The popular parts of the library such as the first floor of the stacks, and the entire information commons building, I’ve tried, and failed many time to work in. It has too many familiar faces, too many buzzing printers, and too much commotion. In an attempt to study somewhere other then my desk which has [...]

With a new school year starting, there is a whole new class of freshman that have joined The Facebook. With most students having a computer – or the ones whose parents love them anyway – the majority of students are registered on The Facebook. After all, it is a good resource to match faces with [...]

There are many times I hear people complain about Microsoft products in regards to security. It’s something we’ve become used to; auto-updates, clean reformats, anti-virus software, spy ware. What users tend to ignore is that the people that create these problems are also rational people. Why design viruses and spy ware for a small percentage [...]

Tyreke is a 20 year-old 5th grader. This is Tyreke’s homework assignment. He must use each vocabulary word in a sentence. 1. Hotel – I gave my girlfriend crabs, and the ho tel everybody. 2. Dictate – My girlfriend say my dictate good. 3. Catacomb – I saw Don King at da fight the other [...]

The idea is that you pledge an amount of money for each anti-abortion protestor that shows up outside of the PP health center. “We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP”. That is absolutely brilliant. (read more)

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge who granted legal standing to two families represented by an atheist who lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court. U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge’s reference to one nation “under God” violates school children’s [...]

A few months ago I watched a rerun of perhaps the most moving episodes of the West Wing, “20 Hours in America”, in which a pipe bomb kills 44 students at a Midwest University. Martin Sheen, playing President Bartlett gives the following speech: More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of [...]

My email, me@askthefool.com has been plastered all over the internet over the past four years. I get an inordinate amount of junk mail. I’m not talking about the typical 5-10 pieces a day, but rather 600-700 pieces of junk mail an hour. I usually check my email about 15-20 times a day and always turn [...]

My first publicly released WordPress plugin. I’m sure there are others that do the same thing, but I wanted a stepping stone into the plugin API. This provided the perfect reason to experiment with it. An example of the output can be seen on the homepage. The plugin consists of 4 functions: 1) askWPCount_postCount() Returns [...]

With PHP 5.0, SimpleXML makes working with XML extremely easy. Howerver, many hosts currently don’t support PHP 5.0. I don’t offer PHP 5.0 yet because my web control panel, Plesk, dosen’t fully support it. Thus, when I was designing the Photography section of this site I needed an easy way to deal with the XML [...]

I got absolutely nothing accomplished today. I read the same news three different times on three different sites. I read everyone on my buddy list’s AIM info.. twice. I watched a movie on TV. I went to class today which turned out to be a “check-lab” meaning I signed my name on paper and left. [...]

I use two computers frequently. I tried switching to using one and an external monitor with the extended desktop solution of Windows XP but I felt myself working much slower. The two computers are my Dell Inspiron 700m (Princess) and my custom built machine (Beast). Well, I much rather use a full sized keyboard and [...]

Lewis opened the door to let me in and asked me to excuse the mess. I had already forgotten about it because I’ve known her for years. Her hands were covered in black charcoal and her hair in tangles with black streaks in it. I know her blue eyes, as if she was from somewhere [...]

Today, I launch, simpleHotel. simpleHotel performs all tasks of hotel management including payroll, reservations, timesheets, and room reports. Furthermore it provides “snapshot” views of properties where multiple property owners can see real-time status all their properties from a single location. An XML/SOAP architecture allows individual property owners and their designers to securely connect to simpleHotel’s [...]

If you took the past 11 hours as a sample time for the average amount of firealarms in one year here at Read Hall, it would tell you that we get 796 firealarms annually. Half of those at 3:30am. Personally, I’d rather die in the fire… at least I’d be warm.