Happy Birthday week, Anthony! Hope  you had a wonderful birthday-trip home over Thanksgiving.  It was sooo hectic here this past two weeks!  I had every good intention of snail-mailing a happy birthday greeting to you @State College, then all ____ broke out those days late last week.  Today here I am,  MORE than a day late!  Here are some of my poor excuses:  my new duel-fuel range was delivered to Sears Gainesville,  from Jacksonville last Friday, so  I eagerly ran (drove) 40 mi. there to pick it up.  Last Sunday Paul intended to install it for me.  However, he decided "we needed" a longer gas line so I can pull the range out to clean behind. (and a good idea).  Of course, that meant we needed to wait until Monday to buy the part.  Well, we ended up working 8 hours on your birthday, w/Paul having to install a 220 electric line first, for the electric oven, then re-configure a  new,  longer gas line for the cooktop.  Etc. etc. as things go with new installation.  In the meantime, I was preparing for Marc coming home (an 8 hr drive from Nashville, Tennessee) and Laura & Doug (2 1/2 hours home from Daytona Beach) to spend Thanksgiving (they ended up staying w/their sister Lisa all week-end, 10 miles from Mom’s!)  Needless to say, I was running back & forth everyday!  But, we all enjoyed being all together.  We went to see the new 007 movie Friday (not as intriging as some of the older ones but great graphics), then to dinner @Carrabba’s --great Italian food.  Of course, Marc had to go to the toy store and buy a boy-toy...a little electric car.  Only to have Doug talk him into going the next day to a "real hobby store" and Marc bought a "real  ’gas-powered’ car";  then they along with my Grandson Brett, raced cars late into Saturday night and Sunday early morning before everyone had to drive back home.  Whew!  We are all now looking forward to the next holiday when we can all be together!  Wish you were nearer, to enjoy sharing time w/us.  Wish the whole family was nearer.  You all will just have to come on down sometime. . .probably nicest @Laura’s. . .to enjoy the beach!  Well, just wanted you to know I was thinking of you all this birthday week-end...and wishing you "Happy Birthday!" Love you xoxo

Happy Thanksgiving, world!

I’m going home and I’m going to eat turkey... mmmm smoked turkey is good.

I’m listening to the latest Slick Shoes album, the self-titled one. This album is just beyond words. It puts you in the best mood, it’s so upbeat and sing-along.  If you like punk or pop-punk or emo, even a tiny bit, you will love this album.  When I first heard it, I was really upset because I loved the earlier album so much.... and I thought this new one wasn’t very good at all.  But after 2 or 3 listens, I couldn’t stop listening to it!  So really, go check it out.

Hi Anthony, I just found your web site by chance which i really liked alot, i was looking for a way to mame my own family album onsite, you gave me a real good idea...
Thank you

Hey Anthony,

Smile, it’s your birthday!! Have a good one!

It is a sad day. Not everything in life is good. But all things do work together for good.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God...
(Romans 8)

I believe that.

We let the madness sleep on a Sunday night,
beneath the torn bedsheets and the spider’s sight,
when words are few and far...
Only the depth of time makes you realize
this is not a chance to fly.
And only the good men take their time.
And only the good men do what’s right.

You slide an inch or two towards the other side.
I’m staring at the street through a curtain seam,
it’s just enough to see.
And only the bedspring creaks make you realize
when you just don’t feel alive...
And only the good men take their time.
And only the good men do what’s right.

We’re lying faceless adrift in the night,
and what more will it take just to realize
this is not our idea of paradise?
And I can feel the breaking inside,
there’s much more to life than to be alive,
I wish that I could say this to her tonight...
but they never see your side.

We let the madness sleep on a Sunday night,
the television screen, a magazine and a
flickering street light.
Only the quiet nights make you realize
this is not what love requires...
And only the good men take their time.
And only the good men do what’s right.

We’re lying faceless adrift in the night,
and what more will it take just to realize
this is not our idea of paradise?
And I can feel the breaking inside,
there’s much more to life than to be alive,
I wish that I could say this to her tonight,
but they never see your side...

- Joshua, What Love Requires

Apparently most young Americans aren’t very sharp when it comes to geography and other general information about the world. National Geographic conducted this recent survey; you can see the results and take the survey yourself on the website.  I got 19/20 correct... I couldn’t locate stupid Sweden.  Alright, I take it back, Sweden isn’t stupid, I’m just bitter.  Anyway, I thought the survey was pretty simple, and I hated geography/history classes in high school... never paid much attention.  But I do listen to NPR news once or twice a day.

What’s up, A? Talked to Brian today and he pointed me to the site.  I figured I’d drop a quick note to say "hi."  Good to see that all is going well with you...  Tell the family I said "hi."

Hi Honey, just going to my photo page thru your site.  It won’t open from my desktop link so thought I’d try it this way.  7 days till your birthday!!!!  Hey, howscome no photo of Maria on your home page?

I hit 10,000 visitors on Monday! 10,000 over the past 8 months since March of 2002. You can see all the details on my stats page... just click any of the links in the "Last 5 visitors" list.

I get about 100 different visitors per day.  It started out at around 0 or 1 per day in March, and has been growing ever since.  I remember when I was like, wo, there were TEN people on my site today!!  And then 20, and then 50, and then.... it’s just amazing.

The count is a visitor count, not a hit count.  It doesn’t increase when you refresh the page.  So it really is a fairly accurate count of the number of different people who visit.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the secret to getting lots of people to your website is CONTENT.  If you put useful stuff on your site, Google will know, and show you love, and then people who want to find that stuff will show you love.  Really.  All that nonsense about meta tags, and sites that offer to "register your website with 5000 search engines".... it’s pure trickery.  Just put up a site that’s useful and it will succeed.

No posts in a while. There’s so much homework to be done lately.

My site is "crawled" by Google daily.  I think that most sites are crawled monthly.  Google uses an undisclosed algorithm for generating search results, but I know that at least part of it considers how often a site is linked by other sites.  In any case, it’s pretty cool that I can type something on the board here, and by tomorrow Google has it indexed    :&nbsp)

Today I found a good, free 3D graphing program!  It’s so helpful when you have a class that deals with surfaces and solids.  I certainly don’t feel like spending the money for Mathmatica or any of the other giant math suites out there... and come to think of it I don’t really want to install any of that stuff either.  Small software is word, and free software is definitely word.

I’m finally moved into the basement in my house at school.  The one-week project that took two-and-a-half months is finally over!  Well, almost... the bathroom still isn’t installed.  But anyway the bedroom is gigantic, with a giant window and a door... and the closet just got finished, so there’s finally room to set up my drums, so I can play again!  In fact, I’m going to go play right now!

I don’t know if any of you are football fans, or even sports fans, but this story really touched me, I cried reading it.... me... who hasn’t cried since the last time he had a girlfriend break up with him (also the last time i had a girlfriend, but thats a lil besides the point... Anyways, the story is as such, Jake Porter ... well, I will just quote a lil bit from the site...

For three years, Jake Porter made every practice at Northwest. He suited up for every game but never got in. He is mentally handicapped — chromosomal fragile X syndrome.

Go here to read the rest...

I really love your website, the music is great! THANKS!

I’m looking to sell my 19" monitor because I want to buy an LCD monitor. I relocate about 10 times a year, going from school to home and home to school and back all the time, and I need something smaller. So if you know anyone who might want it, let me know.  I need about $130 for it.  It’s a KDS Visual Sensation 195e.

OK, I know that most bands you placed on the "Christian Bands" are not Christian bands, and you say it yourself, that you do not THINK that they are. SO why place them there? Simply, I understand that the internet is free access to say what you want, but give the bands some respect and if you are going to label htem, at least be smart about it.

Labels suck as it is; it’s like judging. Any good Christian knows that God is the only one that can judge. Good photos though.

My boyfriend says (and I quote):shuthte[oops]up. People like him are what make a simple fight turn into a hate crime.

It’s November again, and you know what that means... vote-nazis. You know who I’m talking about. Those people who get on the TV, the radio, the newspapers, and just generally get in your face, telling you that it’s "your duty as an American" and your "obligation" to vote.  I’m sorry buddy, but you’re mistaken.  My duty as an American is to protect my countrymen from psychopaths like you, who are trying to take away people’s freedoms.  That’s right.  Stop and think for a second.  What is freedom?  Freedom is the ability to choose.  It’s the right to NOT be forced into anything.

I actually heard some lady... excuse me, some woman... on the radio who called the people in her city "despicable" because she wasn’t happy with the number of people who voted.  For goodness’ sakes, woman, show a little respect, pretend to be professional.  It’s incredible to me that people can masquerade around in the name of "freedom" and "liberty" while insisting that anyone with a different viewpoint is a communist or a traitor.  If you think that voting is the meaning of life, well, fine... think what you want.  But don’t put other people down and call them un-American just because they disagree with you.

Voting is a means to an end, nothing more.  It’s not the end itself.  And it’s certainly not the only way of getting things done.

I have my own site, steev.net - i love the look of your site, and was wondering if you would mind if i did my site stylisticly based on yours? I use e107, so its gonna take some modification, and the fact that im new to php, and still learning, but i thought I would ask permission to use a look similar to yours before i went ahead and did it

-- steev

just dled a thrice song from your website, good good good band! have to hear more of them soon i hope, hehehe! thank you for your music page, hehehe:-p!

ya, i promote bands i love, and you like cool bands, so ya, everyone get the used cd, cuz the single out now isnt the greatest!!!

A couple weeks ago we went to the Troc to see a band called MattpondPA. Margie works with one of the guys, so she wanted to check it out.  As it turned out, Rainer Maria was the headliner, whom I never heard of.  Their sound was unusual to me, but I liked the guy/girl singing duo.  Anyways, I had no idea what classification they fell under, but you describe them as Emo to the max, so now I know what Emo sounds like.  I guess I’m revealing my age by admitting I don’t know Emo, but oh well.

can someone help me out with the name of the eminem song with the chorus "to whom it may concern"? I see the lyrics posted on this site, but no song title.

Steve Gibson is my hero. Well, after StrongBad anyway. Seriously though.  Apparently the WinXP malformed URL vulnerability is pretty serious... it can delete entire directories from your hard drive.  So Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put off making a patch for the vulnerability until the release of SP1, a few months later.  They claimed that releasing a separate patch immediately would have required "significant technology development."  Steve Gibson wrote a patch in less than a day and put it online.  He’s always on top of these security issues, he calls Microsoft out on their malarkey, and he writes all these cool, tiny programs to fix stuff.  If he told me to put butter on top of my computer and turn it upside down and wipe it on the carpet, I’d do it.  He knows what he’s talking about.

In other news.... you should be browsing the web with Mozilla.  Stop using Internet Explorer.  It’s awful.  It’s full of bugs and security holes.  It displays pages incorrectly and against spec.  And worst of all... it has millions of popups!  Well, at least it allows millions of popups.  Mozilla doesn’t.  It sends that stuff out directly.  I haven’t seen a popup in months, except for the other day when I made the mistake of viewing a page in Internet Explorer and got 3 popups on the first page I went to!  I’ll never go back.  Mozilla forever!

And while I’m showing my support for the underdog, let me just mention Perl.  Maybe Perl isn’t the underdog, but you probably haven’t programmed with it, and you probably should.  Perl will make your life better.  You’ll be happier with yourself.  You’ll sleep better at night.  You can say "Just another perl h4x0r" at the bottom of your emails, and mean it.

It’s snowing!! Muahaha!

My sister Tasha got married this weekend! Check out the photos!

Also, in the process of getting those photos online, I realized that I needed a more streamlined and better-quality process for creating thumbnails and photo albums. I came up with a very slick setup.  I now just right-click on a folder containing my images, and choose "Make Photo Webpage", and it does all the work for me -- resizes images, makes thumbnails, and makes the HTML file.  It takes a little bit of work to set it up (well, it’s really simple, but you do need to download a couple programs)... but that’s once-and-done, and then creating photo webpages is effortless.  You can check it out for yourself.

p.s.

*those things are so gay* ... ???? umm ???

so what exactly is wrong with being gay?
if jesus loves everyone like he says he does,
then whats wrong with homosexuals.
doesnt that mean you should love them too?

its caused by chaos in your brain.
people cant help that i hope you know.

now...please, please enlighten me. tell me how smileys can be *homosexual* i dont think that is what jesus would say. dont discriminate.

i hope you feel like [oops]. before your go around saying your a christian. watch just what the [oops] you say.

...

*The word homophobia.  Let’s be honest, no one’s really scared of gay people.  It’s a loaded word used by gay and pro-gay people to put down those who think it’s wrong to be gay.  If they wanted to be honest, they’d say "that person thinks it’s wrong to be gay," instead of "that person is homophobic," but who wants to be honest nowadays*

you really have issues you need to deal with. there are such people who are homophobes you ignorant [oops].

people who are constantly harrasing gay people, and use such words as gay to describe online smileys...((YOU))...are homophobes.  those are people who are scared of gays because they dont understand it, and  that scares them. and it makes them feel better if they constantly put down homosexuals. and im sure you have met those guys who loooove lesbians, but hate gay men. why? because people fear what they cant understand.

umm what the [oops]?? try to put down people who think being gay is wrong? your putting down gay people. being gay can be caused by [oops] thats all [oops] up in your brain. you cant help that. so sorry.

how are they not being honest by calling someone a homophobe??? get out of your bubble. it will consume you at eat at your *heavenly* soul.