Man Law

  1. Under no circumstances may two men share an umbrella.
  2. It is OK for a man to cry ONLY under the following circumstances:
    1. When a heroic dog dies to save its master.
    2. The moment Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, any of the hot Jessica’s starts unbuttoning her blouse.
    3. After wrecking your boss’s car.
    4. One hour, 12 minutes, 37 seconds into The Crying Game.
    5. When she is using her teeth.
  3. Any Man who brings a camera to a bachelor party may be legally killed and eaten by his buddies.
  4. Unless he murdered someone in your family, you must bail a friend out of jail within 12 hours.
  5. If you’ve known a guy for more than 24 hours, his sister is off limits forever unless you actually marry her.
  6. Moaning about the brand of free beer in a buddy’s fridge is forbidden. However complain at will if it’s friggin’ warm.
  7. No man shall ever be required to buy a birthday present for another man. In fact, even remembering your buddy’s birthday is strictly optional. At that point, you must celebrate at a strip bar of the birthday boy’s choice.
  8. On a road trip, the strongest bladder determines pit stops, not the weakest.
  9. When stumbling upon other guys watching a sporting event, you may ask the score of the game in progress, but you may never ask who’s playing.
  10. You may flatulate in front of a woman only after you have brought her to climax. If you trap her head under the covers for the purpose of flatulent entertainment, she’s officially your girlfriend.
  11. It is permissible to drink a fruity alcohol drink only when you’re sunning on a tropical beach … and it’s delivered by a topless model and only when it’s free.
  12. Only in situations of moral and/or physical peril are you allowed to kick another guy in the nuts.
  13. Unless you’re in prison, never fight naked.
  14. Friends don’t let friends wear Speedos. Ever. Issue closed.
  15. If a man’s fly is down, that’s his problem, you didn’t see anything.
  16. Women who claim they “love to watch sports” must be treated as spies until they demonstrate knowledge of the game and the ability to drink as much as the other sports watchers.
  17. A man in the company of a hot, suggestively dressed woman must remain sober enough to fight.
  18. Never hesitate to reach for the last beer or the last slice of pizza, but not both, that’s just greedy.
  19. If you compliment a guy on his six-pack, you’d better be talking about his choice of beer.
  20. Never join your girlfriend or wife in discussing a friend of yours, except if she’s withholding sex pending your response.
  21. Phrases that may NOT be uttered to another man while lifting weights:
    1. Yeah, Baby, Push it!
    2. C’mon, give me one more! Harder!
    3. Another set and we can hit the showers!
  22. Never talk to a man in a bathroom unless you are on equal footing: i.e., both urinating, both waiting in line, etc. For all other situations, an almost imperceptible nod is all the conversation you need.
  23. Never allow a telephone conversation with a woman to go on longer than you are able to have sex with her. Keep a stopwatch by the phone. Hang up if necessary.
  24. The morning after you and a girl who was formerly “just a friend” have buck wild, drunken monkey sex, the fact that you’re feeling weird and guilty is no reason for you not to nail each other again before the discussion occurs about what a big mistake it was (this discussion is, of course, optional).
  25. It is acceptable for you to drive her car. It is not acceptable for her to drive yours.
  26. Thou shalt not buy a car in the colors of brown, pink, lime green, orange or sky blue.
  27. The girl who replies to the question “What do you want for Christmas?” with “If you loved me, you’d know what I want!” gets an Xbox. End of story.
  28. There is no reason for guys to watch Ice Skating or Men’s Gymnastics. Ever.
  29. We’ve all heard about people having guts or balls. But do you really know the difference between them? In an effort to keep you informed, the definition of each is listed below:
    • “GUTS” is arriving home late after a night out with the guys, being assaulted by your wife with a broom, and having the guts to say, “are you still cleaning or are you flying somewhere?”
    • “BALLS” is coming home late after a night out with the guys smelling of perfume and beer, lipstick on your collar, slapping your wife on the ass and having the balls to say, “You’re next!”

Recent music consumption

Rebecca and I have been on a music binge lately. In order, by date, we’ve seen Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Kasabian, OK Go! and The Decemberists. In order, by best show, we’ve seen OK Go!, Kasabian, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and The Decemberists.

OK Go! is probably one of the best bands I’ve seen live. They rocked the house, sounded crisp and clear, had good crowd interaction and mixed things up with a short acoustic set. If they’re coming to a city near you anytime soon I’d highly recommend purchasing a few tickets. As a teaser here’s a clip I recorded during their encore.

Kasabian put on a great show as well, but they won’t be back in the states anytime soon. CYHSY put on a decent show, but nothing to get excited about, which is disappointing considering they’re one of my favorite bands and they absolutely rocked the house at Sasquatch.

This brings us to The Decemberists. Jesus, what a horrific show this was. Absolutely no crowd interaction and the band looked like a dead fish on stage. The show would have been great if I had closed my eyes, but that’s just like listening to the CD. Lame.

Back from Michigan

I left Thursday morning to head back to Ypsilanti, MI, home of my alma mater, Eastern Michigan University for homecoming festivities. A quick run down of everything that transpired follows.

  1. Josh and I hung out with some of my fraternity brothers Thursday night and had a rather hilarious encounter with some girls from Bowling Green State.
  2. I hung out with Chris B and the crew at Pub 13 on Friday night and didn’t get to bed until 5:30AM the next morning.
  3. I rallied for tailgating, which started at noon on Saturday. As per usual, I didn’t make it to the game and, instead, opted to go to BW3’s to hang out with the old school Sig Taus.
  4. Saturday night I hung out with Charlie and some of the younger Sig Taus; after the old farts had went home to their wives and kids.
  5. Sunday I went up to West Branch with Jonathan and Erika to have lunch with my mom and dad. I had quite possibly the best burger of my life at Applebee’s. It was their new burger with pesto and mozzarella.
  6. Sunday night Josh and I hung out with Melissa and her friend Carrie to watch the Tiger’s second game of the World Series.
  7. Monday I went home.

All in all it was a great trip. I was able to catch up with a bunch of old friends and, after my weight loss and training, got a bunch of double takes from said old friends. It’s amazing how much people change, yet stay the same. Most of my friends from college are married and a good portion of them have kids, which scares the hell out of me.

jQuery Verification Plugin

I’ve created my very first jQuery plugin. It’s fairly simple in that it simply verifies an input field’s value via AJAX after a short delay from the key up event handler. Put more simply, you can verify emails, URL’s, usernames, etc. directly as the user is typing them into the input box.


$(document).ready(function() {
    url = '/verify.php';
    options = {
         verifying  : "urlVerifying",
         valid      : "urlValid",
         invalid    : "urlInvalid"
    };
    $('#email').verify(url, option);
)} 

This will, after a short delay, verify the value of the input with id="email". The script passes the value to the URI as /verify.php?value=foobar@example.com. The script should then echo 1 for a valid value or 0 for an invalid value. See the example for more information.

Download jQuery Verification 0.0.1

Framework 0.1.4

This is a fairly major upgrade for the little framework that could. I haven’t stopped developing Framework. Quite the contrary, I’ve been working on it extensively as I’m starting to build sites utilizing it. Other than the extensive changes, fixes, etc. anybody wishing to try this out will be pleasantly surprised that there is now an example document root in the examples.

  • Added Framework_Exception
  • Added Framework_Template for unified templating in modules
  • Added __sleep() and __wakeup() to Framework_Object and Framework_Object_DB
  • Added $this->template->plugins_dir = array('plugins',$path.'/'.'plugins') to Framework_Presenter_Smarty
  • Added Framework_Auth_ACL to handle Access Control Lists based on module/event pairings
  • Added Framework_Request
  • Added Framework_User::__isset()
  • Added Framework_Site_Common::stop() which is ran from Framework::stop() when processing has completed
  • Added config.xml for site configuration data
  • Added Framework_Presenter_JSON which utilizes php-json
  • Fixed a bug when creating custom user classes in Framework_Uset::singleton()
  • Fixed how Framework_User::__construct() detected the userField from Framework_Session
  • Fixed misspelled function call in Framework_User
  • Fixed a bug where Framework_Object was attempting to create a log file before Framework_Site_Common had been created
  • Fixed mispelled return code in Framework::start()
  • Fixed a bug where a module’s event was running before the session/user had been authenticated
  • Changed Framework_Presenter_REST to include XML_Serializer options
  • Changed all Exception‘s to Framework_Exception
  • Changed Framework_Object::__construct() to use Framework_Site_Common::$logFile to create instance of PEAR Log in Framework::$log
  • Removed a few references to deprecated constants in Framework_Presenter_Module
  • Deprecated Framework_User::$userTable, Framework_User::$userField, Framework_User::$defaultUser, Framework_User::$userClass (see config.xml)

Download Framework 0.1.1

Jamba Juice Triathlon in San Diego

Right after the finish!

I flew down to San Diego last Thursday to spend some time with Dana and participate in my second triathlon, the Jamba Juice Triathlon. Dana and I spent a few nights hanging out with friends, eating copious amounts of quality mexican food and, generally, having a good time.

On Sunday, October 1st, Dana’s friend Felipe and I did the triathlon. I ended up 52nd out of 119 in my age division and 450th overall out of about 1,480 participants. Not too shabby for my second outing. My overall time was 1:06:30, which was 13 minutes faster, but the course was quite a bit different than the Kirkland triathlon. It was a slightly longer swim, but the bike was three miles shorter and didn’t include any of the Seattle hills I had to deal with in Kirkland.

Next up is the half marathon this Saturday.

Zorka Visits Again, This Time He Brought Company

Myself, Keith and William

Keith, in the middle above, his friend William Wallace (I can’t make this up) and Joe (not pictured) came up from Hatteisburg, MS for a visit to Seattle. Keith had a conference, William had some free miles and Joe was along for the ride.

I picked up William and Joe downtown after work and we headed to one of my favorite pubs in Fremont, the George and Dragon. The George and Dragon is a proper English pub so imagine the bartender’s response when Joe, a true blue good ‘ol boy from the south, asked for “a bud”. With some reluctance he sat down with a Pilsner Urquell and we talked a bit about the area, the nuances of American beer versus good beer, etc.

The next night, though, I heard quite possibly the funniest quote ever from the weekend of which there were many. Upon hearing my bike cost about $3,800 new and that I had paid $1,000 to buy it used, Joe retorted in a thick souther drawl, “Shiiiiiiiiit! It ain’t got a motor or nuttin’!” Hilarity, as they say, did ensue.

All joking aside, the guys had a great time wandering around the city, enjoying the Fremont Oktoberfest and generally taking in the sights. Who knows, maybe I’ll make it down to Hattiesburg, which is supposedly the birthplace of Rock n’ Roll!