back to main

Archive for December, 2004


2004.12.28 sanitarium, leave me be:

as mentioned yesterday, i spent a good deal of time wandering around glen friedman's site, following links hither and yon. well, while doing that, i ran across info on the west memphis three. here's a post i made about it elsewhere:

So I was wandering about the internet today and ended up doing a great deal of reading about "The West Memphis Three," which is a group of teenagers that were convicted of murder in 1993-94 with little-to-no evidence. The prosecution trotted out the fact that the main suspect had dark hair, liked heavy metal music and was interested in the occult. That's pretty much all they had on the guy.

It's an incredibly interesting (if not tragic) case. It really seems like these guys were completely devoured by the American legal system. I highly recommend you take a look at the site and read through some of the information they have there. Margaret Cho even went out to visit all three of the guys in prison. You can find the story here (with a link to a lengthy post from her blog).

That said, I discovered that the main suspect (who is currently on death row) has an Amazon wish list, which is chock full of comics, including pretty much all of the Hellblazer trades. If you're interested in the case and want to do something, consider sending Damien one of those Hellblazer trades.

You can see the wish lists of the other two here:
Jessie
Jason

I encourage you to take a look at the site and make up your own mind.

Thanks.

my biggest regret is that i didn't find out about this before christmas, so that these guys could get some nice christmas surprises. i guess late christmas gifts are better than nothing.

thanks for paying attention.

- 12:25 pm - PL :: 1 Comment
categories ::  Nothing

 

2004.12.27 our skin worn thin:

so…merry monday after christmas. i hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable holiday. or a dangerous one that you were able to live through unscathed. whichever works for you. it snowed like crazy down around these parts (ben took pictures), so i didn't even dig my car out until christmas eve, at which point brooksie and i helped each other with the monumental task.

after all that work, i drove out to owensboro to spend the holiday with the girl and her family. the roads were horrible. it took me two hours to get to e-town, which is only a 30 mile drive. nothing like driving 15 mph on the interstate, bumper to bumper. good times. but the fun didn't really start until i got off of i-65 and onto the western kentucky parkway. from there until owensboro…solid sheet of ice. ahhh…the joy of it all.

but the girl got me america (the book). so it was all completely worth it. i love that daily show. love it.

stumbled upon this awesome article while reading through some glen friedman links to pass on to a friend here at work. photos by friedman, words by ian sevonius of the late, great make-up.

penny arcade ran a pretty funny christmas story starring everyone's favorite elder god, cthulhu.

with that, i'm gonna get back to work…

- 01:48 pm - PL :: 2 Comments
categories ::  Nothing

 

2004.12.21 killer for hire you know not yourself:

th girl came home, last night. we spent almost an entire 12 hours together before she left to head out to owensboro, this morning. i'll be heading out there on friday, m'self. ahhh…the holidays. the hustle, the bustle, the shoving, the road rage…it's enough to make you want to kill yourself…or someone else.

i still have some shopping to do on thursday. i'm not really looking forward to it, but i guess i'll make do. as always, i'm running this one down to the wire and i have no one to blame but myself.

but i will find a way to blame someone else before the week is out…just you wait and see.

i saw this today and found it quite alarming. my grandmother uses aleve on an almost daily basis. i'll be advising her to stop using it right away.

i saw this today and found it quite amusing. like wesley snipes doesn't have anything better to do than meet women in crackhouses and fuck them, fathering illegitmate crackbabies. right.

i'm really pissed that lost is in reruns until at least the new year. i craze new episodes of lost! crave them!! i'm also curious as to how lost's schedule will be affected once alias starts airing again. at least i still have desperate housewives and boston legal to keep me occupied.

- 06:08 pm - PL ::
categories ::  Nothing

 

2004.12.15 eventful:

this'll just be a quick entry to point out a couple things…

1) in light of the "IE gets blowed up real good" bug apparently triggered by the recent bipolar revamp, i've unflipped the switch and gone back to the crappy frames version. if anyone knows why a little CSSP/DHTML might be causing IE to hack up a lung, i implore you to please come forward. for testing purposes, the XHTML valid revamp version is still available.

**update**: well, it looks like i've nearly licked the kick'sploding IE thing. apparently, i didn't do too much testing in IE 6 during initial development, probably thinking that IE5 and 6 rendered more similarly than they do. i still need to do a little layout clean-up work (especially on 1.5) for IE6, but otherwise things appear solid once again.

the culprit? stupid proprietary DOM stuff in IE. document.body.clientHeight was causing IE6 to puke, so i just amped up my browser detect, and called document.documentElement.clientHeight for IE6 only. seems to have done the trick.

those of you IE6'ers out there, please pound on one or all of these (jhb15sporg) and let me know if you're still seeing crashes. i'd be much obliged. ** end update**

2) in other news, the "latest images" functionality of the gallery scripts is coming along nicely, though it seems with each new feature i complete, i think of five more things that could make them even better. what this means is that, eventually, i'm pretty much going to have to do a ground-up rewrite of the scripts. yippee.

in honor of the new functionality (as partially implemented) check out the pictures i took over this past weekend, when i went home to p'town to visit the fam and see my sis and my awesome little niece. be sure to check out the rasnake/old_homestead gallery, as there are several kick ass shots of stuff in and around my parents house. (sometimes, i actually think i'm a good photographer)

anyway, hit that link quick, as it's only good for 10 days–one of the limitations of the latest images feature (as it stands now) is that the number of days images are counted as new is set globally. i'm planning on adding a bit where you can specify a date, a range of dates, or your own number of days for which to show images. should be fun.

**update 12/21/2004** more fixin's have been added to the gallery scripts, adding some of the stuff i mentioned above, and that gallery link above now targets a specific date (rather than xx days ago). still no UI for all the new gizmos, but i'll get to that soon-ish.** end update**

- 01:49 am - PL ::
categories ::  Bipolar: News - Calls to Action - Computers/Tech - Cool Links - Family - Personal Projects - Pleased/Like - Upset/Dislike

 

2004.12.14 light a candle it won't light your fire:

forgive me for breaking normal bipolar form and using capital letters in this post…

So, against my better judgement, I decided to go to Fazoli's for lunch. I've been having a string of annoying incidents there and the food has been going steadily downhill, but I decided to chance it. I guess I just wanted somewhere warm to sit down and enjoy a meal.

That and what I order there (baked chicken parmesan and a coke) comes to a nice, (not so) round total of $6.66. It always makes me grin.

So I go and I order my food and I sit there and wait. I should point out that there was almost no one in the restaurant at the time I placed my order. There was certainly no one else ordering and there didn't appear to be anyone waiting for their food.

And I wait. And I wait. And I wait. And I wait some more.

Finally I see someone that I KNOW ordered AFTER me walk by with a huge tray of food and…a baked chicken parmesan. So I walk up to the counter to try to determine what the hell is taking so long. They inform me that they mistakenly gave my chicken parm to someone in the drive-thru. Yet…they gave the next one out to the people that ordered after me. So I was forced to wait for them to make another one.

So I wait. Not as long, this time.

After a bit, a cute girl walked out with a bag and said "here you go. We're really sorry about that." I just looked up at her, really confused. She handed me the bag and I said "tell me this isn't my order that someone brought BACK." She said "no, no…we made you a new one." I accept the reply and open up my meal.

Only to discover that they put meat sauce on it. FUCKDAMMIT!

So I take it back and (starting to lose my patience) inform them that "there's…uh…meat sauce on this."

So they all start yelling at the dude in the back who made it and tell him to make me ANOTHER one. Yep…My third.

So I wait. And I wait. And I wait. And I swear to fucking god it seemed like I waited for another million years (probably because I was hungry) and right when I was about to walk back up there and ask what the fuck was going on, I hear this:

Fazoli's Girl #1: SHIT!
Fazoli's Girl #2: What? Oh…no…you better make ANOTHER one.

At which point, not able to take it anymore, I throw up my hands and yell "you've got to be fucking kidding me!"

Yep. Fucked up again. This time they dropped it on the motherfucking floor.

After my outburst the manager came out and gave me my money back and offered me all kinds of desserts, salads, etc. I let her know I just wanted my food. She asked "are you sure you don'y want a dessert to take home?" I then told her "I won't be going home any time soon. I'm on my lunch break. 40 minutes of which has been spent waiting on one. Baked. Chicken. Parmesan."

She scurried off and my food eventually came out. It was lackluster, to say the least.

I think I may actually swear off Fazoli's after this one.

- 06:15 pm - PL :: 3 Comments
categories ::  Nothing

 

2004.12.14 meet you at the hang wire:

tuesday. the sky doesn't even have the decency to produce a proper snow. flurries. i get more interesting weather by opening my freezer.

i bought a space heater on sunday. i actually plugged it in and used it last night. it's nice. i'm sure it will help counter the astronomical winter heating bill.

i'd like to take a moment to thank people who have sent me things for christmas:

jack…thanks for the book and the secretary dvd. i popped that dvd in almost as soon as i opened the package. mmmm…maggie gyllenhaal. the book has already taken residence in the stack next to my bed.

pete…thanks for the bill hicks dvd. it warmed the cockles of my heart.

jim lee…thanks for the insanely generous gifting of the rrp edition of batman #608. now i just have to find you at a con and beg you to do me a hellboy sketch.

back to the every day bullshit now.

things that are amusing me today: a couple chuck klosterman articles…the 10 most accurately rated artists in rock history and the theory of advancement.

i didn't do much of anything, this weekend. we played a show on saturday. we rocked. it was fun. i enjoyed watching arch rip it up, as usual. arch's dummer mentioned that this site completely locks up internet explorer. maybe matt should take a look at that.

i bought an xbox on friday. it was a gift to myself, but i also told the girl that i would pretend that she got it for me, as she's been too busy with school to even consider doing any christmas shopping.

of course, buying an xbox two weeks before christmas is about the dumbest idea i've had in a long time. i spent 5 hours driving around trying to find a store that had one. i stupidly told myself that i wouldn't be coming home without an xbox and i stuck to it.

so i've been playing a lot of halo 2.

i bet that came as a big surprise, huh?

- 03:06 pm - PL ::
categories ::  Nothing

 

2004.12.07 can't live for tomorrow:

wow…today has been incredibly eventful.

first i found out that the live hot snakes 7" they were selling on their most recent tour was, in fact, a peel session. not only that, but it was the last peel session ever. wow. i found all this out after kurp sent me an email to let me know that they were selling the 7" on the swami records merch site. after some begging and pleading, i was able to find someone who could order it for me (i have no credit/debit card). so…that was awesome. i'm happy.

add to that the fact that i won a contest over on jim lee's blog. i am walking out of that deal with a very rare, retailer only copy of batman #608. it has a different cover than the normal edition and goes for $400-500 on ebay. super awesome! not only is jim lee one of my favorite comic artists of all time, but he's a super swell guy. wow.

something i forgot to mention yesterday was that i spent most of my weekend putting together a dvd of nirvana's 1993 mtv live and loud performance. i made new menus and even added a couple "hidden" extras. i'm quite proud of it. you can download it via bittorrent from here (you'll have to register for the site). that's a raw dvd folder that you'll have to burn onto dvd with a (shock!) dvd burner, but you should be able to play the dvd from your hard drive with just about any dvd player software (does windows media player support dvd now?).

wow. i'd call this a pretty decent tuesday.

- 07:00 pm - PL :: 3 Comments
categories ::  Comics - Music - Nothing

 

2004.12.06 actual improvements:

i'm sure this will elicit a grimace of some sort out of brian, but i've been puttering around the back office here at bipolar the last few days. My most recent accomplishment follows on the heels of a post (or two) i read earlier today about the "spread of weighted lists" or some-such nonsense. anyway, i saw it and immediately wondered if i could wrangle a quick thing together for the categories index of ye olde bipolar to implement the concept. it only took me about 5 minutes to get the basic code worked up in the movable type template for the category index, but it then took me about three hours to figure out the formula to properly weight the percentages so that the lowest-post-count categories would actually be readable. check it out, or wait 'til you get to the end of the post and click the "categories" link. obviously, the more posts in a category, the larger that category appears. pretty simple and visually intuitive (if visually chaotic) method of displaying more complex data than a simple list.

and i figured out the other day a quick painless workaround for that annoying non-scrolling div firefox bug: just click in the area to scroll, hit the tab key (to put focus on the next link), and scroll away! if you mouse while leaving one hand on the keyboard (as i usually do) then you can do this almost without thinking about it. of course, yes, it is a kluge and suboptimal behavior, but i think you can hack it. besides, not everyone has a scroll button on their mouse anyway, and a fix is on the way (an *no* i don't expect people to go out and download a nightly build *just* so they can use their scroll wheel on bipolar… i just offered that as an option for those inclined to it)

finally, i've been working for the last several days on some more improvements and additional functionality for the bipolar gallery, and you can get a glimpse of the work in progress (if all you wanna do is browse thumbnails at this point). the improvements were just in the "multiple subdirectory 'folding'" code (if you really care, ask and i'll explain), and the added functionality is something brian's asked for for quite a while–a "latest images" option. the page i linked to shows a main index of just the latest photos (currently set to show pics uploaded/changed within the last 10 days). eventually i'll make a seperate function that will take this and spit it out in a limited single set of thumbnails (so that i can, for example, have the 4 latest images in my gallery automatically show up on the most recent post). as i said, very beta work in progress at this point. but progress nonetheless.

- 08:44 pm - PL :: 7 Comments
categories ::  Bipolar: News - Computers/Tech - Cool Links - Personal Projects

 

2004.12.06 i'm a live wire:

i hate not having anything in particular to post about, yet knowing i should post. it's…maddening.

we're playing a show saturday at dutch's tavern. it looks like we'll probably be doing it sans rehearsal, once again, as we still don't have a space. the last show didn't go incredibly bad, so hopefully this one will be a little better.

i have been pissing every 20 minutes, today. it's insane. at least i'm not dehydrated, i guess.

it's been unseasonably warm over the past couple of days, here in louisville. it's nice, but i'm just waiting for the full force of winter to come kick us all in the ass.

and now that i've resorted to talking about the fucking weather, i'm done for today.

- 07:03 pm - PL ::
categories ::  Nothing

 


Archives:


 
bipolar
raloqid