Rasterbation is fun.

Well lets see. My spring break is over now, and I had some fun especially on Wednesday, all had with Catherine of course. Which is fine and dandy I'm just disappointed I didn't get to hang with any of my friends, since we all had different spring breaks which is lame, and everyone seemed to be busy this week. My dad was home which meant I couldn't go nuts around the house. All I accomplished over break was working some hours finally, and reading around 60 comic issues on my computer, which is fine by me as I said Powers was really good, and I read just about all of JLA.

This weekend, went to the movies twice, saw The Ladykillers, and Dawn of the Dead. Which now that I think about it is funny since they are both remakes of old movies. I enjoyed The Ladykillers, Tom Hanks has proven he can do just about any role. He pulled this off extremely well, the eccentric character he plays is fantastic, just wish he had some more "lines" you know the ones that you say over and over again when you think of the movie. Tom Hanks had a few but not as many as I would have hoped for such a fun character.

Dawn of the Dead, Catherine liked it, I shagrinned, just because I'm not as fond of horror/zombie flicks as she is. I thought it was ok, just very generic. No official explanation for the zombies was ever given. Its just everyone goes to sleep, then when the wake up Zombies have taken over!! So of course they goto the Mall for safety. And this must be one hell of a mall if all the Mall Security staff has guns. Ving Rhames is good in this movie he played his character very well, the only standout actor in the movie I thought. The parts I liked were the ones w/o much Zombie activity. There were some points where...it just didn't need to be in the movie I didn't need to see that. There was a whole story segment that delt with a pregnant lady who was slowly being zombied, and she gave birth and the baby was also Zombied. Trust me is much nastier than I can convey. The one thing that drove me nuts was at one point they start playing this Jazzy song, and the words were familiar...then I realized it was "Down with the Sickness" a song by Disturbed, sung by a Frank Sinatra type singer, swear words and all...it just felt really trippy.

I ended up going to bed pretty late the last few days, and I woke up today at 7, and my legs felt weak, felt like I had put my face on wrong. I soon went back to just lay in my bed again for a few minutes because my bed, which shall hence forth be known as "The Jumble", was just so insanely comfy today. But yeah I totally fell asleep, had a disturbing dream. Well first of all my mom died, and for some reason my dad and I had to move to house that was just like the one we have but no basement. Then these 2 other kids came to live with us, and for some reason I didn't like them. Then I looked out my window, and I saw a bear. Now normally I like bears, I never see any harm in them. But this bear like charged at my window and them like roared in my face and scared the crap out of me, and I woke up and it was 8 and I had to get my ass going.

Which brings me to Rasterbation, while in one of the Computer Labs I saw Shawn Coblish, he's a pretty crazy guy. He showed me this site. The Rasterbator, you upload a picture or give it a pictures address and then you crop and size it, and then it changes the picture so its made of different sized black dots. You size it as to how many sheets of paper the picture will take up, like I made one thats 3 pages wide, 5 pages tall, and it makes a .pdf file. Which you can use to print it out put it together and make a pretty slick mural on your wall. I'm working on a couple right now. Give it a try, its pretty nifty.

Powers Secrets

Let's see I got out of Jury Duty on Monday, but for 40 bucks a day it certainly wouldn't have been that bad. But it was a rape case against 2 people...I wanted no part of that.

Also on Suprnova they finally got "Powers" a comic series I've been wanting to read for a while and just ended a week or so ago. Its about a couple of police officers in a special homicide unit that deals with 'Powers' or super powered people, heros, villains. I bought the first trade a little while ago, and I definetly wanted to continue reading it. But yeah I read about 31 issues of it on my computer...yesterday, I couldn't stop reading. of course I get to the end and...the last issue isn't there. I read about 31 issues, and the last issue of the series and storyarc isn't there. So I of course went out today and bought the last issue. But yeah so good.

I'm kinda sad I missed it when it first started. It started off with that premise, and its good, but it becomes so much more. You get to see what superheros are really likeThe writer also did some research on cops for this to make it more accurate, his dialogue is spot on and his characters are so enjoyable to read, and actually emote. The art is fantastic very vibrant, jumps off the page. Its actually starting with a new #1 this month or next, I definetly plan to start reading that. They stepped away from the homicide part for awhile, ended up being quite an epic, but now after a certain event 'powers' are now illegal, to be a hero or villain. And the homicide team is back together doing what they do best and that where the series kicks off, I can't wait. Powers is written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Michael Avon Oeming. This writer now writes almost all the comics on my current top five including Daredevil, The Pulse and now Powers.

Hmm maybe I can get Cat into this one, its CSI-ish, good characters, plenty of gore. Worth a try?

Also I added the secret section back, with the old stuff, and one thing I plan to keep adding/changing. I'll keep looking for more stuff to put there.

New Review

I wrote the first of my reviews of my assortment of Graphic Novels/Trade Paperbacks. The first was Fortune and Glory, a real funny story about this writers experience in Hollywood, and shows how movies really get made. If can be found in the Ego section, my friends all know if they want to borrow one of my comics, they are more than welcome.

And so my Spring Break has begun, looks like I'll be stuck with my dad most of the week, and I already said some of the other stuff thats happening, but hopefully I'll still find dome time to have fun.
Thats all I got for now, I'm off to work. Laters

Server Switch, Forum Down..For Now

Just so everyone knows, my hosting service just switched us to upgraded servers. So the website has been down a little bit here and there. Also, because of the switch, can't connect with the Database which holds all the information on the board. I have a friend who hosts a board and has the same service as i do, so I figure we'll help each other get things back up and running.

Also I just dicscovered that FTP is down also...which means no one will be able to see this till everything is fixed anyway. *sigh* What a super day I'm having.

New Pictures

Well I added the room section, for those who don't know me, a small glimpse inside my den of evil. Next is the long in coming Otakon2003 pics.

Yeah...right now for some reason I'm just in a funk. I literally don't want to do anything at the moment. Don't want to write anything or sit down, I didn't really want to even write this. I've been playing Pokemon SIlver as of late. I really liked it in the start, but I feel like there's waaay too much to do in the game, its much less linear than Pokemon Red/Blue were. But I kind of liked that about Red/Blue, plus I swear to god I have like half of the badges, and yet still all I see are Rattatas and Zubats...I can't take any more of them. They supposedly added new pokemon types, and I havn't seen them and I havn't even seen the normal types. I'm already thinking of restarting Silver just because...ok well in the start of the game you have to choose to start with Grass-type, Fire-type, or Water-type. I picked grass...its kind of good, but yeah I really wish I had chosen water right now.

But yeah as i was saying I don't feel like doing anything right now, I've played too much Pokemon, its too early to go to Bed, and I don't know whats on TV, and I'm too lazy to check. Just so you know I'm not depressed...I'm just I don't know...done for the day.

Updates, yep i still do those

Well lets see, some long in coming updates to the Ego section, 1 new poem I like, and 1 new story I wrote based some stories people told me and some life experiences. I stated before I found my first college notebook, and it has some stuff I plan on putting here, a list or 2, some journal stuff. I also think I'm going to try and do a review of all my graphic novels, because that will be fun, and because it'd be impossible to do reviews for all my comic books :-P.

Also I tweaked things a bit, added a line on the right side. Cleaned up some more code, changed the line between the menu and the content area from an image of a line to a border, and changed the line under the banner from a bunch of underscores to a border, which is better.

Also I've been posting on various msg boards asking for critiques/suggestions about the new design. I got people saying they didn't like the blur shadow in the banner (I don't really care about this one, I like the banner as is), one person didn't like the red thought it was hard to read was too bright, I don't remember now but I think one person said the font was too small. What do you think?
If you could change one thing what would it be?

Spring Break

Well my Spring Break is shaping up to be fantabulus. It started with the fact that I've been out of work for the past 5 weeks because no one can give me hours at Price Chopper. But the Bakery told me that they were going to give me some hours in March. They want me Friday, Saturday, Sunday, during the closing shift, on the last 2 weekends in March. Which are the weekends on the ends of my Spring Break, or the only times I'd be able to hangout with anyone else, since no ones Spring Break is at the same time anymore. I can't turn it down because...I need the money. But now it gets even better, Jury Duty starting the Monday of my Spring Break, fucking whoopie.

In other news I met with Teo, and we organized his site and he's fixing up using the template we made. It shaping up pretty good. Insert Name is a fine addition to TheYanni.Net

Hmm I thought I had more to say...guess I was wrong.

For the Masses

Well if you noticed on the side-bar, a forum has been added, simply entiled "The Forum" just a hub for me and some friends to discuss stuff so far, but all are welcome. We're all friendly people, and pretty experienced at this Message Board thing. I can attest that any post will be met with an intelligent answer. I have no tolerance for people wo are just plain ignorant.

Message Board?

Hmm nothin much to report here, just tryin to think where to hid all my secrets...and I'm messing with a Message Board at the moment, seeing if I can think of a good use for it, or if there's interest in it. Just because I use Message Boards a lot, plus I've never set one up on my own before, felt I should know how to do it. Cause at its heart this site is my portfolio for webdesign, and my abilities. Plus it could be fun if enough people regularly use it. Drop a comment if you have an opinion.

This Looks Like A Job For...Me!

Well you see, I discovered I had a little problem with Mozilla, it had some problems with the menu. In Internet Explorer it required line breaks(they make stuff go on the next line down), and Mozilla didn't need those same line breaks it did it automatically, so in certain places it went down 2 lines making some gaps in the menu. So I had to find some code that would be able to tell which webbrowser a person was using and then added or removed the line breaks when necessary. This is something many sites need especially big company websites, since there are a lot of browsers, and other people who don't use updated browsers. A lot of sites use that kind of code to make different versions of their website appear depending on which browser a person uses so it always looks correct. But it was suprisingly hard to find. One easy way would have worked except for the fact that Internet Explorer and some other browsers don't Identify themselves as what they actually are.

Internet Explorer tells the Site something like this:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0)
But every version of Internet Explorer says something slightly different

Mozilla Browsers tell the Site something like this:
Mozilla/5.0 ( ) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
plus their are a few different Mozilla Browsers so they all say something slightly different

This made my job annoying. Everyone had all these ways that supposedly worked but didn't, so I had to go mess with some guy's code that had a good idea, but didn't work because it tried to do 2 things at once, which made it not work. But I got it to work now by finding words that uniquely identify each browser in that line that's up above. I used a function that could search that line of information for specific words, Netscape is simply "Netscape", Internet Explorer is "MSIE", Mozilla is "Gecko" . If anyone else uses another browser that these 3 and the site looks wrong tell me.

Comings and Goings

Ah Well now that we're fully in the swing of things with the new look, and the cleaning up and trimming the site in some area. I have some announcements that have been made in other places but not here. But the Mighty Matrix has finished, me and Matty just never got the time or the drive back to continue doing stories...oddly enough we now both have started our own comic strips. But since it has finished, I will be taking down the Mighty Matrix Website, hosted here. If anyone wants they can find copies of all the Mighty Matrix stuff on Matty's Website.

While we say goodbye to MightyMatrix.theyanni.net , we say hello to insertname.theyanni.net . Insert Name, a comic previously hosted at Keenspace, is now hosted here. Made by my young friend Teo, we're setting him up here to join the family. The site is basically set up now but we're still working out a few bugs. I'll have to have a little web design brainstorming session with him to help him spruce things up, and get things more organized. Also for some reason when he uploaded his stuff, it initially didn't show any pictures for some reason, but yet when I downloaded everything from the site and re-uploaded from my computer, everything worked...really wierd. But yes I'm working with him, and I think we're going to try and spruce up TheCatherine also, she's been unhappy with her design, and we keep forgetting to mess with it.

And I also have been going through some of my old notebooks, and found some journal-ish stuff I wrote that predates anything from the 'Red' that I plan to add to it, and a few other things I wrote that will be a much needed update to 'Ego'.

And the Winner Is...

Oscar Time, and yeah I watched them, I took notes and stuff as I watched, and here they are.

Is Billy Crystal still using Marlon Brando jokes? Like all his jokes and impressions are from people long dead, or from about 15 years ago. Contemporize Man! But seriously the opening was atrocious, and I discovered I don't like Billy Crystal that much after all.

Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins (Mystic River) Good Guy, but never expected to win an Oscar, man his speech was long
Best Production Design: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King, design in Seabiscuit are you serious.
Best Animated Feature: Finding Nemo ..I was rooting for Triplets of Belleville, but Nemo was really good
Best Costume Design: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King
Best Supporting Actress: Renée Zellweger (Cold Mountain)

Bob Hope sure did seem like a classier host than Billy Crystal could ever be.

Best Live Action Short: Two Soldiers ..Never heard of it
Best Animated Short: Harvey Crumpet ..Never heard of it
Achievement in Special Effects: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King

Hmm I mean Jennifer Garner usually looks ok...but for some reason she looked really hot up there, maybe it was the hair?

Jim Carrey got a little too personal, but the guy he was giving the award to was a funny guy, I should see some of his movies.

Achievement in Makeup: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King
Achievement in Sound Mixing: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King, That's 5 for 5
Achievement in Sound Editing: Master and Commander ..only because Lord of the Rings wasn't up for it

Why did Julia Roberts dye her hair blonde? I swear if one more person dyes their hair blonde I'm gonna go crazy. I go out with a REAL blonde, damn straight, accept no substitutes.

Oprah WTF?

Best Documentary Short: Chernobyl Heart ..no one cares moving on
Best Documentary Feature: The Fog of War *sigh* why Do Documentary film makers have to use the Oscars as a political pulpit, Son of a Bitch!
Best Original Score: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King ...and 6
Achievement in Film Editing: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King ..7
Best Original Song: "Into the West" Lord of the Rings - Return of the King ..8
Best Foreign Language Film: The Barbarian Invasions
Achievement in Cienmatography: Master and Commander ..again only because Lord of the Rings wasn't nominated
Best Adapted Screenplay: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King ..9
Best Original Screenplay: Lost in Translation
Achievement in Directing: Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings - Return of the King) .. and 10, this was the only one I knew they definitely win, just because Jackson had s much to do with every part of this movie, more than almost any other director, he totally led this film to greatness.
Best Leading Actress: Charlize Theron (Monster) ..She's good, I mean she won and still looked really ugly in this movie. I thought she really looked as bad as she did in the movie, but it was just makeup.
Best Leading Actor: Sean Penn ...I know I thought it was gonna be Bill Murray to.
Best Picture: Lord of the Rings - Return of the King ..11 for 11, nice
come on it had to be.