Lodge decorations.

Something I forgot to comment on when I wrote this entry and have been meaning to write but keep forgetting to. Both lodges were beautiful. The decorations in each of them were unique. For example the wall in the East of the Lackawanna building was drawn. It depicted King Solomon, Hiram Abif and [] as they were discussing the building plans of King Solomon’s Temple. The Lodge also had a full size pipe organ, although it was smaller than the ones I have seen in churches and cathedrals throughout Europe. It was good to hear it. The evening of the ceremony we had a visiting brother who played it for the ceremony. It was wonderful to attend a ceremony with music. I am saying that only because it is rare now-a-days to come to a lodge or ceremony where there is someone who knows how to play the pipe organ.

anika's words of wisdom

As short as this post might be, I feel the need to share the following with everyone. I love this, and I should learn from it, especially knowing how gloomy my personality some times tends to be and the excessive lack of sense of humor I posses. The following quote I found in the AIM profile of one of my gaming buddies.

anika's words of wisdom:
**Never frown because you never know who's falling in love with your smile!**

Short but Sweet!

Because I am using the more tag in my entries, to limit the amount of text displayed on the initial page view, my home page is having a lot of blank space. To solve this problem I am using a Perl script to display quotes as filler for the white space. The script reads quotes from a play text file. I know Word Press has some plug in which can display quotes as well. I might explore it in the future and use it as a substitute to the Perl script.

Good times at the ceremonies!

Tonight I had another wonderful evening of ceremony with my fellow Masonic brothers. Tonight’s ceremony was at Buffalo Lakeland Lodge. At first I was just a visitor, but I was asked to be a fill in as a Steward for the evening. There were not enough line officers for the ceremony to take place! I did enjoy the evening a lot. We did a Second degree and raised two brothers. It was a wonderful opportunity to refresh some things and of course have a practice. I had not done second degree work in quite a long time. Afterwards the lodge had prepared home made chilly, which I loved. Usually I do not eat chilly, because I do not like how spicy people make it. This one, though, was amazing, it was not spicy at all and it was rich on meat. During the dinner, I also had an opportunity to mingle with the guys. I hear some really good stories from the times when they were rookies at their jobs and the pranks that were played on them by those who have been at the job longer.

HL2 is Mine!

Well I stayed up for this:shock:

Ahhh I have it


It’s 3:01 A.M., w00t, finally:grin:

Now time to play it!!! :cool:

I am so fucking pissed right now.

I am so fucking pissed right now. The cocksuckers from the channel 7 news and whoever is above them are fucking retarded. This is what happened. Right now I am watching the news, and the announcer reported that a new video from Iraq has been released. It is of a marine shooting a wounded Iraqi opposition soldier. The assholes warned me that what I am about to see and hear might be disturbing. Wow, LoL, LoL, LoL

Cold, it is not what I was looking for.

Ahhh. I feel like rag. My throat has been soar for the past two weeks or so. Now, since yesterday I have a cold. On a positive note my throat does not hurt any more. Both of these are my own fault. I have been staying up to five o’clock in the morning for no reason. It is always like that when I stay up so early night after night.

Today I have been sneezing and blowing my nose, which by the way has been like Niagara Falls. Haa, what a coincidence, they are only twenty minutes from here. Tonight I went to Wegmans and bought Tylenol Cold – Night Time. For whatever reason the Tylenol Cold – Day Time does not cover Runny Nose. That is such nonsense! Why? Because, if you have a runny nose, like I am, you do not want the sniffles at the office, which if it is not scary to most people, it is defiantly annoying. At night, you are sleeping, you will be blowing your nose a lot less than during the day. But anyways, the meds kicked in two and a half hours later, so now instead of feeling like a rag, I am feeling like a drunk zombie. HAHAHA I think next time I will chew the pills, before I swallow them. It should take less time for them to dissolve and take effect.

It is taking me forever to work on things. My thought processes, although sluggish, are still turning. So, after spending little bit of time, I fixed the errors that were coming up on the home page. They start coming up after I activated the style chooser plug in for the blog.

Ahhhh, Half-Life 2 will be unlocked tomorrow morning at 3 A.M. I would love to stay up and play it for bit, test that Source engine and see how good the story line is. Unfortunately, at the moment, it looks like I am going to bed after CSI: Miami.

SPAM it's everywhere!

SPAM it’s everywhere, Stupid People Annoying Menace. It is such nonsense, waist of time and waist of bandwidth. Tonight I was SPAMed by one of my friends, because his friends were doing it to him. So, he thought it would be a good idea, and instead of breaking the chain, to add another link. This is what he sends me:

Dear AIM users,
Because of our overloading of our servers, we are being forced to extract our non-active AIM users. Because this is a free service, AOL has exceeded the budget for the AIM service. We are asking that you send this exact message to 20 other AIM users to ensure us that you're an active AIM user. Our system tracking devise will pick up this message to keep you on our active list. You have 72 hours to complete this task or your service will be cancelled immediately. Starting January 1st, 2005, we will be charging a small fee for registering of a screen name for AIM. Thank you for your time and for using AOL or AIM.
Sincerely,
Mark Jenkins
AOL Owner and Founder.

Some people will ignore this, some will find it funny, like techie people, but I bet most people will think that this is a real message. They will send it to twenty of their friends and just piss off other people and create more useless traffic on the Internet. Here is why this is just a SPAM and nothing more.

1. Overloading of servers. The only way to overload the servers is with a lot of traffic. The users’ information is simply text. Today’s servers could parse through text databases in seconds. So even if they have so many inactive users it will not overload their system. To store text is incredibly easy and cheep. With the way storage space it is sold now-a-days, the more space you buy the less you pay. That’s why large storage hard drives are so cheap.


2. AIM, has been around for so many years, which if it was possible to exceed their budget and have to charge for the service, they would have done it after the first year of the service going live, not now! AOL even added those annoying ads that we like to block by using Dead AIM and AIMutation.


3. Send it to 20 other people to make sure that you are active. HAA, Are not already IMing people on daily base?


4. Their system tracking device will pick your message. Hmm, a) tracking your message, kind of illegal, and pointless, if they are already over budget. The money used to maintain that tracking device can be used to pay for their more important expenses. a) tracking device!?! Whoever wrote this is a Moron. S/he needs to expend their dictionary. Tracking device, LoL, what are you? A spy! I think terms like application or environment might be more appropriate.


5. A user is placed in the inactive queue if they have not logged in for a set period of time. This type of tracking is more accurate, cheaper, SIMPLER and easier.


6. AOL will NOT start charging for AIM. Just like there is battle of the browsers, battle of the e-mail systems, there is a battle of the IM systems. Unless Yahoo! Or MSN start charging for their messengers AOL will not. If they do it will be very bold action on their site. When they do, they will fail Miserably. There are number of other messenger systems - ICQ, which has been around forever, Odigo, Jabber, Gaim. To add to the above few, Skype is not only offering IM capabilities but also advanced VoIP services, and few others- out there which will be a free solution, and which are already providing competition. Never underestimate the power of Open Source. Microsoft did! Now they are paying for it, and a willingly opening parts of their source code to the public and developers. Kind of late now, thought.



7. AOL Owner and Founder. Wow, yet another clue why this is simply SPAM. The person who wrote this should do their homework better. What a geek. To me this sounds like a 14 year-old. AOL is a publicly traded company/Corporation. There is no sole owner, but many shareholders and controlled by a board of directors.

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p><

p>Oh, BTW, I wanted to se who Mark Jenkins was, and what his association to AOL was. I Googled it and this is what I came across: http://hoaxinfo.com/imcharges.htm. So this has been around since April 2003. In the one I received today the date was simply updated. WOW

Veterans' Day

This afternoon I attended a service presented by the Masonic Veterans Organization. It was held at the VA Hospital in Buffalo, and it recognized all five military branches. For these of you who do not know what they are, I will list them: United State Marine Core, United States Name, United States Army, United States Coast Guard and United States Air Force. In my opinion it was great to see fellow Masons and other veterans. It was a small ceremony, probably about 50 to 80 people, but it was great. I enjoyed it a lot, and was pleased to see so many people together and see them recognized and appreciated.

My word of inspiration.

My word of inspiration to the -(MP)- Clan from earlier today:

to Victory

We had our first scrim after last FAL season. It was against -|[FxR]|-, and surprisingly -(MP)- got pummeled. We lost both rounds due to the lack of moral and action on our part. This is something that the clan has to seriously turn to and improve on. We need to start acting as one again. The new FAL season is around the corner and we need to be ready. There are number of new clans, which formed after last FAL season, so we will have some competition, but, we have an advantage. We are one of the oldest clans still in existence. Our rules and traditions set us apart from the rest, but our skill and unity sets us ahead of them.

Last FAL season, we were one of the clans who made it to the semi finals. We had a shot at the title of FAL champion, and we came close. We can do it again this season, and we can win that title. There is some new blood in our ranks, members who are very skilled. After being on the server on Sunday night and seeing 11, yes eleven, -(MP)- members waiting to fight filled me with optimism and happiness. I saw that we are active and we are ready to fight. We just need to work on how we interact and follow orders. If Wind, The Pro and Defen were able to join us, I saw them on AIM, we would have had a full server of just clan members. This is AMAZING, it is something I have not seen before. This is why I was happy to see you all guys, and I know in my heart that we can win this FAL season.

FAL starts in a week. Our first match is against -|[FxR]|-. I also have screen shots of us in the gallery.

Good luck and God Speed.

There is no “I” in clan nor -(MP)-

Alex aka Vulcan

Blog Update!

I have made number of changed to my blog, and I have alos added some more plug ins. I have added blogtimes. A plug in which show at what time, in a period of twenty four hours, entries where made in the last thirty days. After the times are acquired the plug in generates a bar graph. It is dynamically generated every time the page is refreshed. I placed the image from the plug in at the bottom of the page. So, just scroll to the bottom of this page and you will be able to see it. I have also added an amazon.com wish list plug in. It will randomly display an item from my Amazon wish list and link it back to the amazon.com site. So feel free to send me some gifts!!!:wink:

New haircut, new looks!

Today I had a meeting with an old friend of mine, who I have not seen in about a year. It was great to see her again. She looked really good, just like always! Due to some complications with her health, her boss, and some new laws implemented by the U.S. Customs, she had quit her job as a customs broker at UPS. Now she is going to beautician’s school, where she is working on her beautician's license. It is something to do as a back-up plan and some extra income, until things get back in line.

Since I gave myself a haircut few weeks ago, my hair had grown to the point where it just looked like I had just got out of bed. Irrelevant of what point in the day it was, it just looked pressed on one side, pushed up on the other, and simply going in all directions. So, we had a laugh about it at my expense, but she was right, I needed a haircut. We were outside her school, so she just asked me to come in for a haircut, so I did. There were 7 or 8 other students watching her work on my fur. LoL. She was showing them how to do clipper fading. I also had two other women work on my hair and on top of it I also received a nice head massage. Woo Hoo

Now my head and face look more round. Before, because of my hair pointing in all directions, and mainly looking like a mohawk, my face looked more elongated. I can not complain, she did great job both with the haircut and the styling. My hair looks awesome now, and I have received a lot of compliments on it. Heh, few people commented that the style makes me look more like an American boy. I took some pictures. Once they are developed, I will add them to the gallery and also update this entry with links to them. I will have before and after, also.

I love my new looks.

Presidential poll.

Heh, after talking to hand-full of people I know a little bit better than others, about the presidential elections, I told them that Bush will win, no matter what! The reasons are very complex, and only some people, who understand fraternal and secret organization as well as history and politics, would agree with me. I can easily explain what is going on in the world and why, but it will be in very lame terms.:neutral: This sort of explanation would only take me five minutes, but to actually back up what I would say in these five minutes, I would need to present at the least a two hour lecture :shock: on the background of the above mentioned subjects of understanding.

But, back to me telling people that Bush will win, I wanted to see who some of the visitors of my blog think that will win the presidential election. Here are the results from the poll:

Bush: 2
Kerry: 5
Nader: 1

Although, in my poll Kerry won, in the end Bush won :razz: , so did I. :smile: LoL