This is an amazing set of pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/
They aren’t Photoshoped images. It’s a picture of the background as the Desktop picture giving an illusion of transparency. The most impressive one to me is this one.
This past weekend I went down to Philadelphia to meet up with Robert, Brian, and Chris at Brian’s place near Philadelphia. As a part of the plan, we decided that we had to try an actual Philly Cheesesteak and set our sights on Geno’s, which is supposed to be the “best”. (Yeah, my dietitian was not impressed with me eating a cheesesteak, but I promised to workout an extra day this week to make up for it).
After the quite yummy cheesesteaks (I had the official cheesesteak which has CheeseWhiz, which is actually very good), we decided to go see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. I had no idea the hassle that would entail.
We got into line to enter the little building they have built to house the Bell. There were park rangers checking this one guy out that was just sitting on a bench off to the side of the plaza where the building sits. That had everyone in line a little nervous, even though he didn’t look that scary. Inside the building, we were ushered into lines to go through security. And oh my, what security it was. We were told to take our belts off and to completely empty our pockets. And even then, the metal detectors were so sensitive, the metal in the eyelets on my shoes set it off. I had to hold out my arms and be “wanded” with the little handheld detector. I then had to show my shoes were legit. All bags had to pass through x-ray machines like those at the aiports. I understand the bell is over 200 years old and is a national treasure, but jeez, it just seemed a little bit excessive to have all this security.
The part that cracked me up (no pun intended), was this sign down by the bell that tells you basically not to touch the bell, effectively saying: “Much like liberty, the Liberty Bell is fragile, and must be protected”. The irony of this statement with that crazy, and frankly unnecessary, security checkpoint was just too much for me. We decided that getting into Independence Hall was probably not worth the hassle.
It brings to mind my favorite quote from Benjamin Franklin:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Sadly I doubt we will ever be able to get back to a point where we don’t have to be searched everywhere we go.
I had posted this earlier, but due to some user error I accidently deleted it from my blog. Oops. So I’m going to try and recreate it as best I can.
So I went to the doctor a while back for a routine checkup and he told me much of the same things my doctor in Texas told me: You need to lose weight (about 100 lbs), otherwise you risk heart disease or Diabetes.
This time I finally took it to heart (no pun intended) and asked for a referral to a dietitian. He gave me one and I made an appointment to see her.
For three days before the appointment I had to keep a log of all the food I ate. When I gave this to her, she frowned at me a lot. When I showed her my blood test numbers, she was shocked to see that I had a very low LDL Cholesterol (the bad stuff). The part that scared her and my doctor was my low HDL Cholesterol (the good stuff) and high triglyceride count (about 3 times what is considered good). The only way to raise HDL and lower triglycerides is to lose weight and exercise.
So we talked for a while about the different things I should eat and the things I certainly should not eat. She put me on a 1800 calorie/day diet in which I am to avoid so called “empty calories”. This includes juices, which shocked me a bit. Basically I can drink water, skim milk, coffee, or tea. So I’ve mostly been drinking water and having to go to the bathroom every freaking hour.
I try to eat 500 calories at each meal and then have two snacks a day around 150 calories each.
So far, I’ve been doing pretty well. When I first went to my doctor, I weighed 276 lbs. Then about a week and a half after starting my diet, I weighed 260 on his scale, meaning I had lost 16 lbs in that short amount of time. Quite a feat. Since then, I think I’ve lost another 5-10 lbs. I’ll know more when I visit my dietitian next week.
I did get this kickass scale from Health-O-Meter that helps you track weight loss. It asks for your height and calculates your BMI based on your weight. You also put in your weight goal and it remembers the first time you weigh yourself and saves that weight. From then on, when you weigh yourself, the scale tells you how much you have lost (or gained) and how many pounds until your goal. It then offers to save that weight and have that be the weight it uses to show you how much you have lost. And as you lose the weight, for every 20% closer you get, it shows a star. So at 5 stars, you’re done.
I’m also working out 2 times a week to help move this along. I’m really committed to making this work. I’ll provide updates as I meet milestones.
Last night I was fiddling around on ebay and started looking for tickets to events I wanted to go to in the NYC area that are kinda hard to get tickets to right now.
First I was looking at “700 Sundays” which is Billy Crystal’s one man show. The tickets there were a bit expensive. The going rate appears to be about $600/pair. Definitely out of my ballpark. But then I thought, “Hey, what about Spamalot?”. So I searched and was disheartened to see that they to were quite high going for about $300/pair. But then I noticed an auction for tickets to the May 18th show ending in 1 hour that were only at $77 dollars. So I set my watch list and check back in half an hour. Still at $77, so I decided those were going to be my pair. I won them for $78, and now have tickets to the show.
The bit of a downer is they are the last row in the theater, but I will at least be in the theater. And I didn’t have too pay much over face value. Something like $6. I’m pretty excited because I hear this show is really wild and silly, as all Monty Python should be. It will also be cool to see Tim Curry, Hank Azaria, and David Hyde Pierce.
One of the movies I loved growing up was “Big” with Tom Hanks. The most memorable scene being Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia playing “Chopsticks” on a giant piano at FAO Schwartz in New York City. When my brother and his family were in town recently, we went to FAO Schwartz (since they reopened in November after emerging from bankruptcy) and they had the giant piano setup and two employees were giving a demonstration and played a few songs, much like the characters in “Big”. Afterwards, they invited anyone who wanted to come play on the piano as well.
Being a kid at heart, I jumped at the chance. I even showed one of the guys how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the “black keys”. (I thought everyone learned it that way)
Anyway, it was really fun and here’s a shot of me on it with my sister-in-law and nieces and nephew (click for a larger view).
FYI: The piano is available for purchase. They come to your home and build it for a mere $150,000.00 USD. 🙂
One of the really cool things I like about New York is how many theaters show movies that haven’t been in the theaters in years. I know I’ve blogged before about going to “Moulin Rouge!” which was really cool. Then I found something even cooler. The Lowe’s on 34 St. (along with some other theaters in the country) show a free previously run movie on Thursdays. Each month is a different theme and February was Romance. This past Thursday was “Titanic”. Yeah, I know, the most ultimate chick flick, but to hold the guys in they:
A) Got Kate Winslet to get naked. 🙂
b) Show lots of people getting killed
I am fascinated by the history of Titanic and the things that conspired together that caused the “unsinkable ship” to sink. So I told Maggie I wanted to go see it again on the Big Screen, and she said “sure”.
The trick with these tickets is you have to register in advance, and then Lowe’s sends out a notice that the tickets are available and you have to be amongst the first to click a link they email you to get the tickets. Well, I got our tickets the second the link came through (it’s sometimes good to be connected to the Internet so much. 🙂 )
We had a great time, and I am always amazed at the amount of small detail you can get on the big screen as opposed to your home TV. And two weeks from now they are showing “Gangs of New York” as a part of their St. Patrick’s Day theme for March. I only saw that movie on DVD, so I think it would be really cool to see the gruesome detail the big screen would provide. Another movie I hope they eventually play is “Pulp Fiction” since I never saw that in the theater either.
To learn more about this, check out this link: http://www.enjoytheshow.com/favorites/
Well, it’s a little bit late, but I thought I would mention my new phone. It’s a Motorola v551 from Cingular. Maggie and I “upgraded” our AT&T accounts to actual Cingular ones so we could get the rollover and the new phones. The thing I really like about this phone is that it can play actual MP3s for the Ring Tones. It’s really, really cool to actually hear the real song instead of some crazy polyphonic midi version. The only thing that I would say I am not impressed by, and that Nokia continues to lead the world in, is the Phonebook. It’s usuable and you can assign both pictures and specific ring tones to people, Nokia organizes it better. The only other downside that my old Nokia phone had a much better camera. But hey, I never took that many pictures with the other camera anyway. As a final note, I definitely like having a flip-phone again, and I am pretty sure I’m getting much better reception because of the external antenna.
I’ve been a hockey fan since I saw my first game on ESPN back in like 1989. I thought to myself, “What an amazing sport, they have to do all their work on ice of all surfaces!”. I became a New Jersey Devils fan for no reason other than they happen to be the team that was considered the underdog in the game. (For some reason, in sports, I like to cheer for the underdog when I don’t care much about either opponent) Then, a miracle occurred, and the Minnesota North Stars moved from the more appropriate home in the north, to Dallas to become the Dallas Stars.
Immediately my allegiance switched to the “new” team. I finally got to go to my first NHL game in the fall of 1995. If you really, really dig deep, you can find a column I wrote about the experience in my college (at the time) newspaper. And once you’ve seen a live game, it gets just that much better. Ask my in-laws, they went to a single game two seasons ago and were hooked enough to watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Since about 2001 there have been grumblings about the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) expiring in 2004 and how it would be “Armageddon”. Both sides could have been working out their issues since then, but instead of talking, September 15th, 2004 came along and the owners locked the players out.
The league wants what it calls “cost certainty”, which basically means some sort of salary cap on the players based on the revenues the league generates. The players will have none of that and want a luxury tax system that makes teams that spend over a certain limit pay fines for doing so.
So now it’s a bunch of millionaires fighting a bunch of billionaires, which makes me and most of the rest of the country wish they had these guys’ problems. Yeah, I know not all of the players in the NHL are super rich, but even with a league minimum of $250K per year, they are certainly doing better than most of America.
I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I think I’ve finally decided I’m with the owners on this one. Some would say that it’s the owners that have put themselves into this position, which is partly true. But when they have to bid against each other for Free Agents and that artificially drives up the price since each team wants to win (although only one will win it all every year) and thinks they have to have all the “best (read: more expensive) players. So that’s why some 3rd line center can pull down more than $1 million a year.
The thing that really puts me on the side of the owners is that these players don’t seem to understand how little importance their sport and league play on the American Sports Landscape. Basically, hardly anyone on radio or print (outside of Canada) even talks about Hockey, unless it’s the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and there was some major controversy, it gets a highlight on SportsCenter, right after the bajillion, and insignificant, summertime baseball scores. Hell, there might even be NFL news before Stanley Cup news. That’s pretty far down the line to me.
And the way things are going, if the leagues stays off the ice for the year (which it looks more and more like it’s going to do with the weekend deadline set by the league), I think they will lose a great deal of fan base, especially in the newer cities like Atlanta and Nashville (although Nashville did finally make the playoffs for the first time last season, so there’s hope there). This will have a fairly drastic affect on league revenues and further erode the amount of money to pay the players and other personnel. You can’t truly believe you can spend over 75% of revenues for players and still make the investment worth it for the owners.
The players also seem to be all about the money, even though not one of them will tell you that. It’s not about the game, if it was, these guys would realize how good they have it and would be playing for peanuts, like the MLS guys do now. They say they won’t play under a cap. Well guess what, the two leagues generating the most revenue and having a lot of success are the NFL and the NBA (you may have heard of them) and they each have cost containment. The NFL has a hard salary cap with a lot of rules, and the NBA has a very harsh luxury tax system.
For the players it comes down to realizing that there’s a limited amount of money, the owners are in it to make money too, and to just be damn happy to get paid to play a game for a living.
Well, I hope to never see something like this happen:
http://www.aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf
I find it amazing the amount of privacy people are willing to give up for the sense of security. I think Benjamin Franklin said it best:
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.
Robert just IMed me this link:
http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/rainbowtvepisode.html
I just can’t believe that comes from a kids show. I’m almost choked while drinking some water while watching it. Enjoy! (You might want some headphones if you are near sensitive ears)
When Andy was up in October, he was in the middle of reading the Bourne series by Robert Ludlum. I really, really, liked the movies and I asked him how the books where. And his response was “They kick the sh*t out of the movies”. Needless to say, I was intrigued. I was in the middle of reading “The Dark Tower 7: The Dark Tower” by Stephen King (I’ll be getting to those later), but I put the Bourne series on my list, and I am very glad I did. Read on for my review of the book…which might contain some spoilers.
I was walking to the train the other morning after our 16 inches of snow and stumbled across this outside a bar called the LightHorse a couple blocks away from the apartment:
To give you some scale, Mr. Frosty’s heart is at about 6 ft. These are gigantic! And amazing. Definitely a great deal of effort was put in to create them.
Then to my horror, the next day, the top part of Mrs. Frosty was missing. But then I found this scene this morning as I walked by:
The sign has a reward on in for a free dinner at the LightHorse for information leading to the recovery of Mrs. Frosty. It made me smile that the LightHorse would at least have some fun with the situation.
I apologize for the quality of the photos, they were taken with the camera on my cell phone and well, Megapixel it is not.
I know I’m a little behind the news here, but I started using Ta-Da List the day it came out and I loved it from the start.
One of the coolest things is I can share the list with anyone…so for one, I’ve made a list for my wife to use for “Honey Do” items.
It’s been pretty good because I have a terrible time remembering everything I need to get done. But since I sit at a computer connected to the internet most of the time, I can quickly pop in and add an item to my lists and move on and then know that I have written it down so I can’t forget it.
Another great feature, especially if you are sharing a list, is the RSS feed of a list. So now I can know almost immediately (or however often I have my RSS reader setup to check) when a new item is there, or if one has been updated.
Another amazing thing is how simple the interface is. Nothing to get in your way, but very functional and actually kinda nice to look at. As my friends will tell you, GUI designer I am not, but I can appreciate a good design when I see one (for an even better example see the interface for Gmail).
It’s a pretty good system and I like the satisfaction of checking off completed to-do’s (or would they be ta-da’s?).
I highly recommend checking it out.
These guys have to be just a little bit crazy since they are doing some amazing jumps from building to building : http://www.boreme.com/bm/DEC04/a/city-jumping/fr.htm
The gang here at work figures this next one is either from a Fraternaty or (my vote) some bored Armed Service personnel:
http://www.boreme.com/bm/NOV04/a/tablefootball-skills/fr.htm
This last one is a bit of a morbid spoof television commericial. I had heard about it the other day on Fark, but I hadn’t actually seen it. I laughed…Maggie was not amused:
http://www.boreme.com/bm/JAN05/a/vw-suicide-bomber/fr.htm
The first two are definitely safe for work…the third one depends on the sense of humor of your co-workers. Be careful with it.
Ok, so Maggie and I have made it through the first blizzard and we seem to have made it out ok. I wanted to post some before and after pictures to give you an idea of how much snow we got. I don’t have stats for Jersey City, but I saw where Central Park got 13 inches!
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| This is the courtyard of our building about an hour after the snow started falling. |
This is the courtyard of our building this morning…those ledges are about 2 ft high. |
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| These are the windows of our apartment about an hour after the snow started falling. |
These are the windows of our apartment this morning…they are about 2-3 ft high. |
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| This is the sidewalk outside the front entrance of our building about an hour into things. |
This is a shot of the same sidewalk during the storm. The snow was coming down hard and the flash really reflected off of it |
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| This is a sidewalk on the other side of the building this morning. |
And across the street are some cars parked on the side of the street…covered in snow. |
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| The snowstorm at night, really raging. | Maggie and Sam standing in the snow on our walk during the storm. |
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| This is a small portion of Liberty State Park after the storm with Downtown NYC in the background. |
Another shot of Liberty State Park after the storm. The brown concrete walls around the bench are 2 ft tall. |
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| This is a picture of the Hudson River. If you look closely you can see that it’s beginning to freeze. |
Another picture of the Hudson freezing. This area is more out toward where the real current is and it’s still starting to turn to ice. |
I know I know, crazy boy from the South all excited about a little snow storm. Well, I think it’s absolutely amazing how quickly it can all change. Kinda like a Texas thunderstorm. These people up here have no idea what sort of power that can be. I guess we all get our own special types of weather.
Ok, here’s something we don’t get in Texas, from the National Weather Service:
…BERGEN NJ-EASTERN PASSAIC NJ-ESSEX NJ-HUDSON NJ-UNION NJ- 600 AM EST SAT JAN 22 2005 CORRECTED EXPIRATION TIME … BLIZZARD WARNING FOR THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING… SNOW WILL MOVE IN THIS AFTERNOON… AND WILL BECOME VERY HEAVY LATE THIS AFTERNOON AND EVENING. THE SNOW WILL CONTINUE INTO SUNDAY MORNING… THE TAPER OFF SUNDAY AFTERNOON. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS WILL BE 16 TO 24 INCHES BY SUNDAY EVENING. IN ADDITION TO THE SNOW… NORTHEAST WINDS WILL INCREASE THIS AFTERNOON… AND WILL BE QUITE GUSTY TONIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING. WINDS MAY GUST UP TO 45 MPH LATE TONIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING… ALLOWING VISIBILITIES TO DROP TO NEAR ZERO AT TIMES. THESE WINDS WILL RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF SNOW AS WELL AS POWER OUTAGES. WIND CHILL VALUES WILL BE BELOW ZERO AT TIMES. A BLIZZARD WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WIND SPEEDS OR FREQUENT GUSTS OF OVER 35 MPH ARE EXPECTED WITH CONSIDERABLE FALLING AND OR BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW. VISIBILITIES WILL BECOME POOR… WITH WHITEOUT CONDITIONS AT TIMES. THOSE VENTURING OUTDOORS MAY BECOME LOST OR DISORIENTED… SO PEOPLE IN THE WARNING AREA SHOULD STAY INDOORS. ANY TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. IF YOU LEAVE THE SAFETY OF BEING INDOORS… YOU ARE PUTTING YOUR LIFE AT RISK. THIS IS A LIFE-THREATENING WINTER WEATHER SITUATION! PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD COMPLETED BY NOON TODAY!
And they were right about being completed by noon. We took the dogs out for a walk around 11:45 and it started snowing while we were on the walk. By the time we got back to the apartment building, the sidewalks were already starting to get covered in snow. You could no longer see NYC because the snow was coming down so hard.
We quickly went to Target for a few essentials we needed and by the time we got back (about an hour after it started) there was already an inch on the groud. I’ve got some “before” shots right after we got back from Target. I’m hoping to get shots throughout to give an idea of how deep it got. I’ve also got a shot or two of the Hudson river starting to freeze. That truly amazes me because of how much churn the river has. Not to mention it’s mostly salt water.
And to think, yesterday the forecast was just for 10-12 inches. Now they’re talking 2 ft. Wow.
I’ve been asked which hacks I was using for comment preview and for the comment image.
For “live” preview I am using the code from here:
http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2004/03/15/live-preview-for-comments/
And for the image I am using:
http://www.gudlyf.com/index.php?p=376
Both are pretty easy to install. If you have problems with them, leave comments on the different blogs and the code authors or other users will try and help you out.
And better than ever…well, maybe.
So I’ve added two hacks to WordPress for comments. The first is a new comment preview that does it “live” below the comment box.
The second one is to try and stop spam. In order to post comments, you’ll have to enter the code displayed. If you fail to enter the code correctly, you lose your post and will need to reload the page to get a new code. I’m going to try and see if I can work something out where you might be able to rescue your post and get a new code to try.
So there we go, I’m going to re-enable comments on past articles, in case some of you wanted to commented on previous articles. And here’s hoping the spammer folks won’t get past this one so easily.
Check out this picture (click for full size):
I need to find some balloons like that and see what sorts of looks I can get. 🙂
I’m guessing the police wouldn’t take it so kindly.
This is the start of a series of entries about books I’ve recently read. I hope to add links to these books to the right and also a section detailing what I am currently reading (at least one person I know was intersted in that tidbit of info).
I picked up “Angels & Demons” because it was recommended to me by Heidi when I started talking about wanting to read “The Da Vinci Code” since it’s been talked about a bunch the past couple of years. Heidi told me that the author’s first book was much better, so I began reading “Angels & Demons”.
If you don’t like spoilers, I suggest you come back later and read the remainder of the article after you’ve read the book. As for my opinion, I would highly suggest reading this book.