Blog of Josh Hall

I walked over to the North Side yesterday to play basketball at the Allegheny Center Alliance Church and I walked through the Allegheny Center mall…That place is like walking through the set of 28 days later.  There’s no one there.  Stores are empty.  THIS IS A MALL.  I felt like I was walking through some sort of quarantined area, and it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon!  The whole area is just dead and creepy.  It’s totally wild to see such a big area completely abandoned.  Even the old Carnegie Free Library has a sign on it that says "Closed indefinitely."  That’s nuts!  What happened here???  It’s almost like this area has a dark secret in it’s past and no one is talking about it.

Maybe all the development on the North Shore will revive that place.  The Steelers are in talks with a west coast developer to bring in some sort of venue/entertainment complex next to Heinz Field.  You’ve got Don Barden’s casino going in.  Another hotel going in by PNC Park.  The North Shore connection with the T to be finished in 2011.  If I were to make a prediction, I’d say that once the river front of the North Side is developed in the next 5 years, the West End/Station square side is going to BOOM.  When I say BOOM, I mean it.  The attraction of that side of the river(s) is that there’s nothing there right now.  Developers will be able to plan huge buildings, not worry about closing roads and such, and have a clean canvas to work with.  I haven’t heard anything about that Pittsburgh maglev project for a while either…

" I feel for you, but I just can’t reach you."

Legend of the Green Dragon is a text based RPG (Role-Playing Game).  All you need to play is a web browser, an internet connection, and a sense of humor and imagination.

I’ve hosted this game before and had 1500+ players from around the world.  I stepped away from the game for personal reasons almost 2 years ago, but now I’ve found the time and desire to get it back to the game it once was.  It’s all PHP based and it’s a ton of fun.  It’s quite addicting! 

I want to own an island.  Pure and simple.  I want to own my own land to do whatever I want with it.  I remember watching TV one day, I think it was RealTV, and some guy in Australia had tied 2 liter bottles and milk jugs and such together for a series of time and he put plywood on top, then stole sand and dirt from the beach, and he built his own island/raft thing.  He had it tied to a dock at a marina, and it was like 30 square feet.  He had a little garden, a little hut with a hammock, and even a cat on the island with him.  He just kept adding on and expanding, and eventually the government made it officially an island.  I LOVE that idea.  I want to be that guy.  Can you see me down on the Monongahela River on my land raft?  SWEET.

I looked through the archive and I couldn’t find this topic, but I’ve ranted about this before.  I’d be in total support of cutting the world’s dependency on commercialized food products down and replacing the obligation of eating with nutrition tubes.  These tubes would be something you could wear on in a backpack or belt pack or something.  I don’t expect them to be too large, since they would just be raw nutrients. 

Just like diabetes patients have little insulin cartriges they were like beepers, the same thing could be done with these nutrition packs.  And i see different "flavors" for activities.  one would be a sports pack that has caffeine and protein in it.  Another would be a cleansor that would have lots of antioxidants and such.  When you body build, they say you should be consuming proteins and such every 3 hours or so.  This takes the obligation of preparing food out of the equation.  Saves time, dishes, and effort.

And you don’t have to give up food.  You can still eat if you want to.  Your daily nutritional value is coming from the nutrion cartridges, you don’t have to make sure you have that "breakfast of champions" or whatever.  You’d probably even appreciate food more.

I was just reading some threads of people going back and forth between HD-DVD vs Blu-ray technologies and which was better, and which is going to survive, and all that jazz.  It’s a template argument where item X and item Y can be replaced with a bunch of different things.  They never get anywhere, so here’s a list of the most common ones I can think of.

1. HD-DVD vs Blu-ray
2. Microsoft Xbox vs Sony Playstation
3. ATI vs Nvidia
4. Intel vs AMD
5. Pepsi vs Coke
6. McDonald’s vs Burger King
7. Ford vs Chevy
8. East Coast vs West Coast
9. Microsoft Windows vs MacOS
10. Ashley vs Mary Kate