youth (or, it's a small world after all)

in

so, in the spirit of valentine's day, i saw a post on gawker that linked to the black hearts party. i started reading through, looking at pictures, and then realized that it all seemed a tad familiar. i went and looked at the archives, and came across BHP IV. "New Brunswick, NJ"? waaaaaait a minute... i was totally at that party! oh yeah, that part about the impromptu penis viewing? yeah, that was me. what can i say? i was young and silly. anyway, i was quite pleased to see that i made the writeup.

bike stuff

in

it's gonna be spring next week no matter if the weather wants to cooperate or not. i ordered a bunch of cold-weather clothing yesterday from nashbar, a balaclava (so tasty!), tights (faggy!) and some weatherproof socks. my nizzle paul was over last night helping me put all my new components on the bike. should be finished up tomorrow, so when the clothes get here and the weather is downright balmy in the mid 30s middle of next week, i'll be riding in. i really want to start binge eating again.

in other news, i see that brian has updated his weblog to Movable Type. gotta change my sidebar link. i also see that he's trying out proper cApiTalZaTioN. i think i might go that route myself soon, because i've heard from more than one person that my weblog kinda looks like one big (and hard to read) lump o' shite.

flush (or, how to gross out your co-workers)

in

ok, so i drink a lot of liquid during the day, so that means i go to pee a lot. the urinals in the men's room are the slightly old-fashioned type, in that you have to pull the handle when you're done; there's no little red eye that knows when you're through tapping a kidney and flushes for you. i've noticed that at least once a day, maybe more often than that, i'll go in and see that someone has used the urinal and not flushed. now, i know that since most urinals do this auto-flush thing, maybe people have been conditioned to not think about flushing so often, but i still really think that you could realize that you're leaving a stinky puddle of urine and give the handle just a little flick...

Laid-Off Zoologist Goes On Tranquilizing Rampage

in

SAN DIEGO--Twelve San Diego Zoo visitors and two employees were brutally sedated Monday, when laid-off zoologist Dr. Brian Vermeer, 41, returned to his former place of work armed with a tranquilizer gun and began firing into a crowd. "It was kind of horrible," said Maria Christopher, 44, who witnessed the tranquilizing spree. "People were gently falling asleep over the course of 20 to 30 seconds everywhere." The spree ended when Vermeer turned his gun on himself, knocking himself out for half an hour. Original Onion Article

heartbreak (or, the unbearable likeness of being a rangers fan)

in

ok, so the rangers re-acquired kovalev from the penguins. big deal. so what if you look at the team page and kovalev already is the leader in all scoring categories? who cares? sather fires trottier and goes behind the bench himself. yawn.

as a longtime fan, i've been through the entire range of emotions. the overwhelming joy of them winning the cup. the sense of loss when messier went to vancouver. the dread when lindros came to town, one concussion away from retirement. and i've sat and watched them miss the playoffs for the last 5 years.

yes, kovalev is proven talent... at least, he is when he's in pittsburgh, and most notably playing against the rangers. doesn't matter. they need a team, not the collection of aging, overpaid "superstars" that they have now. sather needs to use his $70 million payroll, cut everyone over the age of 30, and use all that freed-up money to secure some good draft picks and promising young players, like blackburn and lundmark. i know that sather has to placate the n.y. fans who are getting pretty damn impatient with being the team with the highest salary and not even an 8th place spot to show for it, but just suck it up, prepare to suck for a few years, and start fresh. that's the only way to build a strong team that will actually play as a team. the knicks are going to have to learn the same painful lesson over the next few years, too...

jam-packed weekend of birthday fun.

in

jam-packed weekend of birthday fun. friday night went to dinner with slf, ryan and dawnie-dawn. after dinner we went over to the holiday to have some (read: many) birthday shots. now i know what Jagermeister tastes like. saturday woke up late (obviously), and made some yummy blueberry crepes. went for a quick bike ride to try out the new one (brrr! cold!), and then started making my mushroom thingy for the potluck dinner i was going to that night. the cooking went ok, but i definitely need a bigger saute pan.

yesterday was pretty mellow; went to the mattress factory, then went and saw the recruit, and then quiet evening at my apt.; making potato/garlic soup and flailing around trying to get redhat 7.2 to recognize my videocard. i'll be writing about all those mis-adventures later.

birthday (or, one day closer to DEATH!!!)

in

ok, maybe i'm being a little overly dramatic, but it is indeed my birthday today. i don't really attach too much significance to my birthdays, since i don't really worry too much about getting old. perhaps the only really significant thing about this year is the fact that i'll be 30 next year. anyway, trying to cobble together dinner with some close friends tonight, so that should be a good time.

wrc party

in

ok, so the plan was supposed to be to have a few people over to watch the speedvision wrapup of the wrc rallye monte carlo. tivo was going to tape it on thursday night after i had already gotten on the road to n.j., and everyone was going to come over last night and watch. the problem was, i got home on monday night, and it wasn't there. it just didn't tape it. my thought is the wishlist search i use to tape all wrc rallies didn't work, because the program guide has a slightly different name for the show this season. i'll adjust it in time for sweden, and we'll see if i can't get it all sorted out. people still came over last night, and it actually wound up being bigger than i had initially thought... jen, casey, mara and the slf were all there; it went from a sausage party to a low-grade wingding! slf completely bailed me out by going and doing food/wine shopping during the day so we'd have enough snacky-treats... she went overboard, but in a very good way. the best part was that they brought me a little suprise birthday party cake! with b00bies! see for yourself: ooo! you suprised me and my luscious breasts! you're excited? feel these nipples! the girls help get all that pesky whipped cream off see all the pictures

nothing too exciting happened on

in

nothing too exciting happened on monday. i made my way down to philly, took ryan to an interview, went to king of prussia mall (um... BIG!) for an hour or so, wandered around urban outfitters w/o finding anything to spend money on (must be my new thrifty outlook on life), and then we were on our way back to lovely pittsburgh. on the ride back i talked to my dad, who wanted to know what i wanted for my impending birthday, so i basically just gave him my bike wishlist to pick and choose from. oh, i know something exceptional about the weekend... saturday, sunday AND monday morning i had a porkroll and cheese sandwich for breakfast. dee-licious!

game, set, match (or, 'ow ow ow ow', part 2)

in

sunday i slept in pretty late, and then went to go visit my mom. i would have gotten to her place before she was back from church, so i went and blew an hour or so walking around at the mall. i thought i found a really cool thing for the slf at williams-sonoma, a french press for coffee. i thought i had heard her and brian talking about it when we were at dinner a few weeks ago, and her saying she didn't have one. turns out she does, but just not one that also is a travel mug. oops. got to my mom's, we swapped belated xmas presents, and then my mom suggested we go play a game of raquetball. i've never played before, and i didn't even really have the right clothes, and certainly not the right shoes, but i borrowed sneakers from my stepdad, and we were off! let me just tell you; if you've never played raquetball before, it is hard! my mom is in her 50s, and she ran my ass into the ground! granted, she has been playing for quite a few years, but i still wasn't adequately prepared for the slaughter. she seems to think that i did great for a first time, and i'll get much better if i keep playing, but that might have just been her being nice. i ran full-speed into walls, took dives on the floor, you name it. i'm actually writing this a couple of days later and pre-dating it in blogger, so i can tell you that things still hurt; i'm having trouble raising my raquet arm above shoulder-height, and my ass hurts from repeatedly falling on it. all that said, i really enjoyed it, and i definitely got a good cardio workout. i'm loathe to take up another sport, but perhaps next winter it'll be a nice thing to keep me in enough shape to eat what i want when it's not bike season.

ow ow ow ow.

in

started off saturday with a little bit of a hangover from the night before... to make myself feel better, i started tweaking my dad's computer. put some spyware-detection, some popup-blocking, and some memory-defragging on there. while i was doing all that stuff, my stepmom started telling me about their neighbor that had just gotten herself a savannah. for those of you that have never heard of one, they are exotic cats, a cross-breed between a bengal and an african serval. they're supposed to be like dogs; extremely playful, no special vet care required, and they get big. really big. i think it would be great to have a cat that weighed around 40 pounds. the main problem is the price (and the fact that i already have 3 cats, and with how much they shed it's more like 4 or 5), since depending what percentage serval they are (75% can start around $5k for male, $10k for female (1st and 2nd generation males are sterile)). actually, a guy who lives right down the street from me has had a running adventure with a full-blooded serval.

saturday night was a nice big family dinner. my younger sister was in from out of town, and my older sister was there as well with her new man. my grandmother was up from philly because, as my sister astutely pointed out, it was the 1st anniversary of my grandfather passing. while we were all there, my younger sister gave me my xmas/birthday present, a hand-knitted afghan. apparently it took her 5 months to do... i was just floored that she had put as much work into it as she had. pictures below: me and siblings me and siblings recreating old family portrait me and siblings me and siblings me and siblings 

back in joisey

in

set out from philly this a.m. stopped in at my old job to say hi to everyone, and jaime and i went and grabbed a nice sushi lunch. it was really nice to see everyone that i used to work with, but it's also sorta tough; they had a really bad year last year and had to lay some people off. but, it sounds like they have some good things cooking and i'm really hopeful/optimistic for them. made my way up to my dad's place after that, and we had a nice mellow evening. my stepmom made a completely kickass mushroom appetizer thingy. i think i've come to the conclusions that mushrooms are not nearly as bad of a thing as i thought they were previously. i'm gonna have to try and make that, with the slf's help, of course. (look! new slf pictures! aren't we cute?!)

when we were done eating my dad busted out his pictures from his recent trip to barcelona. i don't have copies here, but the pics of the gaudi architecture was incredible.

Helene
Helene so shocked she needed
to immediately start drinking.

after dinner and pictures i went out to look up an old high-school friend that i hadn't seen in 10 years. she didn't go to our 10-year reunion, and although people knew she had gone to florida to join the navy, we all pretty much lost touch with her after that. i remember getting a random email from her about 6 years ago or so, and it went like this: 

To: matt
From: helene
Subject: porn

hey matt, it's helene!  do you know where i can find some good porn online?

i think by the time i got around to replying the address i replied to had bounced, and she sorta slipped out of sight. so, i heard from a friend that they had seen her bartending over the summer at a place right back in our hometown, so i made a few calls, made sure she still worked there, and dropped by for a visit. she didn't recognize me at first, and she seemed shocked as shit to see me.... not suprising, i guess. turns out she's had an interesting life in the last 10 years... married for 3 months, in a bad accident requiring all sorts of rehab, and then back in n.j. to finish her masters and become an english professor. her fiance came in while i was there, too. he was very deep into eastern philosophy; had been a yogi for a few years in india/nepal/thailand/etc., and now was back in the states. anyway, the plan is to head back to n.j. with ryan at some point in the near future, and try and do a better job of catching up with what everyone's been up to the last 10 years.

after my trip down memory lane with helene, i went and hung out with jen, another high school friend, for awhile... along with her roomate and boyfriend. we drank some wine, and in general had a good time.

urg. blogger ate my post

in

urg. blogger ate my post from before... i guess their database dropped a nut or something. i would really love to move to some sort of homegrown (or at least self-contained) blogging solution, but i guess i would actually need time to set that up, eh? for awhile before i went pro, blogger would eat my posts on a regular basis, so i got in the habit of actually making them to a text file, and then pasting in when i was all done. i didn't this morning, but i might have to start again. anyway, i was pretty happy with the weather this a.m.; after the last few weeks, 30 degrees and light snow feels like a balmy summer day.

in other news, a friend of the slf who happens to be a music distributor sent along pre-release copies of the new kristin hersh and throwing muses cds. i know that all the people on the throwing music messageboard are all geeked out because of the new muses record (titled "throwing muses", appropriately enough), which is their first since they went into semi-retirement in the late 90s, but i've really only been able to give that one spin so far. i've been completely entranced by kristin's solo album, "the grotto". i've been listening to it pretty much non-stop at work since monday. the album is a collection of raw nerves, bundled together for your listening enjoyment. the music on some borders on downright "rollicking", but most are classic solo kristin. perfect example is track #1, "sno cat". stripped-down arrangement; just kristin's quavering-yet-strong voice, her guitar, and a tinkling piano in the closing seconds. pure bliss.

Why MAC addresses suck

in

any idea how much of a pain it is to find info about obtaining hardware MAC addresses from clients using an ASP page? for windows machines:

strIP = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_X_CISCO_BBSM_CLIENTIP")
strMac = GetMACAddress(strIP)

Function GetMACAddress(strIP)
	Set net = Server.CreateObject("wscript.network")
	Set sh = Server.CreateObject("wscript.shell")
	sh.run "%comspec% /c nbtstat -A " & strIP & " > c:\" & strIP & ".txt",0,true
	Set sh = nothing
	Set fso = createobject("scripting.filesystemobject")
	Set ts = fso.opentextfile("c:\" & strIP & ".txt")
	macaddress = null
	Do While Not ts.AtEndOfStream
		data = ucase(trim(ts.readline))
		If instr(data,"MAC ADDRESS") Then
			macaddress = trim(split(data,"=")(1))
			Exit Do
		End If
	loop
	ts.close
	Set ts = nothing
	Set fso = nothing
	GetMACAddress = macaddress
End Function

for *nix boxes:

strIP = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_X_CISCO_BBSM_CLIENTIP")
strMac = GetMACAddress(strIP)

Function GetMACAddress(strIP)
	Set net = Server.CreateObject("wscript.network")
	set oShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
	cmd = "%COMSPEC% /c ping -n 2 " & strIP & ">nul"
	oShell.Run cmd,0,1
	set oShell = nothing
	Set sh = Server.CreateObject("wscript.shell")
	sh.run "%comspec% /c arp -a " & strIP & " > c:\" & strIP & ".txt",0,true
	Set sh = nothing
	Set fso = createobject("scripting.filesystemobject")
	Set ts = fso.opentextfile("c:\" & strIP & ".txt")
	macaddress = null
	Do While Not ts.AtEndOfStream
		data = ucase(trim(ts.readline))
		If instr(data,strIP) Then
			macaddress = trim(split(split(data,strIP)(1),"DYNAMIC")(0))
			Exit Do
		End If
	loop
	ts.close
	Set ts = nothing
	Set fso = nothing
GetMACAddress = macaddress
End Function

substitute "REMOTE_ADDR" for "HTTP_X_CISCO_BBSM_CLIENTIP" if you're not using this weak-ass cisco proxy software like i am. i hate ASP.

JWZ -vs- W3C

in

so, over the weekend, everyone's favorite iconoclast jwz decided to take on the new trend towards standards-compliant sites. i disagree with him that designers fall into only one category these days:

"HTML must only be used for semantic markup, but that semantic markup must rigidly adhere to the pixel-accurate positioning in the spec, so that we can still design our web pages in Photoshop!"

i think something that he's missing is the fact that a lot of times designers do come up with their "paper-based print-layout design they learned in art school", but then hand them off to schlubs like me to bring these creations to life. the issues on my end look like this:

  1. designers i work with only care about the finished product. period. as long as the screen they see on their mac look like what they did in photoshop, they're happy.
  2. i might not be the only one working on a particular site. someone else has to come along and decipher my code at some point.
  3. accessibility of the site, both to search engines and disabled visitors.

and here's why i like the "anal-retentive W3C" solution:

  1. you can't beat css for making global changes which seem to be so common for designers. "oh, can you bump the headlines up a point size? can we decrease the font size on all these pages here?" in table-based layouts, <font> size at a page level does not carry over to inside <td> tags. if you want to do a global search-and-replace on potentially thousands of pages, be my guest.
  2. nobody likes to read tag soup. i've had enough of slogging through someone else's (bad) markup trying to figure out which fucking table cell is pushing everything over like that. what's more, semantic markup gives meaning to the content. granted, you could bump up the font size and just use <b> for a headline, but using an <h1> tag actually means something. what's more, having semantically correct pages makes them index better on search engines, and helps them return more meaningful and useful results.
  3. granted, giving lip service to accessibility is useful when explaining to clients why you want to shred all their current pages, but there are legal reasons to do so, as well. jwz's stance against css i find puzzling, especially since he's been such a proponent of function over form. if your browser supports css, you see a happy page design. if not, you see the content of the page, and if it was done in semantically correct html, it might even almost have the document hierarchy/structure that helps it make sense, even without all the fancy columns/pictures/fonts.