• The 2008 MuchMusic Video Awards - This was a complete failure due to the fact that the awards were held every Father's day this year. I was able to see one of the members of the recently-reformed New Kids of the Block (iirc, it was Donnie Wahlberg) heading out from their soundcheck, but was unable to see Simple Plan at that time. To make matters worse, the weather was wrecking havoc for the awards. I will not ever go downtown again every father's day and instead spend my time with my dad for sure. It's family, eh?
• Vans Warped Tour - I spend years on battling on having the tour being held in Toronto and that wish finally came true. The tour this year was held at "The Flats at Arrow Hall" in Mississauga, Ontario (International Centre). I really love the way the organizers opened up a separate hall for fans to cool off and such. I hope that the tour will be there again next year and for many years to come. As for Barrie, no way!
• My trip to Windsor - it's my lifetime trip that I will remember for sure. Me and my dad really had a great time and we also checked out my uncle's university down there. Just like the song by Hedley, "All that's left in this brave new world."
• Summer school at Durham College - The course lasted for 7 to 8 weeks, 2 days a week on Tuesdays and Thursday and I was able to pass successfully. The course was Computer Electronics and this was a replacement for the first year, first semester course that I had struggled. At least this had finally filled that void.

What's coming up:

• The upcoming Simple Plan concert - I've invested my time and my money on going to this particular concert when it first broke out sometime in May this year. I'm gonna buy some good clothing from the concert. Notably hoodies and t-shirts. Faber Drive (one of my favourites), Metro Station and Cute is what we aim for is also joining the tour. At the time of this writing, the tour is kicking off.

Enjoy your summer holidays, while they last!!!!

Just wanted to remind everyone that this Sunday, August 24th is the annual Block Party here at Faith. There will be one special service at 10:30am led by Pastor Warren Arndt.  The party will begin immediately following the service.  We will have free food, inflatable games, a car show, and much more throughout the day.

There will be no Middle School Ministry classes on Sunday, August 24th due to the Block Party and on Sunday, August 31st due to the Labor Day holiday.  We will resume our regular class schedule on Sunday, September 7th at 9:15am with the Good Morning Game Show!

As I was going thru some of my stored "stash" I came across these beautiful dresden quilt blocks I had purchased quite some time ago.  I took one and made a 20" x 20" pillow sham with it and paired it with black polka dots.  I think it frames it beautifully.  Of course, since I had the polka dots out, I had to make a stocking in non-traditional colors for Christmas.  The rest of the quilt blocks, I think I'll list on etsy.  The colors really took me out of my "shabby chic" range, but I had a lot of fun!

http://www.picapp.com/PublicSite/Search.aspx?frompage=MostRecent&region=8&term=new+kids+on+the+block

I hope we dont bail out in the result of no place to go. I mean, I dont mind going anywhere. But the problem is, its always the saem thing. We go to the *shiver* mall, and then we walk around, eat from the food court, and then go home. Nothing happens really.

Dont get me wrong, I am not expecting like a big adventure to happen like Indian Jones. But how about a party? Or maybe you know, a dinner at a place, you know, a place...

yeah, not exactly that convincing, am I? Ha ha ha.

planning to wear this today, likkkkeeeee, for no reason if nothing comes up.

hmm, yeah, I have nothing else to say.

I have a big artist block. I find myself watching endless batman and spidermanshows, reading comics, even occasionally wearing theatrical makeup, just to see if my brain has a freaking reaction to it all. It does, but the only reaction it gives is making me appear even more crazy.

xoxo,

nina-lolita

I certainly haven't watched any Smiley Virus videos. Like, ever. So the only possible reason I can think of why My YouTube Recommendations should offer two videos (out of three) of this, presumed, piece of jailbait poplette ass is that either: a) Miley Cyrus now makes up 77% of everything on the internet or b) the recommendation thing is just plain silly. Whichever one it is, neither are very interesting to talk about.

The other current meme making its way across the blogosphere is this Olympics viral campaign thing that's being over-shared to death. It's almost enough to incite me to write a How to Spend a Few Hours Online without Being Bored by People Talking About the Olympics post.

Here's a quick how-to on "how to" block the Olympics from your personal infosphere:

1. Try to spend as much time reading your feeds on Google Reader - actively seeking knowledge is so anti-progress anyway - and install this script to add a filter. Enter Smellympic terms in the exclude box and rejoice at your shitty contest free world.

2. If you have to venture into the wilds of the web this approach is no good. To give yourself a fighting chance of remaining a Fairly Interesting Person, use the negative Google search operator. If you use '-olympics' after every search term, your value over life ratio will increase.

3. In extreme cases, you may need to use one of those netnanny products (In the future, I'd like to see some stats showing the relationship between NetNanny'd homes and kids who end up as porn stars/crack whores/rapists) and see if they can be switched to block all Gay-lympic stuff instead of the good stuff. Extra bonus, using these programs you can even protect yourself from instant messenging conversations with people talking about the Dullympic Lames! I may apply that to any conversations I have with chicks which don't devolve into cybering after five mins. Cut those prick-teases off!

And that's my key to a far more fulfilling lifestyle over the next...however many days/weeks/months this thing lasts for. Can't we just go back to being afraid/exploiting of China and stop pretending to give a shit that their hosting of the games is the first step to greater inclusion with the 'global community'?

Here is your last chance to get organized and clean out those closets before the seasons change to cold weather again....and make a few bucks in the process!

Please join your neighbors in hosting a garage sale

SEPTEMBER 11-14th, 2008

in conjunction with Brookside Village's Fall Subdivision-wide Garage Sales!

Leave a comment on this page giving your address and what types of stuff you'll be selling, or call us at 734-448-1312 and leave us a message. We are hoping to get at least 20 houses to support promoting it locally!

August 9, 2008

I'll be heading back to Austin soon where we hope to regroup and move on to the next steps in our efforts to stop coal plants. All in all I consider this Arkansas trip to be a large success. We had 77 people come out for the screening in Fayetteville and had over 150 in Little Rock. Many Arkansans are eager to unite and stop these coal plants in order to promote and move towards renewable energy generation.

Here in Hope, however, my spirits were a bit lower. We distributed thousands of fliers at the Watermelon Festival in

It is in these local towns, closest to the plants, where the hardest fight lies. Many, if not most, of the locals see the plant as an economic boon, since the few of them who get jobs with the company are usually getting the best job they’ve ever had. Concerns about public health, environmental degradation, and long-term economical impacts are ignored or justified in the light of some industry, any industry, willing to invest in the local community.

As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it." This was true a hundred years ago, and it is still true today – both for men and women. And as long as the majority of people in this country are kept beneath a yoke of low wages and corporate consumerism, the will of the people to acknowledge, much less fight, the ills of our age will be greatly weakened.

This is not just an American dilemma, consider this Chinese coal plant situation:

The companies who build these plants know this. This is why they choose economically challenged or depressed sites and communities for their projects. It is also why it is so important to find those few locals who are willing and eager to speak against the crowd and stand up for their health, the environment, and a stable and sound energy future.

With that thought in mind we are networking the few dedicated souls in Hope with the rest of the great volunteers throughout Arkansas in our efforts to stop these coal plants. With the momentum we’ve gathered I think we have a great chance of achieving the change we seek.

As with Pandora, all it takes is a faint glimmer of Hope.

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone:
888-382-1222.

It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your
time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the
cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a
different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.. It takes about 20
seconds or go to www.donotcall.gov

Wikipedia's definition of a writer's block:

Writer's block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity

Now I'm having a blogger's block.

Much apologies.

Will update soon.

Oh well.

So, here follows the article from thepiratebay.org (http://thepiratebay.org/blog/123):

Fascist state censors Pirate Bay

We're quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators.

This time it's Italy. They suffer from a really bad background as one of the IFPIs was formed in Italy during the fascist years and now they have a fascist leader in the country, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi is also the most powerful person in Italian media owning a lot of companies that compete with The Pirate Bay and he would like to stay that way - so one of his lackeys, Giancarlo Mancusi, ordered a shutdown of our domain name and IP in Italy to make it hard to not support Berlusconis empire.

We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.

We have already changed IP for the website - that makes it work for half the ISPs again. And we want you all to inform your italian friends to switch their DNS to OpenDNS so they can bypass their ISPs filters. This will also let them bypass the other filters installed by the Italian government, as a bonus. And for the meanwhile - http://labaia.org works (La Baia means The Bay in Italian).

And please, everybody should also contact their ISP and tell them that this is not OK and that the ISPs should appeal. We don't want a censored internet! And the war starts here...

Foudn this amazing burned down building to 'play' around in.

This was some time back when I encountered a glitch (unnecessary alphabetization of data) while testing it out and they rectified it recently =))

Widgenie is still in beta mode.

So after much deliberation, I decided to use data of visitors from all over the world categorized into respective countries instead of solely using monthly visitors stream, as then I would have more data to play with.

Many thanks to SiteMeter for providing the statistics.

Here's first look at SiteMeter's data. Data used is from 22 July till today.

Roughly half a month's worth of data. (Yeah, it's cos I just signed up on Sitemeter and it's lovely)

Everything's pretty straight forward here on SiteMeter. =))

We then use the statistics and replicate the results on Widgenie.

I had to type in the results via Microsoft Excel or via a CSV file..I chose to use Excel to do my results and the file can be obtained here. After entering your required data, you would have to upload it onto Widgenie.

If you noticed, CHINA being the largest population and all (≈ 1.3 billion people), I don't even get a single hit from them, they also lose out to Vietnam (≈ 85 million people).

I figured I should compare China with another communist country.

I'll get to explaining that later.

The Excel file apparently is functioning as it should be as shown below (in decimal, although I would have preferred they stuck to what I wrote in the Excel file i.e. in percentages like 50%).

If you noticed, there's a difference in results like for the US in the Sitemeter captured picture, it states 50%, then in the following picture, it's 50%. Pardon me, but due to my slow capturing...visitors came and went and thus the results got altered a little.

Going over to creating widgets - we find that there are six widget types; namely Tabular, Animated Line Chart, Animated Bar Chart, Animated Area Chart, Animated Pie Chart, and Text Cloud Widget.

Their widgets are not Wordpress-friendly - which sucks.

So I have to use links for you to see them as they should be seen.

Click on the images to bring you to their normal state.

A look at Tabular layout:

I don't get why there is a useless "0" at the end of every data, except that United States has a "1" at its end - which puzzles me even more. Not to mention, it's an eyesore too.

This happens for every following widget I made. Sigh.

Animated Line Layout:

Say "Hi" to Mr. "0" there behind Germany.

Animated Bar Chart:

Singapore yells "0"!

Animated Area Chart:

Ok I gotta stop poking at the app. =D

Animated Pie Chart:

Lastly, the Text Cloud Widget:

Except that it would be with links on them, I just didn't put any into my Excel file.

It's nice they came in different colors, but would have helped if they also appeared bigger/smaller relative to their size.

Overall: If the site's system weren't so slow to make changes, I would have made more change to the layout of the widgets.

But when it takes somewhere around 30 seconds to change one colour and to reload the widget - not many people would want to deal with changing of colors.

And if it weren't glitchy, I would have totally avoided encountering this error no less than 4 times.

If Widgenie...

• Incorporated Wordpress-friendly widgets,
• Less or not glitchy at all,
• Faster in terms of amending details,
• Option to just input data on the site itself and not needing upload input via MS Excel or using CSV,
• Would help if it did not automatically refresh with every single change - takes up sooo much time!
• And it would be awesome if there was an option to disable showing of the Widget Name, Created Date, Created By (which unfortunately shows the email instead of the maker's name), and Description, when clicked on the links which directs to Widgenie. That is, just show the interactive Widget, no more, no less.
• And what's with the redundant "1"s and "0"s appearing?

It would have been a much more useful system if they had all the good stuff and none of the bad.

But, I think for now, they would be safe still in Beta mode.

Ok so here's the scoop on why mainland China ain't feeling me!

I did a test on WatchMouse as suggested by this article on BlogHerald and found out that CHINA BLOCKED PINEAPPLE PINNACLES!

The image above is done using a old blog address - samkhk.blogspot.com

And the ping to Shanghai, China got the OKAY.

Then I tried - iamsamuel.org - Pineapple Pinnacles

And the ping was that ALL PACKETS LOST.

Hmm. I have no idea whether to be glad that China blocked my site or to be sad that my site's blocked by a country.

(It's true that we Chinese hate each other - lol)

]]> http://synersign.wordpress.com/?p=216 Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:49:17 +0000 frewon9 http://synersign.wordpress.com/?p=216 HI again this is my latest post on this page its about Frustration trust me its helpful when you need to deal with it. as we know things can get really frustrating.

http://synersign.wordpress.com/all-aboard-the-fustration-train/

if this is a thesis/ subject report it would be insane

If you want to let it all out email me mayc2k2002@yahoo.com

pictures, message or post comments of all your frustration its time the release them.

cautions its barking mad

The Unusual Suspect writes,

"blogTO writes of a Canadian PhD student studying Social Political Thought who was intercepted by Kelowna Airport screeners when they spotted her necklace, which has a charm in the shape of a gun. (Article includes a photo of the actual necklace.) The charm is less than 2" in size, and has no moving parts."

"How do you know it wasn't a real gun?" asked Guy, a security agent with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, who also declined to provide his last name.

"Who knows if there is a gun that small that can shoot bullets? You don't know that. They followed the rules."

Airport security called it a replica? A replica of what?! The Lilliputian Ruff Rider's Sidearm?

Cory writes,

Hey, Guy? If I could make a miniature gun that was 1.7" long and contained no moving parts and could still fire bullets, I could also make it in shapes other than gun. If your security seriously contemplates defending against that level of technology (firing bullets out of a solid object less than 2" long), then you'd better confiscate all metal objects, period. Also, what are you doing about other conceivable -- but technically impossible -- threats, like telekinesis, voodoo, and directed sunspot radiation?

Gah! Here's the link.

ich bin unlängst auf meine erhöhte Tippfehlerquote in Blogeinträgen hingewiesen worden. Da ich natürlich nach wie vor einen gewissen Anspruch an mich selbst erhebe, werde ich tunlichst daran arbeiten, diese wieder abzustellen. Wäre ja auch sonst schade drum ;-).

Vorab gibt es mal wieder ein bißchen auf die verwöhnten Ohren:

Mnemic rocken wieder ordentlich!

Heute habe ich mal wieder die deutschsprachige Artikellandschaft durchwühlt und bin direkt an drei Artikeln hängen geblieben, die mir sehr gut gefallen haben. Da wäre zunächst einmal atog28's Schwarz-Weiß-Film auf MagicUniverse. Ein sehr ausführlicher und informativer Artikel - und dazu gut geschrieben. Das einzige, was mich bei dem Artikel wirklich stört ist die einfache Tatsache, dass ich ein BW-Deck wohl genauso wie Markus angegangen wäre: eine coole Karte, Synergien schaffen, darauf fokussieren, goldfishen, losspielen. Es stört mich also nichts wirklich am Artikel, sondern viel mehr mein eigenes Unvermögen ;-).

Und dann gab es noch (rein zufällig, ich liiiebe solche Zufälle) zwei Artikel zum Thema Mono-Rot: Hier vom MU-Team auf MagicUniverse, hier von TobiH auf dem Planeten. Während SteCo bereits die Diskussion vorantreibt, welcher Autor mehr "Recht" hat, stehe ich ja immer noch auf dem Standpunkt: Recht hat, wer gewinnt. Meiner persönlichen Erfahrung nach ist der Ashenmoor Gouger der Boggart Ram-Gang vorzuziehen, ansonsten bin ich - was monorot angeht - allerdings äußerst schmerzfrei. Ich finde es nur immer wieder erstaunlich, wie viele Leute, die ihr Leben lang noch kein Wort - neben nebulösen Kommentaren - im Netz hinterlassen haben, meinen behaupten zu können, MU hätte mal wieder "voll abgeloost". Das Team hat sich Mühe gegeben, der Artikel ist gut geschrieben, die Deckliste nicht völliger Murks und die Karteneinschätzungen sind Ergebnisse Ihrer Tests. Punkt. Monorot ist eben nicht gleich Monorot...

Ich habe es unlängst tatsächlich geschafft, das neue Magic-Magazin aufzutreiben. Eine ausführliche Rezension folgt allerdings später, wenn ich das Ding auch ganz durchhabe. Allerdings habe ich den Eindruck die bislang stärkste Ausgabe vor mir liegen zu haben.

Und dann gibt es - wie der Überschrift ja bereits zu entnehmen ist - endlich Neues von der Deckfront. Ich habe unlängst mal wieder eine Bekannte zum Zocken herausgefordert. Und da ihre Karten immer noch in irgendeinem Umzugskarton in einem Umzugscontainer lagern, stelle ich gerade Decks zusammen. Da ich zum Ende meiner letzten Hochphase hin alle Weichen auf Rogues gestellt hatte, ist das auch mein erstgebautes Deck seit langem:

2 Nightshade Stinger
4 Prickly Boggart
3 Frogtosser Banneret
3 Oona's Blackguard
4 Inkfathom Infiltrator
4 Marshflitter
2 Stinkdrinker Bandit
3 Glen Elendra Liege

2 Disperse
4 Nameless Inversion
4 Notorious Throng
3 Morsel Theft

3 Faerie Conclave
ein paar Swamps und ein paar Islands (da keine Filterländer vorhanden sind)

Die Liste ist - unschwer zu erkennen - eine Block-Liste (von den paar Faerie Conclaves abgesehen), da ich meine Bekannte lange Zeit recht inaktiv war und ich den angestrebten Abend dazu nutzen möchte, sie auf den aktuellen Stand zu bringen. Wie bei einem so großen Block üblich tut sich zu den Standard-Decks nicht allzuviel. Bad Moon ist halt nicht dabei und wird durch die Glen Elendra Liege vertreten. Sonst versuche ich ein wenig aggressiver und evasionlastiger zu Werke zu gehen - dank Inkfathom Infiltrator in Verbindung mit den Lieges. Außerdem wollte ich unbedingt Notorious Throng integrieren. Nicht, weil es so unglaublich effektiv wäre, sondern weil es einfach so herrlich abstruse Dinge anstellen kann, wenn es funktioniert ;-). Ich frage mich nur immer noch - Disperse rein oder raus? Squeaking Pie Sneak rein oder raus? Mehr Nightshade Stinger? Was meint Ihr?

So, es ist mal wieder spät geworden. Ich bin gespannt auf Eure Meinungen und werde jetzt erstmal dieses Magazin-Dingens zu Ende lesen.

Bis dahin
Seanchui