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My Brand New 2003 Silver Echo Sedan [541 replies]
Why I Hate Microsoft Visual Basic 6 [372 replies]
The Complete First Season of Alias on DVD [606 replies]
Family Guy May Return to Network TV [1750 replies]
Wireless Internet and No Laptop [1234 replies]
Spiderman 2 Trailer is Released [2690 replies]
Penguin Warehouse, Inc. [585 replies]
A Computer Scientist and Engineer Joke [311 replies]
Wil Wheaton Has a Weblog [511 replies]
Brad Pineau
The bloggerman.
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Posted by Brad Pineau on August 16th, 2003 at 5:36 pm AST [4883 views]
Welcome to Bloggerman.
Bloggerman is my first attempt at weblogging. After being an avid reader of some fantastic weblogs (Acts of Volition, CEOBlues, New Recruit, Reinvented, and many others)... it was only natural for me to start my own.
Working at silverorange, I had the option of using the silverorange weblog platform. However, I wanted to use a weblogging platform that could be open source (didn't depend on the silverorange proprietary codebase), and most importantly, could run on a MySQL database, which is the standard database supported by webhosting companies.
Being a programmer at heart, I decided to build my own weblogging platform. Bloggerman is the first weblog to use this platform, and perhaps not the last. I have several friends who have expressed an interest in starting a weblog.
While building this weblog platform, I kept many of the Ultimate Weblogging System features (posted on Acts of Volition) in mind. Things like clean and search engine friendly URLs, article archives, article categorization, and article management were very important to me. There are still a few features I plan to add in the very near future, such as pinging Weblogs.com, accepting article entries thru email or messasing systems, a more customizable website layout, and several article management features. However, such things aren't required for a weblog, so I figured I could launch Bloggerman without them.
Designing the layout of the Bloggerman weblog platform proved to be very tedious. I wanted to build a platform that was original and of my own design, however much of the layout and many of the features began looking very similar to other weblogging platforms. Especially the silverorange weblog platform. There was really no getting around this, as that platform has a flawless design, and as they say, great minds think alike. My first website design ended up looking very similar to CEOBlues. It had a blue theme with a grey sidebar. I finally ended up with the current design, which I'm fairly happy with. (My heart was originally set on blue).
The name "Bloggerman" was not chosen until the day I sat down to register a domain name. Sadly enough, the choice of weblog name depended on what domain names were still available. I am a huge superhero fan (Superman, Spiderman, etc), so I eventually had an idea of naming my weblog after a superhero. To my surprise, bloggerman.com was still available.
So that's a little background behind Bloggerman. Thanks for reading my first post. I tried to break it up into paragraphs to make it more palatable. I look forward to having countless discussions with everyone.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 17th, 2003 at 4:53 pm AST [19119 views]
I'm hoping someone out there knows the answer to this question... it's been plaguing me for years...
Why, in some apartments, is the bathroom light switch on the outside of the bathroom?
In my current apartment, and in my girlfriend's previous 3 apartments, the light switch has always been on the outside of the bathroom, in the hallway. I have no idea why. I don't see any advantage of it.. In fact, it's very annoying when you have friends turning the lights on and off when you're in there. Any ideas?
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 18th, 2003 at 4:35 pm AST [1748 views]
All week, I had been anticipating the Superstation's original movie, Red Water. It aired at 9:00 EST on Sunday night, on the TBS Superstation.As usual, the movie had a lot of hype going into it.. it was supposed to be unlike any shark movie we've seen yet. Well, they were right. It was a lot worse.
The movie starts out with a woman swimming in the water, with the patented camera shot from underwater where you can see her legs kicking. The shark surfaces to the water, about 30 feet away. The woman sees the dorsal fin, and yells "Shark!". Of course, we get to see the race to safety. The woman swimming with all her might, and actually starts to out-race the shark. It's amazing how fast a woman can swim when in danger, and how slow a shark swims when it's hungry. I wont tell what happens next, but I'll give you a hint. She gets eaten seconds before she makes it to safety. What a surprise. In fact, the movie is filled with many "surprises".
Aside from the shark terrorizing the waters, Red Water has a both a side story about kidnapping, and a pseudo-love story, all mixed in with the killer shark. Red water had all the elements of a good story, but it unravelled behind some cheesy dialog, and a lot of people falling into the water. In fact, any small nudge on the back, or slip of a foot, seemed to send the characters flying head-first into the water. And of course, as each person swam back to safety, the shark always ended up in close persuit behind them.
Red Water, with it's kick-ass remote control shark, and a cast of familiar faces, almost makes my list of good movies. Like I said, it had all the elements of a great movie (Blood thirsty shark, stupid people getting killed, Sunday night time slot, the guy from La Bamba), but it just didn't do it for me.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 18th, 2003 at 5:49 pm AST [30353 views]
Over the years, I have programmed many different things, from old BBS "doors", to windows utils, to stupid games. Over the next while, I plan on releasing some of the crazy things I have programmed.To start, I'm releasing a game I built as a parody for one of my friends, Tim Robinson. We always joke around that Tim likes to make love to sheep. Well, in this game, Sheep Rampage, he does more than that.
Download Sheep Rampage.
Please note that this game requires Windows 9x+ and DirectX. Also, this game is meant to be stupid, so keep that in mind. That said, lets see who can get the high score!
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 19th, 2003 at 7:22 pm AST [9816 views]
On July 4th, my software company, Solostar Software, released it's first commercial product, SoloKeep. After submitting the software to various shareware sites, I quickly noticed the site's traffic increasing... On the average day, I would get about 15-20 users downloading the trial version of SoloKeep.
One day, I checked my logs, and I noticed that I had upwards of 100 downloads in one day. "This is great!", I thought, until I looked at the list of referers. All the hits came from this one site that had a key generator for Solokeep available for download, along with a link to my site.
As upset as I was about having my copy protection cracked, I was thrilled that I had so many people using my software. If even one percent of those people who used the key generator liked the software, and decided to buy it, that could turn out to be a lot of sales.
So my question is... is software piracy a good thing? Can it actually help generate exposure and sales?
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 21st, 2003 at 1:44 am AST [27499 views]
The guys at work showed me this video clip of a tornado moving through a forrested area. The clip was taken from a nearby plane. Totally awesome.
Download Clip.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 21st, 2003 at 3:30 am AST [11676 views]
I was browsing through the special features on the Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones DVD, and I watched a featurette on the movie's sound production.They talked about how much time they spent perfecting the sound effects, especially for the scene where Obi-Wan was chasing Jango Fett through the asteroid field. They wanted to find a truly original sound for Jango's bombs. It ended up sounding pretty cool... but it made me realize a mistake all sci-fi movies and tv shows make: sound effects for explosions in space.
We learn from a young age that sound can not travel in space. So how come whenever we see an explosion on tv or in the movies, we hear sound effects? I think it would be awesome, if for once, a movie had no sound effects for an explosion in space. You would only see it. It's something that I've never seen done before, but would make it that much more believable.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 21st, 2003 at 12:17 pm AST [6049 views]
With a title like that, you've got to watch it.
See Video.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 21st, 2003 at 9:38 pm AST [16110 views]
I setup Bloggerman to ping Weblogs.com whenever an article or reply is added to the site. I'm using the Ping Cacher that was set up by Reinvented Labs.
Because of this, replies will be posted much quicker, as the 5 to 10 second ping to the weblogs.com server will be replaced by a much shorter ping to the Reinvented server.
Thanks Peter.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 23rd, 2003 at 1:03 am AST [13068 views]
How come we are expected to leave a tip at restaurants, or tell the pizza delivery boy to keep the change? What makes waitresses, hair dressers, or bus boys so special that we need to give them a tip?Is it because they work in a profession that deals directly with customers, in which if they give you a good service, you leave them a tip to show your gratitude? Why? Isn't it their job to give you good service anyways? If I go in to Futureshop, and get great service from one of the sales associates, I'm not expected to leave them a tip... because they are just doing their job.
When I was younger, I worked at a convenience store. Everyday, I gave exceptional service to the customers. I always greeted them when they walked in the store, and said goodbye when they left... and I never received any tips (other than the occasional quarter that was left in the penny jar).
All that being said, I actually do leave tips for people. Even though I feel it's morally wrong, I do so, but only because it's the social norm, or the rare time that I do receive exceptional service and want to show my gratitude.
What does everyone else think? How do you feel about leaving tips? Is it right, is it wrong?
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 23rd, 2003 at 10:36 pm AST [4643 views]
Tonight I went to the movie theatres to see the latest kick ass cop movie, S.W.A.T., a fast paced movie about a Los Angelas S.W.A.T. team caught in the middle of crossfire while trying to transport a wealthy criminal who offered a $100,000,000 reward to whoever could set him free.The cast of actors included a very well casted Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farell, Michelle Rodriguez (best known from Resident Evil), and LL Cool J.
While not as well hyped as other summer blockbuster movies like Terminator 3, S.W.A.T. proved to be a great movie that I will suggest going to see. The cast was great, the weapons and scenarios seemed very realistic, and there was a lot of gun fights and cool weapons.
My only qualm about the screenplay was at the end of the movie, where the hero chooses a fist fight over apprehending the bad guy with his gun. They should teach in police school that if you have a guy at gun point, arrest him! Don't throw your gun away to give him a second chance!
I give this movie 5 out of 5 stars.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 25th, 2003 at 11:44 pm AST [7001 views]
Over the weekend, I bought a Linksys Wireless Internet Kit from Futureshop. It was super easy to set up, I just plugged it into my current network, installed the card on my laptop, and I was wireless in less than 5 minutes. In fact, I recommend it to anyone who wants to go wireless.All was going great, until all of a sudden, my laptop stopped working.
So now here I am, with wireless internet in my apartment, and a Compaq Armada laptop that won't boot up. That's like giving a kid a beebee gun and no bullets.
I guess this gives me an excuse to get new laptop.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 26th, 2003 at 1:39 am AST [13318 views]
I gave the Bloggerman Weblog a face lift today (again). It now has a new blue & grey color scheme.
I just wasn't happy with the green, so I decided to go with my orignal design, the one you see now. I may eventually go for a tableless page layout, but I probably won't be changing the colors again.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 26th, 2003 at 8:16 pm AST [17262 views]
An old man turns 85, and his long time friends decide to chip in and buy him a prostitute for his birthday... to try and excite things up a bit.The prostitute comes to the old man's room at the senior's home, and says to him: "I'm going to give you super sex!"
The old man looks at her, thinks a minute, and responds: "Well in that case, I guess I'll take the soup."
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 26th, 2003 at 11:54 pm AST [5409 views]
Bloggerman is now fully indexed on Google. All of the "semi-static" pages are indexed (ie, the articles, authors). Any of the pages that are constantly changing (like the front page or article archives) are not indexed.
I've been watching the Googlebot's activity in my logs very closly... here is some facts/assumptions I gathered from the logs and the google search... (I could be way off...)
- One machine will crawl your site, index the page, and gather all the URLs to follow (Doesn't actually follow them yet).
- Shortly afterwards, the gathered URLs are crawled one at a time... each URL is crawled by a different machine and different IP (I'm guessing the machines are grabbing the URLs from a queue of some sort). Each of these URLs are indexed like in step 1, and URLs are gathered and queued.
- It takes about 24 hours for any newly indexed pages to show up in a google search.
- It doesn't seem that a tabled webpage layout influences the indexing... for example, bloggerman uses a tabled layout, and is the #1 hit for superstation red water, bathroom lights outside, why do we tip, and realistic sound effects.
- Naming the title of the article something that a person might search for.. and having the <title> of the webpage the same as the title of the article will help with hits.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 27th, 2003 at 10:26 am AST [6380 views]
A new weblog has been created recently, Tall Dark and Scooter. It's the first weblog to utilize the Bloggerman Weblog Platform (Other than Bloggerman, of course).
Scooter is a friend of a friend, and should have some interesting things to talk about... check it out.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 27th, 2003 at 10:10 pm AST [33330 views]
I'd like to introduce my new teddy bear hamster, Shadow. My girlfriend and I just came home with him (or her) tonight. It was totally an impulse buy... we stopped into Pets Unlimited because we were bored, and we feel in love with this little fella. We had an old cage at home, which we were going to use, but we saw a really cool Space Station cage that we just had to buy. We also bought a Rock & Roll Hamster Ball so he can get some exercise.
Cost of hamster: $8.99.
Total cost after accesseories: $70.00.
Happiness of me and my girlfriend: Priceless.
Here are some picture of the little guy... (Click on a picture to see full size...)
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Posted by Brad Pineau on August 28th, 2003 at 10:33 pm AST [15190 views]
I just finished watching Jeepers Creepers and all I can say is that it's another movie to add to the list of the worst movies of the century. What a waste of money. The reason I had even gotten the DVD was because I had planned on going to see Jeepers Creepers 2 on Friday (there is no other movies I want to see, and I like to go to the movies on Friday)... so I figured I'd watch the first movie so I wont be lost in the sequel.The movie started off great... but at about 1/2 hour in... it started to get stupid. It's basically about this creature called the Creeper who eats people for 23 days every 23rd spring (the movie gives a partial explaination why... it leaves the rest to your imagination).
The movie may have had a chance if the characters weren't so stupid. I swear, I spent at least half the movie yelling things at the screen like "run!" or "don't do that!" All I know is that if I saw something that scared the beegeesus out of me, I would run the other way, not stop and stare at it. If you've seen the movie, you'll know what I'm talking about.
I give Jeepers Creepers 2 out of 5 stars... and after seeing it, I'm not sure if I want to see the sequel anymore...
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 28th, 2003 at 11:00 pm AST [6951 views]
I have come to the conclusion that a lot of people who use the internet are perverts. I've always assumed this was so.. but now I have proof.
Ever since I've posted this article, which is nothing more than just a funny video, I have received dozens of referers from google and yahoo about the same topic. For example, the latest search-engine-referered visitors found my site using the following combination of keywords:
- anal website reviews
- "how to" "have anal sex"
- "Shark" "download" "sex" "2003
and believe it or not...
Have any other weblog owners seen similar hilarious referers to their blogs?
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 30th, 2003 at 11:54 am AST [4982 views]
Well, instead of going to see Jeepers Creepers 2 at the theatres, I decided to watch From Hell instead.The movie was based loosly on the story of Jack the Ripper, a notorious murderer from London, back in 1888. The movie had a good cast - Johnny Depp, a very plain looking Heather Graham, Ian Holm (best known as Bilbo Baggins), and a few other familiar faces. They all did a terrific job acting in this movie - it really felt like a 1888 London. That being said, I had a really hard time getting into this movie. It's not that the movie was stupid, it's just that I didnt find it interesting. And to be honest, there was a point in the movie where I really had no idea what was going on.
They had already sold me on the fact that the movie was about Jack the Ripper... all they needed to do was make the movie interesting... but they didn't. The DVD has a 2nd special feature DVD, but I will probably never watch it. I would recommend seeing this movie only if there's nothing else on... it's not a bad movie, it's just kind of boring. I give it 2.5 out of 5 stars.
Posted by Brad Pineau on August 31st, 2003 at 3:06 am AST [8531 views]
While working on a game level in a previous job, I had to create various textures when I couldn't find any free ones I could use. I have thrown together a quick tutorial on how to create a wooden texture in Adobe Photoshop. I used three variations of this texture for the doors in the game level.
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