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strange how things turn out

JJ introduced me to the Toxic Avenger, and horror as a genre
So, Frank called me again today – which I thought was odd when I saw his name flash on the caller ID. Turns out he was calling to tell me that JJ Pesek had died. He had seen the obituary in the FL Today and wanted to give me a ring and let me know. After hanging up, I told Sharaun and she pulled up the obit online. What a bummer.

I tried to look through my old middle school yearbooks for a picture or something I could link here, but I didn’t find any. I guess JJ and I really only hung out for about a year, the year before I met Kyle. He signed my 7th grade yearbook twice. Using the infamously funny “First to sign your crack! Me, JJ. Beatles Forever.” and “I will call you every night until you get sick of it. And you will still live at my house Fridays. JJ.” I remember I used to think that he would lose his parents young, because they were so much older than him, and how much that would suck. Strange how things turn out.

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starting a tool graveyard


Spent Friday evening (while the light was still with us) diggin’ the trench in the backyard. I’ll add some pictures and link ’em soon. Basically, before we can put up the 1st course of the wall, we have to dig a trench and partially fill it with a base material of crushed rock. The rock then gets compacted (with a hand tamper) and leveled. Basically, there’s still a lot of work to be done. But, things are shaping up, and with the help of friends the digging has gone much faster. Then we hit the sushi joint for some rolls, and eventually closed down the local pub at 2am with some friends. Late night.

The PC’s in the house are acting dog-slow, internet-wise, because I’ve been roped into downloading SVCD rips of the 2nd season of Alias. Sharaun got addicted to it, thanks to the Mooney’s. It’s a good show, much better when you watch in succession and actually get into the X Files-ish plot. Bittorrent is great for TV rips.

Was talking to Bob in FL again last night, and he mentioned that he might be getting some plywood and cutting/fitting for his windows. The latest hurricane out in the Atlantic really looks like a killer, but they don’t know where it’s really headed yet. I remember when Frank and dad did the plywood thing at our house in Levitt, in FL hurricanes are a big deal. Funny being here in CA, and rarely ever hearing about them on the news. Instead we get to see Ahnold stumble his way through some questions about special interest groups. Yeah!

Well, I guess it’s time to get back to… something. Today is pretty open. Watching some football right now, and I’d like to watch the Gators play @ 3pm our time. Other than that, I’ve got several projects I could be working on. #1 would be heading to Home Depot to get a new shovel and pick… yup… the pick broke again!! And, Steve somehow managed to break the shovel yesterday also. I’m tellin’ you, this yard is pure rock, and any digging is just insane. So far we’ve been through 2 picks, 1 shovel, and 1 wheelbarrow. I’m thinking of starting a tool graveyard, but it would be too hard to dig the graves.

Bye.

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frank leaves for the army

Well, it’s another slow day at work. My boss didn’t come in again and that makes me want to be here even less. I’ve been working with my good buddy Bob in FL to get the comment count below to display without the additional space before the closing parentheses – but we can’t figure it out. So for now it’s gonna be there, better get used to it.

My mom wrote me this morning about Frank leaving for the Army, and wanted to give me his number so I could call before he ships off. I guess I hadn’t talked to her since he last called me, which surprised her when I mentioned it. Here’s what I wrote her, mostly to test my style sheet 😉

Actually,

He called me 2 days ago. Called everywhere looking for me, work, home, cell… I finally managed to be there when he called on my cell phone. I talked to him for about 20min or so, about nothing much really. He is really excited to go, and I could also tell he’s a little nervous. He talked about how the drill instructors only try to “break” those who are new and green, and he (being physically fit and somewhat experienced in life) shouldn’t get picked on too much. You could tell he was as much reassuring himself as he was telling me. He said he’s having a massive party tonight, a “going away” thing with all his buddies.

I told him I’d call him again before he left, I really enjoyed talking to him. OK, I’m off. Peace.

Anyway, today is Friday, and I don’t really have any plans. I want to work on the yard tonight, but not sure. I’d also like to work on some of the Halloween props for the house haunt we’re doing. More about that later. That’s it for this entry.

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today is the first day

Today’s the 1st day I’m gonna try and start this journal thing. I just got the software and site template working, and nothing much more than that. For now it’s an experiment.

I’m still seriously messing with layout/format/content… so far I’ve consciously made the decision that I think I want to type in all lowercase letters, for some reason that looks fly to me. I’ve also just decided on a title for the page, which you can see at the top of the browser. I have no idea what it means. Right now the page is green, really green. I didn’t actually intend for it to be green, I was just using a filler word in the html as a color placeholder – but now that I see it, I kinda like it. Primary and simplistic.

The comments link won’t work right now, and I may remove it altogether unless I can automate it somehow, which will be a lot of work. whatever, I’ll get to it one day. Either tomorrow or today I’ll work on fixing up the archive function (each week’s entries will be moved off this front page and put into a separate archive file). But for now I think it’s working OK.

Owell, this is it for now.

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working out the kinks

So, I take back the thing from below about the comment script not working. Let me explain…

To make this blog, I used a bunch of freeware apps/code that I hacked up into what I want. The s/w I’m using to write/edit/upload these entries is called “Blog.”

The Blog s/w has a built-in commenting feature that is implemented thru e-mail… and I didn’t like that. So I Google’d and found some freeware ASP commenting scripts, which I heavily edited for my purposes (specifically, I went to work on this script source: Blogcomments).

The toughest part was the comment counter at the bottom of each journal entry. Believe it or not there’s about ~100 lines of code just to get that counter working correctly (and for some reason it’s still got a stinkin’ extra space after the comment count!). Anyway, the commenting feature now works, as does the majority of the blog. However, there is still a lot to be done, adding archive links, formatting, eyecandy, etc.

Hope you’re enjoying it so far.