IM Chain Messages

Chelsea, of this myspace.com page, sent me a chain instant message today. It said:

"IM this to 15 more ppl in the next 145 minutes and then press F6 and ur crushes name will apear in capitol letters! its scarry because it works!! or else u will be cursed with love for the next 10 year"

Of course I wanted to know the name of my crush so I quickly passed on the message to the first other 15 people that I thought would like to know their crushes too. This all sounded too good to be true. I mean not only do you find out the name of your crush, DISPLAYED IN ALL CAPS NONE-THE-LESS, but all that you have to do to get this reward is send the message on to 15 other people!

I just couldn't wait to see the name of my crush, IN ALL CAPS, after sending the message to all 15 other people. Then, after only a few seconds, the name appeared.



Now I just have to find out who this mysterious Gullible is and how I can win her over.

Update: Not more than ten seconds after posting this did the instant messaging world reach a new low. Observe.



Update (1/31/05): I talked to Chelsea and Megan after school today and Chelsea said that after seeing the picture showing "gullible" on my desktop she tried again and again to get the chain message to work. Silly Chelsea!

- Steve

Bad Timing

Saturday and Sunday and my two biggest days of traffic for my site. I usually try and write up something interesting by noon on Saturday but I didn't today. And now you get this.

On the up and up I finished the portable knive throwing board with a bit of help from Andy and Tyler and we got to test it out for a couple of hours last night. As much as I hate to say it, Andy actually threw pretty well on the new board. He got to the point where he could pretty much call his shots. Tyler threw pretty decent too, but most of his shots somehow ended up in the groin area on the man painted on the board. Good aim or luck? We'll never know.

The highlight of the knive throwing was when Andy threw the butcher knive so hard and bad that it stuck in the board by the handle. That was crazy! It landed right on the outlined figure's hand too, so had Andy been a cop throwing knives at a criminal, he would have just effectively handed his weapon over to the bad guy. That is why they don't let "some people" be cops; it is just too risky.

But now I have to go and finish up a movie to show the Middle Schoolers in church tomorrow. It will take some work, but I think that it will turn out ok.

- Steve

O'clock

I was just thinking today about the term "O'clock." Why the apostrophe? Is it maybe there teasing us of a time a long time ago when people referred to time differently?

What I would like to propose is that the apostrophe is replacing the letter "f" in the term "of clock." So times would used to have been read "it is 7 of clock." As in someone telling another person "according to the clock, it is 7." or "it is 7 of the hands shown on the clock."

"Of clock."

After coming up with something as great as that, I just can't imagine what else I could possibly do in my life that would be greater than this.

Other people need to start questioning these things that we just live with everyday! "Of clock" matters!

...

I was just thinking the other day about the term "I am an idiot." Why the "I?" Is it maybe foreshadowing some sort of truth to be discovered?

- Steve

Cooking

We had rice-o-roni for dinner last night. (rice-e-roni? rice-a-roni? a, e, i, o, or u. you pick one. My older sister mentioned to my Mother that she didn't like it with the almonds in it. My Mom retorted that if she didn't like it, then she could just cook it herself.

My mind whirred.

*click*

After minding, whirring and clicking, I directed my Mom's attention away from my sister by saying "I'll cook from now on."

And that was the beginning of the new age of my culinary abilities.

During the rest of our dinner that night we talked more about what would need to be established before I was allowed to take up the job of cooking. The requirements of a fruit, vegetable, meat and starch option in every meal quickly threw out my idea of top ramen, easy-mac, microwaveable pizzas and ice cream every day, but as soon as budgeting issues came up the situation started to look a lot brighter.

My dad said that he would give me X amount of money each week for groceries and that I could keep any of the money that I did not spend. This didn't sit well with my sister and she quickly got her two cents into the conversation by saying that that was way too much money for each week. Seeing my beautiful opportunity dwindle rather quickly out of my reach, I tried to restore order to the table and get the conversation back in my control by saying "Why must we always argue at the table? All that we ever do is bicker and fight! Can't we just enjoy one meal in peace?" Everyone had a good laugh, except for me, and we went back to working out the details of me cooking.

I grabbed my legal pad and pen and started taking down suggestions for fruits, veggies, meats and starch. This was about when I realized how hard keeping track of all of the food would really be. It also looked like a lot of food and lots of food costs lots of money. Lots of money equals loss of profit and loss of profit turns rather quickly into half-servings of soup cut with water and day-old bread bought at half price.

I think that this whole cooking thing might turn out to be really fun and a great learning experience for me. I will learn to cook more good stuff, manage budgets and money better and, we all know that it is true, I will become like super sexy. The ladies will be lining up all around me... for food at least.

- Steve

2nd Half Life

Oh what a witty post title!

All of my classes got switched for this second half of the school year. I have all of the same teachers as I did before, with the exception of a writing instructor and computer science teacher, but I just have them in different periods.

It was a bit of a hassle changing periods in every single one of my classes, but I think that it turned out pretty good. In fact, it turned out totally awesome. Not only do I get to meet twice as many people as I would have this year, but all of the classes that I switched into have at least double the amount of good friends of mine than they did before.

My favorite new class is Language Arts. The class that I am in now has been working last semester in groups to produce a single book containing a short story from each member of the group. These books are due February fourth. That means that I don't have to do anything in that class until February fourth except for the occasional pitching in of artwork and maybe throwing some stuff together on the computer. I'll see.

I will miss all the people from my old classes and hope to see them in the halls sometime, but deep down inside, where my heart is honest and pure, I don't. Not one bit.

- Steve

How To How To

Remember back in my first post when I said that you could add things to the site? Well I meant it.

I finally finished my how to document explaining how to publish your own works on my web site. I put a lot of work into it and think that it is quite extensive, but even I can make mistakes and if there is something that you don't understand or if you have problems with something then tell me! Seriously!

I don't care if you are selfish and aren't ever planning on giving back to the site. I think that if there is something that you are having a problem with there must be at least one other person having the same problem and they might actually want to contribute.

Some super neat stuff happened today that I will share soon, but I have homework to do, a movie to watch and cakes to bake. I have also found out that I should never ever allude to things that I am going to write about because I usually lost interest in writing about them and everyone hates me just that much more.

Before you hate me, check out the new How To Section.

- Steve

Steve Sunday

Today was a very neat day in church for me. I got to play two of the movies that I had made in the past two weekends promoting the Justice Fast program in just one sitting of Sunday school. As if it couldn't be cooler, those movies were followed up with a cool movie that my cousin, Adam, and I made yesterday. Suffice to say, I thought that it was really cool.

The first movie that was played in Sunday school was the Extreem Lego movie that I made last weekend and has been available for download from the left side bar since the new site design was put up.

The second movie was a old Goliath cartoon cut up and with my voice dubbed over it. It is neat.

Get it.

This version of the movie has the song that I had originally planned to use at the end of the movie. I got it from the Rushmore soundtrack. I really liked the guitar riffs at the beginning of the song, but they are quickly followed by the lyrics "making time, shootin' lines." I didn't think that those words would roll over too well with the rest of the church crowd so I replaced the song with David Bowie's song Queen Bitch. Now that I think about it, if anyone had recognized the song title that was probably a worse choice of music. Oh well, I like that song too.

Goliath 16.2 MB [right-click on the link and "Save Target As..."]

- Steve

Calling it a Day

Today was definitely a day. And a progressive one at that. I have been working from almost quite literally noon until now, 3:30 AM, on the site. I am proud of what I have done, but I am still not quite sure what the heck it is that I have done.

How did it possibly take me 13 hours to just finish up the design, gut a blogger template and shove the design into it, create a completely different commenting system for each subject page, create each different subject page, synchronize all of the links on the pages, change all the pages, fix the links, change the pages again, fix the links, create sub accounts on the FTP server itself as a feeble attempt at security to house each user-submittable page, move the pages into those subaccounts, fix the links yet again and dragging all the music over from the old mathcaddy server to here? 13 hours? That is just crazy.

Crazy. As am I. At least I am not a chicken.

- Steve

First Addition

Welcome! While the majority of you were getting ready for and having a great time at Tolo I spent my whole day creating this, the first addition of the Wall Steve Journal. (Many thanks to Mason for the name.) First business, did you really look at this as soon as you got home from Tolo? Disturbing. For anyone who really did check this as soon as they got home's sake, I hope that you had a great time at Tolo, you probably need it. So as you can see I have revamped the site to make it a weird retro mix of a newspaper, a website and the colors red and blue. I also took the liberty of packing some sweet new features into the site along with the new design. For example, anyone can now contribute their own writing, music picks, animations and pictures to the site. Maintaining all of this will take a lot of censorship work from me, but I believe that it will be well worth the work.

The contributions feature was made possible by the blogging service Blogger. If you are ever interested in starting up your own blog I would high recommend using their free and efficient services.

To get your own material on my site all that you have to do is log in to blogger with the username: gelusojournal and the password: public. Once you are logged in you simply choose the category that you want to contribute to and click on the new post button next to it. This will direct you to a page with instructions on how to put your stuff up on the site and where to write about it. Fill out the page as directed and then hit the big orange button at the bottom that says "Publish Post." It may sound sort of complicated, but I think that it will actually be fairly self-explanatory. Either way, good luck. I will whip together a more thorough guide later.

Quite honestly, this design isn't what I first had in mind for the new site. I originally wanted it to look more like a newspaper. Newspapers proved to be a bit harder to design on a web page than I had thought. When I couldn't do one thing that I had wanted I just toned the design down a bit until I would up with something that I could handle, this. However, as some of you may experience, this site does not look good at all in some browsers. In my normal internet browser, Firefox, the site looks like this. For all of you who may be experiencing the same problem here is a picture of what the site should look like. It is kind of sad when I am so bad at web design that I have to use a different browser than usual to view my own site.

As long as we.. excuse me.. as long as I am on the topic of web design, here is a funny little story about the old legal pad design from, the now dead, steve.mathcaddy.com.

Some of you.. excuse me again.. one of you may remember my very first web site design. It was a white background sparsely populated with text. I would have said that it was pretty intense back then. Eventually I grew tired of the bland flavor of the site and decided that I wanted a new design, or rather a design at all.

I carried a small legal pad around with me for the next few days sketching different ideas of basic designs for the site. Eventually I had what I wanted set in concrete and sat down with the pad to whip the site up. The only problem that I ran into was that I had not considered what kind of background of overall image kind of look I wanted to give the site. I sat there for a bit staring back and forth between the blank HTML and the legal pad and then finally decided that the legal pad looked kind of cool and I just scanned it in and made it the site. Now that is being creative! So that's why the site used to look like a notepad and all the left side links were hand written. Amused? No? Darn.

And that brings us to the end of this first addition to The Wall Steve Journal. I hope that you like the new design and are looking forward to making use of all the cool new capabilities of this site. The Wall Steve Journal will become a living, thriving community of people from all over the world sharing their talents and interests with each other in one focused hub of awesomeness and it will continue to grow and grow until it becomes the coolest place on the net.

Or I will continue to write myself to sleep every night without ever earning a single comment or seeing someone else throw something up on the site and the site will dwindle and dwindle and *suck.* We'll see.



- Steve

new

(put post here)

- Steve