My Poor BigToach
For the past few weeks I have had an ingrown toenail. I finally had it removed by my doctor on this past monday. The procedure went by really fast and everything seemed fine. I was directed to not remove the bandaging for 3 days. When I finally did remove the bandages my toe looked horrible. It looked like it had been severly burned and was just plain nasty looking. I have been to the emergency room twice now and to the doctors twice as well. I am now on 3 very strong anti-biotics to try to stop the infection or whatever the heck it is that is wrong with it. My doctor said that it might be a staff infection so they are being very aggresive with it. Anyways if you people want to see some really nasty images Here They Are.
The first two pictures were after I had been to theemergency room and they had drained those blisters once. The second two were immediately after I initally removed the bandages after the 3 days.
Possible Down Time
My host JaguarPC (who so far I have been very pleased with) is unfortunately right in the path of Hurricane Rita. They were very professional and e-mailed me las night to warn of the possibility for downtime and to recommend me to make personal backups just in case the damage is extremely bad. I put together a quick little google earth image so you can see where exactly the hurricane is headed and where my host is located. Click on the image to the left to check it out in better detail.
Just a sidenote, I used this method to show the map.
Arrested Development Season 3 Begins!!!
So in case you missed the fact that Arrested Development will be having a third season this year, It starts tonight. It is seriously the funniest show I have ever seen in my life. Everyone that I know that I have introduced the show to has fallen in love with it as well. I really really hope that everyone will watch it as much as they possibly can this season because the last two seasons the shows ratings have been very poor for some reason (mostly bad time slots).
Anywho enough chat and down to the specifics. Arrested Development will be on every MONDAY night at 8PM (7PM central time).
What happened to Cropp.in?
The staff server that I was hosting Cropp.in has been down for a while. Sometime soon I will transfer the domain pointer to this server so you kids can still use it.
New things will be coming to Cropp.in. I decided I wanted to make the image transactions between the server and the client use AJAX (similar to gmail, gmaps, flickr and some other ones you kids might have heard of). Since I will need to do lots of javascript work in terms of the AJAX anyways, I decided to make the interface for the system sexy as well with plenty of javascript.
I have been playing around with the Rico library which runs on top of Prototype. So far this thing is awesome. It is extremely easy to code with, and looks terrific. So far it has been easier to code the JS than the PHP that will do the backend work of actually editing the images. This is ironic because I am extremely familiar with PHP and only so-so with JS (barely any object knowledge in JS and rico and prototype are all written that way).
Once the new system is in place, not only will it look sexier (hopefully someone good at graphics will make me a design as sexy as the one that Ed made me), it will have more image functions as well. Because of the Snippets that I have been writing, I have written plenty of image functions that apply other certain filters to images and all of these will be available to change images with on the next Cropp.in. Here is a list of some of the features.
Also, if any of you would like to see a bit of what the next Cropp.in will look like, keep an eye on This File as it is my
I’m Engaged
So after over 6 years of dating my girlfriend and I have finally decided to tie the knot. I proposed to her today at around 7 pm in Newport Beach. Here is a full explanation of how I pulled it off and just some more general info.
Annie and I have been discussing getting married for some time now so she was expecting to get engaged fairly soon, which gave me the challenge of finding a way to make it a surprise for her. So as I went ring shopping (using images she had given me from online as my guide) I bought the ring the first day that I went to look. I went with a good friend to some lady that he knows and got a great 1.19 carat ring for a great price in a awesome looking ring. I did all this without Annie knowing that I had actually bought a ring, but she did know that I went with my friends to look at rings. The same night that I purchased the ring she asked what happened when I went ring shopping, and very sneekingly I replied “oh we just looked at some brochures and stuff and I think we are going to have to get one custom made” and she thought I was dumb for giving her this info.
So since I had the ring, I had to find a way to give it to her and make it still be a surprise. If I were to take her anywhere fancy or anything like that, it would set off a flag in her mind and she would know what was going on right away. By change my sister had just decided to fly into L.A. to visit my family and I decided this would be a great decoy to use to throw her off. I contacted a close friend who has a gorgeous house on the beach in Newport Beach (one of southern California’s nicest beaches by far) and asked her if I could use her house to propose at. She happily agreed that this would be a great Idea and I set the plan into motion.
The idea was that my sister, my mom and Annie would have a ladies day out and go to a day spa resort. Then after that Annie and my sister would go to an art event, in nearby Irvine, called Pageant of the Masters. However the tickets that my sister got for this event were from a lady who lived in Newport Beach, and she would have to stop by the house to pick up the tickets before they went to the show. Instead of them actually going to the show, I would be waiting outside on the beach wearing a tuxedo and instantly she would know what was happening.
As the week between when I bought the ring and when I was planning to propose passed, everything just came together perfectly and Annie had no clue what all was going on around her (all the lies that I had been telling her to keep her in the dark). So when she arrived at the beach house and went outside to look at the gorgeous view, there I was, waiting for her in my tuxedo. She right away got so excited and surprised. I then said something to her (I’m not exactly sure what it was that I said because I was so nervous, and she didn’t remember either because she was so excited and surprised) and then asked “Will you marry me Annie?” She said YES and we hugged and kissed and my sister came us and hugged us and everyone else that was hiding in the house continued to do the same.
After the proposal was successful, I had a romantic dinner on the beach where we could sit, talk, and watch the sun set. We were served steak and lots of champagne for dinner and had a great chocolate fondue for dessert. The lady who owns the house LOVES to cook so she prepared everything and served it to us out on the beach. The food was excellent along with the view and my gorgeous new Fiancé sitting next to me. Following the dinner we went back inside to see that both Annie’s parents and my parents were upstairs waiting for us. The rest of the night we stayed upstairs and just relaxed and exchanged stories. It was a great night and now I am engaged to the best chick ever!
Heres some media of the whole thing so you can get an even better idea of how gorgeous it was outside.
Pictures of the Proposal and a Video of the Proposal
(wmv with no sound. If there was sound, all you would hear is Crash by Dave Matthews)
Treo 600
So my dad just recently changed all the phones at his company from Nextel to Verizon (Nextel was raping them with charges) and so my dad got the new Treo 650 phone to use as his only phone from now on. So this left his old Treo 600 without an owner. So, being the loving son that I am, volunteered myself to take the responsibility of finding an owner of the Treo 600.
It took me like 30 seconds before I gave up and decided to keep the phone for myself :D So I got a free Treo 600 with all the bells and whistles already in place on it. All I had to do was have Verizon Wireless redirect my cell phone number from my old LG VX6000 to my new Treo and Voila, I have a fully-working free Treo 600 phone now. I also have a leftover 256M SD card to use as extra storage on the phone as well. OKay I guess that is enough bragging for now.
Creepy Dragon
Since I haven’t posted in a while, I figured I would post some random crap to keep those of you who read this somewhat entertained. I was going over some new software for the cvs digital camera and camcorder that I bought a while back to play with and hack. So far the digital camera works perfect. I use it all the time to take pictures of random stuff and can do so without being worried about breaking it (it set me back only 20 bucks). Some people are still working on doing a better job at hacking the camcorder, but a few random videos are out.
As I was going through them I found an old optical illusion that I have seen many times and figured that I would share it with you kids and give you some links to let you build it if you would so desire. It is the old dragon that seems to follow you wherever you go. If that doesn’t make any sense at all, here are a couple videos that demonstrate it for you.
Video 1 (windows media)
Video 2 (Xvid, go to Videolan.org and download their player if you dont have Xvid support. It’s the best player ever!)
The second video was also captured on the CVS camcorder that I will hack once better software comes out for it.
If you guys want to make your own little ones of these, you can use this JPEG or this PDF file to print them out and then assemble. These files were obtained from grand-illusions.com.
That about does it for this post. I am sure I will be posting again as soon as the PM system goes live over at Neverside.
Finished (mostly)
So after a long time of working in my free time it looks like I am done with my part of the PM system for Neverside. Jeremie still has to code the templates because I am horrible at making things accessable and good looking.
I do still need to go through the system and make sure that there are no gaping security holes or any lingering bugs. I might also need to implement some bread-crumb navigation things (Neverside - Private Messages - Foldername - Inbox - Message name) etc. Although that will be fairly easy to implement. So as soon as NS 1.5 (I think…?) is released all you kids should be able to bug each other with PM’s and not just the forums alone.
Snippet Section
So I needed a break from coding for Neverside, so I decided to add a new Snippet Section to my site. It is the third tab on the navigation up top in case you missed it as well.
The system will have lots of useful little PHP snippets that you can use in your scripts for various different things. My favorite thing to do in PHP is write little snippets like this so I figured that I could write one every so often and just post it here so you people can use them as well. I currently have like 10 snippets or so. Hopefully you kids will enjoy them, if not I will. Now go use them for cool stuff like exposing Idiots… somehow it could do it i guess…
Stupid Broadcast Flag
So in case you don’t know what the “Broadcast Flag” is, it is basically just a 16bit code inserted into over-the-air high-def transmissions that will stop people from recording the content. The retards in Hollywood are pushing this to the FCC and it looks like they may accept it.
The reason I don’t like this, is because the FCC will only allow hardware makers to make their systems so that they can NOT record these shows when the Broadcast Flag is present. So the Government is telling me what I can and can’t do with my own equipment and shows that I bought. I hate the Government when they pass more laws that limit my rights in case you didn’t already realize that. Unlike a lot of people I actually have High-Def televisions so this will make a difference for me. I have my own BigScreen Sony television. Along with my tv, my parents have the new Mitsubishi DLP TV and my girlfriend has another Big Screen Mitsubishi as well. Needless to say I really dont want this peice of crap flag to go through.
Luckily if you live in one of the following states you can still do something about it. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Washington, or Wisconsin. Over at BoingBoing.net there is a guide to how to do something about it.
If you want more info about the Broadcast Flag, there is great info for it at C|net and the opposing is also at C|net.
Good Riddance.