Archive for December, 2004

Christmas gifts that keep on giving

Wednesday, December 29th, 2004

From the Associated Press:

Roy Colette and his brother-in-law have been exchanging the same pair of pants as a Christmas present for 11 years – and each time the package gets harder to open. This year the pants came wrapped in a car mashed into a 3-foot cube.

The trousers are in the glove compartment of a 1974 Gremlin. Now Collette’s plotting his revenge–if he can get them out. Read the rest of this entry »

End of year list resources, part I

Monday, December 27th, 2004

For those of you interested in creating your top ten movies of 2004 list, here’s a complete list of the movies of 2004, sorted by date of release, that includes how much the films cost and how much they’ve made so far.

Holiday greetings from the baby sister

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004

The Army and Air Force “Hometown News Network” made it possible for soldiers serving overseas to record holiday greetings videos for the family back home.

Here’s my sister’s, Captain Meister, holiday greetings video.

The Winter countdown …

Friday, December 17th, 2004

As you can probably see, I added a countdown to Spring to the top of the journal.

I created it as a self-taught lesson about creating dynamic images through PHP and the GD library. When the page is accessed, the web server reads in the script that generates the image and then contacts the NOAA weather site to get the current temperature for the Cleveland lakefront area. The server then calculates the number of days between now and the first day of Spring and finally creates forty random snowflakes and scatters them across the image. Once all that is combined with the background picture, the resulting image is sent to your web browser.

If you refresh your browser window, you’ll see the snow change.

A nearly useless waste of computing power, but still fun none-the-less.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Thursday, December 9th, 2004

The first teaser trailer is up.

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