Making Hash Browns

xkcd

Makin’ Music with John Mayer

Hilarious how-to video from John Mayer and Funny or Die

The Wii Remote - Will It Blend?

Blending two Wiimotes

It’s been a long, loooong time in coming, but I think I’m finally ready to unveil the new look of Breathingfire.com. I started this particular design (one of many I’ve started but never finished,) in February for what was going to be the new look of my personal website. After switching things over to here, and getting a nice break from school, I was finally able to finish it up.

I’d like to stress that this is an entirely original design, all coded in CSS and XHTML 1.0 Strict by hand from the ground up. I only say that because I’ve been using someone else’s template for my blog for maybe 2 years now, and I’m quite proud to be back in the game. Some straggling items may cause some invalidations, but I’m trying to fix them all. Also, if you happen to run into anything weird looking, please let me know.

I’d like to take a second to praise the Wordpress team for their fine product. I’m using Wordpress 2.5.1, and it’s magnificent. It makes running a blog and a website so much easier than it could be. It’s written entirely in PHP, so templates are easily laced with the proper functions and conditional statements. Extra functionality is made easier (and more securely, by not having to touch the main Wordpress code) by plugins. Right now I’m running 12 plugins to manage things from comment spam to movie reviews to emails and more. It’s really a thing of beauty. And finally, the support community at the Wordpress forums are invaluable. They’ve gotten me out of quite a few jams.

As you can see, this design pays particular attention to my interests, represented by all the junk at the top. While it’s just 1 or 2 images making up the collage now, maybe someday I’ll get around to making it interchangeable.

The Most Popular Posts list bases popularity on things like the number of views, comments and ping backs a post gets. Right now, my NBA Playoffs bracket is going gangbusters and is getting lots of comments so it’s number 1.

My del.icio.us links are scattered throughout the main posting column, and I’ll be adding to that whenever I come across something interesting. You can spot these by the white, blue, black and grey de.licio.us logo next to the post.

My latest movie review is shown on the side, with a link to the rest of the reviews. On other pages than the home page, you will see links to posts similar to the one you’re on.

I’m trying to find a way to list songs from my Mac itunes playlist, but I’ve been unsuccessful so far. That might get replaced. Also, I’m looking into doing a podcast of some sorts. More on that later.

Anyways, thanks for stopping by to take a look. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. I appreciate it! And make sure to stop on by frequently or add my RSS feed to your reader of choice (I prefer Netvibes, myself.)

Many people know that I’m a big Detroit Pistons fan. Shannon asked me what the one thing I wanted to do on my birthday was, and I said go to a Pistons game. I’m not really sure why I like them so much, or why I like following the NBA so much. It’s not really a sport that a person like me (or people in general, I guess) can relate to. A lot of rich guys play a game where most of the time it seems like money comes before the love of the sport. But I like the match-ups, I like the stars, and I like the coverage. I like how it had that edge to it, and I love watching big plays happen.

Right now the Detroit Pistons are playing the Philadelphia 76ers in round 1 of the NBA Playoffs. In game 3 and the first half of game 4, they were looking pretty bad. They were giving up the ball a lot on mistakes, taking bad shots, and losing their cool. So at halftime the coach said to them “Are you having fun? Because it looks like you’re not having fun.” That and a little speech by Antonio McDyess (fresh off a broken nose) turned things around and now, a game and a half later as the Pistons are on the cusp of winning the series, they’re having fun. They decided to not worry so much about winning and worry more about whether they are enjoying their work.

I found this to be in common with the sand volleyball team I played on last year. It was me and a bunch of my buddies. We thought it would be fun to get together every week and play some volleyball. We were all pretty capable players, and we all liked playing. But a lot of the times, we sucked. Bad. We made mistakes, we got in each other’s way, and tempers flared. A few times we left after the games without saying much at all to each other. We’re all pretty competitive, and things weren’t going the way we’d like.

But I think the thing that got us the most is that we didn’t have fun with it. We worried so much about winning, about getting every point we could and beating each team that we forgot to just have fun playing ball. I’m definitely one of the biggest culprits, because I want to win so badly. I wanted to prove to my friends and the people around me that I could be a winner, and that I could be good at volleyball. And it’s tough, man. You want to have fun, and maybe things start out that way. But there’s always a score, and that feeling of embarrassment when the ball hits the ground in front of you and you were supposed to hit it. So fun gets thrown oout the window as you get a little more serious about things.

I don’t know, maybe I’m not good enough to have fun and do well at the same time. But I’ve done it before, somehow. And I know it’s much easier, and a much better time, to just have fun. So I’ll try to remember that in the future.

My favorites, based on stories and works I’ve enjoyed (mostly for my own archival purposes):

1. Alan Moore (Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, Batman: Killing Joke)
2. Geoff Johns (Green Lantern, Infinite Crisis, 52)
3. Frank Miller (Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Sin City, 300)
4. Grant Morrison (JLA, Seven Soldiers of Victory, 52, Final Crisis)
5. Brian Michael Bendis (Avengers Disassembled, Secret Invasion)
6. Judd Winick (Batman: Red Hood)
7. Mark Waid (Kingdom Come, JLA, 52)
8. Alan Grant (Batman)
9. Brad Meltzer (Identity Crisis, Justice League)
10. Kurt Busiek (MARVELS, Astro City)
11. Jack Kirby (DC Fourth World)
12. Larry Hama (G.I. Joe)
13. Gerry Conway (Justice League)
14. Jeph Loeb (Batman: Long Halloween, Batman: Hush)
15. Gail Simone (Villains United)

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is the best comic series ever. I just wrote an essay about it for my Liberal Studies class. Frank Miller co-directed the movie adaption of his comic Sin City, which turned out to be the best comic book movie ever. He also wrote 300, which is another great movie. The rest of them you probably wouldn’t have heard of before unless you’re into comics.

Yo, check out this hot new mixtape I made. I made it on boomshuffle.com which is a pretty sweet site. They have pretty much everything as far as music goes. Some people they didn’t have much of, and Michael Jackson was broken so I couldn’t get songs from him or he’d be up in here with some Billy Jean or something off Bad for sure.

Update: Ok, that broke. Nevermind!

I would like to thank the following people who took time out of their day to wish me a happy birthday:

My mom, Shan, both Grandmas, Dad & family, Shan’s G & G, Lauren, James, Aunt Bonnie, Ed, Dad Zoet, Robin, Brandon, Scott, my brotha, Chris, Shan’s mom, Kevin, doahleigh readers, Andrea, Emily and Adam K. (which, surprising comes out to about the magic number of 28)
You guys are awesome and I love you all. Thank you for thinking of me.

I received a bunch of nice cards, some spending money, an awesome 2-years-in-the-making Batman quilt from Shan, candy from the Zoet sisters, an Amazon gift card from Scott, and more exciting goodies.

Plus the festivities are only beginning, as Shannon and I will be cheering on the Detroit Pistons this Friday as they take on the New Jersey Nets. She asked me the one thing I want to do on my birthday, I told her, and she made it happen. I can’t wait.

Thanks again to everyone. Your love and attention is more than I could ever ask for.

Desire Paths

Photos of paths that people make on their own in spite of planned walkways

I made a simple little web thingy that compares the number of Google search results returned for two terms, and presents them as two parts of a pie chart.

You can check it out here. Update: Got all I needed, thanks!

It’s extremely primitive right now, but I made it for a class project and I’ll probably be adding more to it as time goes on. Thus the list of ToDos at the bottom of the page.

Any help with how it works, how you expected it to work, or suggestions for features would be very nice. I would appreciate it!