Blog of Josh Hall

Unless you’re standing in isolation on top of a mountain somewhere, it is never acceptable to urinate with your hands on your hip with your elbows out.  Not only do you look silly, but that’s just asking for an accident.   CONTROL YOUR FLOW.

I’ve told this story to only a few people.  You might be a little grossed out, but it’s pretty funny.

Sometime when I was in college, my cousin, Adam, invited me to take a trip to Cedar Point with a bunch of his friends.  We met up at like 6 am and drove out to the park.  I was just getting over a bit of a cold, but it wasn’t all that bad, just needed to blow my nose every few hours or so.  We got in line for the Mantis, which is one of the better rides in the park.  The line was unusually long, but it was definitely worth the wait.  If you’re familiar with the ride, it does this fantastic set of 3 inverted loops for the finale.  The G force is so intense and that fact that you’re standing up makes it completely different from anything you’ve felt before.

What made this ride so memorable was what happened during those loops.  Standing in line for so long, sniffing my snot, didn’t seem like that much of a worry.  As soon as I hit those loops though, my nasal passages had nothing of a fight against gravity.  Snot went everywhere.  It was along the sides of my face, on my shoulder, and by the screams of “EWWWWWW!!!” behind me (I was in the front), I’m pretty sure some people got a present as well.  The fortunate thing (for me, at least) is that you do those loops on top of a body of water, so it’s not uncommon to get hit with some moisture.  I don’t think anyone knew what happened, until I told Adam, much much later.

Never date your friend’s sister.

Political opinions are like butt holes; Everyone has one and they all stink.  To extend the analogy, they should not be revealed in public places.  To extend it even further, possibly into metaphor, If you are so emotional about your political opinion and it’s all you really think about, perhaps your head is a little too close to previously mentioned nether-region.

I like how pandora and last.fm recommend music based on the genre and bands you’re listening too, but I’m envisioning a site based on literal connections that bands have.  I think the interface could very pretty and fun.  It could be like TheyRule.net.  Think a colored red circle with "Foo Fighters" written in the middle.  clicking on it would pop out all these little circles.  Maybe one would be a blue circle with "Nirvana" written on it.  You could click on the line that connected the two and it would tell you that Dave Grohl played drums in Nirvana and is the front man for Foo Fighters.  Maybe another Circle could be Gary Numan, and the connection is that Foo Fighters covered his "Down in the Park."  Getting content would be as easy as partnering with last.fm, http://www.coversproject.com/, and maybe freedb.org.  I’d like to see connections such as band members that have the same birthdays or went to the same highschool and bands that have the same lyrics or song titles.

So, I’m going to leave the phpnuke system and convert from ravennuke to wordpress.   I’ve had this blog running on phpnuke for a long time, and I loved having the flexibility of editing the code and writing my own modules and having a very full featured site, but I think it’s time to shave it down to what is useful and also maintainable.  I’ve written a php script to convert all the stories from ravennuke to a fresh install of wordpress and I’ll be messing with templates and features in the next month or so.  The demo site is http://joshuadhall.com/wordpress and I’ll eventually switch it over to the main URL once I’m done playing and find something I’m satisfied with.  RavenNuke is still a great product, don’t misunderstand me, but it’s not the best system for blogging.  I’ve made my concerns known to the community for a long time, and have even contributed code that it lacked, but there were projects that kept getting delayed that are already available in wordpress, so that’s tipped me over to the switch.

Here’s the link to the script – http://sixf00t4.com/downloads/?did=65