Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Do people pick up each other in the Union? ‘Hey, nice smoothie.’

– Dr. Alexander, asking where we went to find other people on campus

Found this one on one of those sites that links a bunch of Flash animations…

First, watch the music video to the White Stripes’ ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ (a very cool video, BTW).

Then, watch the Flash animation of punk kittens. Scary but kinda cool.

I talked with Laura a little last night and after seeing the MIT Random Hall Bathroom Server and Laundry Server (scary) linked from mattcain.com, I decided to make up a little script to display when the webcams on this page were last changed (you can see it over in the right column). It’s a really simple script, and I think you can use it for any file, not just images.

I decided to go open-source with it. If you’d like to use it on your blog or web page, you can download the source below.

Download PHP Last Active script

Outside: Halloween is the season when horrible apparitions rise from the primordial slime and stalk the land hunting their innocent victims…

Inside: That’s right – it’s election time.

Thanks, Mom and Dad. 🙂

I admit it’s not the best picture, but do you see those little streaks by the light? Yup, it’s almost winter!

Sarah’s new Dell Dimension 2300 1.8 GHz P4 came today, so I helped her set it up along with a few other people. It runs pretty well, and I got to play around with XP a bit. I also got to install some of my choices of best programs, including:

• Trillian
• Winamp 3
• Mozilla
• IrfanView
• Unreal Tournament 2003

Hey, you even got a list of my favorite PC programs out of this entry. Lucky you. (Of course, if she needed it, I would’ve put VirtualDub on there, too.)

Holidays are weird if you really think about it… while some have remained true to their original purpose, we’ve really gotten strange with some of them.

Halloween: we go around in costumes asking for candy from complete strangers (isn’t that what we shouldn’t be doing on a day like Halloween?)

Christmas: we cut down a tree, put it in our house, and give presents to each other, and a guy in red comes into our house and leaves wrapped up boxes

Easter: a big white rabbit comes around and gives little chocolate eggs (or the like)

Columbus Day: we don’t do anything… well, neither did Columbus, really :p

Thanksgiving’s actually one of the only holidays that still makes sense – we gather together to give thanks to what we have in life. We’ve developed some pretty strange traditions for other holidays (on top of celebrating the original intent of the holiday, of course). I should really read up on how those traditions got started sometime.

This is from an exercise in art class called ‘matching the machine’. It’s a 5×7 photo I took from Cadillac Mountain in Bar Harbor, and we needed to extend it three inches on each side using pencils and a black Prismacolor pencil. I really like how it turned out; I think it helped me see that I can ‘draw’, but I can’t draw something from nothing. I have to have something to work with first. (Click on it above and it’ll get big.)

Check out today’s FoxTrot strip. ‘Ha, ha,’ you may be saying, ‘what kind of idiot would dress up as a computer for Halloween?’

No comment. Just don’t look through my Halloween pictures from a few years back.

I really like PHP. Too much. I’ve been doing it for hours over the last couple of days.

My next project is something that’s pretty similar to RateMyPage.com, only I think it’ll be attractive to a wider audience. It’s another Web service, it’s free, and it’s easy to use. It’s just not done yet. It’s giving me some really good PHP experience, though, even if I want to throw the darn book out the window.