Google is hring for their Copernicus Complex!

You know what would be really funny? If I made a big announcement on April 1st that seemed like it was a joke ... but it wasn't. I think one of these April 1sts I'm going to do that ... eh heh heh.

Some random facts I just discovered while watching the "Powder" video ... the drummer for Yellowcard is Longineu Parsons II (who is amazingly SICK!) ... who happens to be the son of Longineu Parsons, the folk trumpet player.

If you've got time, can you mess around with the demo spell checker and see if you can find any bugs?

The only UI problem I see is automatically changing the text in the preview to automatically correct ... for the life of me I cannot get the JS fixed to change that, although it works fine in the textarea. Gah.

Interesting links:

Duhon's shot worth up to $100 million?

"Anybody but Duke."

From the article:

They won five consecutive ACC tournament titles from 1999-2003 and have reached seven straight regional semifinals since 2004.

And they've achieved it all, the Blue Devils like to point out, the right way. There are no recruiting violations. No rape charges. You never hear about Coach K tossing back Natural Light's with college co-eds. And other than Kansas, no school in the Sweet 16 graduated a higher percentage (68 percent) of its players.

Hmm... although I cannot deny Duke's success, I can't say that it's not been without some smudges (there have been drug and rape allegations). But those seem to be the norm rather than the exception at most colleges.

I didn't get to see the game (went to watch Hellboy with Yush), but I hear from Duke fans that the officials "stole" the game, while I hear from most everyone else that although it was pretty bad, it was poor shot selection, Okafur, and turnovers that really led to their defeat.

So I decided to check out Dickie "I love Duke" V, who would probably give me the best answer.

Duke, the No. 1 seed in the Atlanta Region, didn't manage the clock well and didn't take good shots down the stretch -- especially two bad jumpers (with the lead) late in the game when it would have been better to milk the clock.

Well, I'm sold.

Oops, Tabulas had its first significant downtime when my upgrade script much longer than it should of and I went to bed because I couldn't bother waiting for it to finish.

(Want to know what I was doing?)

Unrelated: The lessons of Mogadishu applied to Iraq.

Jeff Bezos is such a smart man. There's a good streaming webcast of the lessons learned from the dot.com era.

Speaking of which, if you're looking to replace RealPlayer because it sucks ... look into downloading Windows Media Player Classic. It's incredibly small ... low CPU overhead ... and it works perfectly.

I haven't installed RealPlayer on this computer since :)

Yes, William Hung has an album out. I've had the honor of listening to it ... and much to my roommates' disgust, I've shared my love of this album with them. William Hung's release shows his confidence as a maturing artist; now that William has conquered all our hearts, he's out to conquer the charts.

Go give it a listen.

My favorites are "I Believe I Can Fly" and "Shake your Bon Bon."

. . .

I think the perfect end to this meta-joke would be to get Joseph Kahn to direct one of William Hung's videos... perhaps it's time I start a petition to try to get Joseph Kahn to direct one of these videos.

Man, I love this! An environmental class bought up the rights to pollute the environment with 9 tons of sulfur and then renounced those rights; it's using capitalism to save the environment!

The EPA (those fine folks charged with keeping our environment as clean as possible) auction off the rights to pollute the environment; most of these are bought by power companies who need to emit greenhouse gases. Now, these allowances are actually sold publicly ... and anyone can buy them. So apparently this class (and others have done this before) buy up these allowances, basically denying anybody else the ability to pollute!

It's a grand idea... the article notes that what the class bought is probably not enough to affect the power companies, but imagine if tons of people started getting involved with this; if enough people could buy these allowances, it would constrict supply so that the price for the allowances would increase for the power companies; if the prices became too high, then the power companies might (in a really idealized world, I know) pursue alternative fuel sources. Of course, increasing that price would also increase the average cost of the homeowner's energy bill, but this would also help force people to quit wasting so much energy!

Using capitalism to save the environment, who would of thunk it?

i'll be the man who will fight for your honor
i'll be the hero that you're dreaming of
gonna live forever knowing together
that we did it all for the glory of love

It has just occured to me that I am madly in love with Kate Beckinsale.

KATE BECKINSALE, PLEASE BE MY BABY'S MOMMA!

Oops, I almost posted this to the 'tabulas' journal... ehehehe

The fallout from the Super Bowl show still goes on ... with the FCC increasingly getting anal about what can be shown on TV, Victoria's Secret has canceled their annual show.

. . .

There's also some ... stupid commentary regarding the supposed 9/11 memo. Did you actually read the 9/11 memo? The only thing it mentions is that Osama bin-Laden is not "deterred by setbacks." You see, this would be a big scandal if the memo actually said that Osama planned on using airplanes to attack NYC on September 11th. Instead the memo just seems to be saying, "Oh, Osama is a threat." OH REALLY. WE DIDN'T KNOW... THANKS

. . .

Update: Rebecca Romijn and John Stamos have separated. YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Working on revamping the control panel has been tougher than I thought. Part of this was my vacillation on key features/aspects of data handling which led to rewrites and more rewrites. (Example: How are 'drafts' and 'private entries' different? Answer: They're not. Or they are. Or they're not)

In any case, I've also wanted to add in a lot of features that require a lot of database changes (e.g. multiple category selection for a selected entry) ... so to add these changes in transparently into the exising Tabulas DB while rewriting the control panel has been a time-consuming and nerve-racking task in itself.

Part of the other trouble is simple motivation; this control panel isn't just an aesthetic change; it's also implementing a lot of new features... I'm in essence rewriting most of Tabulas ... not just the way entries are handled, but also the gallery output, the content pages/links output, the hit logging output ... so it's been very discouraging for me to see so much left to do... but I've just gotta chip away at the huge block. One day I'll wake up and find that the block is almost gone (Yay!)

The spell-check feature has been giving me nightmares. It works fine, but there are a few *big* UI issues that I cannot address because it involves me learning Javascript (beyond my crude Neanderthalic understanding of JS) ... so I know once the spellcheck feature is released, I'll probably receive a lot of (justified) complaints. But small steps. Small steps.

With some intermittency, I've been working with Borst on the Lightbox7 uploader... the uploading works fine (there are a slew of UI issues to deal with ... but Borst had been working diligently until he got sick) ... but we don't have the handshake portion from client to server down pat yet.

But the benefit of all this is that the work is being done on a separate URL ... so people could in technicality access the new control panel to add their entries and whatnot. I may do that to test the new entry addition engine (which took a week (!!!!!) to write) while I hack out the other features. (Any volunteers?)

But yeah. So much crud to do, so little time. None of this even factors in my workload for Audiomatch, which I have been hacking away at (only a few minutes a day ... but I'd like to devote about half an hour to an hour later today on it)...


AHHHHHHH. SOMEONE SAVE ME!!!

I'm sitting here in Undergrad Library (2nd floor) ... doing a lot of work. Nasty Nate came over and we went to get a drink. As I walked out, I noticed a pretty cute Asian chick .... playing Party Poker on her laptop.


Girl who play poker == hoooooottt.

Haha.

Very interesting commentary about N. Korea ... and also, I'm not sure how valid this article is, but supposedly the United States is pulling out of the DMZ later this year.

. . .

And uhh, apparently William Hung broke the top 50 on the Billboards.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Go boy!

Most of you who know me in personal life know that I have a small... hard drive. I am ecstatic when I can free up more than 100 megs of free space to run Photoshop without running into, "You have run out of scratch disk" error messages.

In any case, I've been doing some freelance work, and I had to open one of the documents sent by the client outlining the work load. Eudora downloads all attachments (whether they are viruses or legitimate viruses... I think Eudora should delete the attachment when I delete the email, but that's another story) ... long story short, I opened website01.doc instead of web site improvements.doc. And guess what? website01.doc was actually a virus (W32.Netsky.P).

So I trudged on over to the UNC software download site to download Norton. But the stupid website decided that downloading the Managed Norton Client should be the default option ... and left only a small hyperlink to download the Unmanaged client.

But of course, I didn't realize this until I had spent about 20 minutes clearing out the required 150 megs to install the program ...

So I went back and downloaded the Unmanaged version and found out I had Netsky. Not really being the patient type, I reconnected my computer to the internet (I left it disconnected to limit the virus' capabilities) and found out how to manually remove the virus.

One thing I will never understand is why some websites just don't publish EASY steps on how to remove these viruses.

So if you have Netsky.P, here is how to remove the virus: WARNING: THIS WILL NOT REMOVE THE VIRUS FROM YOUR SYSTEM COMPLETELY; IT WILL SIMPLY DISABLE IT SO IT STOPS USING YOUR COMPUTER AS ITS PRIVATE MAIL SERVER

1.) Find all the nasty .exe's it leaves around (since it replicates a lot on your hard drive, it may take you a while... use a scanner to get rid of them... you can use Microcall's Housecall Free Online Virus Scanner)

2.) Go to your Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and locate FVProtect.exe. Close it.

3.) Go to Start, Run, regedit

Select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Select Software
Select Microsoft
Select Windows
Select CurrentVersion
Select Run

4.) Delete the value "Norton Antivirus AV"="%Windir%FVProtect.exe" on the left side.

5.) Go to your Windows folder (most likely C:Windows and delete the following files:

FVprotect.exe
base64.tmp
zip1.tmp
zip2.tmp
zip3.tmp
zipped.tmp

This should stop the virus from working ... but you still need to remove it using the link below.

Edit: Symantec also has a link to a free removal tool.

Woo. That was fun... time to go do some work now.

So as it turns out, moments after I posted the story about the "stuck up poker girl" (as me and Nasty Nate have decided to call her), Soob IMs me and manages to tell me who she is. Apparently she had a penchant for playing Party Poker while they were trying to work on a group project. This did not please the Soob-ster.

I feel one of those innocent anonymous mini-crushes coming on! They are so fun. No emotional danger, either ;D

I've spent a bulk of time the past two days here in UGL. It's pretty nice, actually... really quiet. I'm probably going to be here until about 3 am-ish working on client work. I also got some more Tabulas work I want to do. The way the new CP is coming along... it might even be ready by weekend's end (for testing, not for general consumption!).

Dilated Peoples Ft. Kanye - This Way

Hot song. Thanks to Joe for the MP3.

this time i've made up mind
this time i'm back on my grind
i know there's things in my life
that i gotta let go starting tonight

i can't live my live this way

Please help identify these individuals...

Hahahahaha.

I remember a few years ago UNC beat Duke (I think during Forte's last year) ... and it was a huge win. We rushed Franklin St... and as it turns out, there was a sole car parked on Franklin St. It was quickly overturned and messed up pretty badly. In any case, the people responsible were caught by television crews and were punished.

But really, what do you expect when you park on Franklin St? It's pretty idiotic to think your car isn't going to get messed up... people get what they deserve.

... But it is a good way to collect insurance if you don't like your car ;)

Here are two first point stories from actual civilian contractors in Iraq ... that pretty much refute the grim picture that the liberal American media has painted. Trust the media or trust first hand sources?

Hmm....

Link 1 and Link 2

This makes me sick. A dumbass who believes he is a Ricer God killed two kids with his car... and somehow he still has a license; he wasn't even charged with anything.

I posted a comment in the weblog entry about it ... I posted a comment at the bottom asking if what he did was involuntary manslaughter. Perhaps some of you law-nerds (I'm staring at you, Aleen) could help clarify this for me?

Wow, I'm going to be really really late on this bandwagon ... I had (downloaded) and listened to "A Praise Chorus" and "The Middle" a while ago, but I never thought Jimmy Eat World was a legit band; I thought they were more of one-hit wonders. In any case, I read a GroupHug.us confession that (I'm paraphrasing here because I forget it verbatim) said: "I cry everytime I listen to "Hear You Me" by Jimmy Eat World."

So naturally I downloaded the song. And wow... what a powerful song about death. (I have also temporarily uploaded it for downloading)

In any case, it inspired me to buy the album. After a short trip to Barnes and Noble ($18.99 FOR THE CD?!??! I THINK NOT!) I settled on buying it from Wal-Mart for $14.88. Still way overpriced.

But the album is so very solid. I'm loving every track on the album... go download/purchase the album if you're into any of the Jimmy Eat World singles ... the rest of the album is just as good.

I'm really digging "If you don't, don't" and "The Authority Song."

. . .

I also got to watch The Punisher this weekend. I really loved it a lot. If you're a Marvel purist, you'll hate it with a passion ... the movie is more of an adaptaion of the Punisher character.

I just love the concept of the anti-hero ... I think I'm really drawn to these anti-hero characters... moreso than characters like Spiderman and Superman (who are considered 'heroes').

An anti-hero is defined as a hero with a tragic flaw ... in a sense, he's a hero because he does accomplish good in the end (or because he has the right mindset). However, the protagonist accomplishes these tasks outside the realm of the law or using questionable methods. Batman is another good example of an anti-hero... and the two brothers from Boondock Saints (IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS MOVIE, GO WATCH IT!) are really good examples of anti-heroes.

But yeah. I loved the casting of Thomas Jane as the Punisher. He just had the feeling down right, although I kind of feel like they could of done more to show the neurotism of the Punisher ... but it's stilll a wonderful entertaining movie.

. . .

so tell me what do i need
when the words lose their meaning
i was spinning free with a little sweet and simple numbing me
yeah stumble until you crawl
sinking into sweet uncertainty

- jimmy eat world "sweetness"

I've always been amused by the humor at articles that are titled Kim Jong-il Arrives in China for Secret Visit. Ain't so secret now, is it?

I went into shock this morning. Not sure from what. Guessing bad sleeping/eating habits.

. . .

Supposedly mySQL allows clustering now, but you have to store it all in memory? Meaning I would need to buy 6-12 gigs of RAM (to be on the safe side) ... and then cluster around it? Very interesting.

. . .

A useful discussion on Slashdot regarding the salary of entry-level programming jobs. I wish I had the Java/C++ background to pursue these jobs. Maybe I'll learn some C++ or C# or .NET or something.

statistical breakdown of tabulas users with ages given (you can also see the gender breakdown)

Interesting thing to note: For some reason, we have an interesting bump at 34-year old users. I'm guessing older friends referring friends (?).

Livejournal also has a statistics page and you can note how their data correlates closely to Tabulas' data (albeit in a smaller scale). Girls definitely keep a highg number of journals than guys ... very interesting.

Need ... more ... data... if you haven't done so and don't feel too private about it, at least set the year of your birth in your profile page.

Edit: Oops, for whatever reason, the script was defaulting all "bad" ages (those in the future and vastly in the past) to '34.' Hehe. The new number is ... '4'. So no bump. A nice curve...

. . .

Apparently Yahoo is sexist ... but I guess with the statistics above ... not too surprising they would cater to one sex like that. (That was a joke).

Right before I drifted off to sleep today, some guys in my room were talking about the Mario Winans "I Don't Wann Know" song ... how the beat was 'sampled' from the Fugee's classic "Ready or Not." Although it was sampled from there, the original source of song is actually Enya's "Bodicea."

It's an awesome beat anyways.

footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose-garden

- ts eliot

Ok, so my self-imposed break from stuff failed horribly. Here I come ... crawling back to my Tabulas. I've shut down my LJ and Xanga, and I really don't have an interest in resurrecting either of them, so I'll post exclusively here.

I don't really want to get too much into why I went into a self-imposed break, but I really needed to change my life. Things are just really starting to get confusing and out of control for me ... and I just feel so helpless and lonely about it all.

In any case, I realized today to just be myself. Other people seem to have confidence in my abilities; I just need to quit self-doubting and do what I love. If I pursue what I love with ambition and discipline, I will achieve success.

So I need discipline. I've quit playing poker online, for it sucks too much of my mental awareness and time away from me. I pulled out all my money from the site ... and now I will focus on work.

I've reached a renaissance in terms of my projects; with amazing clarity I can see what needs to be done (both in the short-term and long-term) for all my projects ... and I will begin executing my plan ... now.

With the return of my work ethic, expect a lot of work-related posts... :)



A song strangely fitting:

"i don't wanna be anything other than what i've been trying to be lately
all i have to do is listen to me and have peace of mind..."

I've fallen absolutely in love with the song "Malaguena Salerosa" by Chingon, which is the song played at the end credits of Kill Bill 2... it's so passionate! I love passionate songs.

I ended up watching "Chingu" (Korean for 'friend') on DVD today... the usual tearjerker Korean drama/movie. The girl in it was pretty cute.

Sometimes I want to go back to Korea just because of the cute girls. Sigh!

Lyrics for "Malaguena Salerosa:"

Que bonitos ojos tienes
Debajo de esas dos cejas
Debajo de esas dos cejas
Que bonitos ojos tienes

Ellos me quieren mirar
Pero si tú no los dejas
Pero si tú no los dejas
Ni siquiera parpadear

Malagueña salerosa
Besar tus labios quisiera
Besar tus labios quisiera
Malagueña salerosa
Y decirte niña hermosa
Que eres linda y hechicera

Si por pobre me desprecias
Yo te concedo razón
Yo te concedo razón
Si por pobre me desprecias
Yo no te ofrezco riquezas
Te ofrezco mi corazón
Te ofrezco mi corazón
A cambio de mi pobreza

Malagueña salerosa
Besar tus labios quisiera
Besar tus
Labios quisiera
Y decirte niña hermosa

Que eres linda y hechicera
Que eres linda y hechicera
Que eres linda y hechicera
Como el candor de una rosa
Y decirte niña hermosa

Translation:

what nice eyes you have
beneath those two eyebrows

they want to look at me
but you won't allow them
not even to blink

charming malaguena (malaga is a province in spain)
i would like to kiss your lips
and i say to you, beautiful girl
how beautiful and bewitched you are

if you despire me because i'm poor
i admit it
i dont' offer any treasures
i offer you my heart
for the price of my poverty

how beautiful and bewitched you are
like the innocence of the rose

P.S. How you like the multiple categories? EH? EH? This one is posted to both Ramblings AND music! Muhahahaha.

I use SSH Secure Shell to SFTP into my server, and I'm starting to get very very sick of it.

Let me list off why I hate this thing:

1.) Whenever I log-in and choose a local folder, the program freezes slightly. Why? It's just navigating from folder to folder! Agh!

2.) In the options menu, the "Cancel" button does _not_ work. It doens't close the window. You have to always hit "Okay." Great.

3.) The program supports dragging and dropping between your local and remote folders (as it should). But lets say for a second you select ... 300 images to upload from your local. But you realize you're in the wrong folder? So what do you do? You naturally just release the files in the local folder. Then the program should gracefully realize you're not actually trying to move the images into the same folder.

Instead I get the stupid error message:



And guess what? I have to hit "Okay" 300 times now. STUPID STUPID STUPID.

4.) It cannot "remember" local folders. It would be nice if I ftped to the Tabulas folder it would automatically go to what I've defined as my Tabulas local folder. But NOOOOOO... I have to find it.

Disclaimer: I realize my projects are nothing compared to a program like SSH Secure Shell, but jesus... you're getting paid as PROFESSIONALS to write software. I'm an amateur. I'm allowed to screw up!

Oh man. I was relaxing from studying when I found Notting Hill on. I was immediately enraptured... and I just wasted two hours that i should of spent studying for my final tomorrow morning!

But it is SUCH A GOOD MOVIE!!!! AHHHHHHHH. I want to buy the friggin' DVD now!!!

And why did nobody tell me Love Actually is out on DVD?! AH!

If you didn't know, I'm a total sucker for romantic comedies. Here are my favorites ranked (no surprise here probably):

1.) Love Actually
2.) Notting Hill
3.) You've got mail
4.) Serendipity
5.) Sleepless in Seattle


Somehow I feel like I'm missing a bunch from this list.

P.S. I like Yush's latest poem.

I remember when I first heard this song ... I was entering freshman year of high school (I believe, it was around that time). When I first heard The Verve Pipe's Freshmen, I instantly fell in love with it. I remember the video was shot in one frame (well, it seemed) ... but it's funny how you never really listen and interpret the lyrics. 6 years later I still listen to the song with only a vague understanding of the lyrics...

(If you need the lyrics)

Of course, in the most general sense the song is about the failures in life we have being "freshmen." In America at least, being a freshmen is about trying new things. Finding yourself ... and it's okay to fail.

To that end, I always loved the meaning of the song ... it's about the failures that we all face in our lives, and our abilities to reflect on them. But the song has a more literal meaning (as I just found out).

This song is actually a very personal song from one of the members of Verve Pipe ... the story goes like this:

There was a groupie that the band pretty much passed around; she fell in love with one (or more of the members). Eventually she became pregnant ... but she had an abortion. The father of the child (who was known), didn't care much about the abortion. Because of this, the girl got really depressed and took a bunch of Valium (she didn't commit suicide though).

You can catch the key lines of the story in the most obscure line of the song: "Stop a baby's breath and a shoe full of rice." A baby's breath is a popular arrangement at weddings, and a shoe full of rice is a wedding traditional (American?) that is supposed to symbolize good luck in the marriage... but "stopping" a baby's breath is also a reference to the abortion. It's a rather clever double entendre.

Well, I still love this song dearly ... do any of you remember it at all?