Good times!

A day late and probably a dollar short... but here it is!

Blog
If you're reading this, you already know about my blog. I use Blogger to upload it via FTP to my own personal website.

Xbox's Blog
This website monitors my XBOX usage and turns my stats for the previous day into a small snippet in common English.

Audioscrobbler
A nifty little service that reports all the music I listen to. It tracks by track and artist to see what I listen to most frequently.

Picasa Web Albums
I find this to be a very nice interweb photo album software. It lacks some key Web 2.0 social features like the captions feature on flickr. Its just not that great at dealing with sharing a single photo. Super easy to upload and use though.

Starred Items in Google Reader
This is awesome, when I mark items as a "favorite" in Google Reader they'll show up here. Maybe I thought it was cool enough to check or later and blog on, or maybe I wanted to share it with you guys. Either way, you'll find it on this RSS feed.

Wikipedia
No RSS feed here, but I sometimes edit this user created and maintained encyclopedia. I've linked to my user page where you can find some useful links about what I've done there.

Update:
Flickr
I just bit the bullet and uploaded a couple of photos onto Flickr. If I end up getting comments or feedback on it, I'll use it more often. Otherwise it'll probably be rare to see new pics on there.

If I missed any, let me know! Have any suggestions? I'd love them! Post a comment!

ExxonMobil has just turned the second largest corporate profit ever. The only profit to beat this one was their own record $10.7 billion profit back from Q4 2005. The second quarter missed the record by a mere 300 million off the record... a cool $10.4 billion. The intermediate first quarter grabbed these oil whores a measly $8.4 billion. The company expects to set a record quarterly profit in Q4 this year and turn a record for yearly profit (obviously).

Now here is the COOL part. I make two tenths of a cent every second, and only while I'm clocked in. Bill Gates makes about twelve cents per second (just counting his salary and bonuses for fiscal year ending 6/30/04). ExxonMobil makes and amazingly high $1,318 per second. CNN did the math on this one -- With that much profit per second, even at the current $3 a gallon national average, you can buy enough gas to drive a Hummer H3 between Los Angeles and New York three times.

If you were to earn an equivalent wage for a single eight-hour shift, you would be a multi-millionaire by the end of the day, even after taxes. That'll give you enough cash to give to ExxonMobil on your way home.

I've just set up blogger 4 my mobile. Now i can post images and short messages from anywhere on the planet pretty much. I look forward 2 posting!

Update from PC: Looks like there may be some rate limiter involved with these posts. I had sent this and then later I had to forward it and then I received the conformation. In other news, I don't think its possible for me to get drunk, I had an ammertto sour (spelling?), many shots, and a long island iced tea (I guess in retrospect that's really not that much). I just got home and I'm feeling a little buzzed, my typing isn't the best but I'm still able to catch my errors. I'm actually thinking that is because I'm looking at the screen the entire time instead of glancing at the keys at all. This really should have been two separate blogs. You can surely tell that I'm a little buzzed, because I don't think I'd be able to type so much useless stuff otherwise.

Another update: I've changed the template to show what posts or what part of posts are from my mobile phone. They're indicated by the dashed line on the left, midnight blue text, and the small icon of my phone. Photos from my camera in my phone only receive the dashed line on the left.

Philadelphia is officially out of contention for the 2016 Summer Olympics. This comes as no surprise to me. A while back each potential city sent a representative to sell their city to the committee. Every city sent their mayor except for one, Philadelphia chose not to send Mr. John 'Fantastic Mayor' Street. (Not a big fan of this guy!)

Our location is quite right, proximity to New York City (whose infrastructure doesn't seem like it can handle an event like this), our hotels, our non-sporting attractions, and transportation. You can take rail through all of the suburbs, to and from the airport, within the city, and all the way to New York or Atlantic City. I'm sure the infrastructure upgrades that we would get would make it even better. I wouldn't really mind living with them afterwards either.

Hopefully the city can get it for 2020, but by then I'll be a ripe old 36. Will I even have the desire to do anything when I become that old?

Update: Houston 2016 Olympic Dream is Dead…Again: here is the scoop from another town to get cut alongside Philly.

Tomorrow I'll be going to the shore in the morning and then I have my next to last class of the summer soon after. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll see about getting together a complete list of my Web 2.0 features. Duncan is a big fan of them, and most likely the only reader of my blog. (P.S. Firefox 2b1 is retarded because it says both "blog" and "Firefox" are spelled wrong.) So far I have an amazingly high zero subscribers. I suppose it takes a few days for FeedBurner to figure out the stats and update that counter. I don't like posts with out images, so here is a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head.

Just recently I figured out what Feedburner actually was. I thought it was for high volume sites and was used to take the load off of continual feed refreshes or something. According to its Wikipedia stub page it is "a news feed management provider - FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters other web-based content publishers."

So what does that mean for you? It should mean nifty little links below each of my posts when viewed in a reader and some interesting stats too. I do request that anyone that is already subscribed to this using a read, that you please change the address you have subscribed to this one . I've changed my syndication links on this page to reflect the new URL, so all future subscribers *should* be subscribing to the FeedBurner feed. If somehow someone does subscribe to the non-FeedBurner feed, I'll be quite upset! I will probably cry and call people faggots if that happens.

Enjoy!

Here is another lovely picture from Gothamist/flickr. If you click on the image and visit flickr there is a original resolution image available there.

Labels: flickr

An off duty police officer stopped a man from carjacking him by shooting him in the face. Officer Kenneth O'Connor had been sitting in his car in the precinct that he works in when Daniel Arroyo threatened him with a gun just after midnight on Sunday. O'Connor used his off-duty sidearm to shoot the subject who then dropped his own weapon and fled. O'Connor called 911 from his cell phone and the subject was captured a short time after.

This situation is why every law abiding citizen should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon. Arroyo would have thought twice about this car jacking if he knew that the majority of the population was carrying.

I found this photo to be awesome. I picked it up off of Gothamist and then blogged it from its source at flickr.
1024x768 version

Update: I added a link to a higher resolution shot and I've provided a higer resolution shot within this post.

Labels: flickr

On July 1st, New Jersey was ordered to close. On July 5th, it did. State operations shut down and left their employees without a job. Motor vehicles, the casino control board, and other state services shut down leaving tax payers and government employees in a hole. This may come as no surprise to Republicans, but Jersey is run by Democrats. The closure is over a budget conflict that may have just been resolved. You can't by lottery tickets, nor can you gamble is Atlantic City, the casinos can't operate without inspectors from the Casino Control Commission. On my personal level, I can't get my license renewed that expires this month. The good news is that they seem to have extended the deadline for inspections and licenses expiring in July into August.

I seem to agree with this guy from FOX NEWS. Why should the government be able to hold us hostage when we basically don't even have a say in the matter? Sure we can vote every single person out of office in the next term, but that means we have to wait, and they have to have opposition. Minorities will probably vote democrat because they know no better.

There is an upside to this, Connecticut is benefiting from the closure.

Yesterday, at the original Nathan's Hot Dogs in Coney Island, the Annual 4th of July Hot Dog eating contest was held. Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi is now the six time champ by besting second place Joey Chestnut. Kobayashi ate 53.75 hot dogs besting Chestnut by 1.75 dogs. This is the closest that an American has come to Kobayashi, last year's separation was a whole 12 dogs!

Kobayashi eats the hot dogs by splitting the frankfurter in half, swallowing both parts at once, and then dipping the buns in water, Sprite, or 7-Up and stuffing it in his mouth. Kobayashi has a condition called gastroptosis, an abnormal downward displacement of the stomach. It is unclear whether this condition plays a factor in his eating ability.

I've had these hot dogs before, I find the casing too tough and little flavor in the actual dog. They serve beer at this location which is quite an odd sight for me since I'm from NJ and you can't get alcohol at fast food places. Their fries are quite delicious, especially with cheese and bacon bits!

A new blog post every day this month? (This week at least?) It's possible!

Happy Fourth of July! Don't blow your hands off!

 I've been having some problems with my TV tuner on my PC, every so often the picture goes fuzzy and I have to play around with splitter (that is no longer needed to split anything) that is in my closet. I finally gave in messing with it today and decided to purchase a female to female coax connector. My first choice was Radio Shack because it is the closest place that I know will have them. Unfortunately they were closed. I went across the plaza to ShopRite (a grocery store) to see if maybe they had a small electronics section, they did not. I was too far away from a Target at this point so I had no other choice but to enter the dreaded WalMart across the street. If "Wal-Mart" isn't ghetto enough, try calling it the "West Berlin Wal-Mart". West Berlin? wtfuxm8.

Get in, get out. That was the plan. Don't look at people in they eyes, or any other part of their morbidly obese excuse for a body. Of cause, this was inevitably not possible. I walked in behind a group of non-English speaking persons who then decided to stand in their large group of about twenty-seven and block the entry way. Once I managed to escape that holy mess, I was then present with two candidates for world's largest woman. I began scrubbing my eyes with Brillo pads that very moment. I was able to retrieve my cable connector with out many more hard-featured people getting in my way. This all changed on the way out. I passed a woman that was wheezing, she didn't seem a day over 50 yet she sounded like she crawled to the store across the Mojave desert, got trampled by a heard of horses, and chain smoked the whole way. I'd be surprised if she left the store in a state other than dead.

I will NEVER return to that Wal-Mart again. I'll drive the extra 10 minutes to Target.

 Only in Brooklyn would a taxi driver that hit an 8 year old girl on a bike get beaten by by-standers. But that's not all! As the cabbie was busy getting beaten, he managed to tell his assaulters that he crashed because he was hit in the head with a pole. The pole came from none other than the cabbie's fare who was attempting to rob him. The mob then proceeded to beat the thief. Police arrived and arrested the fare and charged him with robbery and assault. The child and cabbie were taken to the hospital and are both in good condition. No word on the thief!

I currently use the Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite Keyboard and Mouse and I find it to be a nearly perfect combo. I've had to clean the scroll wheels on both the keyboard and the mouse before but they're currently working perfectly. It has the usual media player buttons and shortcut keys which work nice, and in nearly all applications. The scroll wheels have 5 actions, scroll up/down, left/right, and click which is quite nice. The buttons are a handsome translucent too.

It seems I may have found a replacement though... the yet to be named Bluetooth wireless backlit RECHARGEABLE combo that Microsoft has recently teased us about. The combo will be backlit only when the lights are dim in the room AND it senses that you are not present at the keyboard! It has a sleek design and some flush looking media buttons with low profile regular keys. Very nice! Hopefully it won't be priced too high! I'd quite like one!