Yesterday I got myself caught up in various blog posts around places like Engadget speaking of the new Apple iPod. The iPod, claimed to be a “true” video iPod, has any interesting features… the main being the most obvious by the obviously fake (yes, we all know by now that they are fake) images.

Don’t have brains? How about technical know-how? Well, you don’t need them for Google’s newest project, Google Page Creator. You marveled at how they gave out two gigabytes of space to everyone with an email account, now marvel at how they’re giving you web hosting as well. How much space it offers, I can’t say. Perhaps it works off of your Gmail space (which would be the logical thinking). if Google’s going to outdo themselves like they normally do, it’s a sure bet that they’re offering a whole new chunk of space.

It seems to be your normal free host, similar to what AOL Hometowns was but with an HTML editor and access to all of Google’s services. Since it seems to be down for maintenance at the moment, I can’t try it myself to see what it does and how it works its magic, but I can definately see this becoming something in the future.

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On the second day of the vacation, my father slipped on some watter while stepping full length over a flower bed by the poolside. He was looking for ice cream. his ankle snapped and broke in three places. he was rushed to the hospital for major surgery, my mother went insane, and my brother and I were pulled out of Iberostar to stay in a shitty motel-esque place in downtown Cancun. Downtown Cancun is NOT the tourist section of Cancun.

I spent five days in hell. I lost my only vacation in four years. I have absolutely no moral to work on school. The only thing that might motivate me in the new palm piolet I could get. Wish me luck in trying to surpress the urge to drop out of school. We actually got home on Tuesday, two days earlier than was scheduled (which also pissed me off, but the vacation was ruined so I couldn’t much help it), but I’ve been putting off this post.
The surgery luckily went well, very luckily, but cost a good chunk of money. The hospital was a private hospital, since you don’t go to the regular ones in Mexico. You just… don’t, because they’re that bad.

The whole ordeal is being turned into a roughly twenty-page short story by me. Look forward to it, it’s quite… a story.

The day after we returned home my mother got a call while we were out buying a laptop (my father needed one to work, so it was a great excuse to finally get a laptop)… that her father was in the emergency room because he couldn’t eat. That freaked her out even more, because we thought my grandather would die that night. He made it out of the emergency room and was fine in the end, though I don’t know how much longer he can last.

Aren’t I a lucky little boy?

Tomorrow at 7pm we shove off for Mexico (or rather the airport that will take us to Mexico, and on THURSDAY we actually go there). I’ve been researching our hotel, and now I’m more excited than ever.

Our hotel is all-inclusive. That is, I get to be a pig for free, to put it in terms that might make myself look bad. To put it in terms that look good: The place has about 16 fancy dining restaurants, snack bars, a bar bar, internet cafes, 24-hour room service, and much more. I get that all for free. I can eat and drink as much of anything as I want. I can walk into the fancy restaurants and order as much as I need to, and it’s all mine without paying. I can request room service for a hundred food items in the middle of the night, and I’ll get it. For free.

I can even order liquor and have that for free. I don’t want it, but it’s neat that the right is there. I know my friend Aaron would have a blast with that. he doesn’t drink, but he’d exercise the right and be damn proud of it.

For those of you who think I’ll be gaining a few pounds, don’t worry: They’ve got an entire fitnessy gym, too!

The hotel also has a couple very large pools (I can compare them to lakes), which at the center of ONE of them, if I can find it in the mass of jungle and lake-pool, is a jaccuzi. I’m sure there are multiple. And I plan to spend basically an entire day in one of them because I love jaccuzis and hot showers and relaxing and relaxing and relaxing. I need a vacation, so so badly. And I’m so psyched! o-ooo…

They’ve got a spa, and 432 rooms with a jaccuzi tub in each room. We’ve got a junior suite, and it’s going to be HUGE - two beds, a balcony, and some kind of living room structure it looks like. Huge room, I’m excited.

The forecast says rain five days of our trip. I don’t believe it at all - yesterday every day was sunny. it’s onyl a 30% chance of rain each day, so I take it lightly, and expect really hot and sunny beautiful weather.

Adios America! We’ll be in touch.

(For more information about the hotel, visit Iberostar’s website.)

Originally a choral assignment… which I made into a good-lengthed poem.

Ode to Music

And let it sway, and let it sway,
Let it rock me back and forth-
For like no-other what can do
In inexplicit glory,
And yet with an Exacto-Knife
Cut clear for my inquiry.

O let nothing there be laid to waste-
Be nothing left there strewn
My golden walls at last have fell
For platinum-records which live and tell
For platinum-records that no one’s seen
Or for that matter, heard
Far and wide and in-between.

Ode to music, ode to dance, but mostly music to,
For while you sing I wait serene,
Inside my tiny castle
Wherein the sheaths of speaker’s blades
Inscriptions of the music staves
Adorn them with their notes aglow
Hiding in my bungalow.

So shall it come against the lines?
So shall it go against the rhymes?
Was free verse meant to tell the rest
And disperse all the lies?
Nor tempo tap
Nor rhythm rap
Could satisfy my mind—

Both stresses, less with more oppresses,
Come and line my eastern wall,
With references and references to paradise gone by,
So sits upon the screen a casting of a lullaby,
Which sits and waits, and waits and waits,
For where train bells never toll…
But only one who sits alone, and to the lullaby
While waiting on the bench for bells
Forces eyes to hide the bells and
Lets it sway, and lets it sway,
And lets it rock them back and forth.

And suddenly the wall rebukes
Its previous sickly comment,
In favor of more flowery speech
The Romance Novel’s comet
And swaying back and forth the man with ears can only say
“Let it take me back and forth, O let it rock me back and forth,
And let it sway, and let it sway.”

What struck me about browsers was my recent complete voiding of my cell phones warranty. So now I don’t just have cool games on my phone that I can install directly from my computer with the application loader Motorola didn’t want you to see, I also have a java browser: Opera Mini! (Possibly a registered trademark of Opera.)

What is opera mini? A fully loaded browser on your cell phone. And when I say fully loaded, I mean bare bones. But that’s no problem, because we’re dealing with cell phones here - things so behind the storage capacity times that we’re still struggling with five megabytes and less of space for contacts, games, and now browsing webpages and downloading that stuff. I must say, for what Mini was intended to do, it does it strikingly well.

Opera Mini was designed to do something radical: Browse the internet. And it does just that, browsing the “net of inter,” I mean. But that silly international network doesn’t like cell phones, no you don’t! So the folks at opera decided to make web pages teeny tiny through their little Small Screen Rendering (TM) technology, which really just makes web pages very very tedious to scroll through because it shoves the whole of the website’s content into an approx. 200×300 pixel box. Never fear, though, SuperOperaman to the rescue! The innovative folks at opera (such folks they are) have thought ahead - and now you have the option to have either text that’s so large that ten words takes up your entire screen, or have text so small that you have to squint to read it. I much prefer the tinytext myself, because you have to scroll less, and thought they say it increases loading time, I don’t believe them.

The tiny text is most useful when you don’t feel like scrolling through pages for hours on end. Internet on cell phones is something that isn’t very evolved, and with giant text it makes going through pages hard to read and tedious because you have to hit the “scroll down” button every other word. The tiny text solves this, and if you’ve got any decent wireless phone intarweb service, you’ll be happy with the smaller text.

It also lets you have Favorites and History of pages browsed. Some nice little features for its small package, and incredibly useful since nobody in their right mind wants to type out the same website URL over and over again every time they want to visit it - especially when the keyboard is their dial pad.

Opera Mini is a nice little trinket that let’s me take the internet (or what my phone makes of the internet) anywhere. Sure, I could have used the built-in browser, but then it wouldn’t have the glory of being a large company’s very speedy cell phone version of a larger version of a browser I prefer only next to Firefox! Speaking of which, where’s my Firefox Mini…

If you’ve been struggling trying to figure out whether this article was a compliment or a criticism or Opera Mini, I can help: It’s a compliment. Opera Mini is a very nice thing… but cell phone based internet, in general, neeeds a lot of work and evolving and at this point is only useful for looking up definitions on dictionary.com while I’m at school and not much else. Now Blackberries, I hear that’s a different story. But I don’t have one of thems, so I can’t quite speak out for the Blackberry fanatics.

My dad and I took a trip to Borders (book store) today to pick up some novels to read while we were away. I’m already reading the Narnia series and while I hate to stop to look at other books, as if I had some terrible case of OCD that would stop me from reading two books at the same time, I went anyway because I love picking up a book and taking it home. Even if I don’t read it.

Wasn’t I surprised when I found two novels I’d been waiting forever to be released: .hack//AI Buster 1 and 2. “At long last!” I said. “Took ‘em long enough to get these things out.” So I picked up the AI Buster novels and walked off. They look like easy reading, what I’d expect from that company, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy them. It looks more like a wordy manga than a full-fledged novel, with its intricate illustrations adorning some pages and 1.5-spaced large text. I can’t wait to check them out, though, sicne I’ve been waiting for them for so long. I believe there’s still one more .hack novel that needs to be released in the US.

I also picked up Howl’s Moving Castle, the original book that a recent movie made by Hayao Miyazaki (2001 Spirited Away director/creator) was based off of. The movie was quite good, and I reccommend it to just about everyone who doesn’t mind a little fantasy, a little romance, and a huge slab of creativity on one plate. Miyazaki has to be one of the most creative minds I’ve seen in a while, so after seeing Spirited Away, I just had to turn around and watch Howl’s Moving Castle, too. So much creativity… and then I learned that it was based off of a book of the same name. Well, I can’t just sit around and not read it! So I have it for the trip to Mexico, along with .hack//AI Buster 1 and 2 and the Narnia series.

We leave for the airport Wednesday evening, where we’ll stay overnight in a hotel near the airport, and then leave Thursday morning for Cancun.

On Valentines Day

Valentines day must be the single most commercialized holiday in existance next to Christmas. Flowers for $50 (Kings supermarket and Stop and Shop supermarkets), chocolates for $100 (Godiva) - sheer madness! And yet I see streets and buildings crowded with people whose pockets are stuffed with bulging wallets or just the green paper by itself, or people on the grocery store line with flowers that would cost them half of their house if they had half of their house to give. The Godiva Chocolatier store wasn’t so busy, but my dad and I were off to the place early in the morning on purpose to avoid the rush. And we STILL found people spending their hearts away to buy… hearts.

“Well, I don’t normally eat my weight in chocolate, but it is Valentine’s Day.”

Is it ironic that I despise Necco wafers, but I love Necco’s heart-shaped chalk-flavoured Sweetheart candies? Is it a crime? Can I be put in jail for such a fellony against humanity? Certainly I’d hope not - but I can only notice an increasing amount of hypocracy on and around Valentine’s Day, and most of it is surrounded by food and chores. People start doing things because it’s a holiday, but they’re really not doing things, they’re just convincing themselves. I’m mainly speaking about my father when I say this, who pledges that he won’t smoke in his car, that he will buy the best roses, that he won’t eat fast food that day when we go to pick up chocolate. In the end, smoke fills the car, he skimped on the roses because he wanted to pay less than $50 (I don’t blame him), and I had to drag him away from Popeye’s Chicken to stop him from eating the whole joint (or any of it at all).

The cards are dumb, in fact, here’s a summary (because I can’t find a quote - but who needs those?) inspired by and semi-stolen from a recent comedy show by Jim Gaffigan that expresses my thoughts on greeting cards: Greeting cards are a waste. I love how you go to the store and pick out cards; “Hmm, yeah… this looks like something I’d say. I’ll take it.” Scribble your name at the bottom and give it to the person you want to - “So, do you like what that other guy wrote in there? Took me five minutes to find. Cost me two bucks.” The person looks up from the card and says, “Happy Valentine’s Day? You couldn’t have thought of that yourself?”

“Whoa, slow down there - I’m not a human slogan machine.”

I sure feel bad for the people who are all alone during this time. I mean, what must it be like to have no loved ones to empty your wallets out for? (By the way, that question is rhetorical.)

And for God’s sakes, it’s Valentine’s Day, not Valentime’s Day. If Valentime’s Day ever becomes a national holiday, I’m moving to another country.

6,592,050,319 people bought fancy chocolates on Valentine’s Day just to look at them sit on their shelves.

Nice little ring to it. :D… anyways, to the point: My mom and her friend are eager to start an online business. Can’t have one of those without an server! And they don’t want to lease one, no. Since we live in a community of rich snobs, my mom and her friend can afford to buy one. You know, to keep and such. A nice, real, physical server. The best part is, I get to manage it if they do get it, and that means some fun around here.

This site will be moved to the new server, as will my other sites, and I’ll finally have total control over them without having to go through anyone else for it. Sure, it’s a bit of work to learn to manage, but it’s an actual job that I’d be getting paid to do. Get paid to run your own server, get free hosting… man, I can’t think of any downs to this, considering I already spend an umptillion hours on the computer. It’ll give me enough money in enough time to be able to buy myself a new Palm Piolet and a keyboard to go along with it. Hopefully, in that way, I’ll be able to go to Europe over the summer and keep an electronic journal, and then post it ON HERE from the palm piolet with wi-fi if I can find a hotspot somewhere.

Yes, I am going to Europe this summer for three weeks on tour with choir peoples if I haven’t told any of you already (and I know I have told SOME of you.). But that’s not what my vacation needs are focused on at the moment: Less than two weeks away is a vacation to sunny Cancun! Viva Mexico! o_o I get to snorkle, and go to the Mayan ruins in Tulum (awesome +1), and RELAX! Yes, Jason gets to finally, finally relax!

And with midterms and report card all over, it’s just a simple straight line wait until Mexico. ^___^

Jason tries to play some random improv piano! Be stunned by terrible accidentals and nasty sounding glissandos, and hopefully you will find in there a melody worth making into an actual song-like thing! Feel free to say which part is worthy, because the whole thing runs like a badly put together medley. I should learn up some more piano skills, it would probably do me good.

I suppose there’s no use extending this post to make it more to read. *click*

Spanish III midterm: C

Ugh.