Saturday, March 06, 2004

Saturday night....

Well, it is Saturday night. So party party party, right...no not so much. I either have a really good cold or a really bad sinus infection. It hasn't decided what it wants to be yet. So I'm sitting in bed, watching movies on my puter DVD player and curled up with a good RFP (Request for Proposal) response. Unfortunately the cold medicine has me groggy. Happily the RFP is a really page turner, and the movie, Second Hand Lion is wonderful. Being that sudafed has left me with a peanut the size of a brain. I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from one of my favorite comedians.

I must confess, I was born at a very early age.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.

-Groucho Marx

Friday, March 05, 2004

quiet

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.

- Hans Margolius

Thursday, March 04, 2004

McGyver's iPod

This is the kind of story I love. Guy, buys iPod, guy wants more battery life from iPod, guy builds iPod battery pack. Mr. Drew Perry is a real life McGyver, Folks! He had a need and with a couple of rechargable batteries and a deck of playing cards later he had his iPod battery pack! Better yet, this fine gentleman has even posted schematics on how to build your own battery pack. He says that he is getting an extra 10 hours out of it.

New Gadget Blog

Surfin some of my favorite blogs, I found a link to Engadget. This is a great blog for those that have to have news on the latests and greatest gadgets. It covers the whole spectrum of gear. Cellphones, Desktops, Digital Cameras, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Laptops, Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Robots, Tablet PCs and Wireless. Basically, if it's geek, they'll tell you about.

So far my favorite article is on the "Devil Duckie". I love the fact that someone had a enough of a sense of humor to make a rubber duckie in to a USB storage device.

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

The toys of my Childhood are now Online

When I was growing up we use to love rainy days. Why? Well first off, growing up in Southern California, there just weren't a lot of rainy days. And secondly and most importantly was our rainy day toys. These were Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys and Legos. My favorite was the Legos. I was always building castles and cars (okay, things that looked like cars if your crossed your eyes and used your imagination).

So today I was just kind of surfing around and I went to one of my favorite design site. Chopping Block.com. I mean any site that has a theme song by "They might be Giants" is pretty cool if you ask me. Anyhow one of their newest projects was for Legos. So I checked it out, and what did I find? My childhood rainy day toy is now available 24/7 on a computer near you. I was taken back for a moment. I thought about this and was a little hurt at first. My toy was now a computer program. Then I thought about it a little more, humm if it's on the screen that means there isn't any little plastic pieces to step on in the middle of the night. Whoever thought of this is a Genius! My poor parents must of stepped on about four hundred million of those little legos at night. I won't have to now. When the little boy wants to play with legos we can just fire up the computer and way he goes!

So with Legos found, its off to google to see about Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. There is still a version of Lincoln Logs around. Infact they even have PDFs of how to build the bank, and the barn and other buildings. Tinkertoys however took a little more searching but I did find something about them. Hasbro still sells Tinkertoys. Somehow it is nice to know that they toys of ones childhood are still around in some fashion.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Win a Date with Javascript

So I have a couple of pages on our site that use javascript to display the date and or time. And of course none of them have the same format. Right now each page has a different javascript to display the date. And if course that isn't very modular. So I wrote an fairly complete javascript function, that if you tell it the format you want it in it will give today's date in the format.
Here are the formats available:

shortdate: 3/2/2004
shortdatetime: 3/2/2004 10:35
shortdateUTCtime: 3/2/2004 18:35:27
longdate: March 2, 2004
longdatetime: March 2, 2004 10:38
longdateUTCtime: March 2, 2004 18:40:12
longweekday Tuesday, March 2, 2004
longweekdaytime Tuesday, March 2, 2004 10:41
longweekdayUTCtime Tuesday, March 2, 2004 18:42:18


You can download the source code here. Download the text file and change it to a iDate.js. The file is commented on how to use it. Feel free to use it in your projects.

Monday, March 01, 2004

Which Forgotten 80s Cartoon Character are you?

I got this link from PixieStitch. She was Butterbear from the Wuzzles. Too Funny!

He-ManYou are He-Man from Masters of the Universe! You
take life very seriously, and you should, considering you are the keeper of all that is good and right in the universe! However, your nonstop suspicion of Skeletor and his henchman can start your friends wondering why you don't loosen up once in awhile.

Which Forgotten 80s Cartoon Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The funny thing about this, is He-man was one of my least favorite cartoons. I always thought if it as filler. I always thought I would me more like Lt. Quicksilver, from the Silverhawks.

Sunday, February 29, 2004

"This land was once, green and good"

Yesterday I bought the movie "The Dark Crystal". I knew what all of the characters where named for the most part, but I didn't remember the story. The details of the story anyway. So my Beautiful Wife and I are watching the movie. The narrator is telling the history of the story. He says, "This land was once green and good, before the crystal cracked". I thought, hold the phone, I have heard that recently; in fact I know all of this. It isn't that my memory was that good. It's the opening lyrics for "The Crystal Method" song "Trip like I do". Which I thought was very hip. It's not the same voice as the narrator in the movie, which somehow I like even more. I forgot how beautiful and enchanting this film is. It is simply amazing to me that this film was made in 1982. Jim Henson was a genius.

I have seen "The Dark Crystal" tons of times when I was a kid. Not in the movie theater though, we didn't go to the movies that often. You see when I was growing up we had the movie on CED disc. Our first CED player was a Zenith and we got it at GEMCO. Mom and Dad had put it on layaway. I remember when we picked it up. It was a Friday night and we even got the movie "Dumbo". I remember going home and watching it all the way through and feeling like I had stayed up really late (9:30pm). I must have been 8 or 9 years old. Then the next morning we got up early to watch it again.

It’s really funny the flood of memories that comes back thinking about these CED movies. The little store in Arcadia that we use rent the CEDs from, the library of CEDs that Grandma and Grandpa use to have. In fact we had just come home from the Video store when I got my finger partial cut off in the car door of our old 1973 ford pinto station wagon. I had the movie ”Alice in Wonderland” in my left hand, and I took the tip of my ring finger off with the car door on my right hand. The same car door, that my Brother and I would ask Mom to leave the window rolled down so that we could jump through it like they did in “the Dukes of Hazzard”.

I remember when Dad figured out to hook up the CED player to the stereo. (This was like in 1985-86 mind you) and Dad had these big tower speakers that he had built. They were taller than I was at the time. Anyhow us kids were watching the movie “The Neverending Story” and Mom was ironing. It got to the scene where the Rock Biter was riding his stone scooter and the floor shook. It was so cool. It felt like you where in the movie. I looked over at Mom grinning and she smiled at me and pointed at the measuring cup full of water on the ironing board and you could see the ripples in the cup from the stereo. We also use to watch the CEDs that were music videos for kids, It was called DTV (Disney TV). and it would have a montage of cartoons edited to go with songs like Hall and Oats’ “Private Eyes”.

I just did a search on ebay for CED. I was amazed with what came up. Hmmm, I may have to pick a couple up for Nostalgia.