Let me start off by saying, it takes a lot for a book to grab my attention. I had major problems growing up reading. The problem was, if I’m not interested in the books message or theme my mind tends to just give up and I eventually stop reading the book entirely. I wound up going to reading class until I was in the 8th grade. Not only did I sharpen my reading skills but I also learned that you don’t HAVE TO (unless school makes you) read a book that you don’t want to. You cannot FORCE yourself to be into a book, no matter the topic. I blew through 100+ pages the first day I got this book it was so great. I read over I believe two chapters because I wanted to solidify them into my head because they were so well written and had a great message.

I will not ruin the book for everyone but for me to tell you to go out and spend the $12 on a hard cover book because you’ll probably wind up reading it in one night because it is so good that says a lot. The best thing about it is that it leaves you wanting more but makes you realize that everyday is a struggle for this person and the minute you stop reading this book you want to google Brandon Novak to see if he is back on drugs. (at this point he is not)

The book starts off with him in a Garage basically coming off a night of heavy drug use. He himself is an homeless addict. A star at the top of his game who through it all away on drugs. Next you see this star who is so at rocks bottom that it is sickening to read on but you must. Lets just put it this way right before he enters rehab he winds up having to prostitute himself for fix .. by having another grown married man suck his d!ck. What happens after that .. is just heartbreaking.

Please Read this book it really has a good message that even the best can fall. If you do read it and want to say a couple words about it on my site I will more then happily oblige.

( email - bcinelli@gmail.com )

I been busy lately sorry. Between Gears of War 2 and the new book I’m reading Dreamseller my attention has been elsewhere. On top of that I have a beer pong tournament that I have to push promotion for coming up on the 22nd of November so that should only delay more posts but who knows what my insomniac nights bring. For now enjoy this book.

I haven’t written much about myself lately, as I look back at past posts. I have kind of kept myself out of my postings and just talked about material things and such. Well that ends today, I feel as if I owe it to myself to talk more about myself in my own blog other then to talk about shit I purchase or computer tech issues. Those topics will still be talked about but expect more talk about myself. That is what people find interesting and actually come back to read. So here it goes.

My birthday has just passed last friday. I celebrated it Saturday night because Saturday morning I had a softball tournament out east and didn’t want to be hung over for it. That is how I get when it comes to sports and competitions. I want to be at my best. If I falter I only have myself to blame and not the dozen and a half beers I drank the night before. Friday night, I went out to dinner with my family (mom, dad, brothers, Melissa and Melanie) for my birthday at New York, New York Restaurant. It’s pretty much my favorite restaurant right now to eat at. For one, its a local place and I rather give my money to them then a Chili’s or Fridays. Secondly, the Italian food is great. I had a crazy urge for lemon chicken and spaghetti with garlic and oil. NYNY always gives you a ton of food and never leaves you hungry. We all had a ton of fun eating and enjoying each others conversation. Afterward, we went back to the house to do the whole birthday cake thing. That was my 24th birthDAY.

As for Saturday, woke up about 6:45 got all dressed picked up john with tom and headed out east to Shirley to play softball in an Autism tournament. I can honestly say this is one of the best tournaments/leagues I have seen competition wise. All these teams are no joke. We lost two of our first games and were eliminated. Could we of won? Yeah, but our bats weren’t there at all. Still you play this great competition and you will only get better. Quickly went home and took a nap for the rest of the day since I was crazy tired.

Saturday night was the night planned on celebrating my birthday. I kind of felt like I was one of those people who celebrates there birthday all week/weekend. Well, I kind of didn’t do much Friday so Saturday was the real celebration. Me and all my friends went to Wasabi (hibachi place in Farmingdale) to celebrate with food and Saki Bombs. I seriously have the best times there. I love great food, friends and booze. There aren’t much better things in life that make me happy then that equation.

After Wasabi we all headed over to the Nutty Irishman for drinks of course and lots of dancing. Yeah, I like to get really full on food and saki, then get even more boozed up and dance. I’m not no fucking Chris Brown out there but I hold my own enough for people to not single me out for looking like a tool, or at least I think so. I had a ton of fun with everyone who came. Click on the picture below for the gallery.

I also have to say I got some great presents from my girlfriend. I got an authentic Lawrence Taylor Jersey (my favorite Giant of all time) and tickets to the Giants Vs. Ravens game November 16th. Seeing as the Giants only have two more seasons left in the Meadowlands (current one and next year) before it’s torn down, I really want to take advantage of every game I can get my hands on to go to. Its a scheduled 1 p.m. game but it’s one of those games where they can move the game to either 4 or 8 depending on how it will do ratings wise for the NFL. I have always been a fan of that new scheduling idea the NFL has used over the last two seasons with putting premiere games in the better time slots. Anyways I’m very thankful Melanie did this for me.

I don’t want to make one long drawn out post, so I’m gonna let this one soak in for a day or so. Also, check out the right hand side of the page where the menu is because I have changed a couple things up and updated links. Don’t forget to visit my friends.

EDIT: SORRY LISA .. i’m 24 not 25 .. THANKS FOR THE CORRECTION ass!

Well I decided using the old 4image and ‘gallery’ to use as a image gallery viewer was just not what I wanted anymore. Also, using flickr.com even though it’s been amazing to me to host my images, that $25 a year just isn’t worth it when I’m paying for hosting space I don’t utilize to its full potential. This all lead me on a journey for a flickr’est photo gallery that was easy to customize as well as easy to navigate all while looking beautiful.

This lead me to Surmunity.com my hosting sites community forum. I was offered plenty of solutions but one I truly liked was Zen Photo. It is a web photo gallery that isn’t very big ‘footprint’ wise and is very quick while using. It fit my simple needs and was fully customizable via css and php.

To get started all you have to do is download the files from the site which is wrapped up in a neat package for you. Upload to your server, Create the MySQL Database/Account for it to use, Then Visit the Setup page and your done. Just start uploading your pictures either via the web upload interface or FTP the albums in yourself. FTP is the obvious speedier way to do so.

Getting all that setup took me no longer then 20 minutes. The ONLY and I repeat ONLY issue I had was adding a frill I wanted. The frill was when you click on the image if fires up a javascript that darkens out the rest of the page and calls up the image you want then lets you navigate to the next image or go back to the previous image.

The problem I was having is I was trying to use Slimbox which uses mootools javascript framework. Zen Photo already uses the jQuery javascript framework. I did not know this. For days I was beating myself up trying to get the damn thing to work when jQuery and Mootools were taking DUMPS on eachother and not working.

I enlisted the a friend of mine of a website I will not mention but lets just say he is pretty ‘gangster’, lol. So, said friend helped me realize what I just described and helped me implement a javascript like Slimbox that is bulit off the javascript being utilized by ZenPhoto already. The script was simply enough ‘jQuery lightBox plugin’. He found it at the LightBox for jQuery Plugin website that someone had created. As quick as the file was downloaded was as quick as it was implemented. Just a few code changes and presto the script worked.

Now I can host all my images on my home site, back them up whenever I want and feel like I’m truly utilizing all of my hosting. Also, makes for better search targets when people are using google image search. I’m guessing after reading all this you want to see the gallery in question. Well here it is:

Also, I upgraded my Hard Drive to a 250GB Hitachi Travelstar. I used to have a 80GB Toshiba hard drive in my Macbook prior and desperately needed a bigger one. All my music, pictures and video were stored on my MYBOOK 500GB USB External Hard Drive. Which stunk because I had to wait till I got home to get things I might need on the road.

I went ahead and upgraded it myself, with the help of Time Machine. Leopard OSX comes with an amazing hard drive backup program called “Time Machine”. TM backs up hourly, daily, weekly and finally monthly. Doesn’t take up much space on my External Hard Drive to do backups which is also a plus. The biggest help was all I had to do when the new Hard Drive arrived was install it, put in my Leopard OSX cd, connect my External with the TM backups on it and within an Hour I had my computer restored to the EXACT same place it was prior with one difference, MORE HARD DRIVE SPACE!

Once all this was done, I shifted all my music and pictures over to my hard drive and decided the video could stay on the second partition ‘Garbage’ *after the Hackers movie* lol. When I was done with all that I reset the partitions on the MY BOOK drive for about 300GB for my TM backups of my new 250GB hard drive and then 200GB for my own personal storage that I don’t need on my laptop which contains videos, application installs and other misc stuff.

Now I can carry around whatever I please, and my computer is running amazingly. I opted for the 5400RPM drive over the 7200RPM drive because of the power drain the higher RPM drive might cause. Since I’m on the train for 2 hours a day I thought this was the right move.

Well got off the train at 7am yesterday at the Chambers Street Station and walked out to see a Buffet lined up in the street. At first I was like “Free Breakfest!” but then quickly looked around to see they were shooting something at a local bar I go to sometimes. They were shooting at the Patriot, a bar located on Chambers street. I have to say they had a nice little spread of food setup. Those actors are pretty pampered I would gather.

As I walked further up I started seeing signs to the set and such and people walking in and out (people on set and assistants. I have no clue what they were shooting there. One of my friends from work is good friends with the people who bar tend there so hopefully I can shine some light on it in a later post.

Tomorrow I’m going to discuss my Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade.

Well, it went the way I wanted it to go. I got the box Friday afternoon after work and instantly tried to put it in. Thing is I didn’t have the small set of Philips head screwdriver needed. Went out to Lowe’s and picked up a complete 8-1 set which stores within itself which was pretty cool for $5.

Opened up the MacBook case which was easy as pie and installed the new ram chips. Took out the two sticks of 512MB RAM sticks and popped in the new 1GB stick and 2GB stick in the spots taken before. Powered on the machine and it recognized it with no problem. I opened up the Activity monitor and OSX was using all 3GB worth of memory. I’m just real happy it all went to plan like it was supposed to.

After the machine starts using the memory and cache’s a few things the machine started moving around a lot quicker. Probably not so noticeable to the average user but I could definitely tell a difference. When browsing, chatting, downloading torrents, and working in photoshop all at the same time running it worked a lot quicker. I recommend throwing in as much as you can to speed up your MacBook if you need it, which is priced rather cheap at macsales.com .

Something else I found out is that I can assign applications to separate ‘Spaces’. Meaning when I want to run Photoshop CS3 I can run it in space 2 and un-cluttering space 1. When I want to go between spaces just a click of the mouse (might mouse top button) or F8 brings me back to space 1 and my other apps that are running. It’s quite efficient if you ask me. I picked up on this little trick through reading a blog at askdavetaylor.com .

On top of all that, nothing much is new. Had a great weekend got back to playing softball on a Sunday morning team. I hit 5-7 I believe with 2 home runs, 1 double and 2 singles (not absolutely positive on the doubles and singles) but reached base all but one time that day. Had a bad case of acid indigestion throughout the game probably because I drank the night before a block party. STill not to bad for a guy who hasn’t played in about 3 weeks.

Oh, here is a picture Charlie took on the train today going in to work of me (not the most flattering its 7am and I’m exhausted) with his LG touch phone from Verizon. You can add little things to the picture to make it funny. Till next time… lata.

I decided 1GB of RAM for my Macbook just isn’t cutting it. Even though I didn’t realize that I had only 1GB of RAM until I looked at the system profile the other day. I was actually looking into upgrading my Hard Drive at the time from 80GB to 250GB, so I don’t have to store things on the MYBOOK 500GB external drive (150GB partitioned to Time Machine Backups). The hard drive upgrade i’ll keep for another days post.

Upon researching the memory limitations for my laptop I came into a bit of a problem. My laptop which is the version of Late 2006-Early 2007 Intel Core 2 Duo, on the Apple website says there is a 2GB limit. Upon researching and posting in the Apple Support Forums I found out you can put a 2GB module and a 1GB module in the laptop and have it run 3GB with no problems. Thing is I got mixed answers on the forums on what I can do. Some people said it won’t work and that 2GB is the limit and some said 3GB would be just fine, 4GB was out of the question.

Next up was where to buy it. I searched around as well and Amazon had some good prices but the best prices I found were at Macsales.com. I bought the 3GB set of memory for $64 and spent $9 on two-day fed-ex express shipping (instead of the $6 2-5 day standard mail). All together it cost me about $75 dollars when all was said and done. I should get it rather quickly and I’m pretty excited. The only thing I’m worried about is compatibility. If it doesn’t work I checked the return policy which is quite nice and I should have no problem swapping for the 2Gb (1Gb+1Gb modules) with some money back.

I’m just very excited when I make a purchase like this. I want it fast and I want it to work when I open it up right out of the box. I’m horrible when it comes to these things.

I’m selling off my Mac Mini to my younger brother so that will fund my Hard Drive upgrade as well as this memory upgrade.

Report to come soon!

Riding the train in today I noticed something I hadn’t noticed in months. There were an abundance of kids on the train. That only means one thing to me. School is back in session, and now the subway cars are going to be packed to the balls with kids blasting there iPods at ridiculous volumes. I don’t know it could pretty much be my age and getting older but its so annoying to have to listen to another person’s musical choice while your on your commute. I understand that if there is a low dribble of music coming out of your headphones while they are on you that I can hear, i’ll deal. If you BLAST your shit so everyone in the subway car (which are pretty long) can here you deserve an angry bum to inject you with his crack needle thus sharing his AIDS. Enough of this rant, at least they will probably run more subway cars now.

Labor day weekend is over. I had a block party the other day (Sunday) which a bunch of people attended. We probably made it up to 30-40 people at max. We all were up late in the street drinking and playing beer pong of course. Then we turned into chilling in the driveway sitting around a table chatting it up with everyone and still drinking. Everyone decided to head to bed around 2:30 a.m. or something. Since it was the last night of summer I decided to take advantage of the tent I still haven’t taken down in my back yard and slept in it with Melanie. Have to say .. was a great nights sleep outdoors.

Thursday of last week I had another appointment with my Allergist. We went over what medicines worked and what did not for me. Nasacort (nasal spray) sucked which he told me to discontinue using. Pantanase (nasal spray) worked pretty good and switched it to the main spray I will use. Singular (allergy pill) was doing nothing but making me feel weak and a little cartoonish so we dumped that for a 24-hour pill of Allegra-D. Allegra-D is both an allergy pill and decongestant which helps because I get terrible sinus pressure in my nose and below my eyes when I wake up. Its been a few days and its been working wonders. Another big thing was a change in my Exercise induced asthma inhaler. He wants me to use Proventil-HFA which is just like the Albuterol inhaler I had prior but doesn’t have CFC’s that hurt the environment. This sucked it didn’t have the same power my last inhaler had, which helped the most. I dropped using the Proventil and went back to my Albuterol inhaler.

Oh, while I was there he wanted to do another allergy test on my skin. This time he wanted to use injections (20 or so) of all these different types of allergies that are most common. I tested really bad for dust mites, where it gave me a bump that lasted for two days afterward that was gross. Still up until last night I was very itchy in that spot on my forearm. In the picture its shows the injections and such on my arm. I almost passed out while he was doing it, because I was stupid and didn’t eat beforehand and then tried to be all manly and look at it while he is shoving 20 something needles in my forearm. I’m retarded.

Other then that .. bums have been popping up more and more around my job. I guess they are all coming back from there summer homes in jersey. ha-ha. The best is I saw a guy setting up shop right by a Bank of America ATM storefront in only jeans. Visibly you could see he was using a plastic shopping bag as underwear. Seriously, what the fuck. Go to a shelter and get some hanes. I donate a ton of clothes a year to these charities and such for the homeless to have clothes. It’s kind of upsetting because you know that guy checked out mentally years ago and now there is a crazy man living in that head.

Well that is pretty much everything up to date, Oh and that we won our softball championships for both our Sunday Night A division and Mens Weeknight DirtyDalerz team. Both I’m so happy to have won and pretty happy that softball is kinda over. It took a toll on my body, now its time to get back to the gym.

Well .. we are one game away from the championship with the DirtyDalerz softball team now. We played an excellent game as a team last night and lets just keep it up for Thursday. Well of course If you know me personally every Thursday I run a beer pong tournament at the local bar The Nutty Irishman. The game is at 9 p.m. and sign-ups usually start at 9:30. I’m going to have a friend help out and start up the signups for me and I’ll just hurry there right after my game.

It’s been a very busy past week. I have had a softball game everyday since Sunday. I had 3 games on Sunday, one on Monday and one yesterday. I am quite exhausted. I have also been making it into work everyday really early also so that’s not really helping either. My bones hurt in my legs and last night I didn’t play to my fullest potential but I got the job done of course.

Lately, You I have been finding things I haven’t gotten around to buying or have not found for the right price. I been searching Amazon.com for these things. So far I have picked up a 6 foot HDMI cable for $9, a 8GB Flash drive for $25 and a 4GB Micro SD Card for $15 bucks. I’m not happy with the 8GB Flash Drive I ordered SO, on top of that I like how the Micro SD media works and it is basically used in everything today. I ordered a microSD card reader that is very small like a thumb. Only $8 all together, which should work out better then a USB Flash Drive.

I also ordered a $7 DVI to HDMI cable for my Mac Mini. Currently I have it hooked up via DVI to VGA connector then its VGA’d to my Vizio 26 Inch LCD TV. Since mounted it I want things to be pretty smooth all together. We’ll see how that goes. I’m gonna take a better picture of the setup.

Sorry if this sounds all outta wack this post but I tried writing it while at work .. lol and I got busy to its all choppy.