I have a novel idea, instead of making an announcement in the “blog” section everytime I add or update a page, I’ll just add a little “Updated” icon next to the link in the menu. But then I thought to myself, that requires work…and if you know me at all, I really don’t like to work at all. So I’m going to build it into the PHP and mySQL code. Everytime I make an update, a date stamp will be added. Then for the next week, an icon will show up next to the link. How cool is that? I’ve written the code yet, but I will. In fact, I plan on making a page dedicated to the code I write, including snipits of code YOU can use.
In the meantime, I’ve updated the “Andrew” page. You should check it out, it’s really kind of funny.
You may have noticed that the words “Sections”, “Articles”, and “Technical” have been replaced by an image. I have now added on-the-fly production of such images elsewhere on the site. It’s cool. Really cool.
Also, I fixed a coding error that prevented the end of a page from being displayed when no music was playing.
Finally, I will send $1 to anybody who can figure out what the mysterious alphanumberic combination at the bottom is AND can decipher it. Just send you answers to me with subject of “Mysterious letters on website” in the subject.
The migration is on! Ducks are flying south and I am upgrading! The process to move from a Windows 2000 Pro based to a Windows 2003 Server setup has begun. First step, testing. I have currently setup the server to stream all the video files. You can verify this be noting the fact that before each clip is played, a short “Powered By: Windows Media Player 9 Series” ad is shown. For those of you complaining about IIS, have no fears, I’ll still be running Apache. That begs the question, why not just run Linux….if only it were as simple as that.
So 9|11 is upon once again. As I was driving home from school today, I was listen to the Dave Ross show on 710 Kiro. Mr. Ross was playing some sound bytes from the first David Letterman show after September 11th, 2001. I really liked them, and I’m still trying to find it found it. However, I have found the following…which should be a start:
—Begin—
cold opening and applause
Thank you very much.
Welcome to the Late Show. This is our first show on the air since New York and Washington were attacked, and I need to ask your patience and indulgence here because I want to say a few things, and believe me, sadly, I’m not going to be saying anything new, and in the past week others have said what I will be saying here tonight far more eloquently than I’m equipped to do.
But, if we are going to continue to do shows, I just need to hear myself talk for a couple of minutes, and so that’s what I’m going to do here.
It’s terribly sad here in New York City. We’ve lost five thousand fellow New Yorkers, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can see it. It’s terribly sad. Terribly, terribly sad. And watching all of this, I wasn’t sure that I should be doing a television show, because for twenty years we’ve been in the city, making fun of everything, making fun of the city, making fun of my hair, making fun of Paul… well…
So, to come to this circumstance that is so desperately sad, I don’t trust my judgment in matters like this, but I’ll tell you the reason that I am doing a show and the reason I am back to work is because of Mayor Giuliani.
Very early on, after the attack, and how strange does it sound to invoke that phrase, “after the attack?”, Mayor Giuliani encouraged us — and here lately implored us — to go back to our lives, go on living, continue trying to make New York City the place that it should be. And because of him, I’m here tonight.
And I just want to say one other thing about Mayor Giuliani: As this began, and if you were like me, and in many respects, God, I hope you’re not. But in this one small measure, if you’re like me, and you’re watching and you’re confused and depressed and irritated and angry and full of grief, and you don’t know how to behave and you’re not sure what to do and you don’t really… because we’ve never been through this before… all you had to do at any moment was watch the Mayor. Watch how this guy behaved. Watch how this guy conducted himself. Watch what this guy did. Listen to what this guy said. Rudolph Giuliani is the personification of courage.
applause
And it’s very simple… there is only one requirement for any of us, and that is to be courageous, because courage, as you might know, defines all other human behavior. And I believe, because I’ve done a little of this myself, pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing. He’s an amazing man, and far, far better than we could have hoped for. To run the city in the midst of this obscene chaos and attack, and also demonstrate human dignity… my God… who can do that? That’s a pretty short list.
The twenty years we’ve been here in New York City, we’ve worked closely with police officers and the fire fighters and…
applause
…and fortunately, most of us don’t really have to think too much about what these men and women do on a daily basis, and the phrase New York’s finest and New York’s bravest, you know, did it mean anything to us personally, firsthand? Well, maybe, hopefully, but probably not. But boy, it means something now, doesn’t it? They put themselves in harm’s way to protect people like us, and the men and women, the fire fighters and the police department who are lost are going to be missed by this city for a very, very long time. And I, and my hope for myself and everybody else, not only in New York but everywhere, is that we never, ever take these people for granted… absolutely never take them for granted.
applause
I just want to go through this, and again, forgive me if this is more for me than it is for people watching, I’m sorry, but uh, I just, I have to go through this, I’m…
The reason we were attacked, the reason these people are dead, these people are missing and dead, and they weren’t doing anything wrong, they were living their lives, they were going to work, they were traveling, they were doing what they normally do. As I understand it (and my understanding of this is vague at best), another smaller group of people stole some airplanes and crashed them into buildings. And we’re told that they were zealots, fueled by religious fervor… religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any Goddamned sense? Whew.
I’ll tell you about a thing that happened last night. There’s a town in Montana by the name of Choteau. It’s about a hundred miles south of the Canadian border. And I know a little something about this town. It’s 1,600 people. 1,600 people. And it’s an ag-business community, which means farming and ranching. And Montana’s been in the middle of a drought for… I don’t know… three years? And if you’ve got no rain, you can’t grow anything. And if you can’t grow anything, you can’t farm, and if you can’t grow anything, you can’t ranch, because the cattle don’t have anything to eat, and that’s the way life is in a small town. 1,600 people.
Last night at the high school auditorium in Choteau, Montana, they had a rally (home of the Bulldogs, by the way)… they had a rally for New York City. And not just a rally for New York City, but a rally to raise money… to raise money for New York City. And if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the… the spirit of the United States, then I can’t help you. I’m sorry.
applause
And I have one more thing to say, and then, thank God, Regis is here, so we have something to make fun of.
If you didn’t believe it before (and it’s easy to understand how you might have been skeptical on this point), if you didn’t believe it before, you can absolutely believe it now…
New York City is the greatest city in the world.
lengthy applause
We’re going to try and feel our way through this, and we’ll just see how it goes… take it a day at a time. We’re lucky enough tonight to have two fantastic representatives of this town, Dan Rather and Regis Philbin, and we’ll be right back.
School started officially on Monday. And with that starting, so did my final year as a Senior. How sad. Not really. I actually have quite a nice class load: Physics, Biotech, Vocal, Honors English (my school doesn’t have AP or IB classes), Study, Calc II, and American Government.
I finially got my VPN working. This is good for two reasons:
I have a secure transport layer for my Wireless card
I have a transport layer that is secure for when I am at school so I can get access to my files on my server. This should pave the way for remote back-ups. How exciting!
I was dinking around on the Windows Media Player Plugin Site and found a plugin that dumps the content tag of your current music to either a XML or text file. Then I found some simple PHP to decipher the text file and I added it to the bottom of the page. So when I’m listening to music, you can see what I’m listening too.
As you may have already heard, Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been in the last 59,619 years. Everybody was touting how if you looked up towards the sky at 2:51am PST, you would be seeing Mars at its closest point to Earth. Well, everybody was wrong.
At this point, you may think that I might be referencing the fact that the time should really be 2:51 and 14 seconds, or something like that. But no, NASA, as well as a majority of news reports incorrectly stated the time by over 3 minutes.
Three minutes!! How could a fallacy this great come about? Well, it’s very simple. Almost everybody forgot to account for time dilation, that is, the amount of time it takes light to travel from Mars to Earth. At 34.6 million miles away, it takes light an astounding 186.02 seconds to travel to Earth (34,600,000/186,000 ≈ 186.02). So unless you were looking towards the sky at 2:54.06 am PST, you missed out.
Don’t fret, Mars will perigee in another 2287 years.
Graphing is cool. Especially when you extrapolate data from it. Graphs are also cool when you graph useless information with them, such as how many emails I get per a month. Or how many emails I send per a month. Or both! So that’s what I did. I graphed the amount of email I’ve gotten per a month since 1998. And no, I’m not joking you. I’ve saved almost every single email since 1998. Many of you know this, most of you don’t. In case your worried about privacy issues, don’t. My computer is secured behind a firewall…with all data encncrypted. Now for the results!
This is how many emails I’ve gotten. As you can see the trend line is going UP! Within the next year or so, I should be recieving upwards of 1000 emails per month. This does not include SPAM or newsletters or automated emailings. 99.5% of these emails are from real people. This does not include my school account, which I don’t use at all, except for inter-school emails. Click on the image to see a bigger, more readable version.
So I realized that I forget to post info about my trip. Well, my trip was good. Great in fact. The server flop like it did last year. I had a great time, got a sun tan burn. Went water skiing and tubing. Went to Elitches and Water World. Pictures will be posted soon.
Now on to some other things. I’ve edited some of the content, taking out items that I didn’t care for anymore, mostly because they were old. I also took the liberty of revamping some of the graphics. So really minor things here and there.
As a note for people you are interested in web development, or more specifically Content Managment Systems (CMS), I’ve finally completed my version. If your interested in using it, let me know!
Previously know as Operation: Red Hat, this is the next step. I have successfully installed SHRIKE, aka Red Hat Linux 9, as the second OS on my Toshiba Laptop, the primary OS being Windows XP. Also, the goals of RH/CH have changed. Instead of migrating to use only Red Hat, the goal is now to have Windows XP and Red Hat live and work together in unison, providing me with the best of both worlds. Thus far, I have been successful, installing a the NTFS patch for Red Hat.
