play – Page 4 – Welker Fam

rss feeds in your mailbox

i just discovered that, when using a compatible mail client (such as mozilla thunderbird), you can have my blog entries sent right to your inbox without having to check the site every day.

this is also true of any RSS feed.

so, what are you waiting for? get the latest version of thunderbird and check it out !

there is also, as of the time of this writing, a Release Candidate for the 1.0 version of thunderbird.

you may want to check that out as it has many bug fixes and newer features.

now for the instructions:

to set up thunderbird to read the rss feed, click on Tools -> Account Settings…
then select ‘News & Blogs’ from the menu on the left. this will allow you to click the button labeled ‘Manage Subscriptions…’

click the button labeled ‘Add’, and in the Feed URL: box enter http://www.iohelix.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2http://www.iohelix.net/blog/feed
(this address can also be found on the main page of the blog in the box labeled “META” on the menu side of the page, as well as some other feeds, like the comments)

click ‘OK’, then ‘OK’ again, and ‘OK’ one more time.

after you have returned to the main thunderbird screen, click on ‘Get Mail’ in the upper left hand corner of the screen, and watch in wonderment as the blog posts appear automagically in your inbox.

anytime i make a new post, it will appear there all bolded and highlighted and ready for your reading pleasure.

if you wish to comment on one of my posts, just click on the link provided in the header info of the post and it will sweep you off to internet land where you can view the post on my site and add comments however you see fit.

amazing, isn’t it?

that is all… for now…

new blog software

this new blog software has got to be the best thing ever.

it looks pretty cool, the back end is awesome and the best thing is… automatic comment moderation.
which means, i don’t have to sift through all of the comments any more and search for comment spam. before a comment hits the screen, it’s sent to a queue where it sits waiting for me to delete it before ever appearing on the blog.

nice.

except that i didn’t have any comment spam until i added the link to the old location of the blog…

maybe thats my fault, maybe it was inevitable, either way, i still don’t have to sift through them.

yay =)

BYU vs. Utah

so i went to my first college football game ever on saturday night and it was awesome !

first off, it was the last game in an undefeated season for the utes and it was against our rivals: BYU. the game started off kinda slow and i was a little bit worried for the first quarter, the cougars (BYU) were keeping up and had the score tied just before the end of the half (14-14), then we came back after an interception by the cougars that almost got them a touchdown, and intercepted thier ball and brought it back 92 yards for a touchdown. it was the best play of the night. when the game was over the score was 52-21 Utah and the crowd stormed the field. it was an amazing sight, even from outside the stadium where we were waiting to beat the crowd but still watch the field rush. if you’ve never seen one, it’s like red water rushing onto the field… but faster.

view the play by play

the whole game was an experience, even during the game, the drum section of the band would play little ‘songs’ that were pretty cool, and when the cougars made a touchdown their band would play but our drum section would play something else really loud trying to mess them up, it was pretty funny.

after the game, we went home, got some food, and then i headed over to a friends house for a LAN party that lasted until about 5:30 in the morning. my brother also came to the party, and i’m assuming it was his first, and i think he had a good time, he actually surprized me a little when he started doing good.

anywho… if you ever get a chance to go to a college football game, especially on rivalry week… go. it’s fun.

but even though i waited in line for tickets for like 10 hours, our seats were still pretty shitty, maybe next time i’ll just buy them…

everything moves so fast…

its crazy how everything moves so fast. i thought i was gonna start posting in this blog more often, and here it is already a week and a bit after my last post. crazy.

so i stayed out all night a couple nights ago waiting for tickets to the BYU vs. Utah game that’s coming up this weekend. i thought it was gonna be cold and boring and long, but it actually turned out to be a really fun night. we hung out and watched movies, played poker, played old skool nintendo, contra, tennis, tecmo bowl, had a bbq and just basically hung out and messed around all night. made the night go by pretty fast and it wasn’t nearly as cold as i thought it was gonna be, although i did have three layers on…

the game is on this coming saturday (nov. 20th) and will be broadcast on ESPN2 and we (Utah) are gonna whoop some holy ass !!

so anywho…

have a good day !

latt

stupid bleeding edge

bleeding edge, for those of you who don’t know, is the term for the top most version, the cutting edge, the newest and in most cases, not even supported yet, recomendation or version of codes, code structures, and languages and other technological entities.

the bleeding edge that i am referring to now is the new XHTML 2.0 specification. it is still in its infancy and is not even released as a recommended specification yet, but when it is, it is going to radically change the way that web pages are created and displayed.

when html started, it was a markup language, not unlike TeX (pronounced ‘tech’, like the greek letter chi, which is not pronounced like the tea, but like ‘ki’.). it was designed to allow people to produce a page and then tell about the content (with tags like h1 {a first-level header}, and p {a paragraph}, etc., and the client reading it was supposed to make desicions on how to display that content.

then the web got popular. people wanted to be able to edit and control the way that people viewed their pages. along came all of the superfluous tags like u {underline}, i {italics}, etc. that are the bane of current specifications and have been deprecated (which means they are no longer recommended but are still supported by most, if not all browsers). that is all going to change with xhtml 2.0. there will be no support for any deprecated tags and even more tags are being removed(img, for starters, h1, h2, etc.) with others being deprecated (such as <br />). these tags are going to be replaced by new (, or already existing but rarely used) tags like section, line, and object.

some new exciting features of xhtml 2.0 is the change of the href {Hypertext REFerence} attribute of the a {anchor} tag, which is now part of the global attributes, like class or name. this means you can turn ANY object, be it a list item, an image, or a table cell, into a link without having to wrap it in an anchor tag ! this is cool.

but… as cool as the new features may be, the fact that ALL specifications that came before are now unsupported, nearly the whole of the www is going to have to be re-written. including all of my pages and other sites that i am working on, which is quite a few, sometime in the near future. that sux0rs.

for more information on this subject, here are some links:
The Web’s future: XHTML 2.0
XHTML 2.0 Working Draft

election day aggravation

well… it’s official… Utah politics sucks my ass. I can’t believe that that many people are willing to throw away the rights of other people based on the sole fact that thier (the other people) way of life makes them (the stupid ones) uncomfortable.

election day was yesterday and on the ballot was a constitutional amendment (#3) that changed the definition of marraige to being the union of a man and a woman. it also took away the rights of any other such union. here is the actual text of that ammendment:

(1) Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman.
(2) No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.

now, the first part in itself is severly fucked up. why? because. who are we to say that two people who aren’t a man and woman can’t get married? why does it make you so uncomfortable? and why do you think that by taking away thier rights it’s going to make you feel better about yourself? i mean, while we’re at it, why don’t we take away women’s rights, and the rights of blacks, too? what makes a gay marraige so threataning? is it the fact that some book says it’s a sin and therefore it must be true? or is it something to do with the safety of children? because lord knows that gay people can’t love a child the way straight people can *end sarcasm*.
the second part of this little two line atrosity is even worse. look at it closely. it takes away the rights of common law marraiges, for ALL PEOPLE, not just same sex couples, who now, by law, can’t get married, visit each other in the hospital, make desicions in times of emergency, and determine what is best for the person with whom they’ve shared their whole life and love with because a single sentence that just got added to the utah constitution says so. how fucked up is that?
and don’t even get me started on the damn presidential election. i mean, if i hear one more person say they hate bush, AND THEN NOT VOTE FOR KERRY?!! wtf? i hear it all over the place… that bush is stupid and bush is lame, and bush sucks at this and bush sucks at that… blah blah blah… well, you just had your chance to fix it and what did you do? sat on your ass and moaned about it. i voted. but only two of the things i voted for passed because the rest of the people in this closed-minded, bigoted state can’t see past thier own narrow feelings.

*end venting*

sorry about that, i’m just so frustrated, and it’s not just utah, like 12 states passed similar amendments. i mean, seriously.

— insert huge topic change here —

so… i got engaged a little while ago, kinda excited, kinda nervous, kinda swamped with school, work, and now planning for a wedding (ok, not really ‘planning’, but saying ‘okay, sure’ to ideas my fiance throws out). it’s not like i’m super stressed right now, but there are times when i’m not quite sure where to start and it gets to me a little bit.

also just got back from disneyland where my niece had her fourth birthday, got to hang out with my sister, and my niece for a day while at California Adventure, which is way cool. Tower of Terror is awesome, i recommend it to anybody, except for you wussies out there.

i’m also working on the new corporate intranet and public site for EGI, which is pretty dang huge for a guy who only designs websites as a hobby. the site uses ColdFusion, which is a server side script not unlike php and perl. although it does have its pros and cons. pro is its simplicity, theres no distinguising between the code and the html while coding, the code merely consists of specific html ‘tags’ (for instance <cfif> </cfif>), but because of it’s simplicity, it’s also a little harder to do complex things without a superfluous amount of code.

i also designed a site for a friend of mine (soon to be brother-in-law through two marriages) at www.photmillard.com. i really like the way the site turned out for him, i’m actually quite proud of it. it’s simple, but the backend is custom coded in php to select a different random picture from each of the various photo albums and display it as a rollover on the main page every time it is refreshed. i also re-skinned the photo album that he uses (the same php script as mine), and created all new graphics, edited css, and code.

anywho… it’s been a while, sorry to keep everybody in the dark about what’s going on, but i been busy.
plur, lates

p.s.- you may also notice (if you frequent my blog) that the look (and script) has changed, i was forced to do this by some weinie that kept comment spamming my blog. why do people feel they have to be dickheads? what happened to respect?

bachelor party

so my friend josh is getting married soon. what better reason to have a bachelor party? {crickets chirping}

that was a good joke, come on…

anywho, so for the bachelor party, we decided to go to cali and vegas.

we left at like 11 at night mountain time on thurs for the looooong drive to anaheim and got there at about 9 in the morning pacific time. so do the math, it was long. we had stopped at buffalo bills for about an hour or so and ate and threw down some cash, but not much.

after we got to anahiem, we tried to check into the motel we were staying at, but couldn’t. they wouldn’t let us. it was too early. so we decided we’d check out the new downtown disney shopping center in disneyland. it was pretty cool, they had a lego store that hadn’t opened yet, so were peeking through the windows at all the cool lego stuff, and while we’re looking through the windows, we noticed people walking around inside… how long had we been looking through the window? so we go inside, check it out, get bored and leave. we walked around the place for a bit, then decided it was gettin boring and went to disneyland.

holy crap! i’ve never been to disneyland that i can remember, and it was pretty fricking dope!

first off, in tommorrowland, there is this huge stone ball sculpture that is like 10 ft in diameter and apparently wieghs in at about 85,000 lbs. we went inside of the innoventions display theater thing that was there, and spent about one and a half to two hours inside playing around with all of the cool stuff. a couple of us even tried out some of the new segway personal transporters, which are, by themselves, worth the trip. after hangin out in the innoventions theater, we went back outside to play with the huge moving stone ball that was in the courtyard (that’s the word i was trying to think of), we spent about a half an hour just playing with (and like) a bunch of kids and this huge ball in water. it was pretty smooth.

we finally decided we should go on some rides, so we headed over to star tours and got a fastpass ticket, then went to the matterhorn and rode it, after the matterhorn, we went back and saw star tours, which is pretty cool (the matterhorn is dope, as well), then we went over to “honey, i shrunk the audience” which was pretty amazing considering it was only a 3-d show. i seriously ducked when the little flying thing came at my head, as did the rest of the audience, because everybody screamed and then started laughing.

after that, we went back to the motel, checked in, and took a much needed four hour nap. we went back to disneyland, went on a few more rides (indiana jones, haunted mansion, splash mountain, and some others), and then headed back home and played some texas hold-em, of which i won once and lost once.

the next day we went to magic mountain, and got rained out, which really sucked because i really wanted to go on some of those rides. i’d never been there before, but the rides looked cool as hell, although if you ever get a chance to go on the batman ride in the rain, i highly recommend it, it was awesome. so we left magic mountain just as the rain stopped (shitty, huh?) and headed over to claimjumper restaurant where josh got a psuedo “clappy lap dance”. (and no, kati, it wasnt a real lap dance, ask josh about it)

after that we headed back to the motel and hung out in the hot tub and got shitty the rest of the night with some canucks.

we left at like 10-11 in the morning for vegas, got there at around 2 and started to gamble a bit.

we met this crazy “ms. georgia” who pretty much followed us around for the remainder of the day, but it was cool, because she was. we went to the star trek experience, saw a couple of shows, and then proceeded to the reason we came to vegas… quark’s bar.

they have a drink at quark’s bar called the warp core breach. if you’ve never seen one of these, it’s described by one reviewer as “a shot in a fishbowl”. it’s huge. to say the least. its basically every kind of rum that bacardi makes (including 151), served in a fishbowl with dry ice as a garnish.

between five of us… we had four. ’nuff said.

i don’t remember much about the rest of the evening, except something about a klingon saying “wassup, player?” to cpt. kirk, and a fat, greasy mexican man hitting on him, exclaiming “i heard rumors about you cpt. kirk, fifty dollars for everything”. so… it turned out to be an interesting evening…

{insert “what happens in vegas, stays in vegas” saying here. because, well, i dont remember enough to tell you}

naw, i’m just kiddin, i wasn’t that drunk, but we were having way more fun than if we had been sober.

so then we all went back to the hotel, and CRASHED! three days of fun had finally caught up with us.
and that’s it, save for the long drive home.

hope it was as much fun reading as it was… doing.

plur, lates. {} <– you know what this is.

stupid computer crashes

i know i havent posted on my blog in a really long time, but i’m kinda bummed/pissed at computers and websites right now, namely, mine.

i guess there was a pretty major hardware failure at the datacenter that host the machine that hosts the website you’re looking at right now. it wiped out eveything that was posted on the blog and the forum after april 5th.

this really sucks, because i had just written a hugely long post about meeting my real dad for the first time on the 7th. (i didn’t meet him on the 7th, i wrote about it on the 7th)

so anyway… to breifly recap that last post… (and for those of you who didn’t know, recap is short for recapitulate… just some interesting information for ya)

so, we had a pretty good party at my house on the 3rd, which went pretty well (didn’t get a lot of pictures though, sorry) threw down my new track, had some drinks, etc. pretty normal party. then on sun, the day after the party, we (my girl and i) went to one of my new aunt’s and uncle’s house to hang out and have a bbq, cuz it was my aunt’s birthday on the 4th. as i walk into the backyard and get introduced, an older woman stands up and says, “so you’re my grandson”… yeah, that floored me for about 10 minutes.

she was acting just like any other grandmother would, hugging me, kissing my cheek, etc. except that i have never met this woman in my life, and it was a little wierd. so we have lunch/dinner (amazingly good ribs), and i go inside to chill for a bit, cuz i had just met a new grandmother, new cousin, new aunt, and was feeling a little awkward. after hangin out inside for a half hour or so, i walk back outside, and just as i did, a man i’ve only seen in pictures walks around the corner of the house…

{insert dead silence with intermittent pounding heart beats here}

i try and play it off like i didnt see him, and sit down on the bench outside. as i’m lookin over to get a better look, i make eye contact with him, because he was staring right at me. it was too late, i couldn’t play it off anymore, i had to do something. so i stand up to walk over to him and everybody who was in the backyard, knowing the situation, stops talking and watches me walk over… no pressure.

so… what do you say in a situation like that? “hi, i’m benjam”? i mean, he already knows who i am, i know who he is, what do you say?

so i walked over, all eyes burning a hole in my back, and say “hi, nice to meet you, wierd and unexpected, but nice” and sit down next to him. we kinda have an uncomfortable silence for a bit, which was even more so, because the whole party was having it with us, and then my mom breaks it by asking him a question… thanks, mom.

so we make small talk for a little bit and then it’s time for us to leave, cuz i don’t think i could have handled meeting anymore new relatives. so we leave.

and thats about all that was in that post. it was a little longer and maybe a little more in depth, but you get the idea, it still kinda sucks that it was lost.

but anywho… ya’ll have fun, and don’t crash your comp reading this.

plur, l8

wow

i’m so frickin excited for my party comin up this weekend !! i don’t think i’ve been this excited for a party in a long time. the only thing holding me back is the fact that i’m prolly failing a couple of my classes in school.

i just can’t wrap my brain around particle physics, and my thermodynamics teacher is whacked in the head, i swear. i even went to a study group for particle physics and still don’t understand it. it sucks. and it’s kinda lame because if it were really “particle physics” instead of “really weird math”, i’d probably understand it. but as it’s the latter, i don’t. and the teacher throws up these really odd looking equations on the board and then proclaims that “obviously, this must be true”, and i’m thinking, “who is this obvious to, besides you? i don’t even understand what you wrote down.”

stupid math notations.

but it’s all good, cuz this saturday night, i’m throwin down some phatty tracks at my house, chillin with some good friends, and monitoring my drinking, because i’d like to stay awake for this one. =)

anywho, had to post cuz it’s been a while.

latah,
PLUR

it’s done!!

i got done putting the finishing touches on my new and improved website layout last night, made a few new pics for the walls section, and uploaded them today. take a look around at the new site and enjoy!

i really like the cleanliness of the whole layout, its very easy on the eyes, no part is too contrasted, and they all blend very smoothly. if you’re using mozilla or firefox as your browser, you also get an added bonus, if you’ll look in the blog (which you are right now), you’ll notice that as you move the screen up and down, the background doesn’t move, not even inside the light parts. makes for a really interesting effect. i kinda like it. oh well, enough about me, lets talk about you.

leave comments if you wish, or sign the guestbook and let me know what you think.

plur, lahter.