Lewies Blog

You know, I took an extra two days off of work to give myself a five-day holiday weekend. These last two days have been no picnic in the part. Again, I have come down with some allergies or something. I thought I already had my hay fever for this summer.

Rite away I’ve started taking some Advil Allergy Sinus tablets. They seem to be helping a little but the back of my throat is still a bit sore.

I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to get up. I don’t even want to sit at my computer for long before I go back to bed and take another nap. But never fear, I’ll still get the strength to take a picture and write a post to scare my readers. Fear the alergies my readers … they’ll turn you into a zombie.

Tags: Sick, Health, Zombie, Advil, Allergy, Allergies, Hay Fever, Vacation, Work, Holiday

I have been participating in the SETI@home project for almost 3 years now. For those of you who may not know, SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Many people download a client application that processes some data and then send it back to the SETI people at Berkeley University of California.

Each portion of data that everyone processes is called a work unit. The data was originally collected from the Arecibo teliscope in Puerto Rico (about 35 GB a day). It is then split up into smaller pieces and distributed to many computers in the SETI program. These work units are processed when the computer is not doing anything else. The data is scanned in many ways by the SETI clients to determine if there are any patterns that the teliscope received from space as a sign of intelligence.

Seti is one of the first pioneers in distributed computing. I am proud to be a part of it. Out of the current 5,430,154 users, I have completed more work units then 99.253% of them according to my SETI statistics. Today I reached a milestone of having processed over 7,500 work units. This brings me up to 40,571st place. I’ve been at this since July 1st of 2002 (just a few days before I got married) and I have 4 computers working away at these work units. I even figured out how to set my Mac up to participate as well.

There are many other distributed programs out there besides SETI. Another popular one is folding@home by Stanford University. They try and understand how proteins fold and how to build there own. Talk about some cool nanotechnology.

Tags: SETI, SETI@home, Aliens, Intelligence, Extraterrestrial, Client, Berkeley, University, California, Arecibo, Teliscope, Puerto Rico, Server, Data, Statistics, Work Unit, CPU, Mac, folding@home, Stanford University, Standford, Berkely University, Nanotechnology

In the World of WarCraft game, you have the ability to take screenshots of anything you see. Most of the time, I don’t use this feature. Angel told me that she uses it alot when ever she is riding a griffin. The funny thing is, about 90% of my screen captures are of me riding griffens as well.

I guess it all has to do with the fact that you can’t do much else in the game while you are riding one. Also, it is greate to fly on a beautifully winged creature. This particular capture is of me when I first got onto a griffin. The smoke is still surrounding me and rather then just a screen shot in the game, I have a sreen shot of the window as well. My client was acting up a little and I had to reset everything.

Well, I guess it is time for me to go back to playing the World of WarCraft.

Tags: WarCraft, Flying WoW, World of WarCraft, Griffin, Game, Entertainment, Screenshot, Angel, Wings, Smoke, Client

With the Memorial Day Weekend upon me, I had some free time to take a look at my blogs template for comments. I use a commenting service called HaloScan. I had paid the $12 fee to upgrade my account for a year some time ago, so I have a few extra features available to me.

I had used someone elses template and modified it a little bit when I first set it up to handle gravatars. Today I worked on it for a long time to try to make it look similar to the template on my own blog. Take a look:

It still needs a little work. I’m finding that the worst part of HaloScan templates is that it isn’t applied to the trackbacks view. I don’t use trackbacks often and no one seems to send trackbacks to me anyways.

One feature that I would like to setup is tha ability to put a link back to the original post that the comments are commenting on. Too many times I have received an email linking to the comments when a new one appears, but if it is an old post, I have no idea what the person is replying to.

Tags: Template, Templates, Haloscan, Gravatar, Gravatars, Upgrade, Comment, Comments, Trackback, Trackbacks, Link Back

So I partied my butt off as if it were news years eve of 1999 - Literally. I hadn’t touched alcohol since then. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t smoke, drink, and stay away from caffine. I used to drink a lot with my friends until I got a car. Still, I would get hammered when I wasn’t the designated driver - which was rare. After 1999, I gave it all up due to complications with my heart.

I’ve had an operation between 1999 and now, so those complications seem a bit impossible, but I still stay away from smoking, alcohoul and caffine for good measure. Last night was special - or at least I made it special. I partied, but I didn’t get wild or anything. My brother came up and spent the night and the five of us (Wife, Brother, Sister In-Law, Sister In-Laws Boyfriend) had a good time.

I started out with a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and almost got really drunk rite away. Of course, it didn’t help that I didn’t eat anything yet. I had a few snaks to help absorb the alcohoul and diluted it with some crystal lite. Dinner was great. There were steaks, skewers, potato salad - did I mention that my sister in-law makes great potato salad? I’ll have to get that recipee sometime.

Lucas bought me a birthday gift. Some goggles, ear muffs, gloves and a mask to help out with the weed wacker that he purchased for me a while back. My sister in-law treated me to some ice cream the night before with a Dublin Mudslide but came up short $4 and I had spotted her the extra cash. Makes you wonder … but her heart was in the rite place. Also, Angel withdrew $50 extra from my card for a gift - I hadn’t seen it yet and was shocked that she knew my PIN number.

Enough of the sad news. Let’s just say I had a lot of fun last night. We didn’t do much - we just hung out downstairs in the lounge. BG was playing his tape of the band that he is in. It was some really great stuff and he can jam on his guitar really well when he is soloing. My brother and I would rip up the singer though. The singer isn’t all that great. Actually, the singer is terrible. I told him that he needed to find a woman with a tiny, yet strong high voice. It would play the part better.

Let’s advance to today shall we? I had a hangover, but nothing seriouse. My brother brought back my San Andreas game and was playing it with all the cheats. Our conversation moved to him being a vegitarian. I was mocking him for purchasing a car with leather seats made of dead animals so he could be comfortable. He got me back pretty bad. All this comming from a guy with meat on the floor. I missed it, but the extra steak left out over night along with the skewers was partially consumed by our nine cats. When they were done with it, they just left it on the floor.

It was hard to keep my eyes open and I went back to bed. My brother knocked on the door and let me know he was going to leave. Later my mother in-law came with my nephew and niece. We went shopping while the kids were at my house. Let me tell you - shopping while hung over is no picnick. I usually can taste everything in my mouth as I walk past it. I thought I was going to throw up today. That and the constant feeling of tiredness and weakness.

You would think that I may have learned my lesson not to drink, but no. I’m trying to finish the mudslide. I like to blow bubbles in it with a straw like it was chocolate milk back in grade school. I am drinking it because I like the taste of it and the bottle is taking up valuble real-estate space in my refrigerator. The mike’s hard lemonade can stay in there for all I care or someone else can have it. It is easy to place those bottles into smaller areas if we run out of room.

Tags: Birthday, Party, 30, Aging, Family, Friends, Alcohoul, Drinking, Hangover, 1999, Operation, Heart, Mudslide, Hard Lemonade, Lemonade, Drunk

Last week I went GeoCaching with my nephew and picked up a dollar bill that was in the Where’s George program. I have entered a few more bills since then and have spent them wisely. I got a notification in my email today that someone found my $1 bill and they live in Dover, Deleware.

Found on Delaware Turnpike at the Delaware/Maryland boarder in Lane 18 Southbound.

It is interesting to see how the money travels so quickly. It traveled 100 miles on an average speed of 18 miles a day. I think that I’m going to enter more money into the program. I’m finding that it is best to mark the bills with a black pen. I marked a few with a bright green pen, but felt funny when handing them to a cashier.

Tags: GeoCaching, George Washington, George, Where’s George, Money, $1, Dollar, Tracking, Travel

Our little group at my home tonight started going over poems and such. A few of us actually submitted a peom to Poetry.com. We all went through the same experiences. We were offered to purchase a book our poems were in (no discount), and we were all offered to accept an award at some ceremony.

I bought into the book thing because I wanted to give my grandmother a gift one year. I purchased 2 books, so that I could have a copy as well. I went and found the book tonight and saw this poem that I had written.

Good-bye

Never letting go
to the impact of her doubts,
chilling to the core
with each indication
the past does shout.
The grasp of my forgotten lies.
The pain,
The passion,
The past …
Flowing to her shores
of silent awakening.
Towards the rocks of lamentation,
to shatter my illusion of innocence.
The love between two thorns,
pricking at the stars within.
The realm of my very own dreams,
devoured by loves once hidden.
One of the hopelessness now remembered,
come to desire me away.
One of the present with content
to kill the pains of memories since lost.
Opening the wishes of three minds
only to feel the attention of
our welcomeing good-byes.

This was written regarding one of my past girl friends who wanted us to get back together. It was a hopeless situation. I can not remember who the other girl is. I think it was a woman that I would only wish that I could be with, but never had the nerve to act on it. I had really gotten depressed over both of them - one that I knew was never going to happen, and one that I didn’t want to go back to.

It was all that was on my mind at the time. I could not act on my dreams since I was so occupied with relationships.

My past girl friend was slowly waking up to the realization that it wasn’t going to happen between us. The lies would be those sweet nothings that you promise that you’ll be together forever. It hurts to go back on your word with the smallest things sometimes.

Anyhow, this poem appeared at the top of page 226 in The International Library of Peotry - Flowering Splendor.

Tags: Poem, Poetry, Good-Bye, Book, Poetry.com, Relationship, Love, Goodbye, Depression

I woke up around noon today and set out to get a few things for the house. I also got a bit of food to have a party for myself. I got some steaks, some vegies for skewers, some potatoes for potato salad and lots of sodas and a few alcohaulic beverages.

I called up my mother in-law for help in making potato salad. I had already diced the potatoes and had them cooking. She told me that I needed a dozen eggs. I was lucky that we still had an extra dozen. My sister in-law walked in the door and I was saved. She makes the best potato salad and appeared to be happy that I had done a lot of the work for her. I diced some green pepers and some celery stalks for her as well as some onions.

Afterwards, I prepared what we had left of the green pepers for some skewers. My brother is a veggie, so I let him make his own skewer. I started making a carnivore skewer to poke fun at his veggie skewer. He promptly moved his skewer to the end next to one that didn’t have as much meat on it. My sister in-law volunteered for the carnivore skewer as she didn’t like mushrooms anyway.