mekosh.org

Well, I’m back in Scranton after the whirlwind of holiday festivities that was my Christmas break. I meant to post several times to cover each little event, but time is rarely on my side. However, Annie and I managed—somehow, I’m still amazed by it—to do all of our Christmas shopping within 36 hours, much of [...]

Over the weekend, I drove to Baltimore to visit Annie for the weekend. It had only been a week since I had last seen her, but it seemed like a few weeks had passed. On Friday, Annie and I went with Veronica to visit the Aquarium and then to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. [...]

The fans of 24 received a nice little treat this season: four hours of 24 in two days! Those of you who know me or are familiar with this site already know that I’m a devoted fan of 24 so it should come as no surprise that I made plans a long time ago to [...]

I think H. L. Mencken (1880 — 1956) had it right when he wrote: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White [...]

It really surprised me just how disgustingly sour Sour Skittles happen to taste. I like a lot of sour candies like Warheads and Sour Patch Kids and I love Skittles so I thought that I’d also like Sour Skittles—the best of both worlds. But unfortunately, they’re disgusting. I ate half a pack and threw the [...]

I finally finished importing all the links from my older sites into del.icio.us. I left out some links that are dead and replaced a few “no longer available” news stories with similar articles from better publications. Right now I’m crudely importing the links, but I’m going to try to see if I can cache them [...]

Yesterday, I noticed that Gmail has upped the number of invitations for my account to 50. Looks like they’re getting closer to completing their beta period and interested in how their servers will hold up under increased demands. Would you like to help them? Send me an email if you would like one of my [...]

I’m long overdue on updates here, again. I’ve sworn multiple times to update more often, but it seems that as soon as my life gets busy, I ignore any and all online presence I pretend to possess. In my last post, I completely left out a much bigger event—relative to my life, of course—than Gmail [...]

I must be getting popular: another person has stolen one of my designs. Mohammed Khan of Nashville, Tennessee stole the entire “Request a Proposal” form from my site and slapped it up on his site, Computer Technologies Inc., sans the style sheet. I’m surprised he’s not hotlinking the section heading images. Judging by the Whois [...]

Last night, Dan N., Dave J., and I went to see Jim’s Big Ego play in the Wolves’ Den on campus. I had not heard of them before yesterday, but I did recognize a few of the songs that they played and thought it was a cool set in general. However, I wanted to talk [...]

I started doing a major update for this site yesterday, but it won’t be complete for a few days. It’s likely that few noticed it, but I moved mekosh.org from JiffyNet‘s servers to DreamHost. That came about after they changed a server configuration and it broke my code again. It seems that every month I [...]

It’s rare that I brag about something I said, but I think that this time it’s funny enough to share. Yesterday, Dan was talking about how the photos/video of John Kerry trying to catch a football was hilarious and about how bad Kerry looked. I said, “Do you know what’s funnier than that? Watching Bush [...]

It’s true. I put it off until the very last day, but I contributed my $2.50/month to help Jason make blogging his full-time job. For the sheer number of great links I’ve followed from his site, it would be worth it for me to help keep him in business. However, I really like the way [...]

I’m not going to even try to relate every detail of the last two weeks. It’s not really worth it. However, I do want to say that last weekend (as in the one before this past weekend) was nice. I visited Annie and stayed down there from Friday to Tuesday morning; I even took her [...]

Within the past week, Turkish hackers losers decided to hack the Northumberland.us Forums using a simple exploit of phpBB‘s session handling twice. Why? I have no idea. There are only three forum members and hardly any activity, so why anyone would go to the trouble is beyond my understanding. Were they tired of popping zits [...]

The weather over the past five days has been unbelievable! Living in Northeast Pennsylvania all of my life, I’ve grown accustomed to overcast winters and hazy summers; rarely does the weather deliver bright, sunny, cloudless days. I honestly don’t remember the last time we’ve had blue skies for five days in a row. When I [...]

Am I becoming popular? Considering that I was a victim of design theft and forum hacking last month and bandwidth theft this month, I think I am gaining popularity (on a small scale). I noticed in my referral logs—aka: my best online friend—that someone was requesting one of my images many times from another URL. [...]

Not surprisingly, adding new content to this site is pretty low on my list of priorities. It’s fun, but it takes a backseat to things I need to do. However, in between all of my obligations, I managed to come up with a few little things to add. The first thing, a photos section, is [...]

I’ve been a big fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams since I first read it a few years ago, so I was excited to see that they were making a new movie based on the book. My anticipation only increased when I saw the trailers for the movie were a [...]

Annie and I drove to the New Jersey shore on Saturday to do something different for our five-year Anniversary! It’s hard to believe that we started dating five years ago, but at the same time I can remember so many things from the earliest days, weeks, months, years that made the five years seem short. [...]

That’s right, it’s time for final exams. I want to write about a dozen things, not the least of which is the five-year anniversary that Annie and I celebrated last Saturday! The entry for that and one or two other events will be back-dated. I also have a few really exciting things going on right [...]

Now that Jason Kottke has provided us with a guide on “How to Order Food in a Restaurant,” I no longer have to worry about how I will pick just one item from a menu of dozens or hundreds of choices. I merely must decide which method to employ; another choice to make!

I walked across the stage and received my diploma just over two weeks ago, but I haven’t fully absorbed the idea yet. The fact that I wrote my last paper, turned in my last assignment, attended my last class, took my last final—unless I summon the desire to earn my masters, that is—refuses to sink [...]

For the past few weeks, I’ve really enjoyed having the time to read for fun. When I was in school, it was rare for me to have time to read a non-required book in my spare time; there really is a limit to how much reading is possible in one day. Since graduation I’ve already [...]

Annie and I rented Sideways from Blockbuster tonight and I was a little disappointed. I loved the book which inspired the movie—as you well know—so I was hoping for greatness with the film. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but it didn’t do much for me. It’s almost passé to say that the book was [...]

I’ve wanted to see this film for a few years; now that I have, Pulp Fiction ranks near the top of the Weirdest Movies I’ve Seen list. The movie begins with the entry for “pulp” from the American Heritage Dictionary New College Edition in white text on a black screen: pulp n. 1. A soft, [...]

One of my major gripes with digital cameras was the painful delay between the moment the shutter was pressed and when the camera would actually take the picture. On 35mm or other conventional cameras, this delay is nonexistent in all but the most demanding situations. I read an excellent article in the New York Times [...]

I will be leaving for vacation with my family tomorrow morning, so posts will be infrequent for the next week. We’re going to be staying at our timeshare in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; it should be fun as I haven’t been there in five years. I’ll be Interweb-less for most of the week, but if [...]

My family and I arrived home from vacation late on Friday night and I’ve recovered enough to actually accomplish something. The drive to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—about 630 miles, one way—turned out to be more interesting than planned: the transmission on the minivan decided that second gear was a good place to stop shifting, whether [...]

The price of gas is killing me. In Baltimore, the price ranges from $2.56 to $2.70 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is two dollars more than I can really afford. It’s a good thing that Bush & Co. gave the oil companies what they so desperately needed: multi-billion dollar supplements and tax breaks. Last [...]

My brother plans to major in Physics and/or Chemistry when he goes away to college next week. I joked that he should invent a photon torpedo, but my mom misheard me. She thought that I wanted Jason to create a “futon torpedo.” The market for that would be astronomical.

I finished the newest version of Speed Web Design on Wednesday, but I have not had the time to mention it here. There are still a few minor quirks I need to work out of the code and I’d like to make complete project pages for each project I’ve completed, but the site is basically [...]

The past 36 hours have brought a much greater understanding of the magnitude and severity of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in New Orleans, which has descended into a watery hell. Compounding matters is the widespread looting, violence, and societal breakdown for the city. With thousands feared dead, New Orleans’ [...]

I received a phone call from Annie that she heard that gas stations in Baltimore would be closing this afternoon because of a fuel shortage. The rumor came from a friend of a friend who works downtown; they were let off early so that they could fill up their vehicles before the stations closed. It [...]

When I wrote my last post about Katrina, I believed that the situation in New Orleans had sunk as low as it would, but I was very wrong. I knew that people had died and the city itself was devastated, but I never thought that the disaster response would be this bungled. It’s insane that [...]

I’m making gradual updates to this site because I probably won’t have the time to devote to major changes for a few weeks. I changed the way RSS/Atom feeds are handled by using Steve Smith’s FeedBurner Plugin along with my new FeedBurner account. It’s a sweet WordPress plugin that will redirect any and all of [...]

Over the past five years, I suffered with the painfully slow dial-up connection at my house whenever I returned home for summer and winter breaks. I never hesitated to explain to my parents how DSL wasn’t much more expensive than dial-up. I offered to help pay part of the cost difference. Explaining how much extra [...]

This site is now running on TextDrive‘s servers. I made the switch because they were running a special “Hosting for Life” promotion that will save me a lot of money in the long run; I’ve also heard a lot of good things about TextDrive and their focus on great hosting service for people who “get [...]

Jason and I went to see Lord of War on Saturday night. It was better than I expected and both of us enjoyed the movie. The movie is a narrative told by Yuri Orlov (Nicholas Cage), a charming, intelligent, and witty gun runner who is a disgusting mess of a person. The film itself seems [...]

I live in Baltimore, Maryland! That sentence has been in the works a long time. Last Friday, my parents helped transport most of my stuff to a Canton apartment that I will be sharing with Kevin, one of Annie’s coworkers. We arrived a little later than planned, but the move went off without any major [...]

Annie and I saw a morbidly obese teen who was wearing a t-shirt that stated “This working out thing isn’t working out for me” in Burger King on Saturday. As we were leaving, I overheard him telling his similarly obese family about some other boy who was running down a hallway, waving his arms in [...]

When I find software that does what it should without getting in my way, I tend to remain faithful. For several millennia—or seven years in Internet Time—I’ve used Winamp as my primary music player on my computer. The free version did everything I needed it to do without trying to “help” me do things I [...]

If you run a business and are looking to alienate your customers, just do exactly what the music industry does. You can’t fail with this method. More information about Sony BMG’s XCP was released today as several security firms confirmed that some Sony CD’s installed rootkit malware on users computers. The software installs itself without [...]

Annie, Veronica, and I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the Senator Theater in Baltimore yesterday. The first thing that struck me—as well as most of the critics—about the newest Harry Potter is how much darker the subject matter is when compared to the earlier films. This Potter installment finally [...]

It was announced that Yahoo bought del.icio.us today. For those of you not familiar with del.icio.us, it is a social bookmarking website that I use to power my “Worthwhile Clicks.” Basically, it allows you to add a URL, describe the link, and tag it with descriptive terms so that it’s easy for me or other [...]

I used sarcasm in the post title; the picture may have let you in on the secret. I could also have titled this entry “Please Reconsider Using Public Transportation When It Snows.” Today Baltimore received its third helping of wintry weather so far this season. Since Charm City is snuggled mid-Atlanticly, Mother Nature likes to [...]

Overall, 2005 was an eventful year for me, and most of those events were positive ones. I thought it would be interesting (and somewhat challenging) to force myself to come up with the most important happenings in my life for 2005. The events I came up with are merely keyframes in a very busy year: [...]