Month: February 2005

The Gates

today on my moms recommendation i went to see ‘the gates‘, over in central park. if you don’t already know, these two artists christo and jeanne-claud, famous for similar previous work including wrapping the reichstag in ’95, decided to install 7500 bright orange flag-holding gates on the pathways of central park. see the pics in the link.

weird you say? no kidding. it gets better: they dont accept any donations at all to foot the $21 million bill, and the whole thing was up for only 16 days (today was the last). deliberately designing a huge but fleeting project like this wowed me more than the actual implementation…all said this was definitely highly interesting to walk through and learn about. its amazing what artists can do with the right resources.

the walk back downtown to penn station was great, nyc always feels so stuffed to the brim with culture from all walks of life. i heart being lucky enough to live close to nyc. pictures will be posted once i install drivers for my new digicam.

Spring Break

the ideal fought the real

Post author By Pat Skinner
Post date 2/26/2005
No Comments on the ideal fought the real

i had these big plans to go any place where the daily temperature is greater than 20 degrees…but my compadres from RIT all ended up having work this week. instead i’m going to edumacate myself in all those things i didn’t have time for before. this includes reading books on Politics™ so i can win more armchair debates, learning CSS so this site can be more awesome, and getting started on my CSH major project: the Major Project Database.

when i was a freshman in highschool, i had these wonderfully exciting dreams that college spring break would mean being in the Bahamas with my friends surrounded by hundreds of attractive top heavy (topless?) women, a handy assortment of cheap quality drinks, classy music, and the like. this is not a pipe dream! someday instead of lying back on the couch and reading Bushisms…i’ll be on a hammock under some palm trees.

Humor

ashlee simpson’s bodyguard

Post author By Pat Skinner
Post date 2/20/2005
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So tonight ethan’s friend from somethingawful.com ‘s forums forwarded him a copy of paris hilton’s hacked Tmobile sidekick address book, personal notes, and pictures (!). Needless to say…someone who shall remain nameless had a wonderful time dialing every single celebrity in the book. Unfortunately most of their mailboxes were full…but there were a bunch of scandalous pictures of ms. Hilton..

almost all of the numbers were real, but their mailboxes were full. sad. but we covered a lot of ground dialing the hollywood rite-aid in ms. hiltons address book. score! a real person picked up.

later we did get ashlee simpson’s bodyguard…

body guard: “hello, who is this?”
b.p.: “hey this is bp, whos this?”
bg: “ummm…i don’t know any b.p.”
b.p: “i was just where you are”
bg: “…thats impossible”
b.p.: “…i know…sorry.”
*click*

General

upgraded to wordpress 1.5

Post author By Pat Skinner
Post date 2/16/2005
No Comments on upgraded to wordpress 1.5

so i just finished setting up wordpress 1.5 (the mysql/php-based software running this blog).
the wordpress team impresses again with really easy upgrading – they had an easy to use upgrade script that took care of the majority of the configuration details.

so now things are looking pretty hot with a new default site design and a lot of new features…i don’t know if this is new with 1.5 but apparently you can setup an email account, and when you send it mail wordpress will retrieve the message post it automatically. cool.

General

economics

i just ran across a really interesting joel spolsky article .

its a pretty good overview of basic economics…and it doesn’t get boring in the least. spolsky’s articles have this way of reading like they’re very down-to-earth, plus he’s a smart guy. props to him.