Life is a Highway...

George Lucas Should Have Use These Folks for Star Wars Episode I

Two people, Cary Ho and Calvin Ho (unsure about the relation), created a video and posted on the video website, YouTube.com. The contents of the video is something worth watching -- especially after you've seen the saber fight scene between Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul. The choreograph is very good and played out nicely. Mr. Lucas... George... you might look into hiring these guys.

Posted by John Highway at 07:00 PM | 0 Comments

My Blog Upgraded...

I've upgraded my blogging application to the newest version of MovableType ... as an early adopter -- I pretty much get the premiere package for free. This new version includes comment spam blocker... which I use heavily. What can I say, spammers like visiting my site.

Posted by John Highway at 08:01 PM | 2 Comments

Spend and Decorate Responsibly

Okay, you've seen all those ads from the Discover Card telling you how you can save each time you go out and buy Christmas decorations for your house and such (for the friendly competition you have with your neighbor trying to out-do each other)...

Well, this article from the Dayton Daily News ... shows one person with way too much time and way too much credit ;)

J/K the video is awesome and you should download it from the article.

Sheriff's deputies asked the owner who lit up his house with 25,000 Christmas lights synched to music to turn off the display after a traffic accident Tuesday night.

Deerfield Twp. resident Carson Williams agreed to shut down his holiday decorations indefinitely.

Williams told a Cincinnati television station that sheriff's deputies could not reach the traffic accident because of the traffic lined up in his neighborhood.

For more, read: Car crash, heavy traffic turn out Christmas light show

Posted by John Highway at 02:33 PM | 0 Comments

Prius Number Crunchers

Laura Adams of Bowie, Maryland, a neighborhood outside of Washington, D.C., bought her first-generation Prius in January 2002. "I've always been interested in finding alternate methods of fuel," she said. "I would love to have an electric vehicle, but this is the next best thing."

Adams drives about 50 miles a day to take her children to school and run errands. She wants the world to know that the idea that hybrids are slow is a misconception.

"Our traffic is No. 3 in the nation. I have no trouble merging into lanes and keeping up with traffic," she said. "That bothers me that people think I have to give something up to own this car. [Compared to other compact cars], I don't give up anything in terms of space or in terms of power."

What Adams has given up is high gasoline bills. Her average fuel economy from spring through fall is 48 miles per gallon. In the winter she averages 39 miles per gallon because it takes longer for the engine to warm and to work efficiently. Her all-time best is 57 miles per gallon.

The Prius Number Crunchers

Posted by John Highway at 10:25 AM | 0 Comments

Hurricane Katrina

TechTV Forever run by Eric Craft (and his team) and Long Live TechTV, run by Chris (densefive) and Mark (mrwebauthor) are banding together to try to get people to donate to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund http://www.redcross.org by posting banners and links at their group homepages and drawing attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on their message boards. At LLTTV they have a podcast called 535 York and which they record on Thursday nights about 10pm EST. Please join in Thursday in a moment of silence at the beginning of our podcast. The moment of silence will run from 10pm EST til 10:01pm EST to remember those that lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina. If you can not make the podcast please still observe a moment of silence. We are going to try to make this a continent wide moment of silence. So please spread the word.

Cyberwalker blog

Posted by John Highway at 01:24 PM | 0 Comments

Blame the Grandmother

With all this talk about the "Hot Coffee" mod for the console game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, that's been hitting the airwaves (both radio and television) and now politicians are jumping on this bandwagon to further his/her dying political careers, something like this infuriates me. Some 85-year-old grandmother has filed a lawsuit against Rockstar and TakeTwo for alleging misleading her and "damaging" her after she heard that the "M" rated game that she bought for her 14-year-old grandson contained sex-mini-game.

Give me a effin' break, lady. You purchased a "M" rated game (this means that only people of 17+ years-of-age should be playing this game) for your 14-year-old grandson. Let's do the math, 17 minus 14 ... if my calculations are correct, that's a 3-year difference. What are you doing purchasing an "M" rated game for a 14-year-old. If there's blame to be given, you should be blamed for your own lack of responsibility. Stop taking lessons from the politicians by shifting the blame -- no one forced you to buy the game. Okay, maybe your grandson forced you to buying the game, but then who's fault is that? The parents?

Pro-G - Prodigious Gaming: Grandmother files lawsuit against Take Two

Granted that there's a sex-mini-game within Grand Theft Auto, but did I find it an outrage... no. Would I buy this game or let anyone just play this game? If he/she is under 17 (or as it stands now, 18) -- no. Do I know the difference between game life versus real life? Hell Yeah!

Posted by John Highway at 01:39 AM | 0 Comments

Great Customer Service from Dell

Welcome to Dell Chat. Please wait for an available agent. You will be notified when your chat is accepted by an agent.
The session has been accepted.
{S****n 8:20:54 PM} Thank you for contacting Dell Consumer Customer Care Chat. My name is S*****s. How may I help you today?
{ 8:22:24 PM} The cleaning crew had accidentally thrown away all the supporting material and software...
{S****n 8:22:25 PM} As there is no response within the last two minutes. I will be ending this chat session. If you need additional support, please contact us at www.dellcustomercare.com. We will be more than happy to assist you. Thank you for visiting Dell Consumer Customer Care online chat.
{ 8:22:52 PM} and thrown into the compact dumpster.
{ 8:23:29 PM} I want to know if I can get a replacement for the laptop order that I just had received today.
{ 8:23:43 PM} replacement for the support material.
{S****n 8:24:00 PM} As I understand, you want to know if you can get a replacement for the support material. Is that correct?
{ 8:24:10 PM} yes
{S****n 8:24:36 PM} I'll certainly look into that right away.
{ 8:24:37 PM} e.g. the windows re-installation CD and all the other peripherials CDs.
{S****n 8:24:38 PM} May I have the order number or your customer number for your Dell account?

Continue reading "Great Customer Service from Dell"

Posted by John Highway at 09:44 PM | 2 Comments

MovableType on highwayman-DOT-org upgraded...

Finally upgraded my current version of MovableType from version 3.15 to version 3.16 which fixes one of the issues I was looking forward for, the notification feature :)

Posted by John Highway at 10:12 PM | 0 Comments

A Little Competition Brings Out the Devil...

As you might know from reading my blogging entries and from various websites, this site is offering FREE Gmail invites to anyone (just like http://www.isnoop.net/gmail) . This site also accept donations from other users with extra invites that they wish to give away. Something I thought might be fun was to assign point value for each invite donated and provide a high-score list for each user (can be removed from visibility if donator desires). Unfortuntely, this little friendly form of competition has caused some users to steal other invites from other websites and claiming as their own.

This came to be when one donator started sending me about 9,000+ invites. I originally took this user (macflashmx@gmail.com) at his/her word -- boy was I wrong. I ended up editing the database and clearing out the invites that were donated by the user. This work started last night at about 22:00 hours. Well, this got the user upset that his high score was returned back to a simple 96 invites.

I explained to him/her that the invites that was received was invalid (links didn't work and Google reported them as invalid) and some even had the little text '(used)' next to them, the kind you find on other people's website who publically posted them. I basically said that I don't need his grief and to take his invites elsewhere. So, this user writes back:

True, but not all of them were invlaid. The one that worked are the one that were counted. They were donating it and i took it and donate to u by spending time and going through all of them. What about this guy XXXXXX (name concealed) on position 1, who come he donated 99. Yeah they were in his gmail. There are alot of poeple who did this stuff. I was just being nice to donate. The rest of the 9000, that do work will be given to some else. I'll never donate more than 100 invites here. At, least im honest.

On Apr 3, 2005 1:03 PM, gqueue.feedback@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe you should read my e-mails to you. I find out that you're taking invites from websites where people post invite codes.

This was evident because the invite codes you've been sending are either invalid (used up), or have the word (used) like those who have posted invite codes and edited when someone has actually claimed it.

You want to give someone else those 9000, be my guest... as they will also find out that the invite codes are also invalid. I've been checking the invite codes.

To burst his (macflashmx@gmail.com) bubble, I went on to Google and did a search for one of the invites he'd given me and voila ... http://www.sawtoothdistortion.com/Articles/GoogleGmailInvites.html with all the same wording '(used)' etc.

I wrote back to him explaining my findings:

You want to explain being honest again? You got the invites below from a website. Oh, which website: http://www.sawtoothdistortion.com/Articles/GoogleGmailInvites.html

You didn't even make the effort of leaving out the '(used)'. If you
don't want donate YOUR invites ever again to this site, that's fine.
You want to donate those invites to another site, be my guest -- give
them the trouble and heartache of finding this out for themselves.

Posted by John Highway at 11:03 PM | 0 Comments

Happy Birthday, Google Gmail

Welcome to Gmail

Just wanted to wish Google's Gmail a happy 1-year birthday and Google's giving me a present? What? 2GiB of disk storage and mail?!?

That's right. Google's very popular Gmail turned one-year old today and they're giving users additional storage space. At the time that I'm writing this, my Gmail storage space is now at 1.525GiB. Here's the blurb on their front page:

A Google approach to math

On the eve of Gmail's one-year birthday, our engineers were toiling away furiously. Notes scribbled all over the walls. Complex calculations on napkins and empty pizza boxes. Millions of M&Ms.

The result?... starting today, we're beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are:

Write, don't worry.
You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond.

The gift that keeps on giving.
Over 1000 megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user.

No complicated equations. No tough algorithms.

Just this one graph:

Continue reading "Happy Birthday, Google Gmail"

Posted by John Highway at 02:41 PM | 0 Comments

I Rented My Gmail Queue PHP Script

Snaps for me ... someone really liked how I designed my "Gmail Queue (GQ)" Invite Distribution system that they've asked to pay for my services to install the same application that I have (http://www.highwayman.org/gmail) for United Email Systems' web services.

Wheee.... that plus I'm hosting their third-level domain on my server for a predefined duration.

Posted by John Highway at 05:57 PM | 0 Comments

No Good Deeds Go Unpunished...

CNN.com - Girls sued for delivering cookies - Feb 4, 2005

DURANGO, Colorado (AP) -- Two teenage girls who surprised their neighbors with homemade cookies late one night were ordered to pay nearly $900 in medical bills for a woman who says she was so startled that she had to go to the hospital.

Posted by John Highway at 04:57 PM | 0 Comments

Who ever said that comment spam blocking doesn't work...

If you think the plugin modules 'blacklist' doesn't work, check this out this tally of sites that were blocked from leaving spam comments on my own personal journal entries. This was only from a 24-hour period.

# Att | Blocked Sites
------+---------------------------------------------------------------
   18 | 123-home-improvement-equity-loans.com
   13 | 1st-advantage-credit-repair.com
   35 | acceptcreditcardsonlineinternetmerchantaccountservices.com
   38 | acceptcreditcardsrealtime.com
   28 | all-calmortgage.com
   42 | alumnicards.com
  189 | cheat-elite.com
   12 | consolidate-debt-usa.net
   32 | credit-cards-credit-cards-credit-cards.net
   36 | creditsharpie.com
   18 | exclaim4creditcardprocessingmerchantaccount.com
   24 | fast-cash-quick-money-easy-loan.com
   25 | firstchoicebanksandpremiercredit.com
   31 | goapplyonline.com
   27 | home-equity-loans-mortgage-refinancing.com
   29 | internet-merchant-account-pro.com
   21 | low-low-rates.com
   19 | lowest-interest-rate-credit-cards-online.com
   28 | lowinterestratecreditcards.net
    1 | mcdortaklar.com
   23 | mortgagemarketinginc.com
   29 | mortgagequestaz.com
   71 | online-deals-4u.info
  227 | ps2cool.com
  211 | reachcasino.com
   19 | repair-restore-bad-credit-report-identity-theft.com
   28 | repaircreditonline.net
    7 | send-free-sms.us
   17 | smart-debt-consolidation-and-credit-services.com

Posted by John Highway at 12:43 AM

F**KING PARKING SPACE HOGGERS

You SUCK at PARKING

I guess you're so important that you need two parking spaces? It's sh*t like this that makes me want to drop an anvil right in front of your car or better yet, take some shaving cream and spray your vehicle.

I should park my car next yours and if you ding my car, I will send you the repair bill.

Get a clue and LEARN to park.

Posted by John Highway at 01:56 PM | 0 Comments

FU H2 dot COM

FUH2 | F**k You And Your H2

My newest favorite website, thank you to the creator(s). First, some information about the H2 (based off the website):

The H2 is a gas guzzler. Because it has a gross vehicle weight rating over 8500 lbs, the US government does not require it to meet federal fuel efficiency regulations. Hummer isn't even required to publish its fuel economy (owners indicate that they get around 10 mpg for normal use). So while our brothers and sisters are off in the Middle East risking their lives to secure America's fossil fuel future, H2 drivers are pissing away our "spoils of victory" during each trip to the grocery store.

The H2 is a polluter. Based on G.M.'s optimistic claim that it gets13 mpg, an H2 will produce 3.4 metric tons of carbon emissions in a typical year, nearly double that of G.M.'s Chevrolet Malibu sedan.

Posted by John Highway at 10:02 PM | 0 Comments

Go Go Shania!

WMZQ-FM

Shania Twain sells 20 million copies of her "Come On Over" album.

Posted by John Highway at 01:20 PM | 0 Comments

The New TSS (The ScreenSavers)

Having finally watched the first episode of The Newly 'Revamped' Screen Savers with Kevin Pereira and Chi-Lan Lieu as the shows new hosts -- Kevin Rose and Sarah Lane are still on board, I can honestly say that I will have to watch a couple of more episodes before passing my judgement on the show. It's a shaky beginning and while I don't see quite the same chemistry between Leo and Patrick as with Chi-Lan and Kevin, the energy isn't as wild as before with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.

Continue reading "The New TSS (The ScreenSavers)"

Posted by John Highway at 04:11 AM | 1 Comments

My Faith in NetFlix has been Renewed...

Back in June, Netflix had announced that it was going to increase the monthly membership from $19.99 to $21.99 for a 3-at-a-time rental and this had always given me some concerns but not enough to have me cancel my membership. Blockbuster introduced their own line of DVD-rentals for about $17.xx for the same feature, rent 3 DVDs-at-a-time and while the price was significantly lower, their level of service in providing the DVDs that's been requested was something less than average. Many of the titles I requested had "a LONG wait" period or a "VERY LONG wait", while the same titles at Netflix were available and ready to be shipped (I still have DVDs out which is why I haven't gotten them).

Continue reading "My Faith in NetFlix has been Renewed..."

Posted by John Highway at 03:29 PM | 0 Comments

The Day After Hurricane Isabel

God I hate stupid drivers the day after a hurricane.

With much of the traffic lights out at various intersections, people don't realize that when there is NO traffic lights working at an intersection, YOU to treat it as a 4-WAY STOP, not a 4-way yield.

This red vehicle (unknown make at the time) came up behind me and when I came to a complete stop, he pulled to my right and proceeded across the intersection at high-speeds. I followed him (only because he was going to say direction I was)... and yup, came to a rolling slow (not stop), and went on through.

Maybe I should have just join the police force and pull this sucker's ass over.

Okay, enough of me ranting... I'm gonna go put on my t-shirt that says:
"I survived Hurricane Isabel and all I got was this t-shirt."

Posted by John Highway at 12:23 PM | 0 Comments