Kirk's Page
Welcome to my personal website! This time, I'm actually going to put stuff here. Hopefully, this website will be able to constantly evolve as my PHP coding skills do. The intention is for this website to be as dynamic as possible, with a database driving as much of it as is practical. This should eliminate unnecessary editing of code later, and make updating the page eaiser. One such example of this is my personal blog, which is displayed below. When the code is edited, I'll change the website "version", which is listed down on the bottom. The version number is the year, month, and day of the last edit of the physical PHP code.

"Africa is like a bunch of poverty and stuff." -Anonymous

From my computer programming class. o.o

Windows Updates. Some people swear by them, some people never install them. Either way, Microsoft loves to pester its users with those little information boxes down in the system tray. You know the ones. They either say YOUR COMPUTER IS AT RISK, or UPDATES ARE READY TO INSTALL! Either way, Microsoft looks like the good guy.

The best 404 page ever written, that I should totally use here:
File not found. Please bother the website administrator. If you are the website administrator, please email yourself regarding this problem, and you will receive a response within 24 hours. If you are a time traveling webmaster, please send yourself an email yesterday so this error will never be encountered, thus protecting the timeline.

It's after midnight, I'm a little sugar high. One of my friends was browsing the website, and someone in my programming class told me I should update more often. So I decided to just take this time to write whatever I felt like writing, since I'm in a great mood and I have lots of opinions that the world has to know about.

Windows Vista. It sucks. =\ Most of the people who use it like it. Everyone who doesn't use it knows better.

Google Voice. Have you tried it? It's a really amazing service, it's still invite-only, but if you go to their page you can request an invite pretty easily. I know two people who got their account that way. Google Voice is what Skype never was. Used in combination with Gizmo, it can make phone calls on the computer. You can send text messages right from the web interface. You can send and receive calls using your own free Google phone number, in your area code, and every time it calls one of your phones - it's an incoming call so it's free. I got ahold of an account, and I swear it's better than a new cell phone. I'm still addicted to it, and I've had it for like weeks now.

Those are my ramblings for tonight. I wish a great Thanksgiving to my literally half a dozen readers around the world.

I was working Terror on the Railroad on Friday night, and this group of people who came through really liked the techno track I had playing. They called me the "dance party dude".

It was an absolute blast, and when they left they all posed for a picture with me. Now, these people don't go to my school, so I never expected to see the picture again, but someone tagged me in it this morning, I was so surprised!

I just wanted to take a few moments to talk about hit counters. People often ignore hit counters, and they were a lot more popular in the 90's, when every page you went to had those numbers on the bottom that made the webmaster feel prouder with every click.

But hit counters are no toy. It has come to our attention that people are playing with my hit counter, here on Kirk Schnable.com, and are causing an artificially inflated hit count to be shown! I just don't know who would do such a thing!

Was it you?
Yeah. Uhh, I mean... *clears throat*. No!

As of this date, the hit counter is having random convulsions. If you refresh the page a few times, you'll probably see it... Can you help me save my hit counter? Skilled PHP coders needed! Oh, but I guess if you've spent more than 3 hours in front of the computer screen, you have sufficient credentials to realize this was a joke on my computer programming class, but since anyone who refreshes a web page 200 times in one class period just to watch the count go up probably has problems paying attention anyway, I'd be willing to bet the person responsible didn't even make it this far into the post.

993429898+E10 people found this post to be amusing.

So I was debating with one of my friends, who has always said "soda". I don't know, I'd never say "soda" in casual conversation, I've always said "pop" right? I guess that's a trait fairly unique to the northern United States. So in an effort to prove that soda sayers are the minority, I found a map that is supposedly a plotted survey of Americans word preference. Soda, Pop, or something else. I was rather surprised. It seems like "pop" is the dominant term in the northern United States, while "soda" prevails on the coastal areas. Evidently the southeast says "Coke" when referring to any pop, which I found surprising too.

Anyway, consider this a mild musing, but I thought it was something worth writing about, since I've been informed by my hit counter and statistics that evidently people are reading this site now. Which, is another unusual story for another day I guess.

I'm not really sure to be honest. I think so...

I've tried having blogs in the past, and I never get past two or three posts. I've never liked having to open a special editor and use WordPress or any other blogging platform I have to install.

I decided that since I don't like having to use third party stuff, I'd code my own version of a blog, specifically for the front page of this website. I'm not sure how I'll handle post archival yet, but I'll figure that out if and when there are enough posts on this to worry about it.

Basically, the way this will work, is I can set which blog posts to show on the front page of the website. Those will be ordered by date of post. However, whether I'll allow you to go back into an archive and view the old ones, I haven't decided yet. Probably. But I've got to figure out a good way to code a frontend for that. Until that point, just consider this website news.

So yeah, first post of the blog! Woohoo!