The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

The crash came sooner than I expected. 4:02 pm to be exact. “Thank you for your interest in the NYC Teaching Fellows program. We appreciate the time and energy you have devoted to the application process. At this time, we have completed a thorough review of your application: you have not been admitted to the Fellowship.” Well, I guess that answers that question.

Then, maybe twenty minutes later, when I was finally regaining my focus on work (I was working from home today), there’s a knock on my door. My super is standing there with a bag of garbage. “Is this your garbage?” I’m looking at the white plastic bag with red ties (same kind I use) and see through it a Perrier bottle and can of Goya black beans. “Maybe. Why?” Instead of answering me, he just repeats his question. I try to avoid answering but he eventually wears me down. After I admit that that is, in fact, my garbage that I disposed of two days ago, he tells me that he got a ticket because I didn’t separate the glass bottles for recycling. “What?” He went on bitching and yelling at me and I apologized although I wasn’t completely sure what the hell he was talking about. When I come back inside, I search around a bit and find that, apparently, there are actual laws in New York City that require you to recycle (see this). What a bunch of bullshit. I mean, I agree with the whole recycling movement and, yeah, I should have recycled those bottles, but who are they to come at me and force me to recycle? The city government is completely overstepping its bounds.

The crazy thing is, that I might not have even taken the teaching thing if I had been accepted, but the rejection still hurts so bad. I keep thinking over and over in my head all the different possible reasons why they didn’t pick me. Was it because my teaching sample sucked? Because I wasn’t wearing a suit? Because I only had a 3.7 GPA? Because I don’t have perfect teeth? Did I smell bad? Was it because I was rude to the weird old guy? Did they think I didn’t care enough? There are so many things that could have caused this but I don’t know which one it was. It’s making me crazy…

I’m not going to let this ruin my week, though. I have too many good things on the horizon to let this ruin my week. I am still fully employed (even if only temporarily) and I have tickets to Yankees games Wednesday and Thursday nights. And, if all that’s not enough, I have one of my best friends flying up here this weekend. So, NYCTF, take your rejection and shove it. I don’t care what you think anyway.

If only that were true…

I always get worried when things go this well. It just seems too good to last. I’ve hit a bit of a lucky streak lately and am just so damn happy and relaxed right now that it seems almost too good to be true.

Okay, so today didn’t start out as good as it ended (although it didn’t start that badly). I woke up far earlier than is normal for a Sunday, put on my running clothes and headed down to Central Park for the Scotland Run 10K. I randomly started talking to some other runners that were headed there too on the train and we walked over to the west side of the park from Lexington Ave together. (By the way, this is what I love about road races — When else do you make friends on the subway?) We get to the registration, get our numbers, etc. and then go back to the giant chute of a starting line. The whole process always makes me feel so much like we’re cattle being prodded along. Especially today. There were 7,000 runners in a very limited space.

I get to the starting line and go back to the section marked 7 minute miles. I’m anticipating a 43 minute finish and therefore think this is the place I should line up. I’m standing there, stretching, waiting for the race to start when I hear my name called. I look to my right and see Michael, one of the guys from my newly formed running group, walking towards me. It was so cool to run into a familiar face at this huge gathering. We chatted a bit and waited for the start, both a little overwhelmed by the crowd that had showed up for this seemingly insignificant race.

Finally, they signaled the start. “Run, the British are coming!” It was funny, but nobody was moving. What the hell? Oh, wait, they are moving up in the front. A full minute later, we finally crossed the start line. But we were still inside a completely solid mass. People obviously hadn’t paid much attention to the correct pace markers and there were old, fat people who obviously couldn’t run a seven minute mile if their life depended on it in front of us and blocking our way. The first mile of this race was seriously a contact sport. I’ve never seen such chaos. The problem is that none of us were running fast and we were all using up a hell of a lot of energy. I was exhausted by the time I got to the first mile marker and the time read 8:15. Are you kidding me? I haven’t run an eight minute mile since… I can’t even remember. I don’t do eight minute miles.

The crowd finally starts to separate a bit after the first mile marker, but then we come up on those giant hills at the north end of the park and I’m wiped from the wrestling at the beginning and in no shape to tackle those hills. I keep passing people but I feel like I’m going to puke. I make it through the hills at the top of the race pretty solid, hoping to get a second wind coming down the east side of the park, but it doesn’t happen. I’m completely wiped out from the grueling start and hills and people are starting to pass me.

I don’t even want to recount the rest of the run in detail because it wasn’t pretty. Let’s just sum up that I finished in 43:51, running a pace of 7:04 miles, which was very disappointing to me. I definitely blame that first mile but still am upset that I wasn’t able to make up for it more later.

Anyway, I still finished the race in the top 10% and shouldn’t really have anything to complain about. Michael finished three minutes ahead of me and we found each other at the finish line and hung around for the raffle to see if we won the trip to Scotland. (Neither one of us did.) There were good vibes in the park, though. Tons of people were there and they were all healthy, happy people who had just finished a race. It’s always a good energy in those scenarios that you can take with you.

I headed over to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle after that (a rare treat for me because I’m never over in that part of town anymore) and bought a bunch of stuff for my dinner tonight.

When I got back home, I (as was predicted yesterday) wrapped up some loose ends on the Five Fish List, worked on clearing out my inbox, and cleaned my apartment. I was hoping to have time to take a nap, or at least to kick back and watch t.v. for a bit, but it never happened.

I started cooking at six. Everyone showed up at seven. Everyone in this case refers to Michael (not the Michael at the race — different Michael), Andres, Joe and Brutus. Michael, Andres, and I used to work together at Saks. Joe is Michael’s boyfriend and Brutus is their dog. It was almost eight o’clock when I finally finished cooking and got everything on the table. I made risotto with portobello mushrooms and a Parisian lettuce salad with blue cheese. I also served focaccia bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Thankfully, everything actually turned out really good. I wasn’t too worried about the salad or the bread, but this is only the second time I’ve made risotto and making it is an intense process with plenty of places to screw up.

So, the food was good. Everyone enjoyed it. Mike brought over two bottles of wine (which were really light and fruity and totally not to my usual taste but enjoyable even so) and we drank those, then opened up a bottle of my house wine, Louis Jadot Beaujolais-Villages. This particular bottle was 2006, but I often have other vintages lying around.

After dinner, we got into a huge argument over the nationalization of health care and the overall implications of such a move on society as a whole. We also debated the America’s role in Iraq, education reform, and the legalization of currently illegal drugs. The majority of the debate, however, centered around health care. Joe and Michael, in a sense, served as moderators while Andres and I argued. Although we all have radically different ideas, we were able to drunkenly share them with each other without anyone’s feelings being hurt. It was a good discussion and everyone brought up good points. (Of course, I was right though. Of course.) They all left about eleven and I washed up the dishes from dinner.

While doing so, I realized how happy I am with my life right now. I have good friends, more work available to me than I’m capable of doing, a healthy devotion to running, and a beautiful apartment that everyone was complimenting all evening. What else could a guy want? Sure, a girlfriend would be nice, but that’s coming soon — I feel it. And maybe, a little more money, but I feel that on the horizon too.

It’s funny the way we procrastinate. Sometimes I find myself working on completely ridiculous projects in order to avoid working on something that could actually be useful. Now is not necessarily one of those moments. I actually had a fairly productive day. I don’t really know why I started with that. I guess it just seems like I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately.

Maybe I’m still upset about procrastinating the writing of my lesson plan for the NYC Teaching Fellows interview that I had this morning. I didn’t even start working on it until last night. I tried earlier in the week, but I just couldn’t make myself do it – I couldn’t get the creative juices flowing. Even last night I struggled. But, finally I managed to come up with a lame lecture on how the certain quotes in the first chapter of The Great Gatsby show that Nick Carroway associates wealth with unhappiness. It all made sense in my head but I sounded retarded when I was teaching it to the “class” today. Luckily, there were some other interviewees in my group that made me look better by being so completely incompetent themselves. Then again, there were a few that really showed me up too. Actually, now that I think about it, my presentation was probably the only mediocre one. The others were all either really good or god-awful.

Overall, I was surprised by how serious people took this whole thing. I was figuring it would be mostly New York kids, but there were tons of people from middle America. I was talking to this girl who flew in from Texas this morning for this thing. And here I was feeling bad for having to wake up at 8:00 and take the 6 down to Union Square on a Saturday.

I originally worried about being too dressed up in a suit, but almost every guy there was in a suit. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t. I took my gray Armani to the dry cleaners Monday so that it would be nice and fresh for today. I picked it up yesterday morning before work and hung it in my closet, not giving it a second thought. Of course, this morning when I’m already running late and hurrying to get out the door, I notice that my jacket is missing one of the front buttons. Ahhhh! That started a mad rush through my other suits (too conservative, too modern, has a stain and needs to be dry cleaned, too cheap, bulky shoulders) and led me to a pair of gray flannel trousers that I hadn’t worn in forever. I’m out the door when I look down and realize that they are horribly wrinkled. Not just a little bit… They look like they were wadded in a ball at the bottom of my locker for a year (which they may have been at some point). I had to change pants yet again and by then had no time left to stop and get any breakfast. I ended up not even wearing a jacket because I didn’t have one that matched well with the pants I had to wear. This afternoon, I thought about going to the dry cleaners and yelling but realized that that wouldn’t really help anything.

Anyway, other than that wardrobe fiasco and the teaching sample, I think I rocked the interview. It was actually more like a series of tests than an actual interview. We had to do group discussion questions, an essay writing sample, and the final individual interview-like session but even then, the questions were more problem solving questions than typical interview questions. I did a pretty good job on all of them, especially the writing sample, I think.

The interesting question now becomes, what do I do if I’m accepted? If I’m not, no big deal, I go on with my Lantenengo life and see where it leads me. But, if I am, I should do this… right? I mean, I spent a crazy amount of time on my application, spent a few hours last night on the teaching sample, spent half my day today at the interview itself, so there’s clearly a serious level of dedication that I’ve put into this. So why would it even be a question what I would do if I was accepted? This is such a tough, competitive program to get into that offers such high rewards that it seems a given that I would want to go through with it if I get accepted. I mean, for god’s sake, there were people flying in from Ohio for the interview.

The biggest allure of being a teacher in a public school is also my biggest fear. I love the idea of going into an environment where your schedule, objectives, pay scale, and performance measures are all clearly defined by someone else. You go to work and do your job and they say good work. Repeat. It would be great to not have the stress of having to figure out all that for yourself. Yet, at the same time, I am so afraid that I wouldn’t be able to fit into that mold. I love the freedom that entrepreneurship brings with it. Could I give that up? Yet, I know that I’m only being optimistic about the whole owning-my-own-business thing now because I had an amazingly good week. I have to try to remember the bad times (just a couple weeks ago) that pushed me to apply for this teaching thing in the first place.

So, what was that amazingly good week, you may ask? Well, for one, my biggest client is now needing forty hours a week of contracting work from me. Yeah, that’s pretty much a full time job. Even better, I’m going to be working on a bunch of really fun, cool, exciting projects that I can learn a lot from for them. On top of that, through a reference, I have another small site design on the near horizon. In the few minutes I have left over, I’ve been working on my network project and building up my advertising revenues. I spent about six hours on that today and made some big breakthroughs.

The one I’d like to highlight is the fact that I finally was able to wrap my brain around mod_rewrite and use it on my directory site. If you’re wondering what in the hell mod_rewrite is, don’t worry. I’ll explain… When you type in a web address the server generally directs you to file named correspondingly on the server. This works. But, you can end up with some ugly looking URLs that the search engines don’t like and that don’t mean anything to your human visitors. Here’s where mod_rewrite comes in. It displays the real file (with the ugly filename) when the nice, clean URL is entered without redirecting the visitor. Okay, even I realize that didn’t make much sense. Let’s try an example: http://www.fivefishlist.com/list.php?c=38 is now http://www.fivefishlist.com/blogs. See the advantage? Anyway, this was a big technical hurdle for me. I was having trouble getting it to work and I finally overcame it today.

Unfortunately, I got none of the work that I want to get done on East Coast Runners accomplished. I really want to incorporate maps and weather, and also to improve the storage of common route and shoe information for my users (including me). I’d like to get some of it done tomorrow, but that’s probably not going to happen. I am running the Scotland Run 10K in the morning and then hosting a small dinner party tomorrow evening. I’ll have maybe four hours in between and I’ll need to wrap up loose ends on the Five Fish List and respond to the twenty or so messages that are sitting in my inbox and clean my house. This next week’s not looking good either… I’ve got at least fifty hours of work lined up, plus baseball season starts and I have tickets to two Yankees games and then my buddy Josh is coming up from Miami on Friday so the weekend is going to be drunken shenanigans instead of being productive.

I just feel like there is never enough time. Time really seems to be racing by and I can’t seem to keep up. I guess I need to figure out how to because its probably not going to slow down anytime soon…

1. Sushi
2. Rice Cakes
3. Avocados
4. Jamba Juice*
5. Cheese
6. Tortellini
7. Prosciutto
8. Macadamia Nuts
9. Grapes
10. PowerBars

*Yes, I know this is a drink, not a food, but still…

As of today, I’ve run more this March than any other month since October 2003. And I still have another week to add more mileage. Even so, I’m not going to make the 100 mile goal that I set for myself. I’m at 59.3 now and will probably end up at about 80. I think I may have been overly idealistic when expecting to suddenly bounce back to hundred mile months. I had forgotten how much pain comes along with them. And I think I underestimated the damage that I did to myself by smoking for so long. I’ve been having some serious issues with fatigue on my runs lately that I can’t explain. I should be in better shape than I am for how much I’ve been running lately. Yesterday, I met up with a fellow East Harlem runner that I found through NYRR and nearly died trying to keep up with him. We finished a loop of the park in 7:04 miles, which shouldn’t be that difficult for me to do, but I was having serious troubles. Today, I ran almost eight miles, but my pace was a miserable 7:21. I have the Scotland Run 10K coming up on Sunday and was hoping to get a sub 42 minute time on it, but now I’m thinking that that may not happen. Then the Bolder Boulder is only two months away and I want to beat 42 minutes on that too. But there’s the elevation and I’m not even sure I could do that here at sea level now. I have my work cut out for me over the next two months. Of course, all of this is just chickenfeed compared to marathons. My name is in the lottery for this year’s New York City Marathon and I am, needless to say, nervous to find out if I’m going to be running it. Furthermore, I’m nervous to see if I’ll actually be able to get myself in that kind of shape by November. I used to think that it was a given, but now with the fatigue and cramps and everything I’ve been experiencing lately, I’m wondering if I’ll really be able to get there. Maybe I missed my window. Maybe Tybee Island was it.

Sorry if I lost you there. I’m guessing that most of the people reading this know the significance of Tybee Island has for me. For those of you that don’t, Tybee Island, Georgia is the place where I was supposed to run my first marathon back in 2002. It didn’t happen. I got pneumonia a month and a half before the race and wasn’t able to keep up with my training. Not running that marathon has been hanging over my head and haunting me ever since. Of course, this has a lot to do with the fact that I’m considering marathons again. I almost wanted to go back and do Tybee first, but I decided that New York would be more memorable (and practical) considering my present geographic situation. But if I don’t get picked in the lottery this year, I’ll probably end up running Tybee in February ‘09.

Enough talk about running. What else has been going on lately? Let’s see… My sister came to visit for three days. It was a good trip. We wandered around the city a lot (we mapped it out and it came to a total of 25 miles), taking lots of pictures (I got 150, she had at least twice that), and just generally acting like tourists. It was good to get out and explore the city. I worked across the street from Rockefeller Center for a year but never went up to the Top of the Rock before this week. The views were amazing, by the way. And I hadn’t even seen the Statue of Liberty in God knows how long before we went down and rode the ferry out to Staten Island to get lunch. It was good to see my sister too. But, we really don’t have a lot in common and it makes it really tough to connect with each other. I mean, I sincerely enjoyed having her out here but I didn’t really know what to say to her. I sensed the same feelings coming from her. I was talking to Stoltz about this today and he thinks the lack of sibling closeness may be a Colorado thing. I wish I could come up with the direct quote of what he said because it was good, but it slips my mind. It was something along the lines of everyone out there is more introspective and that makes them associate with others less. Something like that. Like I said, what he actually said sounded better.

Of course, taking Monday through Wednesday off to bum around the city left me with a lot of work to catch up on. I spent Thursday and Friday working for Precision Prospects and then yesterday and today working on my own projects, namely restructuring my entire database schema for the Lantenengo Network. The thing that sucks about it is that there is almost no visible difference to show for the 15+ hours that I spent working yesterday and today. I do have a vastly improved internal record keeping system now, though, and that’s something that I’ve been needing. Now, I can easily visualize how many visitors each of my sites has had in the past 24 hours, week, month, etc. This is very important for the growth of my network. I can see what’s working and what’s not. Right now, East Coast Runners is the big king. So, my immediate plan is to work on promoting it, improving it, and making it even more popular. Then, I’ll go back and work on the other sites that are attracting less visitors. Some might go for helping out the floundering sites, but not me. I want to build up what’s good and make it great and then, if I have the time, fix the stuff that’s not as good. Another big benefit of the changes I made today is that enabling my sign-in functions is now much simpler on new sites because I standardized everything. So, I should be able to get the sign in part of Plant Ink up and running tomorrow and finally get the car mileage chart and vote functions back and working.

I had planned on writing about the whole Bear Stearns fiasco, but I don’t really have the energy for that now. Let me just say that this is only the first of many such failures — the finance industry is a house of cards that has been built up far too high and is about to collapse. My only hope is that the people responsible for these catastrophes get dragged down along with all us “common folk.”

I’m tired. I need sleep. I’m done. Good night.

You know, starting these things is really the hardest part. Once you hit your stride, you’re fine. It’s just the getting going that poses a challenge. I’ve been sitting here for about eight-and-a-half minutes now trying to think of a clever, witty, but not overdone intro to this article and nothing has come to me. I have several interesting topics lined up, but no real idea of how to introduce them. Of course, I came up with this, but that was a desperate move. You can only use the topic of introductions as an actual introduction once. Well, I hope you enjoyed it because you’re never going to see it from me again.

Before I continue, let me apologize for any misspellings, bad grammar, or general nonsense I may be publishing. I’ll admit that I’ve had a few beers tonight. This does not violate my recent restriction on drinking, however, because today is part of the weekend. Furthermore, there was a really cute girl at the supermarket today who told me she’d give me a free t-shirt if I bought a 12 pack of Presidente. How could I have said no to that?

Moving on, tonight’s post will cover the following topics: Governer Spitzer’s recent resignation, Harlem, my new professional blog, and face recognition software.

You’re probably sick of hearing about this whole Governor Spitzer thing. God knows I am. I generally do a pretty good job of sheltering myself from the popular news because I think it’s mostly hype and scare tactics (Note to self: develop this into something more substantial at a later date). Even so, I’ve been bombarded by this story at every turn. I first heard of it from a marketing e-newsletter that I subscribe to. Then, I was at the laundromat and it was all over the television news that I couldn’t turn off. And, most recently, it showed up in the newest edition of The Economist, the magazine that is pretty much my only link with traditional media. I read their magazine because respect the fact that they report only real news and not merely sensationalism. That being the case, I have to admit that I was a little surprised to see a full page devoted to the Spitzer story (I don’t believe this is “real” news at all) in the current issue. But when I read the editorial, my faith in the magazine was restored. It was one of the most accurate criticisms of our country’s hypocrisy that I’ve read in a while. You can see the full article here or you can just enjoy the following excerpt that I find particularly true:

“The combination of legalism and puritanism invariably produces the same dismal results. It creates expensive government bureaucracies that seize on any excuse—rules relating to inter-state commerce are a particular favourite—to extend their powers to boss people about or spy on them. It throws up swivel-eyed zealots who pursue their manias with little sense of proportion or decency (remember Kenneth Starr). And it ends by devouring its children. Mr Spitzer is only the latest in an endless line of self-righteous crusaders impaled on their own swords.”

I was also happy to find an article about my own neighborhood in the magazine. (You can view it here.) It spoke of gentrification and the current residents’ complaints against it. I hold a unique view on the whole situation. As a white person, I seem like one of those gentrifying types that the locals seem so concerned about but, in actuality, I worry about my own rent going up just as much as the people who have lived here forever. My apartment is just down the street from the new Super Target that they’re building and I’m real scared about what that’s going to do to my rent when it opens up this fall just before my lease renews. I can’t afford any rent increases any more than my fellow Harlemites can. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating rent control at all (Note to self: You really need to write an article on rent control because you speak of it as though everyone already knows your thoughts but they really don’t.), I’m just saying that I worry about the neighborhood getting “too nice” too.

Moving on. I spent a ridiculous amount of time today launching a new blog. I’ve really been trying to think of ways to promote my new business lately and came to the conclusion that creating a blog on website design, development, and marketing would be a good start. Please visit the blog - NYC Web Design - and give me any feedback that you have. I ended up using WordPress instead of Blogger for it and was pretty happy with it after I downloaded it myself instead of using 1&1’s default version. I’ll probably be switching this blog over to WordPress soon too so that I can get rid of that annoying top bar.

Finally, I wanted to share a laugh with you all. I found a site today that offers face-recognition software comparing your face with celebrities. It seemed like a cool deal and so I submitted a picture. I was a little surprised by the results so I submitted another. This happened a couple times and I ended up sending them four different pictures. The strange thing is that of the resulting 32 celebrities (each picture delivered eight) there were no duplicates. Even stranger is the fact that none of the pictures delivered the name Billy Zane, which I get from people all the time. Strangest of all is the fact that they returned Charlize Theron as the celebrity I looked most like for one of the pictures. I don’t, do I? Click here to view the results of my photos. And, check out myheritage.com to find your look-alikes. Even though they’re not accurate, they certainly are funny. Oh, and make sure to share them with me. I can always use a good laugh.

Nobody told me that it would itch this much. As most of you already know (I publicized the hell out of it) I got a tattoo of an eagle on my back last week. (You can see the photo here.) What you may not know is that getting a tattoo involves a great deal of physical discomfort. I mean, I knew it would sting a bit, but I was really surprised how much getting it done actually hurt and then it was sore for like four days and ever since it has been itching like crazy. And I can’t itch it. But it itches so bad…

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. Who the hell cares, right? So, I went to CitySearch today to post a positive comment for the place where I got my tattoo, Red Rocket Tattoo. I did so and then the site automatically, without asking me, pops up some thing saying that they were importing my review into Facebook. Um, no. That was, officially, the last time I ever used CitySearch. If they want to try sneaky shit like that, they better find someone else to visit their site. Plus, they have like the slowest servers in the world and make you answer a ridiculous amount of questions just to post a review. I don’t really know why I dealt with them at all before. Anyway, from now on, I’m using Google Maps for local search (until something better comes along). By the way, if you know of a better local search, let me know.

Wow, that was a little rant on a soap box. It may have something to do with the fact that I’m reading a book about web marketing and it talks about how much importance bloggers have in swaying consumer opinion. I don’t think I really fall into that category, though, because there aren’t too many people reading this blog.

And why not? Well, I’ve been thinking about that too. The most popular blogs are those that focus on a specific topic. If I decided to publish a web design blog or a running blog or a beer blog (why not?) it would get a better response than this general/personal/nonsensical blog that I have up now. Then again, that whole writing for an audience thing seems to take a lot of fun out of writing. I mean, yeah Web 2.0 gives more of a voice to individuals but, really, most people are ignored as always. If you want to be popular, you have to really make being popular your goal and strive for it. That’s not how I want to spend my free time. I see self-promotion as work. When I’m out browsing the internet commenting on blogs, posting links to myself, etc. I consider that work. It’s not fun. This blog, however, I consider a recreation. I’m writing this for, as Austin Powers would say, “shits and giggles.” Sure, I drop a link in to my projects here and there, but overall, this is just a cathartic release. If you read my first post on this thing you’d know that I’m really not writing for anyone other than myself.

Moving on. So, last time I talked to you (by you, I mean the infinite abyss known as the blogosphere) I was employed. Now, I’m not. Some would call me self-employed. But, really, that’s just a fancy name for unemployed. I hope you laughed at that. But, the truth is, I’m not as self-employed as I had hoped to be. This whole advertising and getting clients thing sucks. I just want to write awesome code and design kick-ass sites. I don’t want to have to convince people that they should be paying me to do so. I have ad campaigns running on Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter, plus I’ve been trolling the ads on Craigslist and Kijiji, but I’m turning up a whole lotta nothin’. Thank god, my biggest client, Precision Prospects, has plenty of work for me and has been able to bump up my hours a bit because, to be honest with you, there’s not a lot else coming in right now.

And, now a word from our advertisers: (a.k.a. me) If you need web design work or know someone who does, please visit my NYC Web Design company’s website and consider us for the job. We do good work for a fair price.

The good news is that all this free time has allowed me to catch up on a lot of projects that I had in my queue. One of the coolest is the running charts I did on my site East Coast Runners (which has finally moved up to #2 in Google’s rankings for “east coast runners” and #1 with the quotes). I made them from scratch using the PHP GD image class. For those of you who have no idea what I just said, don’t worry, it was pretty nerdy. Basically, I was just saying that I wrote the code to draw the pictures by hand. Or, as some would call it, I re-invented the wheel again.

Truly, though, I’ve been better about not re-inventing wheels lately. I just upload 6 videos to YouTube today. I used to host them on my site, but I don’t have the ability to offer streaming video and frankly, I’m not willing to spend the time or money necessary to do so. So, instead of doing it myself, I just moved them to YouTube. Plus, they’ll probably get more attention out there than they would have on my lonely little site.

Other recent projects include the reorganization of plant ink (more improvements are coming soon) and the addition of Google search to the Five Fish List. Check them out if you get a chance.

Well, I have to be at “work” at 9:30 tomorrow so I should probably call it quits for tonight. I hope you’ve enjoyed my nonsense. If so, feel free to comment — I still haven’t gotten any comments on this thing. And, even if you didn’t enjoy it, feel free to comment and let me know how I can make this better. ‘night.

p.s. This had nothing to do with strippers. That sucks if that’s the only reason that you read this. It seems as though you have wasted your time.