I know, we're somewhere near version 3 right now (3.3.1 to be exact, check out the Web Log page to see why), but I'm not saying anything about us being at v.1 now! Everyone, take a moment and look to your left. Don't move your head. See that graphic to the left? Ignore the Aero mouse pointer and look at the design, does it look familiar? Back in July of 2005 (July 7th to be exact), after I had two successful websites under my belt, I decided to venture out and purchase my own personal domain. My first choice was, surprisingly, not "modenadude.com", it was in fact "asim.com". But "asim.com" was not available. The company that owns that domain, still, is Abel Insurance Agency. Can someone tell me how the hell does "asim" have anything to do with "abel insurance agency"? I'm sure you feel my pain at the time. Now, I wasn't particularly surprised that "asim.com" was taken, Auto Show In Motion's (an auto show where you get the keys to drive the car) initials are ASIM, so I knew it was a popular name; I was surprised that it was being occupied by such a lame company! I naturally contacted the company and asked them what the hell their problem is. Well, I was nicer. The actual e-mail (dated 6.30.05) to "Joe" schmoe (joe@asim.com, ugh!) read:


Oh the idiot. This was his reply:


What a turd. Anyway, I followed that e-mail up with a reply asking him if he would renew the domain in 2008 (at the time, that's when it would expire), and he said yes, they would. They've renewed it early and it doesn't go on the market until 2011. But I'm over it now and don't really want "asim.com", well I still do, but just because I don't want them to have it.

continue reading "modenadude.com"'s history....

Wow, it's been a really, really busy week! Could you tell? We graduated last Tuesday, I went to another graduation on Wednesday, had to go down to Irvine on Thursday (that's another story), then Grad Nite Thursday/Friday, then I slept the rest of Friday, then I worked on Saturday, worked on Grad Nite photos on Sunday, worked on my car yesterday, and finished off the photos this morning. Phew. Now I can breathe again.

I didn't think Grad Nite would be all that great. I went into it thinking that it would be twelve hours of boring. But it wasn't twelve hours of boring; not because the drive there and back were an hour each, and we had to wait an hour until we left, and we had to wait an hour after we got there; but because it was actually somewhat fun. Probably because I've only been there a few times in my memory, everything was brand new to me. Even though the rides are nothing like what I'm used to (a big supporter of all things Magic Mountain) it was still kind of fun walking around in the dead of night with people that are all your own age and you probably won't be seeing ever again. Granted it could've been better - much better in fact, if only things could go our own way - it was still pretty fun for those seven hours, and a totally different atmosphere than what I think Disneyland is used to. I was with Josue and Imadul (like always), and with us joined Lauren (who I guess became the person to decide what we'd do for the rest of the night), Roman (who I was really glad came with us), Mario (how the hell did that happen), Margarita and Kyle (who kept arguing practically the whole night), and Robyn (only half the time, we snuck her out of a ride early on until she had to leave for Galit's birthday Pirates ride). An odd set of people to be with, but it worked. I don't think we hit all the rides, but what do I know, I kept calling Matterhorn the Matador. The rides we did go on were fun though - like Log Jammer, I mean Splash Mountain, which we technically went one twice, the first time we got stuck, then they told us to leave; then the last ride of the night when whoever went go soaked (and not only cos of the drop). Space Mountain was damn fun, I was afraid of it (any claustrophobic and nyctophobic would be scared too!), and the Star Wars ride was great, even if you had to exaggerate a bit. We were able to expose the secrets of Pirates and Haunted Mansion with my trust external flash (those guys cheap out in every spot!) and for some reason Disneyland changes Dasani water to Crystal Geyser water. Disgusting. On the way home, things were much different than on the way there - everyone was dead silent, except for Josue and me, we would not shut up. Everyone was too tired to shut us up. So in other words, we had a fun little Grad Nite. I'm sure this description is horrible and I hope you don't judge our night off of it, so now, instead of being angry with me, go on to the photos. There're 179 of them, with funny little captions I hope you've learned to love. Imadul also took some photos, but as we were together for most of the night, they'll probably be the same. Get his here. Otherwise, get mine here.

That's all I have for you guys today. I know it's been a long time and I really owe you more, but I have nothing else. I have a few things in my head, including a new section for July and three new videos (Stand-Up), but nothing right now. I have at least two more photo albums I want to have up next week, but not yet. Plus a new commenting system. So that's what July smells like. Join me, won't you? Before I head out, I want to wish a Happy Birthday to Paul Thomas Anderson - his next film is due out in November, There Will Be Blood, loosely based on the book by Upton Sinclair, Oil!. I bought it, and get through a few chapters each time I try reading it, but then I get caught up in something else and always forget to finish it. Anyway, the San Fernando native turns 37 today. That's all for today. Take care everyone. see u.

Earlier today, after fourth period, the bell rang for the last time. I didn't realize it right away as I was reading my Yearbook signatures when it rang, but when I got up I thought about it for a second and realized it was over... and I became extremely excited, haha. A joy just spread over me. I don't know if other high school kids feel the same on their last day, but I wouldn't be surprised if the other kids in my high school felt just like me because we aren't there like other schools for four years and that's it, we're there for nine. That's half of our life spent going to the same exact area from 8 - 3 almost everyday. After a while, after that long, a routine definitely builds up and we become attached; which in essence should make more reason for me to miss it, but I don't. That'll hit me later o; so for now I shall bask in our freedom.

But that's not why I wanted to write a post tonight - only partly why. The real reason, stated by the title, is I wanted to rant about how dumb thieves are. I might say some things you may not be expecting, and excuse me if I do 'e' before 'i', it's too difficult a word, haha. Thieves are dumb. Not because they steal from other people, from unsuspecting people that are too dumb to guard their possessions. No. Thieves are dumb because many of them are very amateur. Many thieves steal at random with no need to steal at all except for, oh I don't even know why. You would think it's because they are too poor to afford anything themselves so they steal from others that have what they need. I'm talking about a specific occurrence. Earlier today, right before I leave to school, I walk over to my car to put a bunch of junk in it for the day. I notice right away something is afoot. Yes, afoot. I like to keep my car rather clean, while I admit there are some weeks where it looks very unpresentable, I make up for it by cleaning it extra nice the following week; so when I saw this greasy kind of residue left on the outside of my driver's side door, it didn't smell right (not the residue, the situation; the residue smelled quite wonderful actually). I thought some idiot probably walked too close and his hair was really long and that he was an idiot. Then I noticed that the door was unlocked. Now, this only half surprised me because I have been known to leave my car unlocked over night, sometimes to experiment whether my neighborhood is safe and other times because I bring someone home with me and they forget I don't have power door locks. Anyway, I wouldn't've been surprised if the door was just unlocked and the residue wasn't there. But there's more. My glove compartment and my console cover were open. The average person would have been devastated, but not me; my car's been broken into before - people just love the old Civic Hatchbacks, don't they? The first time, I had my stereo stolen, but I didn't mind much because it came with the car, I just went over to a junk yard and they took out stereo from another Civic. But still, at least the first time I was hurt and felt violated, this second time I was just annoyed. These idiots stole nothing. Well, they technically stole a few CDs that were in my console, but I don't even listen to them, all I listen to now is 89.9 KCRW, go NPR. But besides those, nothing. Which made me most angry because that such an opportunity to steal so much. Like most people, I keep my registration in the glove compartment. That was still there, but I understand him not taking that - he didn't need to, it would only frustrate me. There's something else that I keep in my glove compartment that most others wouldn't - my wheel locks. In November I put in these extremely beautiful ASA EM9s and BFGoodrich g-Forces on my car and each lug is a lock. In order to take out the tire for rotation or for change and what not, you need the lug key and another key to take off the center ring. Everything is sitting there in the glove box. But they were still there, and so were my wheels. That made me most mad. This person had the perfect opportunity to steal a sub-$1000 suspension upgrade and he decides not to. Ugh, amateur thieves. But don't get me wrong. I'm really thankful that nothing was stolen, except those CDs, but even still, aren't thieves just dumb? Voice your opinions - oh wait, you can't, haha. Oh, and if you have the hots for my beautiful car, click on the graphic, or here, to get a bigger view of the glove compartment. It's a very attractive car.

Other than this story, I only have three other things to say. One is that there's this really nice new Supercuts (I would go to the barber, I used each time, but I don't know if they'll know what to do with my hair. And I've always wondered, why do so many guys with short hair go to the hair salon, no offense, but why? I usually see more guys than girls at the salon, are you guys afraid of barbers? I don't mean to offend of course) near the Northridge Mall, newly constructed four months ago - not the best location, but great area. Everything's new there. On the corner there was this Burger King that's been there for the longest time that they demolished and in its place they are constructing not only a new Burger King, but on the same lot, a T-Mobile shop and some Mexican restaurant - don't recall the name - and they still have room to spare because there's a number saying something or other - it's on Corbin and Nordhoff if you're interested. And a few months before that, a Lowe's opened up right across. It's looking great. Anyway, this Supercuts is pretty good. Small little place, only four chairs, but the service is real nice. I think my hair's a little too short now, but that's my fault. I kept getting a call during the cut (ahem) and I didn't want to answer it because I was getting a cut but the lady started to laugh at the constant phone calls from the same person so I decided to pick up and talk to her. That's probably why I didn't notice it was too short - it would've been too late to do anything about it though. But that is definitely not her fault (the hair cut lady). Great place nonetheless. I'll go back in three or four months. The second thing I have to say is that I gave Mr. Carroll a wad of printer paper to make up for all the paper we've wasted in the back these past two years. He wasn't in his room so I wrote him a long letter and left it and the wad of paper in his box. I hope he gets it. And I forget the third thing I wanted to tell you. It was probably nothing anyway. Okay, I'm off. I hope everyone enjoys their graduation day. Party at Robyn's house at 10:30, don't worry if you weren't invited, I'm inviting you, haha. And I don't plan on retiring the site anytime soon so check back in from time to time while you guys are living your lives, check Imadul's too, I don't know if he's retiring his after this week. Stay safe everyone. Take care. see u.

For those of you not familiar with the teacher to the left, Mr. Carroll is an English teacher at Sherman Oaks CES. He's the reason I (used to) put up words every week (which by the way will go into the archives once July hits, Insha Allah - don't worry, it'll be replaced by a new section). For our Final, we were to create a play and act it out, the only requirements were to limit it to one act and to humor Mr. Carroll. Why only one group decided to spoof Mr. Carroll is beyond me, but it was great. As YouTube's description of this certain play states, he "maybe one of the nicest, most caring teachers ever". Basically, this play pokes fun of many things that we have grown to love about Mr. Carroll and a few things that we had no idea he took part in. It spans a little over eight minutes, but don't let that get in your way of watching the whole thing, even if the first half contains the only funny parts (in my opinion). For those of you who have never had Mr. Carroll (or for those of you who have never had the other teachers spoofed), you might not enjoy the play as much as the rest of us, so sorry in advance. Imadul recorded it from yesterday, Thursday, and put it up on YouTube last night - Bill, Matt, and Sasan wrote and act it out (Bill plays Mr. Carroll). Click here to go to the YouTube page, or click here to go to the embedded clip. Give it 5 stars!

Other than this update, the only other new thing to tell you is that the server is coming back together. When I talked to you guys last, the FTP wasn't quite working properly, but after playing around with it today, Imadul and I found out that for some reason it needs more than 60 seconds to connect properly. Very odd. Perhaps it will be corrected by enabling Passive FTP, I'll try it later. Anyway, because the FTP is back up, the Videos section is going back up and Imadul is adding more photos (I added the rest of the site via DVD burning to get it ready before Yearbook came out, that was damn annoying). There are still a few problems with the site though, specifically one of the reasons I shut it down for two weeks: comments still don't work - I really have no idea why. But I've decided that now that I have all this new software to play with, I will create my own comments system with MySQL and PHP. I have a basic idea of how to do it, but I still have to play around with it, so for the time being, comments will be unavailable, sorry to anyone who wants to voice their opinions or just spam it up. That's all I have to say today besides 'Yearbooks are a hit'. If you haven't bought any yet (I say 'any' assuming you want to buy more than one), you better get 'em on Monday. Also, Senior Videos by Bill (he's doing a lot, isn't he?) are on sale for $4 from Skylar (and maybe Woods, I don't know), so if you're interested in it (a little less than 30 minutes), go buy it and enjoy. That's all for now. Take care everyone. see u

Wow. After what has felt like eternity, the site is back up. I'll go into detail as to what exactly happened with my server these past two weeks in a later post because today is all about the Yearbook. First of all, I want to greet all the first time visitors as I planted the site's URL at least twice in the Yearbook, so hello! As many of you know, the school year is about to end. Every year about this time (actually, a week earlier than about this time) a special book comes out more special than any other book - that's aimed to you you Pegasus idiots - the Yearbook. Basically all year, a handful of students sit at their very small desks in 104 editing away pages upon pages of things they want to include in the Yearbook. After their sections are fully complete, they submit them to the editors; once the editors get a hold of the pages, all hell breaks loose and they erase practically everything and start over. Just kidding. Anyway, I was lucky enough to be one of those editors this year, alongside with Devon and Robyn. We worked all year to bring you what we think is the best Yearbook that our school has ever seen - and I'm not just saying that. It is a great book. This year, like last year, the whole Yearbook is in color except this year, the color is rotated 90 degrees. That means the Yearbook this year is landscape unlike usual books that go portrait. Who knows if it was done intentionally or not (I doubt it), but it fits perfectly with our theme, 007, as all James Bond films are shot in at least a 1.85:1 ratio, creating a rectangular shape. I think it fits perfectly, no pun intended. Other than that major change, we tried our hardest this year to keep every photo in proportion, to keep every page go to the edge, and to make the whole book just look extremely clean and easier to navigate through. We think we all did a great job. And as a side note to those kids in the Yearbook Staff, I would like to say on behalf of the editors that we thank you very, very much for working with us and dealing with us. If we ever were rude to you or made you feel sad, it was only either because we wanted to see you cry or because we just wanted the book to look great this year. You can pick either one.

Besides the visual look of the book, a few other things are different this year. I'm speaking about advertisements. I can't say this for a fact, but if my memory serves me correctly, there hasn't ever been any kinds of ads around campus promoting the Yearbook - and I'm happy to say that this year, on the 26th Edition, we had our very first promotions. While I'm sure many people overlooked our overused "The Book is Upon Us" slogan, we hope that it made everyone more aware of the Yearbooks' presence, or at least made you think someone was advertising some religious text. Whatever, haha. We had a total of five advertisements. Two main fliers, two mini-fliers, and one big banner. In case you weren't able to catch the ads, I decided to put up a few .PDFs for you guys to check out (just click on the image once you get to the page to access the .PDFs. Feel free to print them out and decorate your room). The first of the mini-fliers went out on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at around 11:30 AM - we distributed roughly 300 of them by stuffing them on/in cars and on/in lockers. All it said was "The Book is Upon Us", the first introduction to our slogan - a date was omitted; you can check it out here. The second of the mini-fliers went out the day after on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 a little earlier at around 11:00 AM - we used less paper and distributed roughly 100 of them only by stuffing them on cars. This mini-flier had the date "6.11.07" written backwards (which later turned out to be the wrong date) as a follow up to the original mini-flier which omitted the date; you can check it out here. On the same day, we posted our first main flier around school at the same time - around 20 fliers were put up over the campus and they said "The Book is Upon Us" with the date "6.11.07" at the bottom written by Devon; you can check it out here - this is the original flier with the date digitally placed at the bottom, this version did not go out as we were not sure on the date. Those were the only ads of the week. Yet for this week, yesterday, Monday, June 11th, 2007 at around 7:00 AM we put up our huge banner "The Book is Upon Us" cut out of yellow paper and duct taped onto the Auditorium wall. We prepared the letters on Thursday, June 7th, 2007; you can check it out at the index of the site here - but if you can't see it in real life, you're just dumb. Also yesterday, our second main flier, and our last flier, was posted around school, 15 of them, at around 11:30 AM and explained the price of the Yearbook as well as offered little tabs to rip off to bring to the Student Store for a FREE discount. About an hour after they went up, to our delight at least 10% of the tabs were taken off; you can check it out here.

That is the gist of what the differences are in this year's Yearbook. I did not do it justice as I have not looked at it yet (they are supposed to come in at around 10:00 AM today, Insha Allah - the truck somehow broke down in Arizona during shipment) and I have not seen a page of the Yearbook since late April. So you best buy your Yearbook before they sell out to check out how amazing it actually is this year. I for one will come to school today to get mine, but I will be extremely nervous - I have this strange fear that the printers messed up the cover and the Yearbook will be horrible, but that's just my phobia. The graphic to the left is the cover. For those of you new visitors, that are still reading this for some reason, I now invite you to roam around the site to see what I have - you got some videos to choose from, some games, some photos from me (and by 'some', I mean hardly any; I need to seriously work on that section), and some photos from Imadul, ThaDogg. So go look. As for everyone else, I plan to write up what the hell went on these past two weeks in another post. Just breathe a sigh of relief that we're all back to normal. Oh, and if you haven't noticed, the font up top has changed. It's now Eras Medium ITC instead of Tahoma. You like? Comments work. Happy Birthday, Gina! Take care everyone. see u.