In case anyone actually cares, I’m back… I got home on the 25th, after my flight was delayed five hours. About 12 hours after getting home, I went to Yawgoog, where I spent 22 hours before being evacuated… You’ll read more about everything in a later post, which I plan to spend hours writing. ( Actually, you’ll probably read about it in the newspapers first. Depends on how slow I am. )
This item is posted to the futre, but I’m not sure if LiveJournal can handle posting to the future…so… ( at least WP can ). I’m writing this post inbetween writing “GHB 712-O” on underwear and other articles of clothing… Now that I’ve been writing this post for seven hours, and it has survived one reboot, I think it is about time to finish it. I lied. I’m too lazy to blog right now, so why don’t you send me some mail and scold me for it.
Philmont address: ( 9th through 24th )
Greg
Expedition 712-O
Philmont Scout Ranch
47 Caballo Road
Cimarron, NM 87714
Yawgoog address: ( 26th through 31st)
Greg, Troop 102 Mapleville
Camp Sandy Beach - Campsite Jim Bowie - Week 5
Yawgoog Scout Reservation
Rockville, RI 02873
Send me mail… or feel my wrath!
I’ve decided to write one more post before I leave for Philmont. ( cause I’m too lazy to write my Bon Voyage post. ). I guess I’ll start with last night, as it set the scene for today. I was up until about 0030 today, talking to Kayla ( XFN hehe. ). As a result, I was too tired to do anything today. Instead of really accomplishing anything, I spent the day refreshing RSS feeds. Instead of writing much more, I think I”ll just throw in a bunch of links and allow you to delve infinitely deep into the Blogosphere.
I began my day by refreshing my aggregator. This brought me up to date on the London Situation. After reading all about that, and still not having a clear idea as to the death toll ( I saw several different numbers. ), I checked out the Latest Developments at Google Blog. Then having math on my mind, I read about the latest changes to mathworld. It was around 10:00 that I decided to head on over to IE Blog, where I read about Browser Security and Long Horn’s RSS support, before reading an ‘essay’ by Peter Torr. Finally, after all that, I got around to reading the latest post on Google Blog. Yeah, so about summarizes my day. ( and Kayla didn’t email me… Grr. )
I’m a water Junkie at heart: I love boating, swimming, fishing, and even floating around mindlessly. For longer than I can remember, my Grandmother, who practically lives on a lake has hosted a fourth of July ‘bash’. The fourth of July is by far my favorite Holiday. ( yes, even above Christmas. ) As my mom is in charge of preparing most of the food, we arrived early enough for my brother and I to fit a game of badminton in before lunch. Although we don’t bother keeping score, I most likely won that game. After lunch, I played badminton against my cousing Matt. Matt and I have been playing for several years. He always challenges me to a game, always loses, and always denies losing, or ‘alters’ the score. I ‘beat’ him this time. He actually gave up and told me I won! ( Victory, alas! ). After a quick game of badminton with Eric, IKayaked mindlessly for a while, before jumping in several times. ( Jumping in is half the fun. ). When I had completed my mindless kayaking, I indulged in assorted [homemade] ice creams ranging from chocolate chocolate chip cookie dough to coffee nut chip. ( Can’t forget the smushin… ). Following my gluttonous ice cream spree, I once again partook in a game of badminton, which I lost horribly. ( Due to the ice cream. ) All the badminton aside, the highlight of my day was probably a kayak war with my sister. ( she started it!!! { and ended up in the water. } ) Luckily there wasn’t a scary lifeguard to yell at me this time. ( That post sucks to much to link to. ). My brother probably won our final badminton game yesterday. He improved a lot over the course of the day, and among other things, learned to take advantage of me when playing without boundries. ( He plays dirty! )
When I got home and checked my gmail, there was an AdSense email confirmation awaiting me. I never signed up for AdSense, but I guess It can’t hurt to try, can it? ( I doubt my pagerank is high enough. 
{ I don’t even know if they consider that. [ I’m double nesting again. ] } )
The latest revision of wordpress seems to have broken pages. I’ll try to look into that later, and perhaps post to the mailing list. Meanwhile, about and contact are down. Aggregator is finally up, though in need of much work. ( including adding more feeds. ) I still haven’t made the “Archives”, “Elsewhere” and “Other” pages. ( Other is actually going to be code. I’m just trying to think of a slightly more interesting name for it. ) Edit: Wordpress plugins also seem to be broken. I’ll look into that too, but until it is fixed, this will not post to my livejournal. ( not that I really care… )
Edit(2): Pages work again. The permalinks were messed up. Plugins are also working again.( don’t remember what I did… )
Current Version: 1.4.1
Born on fourth day of the tenth month of the nine-hundred-eighty-seventh year of the second millenium, anno domini ( for all the illiterate out there: second millennium = 1000 ≤ x ≤ 1999; 1000 + 987 = 1987 ) to his parents, William and Melodee, Greg is originally a resident of North Attleborough ( Mass ), where he lived until the age of four. Immediately following his fourth birthday, Greg and his family moved to the small town of Burrillville, Rhode Island, his mother’s home town. Greg started Kindergarten in 1992—the same year his little brother was born. Although he was at first happy to have a little brother, he soon learned of the horrors associated with siblings. In 1993, Greg attended pre-one because his handwriting just sucked that much. Finally, in 1994, Greg was promoted to the first grade.
Greg has been a scouter since 1993 and attained the rank of Eagle Scout on January 15th, 2004. He earned a Bronze Palm later that year and received a Gold Palm on June 8th, 2005. Greg was the first scout in the history of his troop to be awarded a Gold Palm. On September 29th, 2005, Greg earned a silver palm. He now has 36 merit badges, including all of the Eagle required badges, except Hiking, which he can’t possibly earn, as he is now 18.
Greg has been to two Massachusetts Jamborees, One national Jamboree, one Council Jamboree, 4? district jamborees, White Stag and various other events. After Greg’s Philmont expedition this summer ( in which he ditched Kayla, went to New Mexico, and left her all alone to rot in Burrillville ), Greg went to yawgoog for his eighth and final year as a scout. Prior to being on the reservation for twenty-four hours, the camp was evacuated due to a norovirus outbreak. Greg and his troop returned week eight.
For a short period of time, Greg was nicknamed ‘Super Scout’. The name didn’t stick, but his current nickname, ‘Torti’, did. With the passing of one generation of scouters, the name Torti is slowly drifting out of use. Kayla has now nicknamed Greg “The Italian Stallion” just so that he’ll blush when he reads this. Over the course of his scouting career, Greg was elected to hold the office of Senior Patrol Leader for two consecutive terms. Greg has also held the following positions: Scribe, Den Chief, Patrol Leader, Assistant Patrol Leader, Self-Proclaimed World Dictator, and Patrol Mascot. Greg is currently serving as an Assistant Scoutmaster; he dares you to oppose him. Beware: Greg is NOT youth-protection trained. (that means you, Chris. [I’d be more afraid of Brian if I were you.]) Greg is certified in CPR, and trained in life-guarding, first aid, this, that, and the other thing. Greg is an avid navigator and can tie any knot known to man, including the Jury Masthead knot, the Monkey’s fist, the X leaf Chinese temple not, the double figure of eight, and the hangman’s noose. (don’t mess… :-p) He can also sign your book…
Greg thinks Greg is insane for writing about Greg in the third person. ( Greg loves little Parenthetical Comments. [ Sub-parenthetical Comments must be properly nested. { Failing to properly nest is a syntax error and probably won’t compile. } ]
)
Gr3g h45 833/\/ 4 c0/\/\p|_|73r u53r f0r 480u7 72% (yes, he did the math.) of his life. He has had the same hotmail address since fourth grade, although he hasn’t used it in a long time. Greg began dabbling in web design when he was about nine years old and started learning JavaScript at age twelve. He has since become adept in PHP, XHTML, CSS and MySQL. He also considers himself rather fluent in C++, PERL, and Shell. As a hardcore Linux user, Greg passionately hates Microsoft ( Microshit ). Although Greg is a computer geek/nerd, he plans on majoring primarily in mathematics with a probable double major in Computer Science. With bachelors in math and computer science, Greg hopes to receive a job at Google Labs and someday become Dr. Math. Greg is the proud owner of a Gmail account and self-proclaimed Gmail patriarch of Burrillville. (trace your invite back as far as you can. Who invited you? Who invited that person? He has a long line of descendants.) He is Google’s most loyal fan and is quite angry that he doesn’t own stock in them. Some of Greg’s programming works can be found at: /dev. Greg took two years of high school Spanish, but considers PHP his second language. Quite frankly, he would rather talk to his computer in ASCII binary ( He has memorized the important parts of ASCII. ).
In August of 2005, Greg began coding what he hoped would be a recreation of what Mafia.org was in the days of IzzyCreamcheese. With the game barely functioning, it was opened for public beta in early January. [insert more stuff here.] Greg invites you to add on to the game’s userbase: Mafia Returns
Greg is member of hackthissite.org. ( Greg was too lazy to make that a hyperlink so Kayla did it for him. ) I sure know a lot about Greg for some cheezy narrator/biographer. In a way, you might say I stalk him. (Greg pwns Ryan.)
Greg is Italian enough to call himself Italian. Being Italian, Greg believes that culture is defined as the number of Italian bakeries per square kilometer ( or other measure of area. [ Greg supports the metric system. ] ) Greg can tell when you try to slip ‘fake’ Italian food past him—don’t try it… ( he might just have mob connections… ) Greg believes that Italian is the ‘Master Food’, however, he doesn’t plan to go on a genocide over it. “Some men are Baptists, others Catholics, ” ( A Christmas story ) For example, Greg is a Baptist, and Kayla is a Catholic. Greg is also a coke-addicted coffee man. Greg has been drinking coffee everyday for longer than he cares to remember. The score is roughly: Favali: 3; Trogisch: 1; Greg: 545; Greg has become good at smuggling coffee around school.
For a short time in 2005, Greg dated an insanely gorgeous chicken restaurant who is at least 100 times better than Greg. This chicken restaurant (or Kayla, as many call her) is still the coolest person in the world. (She didn’t even ‘make’ me add that.) (But she did edit some stuff in here.)
Greg can be found on IRC at: irc.jaundies.com #divinelunacy, #mafia (nickname: Mario)
Greg’s birthday is in:
Greg is: old.
Graduation:
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve finally come up with a fun way of contacting me. First, if you’ve tried, and failed to obtain my email address, you don’t deserve to talk to me. I have made absolutely no effort to conceal my email address, so if you haven’t been able to find it, you really are a pathetic lifeform.
For those of you who already know my email address, are too lazy to find it, or aren’t worthy, but are determined to contact me: In my spare time one day, I came up with a simple algorithm to encipher my email address. I then created a php function to model this algorithm and made an inverse function. The enciphered form of my email address is: thdcbhvjlvrtzsmitorhvqa and is of the form: somethingatsomedomaindotsuffix. The algorithm is definitely not linear, so don’t even bother trying anything of the form: y=mx+b. Anybody wanting hints can email me…
It has been a long time since my last real font downloading spree ( 4 years, actually ). As of recent, I decided it was time to download more. 1001freefonts.com seems like a good font website… Unless you want to pay for an archive, you have to download all two-thousand-something fonts individually, or do you? Lets think back to search engines 101… How does a www spider find so many web pages? Simple! It follows all the links from a given page. Any www spider can easily index all the fonts. ( There is no robots.txt file restricting them. ). So all I need now is a spider? Yeah, basically. I just happen to have the latest version of wget installed ( what self-respecting *nix user doesn’t? ). Among wget’s many options is: 
–recursive, which tells wget to follow all the links it encounters. ( Restricted to a single domain unless otherwise instructed. ). Running wget --recursive http://www.1001freefonts.com will download the whole website, but I don’t want the whole website, do I? I certainly don’t want images, web pages, or the mac fonts. This is where more of wget’s options come in handy. When I was finished creating my command line, it looked something like this: wget http://www.1001freefonts.com/ --continue - -nc --recursive -U "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050620 Firefox/1.0.5" --exclude-directories=http://1001freefonts.com/macfonts --ignore-tags=link,img -A zip,ttf -R gif,jpg,png,html,htm,sit -A and -R are allowed and restricted filetypes. I told wget to allow only zip and ttf files. I also told it not to bother with the macfonts directory. Now I have a very nice font directory building up. When that finishes, all I’ll need to do is unzip several thousand archives. ( unzip * ) All Hail wget!!!!!!!11
I am sure everyone has learned of LiveJournal’s OpenID support by now. I imagine most people wondered how it worked, but never looked into it. After doing some research, I am quite interested in this, so I’ve decied to post a general overview of the whole thing.
Lets say you have a LiveJournal account and you’re logged in right now. You happen to be reading a blog post at say, deadjournal, and you want to reply, but you don’t have a deadjournal account. Dear lord, what to do? You can either comment anonymously, or use your OpenID. Very simply, your open id is: your_user_name.livejournal.com. Now you’re wondering how the hell that verifies your identity, right? In the [X]HTML source code of your livejournal, there is a link to the associated OpenID server, which, in this case appears as: <link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml” />. When you submit your comment, the OpenID consumer, or site you’re commenting on, pulls that server’s URL out of the identity you provided ( your livejournal homepage ). The consumer then chats with the server a little before forwarding you there. In this case, you are sent to livejournal.com. LiveJournal can then check your cookies to verify that you are logged in. If you are logged into your livejournal account, the server tells the consumer that you are indeed you. If you are not logged in, it will tell the server that you are some cheezy imposter; your comment will not be posted as you.
And the advantage of this is?… LIveJournal has an XMLRPC interface, which easily allows any non-livejournal site to verify your livejoural identity, providing you give it your password, but do you really want to give your livejournal password out to random websites? I know I don’t. With OpenID, you are still commenting with your livejournal account, but the identity verification is done via livejoural’s server. In other words: Your password does not go through a third party site. If you view the source of divinelunacy.com, you will see that I am using my livejournal account as an identity. If I were to post a comment on an OpenID enabled server, i would simply put divinelunacy.com as my openid. Easy, eh?
I find this all quite intriuging, so I really can’t wait until wordpress supports it. In fact, I might even work on making my own implementation—just another thing to add to my already mile long “to code” list…