Superbowl bets with friends are always better when they don't involve money, but rather something else that will haunt them for the entire rest of the year.

I made such a bet with a coworker and a roommate. The bet was that if the Giants won, they (both Bostoners and HUGE Sox fans) would have to wear Yankees hats during the Yankees/Sox games this season. Well, suffice it so say, they were not very thrilled about last night's outcome. Not only did their beloved cheaters lose (I mean what's more patriotic than spying?), but they will be reminded of it every few weeks for the next 10 months.

So I found out about an awesome feature of Vim when writing my last post. You may have noticed my super sexy syntax highlighting on the code snippets. This was actually very easy to do. All you have to do is higlight the code you want to HTMLify and use (link here)

:TOhtml

Also, you can use these nice presets in your $HOME/.vimrc to make the HTML nicer and to use CSS

115 let g:html_use_css = 1
116 let g:html_use_encoding = "utf8"
117 let g:use_xhtml = 1

So if you've been here a few times, or just hit refresh once or twice, you might notice that my header changes. But you might also notice that no matter what pictures is up there, the bottom right always says "thefotios dot org".

I'm going to explain how I do that in a few steps here so that others may also do it. First thing you want to do is set up a div for the header. Inside this div I have the maintitle (where the image is) and a subtitle (where a witty remark is). Like so:

19 <div id="header">
20   <div class="maintitle">
21     <img id="overlay" src="/images/overlay.png" alt="thefotios.org" />
22   </div>
23   <div class="subtitle">
24     Some witty remark (or perhaps a script to generate witty remarks)
25   </div>
26 </div>

Notice the src tag on the 'overlay' img. That is a png I created here. Using Photoshop or your other favorite photo editor, greate an overlay with a transparant background. In my example, I chose to have a gradiant background so that the white of my text would show up no matter what the colors of the image are. You notice this the most on the background with the Golden Gate Bridge.

Next you want to set the CSS for the .maintitle div. Notice it loads the random.cgi script as the background image. The CGI script is really just a redirector to an image.

Here's the CSS:

26 #header .maintitle {
27   background : url(/random.cgi);
28 }

And here is the CGI:

 1 #!/usr/bin/perl
 2 use File::Find ();
 3 use strict;
 4 
 5 my @images = ();
 6 
 7 File::Find::find(
 8   { wanted =>
 9     sub {
10       /^.*\.jpg\z/s && push(@images,${*File::Find::name})
11     }
12   },
13   'images/headers/'
14 );
15 printf "Location: %s\n\n",$images[rand @images];

The only other thing you have to do is decide on the image size, and crop some images to that size and put them in a /images/headers folder.

So now if you put all of that together you get a div with the overlay as an image and then it loads the background behind it, thus creating a random image with a constant heading.

Now I'm not usually one to comment on politics or anything, but I rememberd the primaries were tonight, so I figured I would check up on how things were going.

Here is a choice quote from the CNN headline:

Exit polls showed issues swayed Democrats but Republicans were moved by personality

Gee...who didn't see that coming?

I wasn't surprised by the fact that John McCain is projected to win the GOP primary. Afterall, he was the last decent Republican to run for office, and would probably be that failing party's best chance at staying in power.

I also was not surprised by the fact that the Clinton/Obama race is in a dead heat (right now it is 39/36 in favor of Clinton, but only 40% of precincts reporting. But here are some intersting statistics: Hillary Clinton is preferred by:

• Women, people over 40, married women, and working women
• People who would have voted for Bill if he was running
• People with no college degree, don't work full-time, and make less than $50k
• People who care more about experience and caring than about electability and ability to bring about change
• People who either made up their mind today or more than a month ago (ie nobody actually influenced by the debates and facts)
• People who think everybody but Clinton ran 'the most unfair campaign'

Having watched the carefully choreographed circus that is whenever Hillary is on TV, I am genuinely surprised at how artificial and flip floppy she is. Stephen Colbert runs a report on her cackling laugh, result: haven't heard that in months. Somebody calls her cold and calculating, result: she sheds a tear claiming that she has such great plans for this country. And don't even get me started on the fact that she should not have been a Senator from New York, having never lived in the state before that and having not done jack for us since.

Now I'm not Political Scientist (I'll leave that to the unemployed), but most of those categories strike me as those that are voting more on gut feelings than on the issues. But who cares right? We know politicians will do and say anything to get elected, do nothing they promised, and then do or say anything to get re-elected. It's a flawed system and the only people who have the power to do anything about it are the elected officials. Guess we didn't really think that one through did we?

Sprint sucks. I just want to get that out there off the bat. Their service sucks, their cell phones suck, even the people who get paid minimum wage to work their shiny, shitty stores suck.

My old phone (Samsung A840) was bad from the moment I got it. The battery life was horrible, it hardly got full signal strength, and it would drop half of my calls. This only got worse. By the end, it would randomly shut itself off or it would freeze, so it looked like it was on, but I couldn't do anything except pull the battery out. Add to that the fact that more than half of my calls would go straight to voicemail, or sometimes my phone would ring but there wouldn't be anybody there when I picked up (they said it would just stop ringing, then nothing).

Finally, I was in Pentagon City, so I decided to stop by the Sprint store I had been passing. If nothing else, with pipe dreams of burning the place down. The "technician" told me that my software was out of date and that the battery was bad because I charged it too much. So they took it over night to update my software. The next day I went back there to retrieve it to find that all of my contacts were gone (except Lewk and Jordan) and that my phone had passed all diagnostic tests.

Maybe I was just imagining things. But probably not. So I went home to lament. That night, I got cut off of a few more phone conversations and was all to close to throwing the phone at the wall (which was the fate of my last phone that I "lost hiking" [1]). I vowed to go back to the Sprint store the next day and exact my revenge (which was convenient because I had to go to Macy's to have them take a security tag off of a rather expensive shirt I bought, gotta love security).

So I walk in there and speak to a different technician who calmly told me that there wasn't even a record of my phone being serviced or returned, only that it needed updates. Well I assured her that I was in fact holding the phone in my hand, and that it was still having the problems. She told me they could run diagnostics. I politely told her an appropriate orifice in which she could place her diagnostics that my phone had already passed. Then she told me they could give me a "new" phone, but it would take until Friday. I told her that it was rediculous that they could screw up that badly, then tell me I would be without a phone for a week. Miraculously she happened to find the exact model I needed in the back with all of 5 minutes of looking.

So there I was with my brand new refurbished Samsung A640. Somehow the model numbers go down, but the phone was the next model in that line, although this one was also discontinued, more on that later. So far, I have no complaints about this phone. It still has the same crappy interface the other one had, but at least this one has a crippled Bluetooth device.

Now here's where some more fun happens. I call home to tell my parents and brother, who have the same phone as me about what I did so that they can exchange theirs too. Overjoyed, they went out to a Sprint store within minutes. My brother came home within 45 minutes with a brand new m500 phone, their newest phone in that line complete with MP3 player, SD card slot, GPS, and useful Bluetooth. All of this without them even having to run "diagnostics".

I called Sprint to ask why I got a shitty refurbished phone and why he got a nice new phone. Their answer? It depends on what's in stock and what the store manager feels like doing for you. Apparantly they can call in for a replacement phone from some warehouse, leaving you with no phone for however long it takes, or they can just give you whatever they want right off the shelf. Translation: I got boned because the manager didn't like me or something.

So I reiterate. Sprint sucks. Maybe next time I'm home, I'll try to exchange this phone and see what they give me...

Ok, well I finally got off my lazy ass and unpacked my 250G drive that was sitting in storage for almost 3 months, hooked it up to my old busted Linux laptop, and got my blog off of it. Then I moved it over to atarininja.org so it would actually have a home considering my machine is somewhere in the basement (read: not running or near the internet), that and I think the drive is sitting here on the desk. I am really going to try this time to blog a little more often, and maybe throw in some bits of knowledge or book/movie reviews, or maybe a bit about our latest rock climbing escapades. Only time will tell... As for now, it's sleep time

Well this is my new home. After a few days of tweaking and whatnot, I finally got PyBlosxom running and set up the way I like it. I made this layout (or "flavour") from scratch using some examples and the references. It was a really good refresher on HTML and CSS. I also started using jQuery a bit, and hope to use it more in the future. Let me know what you think or if you encounter any errors (somehow it seems to work fine in both Firefox and IE for me).

So tomorrow Cathy (my girlfriend) and I are heading out to Davis, CA to start our cross-country adventure back to Long Island. She went to grad school out there and needs to move her new car and other belongings back. So why ship it when we can drive it all back?

I made a nice route yesterday morning that goes a little out of the way, but definitely makes the trip worthwhile.

Here is the full route

Here are the legs of it, if you have any suggestions of places to see or avoid along those routes, please let me know.

• Day 1: Davis, CA to Yosemite National Park, CA
• Day 2: Yosemite National Park, CA to Lake Tahoe (specifically Crystal Bay, NV)
• Day 3: Crystal Bay, NV to Salt Lake City, UT
• Day 4: Salt Lake City, UT to Yellowstone National Park, WY
• Day 5: Yellowstone National Park
• Day 6: Yellowstone National Park, WY to Mount Rushmore, SD
• Day 7: Mount Rushmore, SD to Rocky Mountain National Park, CO
• Day 8: Rocky Mountain National Park
• Day 9: Rocky Mountain National Park, CO to Lincoln, NE
• Day 10: Lincoln, NE to Chicago, IL
• Day 11: Chicago. IL to Cleveland, OH
• Day 12: Cleveland, OH to Huntington Station, NY

Total: 4,214 mi (about 70 hours of driving)

The 16 states we'll see: California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York

I purchased a new lens for my trip across the country.

I went with the versatility because it is only my second lens and I felt that even though the "all-in-one" products tend to not be as good, I thought it would be better in the mid-range than the stock 28-80 that I have.

Hopefully I'll get some awesome landscapes in the 4 National Parks I plan on visiting in the next 12 days, or maybe some good wildlife and touristy scenes. Who knows, this will definitely be a good opportunity to bring my photography to a whole new level. My professors said I have a good eye, but I feel limited by my subjects. I guess that's just something I'll have to develop as time goes on.

So this morning I finally graduated from college. Yesterday was a long ceremony, and to be quite honest I don't remember most of it. Mostly because the speakers were unremarkable, although Bill Clinton had some good things to say. This morning was mostly just pomp and circumstance, and it took all of 10 seconds for me to walk across the stage, shake some hands, and get my degree.

But hey, I'm done, and now it's time to move on to bigger and better things. Things are starting to come together with MITRE and moving down to DC, and everything should be settled by the end of July.