November 27, 2006
Update: I failed to quit smoking after something like 6 days. I quit quitting, so the title of this post still applies. Carry on.
It smells, it makes me smell and it turns my lungs crispy and black. That’s right, we’re talking about cigarette smoke. Sure, I love to walk around the city with a smoke in lip or accompanied with a glass of wine, but do I really need to have a smoke 10 minutes after I get up in the morning? Or everytime I get in the car? Or every 20 minutes while at work? No. I could easily save all these plastic memories but is it worth my health?
I’ve noticed it most in the past few years with my singing voice. I imagine my lung capacity is 40% of what it was before I smoked. I know that cigarette smoke gave me a “rustic” tone to my voice which I actually like, but I’d love to be able to take in more air to support longer, truer notes. That’s not the only reason I’m quitting. I’m quitting so that I don’t have to lie about it to potential girlfriends. It makes me look weak. We started a kitty here at work and Mike and I (who smoke like its going out of style) are giving $5 everytime we want to smoke. If we want to smoke, we can only at the office during the week and must pay $5. The winner after a few months takes both kitty’s. That’s really whats going to get me going. I hope Mike is weak. He’s not in the office yet but I hope hes hurting and weak so at least I can make some money out of this trying time. (The whole next week I may be a bastard, but please understand.)
Thanks to my friend Christynn I have found QuitNet and after signing up it told me that every year I quit smoking I would save $1,551.25. And also, every year I was still not smoking, would add 1 month, 17 days and 9 hours onto my life. Sweet. I’m gonna be around for a long while, suckas. In about a year of not smoking I will reduce my risk of cancer and heart disease by 50% of where it is now. Within 3 days I will be rid of nicotine in my system. Within 10 years of quitting I will have reduced my risk of heart disease and cancer to right around if I never smoked at all, so, here’s lookin at me in ten years.
November 06, 2006
We recently contracted a website for a restaurant that wants to shoot it’s signature dishes to be published on their online menu so we had to figure out the best solution to take well lit photos in controlled white environment that would allow me to pull it out easily in Photoshop.
I found a great article entitled Do It Yourself Lightbox on Joseph Holt’s website. I followed his directions and 15 minutes later and $80 lighter, I had my very own lightbox. I’ve posted my pictures here so you can see the results. I’m pretty excited about it, myself.
I used a Trisuit cracker box because it was colorful and had depth and was the best thing I could find in the office that day. And, I like Triscuits, big deal.
October 20, 2006
The NLCS this year was amazing. Also amazing, was the fact that the NL’s most potent offense was hog tied for several games (except a 12-5 rout in Game 4). I was at games 2, 6 and 7 and I am completely heartbroken. In 1999 and 2000 we were underdogs and it would have been nice to win the World Series, but this year it seemed like destiny.
Continue reading ‘Mets Lose Amazin’ Series’
October 08, 2006
I know the regular season has been over for quite sometime now, but if you’re a baseball fan and you haven’t read Jayson Stark’s 2006 Season in Review for ESPN, get your butt over there. My favorite recap is the foul ball of the year recap where Jay Gibbons of the Orioles actually lined a foul ball directly into his wife’s ribcage while she was enjoying the game. How is that even possible? Speaking of impossibe, Stark also recaps the Dodgers’ back-to-back-to-back-to-back comeback in September against the Padres. I’m just scratching the surface. A great read for any baseball fan to recap this 2006 baseball season.
October 06, 2006
I was brought into this ground floor company by a restaurant owner in my area. My brother had bartended there for a bit and suggested me when he mentioned he needed someone to do a website. His concept was for a website that could let users find and print restaurant menus. Sounded like a good idea. We checked the competitors (of which there are many) and decided on our plan of attack and our USP. The MenuExplorer.com domain name was purchased, we moved into an office a month later and it was up to me, essentially, to get the ball rolling.
Little did I know that mostly (if not all) of our core partners were not very adept at computers. And this whole business relied heavily upon computers; the website, databases of restaurants around the country, the whole works. First things first, we needed a place to collaborate and share ideas and get things done. I was stuck between a rock and hard place because I knew that we needed some computer-based solution for our project management, but these old dogs were a little rusty.
Continue reading ‘Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks’
October 05, 2006
While working on the Menu Explorer website, I came across an error when using our Google Maps iteration called Cartographer.
Every time it would load in IE, I would get an error message saying: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site, Operation aborted”. Damn IE. So, of course, the first thing I did was search Google for this error involving Google Maps. I came across an interesting blog post by Ryan Grant explaining a quick fix. I tried a few of his methods but none worked because we were calling the script from a rails view and the javascript for the Google Map is in the head of our layout so we couldn’t place the javascript after the BODY closing tag.
A comment on his blog post helped me find the right solution to keep the javascripts in the HEAD tag and call it with the “setTimeout(showMap());” in the onload method in the body tag. Worked great. Thanks Ryan and friends!
UPDATE: It seems that I was incorrect and I am still working to resolve this problem. I think that we need to use the cartographer helper in rails. I noticed that we weren’t using the helper and were just hardcoding the call to the jscript in the html view. I will be working on this all next week. I’ll let you know what happens.
September 29, 2006
Jamie Gold reportedly had bodyguards in the final days of the WSOP. Gold’s camp says there were threats made against him. Gold was making enemies with his unorthodox play and irritating style. Taunting other players, revealing his cards and insisting he will call a re-raise. The kind of table talk that really irritates and insults veteran and amateur players alike. Read ESPN’s piece on Jamie Gold’s performance.
I grew to dislike Gold, too. He was in every pot, pushing chips around and hitting flops. He was getting cards. There were only a few moments in the tourney where he may have faltered, but because of his huge chiplead, he never took a big hit.
Continue reading ‘A Case For Jamie Gold’s Bodyguards’
September 26, 2006
This is an epic story. It’s one of those stories that I will tell for the rest of my life. Whenever someone asks me what’s the craziest thing that has ever happened to me, I will tell them this story. Or grunt and tell them to read the damn blog.
A little background
I used to do building maintenance in Neptune, NJ during the fall of 2001. My tasks involved sweeping the sidewalks, taking out garbage, vacuuming hallways, etc. It was a fairly menial job, but it paid the bills. I had to carry around a walkie so that when “Mac” called I could do what he wanted. He was the live-in super there. Old guy, real funny. But he didn’t really call much as time went by. In truth, most of the time I hung out in the pool house reading for most of the day. Those were the days.
At the time I was doing a musical in New Brunswick, NJ at the Cabaret Theatre called Blood Brothers. My friend Jay was the director and it was a lot of fun. I didn’t have a leading role of any sort and most of the time I was portraying a child and just being silly. It was a good show and I’d like to think I helped strengthen the ensemble who, too, were strong. I had been having a rough week when this story unfolded. I must have been stressed out about a girl, maybe. Damn you, spacedog. I really can’t remember why, exactly, but I know it was a rough week with tech week and all that. I’d wanted to get up there real early just to relax and go over lines before the show. But, there was going to be a small kink in my plans.
Continue reading ‘The One About The Kidnapping (Part One)’
September 12, 2006
Earlier today, in San Fran, Steve Jobs took the stage for the second time in as many months to announce more Apple iPod products. Again, this hush-hush announcement was covered in explicit detail from the gang at Engadget.
Continue reading ‘Apple: It’s Showtime!’
I’ve noticed it most in the past few years with my singing voice. I imagine my lung capacity is 40% of what it was before I smoked. I know that cigarette smoke gave me a “rustic” tone to my voice which I actually like, but I’d love to be able to take in more air to support longer, truer notes. That’s not the only reason I’m quitting. I’m quitting so that I don’t have to lie about it to potential girlfriends. It makes me look weak. We started a kitty here at work and Mike and I (who smoke like its going out of style) are giving $5 everytime we want to smoke. If we want to smoke, we can only at the office during the week and must pay $5. The winner after a few months takes both kitty’s. That’s really whats going to get me going. I hope Mike is weak. He’s not in the office yet but I hope hes hurting and weak so at least I can make some money out of this trying time. (The whole next week I may be a bastard, but please understand.)
