To Whom It May Concern...

This brain will someday offer a mean game of F29 retaliator. And this helmet is pretty cool. Now if only I had a bike to try it out on... And on a sad note, never try to get a lava lamp going using your stove.

My friend Lyn just set up herself to e-bay . She has some nifty antiques. I just thought it was great that people can sell online, all over the US, or world, so easily. Her father's site has more technical stuff.

In India, Hyderabad. Guess their pretty desperate to get folks over there if they want me.

Finished Deep Six. Now I have to find The Mediterranean Caper . I'm going to head to the library right now, if it's open.

I saw another article mentioning Wikipedia . The first thing I did, to see how accurate it was, and if it was just loads of geek info, was to look up 'Jehovah'. Now they did not have a direct page for just the name Jehovah, they did point to associated topics, Gods of Judaism, God, and Jehovah's Witnesses , a very well rounded description of the organization. So, I think from now on, I have an online encyclopedia to use, if ever I have need of it.

Wow! I've been blogging for a year!!! Just noticed as I was going through some referrals. Yea to me... I guess. So, what was I talking about a year ago? Well, I was excited about this weblog. I was working on thumbnails appearing on our site dynamically. An issue that is now the norm here. I was excited about re-writing The Image Connection in ASP .Net. Boy, I didn't know what I had in store for me. My cousing had just gotten married, and my wife and I took our first plane trip to see him. Congrats Nick we hear you're doing good. Well, that's it for now. TTYL.

Updated I've been looking into getting another computer at home. Something with a little more umph, something mobile, something I can work from. It looks like the Toshiba Portege 3505 is the one for me. It has Wi-Fi. It does have a DVD which is nice, but it's external. It's got 1.3GHz, 40GB of storage, and 512 MB of Ram for under $1.1k. (Depending on when/where you get it.) But of course, money is the key... so it looks like I'll be waiting a while. (Donations can be made by clicking the button to the right.)

I like to read Wired, cause they have some interesting articles. Since I've been reading shipwreck novels, these two articles interested me greatly: Dive! Dive! Dive! talks about the different environments you'll find at different depths. The Drive to Discover is director James Cameron talking about why he wanted to do Titanic.

So I'm about half way through Deep Six , by Clive Cussler . It's gripping, interesting, logical, puzzling... I think I have a new author for my favorite authors list. I have a list of his books to the right. Thanks Joel for pointing me in his direction.

Looking for a book on Visual Interdev? Try this

In an effort to boost traffic I thought I'd mention some popular topics on search engines. The top 6 from Yahoo are: Apprentice Jeans Gerald Ford Chelsea Clinton Steve Spurrier Life As We Know It Presidential Libraries Now, I'm not political, so 3 of the 6 I don't care so much about. 2 I don't know about. The top one though, Apprentice Jeans, is in reference to the Jeans that the applicants on The Apprentice had to do a marketing campaign for. I haven't watched the apprentice as much this season. Trump is firing the better players, and I haven't liked his calls. Plus, I have a study on Thursday nights, the night it airs, and so haven't had the time to watch it. I did catch the end of this episode though. Not as impressive. On the programming side of things, we're looking at projects for next year. Basically, we have our foundation on the various fronts. We just need to round them out. Improve or fix the features that are there, and then ...

Let's just say my father's house has Wi-Fi and I find laptops in the strangest places. But, it allows me to make good use of some otherwise unused time... unused, that is, by half of my body.

So I just finished reading Chapter 2 and coding all the examples of PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites by Larry Ullman. I like the format of the book. For a coder, this gets me moving pretty quickly. And for all you PHP fans, I must say, I liked the explode/implode methods and the fact that I could address an array of check boxes right from the code. Perhaps VB has something like this. I know I am very under experienced when it comes to the string.format function. I do hate having to use $_PAGE[''] to get to my variables, and have yet to figure out how to get PHP Designer to auto-complete that. I'm going to have to post this book on my books page. I'll also have to link to that page on my side-bar. For now, if you want to see some books that have helped me, check out my books page on my geocities site. Follow the link on the right that says My Page.

Okay, for those of you looking for something a little more rich than a text editor to do PHP. (If you really have to do PHP.) Try PHP designer . It's nice to have an app that highlights the {} for you when that's what you have to use. I'm still getting use to it's autocomplete, but that's a nice feature too. Now, since I've been working from home doing some stuff, I obviously need to have a web server to try it on. Being the cheap geek I am, I didn't want to pay for hosting. So I'm running Apache. (See previous posts that I am too lazy to link to.) 'Well... what is it?' you say. It's not much . But now at least it's something.

Down with Spammers! Actually, hmm... on a bad month, he made $400k. So you work 1 month, buy a decent house for $400k, then work another 8 months, you'll have enough for $40k a year for 80 years. Just to be safe, you could do that for 1 year, and never have to work again...

I put a link to the right, trying to subsidise my educational budget. Click on 'Currently on Ebay' to see my current auctions. Thanks.

I received a letter yesterday, from a company offering me a credit card. How nice. Nothing new really, happens all the time. But this one was different. This one had a dummy card, with it's raised numbers pressed against the envelope. What is more, somebody discovered this, and had rubbed the envelope in such a way that the numbers were visible to the outside world. Now, this is not a real credit card mind you. And most real credit cards (or at least the 2 I've seen) come wrapped in paper so that it would not be possible to rub the numbers visible. But it just goes to show what people will try. On programming... I'm waiting for my next .Net Developer's Journal. Haven't done too much PHP. And at work I'm trying to juice up some of the dynamic portion of the interface. Turning out a little tricky, since I can't devote consecutive time slots to it. I did install a PHP IDE at home... I'll blog on that when I get home.

I put a link to the right called Cussler books . This way I can track which books I've read by Clive Cussler, my current interesting author. Also, I had hoped to have a link on my page for a poll, to see what people use for PHP editors. I couldn't get the link to appear on the sidebar or the main part of the page. So for now, please give me hints in the comments. I am getting tired of notepad.

Here's a brain teaser for you. It's easy to play, but don't waste too much time on it. Petals around the Rose

Wow, that's all I can say about this resume . Found it here , thanks Bruce.

I'm chatting with my brother, who is currently in Florida. He is down there to help with the reconstruction going on. He brought his laptop, as he often does. With his wireless lan, he doesn't need dialup... just a friendly neighborhood unprotected wi-fi router. Of course he never does anything malicious. It's nice to see that people are so generous with their bandwidth. They must be close to him, he can get the signal from inside a trailer.

UPDATE: I added a poll. I'm doing some VB.Net at work today. (Whew!!!) But last night at home I did some more PHP. I am getting tired of Notepad very quickly. So, I pose 2 questions to PHPers... What do you use to develop/write PHP in? Why is it so great? What's it got in it worth coding with? Tell me in the poll to the right. On a personal note, my wife and I got back from the Berkshires last night. Already looking to go away again, one weekend does not restore you completely, but then again, what will in this system.

Last night I jumped ship... I left the Microsoft world, and entered Indian territory. Yes, I installed Apache! Why? Well, I wanted to explore the worlds of PHP and MySQL. What better way to wrap the 3 amigos together. I also picked up a book on PHP and MySQL development. First reflections? Apache has a learning curve... This is probably obvious. No GUI interface, just getting right down to the httpd.conf file. That's fine. There's documentation. I'm a geek, it only took me 20 minutes to get it running my very first PHP page. As for PHP? I don't think it's going to be fun. It looks a lot like ASP/JavaScript stuff... But then again, when I was doing ASP classic, I had very poor documentation skills. Also, I don't have an IDE or WYSIWYG editor, so it's all notepad. I was hoping that I could get the mono.mod for Apache and do some .Net stuff, but according to the documentation I read, the mono.mod (sorry if I hacked that up) only works on Linux so far. ...

I'm wondering what information, tools, apps, people would want in a hand held device. Post your comments here, what do you want to carry with you for tools? This could be anything from car maintenance information, to grocery lists...

Another story from the US, Preachers Urge Worshippers to Vote . Despite Jesus command to 'remain no part of the world' and many other bible principles to remain politically neutral, religions can't seem to stay out of bed with politicians. They pray for 'god's Kingdom ' to come, while promoting human kingdoms. Oh well... not for much longer.

This young man from South Africa took a good stand against witchcraft. Take a look.

Saw this article , and tho it's long, it was interesting. Like a short novel. It talks about the battle against the drug lords, and one of the recent twists.