During the past 2 weeks I’ve had a few friends tell me that one of the local 7-Eleven convenience stores had been transformed into a “Kwik-E-Mart”, the cartoon convenience store that the Simpsons shop at. Being a huge Simpsons fan, I had to check it out.

It took us 45 minutes to drive down there. Luckily, and as you can see from the above pic, they went all out. They were even selling actual items from the Simpsons TV show, like Buzz Cola, Krusty O’s, pink donuts, and Squeeshies. Sadly, there was no Duff beer. Below you can see my brother Kyle holding a box of Krusty O’s.

I couldn’t resist buying a box, along with a huge case of Buzz cola, a Homer cookie, and a Squeeshy. The place was pretty packed, and it seemed like everyone else was doing the same. I’m glad I only bought one box though, I saw several people buying 2-4 boxes. They’ll probably be pretty bummed out when they get home and find out it’s just fruit loops inside (I was somewhat annoyed at this – come on, Krusty O’s != fruit loops).

Before this, I don’t think I’d ever been to a 7-Eleven. So even though there were decorations everywhere, I wasn’t sure how far they’d gone to make their business look like a Kwik-E-Mart. I thought it was cool they had gross looking hot dogs for sale though. If that’s what they normally sell, I’m surprised anyone eats them.

Everyone else in the store was taking pictures like crazy too. You couldn’t move 5 feet without getting in the way of someone’s photo. However, I highly recommend a trip up to one of these stores. It’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had in a convenience store. You can find the closest one to you here:

http://www.7-eleven.com/kem.asp

Here are some more photos I took:

http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/freezer_man.png – The freezer man!
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_buzzcola.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_comicbookguy.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_outside.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/pat_chiefwiggum.png

As a side note, the Buzz cola is just generic soda, and it doesn’t taste that great. So don’t buy a huge case unless you’re doing it for the cans. Same with the Krusty O’s – they just generic fruit loops. The Squeeshies are good, you should definitely get one of those. They were out of pink donuts when we got there, but I imagine they taste like any other donut you buy with pink frosting. There were a couple of other Simpsons themed products, but those were the main ones.

It’s weird that I’m not getting much feed back on the TAAG program. Normally I would take that as a sign that people aren’t interested in it. But it’s definitely causing my bandwidth to go up and it’s causing me to get visitors from google. So I’m not sure what to make of the silence. It’s cool to finally get people from google though. I’ve almost always relied completely on word of mouth or links from other sites to get traffic for this site.

Top 6 keywords used in search engines to find this site (from the 1st of June to this posting):

For the whole month of April, the top keyword was “patorjk” (who searches for that?) and it brought in 39 visitors.

Today I modified TAAG and made it so it could work with FIGlet font files – however, I have NOT updated the version on this site. This is a pretty cool addition because it’ll let the program work with a ton of pre-existing ASCII Art fonts. After getting the app to load the files, I decided I’d implement most of the FIGlet font file parameters, which includes something called “smushing” which lets the author of the font determine the spacing between characters and how they should overlap. Me describing it probably sounds pretty boring, you can read more about it here:

http://www.jave.de/figlet/figfont.txt

Actually, that will probably be pretty boring too, unless you’re interested in developing your own ASCII Art font. Anyway, the reason I’m updating is to say I’m shooting for updating TAAG on Tuesday night. I’ll be in New York city the next 3 days (hanging out with friends), so I wont be able to work on it then, but I hope to polish off the small bit of coding I do have left on Tuesday (I’m taking the day off to rest). So if everything goes as planned, TAAG should have between 20-40 new fonts on Tuesday.

Until then, if for some reason you find yourself bored out of your mind and in need of something entertaining, check this out:

http://www.1-click.jp/

Hackers and Painters

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

One day while I was sitting in my graduate level Operating System class, bored out of my mind, the professor went on a tangent and started talking about coding styles. He mentioned a man by the name of Paul Graham and how Paul thought coding / hacking was similar to painting. This immediately caught my ear and I made note of a famous essay, entitled “Hackers and Painters”, that Paul had apparently written.

Reading Graham’s essay was like a shot in the arm. It reminded me why I was a programmer and why I went to school as a computer scientist. So many people go into computer science for the money, and so many of the people who teach it are “researchers” or theorists, I think it makes someone like me forget why they liked it in the first place. I related to that essay very well, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs as a hobby.

I’m starting to feel a little bad about always promising that stuff is coming, and then never posting anything up :P. However, this Friday, come hell or high water, I will be posting up something new. It wont be finished, but it will be usable and near completion. Here are some tidbits about it:

– It will be an online application, programmed in PHP and Javascript.
– It will mostly be for entertainment / fun, though it will have applications in Ascii Art.
– I originally had the idea back in 2000, but decided against making it because I saw it had been done. However, after thinking a bit, I decided that it’s pointless to try and make something 100% original. So I looked at the existing app and thought to myself “could I make something that was better?”, and I decided that I could so I started programming it up.
– It will be open source, but not until I’m done.

Right now I have something I could post up, but I hope to make a few updates before Friday. Tuesday I get to see Al Gore talk (he’s coming to UMBC and doing that global warming talk he does) and on Wednesday I’m seeing Spiderman. So I probably wont get a whole lot done, but even if I posted what I have now it’d still be a mostly complete application.

This is an update to say updates are on the way :P. I was recently sent a copy of my color spy, so as soon as I check that out I’ll post it up. Also, a few updates back I mentioned I was working on an online app. I’m not going to finish it any time soon, so I’ll try and just post a beta version of it in a week or so (it wont be anything amazing – but it will be kind of cool).

About a week ago someone mentioned to me that they’d be interested in purchasing my domain if I didn’t want it. I said no, but it did make me wonder how much it was worth.

The following site gives you an estimate on what a certain domain name is worth:

http://www.leapfish.com/

I personally think the results it gives are a little over blown, but it’s still fun to try different sites and see what it says. Below is just a hand full of sites I tried. If you want, you can post your own site’s worth in the comments to this.

Site: http://www.patorjk.com
Estimated domain value: $74,240.00
Leapfish link: Click Here
About: My website.

Site: http://www.iamstuffed.com
Estimated domain value: $648.00
Leapfish link: Click Here
About: My buddy David’s web site.

Site: http://www.johnstonefitness.com
Estimated domain value: $455,525.00
Leapfish link: Click Here
About: One of my favorite fitness web sites.

Site: http://www.gasparinutrition.com
Estimated domain value: $6,300.00
Leapfish link: Click Here
About: The web site of a popular supplement company.

Site: http://www.dosfx.com
Estimated domain value: $66,608.00
Leapfish link: Click Here
About: The web site of a popular programmer (someone I used to follow carefully since he always did good work). Looks like he hasn’t updated his site since 2004. Though maybe he’s moved onto something else.

Site: http://www.darcfx.com
Estimated domain value: $33,396.00
Leapfish link: Click Here
About: Does anyone remember darcfx.com? It was the major aol programming site after knk.com went down. Man, I probably date myself with these aol references (as a site note, I haven’t had AOL since the year 2000).

http://web.archive.org/web/20060519165919/http://patorjk.com/

All I have to say is that Mark Z. is the f’ing man!! I would have never thought to look there for my old site. I had no idea they archived images! I know this may sound bad, but when I found out my old host deleted my account (shortly after my hard drive crashed) the only thing I was really sad about was that I didn’t back up the scans some German lady sent me of the feature my Mosaicer program got in a German magazine. Everything else I felt could be rebuilt – and probably should be rebuilt. But the scans actually meant something to me. It just completely blew my mind when I started getting emails from Germans asking about my software, and then finally someone emails me the scans. Anyway, you can see the scans here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050302031952/patorjk.com/newslog03.htm

I’ve also saved a few other things off the site, but mostly just for reference or for modification. Like I said before, I’m going to try and create a slightly different site.

Oddly enough the only 3 programs they archived were IMapper Studios, my API Spy, and Mosaicer 2.0. I wonder if this means that those were my 3 most popular programs? They also archived my Snake game, you can play it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050224064503/patorjk.com/newslog03_2.htm

I actually lost the source to all my Flash stuff on my first hard drive crash (I’ve had 3 crashes in the past 3 years, all hardware related – 2 on my PC and one was on my laptop). Lessons have been learned though. I now back stuff up routinely. Probably a good habit for everyone. Snake is a great game though. I’ve been toying with the idea of making another one, except this time in Java.

Other interestingly high lights:

/dropgraveyard.htm
/IntergalacticOdyssey_04.htm
/snake.htm
/pat_bush1.gif – Infamous Pat/Bush pic. Note: This is not a political pic. I just thought it looked freaky.
/mosaics.htm

Lastly, I had someone request my color spy so I’ll try and whip one up by the end of the week (or check my backup disks, I have a feeling that I backed that program up). If you have any suggestions for the site, let me know. I can’t promise anything, since I work 40 hours and do stuff outside of this site, but I’ll keep it in mind.

My friend and former roommate Ben H. was telling me about this flash game he was playing where you had “5 minutes to kill yourself”. It sounded kind of bizarre, but turned out to be pretty fun. You can play it along with a whole bunch of other cool flash games here: 

http://www.onemorelevel.com/

Watch out though, because that site is great at eating up your free time.

Also, in other news, I’m about 30% done with a new program I’m going to be putting up on the site. It’s being written in Javascript and PHP, so it’ll be an online app. It’ll mostly be for entertainment and wont be anything breakthrough. It should be pretty cool though. Tomorrow (well, really later today) I’m seeing Lily Allen in concert, so I wont have anymore time to work on it this weekend. My guess is that I’ll have it out in 2 weeks.