November, 2002:

Do I have nerves of steels, balls of a bear, and patience the size of the grand canyon? Or am I just clinically insane? I’m not quite sure.

Today, on this day that is hell; this day on which four generations of each family in all of the United States of America cram themselves into parking lots and form long single file lines — lines that begin with mom, her credit cards duct taped to her forehead, are filled with snotty nosed, misbehaved children, and end with grandma and grandpa in matching, personalized wheelchairs — in an attempt to max out every credit card they possess; I am going shopping alone.

Wish me luck. And if you see me patiently slamming my head against my own driver’s side window, or pinning three small children against the abrasive exterior of a mall water fountain, kindly toss me a cigarette. Thank You.

If you aren’t willing to give what you are asking for then maybe you should reconsider your request.

… it’s your birthday. Da-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.

Okay. Maybe I shouldn’t try to sing over this medium.

Happy Birthday, Bonnie. May all your birthday wishes come true.

I’ve found that, lately, I’ve only been writing from work. I’m sure this has something to do with the amount of free time that I’m willing to spend writing when I have so many other things I could be doing. When I’m at work, I’m forced to be in front of a computer for 9+ hours. I’m going to try to start writing from home more often. After all, at least 50% of the point of updating this website is to help me think life through. At least that’s what the point started out being. Maybe it’s evolved?

Our attempt to take sunrise photographs was shot down when we realized it was cloudy outside and there would be no visible sunrise. I listened to the radio before we left and it said “clear”, but I guess they lied.

Something odd was happening yesterday, though. Between 6:30am and 7:30am I managed to drive from south on loop 12 from NorthWest Hwy, then east on 183, then south on 35E then around Woodall Rodgers, then south on 45, then west on 30 then into downtown. I managed to find a parking spot on the street, walk around in Dealy Plaza, and jump back on 35E north and make it home. There was no traffic. At all.

I’ve decided there are only three reasons this could have happened, in order of likelihood. 1) It was a cold day in hell. 2) Everyone took Thanksgiving week off. 3) I’ve been seriously mislead regarding rush hour traffic conditions in downtown Dallas.

Jess and I made pasta yesterday. No, no. We didn’t make pasta like that. We made fresh pasta. You know, with eggs, flour, and a lot of elbow grease. I’d never made pasta before, so it took a little bit of figuring out before everything seemed to come together properly. When it was all said and done that pasta was… okay. Actually, it was really good, it just wasn’t right. It tasted like really good “Ramen” noodles. We were going for “Spaghetti”. I think it has to do with the amount of egg we used. We’ll try again tonight, with less egg.

My brother, Jason, and his new wife, Teresa, are having their baby girl, Sheridan. Teresa’s water broke yesterday afternoon however, it looks like the baby is just not going to come down the birth canal. So the doctor’s have given her an Epidural, and they’ve decided that if she doesn’t have it by 1:00pm today, they are going perform “c-section”.

Jess and I are going to make some breakfast, and then head out to the hospital. I have a very hard time considering Jason and Teresa family, however, I still feel like I should be there for this. Sheridan, after all, will be my first niece.

Jess and I are going to get some McDonald’s for breakfast and then we’re going to take sunrise pictures.

I love being up early in the morning.

I haven’t finished reading all the documentation yet, but Phrame looks like it may be the answer to many of my PHP Programming woes.

Phrame encourages application architectures based on the “Model2″ approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. Phrame provides its own Controller component and integrates with other technologies to provide the Model and the View. For the Model, Phrame can interact with any standard data access technology, including Pear DB/DataObjects, and ADODB. For the View, Phrame works well with PHP, Smarty Templates, XSLT, Flash MX, and other presentation systems.

I am restless. I am unspecifically insatiable.

I close my eyes and see another me. Contained by four white walls that are not mine and are not white, I dance to someone else’s music. Tears that are not mine fall from my happy, hopefilled eyes.

I require more than I am.

A new version of Smarty, the PHP template engine, was released yesterday. ChangeLog:

• Added optgroup attribute to html_options.
• Added strip variable modifier.
• Added textformat block function.
• Minor Bug fixes.

I don’t usually go out to many movies. However in the past 4 days, I’ve seen three. Each time, Jess, Brad, and Morgan were there.

On Friday night, I saw One Hour Photo at the Magnolia Theater in Dallas. It is odd to see Robin Williams play a bad guy. The movie was okay. If a movie doesn’t teach me something, then it should tell a good story and tie up most of the loose ends. This movie did neither.

Saturday night, I went back to the Magnolia to see Wasabi. This left me disappointed. It seemed as though a lot of ideas were crammed into too short of a time period. The action, however, was good, and the dialoge was witty. Does Jean Reno always play a pedophile or is that the fault of the writer?

Yesterday evening, I went to a regular theater and saw 8 Mile. This wasn’t even a movie. It was a bunch of black people and one white guy
spittin’ phat rhymes for two-hours while sub-plot after sub-plot was introduced and then thrown out immediately. Its only saving grace was Brittany Murphy showing some skin, and it wasn’t much skin at all. Don’t even bother going to see this.

I’ve added comment subscriptions to revjim.net. This means that, you can subscribe to a post (either when you comment, or without commenting at all) in order to get notified whenever other people comment on that post. this makes it a lot easier to keep up with conversations.

No subscriptions have been added automatically. So if you’d like to subscribe to a post that you are interested in that was made prior to now, you’ll have to dig that post up in the archives, access the comment screen, and from there, you can subscribe to the notifications.

I know there are a couple of screens that look a little ugly. But, aside from that, if you notice any problems, please email me and let me know so that I can get it fixed. Adding the subscribe system involved changes in the way the site is archived, changes in the comment system, and a few plugin installations. I’m sure something went wrong. I’ll give a special prize to anyone who can find the bugs.

This system isn’t perfect, but it should suffice until I can write something that handles threading, user authentication, and post subscription like I want it to.