I met a neat guy recently who does a lot of origami and stuff — he was folding a bunch of bills into animals at a party. This one’s his blue-jay, although it’s made out Canadian Tire money instead of a real five dollar note. He’s actually got a patent for it and is trying to score a promotion with the Jays.

I think it’s the niftiest little thing—even stands up all by itself.

Apparently he had a successful promotion with the Raptors some years ago, but I didn’t have a fifty for him to fold a dinosaur out of.

Mike

Neither did I, but apparently it’s the PHP Extension and Application Repository… Anyhow, I discovered this because I’ve been dipping into PHP and mySQL a little more this weekend trying to flesh out that idea about the Online Recipe Database. I think I’m going to do it, even if I end up being the only user of it.

After all, there’s no better way to learn about something than to just set yourself a target and plow ahead until you reach it. All the pages on this site are records from a database, but it’s all very basic stuff… The queries are mostly just looking up a single record by ID number. The plan for Recipe site is more like six or seven tables that all link back and forth to keep track of the users and ingredients and quantities and whatever else.

Should be a nifty thing, and I’ve already learned tons anyways. PEAR — who knew?

In other news, today was the closing of the Vacation Bible School at my church, and they ended up printing my logo on every t-shirt, so it was all over the place. I was pleased to see it, although I don’t think anyone knew it was me that did it. :)

Mike

That’s what the ingenious folks over at 419eater do. I know someone well who works very closely in bank fraud, so he hears about the Nigerian Scam all the time.

The description on that page is very much complete. But for the lazy clickers, basically the scam involves contacting a Westerner and pursuading them to participate in the transfer of a huge amount of non-existent funds. As the ‘Advance Fee Fraud’ proceeds, the victim is asked to pay transfer charges and bribes and whatever that seems to obstruct the real payment.

Anyhow… the guys (and gals) at 419eaters ‘bait’ the scammers into believing they have a particularly juicy victim and then turn their own tactics on them — multiple personalities, absurd turns of events, other random hilarity.

Many are quite vulgar, some very blasphemous, but still deliriously funny.

I’ve decided that I should have a section over there on the right for linking to past noteworthy blogs and noteworthy off-site links… but now I need to spend the time coding it… ugh.

Expect that feature in september sometime. [ed: or... whenever. Michael is busy]

Mike

A fellow from ISCF at my high school MSNed me like last night about it. I’m normally not too thrilled about going to random people’s youth groups midweek… but Frannie and I decided to go anyways.

It really was fantastic. It was being hosted by the youth group of a Korean church in Northern Toronto, but the event itself was run by a group from Philadelphia that does some training in New Jersey and then brings their people up to Canadian cities to run services at different churches.

The speaker and worship were very… I dunno… spirit-filled, I guess. Sometimes these sort of events can get way too tied up in how loud the amps are and how many obscure Bible connections can be made, but these guys just seemed very very honest.

The group is called SOR, but it seems their fantastic-looking website badly wants an update. Anyhow, if you hear of them doing anything at a local church, definitely give it a look.

Mike

The fellow said I was a “very safe driver”, so that made me feel good. Dad was a great teacher…

They make you sit around in the parking lot for like 40 minutes so you can build a good case of the jitters and then the whole test is over in five minutes. Out, turn corner, turn other corner, park on a hill, pull away, turn, turn, turn again, pull over and park, pull away, turn left, change lanes, turn, park, done.

I drove back on the DVP just to celebrate — even though straight down Vic Park would’ve been a faster route home. Heh.

For my non-Ontario readers, the license system here has three levels: G1, G2, and G. G1 is the basic license that you get from the written test. You can’t drive at night or alone or on roads faster than 80 km/h. After a year of that, you pass (yay) the G1 Exit test to get the G2 license, which is basically the full one except with stricter penalties and zero alcohol tolerance… and then another year and another test is the full G.

Mom said before that if I got it I could take the car to work occasionally. I’m going to hold her to that, too, because it’s a 20 minute car ride and well over an hour by public transit… good for reading, I guess.

Mike

“Milk is spoiled when it starts to look like yoghurt. Yoghurt is spoiled when it starts to look like cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is spoiled when it starts to look like regular cheese. Regular cheese is nothing but spoiled milk anyway - if you can dig down and still find something non-green, bon appetite!” Source

The biggest way that I’m preparing for school in the fall is by going to work every day and making money so that I won’t starve when I get there. :-) But there’s other things too… Like today I practiced driving and drove Mom up to No Frills for a shopping expedition. It was very informative, but kind of an overload at the same time. I may do GroceryGateway and I may shop, I’m not sure, but either way, I’ll need to have some idea of what I’m doing. Anyhow, in the store, it was every twenty feet that she’d say ‘Oh, this is really easy, all you do is sauté this and throw in a pinch of that and then add the rice and simmer for a bit and add something else and… and…’ Yeah, so I was thinking I should make a list of my top twenty or so favorite recipes and keep them in a binder. And then I was thinking it would be cool to keep them in a database so that I could add to it and sort it and whatever. I’m such a n00b with the whole database thing that it would probably be a good exercise to develop it. And then it could be hosted here and available to anyone in my position. That being the position of someone used to excellent food with zero effort invested suddenly thrust into the scary outside world of meal preparation. I mean, I’ll probably only spend time preparing a couple meals a week and let the rest be Kraft Dinner or pizza or leftover pizza, but some is better than none. Mike

PS - There’s an article up on India Times claiming that a water-fuelled car is right around the corner. There isn’t much science cited in the article, so I dunno what they’re doing with it besides burning the hydrogen from water. They claim to have successful road tests… but for such an immense scientific discovery, it seems amazing that no other major news outlet has picked it up. Is India Times just some tabloid that I wasn’t aware of? If anyone has followup information on this story, I’d appreciate a mail.

PS2 - It seems there’s an official site up about this project. There’s a bunch of stuff on there about vibrating the water molecules at their resonant frequency to make them break apart… I don’t know enough chemistry to tell if that’s bull or not. But if it works, awesome!

But only because Hotmail feels the need to compete.

Not that I have anything against Google, but I’ve already been at Hotmail for four years, and I don’t feel any need to switch. I’m sure it’s a fabulous service, but I’m just not in the market at the moment…

Anyway, if Hotmail wants to suddenly offer their customers 250 MB of storage for free, I’m all for that.

Mike

I noticed that in the most recent Christian Week there are two opposing pieces about Harry Potter in the entertainment section. I was mildly intrigued, because I’d assumed the Harry Potter debate had mostly dried up with lots of people simply agreeing to disagree.

Neither piece was actually a column. One posed as a movie review for Prisoner of Azkaban, and the other as a review of a scholarly book on the topic.

The book, entitled Looking For God in Harry Potter apparently makes a case that the Potter books are so popular because they share so many themes with the story we’re all programmed to recieve — that of Christ. Interesting premise, but on the facing page, the film commentary warns that the wild popularity might be a sign of the devil at work. Of course, the writer massages the message lots so it’s not quite so witch-burning-ish, but it’s the thought that counts.

I’d be a little more concerned about Buffy than Harry Potter… but I guess the argument there would be that Buffy is very overt, while Potter poses as children’s literature.

He also pulls up the business about witchcraft being fundamentally wrong, but that’s a fine line to walk since Tolkien and Lewis used lots of magic in their stories. Of course, magic in there never had practical uses as it does in HP, only for making fireworks and cracking stone tables. But then is Star Wars out too? Maybe it’s just the name ‘witchcraft’ that’s objectionable… perhaps if Hermione was a wizardess, there wouldn’t be any discussion.

I dunno. It’s a prickly ground to end up on. Ultimately, people will read them no matter how many the zealots burn in churchyards. And it sends a lousy message to be so overtly xenophobic about something. I think the best policy is to simply proceed with caution… realising, if you believe it, that (a) it’s just a fantasy, (b) the supernatural does exist in our world, and (c) the only part of it you want to be talking with isn’t manipulated to do magic, and doesn’t want you trying.

All that said, it’s a good subway read.

Mike

I haven’t been on MSN for a few days because it was inexplicably not connecting… I had assumed this was a temporary setback at Microsoft’s end, but have since decided that it was probably because they released version 6.2 and I was still on 6.1. Oh well, being on dialup as I am, it takes like an hour to download a 5 MB installation, so I’ll see you all online in an hour — maybe.

The larger issue, I expect, is simply that Microsoft has grandfathered the old MSN Messenger program in favour of Windows Messenger. I don’t really blame them… but it’s still frustrating to lose support like that.

It seems that Greece won the Euro 2004 soccer thingy-thing, so Philip will be pleased about that. I heard the horns on Danforth earlier — I expect they’ll be celebrating that for a couple hours.

So I was checking my web stats to see how many folks drop by here, and it’s only a handful a day, which is what I expected — a good deal of traffic is generated by the googlespider and other robots. Anyhow, more interesting than the numbers is the referring sites. A couple hits have come in through QBasicnews, which doesn’t surprise me, although I rarely post there any more… and another bunch from the Rage3d Forums. But the surprise was to see 27 hits from the domain www.clublatte.com. If you clicked on that link, you’ll see right away that it’s an online singles site… hmm… How is it that a link to this page somehow ended up on there? Ah well, life is full of mysteries.

Mike

I don’t know what it is about me.

As a child, I was never permitted to watch TV outside of the Olympics and Grandpa’s house — maybe that was it. Or maybe it’s that I’ve never lived in a house with cable. I don’t know. Either way, I’ve developed an odd taste in prime-time television.

For starters, I love ‘Grounded For Life’. The premise of it is that it’s two parents who were married basically at seventeen and they now have a teenage daughter and two younger sons, but are still themselves in their early thirties. Maybe it’s the script, maybe it’s the actors, I’m not sure. I just find the situations and editing to be brilliant. Perhaps they’re setups that first existed on a far-superior sitcom ages and ages ago, but the recycling doesn’t bother me — I never saw whatever the original was!

The other show that’s awesome is ‘Just Shoot Me’, and I think that’s mainly because David Spade is hilarious. Now I never saw ‘Joe Dirt’, and I expect it’s as bad as the reviews said it was, but the guy was great as the voice of Cuzco in ‘The Emperor’s New Groove’. And he’s always funny on JSM.

I guess a large part of the challenge of coming up with a good sitcom is the setting. Shows like ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ set themselves in Apartmentland, USA… but now that they’ve gone and done that, it’s kind of a hard act to follow. And hence we have sitcoms like ‘Just Shoot Me’, which takes place in the offices of fictitious fashion magazine ‘Blush’, for which Dennis (Spade) is a photographer.

Of course, at the base of any show is the writing — and the dozens of shows out there cancelled after the first episode are testament to that. I remember seeing a lot of promotion on the WB for a new show called ‘The Help’. Was that ever a train wreck. Gosh, I think they must have cancelled it during the first commercial break.

Anyhow, I think ‘Just Shoot Me’ and ‘Grounded For Life’ are both targeted more at the female teen demographic, but I feel secure enough to enjoy them nevertheless. Them and ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Emma’ and whatever other chick flicks I’ve digested over the years without putting on a great show of vomiting for the full running-time.

Mike