Jpatrickm

Lance Armstrong announced that he would retire after this year’s Tour De France. There’s been a lot of speculation about whether he would retire after winning his 6th consecutive tour last year. He’s determined to win his 7th and retire on top. I hope he does it.

In case you aren’t familiar with his story, Lance Armstrong fought off cancer and came back to win the Tour de France 6 times in a row, after his doctors said he would never ride again and most of his sponsors dropped him.

I posted about Lance and his LIVESTRONG wristbands back in November.

Read the full news article at Yahoo! News.
Also at Technorati: LIVESTRONG, Lance Armstrong, cancer

Leave a comment

Went to a house party tonight for a football league at a friend’s house. It was a lot of fun. They had about 40 pounds of crawfish spread out on a table with corn on the cob, sausages and potatoes. Although I’m not a big fan of crawfish, it was pretty impressive. Here’s a few pictures.

Jeff on the left, my roommate Dylan in the center, and my friend Tyler on the right.

Leave a comment

I got posted on Self-Portrait Day for this week. I submitted it a long time ago and I guess my entry finally bubbled to the top. It’s a cool site with a new group of self portraits every week.

Check it out –> Self-Portrait Day

Leave a comment

Today’s picture is of the recently remodeled Britt-Scripps House, a bed and breakfast on Bankers Hill in San Diego, built in 1887. There is also a mammoth camphor tree in the back that shades the carriage house. The tree is said to have been planted in 1865, making it the first camphor planted in North America. It’s just a very cool victorian house.

Leave a comment

I’m not an expert on the rules of the Church of England. I know that it does not recognize divorce and as the head of the Church of England, the King or Queen is supposed to represent and be bound by these rules. While Prince Charles and Camilla could not be married in the church, the church did give it’s blessing in a separate ceremony. In 1936, Charles’s great-uncle, Edward, married an American divorcee and had to abdicate the throne, eventually living out his years in France. I guess times have changed, which brings me to my next point. The church also does not allow gay marriage. In the church’s eyes, what is the difference between a divorced couple getting married and a gay couple getting married? I guess as the head of the Church, the royal family can change the rules. Maybe if the King or Queen were gay, gay marriage would be allowed.

Leave a comment

I HATE spam as I’m sure most of you do as well. I own many domain names and that combined with the webmaster email addresses I maintain for clients, brings me in about 200 - 300 spam emails a day. Yes, every day. So I was excited to read today that based on a jury recommendation, a judge in Virgina has sentenced Jeremy Jaynes to 9 years in jail for sending out an excess of 10 million spam emails. The sentence is, of course, pending an appeal.

I personally think this is great news. Although several states currently have spam laws already on the books, rarely are they enforced and it’s often difficult to locate the origin of spam messages without sophisticated tracking tools.

The AP report states that Jeremy was pumping out at least 10 million emails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the Internet capacity that could support a 1,000 employee company. The report goes on to say that Jaynes grossed up to $750,000 per month as a result of the spamming efforts.

This is a good day for the anti-spam world.

Read more at The Associated Press. Also via Threadwatch.org

Leave a comment

Today was a long day. I started doing some freelance web design work at the company where my roommate works to help out with a quick project. It is the first time I’ve gone into an office to work in almost a year. I’ll be there through the weekend so it should be a nice change to my otherwise monotonous work-from-home routine.

One of the great things about San Diego is it’s proximity to Mexico. I think this is great because I enjoy diversity and experiencing different cultures. Although I’ve lived here for 6 months now I hadn’t yet ventured south, but it’s been on my list of things to do since moving. Well today after work, my roommate and I decided to jump on the train downtown and head south. It’s $5 dollars round trip and about a 25 minute ride right to the border crossing. We walked through customs to the other side and weaved our way through the taxi cabs, street vendors and children pick-pocketers to the Avenue Revolucion, the main drag in downtown Tijuana. It’s basically Las Vegas and New Orleans mixed into one only in Spanish. Of course all of the street vendors and store owners working the crowds have learned english, that’s where the money is. We walked around for about an hour or so and headed back across the border. There wasn’t much going on for a Wednesday evening and I wasn’t in the mood to belly up to the bar for some tequila.

One of the other nice things about being so close to Mexico is that there are pharmacies on every corner and medicine is much cheaper. There are also very few drugs where you actually need to have a prescription. And even if you did need a prescription, there are “doctors” standing in the street who will actually write you one for anything you need. It’s quite amazing. I priced out a few of the medicines I’ve previously taken and found that one that cost me about $300 per month in the US, that my insurance company would not even cover, would cost me about $10 for double the pills in Mexico. Another one that cost about $40 US was $4 dollars in Mexico. Both could be bought over the counter there but required a prescription in the US. Our healthcare system here in America is seriously flawed. We are the greatest superpower in the world and I have to go to a cabaret bar town across the border in Mexico to get medicines I can’t afford in the US. In so many ways we are a pathetic nation.

Here is a quick photo crossing the border into Mexico. Not a very exciting picture, but the last thing I wanted to look like was a tourist with a nice camera in a crowd.

Leave a comment