Cook County Sales Tax increase

If you’re one of the many Cook County residents who chronically check the news, you’ve probably heard that we now have the highest sales tax in the entire country. Yes, over 10% tax. 10.25% in fact. If this were France, there would be riots, angry mobs, and protests. I wonder if we will see any of that in the coming months…

HAH! ya. right. The day Americans launch a substantial protest will be a cold day in hell – And the protest would likely be because they want the heat turned back on.

At least it is less than the 11% tax proposed back in 2007.

Busse Ride June 30 08

Rode one lap in busse before doing a second with a slightly faster pace. Second loop took 26m 15s. Previous best time unknown. But i have done the loop in similar periods of time.

Also rode an extra 5 to 10 miles through industrial park afterwords.

“… just maintain don’t loose control.”

Dimitri

The Douchiest Message in History has been posted and talked about all over the net, flooding IRC channels and social news sites, blogs, etc. I’ve grown so sick of hearing about it, i’ve decided to blog about it. He thinks he is something so important, so amazing, that the woman he’s chasing should just be falling all over him and if not, she’s not worth a damn. It’s hilarious. “if you have mental problems, I don’t even want to talk to you”… lol so many stupid ass quotes from that….

WordPress Disadvantage

Originally I ran my blog with Blogger.com. They’re owned by google, have a decent amount of features, and a healthy community. It was nice and for awhile I thought it couldn’t get better. I began learning a lot about wordpress, and felt it had a much better CMS. Which, generally, it does. A lot more flexible and fun to work with in my opinion.

But running a wordpress blog through wordpress leaves one with very limited options. For instance, you must pay money to control the CSS. Otherwise, you’re limited to a (rather large) selection of themes. Who can blame em? They need to have an income, they’re not like Google. But regardless, it irks me that I switched without knowing I couldn’t do so much on their server. It seemed like I would have infinite control, but it is quite the opposite.

Climate Time Machine

JPL has recently released an interactive flash time machine(click on climate time machine). It shows various aspects of our earths climate at different points in history. here are my thoughts on it all:

Low Agriculture output is true!

After reading this article about how US wheat stockpiles are at a 30 year low -going on a 60(!) year low – I think it’s safe to say that the lower solar output is affecting our crops. If I can find other coutries with low supplies, then I think it would be even more convincing.

It should only be a matter of months until output picks back up again. The maximum is due around 2012. At the very latest we should see activity well before 2010. If the blank face continues for another two years, and doesn’t begin to show more spots, we might be in for a long short supply of wheat. Food prices won’t soar, they’ll skyrocket!

Wikipedia has a great graph of the past 400 years of solar cycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers.png

It seems that the number of spots rises fairly rapidly – if you notice how sharp each increase is for the most part. This means we still have time for activity to spike back up. It’s just a waiting game to see what happens. The suns magnetism has strange ways.

The 4th

Sometime during my highschool years I found myself skateboarding near a local church. It wasn’t your christian or catholic church, but some sort of Japanese or Muslim church. I’m still not sure what they taught, but I do know it was a vacant lot. Vacant and boring. Really boring. But its vacancy is what drew me there: few places are skate-able and deserted enough to skate in. But this wasn’t a regular day; it was the fourth of July. Everyone who was anyone was out having fun, shooting fireworks, drinking beer, laughing and being with friends and family. Where was I? The god-damned brown-person church.

So I left the place in search of some more action. I had to get some sort of thrill, some excitement. Perhaps the fireworks will be cool. I could find a spot to skate at, while watching the fireworks! It was a perfect idea, and I had a perfect spot: the itasca industrial park. Itasca has good fireworks – and lots of people too. So I skateboarded my way down to the industrial park near the crowds of people. I could tell where to go just by following the crowds and traffic. I made my way to a parking garage which I thought would be vacant, but really it turned out to be a popular attraction. I guess people were going for the highest places they could. Who could blame them? It gives better view after all.

So I continued my journy down the winding roads laced with chains of pedestrians along the sidewalks. One windowless building stuck out in particular. At first it appeared to be a sort of parking garage that was borded off, but upon inspecting it, I realized the “garage” was an office building under construction. Having no concience and balls of steel I just slipped right under the fences and carried my board with me into the building.

It wasn’t too exciting in there, but I found a set of stairs. As one would do, I climbed them! They weren’t completed but done enough for the workers to carry materials up them. The building must have been 10 or 15 stories tall so It took a little bit of climbing, but once I got up there the fireworks were just about to begin. And as I would learn, I ended up with the best seat in the crowd!

Just two-to-three hundred feet away from me (maybe more) was the firework assembly. The show was launching directly in front of me and not too far above my head. At times the fireworks were so close above that I was showered by the raining fragments left over! Half-broken firework shells also came down on me – this is when I put the skateboard over my head and ran back in for shelter. I kept a souveneir firework shell since it was so big and then left when it was over. Climbing back down the stairs I noticed the rush of people around me and the building. People were leaving and to get out of the building un-noticed I would need to manuver swiftly.

All of a sudden the lights flashed brightly on -everywhere in the building! I froze. Immediatly I realized how obvious it must have been that I was on the roof. With everyone looking up, they had to have seen me! I thought I was doomed and just stood there, inching back toward the stairs. I sat and looked around but no one came, and everyone outside was oblivious to me. Then it dawned on me: the lights were out for the fireworks – to make it more dramatic. It had nothing to do with me, and I realized how paranoid I was being. I found the point of entry and left as quickly as I came, never able to return to the location of my most enjoyable firework display.

That was probably incredibly boring for you to read. Go spend your time doing something worth-while and stop reading my narcissistic blabber!

ColourLovers.com

http://www.colourlovers.com/patterns

Make your own colors and palettes and then apply them to patterns. It is the facebook of patterns! well not exactly, but it’s still pretty fun! Make an account and try it!

Or just take a gander at some of the patterns ive made:
http://www.colourlovers.com/lover/link1922

pChart

A PHP based chart library.

While this may not be revolutionary, or the first of its kind, it’s pretty cool! This library basically lets you generate charts – pie charts – line graphs – bar graphs – just like you would in word. Only this is PHP based and seems like it would be oh so simple to integrate with a DB to make things like a survey.

Gives me so many possibilities.

The demo shows the result as an image so the PHP just renders a graphic – somehow. Whatever it does, it’s awesome! try it here:
http://pchart.sourceforge.net/

Planetary

The song Intergalactic by beastie boys may have a different meaning.

The other day I was reading a book about fords written by an old person – someone who was around at the advent of the invention – and the word planetary was used as a verb! Something like “he went planetary”, and I thought to my self “hmmm I guess it’s just some old slang…”

Then I happened to be reading a book about space when I uncovered the root of the word planet. It used to mean wander. In the nighttime sky, the planets were stars like the others except that they wandered. From month to month, year to year, they would be in different locations. They were planetary, they wandered. So the next time you see your bum friend who left home ten years ago, you can ask him if he’s still planetary.