it’s just you and me

I used to read Word Up magazine.

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Free time has been in very short supply.

Yesterday was the one year anniversary with Jenn, officially making it the longest functional relationship I’ve ever had. On this auspicious occasion, I can’t help but look back over the past year and take stock of what we have. There have been a few rough patches, but that’s to be expected in any kind of relationship. Nothing is ever perfect. The thing I try to keep foremost in my mind is that she actually, truly loves me. She’s not faking the funk. The way she feels is genuine. That sort of thing is rare, and not easily dismissed. If the price that I must pay for that is the occasional frustration and sometimes feeling more like a parent than a partner, then I pay it gladly.

I mean, she bought me a 3 pound bag of gummy bears. What’s not to love?

Here’s hoping we make it another year.

Today is Obama’s inauguration. It went pretty much as I expected. The noteworthy thing, in my opinion, was all the idiocy leaking out of people on cnn.com’s Facebook feed. Honestly, I missed half of his speech because I was laughing so hard at their comments. I’ve saved a few for posterity:

Andre Rivas is glad everything is fixed now. Thanks Obama!

Shit, everything is fixed?! I need to leave work early and check that old TV in my bedroom.

Brandi says “It’s over, pack your bags… we’re moving to Canada.”

OMG A BLACK IS PRESIDENT QUICK LET’S MOVE TO THE NEAREST WHITEST COUNTRY. YAY CANADIA!

Dave Baca wonders where Clinton’s hand is?

No inauguration is ever complete without a quick handjob.

Kiley Gray is The next 4 Years Are Going To Be Magical!!!

And not that sissy magic you see at birthday parties, either. ” I meditate to regain my mana, before casting Lvl. 8 Cock of the Infinite.”

Sherri Buford Today is the first day of the rest of our lives…well 4 years of our life anyway…

No fucking shit. How profound.

Bethany Kaufman thought a red tie meant Republican?

I have no idea if this is true or not. If it is, hilarious. If it isn’t, hilarious.

Cheryl Wesson Thank God for a President who can use multi-syllable words correctly & with ease!

How insensitive. I sure hope there’s someone on Facebook with the guts to respond to your libelous statements…

James Michael Keel stop making fun of the former president of the united states.

OH SNAP! You got served.

Jason Rustle Barr is eating dried fruit for Obama

I believe this is the textbook definition of patriotism. It also explains why fruitcake was so popular.

Fee Guity is Praising God for this moment in History (THE REAL INDEPENDENCE DAY) and praying that Lil B Passes his 1st spelling test!

If “little” happens to be on Lil B’s spelling test, I’d say he’s pretty well fucked.

James W. Hills is hoping that all Black Men answer the call and step up and be more responsible and accountable…

…all other ethnicities can continue to screw around.

Jan Riggs Obama is human.

I guess this won’t turn out like that one Halloween episode of The Simpsons after all.

Kaley Jordan he sucks.

Eloquent.

Anthony Akuamoah-Boateng LiKeS tHe sPeeCh. cAnt wAit fOR tHe tRaNscRipT.

sO i cAn fUCK It uP juSt LIkE i do WITh ALl oF my oWn tEXT!

Daniel Millikin watched the Obama inauguration. Hope in Jesus.

I thought Hope was in Arkansas?

Seriously, though, I’m glad Obama didn’t get shot or blown up. Aside from the obviously sad nature of such an event, if it had happened, I think we’d have no choice but to declare Game Over on America and go play somewhere else.

Edit: One other thing. To anyone else that watched the inauguration: did you notice that when Arethra Franklin started singing, she paused just a little too long between syllables when singing “Our country”? It sounded like she said “Our cunt”, and I giggled more than I’d like to admit.

Last night was the series finale of The Shield. I’ve been a big fan of the show since the beginning, so I was both sad to see it end and excited to finally see all the drama and conflict that’s been building up for 7 years come to a head. Now that it’s over, I have a few thoughts that I’d like to immortalize forever on the interwebs.

Don’t read any further if you don’t want to read a LOT of spoilers.

I don’t want to say that I’m disappointed with the ending. It was a good episode, and I definitely enjoyed watching it, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.

I’ve been rooting for Shane to get what he deserved since the very first season. I’ve never liked him, even in the sympathetic light that he was being shown during the past couple of seasons. I can understand what they were trying to do with his character: he was just doing what he could to protect his family, he finally grew a conscience (thought that’s debatable), so on and so forth. It all culminates with him being overcome with regret and seeing absolutely no way out once Vic gets immunity. Killing his family and then himself is almost cliche, and I thought it was a big let down. I was looking forward to Vic and Shane finally clashing, letting all of the animosity and regret fuel a savage and bloody confrontation, hopefully ending with Shane dead and Vic on the run, or in jail. I wanted to see Ronnie, who finally had a character and a backbone, come into play. I wanted to see what was left of the strike team come to blows and tear themselves apart. Their final self-destruction was long overdue.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Shane became the only likable one, and we’re made to feel sorry for him and his family. Ronnie goes down in an extremely lame way. They just waltz up to him and arrest him while he’s on the couch crying. His anger toward Vic, once he realizes he betrayed him, was believable but ultimately forgettable. I was actually kind of rooting for Ronnie to kill Vic. I didn’t necessarily want Vic to die, but it would have been satisfying to see Ronnie come into his own finally and take down the king.

I’m also not satisfied with Vic’s punishment. A desk job? For three years? I understand that for someone like Vic, being locked in an office doing paperwork for any amount of time is a tortuous eternity, but still… This man killed a lot of people and committed a LOT of crimes, and there’s no real consequence to his actions. Shane and his family are dead, Lem is dead, Ronnie is in jail forever. It’s already been established that Vic is a narcissist, so those things will make him sad now and then, but he’s free from the mental torture that normal people would suffer knowing that they’d caused such disasters. He did lose his family, but whether he would actually get to see them or not was left an open question. He was already limited to sporadic visitation. So it gets a little more sporadic. So what?

I wanted a resolution to the baby serial killer situation, and I thought that the inclusion of the “New Paradigm Party” mayoral candidate was basically filler, since he was introduced and then killed in the span of about 45 minutes. It was pointless. It ended as a small blip on Aceveda’s radar, and had no impact on his campaign.

All in all, though, I thought it was a good episode. It just didn’t give much closure for the series. We’ve spent 7 years watching Vic do horrible things and always get away with them. We’ve watched him destroy his family, and the lives of everyone he got close to, and in the end, he gets a slap on the wrist. I wanted more. I wanted an epic clash. I wanted to see a tidal wave of karma rush over him and envelope him, and I would have been happy whether he survived it or not.

I guess I actually am disappointed. It’s still been one of the best shows on television, and I’m sad that it’s gone. My only hope is that, since Vic is still alive and still sort of in law enforcement, they might be able to wrangle a movie out of this.

I bought a new car today:

It’s a 2008 Saturn Aura.

That is all.

I just discovered that this site’s 10th birthday was on May 7th. That’s insane to me.

Also, there might be a problem with Sandra’s baby, so, whatever you do to try to ward off bad things, please start doing it for her.

Today, I turned 27.

I suppose it’s natural for people to reflect on their lives on birthdays, since it’s a glaring reminder that time is passing whether you notice it or not. It’s a good excuse to compare where you are with where you want to be, and figure out if you’re doing anything to unify those two places.

So, am I where I want to be? No, not really. I don’t really know where I want to be. Certainly there are things that I’d like to change in my life and in myself. I’d like to stop being so irresponsible and ridiculous. I’d like for my career to progress. I’d just like to feel more… grown up, more secure. The apathy of my youth is no longer endearing, entertaining or at all practical. I’ll be 30 in 3 years, but I’m still very much a child. I’ve noticed some subtle shifts in my thinking and my attitudes toward certain things lately, though, so I think all this yearning for change is having an effect, albeit subliminally.

I need to get moving on the various projects and goals I’ve set for myself. There just isn’t enough time in the day. I want to change my diet a bit. I want to get all of my various websites running in some kind of cohesive manner. I want to declutter my house. I have lots of things to do, and I’m not really doing any of it.

Birthdays also serve to highlight the people that give a shit about you. The ones that make the effort, even if it’s just to say “Happy birthday”, are people you should keep around. It shows they at least thought about you. Somehow, I’m always shocked by how few people bother, but those few people are consistent, and I’m thankful for them: my parents and sisters, Jenn, CJ and Joanna, Allison, Sam, Paul Cherry, Meghan, several people at work and a couple of people from my past. That’s all I heard from today. I’m not the type who likes a lot of attention for this type of thing, I just… I don’t know. I guess I imagined that I meant more to some people. But hey, it’s quality, not quantity, right?

I can’t help but think about the other half of my extended family, that used to mean so much to me, but now… I don’t know. I seriously just don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I mean, I do, in the sense that there’s kind of a narrator in my head spewing rational thoughts at me when I’m thinking about them, and I know I should be listening, but I can’t bring myself to do it. There’s yet another goal I’ve been procrastinating on…

Regardless, this birthday was pretty good. My weekend with Jenn was wonderful, the dinners yesterday with Joanna and tonight with my mom and buddy and my sisters were great, and I’m sure the other get-togethers I have scheduled for the week will be good.

The past year has been a good one. I met Jenn and I’ve had a wonderful 7 months with her so far. There have been illnesses and familial troubles, but everyone seems to be dealing with them well. Dad went to a hypnotherapist yesterday, for his smoking addiction. I’ve been waiting for a week to pass before I ask how it’s been going. Hopefully well. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel at work. Having Joanna as a roommate is going well. I’m still not eating fast food. I’m (hopefully) getting a new MacBook soon. Gas prices are down, my spirits are up, and I finally got a DVR.

I suppose I’m actually enthusiastic to see what the next year will bring.

I’ve been on vacation for the past week and a half. Jenn’s been here with me since August 1st. I’m taking her back to Richmond Tuesday night, and not having her here is going to take some getting used to.

I have other things on my mind right now, though.

I found out one week ago that my grandmother has cirrhosis. I’m not really sure how to react. I was really close with my grandparents up until 3 years ago, give or take. I haven’t spoken to either of them since then, for reasons that don’t need to be discussed here. I’m just… angry at them for their behavior, and that’s a hard thing to carry around year after year.

I thought about this exact scenario many times. They’re both older, and have had their share of health problems. It was only logical to imagine that the time would come when one would have some serious illness, before any of the animosity had been resolved, and certain hard choices would have to be made.

The adult decision would be to put all that aside and spend time with her. It would be extremely selfish and petty to let that animosity keep me from seeing her. They both used to be a huge part of my life. I’ve missed them more than I can say.

But at the same time, I can’t ignore that anger. It’s there, and it’s legitimate. It won’t simply disappear just because I want it to. I’m terribly afraid that it’d come bubbling up during a visit and the situation would become explosive. I really, really don’t want that to happen.

And then I wonder how they feel about me specifically. I don’t think I could handle either of my grandparents turning on me. They left a comment on this site a long, long time ago, and it was kind, but who can say if that’s really the case? People say one thing and do another all the time. I’ve learned to never trust words, but to depend on observation of a person’s actions to determine their intent and trustworthiness. It remains a possibility, in my mind, that they might already be angry with me for my position in this.

I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid to do anything, and I’m afraid to do nothing. The only thing I do know is that this is happening right now, and I’m spending my days on vacation, going to concerts and the beach and movies, and sitting around at home watching TV, and going out to dinner and out shopping and sleeping in, and my grandmother is suffering from a potentially life-threatening illness.

I spent a ridiculous amount of money on .me domains this month:

• ep.ito.me – I think I’m going to use this as a gallery of web design work and art work.
• smithis.me and smith-is.me – I just wanted an email address like jr@smithis.me. If anyone else with a last name of Smith wants one, let me know.
• unlink.me – This was just too awesome to let go. For those who don’t know, unlink means delete.
• refocus.me and reorient.me – I wanted to make a simple to-do site, kind of similar to now do this.
• obfuscate.me – Also too awesome to pass up. I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with it just yet.
• unmuzzle.me – I was going to use this as a new blog url, until I saw…
• itsjustyouand.me – which was way better, so that’ll probably be my new blog url. Though I’m considering splitting up the blog categories across domains. Obfuscate.me or unlink.me could be tech-related blogs, unmuzzle.me could be a personal blog, and itsjustyouand.me could be dedicated to Jenn and I? I don’t know.
• farbeitfrom.me – I just had to have it.

That’s 10 new domains at $40 a pop. I really shouldn’t have.

Whenever I get some time, I’m going to start moving things around.

Now I’m going to get back to my busy schedule of kicking myself for being so fucking stupid.

One other thing. I was really impressed with Rumplo tonight. Last night I wanted to integrate the “Favorites” RSS feed into my lifestream, since I use their service to bookmark t-shirts I want to buy pretty often. Unfortunately, the RSS feed was missing a key piece of data: the date that the shirt was favorited.

I sent a quick note mentioning this via their “Contact us” page, as I’ve done many times on many other sites. I expected the same response to those types of emails that I always get, which is absolutely nothing. However, when I got home tonight, I found the following email in my inbox:

Howdy!

Just wanted to let you know that we *just* pushed a big new release to Rumplo (http://rumplo.com) that included a fix that you had asked for (favorites RSS feeds were missing the pubDate fields). I’m super glad that I was able to squeeze it into the schedule earlier today (a quick fix), but I’ll be taking a peak at our other RSS feeds to see if they’re missing anything critical too.

Feel free to email me if you see other problems on the site, or general feature requests!

Thanks for your help!

-Ian

Ian Van Ness
ian@rumplo.com
co-founder, rumplo.com

That’s pretty awesome, and it has indeed been fixed.

This has shaken my firm belief that one person in fact cannot make a difference. Next thing you know, I’ll be registering to vote.

Just kidding.

As some of you know, I bought the LG Dare a couple of weeks ago. Aside from the lack of Bitpim support (so far, anyway), I’m very happy with the phone. Yes, it’s trying hard to be an iPhone, but for those of us that don’t feel like paying exorbitant fees to get out of our contracts and switch to the NSA’s bff, AT&T, it’s pretty much the best thing they have on offer.

So, in an effort to make it even more iClone-ish, people started making browser start pages with iPhone-like icons to take them to various mobile sites (Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, etc). I made my own, using a Photoshop template for making iPhone buttons, and it came out pretty well.

The problem, though, was that the phone switches from portrait to landscape automatically based on the orientation of the phone, but doesn’t resize content afterward. If the page initially loaded in portrait and switched to landscape, it stayed at its portrait-based width, 240 pixels. That was no good.

The only attempt at a solution that I saw was to include links to two different layouts. That was fine, but far too manual and inefficient for my tastes. My first attempt basically removed the manual step of clicking a “portrait” and “landscape” link. It polled the width of the page every few seconds. If it was 240 pixels, it redirected to a page that loaded a css file that set the content div to 240 pixels. If 400 pixels, it did the same thing, only using a different css file that set the width to 400 pixels:

[javascript]
window.onload = checkScreenSize;

var base = ‘http://dare.jrsmith.net’;

function checkScreenSize() {

var url = document.URL;
var width = window.innerWidth;

if ((url == base || url == base+’/’ || url == base+’/index-p.html’) && width == 400) {
document.location.href = ‘http://dare.jrsmith.net/index-l.html’;
} else if (url == base+’/index-l.html’ && width == 240) {
document.location.href = ‘http://dare.jrsmith.net/index-p.html’;
}

setTimeout(“checkScreenSize()”, 2000);

}
[/javascript]

This still required the use of two html files that were identical except for the css file being loaded. I got around that annoyance by using server-side include directives to set variables and include one file in both pages. Less than ideal, but it worked, and I posted it on howardforums. People seemed to like it, but it proved somewhat cumbersome to implement for those not familiar with javascript and html, and most people who don’t make websites don’t really have access to or know how to use server-side includes. Plus the javascript had to be customized, which was no good. The complexity bugged me.

I tried to rewrite the javascript to simply switch out the css files without reloading the page. It’s a common thing to do, and I don’t know why I didn’t go that route in the first place. The browser on the phone is pretty decent as far as mobile phone browsers go. It’s no WebKit, or even Opera Mobile or Minimo, but it’s better than the shitty browser most phones have, and it’s way better than PocketIE.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to fully support enabling and disabling link elements through the disabled attribute. It would pretend to enable and disable the stylesheets, but the changes weren’t reflected in the rendered document. It also didn’t support document.styleSheets at all.

In the end, to get around these limitations, I just had to explicitly set the widths in the javascript that handled the polling. It made that part of the code a little more bloated, but it removed the need for so many other pieces, it was worth it:

[javascript]
window.onload = checkScreenSize;

function checkScreenSize() {

var url = document.URL;
var width = window.innerWidth;

if (width == 400) {
document.getElementById(‘mainContainer’).style.width = ’360px’;
document.getElementById(‘mainContainer’).style.height = ’240px’;
document.getElementById(‘searchParams’).style.width = ’226px’;
document.getElementById(‘shortcutList’).style.width = ’360px’;
document.getElementById(‘shortcutList’).style.height = ’120px’;
} else if (width == 240) {
document.getElementById(‘mainContainer’).style.width = ’240px’;
document.getElementById(‘mainContainer’).style.height = ’400px’;
document.getElementById(‘searchParams’).style.width = ’106px’;
document.getElementById(‘shortcutList’).style.width = ’240px’;
document.getElementById(‘shortcutList’).style.height = ’180px’;
}

setTimeout(“checkScreenSize()”, 1000);

}
[/javascript]

It seemed to go over pretty well on the forum. I posted a link to the file Monday night, and it’s been downloaded 124 times as of 11:48pm Wednesday night. For something so quick and simple, that amazes me.

The other little improvement I made on what I was seeing other people do was to the common search bar they were including. It was just a form that submitted to Google’s mobile search. I added a dropdown list that let you search pretty much anything you want. Here’s the HTML for mine:

[html]

[/html]

It stores the URL for the search engine as the value of the selection and feeds that to a simple javascript function that pastes the search parameters onto the end and redirects to the search engine:

[javascript]
function conductSearch() {

var searchURL = document.getElementById(‘searchType’)[document.getElementById('searchType').selectedIndex].value;
var searchParams = document.getElementById(‘searchParams’).value;

document.location.href = searchURL+searchParams;

}
[/javascript]

It’s nothing fancy. I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to sanitize, secure or idiot-proof any of these functions. These pages are meant to be for personal use on a specific piece of hardware. The javascript could probably be more robust, but I don’t think it’s really worth the effort.

For anyone who’s interested, the zip file is here. It should be easy to adapt to other phones or mobile devices that need such functionality.

Doing this made me remember how good it feels to make things that people actually like and use. The past year or so at work has been so frustrating and tortuous that I’d forgotten how satisfying that can be.

I’m half-assedly working on a simple web application (written in Django) that will let people register and create there own pages without having to get hosting and edit html. It works right now, but it’s ugly and not very user-friendly. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep working on it. If I keep getting help requests, I might just be forced to.

I’ve been playing GTA4 when time permits, and it’s a great game. My (and lots of other peoples’) only real complaint, aside from blurry graphics or lack of DLC for the PS3, has been the woefully low number of cheats available in the game. I’ve been a GTA fan for years. CJ and I used to play the original top-down version years ago and giggle our asses off, especially while playing GTA London: 1969. I’ve always been a big cheater in these games. That’s the biggest draw, in my opinion: the ability to manipulate a somewhat realistic sandbox world and wreak havoc.

So imagine my dismay when the newest version, GTA4, has only 17 cheats available, and almost half of those are vehicle spawn cheats! No pedestrian riots! No spawning tanks or flame throwers or jetpacks or gatling guns! NO MONEY CHEAT! And there are no cheating devices for the PS3, like Action Replay or Codebreaker, so there’s no god mode either.

Because of this, and because of the compelling storyline to the game, I’ve actually been playing through the missions. I’ve noticed that there isn’t really much need for a money cheat, since I had well over $500k (after buying all the clothes in the game, of course) by the 40% mark or so.

Still, I came upon something that might be construed as a money cheat. No, I’m not talking about killing people outside of ATMs and then creating a barricade of exploded vehicles to keep the ambulance from reaching their body, then collecting the respawning money (which I’ve never been able to make work). No, I’m not talking about robbing armored cars, which I do do whenever I see them. They’re just too rare to be a real option.

I’m talking about the Stevie Vehicle Theft missions.

I started doing them because I stumbled on the first car by mistake, and made over $30,000 from stealing it. I decided to do the rest to make some quick money. I made maybe $300,000 from all the cars, which isn’t bad.

The “exploit” comes after you’ve completed all the missions. It took me maybe a few hours over the course of a couple of days to finish collecting all the cars, with the aid of a map. You can find the map at the above link. When finished, you get a text from Stevie saying you can bring ANY car by his garage for some quick cash. Now that I think about it, you may be able to do that at the beginning of this missions. I’m not sure.

Anyway, you can use the car spawn cheats right outside of the garage and turn in the car as many times as you want. I’ve been doing it with the Turismo and I get $11,000 a pop.

I’m now a Liberty City millionaire.

I haven’t seen this posted on any of the forums or cheat websites, so I thought I’d write it up.