August 30, 2001
I moved everything back up to kingston yesterday. At this point it’s kind of weird to be in between work and school. I spend a decent chunk of time like this around may, but it seems forign to me right now. I don’t have any real obligations, like trying to find a job, working or school work. I have some websites to do, but they tend to be fairly flexible. Beyond this, I’m at a loss for words right now.
August 27, 2001
My brother rented Enemy at the Gates last night, so i decided to watch it at some point during the wee hours of the morning. I read the numbers 131 off the back and took it as meaning 1 hour and 31 minutes, not 131 minutes. I ended up being awake longer than i intended. It was a pretty good movie, not my favourite war movie of all time, but deffinitely better than some i’ve seen.
New update to conform, it’s been a week or so. Had a couple problems getting this one done, oh well. Just had one guy who decided not to respond to his email for a few days, so he didn’t end up doing the image, i passed it on to someone else.
This was slashdotted, but it’s a damn cool case mod.
If you want to hear some weird sounds, take a cell phone and call a cell phone in car that has a speaker setup. You’ll get some hendrix-ish feedback to it.
August 25, 2001
New splash up. It’s ok, just needed something that had a darker background.
Kraftwork has some cool stuff happening on their website. It’s one of those art kind of things that doesn’t tell you how to get around. I liked pocket calculator and music non stop.
Wil Wheaton has a website now, he played wesley crusher on star trek: tng. I’m sure it’s propably been mentioned on a dozen weblogs in the last day or two. I thought it was relevant because i was a big star trek fan when I was younger and his website is pretty impressive in terms of him actually taking the time to learn things like php and grey matter. I’d love to play around with grey matter, but I cgi isn’t part of my hosting plan right now, i’d have to upgrade.
In a unrelated note, the contact lens solution that i use now comes in this trippy new bottle. The press release is here but allergan doesn’t seem to like external linking to articles, it wants to display them inside frames.
August 23, 2001
Coffee makes the headache go away. I should probably consider getting myself unaddicted to caffine. Then again, it could be useful.
Only one more day of work. Well, only one more teaching computer camp. I think i’ll try to head up to ottawa tomorrow night and see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, i’ve been looking forward to it for awhile.
Some sites with amazing digital artwork; alexandros pangaia and alessandro bavari.
August 22, 2001
I didn’t find Meet the Parents to be as funny as some people thought it was. It was alright, but i just don’t think that type of comedy is doing that much for me these days.
Only a few days of work left, after which i’ll be heading back to school. Looking back, I don’t really know where all the time went.
There is some interesting work going to thse days involving the blogger api; instant messaging, stand alone blogging clients, wap blogging. Some of the discussion led me to metacard, a cross-platform high level programming language. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit today, it would probably make a good learning language because it’s similar to english.
August 20, 2001
And then there was this guy, who was sitting at the school board thinking to himself “It would be pretty funny if I didn’t pay this dave kellam character for two weeks of work, so he has to dick around on monday morning trying to figure why he didn’t get paid”.
I watched Coyote Ugly last night. It was defintely aimed at the group of teenage girls that likes hanging out at the mall and buying backstreet boys cd’s. I almost felt dumber after watching it. I should have listened to the people who said don’t watch it, but there wasn’t anything else laying around that we hadn’t seen. Thank god we didn’t pay actual money for it.
New layout up now, hopefully I’ll get a new splash up in the next day or two as well. Now I have to get to bed, so i’ll be awake in the morning to corrupt young minds.
August 16, 2001
Listen to the song 21st Century Digital Boy by Bad Religion, it’s a good tune. I had forgotten about it, my mousemate and I used it in a short video.
Most likely, there won’t be any updates over the weekend (well Saturday anyway), I have to head up to kingston.
There’s a new conform image up, this one’s by tom. Kind of a boring day today, I spent a good chunk of my time creating a visual manual for the kids. It was really at the request of one of the parents, so her daughters (and herself) would have something tactile to use as a guide in the future. I also figured it would be handy to give to my boss.
Over the last couple days, I’ve watched higher learning, mercury rising and tomcats. Higher Learning is a good movie, the other two aren’t. Tomcats has some funny moments, but for the most parts it’s a predictable sex comedy.
August 15, 2001
I’ve started some work on a new layout, so there will be a new look around here in awhile. Summer’s starting to come to a close for me, a couple more weeks and i’ll be back to school. I have one more week of work left, then I’ll probably head back up to kingston.
As far as work goes, the group of kids we have this week is really inexperienced (ie six out of nine didn’t know how to turn on the computer). A little problem: how do you explain the concept of saving something to someone who hasn’t used a computer before?
Me: “If you don’t save it, it will disappear.”
Kid: “Why? It’s right there”, pointing at monitor.
Me: “It’s not like using a pencil and paper, if you don’t save what you’ve made, it will disappear.”
Kid: “Uhh… why?”
… and so on. A good analogy is a tv and vcr, the images on tv will dissapear when you turn it off unless you use a vcr. Now, there might be a problem if they haven’t used a tv or vcr before.
August 14, 2001
I don’t really understand why the referer logs from conform have a large number of hits from google for a spanish seach of dragonballz porn images.
August 13, 2001
I don’t really know what to write about anymore. I have a bunch of projects to get working on, namely two websites for different campus publications, a redesign of a small website, as well as some other things already underway. There’s conform which i’m been running for awhile (and getting a bit of flack over for posting an image with porn in it) and a project involving the guys i’m living with next year. Yah, I don’t censor the conform stuff, well for the most part, I’m not going to post hate propaganda. I didn’t get any complaints over two of nik’s images involving being pissed off at the design community and abortion. Some of the anger wasn’t so much directed at using a pornographic image but rather the idea that it was only used for shock value and didn’t work with the rest of the image. It’s debatable, as is most everything in art.
I think I might just be bored with the site, perhaps it’s time for another reworking.
August 10, 2001
I installed litestep last night. I haven’t decided whether or not to keep it yet, I have to play around with it some more.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the last couple days over at my grandmothers house, scraping and painting her garage with my dad. Yesterday, it was way too fucking hot to be doing something like that, we tried to stay in the shade.
I spent quite a bit of the rest of my time the last two days watching movies (Jurassic Park III, The Last Emperor, 3000 Miles to Graceland and The Mexican). Hmm, Jurassic Park was pretty shitty, i’m glad i didn’t pay to see it. This one isn’t even based on a book, although the ever two never really followed the books much anyway. A kid can stay alive on the island for eight weeks by himself, but grown men in a group can’t last five minutes, bah. The last emperor was pretty good, but I found it dragged on a little bit too much. 3000 Miles to Graceland wasn’t what I was expecting. It had some good scenes, but it was a little over the top. The mexican started off well but started to drag on. I was glad i had the deleted scenes on dvd, they cut out part of the story that I was wondering about. There are a whole bunch of problems with the movie, namely what happens to all the dead bodies? Yah, dead bodies, it’s not the light romantic comedy it’s made out to be.
August 8, 2001
New conform update, this one by simon. Apparently, his mom likes it. Simon’s mom is cool.
I’m back from kingston now, it ended up being a fairly good weekend, did some work, had some fun. I watched a bunch of movies over the weekend, Soylent Green, The Graduate, Last Night and Glengarry Glen Ross. Out of the four of them, I liked the graduate the best, it’s a quality movie. Last Night is a tad on the empty and depressing side. I found glengarry glen ross to be a tad boring, there are some good scenes, but it drags on. Soylent Green is soylent green, it’s one of those sci-fi movies that you kind of have to see at some point. It paints a bleak picture of the future though, and some of the issues about the environment seem kind of surprising coming from a movie made in the early seventies.
I picked a couple cd’s for cheap at a used record store in kingston. The three albums i picked up were Collective Soul, Meat Puppets - Too High to Die and The Cult. The meat puppets cd and the collective soul cd are throwbacks to my younger days. Things that friends had, that i made tapes of years ago.
August 6, 2001
Wasn’t going to work yesterday, but I ended up doing it because someone cancelled a shift. Therefore no posts in the last two days. I made a new splash, which you probably saw on your way in. Not sure if i’ll keep it or not, the file size is kind of big.
August 3, 2001
I decide to come up to my house in kingston for the weekend and the weather decides to make it one of the hottest weekends of the summer. I have air conditioning at home in brockville, but not here. Bah.
I went and saw Planet of the Apes last night. I have some mixed feelings on it. I haven’t seen the original movie, so i’m trying to compare the two. As can be expected from tim burton, the movie is visually stunning. The acting and plot are kind of weak. People have said tim roth and helena bonham carter did great jobs acting, however a good chunk of it was just jumping around and screeching (for tim roth at least). There are some plot holes for sure, like where the hell did the horses come from? I don’t think the ending could have tried any harder to set things up for a sequel. It was still worth seeing anyway.
It’s nice and late and I have to work tomorrow. I decided to fuck around some more with php and the archives. Now the archives actually use the month and year for the query instead of the numbers. Kind of pointless, but it gave me something to work on.
Just finished ironing out some of the issues that were caused by me implementing that movie thing the other day. I found out that my archives didn’t work, so i fixed the problem. I’m starting to become a bit more comfortable with php, although i really don’t know that much at all. I also discovered that blogger had managed to delete my archive references from june 2000 to octover 2000. I figured out how to get them back shortly after I posted a message to the discussion board.
August 2, 2001
I watched Enter the Dragon last night. It was an alright movie. The fight scenes were pretty good, but the acting, plot, etc. left a little bit to be desired. I have to pick up some other bruce lee movie’s, i’m told they’re better.
Root zone whois, a handy little tool for looking up whois information for sites that aren’t top level domains.
Some of the kids have decided to just be plain dumb today. They keep asking the same questions over and over again. I think they all ate too much sugar at breakfast this morning. They’re probably ready to start bouncing off the walls. Some days are like this, especially during the middle of summer, the doldrums. They have no desire to learn anything and just want to play games. As long as they manage to retain something that they’ve learned this week, i’ll be happy.
August 1, 2001
I was in the movie store browsing around for some stuff to watch over the next week or so and ended up getting the snatch dvd. It was a used copy, so it was cheaper than it would normally be. The disc don’t have any scratches on them, and it’s not like the quality can degrade. There’s two dvd’s, lots of extras. I also did pick up a few movies to watch too.
I’ve managed to get myself addicted to coffee again. I never really drank that much at school this year. Waking up in the morning and having a pot that your parents brewed sitting there is an entirely different story, it takes no effort on my part. That and having a cafeteria at work that has decent coffee.