.:Gotta Drop a Blog in The Corner:.

i woke up sunday to an email from my friend.

*insert trash talk*

On that bright note....for your birthday present, Canada will win gold just for you. I know, it's everything you could ask for.

well according to them, i got exactly what i was wishing for for my birthday. i received a nice text from them after the game.

Told u that Canadian gold was for u

you have to love how friends are always lookin out. i didn't even know that's what i was wishing for either. how come it felt like such a letdown afterwards? congratulations to canada. it was a really good game.

i'll tell you what though, as a sabres fan, i really enjoyed watching ryan miller going through the line for handshakes and meeting up with lindy ruff. i'm happy for lindy, for his role in serving as assistant coach for team canada, and i'm glad the sabres have him as their hc (longest tenured one in the league too 200 coaching changes have happened since he was named head coach for buffalo btw). watching ruff take a couple extra seconds to console miller on the loss... doing what coaches do... just great to see two buffalo guys representing their countries. can i also tell you how much i like the line for handshakes at the end of games tradition in hockey? it's just a classy tradition that goes all the way down to the lowest levels of hockey. i remember going through those lines win or lose, right glove under left arm, shake, and perhaps give a tap of your stick to your opponents goalie pads if they had a monster game.

so... back to the regular season now. i hope miller's hungrier than ever after that loss. i'm pretty sure being the goalie that shuts down the western conference opponent in the cup finals would be an adequate way to get rid of this bad taste. who knows... maybe it'll be luongo and the canucks come june. now if we can just get past the senators........

i also noticed it was yahoo's birthday. they've been around for 15 years (officially). it's about half of my life. it feels like they've been around for so much longer.

i ended up getting a package from a friend. it was a framed blobfish made of felt.

blobfishes auto-magically put me in better moods. just look at it! how can you not laugh when you see one? it's got this awesome nose looking thing. i want to pinch.

some new shirt.woot shirts that crack me up.

this one is the newest, and doesn't have it's own page yet, so the link may not be be correct after today. in that event you should be able to find it in the bystanders section of the reckoning page. i like what the lady says. greatest thing since...
sliced bread

self-explanatory.
mug shot

i especially like the description blurb they wrote up about this one, especially the mention of dexy's midnight runners and huey lewis and the news.
race for the cure

got some stuff coming up this week. gonna ask for some good vibes if you've got some to spare. hope you all have good weekends.

the all important vote for health reform is supposed to come tomorrow. though there has been legislation and "reform" over the last ~50 years, this is a seismic shift (even though it really isn't). there will be a federal mandate for everyone to get coverage by 2014 or face penalties. the private insurance system will stay, but they will no longer be able to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. they will actually get an influx of new customers with the federal mandate. on the one hand this could be a good thing as risk will be spread out over a larger pool of people. however there will not be a public option, which i think is a mistake. in the end my view is that government should provide health care. a federally managed plan would be able to spread the risk across the most users. additionally due to the size, they would be able to negotiate for lower cost of care and receive better rates from pharmaceutical companies and others. private insurance will never be able to achieve these economies of scale, as they operate as an oligopoly with a handful of them covering the majority of americans, but with none being the most dominant. even if there was a dominant private insurer, i don't know if i would trust what they would do with the health data they could mine from tens of millions of people. sure government could also use all that information against us, but at least there is some power in the fact that we elect people who form the teams to run these agencies. with a corporation, one would have to own stock to be able to have any say in these companies.

what really caught my attention about all of this this weekend is how tea party people are a bunch of douches. even though i don't really feel taxes are terrible on a federal level, i can accept that people are upset that there will be more taxes levied due to all these government programs, but seriously... is there any reason to hurl racial epithets around? the funny thing about the tea party protesters are that their big name supporters/spokespeople are the most mentally challenged (glenn beck? sarah palin?) people i've ever listened to. on top of that, they take their name from the boston tea party which happened because the colonists were upset because they were being taxed without any representation. we've had representation in the US at the federal, state, and local level for a long time. the best thing people can do if they're upset is VOTE those dead weight representatives OUT! however, people just don't vote anymore. voter participation is pretty horrendous here in the states. people who do end up voting also don't seem to educate themselves about the candidates either. i may have posted this before, but if you haven't seen it... really... you need to watch this video on sarah palin "supporters". how exactly would anyone even respond to these people?

so i've been playing around with drupal lately. this place has been pretty stagnant for awhile. i feel like it's time to spruce it up or call it quits. it seems like every time i post, it's always a rant. anyways, in doing some consulting work, i have been planning on launching a drupal site for the project i'm working on as the portal. i'm still figuring out the nuts and bolts of the application i'm building though. i've hit some brick walls as of late. anyone know how to display certain blob datatypes in mysql? yes it is amusing that there are different blob datatypes in sql. there are pluses and minuses for storing binary data within the database itself, and i have been leaning towards doing that... but i may have to switch gears and take the "easier" route.

i'll leave you guys with some funny. enjoy the rest of your weekend.

thank you congress-people for passing some form of health reform and allowing it to go to president obama for signature. this has been 40 some years in the making... and while it probably would have been easier to get it done decades ago before health care got so complicated, it's progress. i know it won't technically go into effect fully for a couple more years (and even then, i suppose it'll be appealable), it's a hurdle that has finally been cleared. the bill's imperfect, but i'll keep telling myself baby steps. eventually, i think a public program will be the best option to go. we have an increasingly global society... and to get ahead of new diseases and control their spread (both infectious and chronic), we need to be able to find data to back up our decisions. with a government run health system... we'll have the capability of having standardized care, and use of best practices. i don't see private insurance disappearing completely though. some people may want to subscribe to coverage over and above what the public option may provide. i don't see anything wrong with that... as long as everyone is guaranteed a minimum (i don't like the word when it pertains to health care... so let's use standard) level of health coverage. with a federal option it will also level the playing field between states too. while medicare is fully funded at the federal level for the elderly, currently medicaid is funded through the federal government, with the state and local governments pitching in. some states provide a number of services while others don't provide much. this affects the level of care for those who may be affected in lower socio-economic levels in some states... and really hit tax payers hard in other states.

the other thing i wanted to comment on is the whole "baby killer" statement from randy neugebauer made in congress. i was doing some research a couple days ago and could find trustworthy verifiable data from 2006 on both legal reported abortions, and numbers of individuals without health insurance. in the US in 2006 there were 835,134 legal abortions reported by the centers for disease control. obviously one should keep in mind that illegal abortions are also performed, so the total number of abortions will be higher. through survey and sampling techniques, the cdc reported 43.6 million people were uninsured in 2006. using surveys may not give the most accurate data, and the figures may differ to a higher degree than if individuals were mandated to report their status to the local, state, or federal government... but i would think that their calculations would take into account an alpha level, error, and sample size which make the results more or less valid. there were 43.6 million people were without insurance in 2006. people without insurance generally have worse health outcomes, and so we would expect a greater number of those without insurance to have higher mortality rates, and higher cost of care as well since they will seek care when they are most desperate, usually leading to a higher burden on the health care system. so my question to those who are opposed to the abortion language in the bill, do we stop abortions and hurt those who ARE living by not passing health reform? looking at this from a fiscal/economic standpoint (and the republican party is generally a party of both fiscal and social conservatives)... abortions actually save money! those who choose abortion may very well do it because they know they cannot support a child. children in lower SES brackets generally have worse health outcomes. due to their SES status, they are often enrolled in medicaid, so their health coverage is covered by tax payers anyways. since they need more care over their lifespan, it actually will cost tax payers more versus being aborted where they may cost the tax payers only the cost of the service. if the parent(s) don't choose abortion and they don't make enough or work at a place to afford insurace, and make too much to be covered by medicaid, they join the ranks of those that are uninsured... whom tax payers will still have to pay for if they seek emergency care and can't afford to pay the bill. now i can't say that i'm pro-abortion... but i think the choice is not up to me, and i do think there are cases that can be made for it. it isn't my body though... and i can't imagine women (and their partners that are involved) who choose that route to look forward to going through with the process.

this leads me to the last thing... sex-ed. why social conservatives are against teaching about this... and condom/contraceptive distribution is beyond me. i would think this is the easiest way to prevent abortions from happening. people (children) should know what may happen if certain events transpire. they should know how to manage and best prevent things that they don't want to happen. teaching abstinence is great and all, and is the only way to prevent pregnacies, tranmission of std's etc... but is it really practical in today's world? if there's a problem... it needs to be addressed, you can't just hide and pretend it's not there. give people options and tools to prevent the occurance! from a fiscal viewpoint the cost of condoms < the cost of an abortion < the cost of healthcare for an individual. for social conservatives... would you be willing to help raise the child who you so want to come into the world? or are you just fighting for a fetuses right to be born, but then ignore the fact that there may be a future individual who may be suffering because they live in a broken home and/or have worse health outcomes?

oh... and i'd also like to thank t.c... whom i started this blog with for helping me figure out what was going on with my php/mysql blob code today. thank you despite the fact that you never post anything anymore.

things are progressing and moving nicely. i've been in a good zone with writing and debugging code. it's been awhile since i've really felt like i'm actually engaging in something that is challenging but fun. the thing with writing stuff for the web that i've always liked is there are so many ways one can get the final product accomplished. i'm not the most creative person, but there's at least some creativity that goes into any solution that's presented. the other thing i like about doing this stuff is that i can get instantaneous results, and it's easy to correct errors (for the most part). i've also always been fascinated with how things can connect and work together too. i've had this obsession which started in college with getting all the different operating systems to talk and share files with one another. if you ask tc, he'll tell you about my computers with 4 or 5 operating systems installed on them. this was before software like vmware, parallels, etc. made it relatively easy to do in a virtual machine. the interwebs is pretty cool if you think about everything that's behind it. all those webpages these days are no longer static html pages. most run on some server which processes dynamic content in the form of mainly php, asp, jsp. this content may or may not be stored in a database such as mysql, mssql server, db2, oracle sql. if you think about how the internet has pretty much allowed the flow of information from one person to another (as long as access is not restricted), it probably wouldn't surprise you that many of the programs and standards that the internet runs on are open source. for example the servers that connect the network together are increasingly run on open source variants of linux or bsd unix. the most popular web server is none other than the open source apache webserver. both mysql and php are open as well. what does this mean? well for starters it lets everyone who is interested into a community of participants. it's actually interesting when you develop programs how willing people are to help you out if you post a question on a board, despite the fact that you may be some anonymous person halfway around the world. it's just another form or blogging if you think about it. i don't want to jinx the flow.. but hopefully it'll continue. i wouldn't want to run into a bunch of code syntax problems like searching through a hundred lines of code to find out i forgot a semi-colon or bracket somewhere. that has always been the part i hated about writing code.

i do have one more techie thought to add. now i don't know why such a large company like adobe can't fix this, "(cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on flash-based storage devices)". for all of their products that install on os x, you can't install onto a disk if it has a case-sensitive filesystem. however if you use the windows version of their products... you can install it onto a windows ntfs partition which by default is case-sensitive. what's frustrating is that os x is actually based on unix... and the unix standard is to have a case-sensitive file system. whether a person wants to choose a file system that can and can't tell the difference between "A" and "a" is up to the person, but i actually came over to the mac BECAUSE their new computers were based on x86 hardware (i could run windows natively if i want) AND because os x was based on unix (though apparently it doesn't keep to the standards). i just think it's a blemish on adobe's part that i still can't install pshop or dreamweaver on my mac in os x because of this stupid limitation... but i've got it installed on my boot camp windows partition on my macbook.

i along with many other sabres fans can appreciate how leafs fans feel when toronto plays buffalo. post lockout (2004) the sabres are 26-8-0-1 against the leafs in regular season play winning 10 straight so far. with the sens winning tonight, ottawa is 25-6-1-3 against the sabres in regular season play and just notched their 9th straight. we're even for the playoffs during that same period of time with each team taking a series. however seeing how ottawa has been doing so well when they play the sabres, i am hoping we don't meet them in the first round and even the 2nd. actually out of all the teams in the eastern conference who look to be close, or are close to heading into the playoffs, i'm the most afraid of ottawa because they just have had our number for so long. i think they have some sort of curse on us. washington and pittsburgh are scary for different reasons. i don't necessarily dread playing them because they have more skilled talent... so if we get blown out by ovechkin and the caps, i wouldn't be surprised. when we have played them though, we've done well and have won games. i think if we play our system, roll 4 lines with timely offense we might do pretty well playing most teams. there aren't many squads that can match our depth, but we are also smaller compared to other teams and can get pushed around easier. if we get into a battle of player conditioning, i think our depth will help out more since our style is to use speed to pester and grind down opponents. all of this goes out the window against the senators though. it just doesn't work. with the standings today, we will play montreal and ottawa will play pittsburgh. if that ends up being the final seeding, i will be hoping the pens can eliminate the sens. in the meantime... atlanta's 9 points behind ottawa and are 9th in the conference with a game in hand and 8 to play. i normally wouldn't support teams south of pennsylvania, but in this case... i'm hoping for a thrasher win streak and an epic collapse by the senators.

i haven't used chat roulette yet, cause i still think it's creepy. however merton has a new video out. check out the first one at the bottom if you haven't seen it.