fantasy sports are good
2005.12.28 11.39
the chronic-what?-cles of narnia
2005.12.27 11.14
| I laughed my *ss off when I first saw Saturday Night Live's Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg music video short ''Lazy Sunday.'' Watch the whole thing using the Google Video player on the left. My favorite part is when they determine mixing Mr. Pibb with Red Vines is Crazy Delicious. Also, ''Google Maps is the best! Double True!'' comes in a close second. Check it out and laugh. I need to re-evaluate my New Years 2006 resolutions to where I can get on the cast of SNL. Yeah! |
it's beginning to look a lot like ivy
2005.12.26 8.07
What I thought was going to be a slow week in Philadelphia turned out to be quite interesting with little fixes and bugs that needs squashing in our application. You can test something over and over but you won't know what people will find when you turn it over to a giant user population. We had some lazy guy entering a birthdate in as 1/1/1111 or something like that. That's a valid date and it turns out our application doesn't like dealing with people who are over 999 years old. Oops. That's fixed. Everything else was just unexpected scenarios and odd behavior that we had to lock down. It's fun doing that stuff. I believe I'm on the project until at least June 2006, so we'll see what we'll see. Philadelphia. Ahhh.i wanna be a part of it
2005.12.22 12.12
This past Sunday, I trekked up to New York City with Heather to meet up with QueenBeth, OktoberNight and Natalie. Beth's boyfriend Hilding was there as well, but I can't seem to locate a website for him. How dare he! In truth, you don't have to have a website to be seen with me, although Super Heather is at least making a minor concerted effort. I'm holding Super Heather's camera hostage so I'll be to blame if there are no cool Hanukkah photos for her to post next week. I'm leaving for Houston for the second time this month later this evening. If you want to catch me live and in person, I'll be touring Houston through next Monday night with my entourage. Groupie applicants, please send me your latest headshot, resume and body measurements. Also, let me know if you're allergic to peanuts.Getting back on task, I took my second journey on the Chinatown bus. Their scheduling is a little weird on the weekends. They had no 11:30 AM bus on the schedule, but apparently that's the bus we were on. They all looked the same to me. Well, there's this one bus that says, ''Not response for person belonging.'' That's a good thing because I get my sense of belonging from friends and family. The bus doesn't like to hug or tongue kiss, anyway. I mean, it's a machine. It did mention something about a chick named Sarah Connor that it was looking for. Ummm. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Heather has a sense of super-smell and was able to survive the bus trip, stinky bathroom smell notwithstanding. We got off in Tribeca and took a subway up to 50th street.
This New York trip included shopping and minor quibbling, although nothing unexpected. You know your friends and their quirks, right? After a long day of walking and checking out cool places, we found ourselves having a very tasty albeit slightly delayed dinner at Menachim Dworman's Olive Tree Cafe in Greenwich Village. 117 MacDougal Street is the exact address. We settled into a small circular table and enjoyed their fine Middle Eastern cuisine and fascinating excuses for the lack of service. Someone left, apparently. How interesting! Seeking to avenge myself, I'd just like to say that the secret code to go to the bathroom is 147. Tell your friends as there's nothing better than knowing you have a safe place to pee when traveling through Greenwich Village with a full bladder.
After dinner, we walked a few doors down to La Lanterna di Vittorio where we were treated to indifferent European-style service and a lack of cheesecake. It's a combination cafe and jazz club with cozy settings, a crackling fire and dim lighting. In lieu of the aforementioned lack of cheesecake, I ordered coffee and blueberry crumb pie. I then demonstrated my innate ability to make eye contact with my friends without listening to them, much to their amusement. Remind me to show you sometime, but you'll need to remind me again after you remind me the first time since I probably won't remember that you reminded me to start off with.
new years party 2005
2005.12.21 7.04
Click here to see an Evite Video I made for my New Year's party that I'm having here in Philadelphia. If I haven't invited you then consider yourself invited. Just drop me an email and you're in.Let me now put on my media guy hat and highly recommend Google AdSense. So much fun and so easy to use. If you have a site with content then I highly recommend checking them out.
voices from the past
2005.12.14 13.39
Listen to an MP3 of my sister and I when we were in the 4th and 6th grades respectively. This was for an English-K class and the assignment was to cover a short story of some sort. I'm not sure how we settled on doing The Helen Keller Story. It's super super cheesy so feel free to turn up the volume as loud as you can and embarass yourself. My sis is the narrator and I'm the other voices, the baby, the sound effects, and whatever else. This is just one of many examples of the audio I imported while I was in Houston last weekend. Here's an answering machine message someone left on my USS Enterprise BBS phone number when the site was down. You can tell he's annoyed that a computer isn't answering the phone. Good times!article about lasik
2005.12.12 12.42
The AP newswire has an awesome article about LASIK now that it's been available for 10 years. The guy they interviewed for the article had the same procedure that I did. I never lost a pair of glasses, however, so that part is all him.9 month update
2005.12.09 15.43
Now that winter has set in the moisture in the air is nearly gone and my vision has had a slight change as a result. I was aware that getting LASIK during the winter is the best time to do it because your vision is slightly poorer during the cold dry months of the year and thus a correction will be more accurate. In the daylight I can still see 20/20 for the most part but in interior lighted conditions and at night my vision is definitely in the 20/40 range along with a slight touch of decreased sensitivity to contrast. When my next meeting comes up with LASIKPLus I intend to have a touch-up done on the right eye to sharpen things up. I can handle the nighttime starburst as long as the light source is nice and sharp. Still, I'm curious to see if my vision will improve again once winter is over. Considering I couldn't see a thing before the surgery, I can easily accept the caveats. I drove two hours in the pitch dark the other evening so it's not as if I can't function. My over-corrected left eye was actually a really good thing since my left eye is still the stronger and crisper of the two. Good times. Vision Simulations has some image simulations that come close to demonstrating the night time goofy vision that I get. My starbursts are more like example #2. Here's an example of the subtle ghosting and contrast loss you get during dim light and indoors. FYI, All of these examples are WAY worse than anything I'm experiencing, so don't let me scare you off from LASIK. I'm still happy I did the surgury and would do it again in a heartbeat. If you had really poor vision to start off like I did prior to getting the correction, you'd completely understand the give and take involved when compared to not being able to see a thing before (without glasses or contacts).Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper
2005.12.09 14.56
This past Sunday night, I trekked out to Wilkes-Barre, PA with my friend Emily to see Cyndi Lauper in concert. Upon recounting the night's activities, I found it funny that people asked me if I was sitting in the front row. Of course I was! It's Cyndi freakin' Lauper. There are only a handful of 80's starlets that I think make the pretty music, and Cyndi is one of them. Wilkes-Barre is far, far away from Philadelphia -- nearly a two-hour trip. Upon my arrival, there was nice $2 parking adjacent to the theater. No food other than candies and chip-like substances, we decided to survive on Twizzlers and those pretzel cheese roll cracker thingies. I'm drawing a blank. The theater was in great shape and our seats were on the end of the center aisle right by the staircase where Cyndi would frequently walk up and down during the course of her performance.First up was Jill Sobule. Her voice is so soft and melodic but her lyrics are dead-pan hilarious. She should be a lot more famous than she is. Heather tells me Jill was really popular and I don't seem to have any recollection. She was visibly shaking during the course of her set. I swear she didn't make a single mistake. I've found some MP3s on the internet of songs Jill covered in her set for your listening pleasure including: JET PACK, MEXICAN WRESTLER, KAREN BY NIGHT, LUCY AT THE GYM, BIG SHOES (with her mom on the phone).
After Jill's 45 minute set was up, Sandra Bernhard sauntered up to the microphone. I'd purposely kept myself in the dark on the night's proceedings so I'd be surprised by the set list and any opening acts that might show up. I never expected two opening acts, much less to see Madonna's favorite mid-90s gal-pal Bernhard. She sang an opening and closing song sandwiched by some decided mixed stand-up. The Japanese yams story she's apparently been telling everyone since Thanksgiving wasn't all that funny. She seems to think it is, however. She read from the newspaper (this is a standard part of her shtick, apparently). Laura Bush was discussing how the White House was bright and beautiful for Christmas. Sandra hates the Bushes (as did most of the audience), so it was hilarious to see her occasionally gag while reading the article.
After an overlong Bernhard stint, Cyndi finally appeared and was dancing all over the stage, kicking off her shoes and going barefoot. She wore a blue silk blouse and black hot pants. They may have ever been leather, but I'm going to stick with my initial hot pants assessment. She sang a nice mix of new material mixed with songs off The Body Acoustic -- a collection of her greatest hits played VH1 style. I didn't even recognize my all-time favorite Cyndi Lauper song TIME AFTER TIME until she started singing it. You can hear the new version playing for free on Cyndi's official website Cyndi Lauper Online. Use the arrows at the bottom of the flash to move to the next song in case TIME AFTER TIME doesn't come up right away. Here's Cyndi's set list as best as I can copy and paste:
ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
I DROVE ALL NIGHT
CHANGE OF HEART
SISTERS OF AVALON
SHE BOP
ABOVE THE CLOUDS
FEARLESS
TRUE COLORS
SHINE
MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING
ALL THE YOUNG DUDES w/Jill Sobule
EARLY CHRISTMAS MORNING
TIME AFTER TIME
STAY
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN
Before she began singing ABOVE THE CLOUDS she gave a short speech about her involvement with Matthew Shephard's mom. Matthew was murdered as a result of a hate crime and Cyndi had only recently met her and instantly bonded. She held a handful of bracelets and asked everyone to spread love and stop hate. She then handed me one a bracelet and then tossed the others around. She was standing 6 inches away from me at the foot of the steps at this point, so pretty cool! I know what you're thinking. She's 52. But she's still cute. She's got her same voice and her lip curl make up for the bad choice of hot pants. I swear.
