Aj's blog - page 3

So, I bought my first used car last month, and I’m happy with the results. Since we’ve been planning on scrapping my parents’ ‘97 Cavalier, I’ve been meaning to find a better replacement. And I did! A very nice car: 2001 Mercury Cougar!(Read more)

I had the chance to walk around New Hope, PA the other day. It’s only 6 miles from where George Washington crossed the Delaware river, and it was very cold (-12°F!) outside. I took some pictures, and I captured a beautiful 360° panorama of the Delaware River from the center of a footbridge crossing it. It’s a pretty cute small town in PA. There’s a canal that runs through the center of the town (which I also took some pictures of). Anyway, on with the pictures! (Read more)

I was at an all-you-can-eat buffet for breakfast a little bit ago; while there, I decided to ask one of my friends from Europe if they’ve ever been to one before – they haven’t. So I decided to blog about my experience at this buffet, show them what they are!

The buffet in question was Old Country Buffet, a popular chain around here. Had a coupon for a $5 breakfast, with the drink it came to about $7 (unlimited chocolate milk :3). Since it’s “all you can eat,” I was able to go up for seconds and thirds. Matter of fact, I had about 3-4 plates. Anyway, here are some pictures!

2022 Edit: Unfortunately, flickr deleted all of my buffet pictures. There’s a reason I’m migrating off flickr :( (Read more)

I have a minecraft server!

Behold, the great minecraft!

I now have a minecraft server at mc.aj.immo! It’s open to the public, anyone can do what they want to do on there, and it’s amazing. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill minecraft, this is hard minecraft, and by hard, I mean really hard. Here are just some dangers to expect:(Read more)

Welcome to my new blog!

Let me first say this, I have many photos. Many, many, photos. I take them with my phone and they sync up to my Flickr account. I still have to go through all of them, write posts explaining what I’ve done and where I’ve been – if memory will serve me correctly.

Next, allow me to introduce (or reintroduce) myself. My name is AJ. I’m a programmer and an aspiring psychologist, among other things. I own a few websites, such as LOLFlash or Tulpa.info. I’m hoping to use this blog to document my adventures, my ramblings, and other misc things. If someone cares enough to actually read this stuff, feel free to leave a comment.

I used to have another blog, where you can read how I learned the Dvorak keyboard layout or check out the flooding in my neighborhood. I’m not going to be updating that blog anymore though, so check here for posts.

I am still developing this website, I’m going to try and add an RSS feed when I get a chance. It’s currently hosted on my Odroid-U3 (as well as my minecraft server), and has been generated using Jekyll.

P.S. The ODROID is running Gentoo :3

My backyard got flooded again this morning. This is happening more and more often, so I decided to take some pictures.

There’s a terrible flooding situation in Rutherford, a small neighborhood in New Castle County, outside Newark, Delaware. Due to the Christiana Hospital (who insisted to the residents of this neighborhood that it wouldn’t affect us), the pipes for Rutherford are backed up and overloaded. (Read more)

Hello everyone, this is my final update on the Dvorak Series. On december 26, 2010, I decided to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. You can go read my posts on the progression.

Well, today, I decided to take a typing test, and here are the results:

Yes, you read that right: 103 wpm. I’m officially up to my QWERTY speed.

Here is a pretty nice log of what I’ve done since the switch:

You know, it took about 8 or 9 years to reach 100+ wpm with QWERTY. It took a little over 1 year with Dvorak. Will this limit be my ceiling? I doubt it, but I’m pretty happy with this speed at the moment.

I highly encourage using the Dvorak layout, and I’m happy to say it was well worth learning!

That is all!

Today I was updating my fathers site, Home Tips With Jim, to be HTML5-compliant. It was pretty much just a matter of removing the center tag and target="_blank" from the links – or so I thought.

I’m putting this out there for anyone that may run into the problem in the future; while trying to use YouTube’s new iframe embed system to embed my father’s playlist into the page, I ran into two problems spit out by the W3 Validator:

Attribute allowfullscreen not allowed on element iframe at this point. And: The frameborder attribute on the iframe element is obsolete. Use CSS instead.

After some quick research, I found the solution; apparently frameborder is depreciated, and allowfullscreen is not fully implemented. The solution, was to remove those two elements, and replace the frameborder one with CSS. So, if anyone else runs into this problem, go into the <iframe> tag, and change this part:

frameborder="0" allowfullscreen
To this:
style="border: none"

To this:

style="border: none"

You can now view the source to the HTWJ site, and see how it’s been fixed.

Hi everyone, assuming there’s actually someone out there that reads this blog.

I thought I’d blog about something that’s been on my mind for awhile now, though it may not be on others: how does one create a desert? I’m not talking about a desert-themed terrarium or a panorama, I literally mean how would someone create a physical desert?

Let me explain. Back when I was growing up, my family lived in this nice little house that we rented. When we first moved there, the backyard had lush green grass, it was a really nice yard. By the time we moved, all of that grass was gone, nothing could grow, nothing would live. The dirt became more of a “dust” or “sand” texture; it didn’t hold water, it couldn’t hold life. What happened in this yard, on a small scale, is what’s called Desertification.

Desertification is primarily what has happened in the Midwest of the United States, and it is currently happening in Asia. It’s why the huge Sahara Desert used to be ocean, and why places in China that were lush green fields just 20 years ago are baron wastelands.

So my question is, how would I create a desert? It seems once the process of desertification starts, it “snowballs” into an unstoppable force, turning entire landscapes into a desert. On other words…..

How does this:

Become this:

Step 1: Overgraze

Probably the best way to kill fertile land, is to overgraze. With so many animals trampling the land and eating the vegetation, it isn’t hard to figure out why the land actually dies. I’m sure people that own large, outdoor dogs can probably agree with me, if their dog pen ended up becoming bare dirt.

Step 2: Dig

Back when we had that old yard growing up, I would dig things up there on a daily basis. I would try to dig my own “streams” try to excavate rocks. All of this constant digging seemed to make the land more “arid” and loose; eventually it became almost like a sand.

Step 3: Irrigate

It seems kinda odd that irrigating the land would actually contribute to killing it, but this seems to be the going consensus. I remember during the summer, I would tie a hose to the top of my sliding board set, and I’d dig streams going from the huge mud puddle in my yard, all the way through to the back in the woods.

Step 4: Overfarm.

Overfarming is also a major contribution to desertification. It’s true that the runoff from farming could hurt the dirt, but when plants grow, they are constantly sucking nutrients out of the earth. usually when the plant dies, the nutrients goes back into the dirt, but if the entire plant is harvested, those nutrients will never go back in.

Conclusion.

It’s simple, really. If you want to kill your land, simply trample the dirt, dig a lot, irrigate, and overfarm. It’s what happened in the Dust Bowl, it’s what’s happening in China. Now go out and create some deserts! :D

It’s been quite awhile since I had a chance to update this blog, been busy IRL, but I thought I’d at least give an update with what I’ve been doing.

Currently in my fourth year at college, leading the school’s programming team again, and also working on some new websites of mine.

Also, for those who are interested, here is a quick update on that Dvorak Keyboard Layout. It’s been about nine months since I made that switch, and I’m up to 89-95wpm again. Yes, it’s not the 100+ wpm I had before, but hold fast, I’m slowly getting there.

Anyways, to the website. I’ve recently created a pretty funny website, called LOLFlash.com. It’s pretty much a website with a ton of funny (and for some, seizure-inducing, so watch out) flash loops. The whole website is written in C, of course, and not php. I’ve also been slowly but surely working on the groundwork for the website, www.ironicsecurity.com, which will be another type of blog I’ll be working on, so keep and eye out for that.

I will try to update this blog when I can though, I’m currently working on an article on desertification (what, you thought I only knew about programming?), if I can ever get around to finish it….

On an unrelated note, Home Tips With Jim is started to get pretty awesome, and there are plenty of new episodes; check out my dad’s new website: www.hometipswithjim.info for the latest playlist.

NOTE: This is part of a series, check the next entry here!