String[] ids = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs(rawoffset);

    String[] ids = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs(rawoffset);
    // if no ids were returned, something is wrong. get out..
    if (ids.length == 0)
      System.exit(0);

I was looking through some Java classes here at work and stumbled across this gem. I felt, briefly, like I was reading a movie script. The comment carried so much dramatic tension. I suppose when drama is missing from a code jockey’s life they find whatever way they can to introduce it.

I was checking the Livejournal

I was checking the Livejournal Memes and wow are online tests and quizzes popular in the livejournal world. It’s amazing to me that you can have two tools which do basically the same thing, except that livejournal has community stuff built in, and they feel like two totally different worlds.

It’s a lot louder in the livejournal world. I supposed that’s because the friends template makes it exceedingly easy to keep on top of changes. Also livejournal can be setup to email you everytime someone responds to a comment you posted, therefore you can jump into the feedback loop faster.

I went to the Angelika

I went to the Angelika Round Table last night. I was nervous about going. I made up excuses in my head like “Oh I have more important things to do” or “I bet it will be goth, trendy, indie snobs that are there because it’s the fashion not their passion” or “I don’t want to go through the awkwardness of trying to figure out which group of people in the cafe is there for the roundtable.” These are the same excuses I always struggle with and typically succumb to. I decided to go. Well, get in my car and drive that direction is probably closer to the truth because I knew I could always bail out. The closer I got the more I got the rush, the tighter my chest felt, the more my face flushed.

Building a better two-way pager

A number of people where I work have two-way pagers. Frequently they are walking with their heads down as they use both hands to type on their pager’s thumb keyboard. Does this strike anyone else as a bad interface?

Why don’t they make a two-way pager with a chord keyboard so you can use it one-handed and you could get bigger keys, also add a wireless (can you do voice over bluetooth?) earpiece (it doesn’t have to be wireless) that speaks what you are typing into your ear. This way you don’t have to look at the screen to know what you are typing. Heck it could even read your messages to you.

Innovation r.i.p.

We need to tell you about some upcoming changes regarding the Majestic PC-CD you recently purchased. While the game was a huge critical success, it was not as popular with players. Consequently, EA has decided to discontinue the Majestic service in order to focus resources on new, more popular content.

After April 30, 2002, Majestic will no longer be in service. I got that in my email today. I was part of the Majestic beta and it was a really cool game. The only thing that stopped me from plunking down $10/month is that it was PC only. The coolest thing about the game was you never really knew for sure when you were playing the game. It periodically invaded your life. You interacted with it through email, instant messenger, web browsers, fax machines and cell phones. I still remember the first time I checked my voicemail and I had a threatening message. I was so excited. I saved the message and played it for my friends. Granted you could wuss out and turn the realism settings down. The story of the game was very X-Filesish.

I've been wondering how far

I’ve been wondering how far would my 401k go if I cashed it in. At my current consumption rate it would be like five or six months. But if I lived in an oubliette in the Utah desert all of sudden it would last a lot longer.

I just need a plan. I need to figure out what I am going to do to assert control over my life again.

The Angelika rocks

Okay, I must admit that at first I thought the Angelika Film Center (What happened to calling it a theater?) would be some awful, megacorp run, fleece the indie/foreign/art film crowd type deal. I was way off. Not only do they devote all eight theaters to indie/foreign/art films they also support that community of people with cool events…and now this:

A new weekly group discussion about the independent film world begins this Tuesday, January 8th at 7:30pm in the Angelika Cafe.

Read more...

Okay, I started wondering what

Okay, I started wondering what would happen if you wanted to link to multiple things from one article of text. So I made this multilink dhtml thing. Below is an example of how it works.

You should check out . You could also read some of the funny things my have been up to.

Latest Box Office—

IMDB

ajt
Hymie
Otopico
Porovaara

*I’m having Mac IE problems detecting the mouse coordinates. I might be having PC IE problems I don’t have a way to test that at the moment. The coordinate detecting stuff worked in a simple page that I used for testing. However, the Y coordinates are always off by about 90 pixels when I use the same code in my site. Weird. If anyone has any clues let me know.

I'll spare you anymore stupid

I’ll spare you anymore stupid javascript/css tricks, but I reserve the right to make a color cycler to be really tacky.

I had a weird dream last night. I remembered a lot of it this morning but now I just remember a small part of it. Just about everyone I have ever known and lots of people I didn’t know, including George Bush (the elder), were there. We were gathered in a large courtyard inside a big one-story house in the southwest, I think in New Mexico. George was saying that we had the technology to communicate in complete privacy. Basically the sending and receiving stations were underwater in the ocean and the messages were sent using the water. They were exploiting some property of water to encrypt the messages.

Oh this is dumb, stayed

Oh this is dumb, stayed up way to late so I could and