just a thought…

I’ve been getting quite a bit of registration spam recently, and it’s really ticking me off. So, tonight instead of doing my homework, I decided to write a plugin that will ‘hopefully’ take care of the problem. At this point, it is hacked together quite badly, and is not user friendly at all, but I plan on changing that this weekend (after my homework). Would anyone like to test it out before I release it to the world? It uses reCAPTCHA so you’ll have to sign up for a free public and private key at their site. I’m not sure that it works one-hundred-percent of the time yet, but I’m logging failed attempts to the database, so we should know within a few days.

So, one of my pictures was published in the aforementioned Jackson24 book, and to my surprise, it was the one I had linked to in my previous post. However, they black-and-white-ified it, and in my personal opinion, made it look pretty bad (not to mention that it’s also printed across the inner-spine!). What really amazed me, is that they didn’t pick one of the other two pictures that actually had people in them; I even converted one into black and white for them! You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little proud of the pictures I submitted to them, for I am. I realize that they are not “The Best Photographs Ever Captured,” but I also know enough about photography now to judge work that is outstanding, good, and poor. If quality was a deciding factor in choosing the pictures that were printed, I’d like to see the reasoning behind some of the photos I saw tonight.

I am human, and I am malcontent. There are some really decent photographs in the book though and I would encourage anyone who lives in Jackson, and likes photography, to grab a copy of it. I do however, wish this town had more of an interest in the arts, and encouraged its residents in their creativity.

I did notice, while flipping through the list of photographers in the back of the book, that several people (presumably staff members) had quite a few more photographs published than the “three per person” rule that us regular (sub-par?) citizens were held to. While I can’t say I’d blame them for taking this opportunity for self-promotion, I think they should have stuck to the rules themselves. There were more than enough good pictures that could have made it into the book in place of the six or twelve extra pictures of theirs that they deemed more important (like my other two. )

In other news, all of the submissions (close to 1,000) are on a DVD that is being bundled with the book, so hopefully someone will spot the others of mine that have been discarded, acknowledge my genius, and give me vasts sums of money.

To the people that submitted photographs and actually had them all printed, I congratulate you. To those of you who missed the book but are on the DVD, keep taking pictures, strive for improvement, and never give up.

Fixes websites, upgrades blogs and installs forums, fixes computers, writes crappy prose, writes crappy code and when he has some free time, takes some pictures. The last item being the real reason I wrote this post. I just got a call from the Jackson Citizen Patriot (our local newspaper) regarding the pictures that I submitted for the book they are compiling about my little town of Jackson Michigan. Now when I get excited, I have a tendency to not hear things correctly, or either hear things correctly and then doubt that they are true; but there is a release party for the book Jackson24 this Tuesday at the newspaper’s office, and I want to believe that I was told my pictures made it into the book. You can see one of the pictures here, and I might upload the other two once the book is released. For any of my friends outside of Jackson, just leave a comment if you’d like to see the others. I plan on attending this party, even though I’ll have to leave work an hour early; I’d like to meet some of the other photographers, and have a chance to sign autographs, kidding of course. I’ll let everyone know how the party goes, and I’ll be sure to confirm whether or not my pictures are in the book; because, aren’t you all dying to say that you know a famous photographer?

The title of this post is a lie. In my defense though, I can follow cooking directions, and I like to think of my living area in terms of ‘organized chaos.’

I’ve decided to start the “Coalition for the abolition of the terms: jump drive, pen drive, thumb drive and all other variants when referring to a USB Flash Drive.” Those other terms really bug me and they need to go away as soon as possible. Seriously, what the hell is a “jump drive”? Are you jumping on it? Is it jumping on you? Are you storing one gigabyte worth of jumps on it? By inserting it into your anus, does it give you the ability to actually perform a “Jump Drive?” I do not even care if “jump drive” is someone’s brand name or registered trademark for their particular type of USB Flash Drive, it’s silly, stupid and not trendy or cool in the slightest. In closing, I recommend that you publicly humiliate anyone who uses any of the now abolished terms–bonus points if you get this on video. After the public humiliation, kindly remind them that they are in fact referring to a USB Flash Drive, as it is a, “flash memory storage device, integrated with a universal serial bus connector.” Then, you may give them permission to publicly humiliate anyone else who commits what we shall now refer to as “the great sin”, and thus, this movement shall spread like wildfire, because as we all know, everyone likes to publicly humiliate the ignorant.

For an application that I’m creating with a couple of guys from work. It’s going to be a help desk application geared for the IT world, but hopefully flexible enough to be used in other industries that would need software of that type. I’d like to avoid both the words “help” and “desk”, unless they can be cleverly used in some kind of acronym. In case you care, the software will be web-based, open source, built with php, mysql, javascript, xhtml, css, xml and probably somewhat awesome. If anyone would like to help, just let me know; none of those involved so far are expert programmers, web designers, graphical artists, or documentation writers, so we are not looking for someone with “mad skillz”, just people who would like to help out and have fun. More on this, some other time.

This, in a way, is me making up for not being able to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I have also resolved to do some planning, brainstorming and outlining for a new novel that I hope to actually write at some point in my lifetime–that time is not now. So, instead of writing 1,667 words every day this month, I will spend at least thirty minutes drafting a new story. Yes, you should expect awesomeness.

I played Guitar Hero III today for the Wii, and I now have to have it, as well as my own Wii with which to play it on.

I’m back. Well, I have been back since Tuesday the 16th, but I’ve been busy catching up on homework and other things, not to mention taking a little bit of time to play Portal and Half Life 2: Episode 2.

Pictures are copying from my macbook to my desktop as I write this, and I will begin sorting through the 600+ images in order to upload the select few that make the grade. NaNoWriMo begins next month. I have an idea for a story that I would like to put down on paper, but it won’t be happening this November. Well, I might begin the process, but I believe it would be quite impossible to write 50,000 words while doing full-time work and school. I had a hard enough time meeting the daily word goal last year with only full-time work in my schedule. I guess we shall see.

The new Stanley Kubrick collection comes out next Tuesday, and I am hella excited. I owe Geoff for first introducing me to Mr. Kubrick’s films, and I cannot wait to see some of the others in this set.

I also need to get a copy of this book to see if any of my pictures made it in. I’m not saying that they will, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t, but I would really be interested in seeing the photos that made the cut, in the event that mine did not.

Alright, I need to do more homework, finish unpacking, clean my room and make a photo slide-show to present to my Church tomorrow.

I’m back in Tokyo now, or more specifically, Mitaka. We are flying out of Narita International Airport tomorrow and I cannot wait to get home to my own bed!

Since my last post, the only really interesting place we went to visit was Himeji Castle. If I had an unlimited supply of money, I think I would make an inhabitable replica of that place in the US for my own permanent residence. Again, I took quite a few pictures (over 100) and will probably be uploading them soon after I return to the US. I’ve uploaded a few more from my trip, but I am trying to remember all the places I’ve been (inside of the main cities) and the names of some people in the pictures, and I think I’m going to need some help from my neighbor to get them all straightened out.

Until next time…

Hiroshima was one of the most sobering places I’ve been to in a while. The images that I have seen of people’s flesh dripping from their arms and hands seem almost too gruesome to be real.  The after-effects that extreme heat and radiation are capable of are also unspeakable. If you’d like to read more about the bombing, click here.

I swear that I have been taking pictures (over 500 now) and will upload them as soon as I have a chance. My days have all been planned out for me, and they involve spending almost all of the available day in different parts of Japan, away from my laptop and the internet.

We took a ferry to some island today and drove over some insanely long bridge on the way back. I will update this with later with the correct names. I took pictures of course, and my polarizer filter never ceases to amaze me.

I also wanted to let whoever happens to care know that my birthday wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be. We attended a church service that my dad spoke briefly at and played a song. During the sermon, a kind Japanese man did his best to translate the message for me into English and at the conclusion of the service, the congregation sang “Happy Birthday” to me in Japanese. When we arrived at the Bridgman’s home later that evening, they even managed to find some cake and some ice cream to mark the occasion. Overall the day was very nice; I don’t know what else I really expected it to be.

Well, lots of things have happened since my last update. I am now 23 years old, and this fact slightly depresses me. For many reasons, I was in a melancholic mood on my birthday. I’m over it now and there are more important things going on in this world that deserve your attention; I have also resolved to never let this blog turn into a live journal-esque ranting spot for my angst. I have the internet now, and should be able to update more often.

We are now staying in Okayama with the Bridgman family, who are missionaries here. We have been with them since Sunday evening and will be with them until next Monday morning (I think). Last week, we traveled to the mountains of Karuizawa (no wiki link for some reason, nevermind, I found it), I took some pictures there and got to see some pretty awesome sights. We stayed in Nagaoka for an evening with a family that just about killed us with kindness. The lady prepared so much food that we ran out of room on the table to place it; we also had some grapes that we had seen in a market in Tokyo that are the size of golf balls; maybe they aren’t quite that big, but they are pretty close.

Speaking of fruit, I forgot to mention the cantaloupes that we saw in Tokyo that were being sold in a gift box for $250.00! I also forgot to get a picture of them, and I really am not sure why– but yes, two cantaloupes in a fancy gift-box, with fancy ribbons and other packaging, for $250.00, or make that approximately 30,000 yen.

Since Okayama is a good distance away, we rode the Shinkansen train to get here. I thought that we were going to be riding on one of the mag-lev trains, but I was misinformed. But, these trains are still quite fast, and expensive! Also, it is a good thing that I brought my American Express card along because none of our visa cards worked–even though they accept them. We even called our credit card companies to make sure that they would work over here! So now I have a bill for 88,908 yen on my Amex card, or $758.18. Yes, that is how much three round-trip tickets from Nagaoka to Okayama cost.

I played ground golf today with some senior citizens, and I would link you to a page if I could find any in English. I think I had the worst score in our group, and my Dad two consecutive hole-in-ones. I took pictures of this event, and as usual, I will get them uploaded at some point in the near future.

Tomorrow we are going to Hiroshima and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. I of course, will be taking as many pictures as possible.

I’ve taken close to 300 pictures so far, and will start uploading them here.

Japan has been great so far and the people have all been very kind and generous. I tried to buy a beer glass last night from a restaurant we were in (we were drinking water of course) and the owner insisted that I take it for free. He also tried to give me a larger glass, or several of the smaller ones that I wanted, but I wouldn’t have had enough room to take them all home with me in my carry-on bag.

Last week, I heard “Jesus Christ” by Brand New on the radio while we were eating Yakiniku. The Lord has been a significant topic during this trip (as I am staying with missionaries and whatnot) and my spiritual life (or lack thereof) has been a source of frustration for myself for the past few years. If you are inclined to pray, I would appreciate a few for myself, that I might receive some answers to the questions that I have been asking for some time now.

I would have written a Japan [0] post, but I had been up for entirely too long by the time I got to an internet connection. In short, I was on a plane for around 13 hours, then had to take a bus for another 75 minutes, then got in a car that took us to our current location. That was yesterday (Tuesday) for me. It is late Wednesday at the time of me writing this.

We traveled around Tokyo today, to a bunch of different places with names that I cannot remember. For lunch, I had Ramen in Miso Soup with Gyoza and you wouldn’t know it, but you should be jealous. We went to Tokyo Tower and I took some pictures of the city from the “special observatory”, which is 250 meters high. I spent some time in Akihabara and visited an electronics store that was several stories high, and contained more electronic gadgets than I have ever seen under one roof. For instance, I swear that they had every Canon and Nikon camera available on the market today, as well as the entire lens catalog for each brand. They also have PC designs that I have never dreamed of, and more cell phone designs than I have ever seen available in the States.

For dinner, we had Yakiniku. We sat at a table that had two small barbecue pits built into it, and you are given raw meats of your choosing that you then cook at your table with other vegetables, sauces and fixings. At some point today, we also had some Yakitori.

We also visited Kokyo and a couple different shrines.

We will be leaving Tokyo soon and going to different parts of Japan that consist of more grass and trees than concrete and cars. This city is amazingly huge, and I cannot see how anyone would want to travel here without having someone who can guide you around and is fluent in Japanese. I know that I would certainly never travel here unless I had some kind of support system; then again, I’m not as daring as some people. I will be posting some pictures at some point, but for now it is time for me to shower and go to bed.