I don't know what's going on.
My AIM buddy icon is a Monopoly top hat token, fyi.

Jon: punk ass bitch
me: i will fucking end you
Jon: you cut me with your words
me: i'll slash your ass with a chainsaw, too
Jon: this one's for you Jerome Grondin.... you are my favorite motehrfucker... I told you
Jon: nice icon!
me: hehe
me: it's big pimpin
Jon: hells yeah
me: i was hoping i could find a pic with that token on like park place or some shit
me: but the shitty green background will have to do, heh
Jon: we could take a pic
Jon: fuck
Jon: I don't have a real monopoly board
me: wtf
Jon: just start wars monopoly
me: are you some kind of fascist
Jon: I don't know... I'm gay?
me: YES
Jon: my sister broke the old board
me: tisk tisk
Jon: alright, I'm going in the shower
me: good idea
me: cause you smell
me: i can tell from over here
me: or something
me: did you just wake up?
Jon: ih, just woke up?
me: uh
me: in english please?
Jon: uh, just woke up?
me: seems kinda late in teh day for a shower :)
Jon: well, its also kind late in teh dat to have just woken up
Jon: so I guess that makes me gay
me: so you did wake up recently
me: cool
Jon: yes
me: ok, that's what i was trying to get at
Jon: yes

I think I need some alcohol now. Heh.

"Who is the least likely candidate for cloning?"
Hehe. The Weakest Link is a pretty cool show. Lots of backstabbing, "I think I'm better than you" attitudes, and the British host can be such a bitch. It's so hardcore in this all-or-nothing game. Too bad I can never remember when and where it's on. When one thinks of TV stations, who thinks of PAX?

Anyways, what has been going in the world we live in?

* Well, there was a guy who beat up the Cookie Monster. Dude, you can't do that to the Cookie Monster! He's one of the more awesome puppets on Sesame Street.

* The Big "O" Day is coming at the end of July (no pun intended), according to some leather-toting, love-oil-selling sex shop franchise in England.

* It's amazing that this 48-year-old guy is single. I mean, how could he be after remodelling his apartment to look like the Starship Enterprise? It confounds my mind.

* Stealth bombers may not be so stealthy anymore. Passive radar, which is used by cell phones, is making the developers of the $2 billion bombers go back to the drawing board.

Asian Bastard links
The folks over at Blogger have a little section of their site called "Blogs of Note." This is sort of like a "Blog of the Day" type of deal, but instead of going through the arduous task of finding one good weblog per day, they just list the good ones as they find them. AsianBastard.com was one such site.

I clicked on the link to the site, and those wily Blogger people actually found a good weblog (sometimes the "blog of note" is a site that just had its second post. Dumb.). The author has some neat features such as "fanky superstar pops" and... eh... well, he finds some pretty cool pictures every now and then.

But while you wait for the day that this site becomes a "Blog of Note" or the day in which I actually get hits, check out some of these stories and links I found over at Asian Bastard:

* I guess a lot of people have a problem with the Olive Garden. This weblog author's cousin is no exception. It's funny as hell.

* Let's get it on. Supposedly, heavyset people are happier and enjoy more satisfying sex than the thin peeps. But I don't care too much for this statement late in the article: "The people who are the hottest sexually are fat white people who are burning in the sun," he said. What a lovely image.

* How to make love to a single girl. People who have issues with nudity should not click on that link. But since I mentioned that, you're going to look at where that URL takes you regardless of age or beliefs. *sigh* But I guess that's ok, because this is also funny as hell.

* "Daddy needs a new sword of wounding!" Find out what your alignment is in Dungeons and Dragons terms. I came out as true neutral. I'd say the first couple sentences in the description of my alignment apply to me rather well.

That's all for now. I think I'll lighten the text color a bit.

Just what I need first thing in the morning.

[GARBAGEman]: HEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MY PAGE WAS UPDATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OHMYGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!
CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!!!!!!!!??????????
I CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN'T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AAAAAAAAARGHHHH!!!!!!!!
ok how you doin?
me: hahaha.
i'm doing ok. there isn't too much going on where I am, so I'm turning to the internet to entertain me for a while.
[GARBAGEman]: ow.....really really boooooooooooooooooooooooooored
you're sooooooo ............
pooooooooooooooooor!!!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHA
me: heh. I think I'll live.
[GARBAGEman]: hehe.........this "much caracter thing" looks cool........hehe
coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool
me: "much character thing?"
[GARBAGEman]: I mean this:
muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch

I hope he stops doing this right about... now.
He's a cool guy and all, but... my head is going to break.

Writing for the WWW - Assignment #5
Attached is a general description of the survey I managed to get some people to fill out in regards to my website.
My future plans for the site given the comments are also included.

Let me know if there's anything else you're looking for, either in regard to this or other assignments, or any other end-of-the-summer-session type of things. I don't think I would be able to fill out a teacher performance evaluation since I'm about 120 miles away. :) But if there was a change in the syllabus or if another little project / assignment was added, I'll see what I can do about it. :)

Thanks for letting me take this course under these circumstances.

Jerome Grondin

That was an email I sent at about 2:30 this morning. This one I sent at about 2:32:

Maybe I should include the attachment, huh?

Woo...

And a reply I got today:

Yeah, attachments help.

Good job on the survey--looks like you found out about
as much as the on-campus students did.

You did good work on all the assignments and a very
good job of keeping in touch with the course, so you
get an A. Congrats. And BIG CONGRATS on now being an
RPI grad.

(There are no course evaluations for summer courses--I
get to be mean if I want to.) :-)

Roger

So what does this all mean? In case you haven't figured it out, I AM DONE WITH COLLEGE. CONSIDER ME AN RPI GRADUATE. WOO FUCKING HOO! Now I have to pay for taking the course and then wait for my diploma to come in the mail. I'm guessing that they won't mail it until the summer semester ends, which will be in late August.

Hooray! I am pretty psyched now.

Now I need to update my resumé again and continue "looking hard" for a job. I think I may get some part-time temp job in town until I find a "real" job elsewhere. I could use some cash. But since my town is small and since I don't really want people noticing me at work, that may take some time as well. Most of the places in the area are various supermarket or gas station chains and restaurants. And I've already made a vow with my best work friend two years ago not to return to the fish and ice cream place. Heh.

I'm back.
Jerome, that is.

First I kinda want to thank Jon for sparing the effort of doing work for a day, although in a way, I kinda had more work to do than he did when it came to posting since he wasn't sure of how I format my text and what nifty CSS class tags I use for different things. But that's ok. I didn't have to think too much.

Today was a pretty cool day. My former roommate Jake (the same Jake that appears in a number of IM conversations) came from Cambridge, Mass to visit me. Unfortunately, no more than ten minutes after he showed up, it started raining heavily. So we had nothing exciting to do for a while. Then the rain stopped only to hail about 30 minutes later. Heh. Oh well. Not too much frisbee throwing happened, but we did get some before the first storm.

Today was great. Jake and I went geocaching. I don't want to get into detail about that right now, since Jake has a lot of pictures on his digital camera and I will have to wait until at least midnight tonight to get them. So maybe that will be tomorrow's treat. Another former roommate, Jarrod, came up this afternoon. After dinner, he and Jake and I went on another geocaching trip. That didn't turn out as well as the first cache hunt. More details about it later.

The Continuing Adventures of Jerkbutt and Dicko
I know this is my third post, but its not my last... I have another one planned for later, since I am chill like that. This one is just another IM conversation anyway. Here is the buildup. We were still talking about viruses, and the Microsft fix to prevent the security loophole that gave me the virus in the first place, and well, here you go: (anything that is indented is where I pasted my conversation with Jake into my conversation with Jerome)

me: ok, I installed the fix, and this is what I got for a message: Windows 2000 has been updated. If you change or add any components to your system, you will need to reapply the Hotfix.
me: Jake says you need to lighten or brighten your font
Jerome: yes he does
Jerome: but i'm on vacation for the day :)
me: he actually told me I should do it for you
Jerome: that's nice
me: since its my day
Jerome: i should leave it "as is" until i email the prof anyway, to tell him of what people thought of the site. like the font is too dark. then i can act upon the changes if i want to
me: did he fill out your survey?
Jerome: who?
me: Jake
Jerome: no
me: how about the professor?
Jerome: no
me:
   Jake: wow. i'm convinced.
   me: he says you can't complain until you fill out the survey
   me: http://www.rpi.edu/~grondj/survey/index.html
   Jake: tell him to shut his piehole
   Jake: he needs to remember the three i's
   Jake: does he have a gold medal?
   Jake: i don't think so
me:
   me: wow, I feel like Mercury
   me: the messenger god
   me: relaying messages between Zeus and Poseidon
Jerome: and my butt
me:
   me: or Jupiter and Neptune, as the case would be
   Jake: or dicko and jerkbutt
   me: yes, that is very close
   me: which one are you?
   Jake: i'm neither, jerome has duality issues
Jerome: go here
Jerome: www.hasanyoneseenmypants.com
me: whoa, sweet
Jerome: shit yeah
me: how'd you do that?
me: do you own that domain?
Jerome: jake and i bought it for like 10 bucks a few weeks ago
me: nice
me: thanks for including me, jerkbutt
Jerome: i don't think it's too late
me: or shall I call you dicko, today?
Jerome: just pay jake $3.3333333333
me: I heard that's the price of your mom, too.

"next post"
Jon here. Well, here it is, ladies and gentlemen, my second post of three. This one has pictures! From my vacation! To Orlando! Two weeks ago! With my dad and sister! Too many exclamation points! As you can see, I have the same kind of stupid humor as Jerome!

1. Here's me and my sister at NASA, with a shuttle launch pad in the background. This was an awesome day, and I took more pictures here than any other day of my vacation.

2. Here's my dad's wife's asshole. (I don't like her, plus she's way fat.) Whoops, this is actually a pic of the inside of a space shuttle thruster. This particular one was used in several missions including the first shuttle flight and the Hubble Telescope placement. It is about 8 feet in diameter.

3. You are the weakest link! Goodbye. Doesn't my sister look like the host of that show? She's single by the way, fellas.

4. Here's me on the beach in Sarasota. This was the most beautiful beach I have ever seen in my life. The best part is, I didn't even get any sand in my crotch! (Or my wallet... funny story, when I went on Spring Break with Jerome (and Jarrod, Mike and Derek) I got sand in my wallet somehow (I think playing beach volleyball. Long story short, despite me trying to blow it out, and wash it out (in the washing maching and dishwasher), my wallet still has sand in it.))

5. Here's my sister (second from left) playing Abdullah Sheik Mohammad Ahzhul Izrahim in Disney-MGM Studios' The Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular. She was chosen as an extra before the show because she jumped up and down and yelled really loud to call attention to herself. (As I mentioned before, she is available.)

Thanks for putting up with me. I'm pretty sure I will have only one more post before my 24 hours is up, so look for it later on today, and every third Wednesday of the given month, right here at Against the Grain.

I'm KING of the world now
Hi all. Jon here. Since Jerome has relinquished control to me for the day (see prior post below) I am going to post with reckless abandon. First off, a conversation with Jake celebrating my victory:

me: check out Jerome's site
Jake: his font is too damn dark
me: I'm on the web!
me: that makes me famous!
Jake: heehee
Jake: dammit, that was my line

Next up, a little background: Jerome, Jake, and I were all discussing viruses last night, since my computer was infected with one. Most of it was pretty silly. Here's me and Jerome:

me: I am wondering who gives viruses and stuff such funky names as W97M.Groov, and Happy99.W32.Ska
Jerome: that would be me
Jerome: i also name hurricanes
Jerome: the folks at Norton and the Weather Channel have to talk to me before finalizing anything

And here's me and Jake:

me: whoa... I didn't know this... apparently NAV send information back to Symantec about what it did on your computer when you do a live update
Jake: neither did i. you mean like
Jake: if it found a virus or cured a virus or what have you?
me: all of the above
me: sends them statistics
Jake: hmm. let's go to their house and teach them a thing or two =)
me: Instead, I wanna beat up the people who make Trojans
me: uhmm... cuz I like Durex better, or something
Jake: HEEHEE
Jake: nice work =)

Finally, because I was doing so much copying and pasting between my two conversations with Jerome and Jake, we get this little gem:

me: me: damnit, I hate when my mouse runs out of batteris
me: the keyboard batteries, I've never had to change. the mouse batteries I've changed twice so far, and looks like its gonna be a third time in a day or two
Jake: heehee
Jerome: I feel like I'm wiretapping :)
me: you should feel lucky I'm letting you do that
me: FUCK!
me: I stole Jake's font!
Jerome: HAHAHHAHA
Jerome: you lose
me: give me back my font, you goat bastard!
Jerome: welcome to narnia

A change in site ownership
I have relinquished control of the site for the next 23 1/4 hours.

Jon: thanks for the compliments on the site :-)
me: hehe
me: I should have just titled it "Jon's post"
Jon: yeah, you should
me: and put your name as the author, hehe
Jon: yep
Jon: do it to it, my friend :-)
Jon: in fact, you should just say I'm the owner of the site, too
Jon: since I'm the only one who seems to care :-)
me: lol
me: ok
Jon: obviously besides you
me: nah
me: just you
me: it's your site on the 3rd wednesday of every month
Jon: sweet.
Jon: that would be today!
me: exactly

So there you go. Today is Jon's day to post. Hehe.

But before I go (and since you are here for some damn reason), fill out my freakin' survey! What the hell, are you too good to fill it out? Do you think you're better than me? It could mean the difference between me getting my diploma or not. Jerk.

And moths piss me off. Especially when they get through my screen window and just fly around my desk lamp until I introduce them to Mr. Flyswatter. Bah.

Jon's a busy guy
Yet despite being such a busy guy (he's particularly busy when it comes to trying to recruit someone into his "Let's move to Connecticut" cult), he has the time to send me neato links. This in turn spares me the effort of having to look around a lot to find good stories. So, the first stories came from Jonny while others came from... eh... probably one of the sites I have listed under "Noteworthy Links." ShackNews, most likely.

* The Chinese drought must be brutal. The people that run the country of China have ordered soldiers to fire at clouds in hopes that they would bring rain. Is this really an effective strategy?

* I didn't know that "bad human gas" is called "malodorous flatus." That's sounds like the genus and species of some living organism. Are they saying that human gas is actually alive? Oh help us all. But at least you can combat this... uh... "possible living thing" with Under-Ease.

* Pay very close attention to the second-to-the-last paragraph in this article. Now tell me how it is possible to not know which kid's birthday it is.

* If you have an addiction that you just can't break, you may want to turn to the Russians for help. Now this is extreme.

* You may want to lay off of the Fritos for a while. They aren't looking so good. I guess someone was trying to invent new flavors or include prizes in each bag, but it didn't bode to well with some of the consumers. Heh.

Re: Writing for the WWW - Assignment #4
uhhhhh . . . . interesting . . . .site, Jerome. I even
made some sense out of some of the postings.

But, it's a nice design--clean and attractive, and you
have a lot of useful-seeming features for what you
want your site to be.

Nice job!

Good luck getting people to respond to a survey.

I'm off to class!

Roger

Hehe. Roger's a pretty cool professor. Especially since he's letting me take this course from home instead of in Troy.
I kinda want to know what makes my site... "interesting," though. :) Maybe it's not what he expects to see from most people enrolled in the course. Or maybe it's the amount of "dynamicity" without actually using my own server. Or maybe I should have saved my conversation with Jake for later... oh well. What's done is done.

And while you're reading this, fill this thing out! Like you have anything better to do for the next two minutes... you're at my site, for crying out loud. Think about it.

Hello World!
In accordance with the requirements for passing my summer course, here is my revamped personal website. Aren't you excited? I know I am.

My old site looked similar to this one. It had a light green background while headings and borders were dark green and the text was white. It had some CSS elements to it as well. It was all right, but I think it was time for that color scheme to go away.

This new design has a more of a... hmmm... it has a different feel to it, and I like it a lot more. The text is easier to read, I really like my new title logo (it's amazing what you can do by messing around with different Photoshop tools!), and I added even more CSS to my external style sheet, making future site palette changes a less tedious process.

The site itself is a cross between a news site and my very own personal journal / diary type of thing. Whatever I feel like writing about gets posted when I have the chance to do so. The last seven days in which I have posted something show up on the front page, while older entries (and even current ones) are automatically archived on a week-by-week basis. Since RPI does not allow the use of dynamic content-generating programs being run from a student's allotted personal web space (and since I don't have a server of my own), I use Blogger to get around that limitation. Blogger is a free web-based tool for publishing new content instantly whenever one has the urge to do so. Blogger maintains a database of your posts, so if you want to manipulate your archive or template settings, you can do so without losing any content. It's a pretty nifty thing.

Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't have a feature where site visitors can search through one's old posts, so I had to use Atomz for that purpose. I don't like the Atomz search engine at all (it doesn't seem to do its job too well... maybe I'm just not searching "right"), but it is good enough until I have my own server to create dynamic pages to my heart's content.

Noteworthy links are shown only on the news pages and the archived pages. When I feel the need to change these links around, it is significantly less of a hassle to make these changes on these pages than all of the pages.

The random quote only shows up on the news pages. The original idea of the random quote generator was that the script would pick a quote at random and it would use that quote for the next 24 hours for every visitor that comes that day. Then, it would put that quote in "the used pile" and take pick a new random quote from the remaining "unused" quotes. Once there were no more unused quotes, all quotes would be set to "unused" again. I don't think I can do this solely using Javascript, so I decided to stick with a boring old random quote generator for now.

All of the remaining left-hand links merely lead to pages with static content. The survey page uses an external Perl script to send the results to me via email. My link to The G Spot leads to a Garbage fan page with extensive CSS and Javascript usage as well.

This site was optimally designed for a 1024x768 24-bit resolution and Internet Explorer 5.5. The site looks perfectly fine at 800x600 and 640x480, but don't be surprised if the centered background image gets "cut" a bit from the title image. The effect goes away if you scroll down the page slightly. The site also looks fine in 16-bit color, but I do not think this site will look incredible marvelous in an 8-bit color scheme or anything worse. The CSS code is CSS1 W3C standard compliant, which means it should work fine in Netscape 6.x and IE 4.x. The site won't cataclysmically fail if you use a more outdated version of these browsers, but don't come crying to me if the site looks like crap.

I think that sums everything up. This site was meant to be for my own personal amusement, and for the amusement of those who find what I have to post somewhat interesting. :) Also, everything was coded by hand (no WYSIWYG editors), so give me some bonus points for that. Heh.

So, take a look around, make sure everything works, and then fill out the survey and give me your input. Let me remind you that I'm getting graded for this, so don't try distorting the results by giving this site the worse or best possible score on everything. For once in your life, what you say matters. :)

And I wanted to be "nice" for a week... :p
Who didn't see this coming?

Jake: what's your phone #?
me: 555-STFU
Jake: that's funny cause uh
me: your mom
me: so there
Jake: 1-800-EAT-SHIT is my toll free number
me: [my number]
Jake: quiet, i am calling 1800 eat shit
me: NICE
Jake: ohmygod
Jake: totally phone sex
Jake: it is scary
me: nice
me: well, not really
Jake: welcome to intimate connections where you will hear sexy *click*
Jake: heehee
Jake: it rocked
Jake: ok, boom beddy bye bye
me: cya

IM of the future

Jake: ok, that's just unacceptable
Jake: my 2nd grade teacher was from maine. he was old and grumpy, although i got along with him ok.
Jake: then the guy who replaced him for third grade was a weirdo, and didn't make us do any work. he only lasted one year.
Jon: I see
Jon: but uhm
Jon: third grade?
Jake: you know how you don't do much work in elementary school?
Jon: were you able to learn multiplication and shit?
Jake: but you do learn stuff?
Jon: yeah
Jake: well, he didn't teach us shit
Jake: like i learned all right cause i was fast etc. etc.
Jon: what a fuck up
Jake: but the one thing i wasn't good at
Jake: cursive
Jake: and which i clearly needed some prodding and help on
Jake: partly cause i was left-handed and the instructions were for right-handed kids, maybe
Jon: we started learning cursive at the end of first grade, so we had to have it all mastered by the middle of second grade
Jake: so he gave me and my best friend (also left-handed) this ridiculous book
Jake: yeah, i was way behind on that. i just didn't want to do it.
Jake: "cursive for left-handers" or something
Jon: I stopped using cursive about that time
Jake: and he didn't even check to see that we were doing the exercises
Jake: yeah, cursive is ridiculous
Jon: jeesus
Jon: were you the only 2 lefthanders?
Jon: I want to get to the point where I don't even have to type anymore
Jon: just think
Jake: well there were 24 kids in the class
Jon: think my thoughts to you
Jake: ok, i'll work on that and tell you when it's ready
Jon: cool
Jake: and so
Jake: there must have been 2-3 other kids, at least
Jon: are you trying to tell me its ready? cuz if you were, I still wasn't receiving the signals
Jon: in my head
Jake: well it must be at least partially working
Jake: since you seemed to know i was trying to tell you.
Jon: women's intuition
Jon: or something
Jake: exactly
Jake: that's the mechanism i'm trying to use. women's intuition IM
Jon: WIIM
Jake: nice.
Jake: that's a damn good acronym.
Jake: we should make it a program and post it on download.com
Jon: ok
Jake: java.
Jon: we'll post some reviews
Jake: nice. i'll see what i can do to get it started.
Jon: hey, and it doesn't even have to work
Jake: no, all it has to be is a stupid gui