to make The Nazis the bad guys. One look at the swastika and all in the audience knows that they're bad.

Enough rambling for today. Bye Bye Jann, have a good time in Hawaii.

Lacey's Pretty Picture

Lacey drew a very pretty picture yesterday and asked me to put it on my blog. Since she is my wife, and it IS so pretty, I couldn't refuse. Check out here picture HERE.

So I'm kinda pissed right now. Looks like I may have forgotten to renew my domain name, christophersmith.us. I may not have any recourse to get it back either, which really sucks.

On a much better note, however, I'm listening to an excellent box set. Jimmy Buffett: Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads It's really good.

Still Writing

Even though a good 1/3 of my readership is on vacation (Condon's Blog) I'll write an update anyways.

Showgirls night was a success. At one point we had ~4-5 people as coming. By the end of the night we had at least 14 different people there. And all kinds of randomness as well, which was super-cool. Kyle Williams, Tim Morea, my sister her boyfriend and his brother, Ro, Kristen's friend. Oh, the movie sucked, though. It is the best box set ever created, so it has that going for itself.

The C.S.I. Dark Motives computer game is pretty fun. Follow the evidence. So far Lace and I have completed two missions and we got "Master" ranking for both. Note to anyone who buys or acquires through some other means: There are bugs in the game. Visit the website and download the latest patch. We had trouble with the second mission because of the bug that prevented our magnifying glass from working correctly.

That's all for now. If I come up with anything especially interesting, I'll be sure to come back.