New Pic

I put up a new picture in the pictures section. It's neat.

(Note to self: write something here later.)

Update: Adam liked the picture so much that he took his own time to go through it and make it all nice and blended together. If you liked the picture before, then get ready to like it even more! It's that good. Be sure to visit Adam's site, mathcaddy.com.

Thank you Adam.

- Steve

Happy Easter

Janelle recommended the movie "I heart Huckabees" to me a few days ago. I am through about the first 20 minutes of it and I absolutely love it!

Here is my favorite line from the movie so far.

And here is another great line from the BBC original series "The Office." This sound clip is from an investigation led by an office worker, Gareth, trying to find out who made a naughty picture of his boss. I liked it.

The Office - Gareth's Investigation

I also put up a new picture in the Pictures section that I took this morning.

I think that Jason Schwartzman is my favorite actor.

- Steve

"Rockin' The Suburbs"

Just woke up. There are key imprints on my face. I have gotten nowhere with either of the two papers that I am supposed to write tonight. Here is an inside look at my brain.



For those of you who couldn't really tell what was going on through that little window into my mind, here is the original picture:



And now here is some Ben Folds lyrics to rock to.

"It gets me real pissed off, it makes me wanna say,
It gets me real pissed off and it makes me wanna say,
It gets me real pissed off and it makes me wanna say,
'FUUUUUUDGE!'"

- Ben Folds

I love Easter season.

- Steve

nothing of substance here

Janelle pointed me at a pretty cheap laugh today. The "Gizoogle Translator."

It takes any website and adds some "izzles," "fo rizzles" and random rap lyrics to it and makes it look like something straight from the streets. It loses it's novelty kinda quickly after you start to recognize every change that it makes and when it will make it, but it made me laugh the first time that I saw it. Most of you will probably just find the translator down right offensive. If you do find it offensive, then let me pose a question specifically to you. "Why are you using the internet?"

In the meantime, before the novelty of the translator wears off, be sure to read the translated version of my site. I think reading my site with that translator should become standard practice soon.

Also take note of the Pictures and Music sections of the site because I finally threw up some old stuff that Travis wanted on the site. The picture is a funny super-hero that he drew up on some super-hero creator program and the song is a rap made by Evan, Sam and Travis based on the book "The Lord of the Flies."

- Steve

"I bought my first CD today. E V E R." said the man who boasts a collection of songs just shy of 10,000

And it is the best CD ever. Every song on it is my favorite song in the whole wide world until the next track comes on.

It's kind of weird owning a CD that I actually paid for. The only other CD that I have is Weezer - Maladroit, which I purchased with a gift card given to me for my birthday a few years ago.

I always thought that people should wait until they are married to buy CDs. It is a special thing that you need to share with that one unique person, not something to do when you are bored and want some cheap thrill. Well Cat Stevens is really neat and I will always be willing to compromise my morals for him.

I went with Chad. He wanted something mentioned about him here to make him cooler and asked for me to be sure to tell everyone what he got, but I forgot. He got some generic scream-o crap. Too bad, eh?

Update: Chad told me that he got "From Autumn to Ashes" and "The Bled," of which I have heard not enough of either to judge. He also got the movie "Gladiator" so no matter how crappy his CD selection turns out to be he has redeemed himself by buying such an awesome movie. (I got Reservoir Dogs.)

- Steve

Track Season '05

Let's look at the facts:

Things Against Me

• Patellar Tendinitis


• Iliotibialband Syndrome (Iliotibialband Syndrome website)


• Pulled, or otherwise just completely screwed up, IT band


• Getting sick this week


• Shin Splints (They haven't come yet, but they will, they always do.)


• Patience

Things For Me

• Time

Patience and time cancel each other out in the lists, so there is really nothing going for me at all this season.

Hmm... wait a second. There has to be something.

Things For Me

• Time


• Sympathy!

Now that I think about it, this may just be the greatest season ever. "Could you please fetch me my sweatshirt and a candy bar from my locker? I am getting a bit cold and hungry watching the rest of you work so hard."

- Steve

Best Forum Post EVER

This is, just like the title said, the best forum discussion ever.

The original topic:

Good drunken debate from a few nights ago.

The question: How many 5 year-olds could you take on at once?

The specifics:

- You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
- You are not allowed to touch a wall.
- When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
- I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
- The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
- There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
* The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

I set my magic number at 30, but upon reflection, I think I could take on a few more. How many could you take on?

I should start posting conversations that my friends and I have. Some are about half as good as that. "What if you were fighting all the 5 year-olds and then time froze?"

The Forum

- Steve

A Long Night

Tonight I got trapped in a writing groove. I was sitting comfortably in my chair and just being completely bombarded with great ideas of things to write about. Unfortunately I got caught up talking with a blast from the past, Ilana, and I only I managed to crank out a few posts tonight. SCREW YOU ILANA! (But I kid, I kid, Ilana. Only a mild "screw you" to you.)

I don't have the energy now to finish up the last one that I was planning as I want to and it's not exactly a subject that I can set aside easily. It's huge and I am very excited for it. I'll write up a draft or something as I drift off to sleep tonight and come back to it tomorrow. I just hope that I don't lose interest in it as I often do when I set things aside. I should post a picture of my "idea drawer" that has yet to be used as anything other than a place to keep paper with "great ideas" on them.

I will try my best not to lose interest and tomorrow you may be blessed with:

Chain Letters, Fortune Cookies and Crying - My Philosophy on Life

It will be a best seller. I swear.

Oh, and a quick shout out to my first fan, Kristine. (WARNING: myspace link. not recommended. not that I have anything against my fan, it's just that I hate myspace.) That makes me feel cool.

- Steve

St. Craptrick's Day

Oh man! I am soooo witty with my titles. "St. Craptrick's Day." What a riot!

The really funny thing about St. Patrick's day is not my witty puns, but that America really has no reason to be celebrating it. We Americans, as a whole, are not anywhere close to being Irish and our history, excluding all the initial hatred toward Irish immigrants, really has nothing to do with America at all. As a country, we only celebrate it so that we have an excuse to get drunk and box each other. We don't even box each other.

I would even venture as far to say that America really has no culture of its own. We are just big mooches. We call ourselves the giant mixing pot so that we can just grab any holiday that we like and make it our own.

Think about it. What holidays are exclusively American? We have President's day. Wooowee! We have Memorial day. And we have labor day, Thanksgiving and Columbus day. Have you ever had fun actually celebrating one of these holidays before? I haven't. Sure, we have lots of fun enjoying these days off, but our holidays just tend to suck. The best that we can do to celebrate a holiday that only we celebrate exclusively is dragging giant balloons down a street for Thanksgiving. And what does that have to do with giving thanks anyways? America is corrupt I tell you!

America is not festive. We are a nation obsessed with olden dead folk.

- Steve

Interesting Read

I found this article over at New Scientist magazine and found it pretty interesting. It talks about some things in today's science that either do not quite add up with what we believe or completely contradict what we believe.

I really liked the first small bit about the placebo effect and how people who were hurt and given morphine to contradict the pain on a regular basis would eventually receive the same effects as morphine from a simple saline solution. It went on to say that the placebo effect induced by the saline could also be counter-acted by a drug that counter-acts the effects of morphine. Crazy.

Who ever really listens to me or cares what I say anyways? Go and read it yourself.

13 Things That do not Make Sense

- Steve

Giving in to Common Sense

After finding out about the looming threat of some friends starting up their own website and reviewing my server stats I decided that it was time for me to redesign this site. It's only real design problem was that it looked CRAPPY when using Internet Explorer to view the page. My server stats said that 60% of the people coming to the site used Internet Explorer. Common sense prevailed and I reasoned that I should make the page appeal as much as I can to more than half of the people visiting it.

To get a little technical, the problem had to do with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, two different internet browsers, interpreting my CSS styles differently. Mozilla rendered the page nicely setting the main posting column neatly between the left and right navigation columns and at their same level. Internet Explorer decided that it didn't like making this site look nice and always shoved the starting point of the posts column way down below the left navigation column. Annoying, but I have never before really cared because I use Firefox and it didn't effect me.

The 4:1 ratio of people using IE compared to those using Firefox was kind of a disappointing ratio for me and my shabby design. That's I have redesigned the site to make it look good to all of you using Internet Explorer. Now you can hopefully find the site a bit more aesthetically pleasing and maybe enjoy it just that much more.

As to all of you Firefox users, I am sorry. The site now looks like crap to you. More like crap than it looked like to the IE users before the redesign. Please help?

- Steve

Total weirdness

I was playing around with this random name generator thing that I found on the internet today. It's nothing too exciting or interesting, it just creates a list of names based on what you choose for gender and the obscurity of the name that it is randomly creating. You can find it here.

Now here is the interesting part. I set the generator to display a list of 30 male names that all have an obscurity factor of "1." I looked down the list seeing nothing really neat, just common names. Theeeen... BAAAAAM! There it was, sitting at number 4 in the list. "Travis Garland." The screen shot is not even faked. It really did happen.

What are the odds?

Travis Garland, soul mate.



Maybe next time Carl Escobar.

- Steve

Writing a Story

I started writing a story today. I think that it might turn out good and be worth a read. Probably not, but we'll see.

What would you like to see in a story?

- Steve

Filme

I am going to keep this simple.

I watched Kill Bill, only part 1, today. It is, quite literally, a FREAKING AWESOME MOVIE. It is completely crazy. If you are behind the times like I am, then you need to go and get this movie right now. Seriously.

I also had Brandon, Chad, Derrik and Josh over to edit their German movie today. I guess that they couldn't keep one coherent story line for more than two minutes so they made their movie into two shorter skits. Not to brag or anything, but everything about these movies are great. They are going to absolutely blow away any competition that they have tomorrow in German when the class sees them. Witty writing, Tarantino-esque shots, dramatic drama and off the wall humor. Off-the-wall-bouncing-up-and-down-between-the-ceiling-and-
the-floor-and-then-off-another-wall humor, that is. Each of the skits have a moral and message in them to be delivered to viewers, but I doubt that anyone will be able to understand it because the movies are in German. I went ahead and uploaded them to the site for your viewing pleasure. Good luck.

German Movies

• Shaving - 21.5 MB (Right-click and choose "Save target as...")


• Knives - 16.9 MB (Right-click and choose "Save target as...")

- Steve

Helllo

You probably couldn't tell, but I typed the title of this post with a really cool rhythm.

I haven't been writing much lately? Yes. I care? Not especially.

I recorded two new mathcaddy Radio sessions with Adam this weekend and today I had a great time making a movie for German class with Jared and Jon. The radio shows are an interesting listen and can be found at Adam's newly refurnished and occupied site, mathcaddy.com, or right here. Session 12. Session 13. I enjoyed session 13 more than 12.

I was very pleased with the speed and efficiency that we filmed the movie and also the overall product that it ended up being. The wierdest thing about the movie was what the sky looked like on film.

We filmed this Sunday afternoon around 1:00 to 2:30 on a clear day. I never thought anything about the sky while we were filming, but once I was back here at home and editing the film I noticed how vibrant the sky was. The clouds are big and fluffy, the sky a unbelievably light blue and the angle of the clouds just seems off as well. It really looks as if we filmed the entire film in front of a green screen and then superimposed the sky during editing.

I also liked this particular frame of the movie where I am rolling down the dirt mound after being stabbed because I think that it looks like I have just fallen out of the sky on to the dirt.

I hurt everywhere.

- Steve

Camp Lake Picture

Here is a picture that I took from that church camp that I went up to. It's not the best panoramic picture ever, but I like how it turned out.



Click for a larger version.

- Steve

Changes

I finally added some external links under the links section where they are supposed to be. The links lead to a few friends sites and other places of interest on the web. I have only changed the main page for now, but will get around to the others later. I don't have much time on my hands. It's Scrubs night! I'll come back, finish up updating the new design and explain a few of the links.

Maybe.

- Steve

ASB Elections

ASB elections are coming up. I am yet to hear any false promises, receive any delicious candy bribes or see any neat posters so I have no idea how this election will end up being. The one thing that I would like to see happen in this election is for a certain someone on the Sandstorm staff to inconspicuously use any power she has in the school newspaper to publish as many "timely" articles expressing her views that would make her a more favorable canidate as she can. That would show genius and pre-planning and I would find it also very funny.

The other thing that I look forward to is reading the speeches written by each candidate and TEARING THEM APART.

I raise my glass to everyone involved and wish them good luck.

- Steve

Screw Vacation, I'm a Baller!

Cali, F. Martinez, Brown Bear and me, Dr. Stephen, got together today at Claybell park for a little bit of 2 vs 2 in the cage. Martinez led me to our third consecutive win against Cali and 'Ginia but then, after the teams were switched up, he took Cali for a little taste of victory.

After grinding another loss in the face of T and introducing me to my first, we all enjoyed some refreshments in the parking lot. Cali said "I never thought that winning meant anything out here on the streets back when I was losing, but now I know that it's everything." Then we turned around to see a group of eight 6th graders heading from across the street trying to claim the cage. The game was on.

We ran back to the caged court and staked out our own half for our next game and the youngens kept filling in. The last kid to come onto the court suggested that they kick us out of the cage so that they could play a full court game. What followed was a sweet game of 4 vs 8 to 10. Or 21 - no one was really sure.

Even though we had as much as a two foot advantage over the 6th grade team we still had to work a heck of a lot to claim rebounds. If you would jump up to catch a rebound for an instant, then there would be three kids halfway up your chest clawing for the ball by the time that you got down. When you were lucky and managed to get away with a rebound it would only take a second of not moving to be swarmed again by the younger team. It was brutal game.

The low point of the game was definitely when a mom came to pick up her kid at the same time that I was "directing" a kid into a corner of the fence and "swatting" for the ball. I am pretty sure that she saw me.

Never under-estimate 6th graders. They trash-talked us up and down the court until they had to go home. They had pretty dirty mouths too. They called me a girl. They also all applauded me when I got my first point near the end of the game. Dirty rascals.

Speaking of the end of the game... they almost won. A 7-5 game in our favor quickly turned into a 9-9 tie which gave way to a 9-10 game point in their favor. Martinez eventually took control of the game and brought us back to a 2-point win at 13 or 14 or something. Maybe 12? Or 15. Whatev.

So you watch out for us ballers. Aint nothing can beat us!

- Dr. Stephen

Vacationing

I have been kind of busy lately. I will be more busy and then going to a church camp over the weekend. The camp will be fun and I hope to come up with some great material while up there in the great woods. I wont be writing here again until Sunday or later so everyone else needs to pitch in stuff to the other parts of the site to entertain each other. Or don't. Whatev.

Someone go to 321 on Friday and record me a bootleg of "Good Luck Mr. Gorski" please.

- Steve