christopher’s lives (v5.3)

well, since i am about to have quite possibly hundreds of balloon pics, i figured i’d better knock out the september pics early (on time)…
i used jalbum again, but, this time i used the Experience skin… it lacks a few things, but, i keep having java errors with ExhibitPlus, the one i really love (i used it last month and for all the 2002 collections)…
leave me some feedback on this album skin, there are so many to choose from, but, i only like a few and would like to keep trying different ones…
this one is ok… has a nice overall layout… exhibitplus has many cool features (like a slideshow), but, i keep having errors when i try to use it, and it runs very slow…
keep in mind that you will see the albums and the thumbnails, click on the thumbnails for a screensize of the pic, then, click on the screensize for the original… i even added comments to a few of them this time…
i notice this skin labels vids as folders for some reason, btw…

this month includes some balloon pics (some things never change), a few from the chaos at the gas station across from the santa ana casino, helping jeff and justin move into their new place, the geeky fun had with justin’s new computer, a couple of the weather balloon, a few of my new van, and a few of a night hanging out in paulette’s kitchen…
and of special note to some are Nathan Sampson’s 4th Birthday Party and The Church Barbeque - you know who you are…

annnyway, with no further ado, you may now proceed to the September 2005 photos…

and coming soon will be all the AIBF 2005 pics and i expect to spend a lot of time there, not just viewing from my apt this time…
last year, i was one of several bloggers who covered it, you can re-live the posts back on the old website by browsing through my posts from september 2004, where i also posted plenty of links to great stuff about the AIBF in general and october 2004 where my actual coverage is posted, of course, none of my pics are there anymore… still, some decent writing, if i do say so myself :P

also soon btw, i have pics from andy shrek, one of the brave souls from my church who went to help out in lousiana… he snapped a few while there and i will have those up eventually and hopefully a guest post by him…

now twice this week an AOL’er has told me that they tried to email me at my usual email address (him at christophercornelius.com) and aol didn’t allow it, saying the address was too long…
anyone know anything about this?
a VERY quick, superficial search turned up no references to anyone else complaining about it, but, i was in a big hurry…

my card has that address on it, my site, it is in many places and i have zero intention of changing all that for aol’ers or having multiple addresses listed, so, if this is common and not just something they are doing wrong, that’s a bit of a bummer…

if any aol’er happens to read this in the future, you can also email me at either of my other domain names, so, him at insidiousplots.com and/or him at jesusfreakgeek.com…
or just send me an instant message, i am on aim as well as icq, yim, msn, and skype…

uh, i made a minor change or two and now, instead of my sidebar, i am getting “Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘}’ in”…

it’s not even a complete error message!

and i am supposed to be asleep right now, no time to look into it in any detail…

i hate it when stuff like this happens…

yeah, i know that Google Talk is what everyone is talking about right now, but, after hearing the word “Skype” for the bazillionth time, i took the plunge and installed it…
if it is as cool as everyone says, i will add it to the contact info over there on the sidebar, but, i gotta’ try it a couple times first, so, all you skypers out there, skype me and lemme’ see what it’s all about… my skype name(?) is “insidious_plots” and i will leave it on all the time for awhile (even if it says i am away, try it anyway)… yeah, i could try SkypeOut and call my folks or something, but, i want to see it in action before i put any money into it… i tried the test “answering machine” and that worked pretty darned well, but, i want to test it with an actual duplex conversation…

oh yeah, and, all you experienced skypers, i haven’t looked into it yet, tell me if there is a way to make a link that you click on and it automatically dials me in the skype client…

Edit:
ok, how about this link:
call insidious_plots (trying the callto:// tag)

ok, i set up monitoring with ChangeDetection.com for this site…
look over there to the right, all the way at the top, right below the search box, and you will see a link that says “click here to be notified by email when this site is updated”…
pretty self-explanatory…
click that, it will take you to a page where you can put in your email address and then, every time i make a new post, you will get an email and you won’t have to remember to check in to the site…

ok, two things about it…

firstly, as it says, it is “spam free”, i have been using this service for quite some time with a unique email address and have never gotten an uninvited email from them…

secondly, if i set it up right, i have blocked monitoring of everything on the sidebar… so, like, if i add a new link or change my contact info you WILL NOT get an email about it… that is a good thing, since little things change over there and you don’t want to know about every “chatterbox” post or new link that gets added to the “looking at” section.. it is only set up to notify about new posts on the main page…
on that note, it will not notify about any other part of the site changing, such as new pics uploaded… but, i always make a post when i do something like that, so really, post notification is all you really need…
and, i might add, you can use changedetection.com to monitor ANY page on my site or any other site, once you get the hang of using their service…

anyway, this is something that i am mainly adding for people i know “IRL” that hear me refer to this or that that has been posted to my site, usually followed by me asking when the last time you went to my site was (and you know who you are)… so, click on that link and you’ll always be the first to know when i post something…

well, this year i am not re-posting the entry i have posted the last three years, but, i will link to the last time i posted it…
i usually call it something like “My Annual 9/11 Post That I Think EVERYONE Should Read“…

and while i am linking to old 9/11 posts, this post on my old site also had a couple 9/11-related links…

Also, Fark.com is remembering that day, here is this year’s thread…
Today is the fourth anniversary of 9/11. Refresh your memory of that day by reading the farkives threads
They also had a rememberance thread last year…
and, though, i am sure it is included in this year’s thread, i might as well link to the very first fark thread about it…
NEWS FLASH: PLANES CRASH INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER, PENTAGON. Our link to CNN works (thanks Metafilter). We have news and pics in comments section, if you have any post it there-

and, speaking of first threads from that day, thanks to Google Group’s 20 Year Usenet Timeline, i was able to come up with the link to the first Usenet thread after the first plane hit… and the second, and the third, and the fourth…

live info from AlbuquerqueGasPrices.com, a handy little site that tells you where to go to get the cheapest gas (though, atm as i am posting this, it is showing a low of 2.62 and the site says the lowest around is 2.85, so, i guess it is not bug-free)… i doubt i will add this to the side bar, but, i at least wanted to mention the site since i gave everyone the wrong address at the little get-together tonight… oops…

also, via DCF, “OurABQTrib.com“, which has promise to be a cool site about our beloved city… news for me, by me… at least, that’s what it says…

and, just because i thought it was cool, via i-don’t-remember-where, this one is called “How To Pimp Your Windows XP Desktop to Look Like a Cool Mac Desktop“…
i must try this out… later this week… even a three-day weekend was not long enough…

if you use firefox, do yourself a favor and go get some extensions!!

i have been using a few since day one, but, i finally went and got a bunch and there are some truly amazing ones…

case in point is the text-to-images… you know how my photo directories are just a bunch of numbered links? well, use this extension and it will show you thumbnails instead… well, not actual thumbnails, they are just re-sized versions of the full images, so, i don’t recommend people on dial-up use it, but, for the broadbanders, it is nothing short of amazing… (so far, i just got it and haven’t thoroughly tested it…)
for the dial-up crowd, there are a couple different extensions that at least make browsing those type of photo directories easier by giving you buttons where you can just click “next” to go to the next photo… (see, since the filenames are numbered, it just does a little math and increases the number by one…)

i have at least twenty installed now, including “quicknote”, a nice little notepad that i have on the left instead of bookmarks, one called “CustomizeGoogle” that removes the ads from google search results and adds things like links to other search engine results, one that gives the weather at the bottom of my browser, which sits right below the news scroll, which is also an extension… and there is even one where you can play pong (!) with other people online (!!)… now that’s geeky…

anyway, i know a couple of my “twinner” friends (people i know both in “the real world” and online) are trying out firefox and may not even know about extensions so i am mostly posting this for the benefit of you guys…

i doubt anyone had noticed, but, the first few directories in the photos collection are photo albums… from time to time in the last month or two, i have been toying with JAlbum, this groovy photo album maker… it is very simple, but, a little slow, at least on my leaves-much-to-be-desired machine…

anyway, so, this month’s pics have gotten the JAlbum treatment as well… i think i need to do more tinkering to get it to come out exactly the way i want it, but, it will do for now and is easier to browse than a directory of numbered pics…
btw, fernando and renee’s wedding pics are not included in the album, i forgot about that when i made the album and uploaded it… maybe i will re-do it or at least make an album for those by themselves…

we’ll see…

anyway, here are the photos i took this month, not as many as usual, but, some interesting ones…
there are many settings and templates for these albums, i will experiment each month as i hopefully continue to “albumize” every monthly upload of pics, so, leave me feedback about what works, what doesn’t, and/or if you liked it better being just directories of numbered pics…

amusing attempt to re-live the old days…
[via Waxy]

for the record, at that time, i was in the early stages of my techie journey with a TI-99/4A (with the 128k (?) memory expansion, disk drive, voice synthesizer, 300 baud modem, printer - ah, what i wouldn’t do for a pic of my old desk), i remember reading computer magazines back then and hand-typing basic programs they had in there (they did NOT come with disks, though, you could order cassette tapes with that month’s programs on them, as i recall)… some progs were so big, they would publish them in parts, so, you had a month to type in all that stuff and then wait for the next issue… i guess i was eleven years old when dad bought me a book called something like “Beginning BASIC For Kids”, which taught me about strings, variables, boolean - i still remember some of the little visual aides and such from that book… after that book, my fate was sealed… for years to come, my notebook full of programs and notes was my best friend… i remember many junior high lunches spent with a mile-long print out of some program i had written, scrutinizing every line, command, subroutine, trying to debug the thing, comparing my original notes, looking for typos, looking for incorrect goto line numbers, any clue as to why it isn’t working…

a misspent youth, to be sure…

i spent most of my non-programming time playing scott adams text adventure games, but, i did my bbs time, as well… on one local bss - i wish i could remember the name - i had been caught cheating at tradewars… selling secrets back and forth - had three accounts, one for each opposing faction and one to collect my hush money payments :) neither team ever figured out who their rat was, but, the sysop did… somehow it all worked out that he gave me co-sysop access and i eventually worked for him at the computer shop he ran… dick scheffler was his name…

on a bbs called “the twilight zone”, there was this little game where you could win more access time (you see, folks, you connected to a bbs using a phone line, so, they limited access to users, usually starting at a few minutes a day for new accounts, and there were things you could do to earn access minutes), this was a “guess the number” game… so, i had, say, 30 mins access time per day… so, i would log on and go straight to that game and try to win more time… but, in 30 mins, i could only guess so many numbers and may guess the same one more than once (it was a three digit number), writing down each number i tried ate up even more of my precious time… sooooooo, i wrote a little prog that could try out numbers WAY faster than i, a mere human, could punch them in, read the results, try again, etc., and would never repeat the number it had tried since i started it…
as i recall, i got busted using that, too…

and, you know, bbs’es live on, both dial-up and via telnet… when i got my psion 3c here just 3 or 4 years ago, i didn’t have any internet software for it, but, i did have a modem and a comms program, so, i got some bbs phone numbers, dialled them up, searched their files sections, and, after trying several bbs’es, eventually found an ftp client that i downloaded, then used it to get the rest of what i needed from the ‘net…

annnyway, fun article… the “oh, let’s make fun of 80s tech” joke gets a bit tired, but, this one is not too offensive…

btw, my brother got a “petster” for christmas one year, more like ‘87…

oh, and, before i go, it would be a crime to bring up bbs’es and not mention textfiles.com and the bbs documentary… which bbs documentary? well, THE bbs documentary, of course :P