The Flow of Consciousness

I first direct your attention to the content of the article, a story of a horrible incident involving a British cannibal.

I then direct your attention to the advertisement beside it.

You may commence rofling.

(Yes, it’s from a while ago.)

I had today the most phenomenal sandwich I’ve had in recent memory.

It was the French Dip and Swiss at Arby’s, and it was fantastic. The au jus was delicious, the bread was perfect, the beef and cheese tasted wonderful. I’m incredibly pleased and look forward to having another very soon.

Clearly, this text is upright.
.uʍop-ǝpısdn sı ʇxǝʇ sıɥʇ ‘ʎ1ɹɐǝ1ɔ

go
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John Chow dot Com, a blog that helps you make money is giving away a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor! To enter, you just have to write about it. This is my entry. Now give me the monitor! The contest is sponsored by BluFur, who wants to let you know that they’re hosting Canada and the rest of the world.

I usually pass on his contests, but this is too good to pass up.

I need to find a decent gallery software and photo/video host that works with it. Any ideas?

I tried Picasa, but Google limits you to 1 GB of pics online and the uploading interface within Picasa isn’t wonderful. I’ve got about 600 MB right now just on my hard drive, and probably another 800 MB on an external.

I like Zooomr a lot, too, but its interface is still a little clunky and it was down for almost two months when an upgrade went bad. I also don’t care for its long user page URLs. I would prefer a subdomain or a first-level directory. I really like its OpenID login, though.

I don’t want to use Flickr because of its affiliation with Yahoo!. It’s not that Yahoo! is bad, I just don’t want to be yet-another-Flickr-user. However, Flickr seems to be about the top dog right now.

Photobucket doesn’t have the management for which I’m looking, or at least I don’t think it does.

I’m looking for something with albums, data reading from EXIF, license management (can specify which photos I want to be paid for use), and an offline album management tool like Picasa.

I used to use SPGM, but got annoyed because it doesn’t do thumbnails on-the-fly. I had to use Gallery Mage to generate, but I couldn’t upload from it because I use only SFTP on my server and Gallery Mage can only do regular FTP.

Facebook is out because of the long URL for public albums and its downscaling of the pictures without being able to see the original. Yeah, I could TinyURL it, but then I’d have to remember 10 random characters.

Ideas, folks?

Apparently, my IP is within a range blocked by PeerGuardian’s p2p block list. It falls within a range owned by “Performance Systems International.”

So, if you’re having problems connecting to my site and you’re running PeerGuardian, make sure that you allow traffic from 38.113.64.90 or permanently allow the range within the block list management section of PeerGuardian.

I don’t know if I could handle watching the “Hurt” music video more than once a week. It’s so incredibly powerful.

In it, Cash is seated at a dining table with a feast before him and singing the song. It cuts to him strumming in a chair every once in a while. However, it’s the clips from throughout his life that really got me. Here’s this man, a very highly respected musician, who is singing a song about keeping people away from himself because of the mistakes he’s made.

However, the most powerful part of the video is when there’s a clip of a young June, his wife, with their child. Not 10 seconds later, she’s shown again, but as she is now (well, in 2003). It’s amazing to see how she’s changed. It’s amazing, too, to see how he’s changed.

Go check it out. “Hurt” is on the American IV album.

I took it upon myself these past few days to redo Phi Tau’s tabletops. They were only about three years old, but the original builders used OCB plywood instead of a finish plywood and then the tables were used before a polyurethane coat dried.

Johnny Nagy is redoing one and I’m doing the other. I’ll post more on Johnny’s when he’s closer to producing something photography-worthy.

I repainted the legs and structure. I kept it red, but used a more vibrant red because that’s the only red that came in the cheap spray paint I wanted to use.

Here’s the table with the new top screwed on:

Unfortunately, I made a slight oops when I screwed in a screw on the end (or Blose did, ’cause he screwed a few of them on):

After the first coat of stain:

After the second coat of stain:

It’s going to get some red stripes down the length and then get some red dots indicating where to put bowling pins/cups should one want to use this table for certain party sports

If you’ve seen the original, it’s going to look like it, but with a stained background instead of yellow and it’ll be smooth and easier to clean.

I went Friday night with Stacey, Mark, and Ian to see a Mahoning Valley Thunder arena football game at the Chevrolet Center in Youngstown, Ohio. They played the Manchester Wolves, a team from New Hampshire.

I was impressed, very impressed. I had no idea that arena football had quite the following it does. There’s some one million people who attend the games yearly, and it’s growing very quickly as people realize how cool the sport is.

It’s pretty much the same as outdoor, NFL football, except a few things:

• The ball carrier can roll off a wall, but if he’s tackled against the wall or the ball touches the top of the wall, it’s out-of-bounds.
• Fourth-down punts don’t exist, but the kicker can drop-kick for a two-point conversion or a four-point field goal.
• The field is only 50 yards long and 85 feet wide. This makes for a pretty quick game, as the drives and possession times are shorter.
• The play clock is 25 seconds instead of 35 seconds.
• A receiver can move forward before the snap. In NFL, this would be motion in the backfield (I think).
• Eight players are on the field instead of 11. There’s less field to cover, so it works out.
• The uprights are considerably closer together. The kicks are never more than 50 yards away, so even mediocre kickers can hit it.

I was also impressed with the sportsmanship of the two teams. During one play in particular, one of the Wolves knocked the helmet off of a Thunder man. Rather than get all macho and offended, the Thunder man and the Wolf shook hands and both screamed, “AWESOME!” The Thunder man walked to his helmet, picked it up, and got back in the game. You don’t see that in NFL ball.

The tickets were cheap, too. Stacey’s brother bought them for her for her birthday, but they’d have only been $40 had we bought them. The seats were really good, too—the equivalent of the 40-yard line at an NFL game. The $15 seats would probably suffice, and if the seats aren’t filled up, the ushers don’t seem to mind people moving into the center once the game is underway.

The bad things? As always, alcohol was expensive. It was $5.50 for a 10 oz beer. That’s it. That’s all that was bad. The restrooms were close, there wasn’t any stupid players doing stupid things.

OK, the referee sucked. He sucked a lot when he counted a touchdown that was clearly fumbled. Instant replay even showed it. He got booed a lot throughout the game for making pretty awful calls.

Here’s a play from the game:

Would I go back again? Hell yeah. The Thunder plays at home the Quad City Steamwheelers on June 16, the Albany Conquest July 13, and the Green Bay Blizzard July 28.

They’ve also got some cheerleaders

I’m going to start posting neat videos and pics to a new part of my web site, the phone stuff archive.

I’ve put up some pictures, as well as two videos. Here’s one of them:

If enough people clamor, I’ll write a little utility that will automatically send the pics or videos to phones.

Go check out the phone stuff archive!