Justins Journal

Camp 2007

Camp Hope and Life 2007 went really well! Better then well. We had one or two incidents but nothing huge. I’ve posted some videos to my youtube, there is no flash player for Wordpress 2.x yet, so I can’t host them myself just yet. Sorry, you’re stuck with the watermark for a while. As a side note there’s also no mp3 audio player yet for anything above 2.1…ah well, still have to wait I guess. That’s the cost of upgrading.

Uncle Danny at Inspiration Point

Marisa and Anthony, two staff members this year.

Anyway, CAMP! This year we had ONE no show, which is awesome beyond words. Some year’s we’ve had up to 5 kids not show at the bus. Speaking of the bus, that cheese flew through Jersey, and on the way back we were cutting other, slower cars off. It was great. That driver & company will be getting our business again, for not driving like an old fart.

Erin in front of the cafeteria and Erin with her bib on, which she really needed.

It only rained once, and it had to happen on our boating day. We got the kids to not mind by showing a movie. I can’t say which one since we shouldn’t have had that, but it is certainly the best summer movie of 2007. Anyway, this year we had a giant waterslide down one of the hills, and it was beyond sick. It made me remember how much fun being a kid can be… where even a simple tarp and some water can transform itself into a ride. Our nurse this year was great as well, she didn’t just stay in her office twiddling her thumbs, and she came around and participated even.

Boat making and laucnhing!!!

My staff was great. We weren’t over staffed this year, I like to have one extra guy and girl counselor in case of emergencies, but this year that didn’t happen. We were merely “staffed”. We had a few people that couldn’t make it, namely my number 1 girl, Michelle, who also happens to be my number 1 Camp Hope and Life Cheerleader. Man, who goes to work instead of volunteering at my camp?

Paul, and myself out and around camp.

But no, Michelle had some work issues which she felt really bad about. Alex, also MIA for this year’s camp did spend a day however on Friday. Other than that there really isn’t much to report. If you want to find out more you’d just have to ask. Some things I can’t write about, like how some people were stripped down to their underwear…or less…at the counselor party in the Upper Lodge…or what other games we might have played…

Those deer are getting pretty bold, in the morning they come right up to the cabins…

Having a problem embedding the vidoes, so instead, here is a link to them~~!

Current Music: Original Broadway Cast - RENT - Another Day
Current Mood: Happy

Back from Camp 2007!

Just wanted to give a quick update, Hope & Life 2007 is over and it rocked! I’ve been busy uploading photos and editing the video I took. I should have it posted along with a nice blog about how things went and what went on.

Current Mood: TIRED

I’ve never wanted to kick so many people’s asses then tonight..

In the downtime that my page was out for, this story broke over the news outlets. I had to comment on it, so I wrote a blog entry, posted it to my Facebook while I took care of things over here. I’ve re-posted it now.

“3:06am Tuesday, Jul 10
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the 2 year old boy who wasn’t allowed to swim in the pool because he is HIV+. If not, you can read the full article - here.

Now the article doesn’t bother me too much, ignorant grounds owner doesn’t know any better. Fine, but it’s the 12,000 comments on the article that piss me off. I read through many and responded to many as well, generally ripping people apart for their idiotic views.
Here’s a few:

“I am an RN, who works in a psych facility. We have patients with HIV, and they sometimes act out in ways that would be unacceptable behavior in the public. You should see how fast they take a staff member to the local medical center if they get spit on in the eye or mouth. RUSH!! The staff member is immediately tested for HIV, given medication to reduce the possibility of getting infected, and then tested again in 6 months. The virus is in all body fluids, not only blood. Saliva, urine, feces. Why do you think all the dentists wear goggles now? Certainly not because it’s the in fashion thing to do. They don’t want anyones saliva splashing into their eyes. The virus lurks there, albeit in smaller concentration than in the blood, it is still there.”

“While all you liberals sound off, think would you risk your child to be in close contact with a known HIV carrier. Maybe you personally would chose to interact but do you have the right to risk your child getting a death sentence disease. Even if the risk is minimal. Kids bang into each other and share blood all the time. Not everyone is tested but if you knew a child was HIV pos would you let you child interact w/o supervision. And more important if you weren’t informed about it how would you feel about the pool owner having knowledge??”

“I work in the heath care field and I have read and heard it all but in all honestly I still do not trust what they say about Aids and HIV and when i care for patients that have it I wear total full body protection. You never know if contact with body fluids would be made so STFU.”

“Do you really think the medical community is going to tell us all the ways you can get this disease. No way! Not with all the political clout this particular virus has now. It’s got a life of its own. Remember, this is the same medical community that tells us to wear a condom that has pores TEN TIMES LARGER THAN THE VIRUS.”

“I work in a hospital and have advanced degrees, also. I still feel we don’t know everything there is to know about HIV and AIDS and would prefer not to be swimming in a pool with HIV individuals. What about him peeing in the pool as little kids will do, that is a body fluid, isn’t it.”

NONE OF THOSE I QUOTED are sarcasm. This is the type of ignorance that goes on? WTF? And these quotes are from three different message boards. Now I have to waste my time debunking MORONS who probably couldn’t even tell you which fluids really transmit HIV/AIDS. Out of the collective 15,000 posts between all three boards, I read through about 500 of them before I got so sick I had to post and vent my rage.

The first person to say something stupid regarding HIV/AIDS now get’s punched in the face, at least until I’m not angry anymore.

Ok so first thing is first HIV IS NOT PRESENT IN URINE OR FECES, AND IF IT IS IT’S BECAUSE THERE IS BLOOD IN THE EXCREMENTS. This RN needs to go back to nursing school. And yes, while it is present in saliva you would need to drink 2 gallons of an infected persons spit to even have any remote chance of getting it that way. Without getting too technical enzymes in the saliva nullify the viral RNA.

Risk your child getting a death sentence? First of all HIV/AIDS is now a CHRONIC condition, mortality rates have leveled off, this isn’t 1994 anymore where it’s 2 months - 2 years and your dead. The chances of kids transferring it to each other through bumps and bruises is below 0.1%. Possible? Yeah in bizzaro world where your circulatory system is on the outside of your epidermis. STFU and read a pamphlet. Hell, go to freaking wikipedia assmunch, your smart enough to post on a forum, check out the rest of the internets.

Ok, great, next! You work in the healthcare field? Really? You’ve read it all? Then you should know that AIDS and HIV are ALWAYS capitalized you dumb shit. You never know when bodily fluids will make contact? Yeah maybe if your blind. Blood, semen, vaginal secretions, breast milk. I think you’d know if ANY OF THOSE secretions get on you.

Virus is ten times smaller than the small pore in a condom? Why yes, that may be true but the virus can only survive in the semen for a short while and MUST be transferred along with it, or else it will die. A virus can’t just “slip” past some latex on it’s own, that’s why it’s a virus, IT NEEDS A HOST TO LIVE. Eschewing facts to serve your mildly retarded sentiments? Micheal Moore is that you?

You have many degrees eh? From where, Almeda College? Or maybe some University in Kenya where you get to stone and kill women who are HIV+? Someone had a lapse of judgment to give you a degree; well I’ll have the enlightenment to give you an aluminum bat to your face. URINE DOES NOT CARRY HIV. Not only that what chemical is in a pool? Chlorine! Mrs. Degree, you should know that. And what does that shit do? IT KILLS. So even if HIV was present in urine in a pool, it would die, along with nearly all other diseases/contaminants.

BODILY FLUIDS != HIV transmission. SOME BODILY FLUIDS do. Again those are: blood, semen, vaginal secretions and breast milk.

Let’s be generous and say the good ol US of A became aware of HIV/AIDS in 1985. If we give the lagging public a three - four year head start, that still gives 23 years of accumulated HIV/AIDS knowledge. There is no excuse for this kind of ignorance. Imagine if it was 1964 and you had no idea that the Japanese were the ones who attacked Pearl Harbor. You’d be laughed into humility and degradation.

This is all baby shit.That should be common knowledge. If these people even tried to comprehend the shit I read:

“Mutational and structural analyses have improved the understanding of the
intricate enzymatic mechanism of site-specific recombinases and have
permitted the identification of variants with altered properties [reviewed
in (9) and (10)]. In particular, Cre recombinase, which has found
widespread use in mouse genetics (11), has been intensively studied (12),
and Cre target specificity can be altered to recognize moderately altered
DNA target sites (13-15). These studies raise the possibility that new
site-specific recombinases can be generated via directed evolution, which
recombine more divergent target sites. More specifically, our aim was to
evolve a recombinase that would recombine a sequence present within an
HIV-1 LTR. Because Cre can efficiently remove genomic sequences that are
flanked by two loxP sites (16), we and others have predicted that an
evolved recombinase that would recombine a sequence present in the 5′-LTR
and 3′-LTR of an integrated provirus could excise viral sequences from the
genome (13, 17-19).”

their heads would explode. Yours may have just exploded now too, but if you’re smart, you stopped reading at recombinases. MLK Jr. said it pretty well; “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Do I feel a little better fater writing this? Yes. Will I sleep well tonight? No. Not possible knowing that there are so many dumb fucktards. Yeah you have a “right” to your opinion, to your feeligns that someone with HIV should be sent to an island, but that doesnt mean your assinine opinion is correct, it’s quite wrong in fact, and your an idiot for thinking otherwise. No wait…idiot is to tame a word, these types of people need a phrase…”

The Truth, the half-truth and the lies.

In no real order I will try and tell you all the truth, the fake-truth, and the lie about why and how my blog went down for 30 days. As a side note, I didn’t re-size any of these images other then just using some markup language to do it, so…56k warning, etc.)

BUT FIRST! Las Vegas 2007! It was my Clan’s 10th Anniversary, so we had been planning to hit up Vegas since January. It was a good location being near the West Coast. Anyway, about 20 people had signed on to go, but the final count was 5. This was a bit upsetting since they are all good people, they are all gamers, and they missed out on a lot of fun. Two of them got pregnant; another two just got new jobs, etc. etc. I almost didn’t go myself because I haven’t been paid since April. Even my attempts to get paid were like trying to get the last Pringle in the can. So my mom spotted me the $$$. I really didn’t want her to, I was about to unpack at home and call it quits. I still haven’t gotten fully paid from April yet either, so when I do get paid, it all goes right to mom. I don’t mean to make it sound like an ungodly sum of money, but it was more than a few hundreds.

Anyway, nothing spectacular on the plane ride over- standard JFK Delta thing. We meet our other people, Andy from Seattle and Richard from North Carolina and start to check out Las Vegas. From here on I’ll try to tell the story using the pictures I took.

Starting off we checked out some of the hotel/casino resorts. They were pretty awesome. We hit up just about every major one on the strip, short of the Stratosphere and Circus Circus. Mainly because one Vegas block != one Manhattan block. So when the locale tells you “Oh yeah, its 6 blocks up that away” they mean 20.

and here we have a decent overview of the strip…

The places we ate at were really top-notch. Paul has a way of picking out very expensive restaurants. We hit up Smith and Wollensky’s…

when the menus come out on wooden backings…and they don’t offer you Champange, they put it on the table…expectign you not only to buy/order but to drink it as well.

Damn that was real tasty too. Yes, sides like potatoes and spinach and such are extra. Two waiters per table are pretty nice too. Later that night we hit some casinos. I lost $20 on Video Poker. Paul was up $40 at 3 Card Poker, and then we learned how to play and lost it all. I was up about $10 on Video Black Jack, I cashed out, went back to my machine…and lost $30.

That was a pretty craptacular slot machine. It was our group’s common meeting point, so while your waiting you slip $5, $10, into it…and you lose it. Gone. So we take a walk up the strip, we find bars and such along the Coyote Ugly theme, the NYNY actually had a Coyote Ugly inside, but since not all in our group were 21+ we had to nix that idea. Would have been neat, but Vegas had much more to offer. We wind up at Harrah’s where Rita Rudtner was headlining and Dave and I wandered around. We watched a few craps tables. I’ve always been fascinated by that game, never really knowing what the hell was going on. Other then you place some bets, you roll the dice and people hoot or holler.

Here’s what you need to know about craps. It takes 3 casino employees to run one. If the minimum is $10, it’s really more like $30. To make any money it’s always triple the minimum, especially depending on how the dice are. Craps is played in “rounds”. With some very specific rules. If you roll a 7 or 11 on the opening roll, everyone wins. Consecutive rolls like this are good, until you roll something else. Then “it’s on”. And you have toll the “on” number again before a 7 comes up. The house wins on 7 and takes ALLLLLLLL your money on the table. Speaking of money on the table, you can’t hand the workers the money, you have to drop it on the table. And only one hand on the dice, I guess for obvious bribe/cheating reasons.

So Dave and I have some nice spots picked out when all of a sudden next to us stands in David and his friend Tim. David drops like $2k on the table. An older gent, he asks us what we’re doing. We explain and David teaches us just about everything you needed to know about craps. Where to bet, how to bet, when to bet, what “odds on” means, about the guy with the stick and not to fark with anything in the middle of the board. So I drop $100, Dave drops some cash too. Dave rolled like 4 or 5 sevens on his opener which made everyone happy. We were both up, I was up about $100, nearly doubling my initial chips, getting free J&C’s all the while. Then the table started to suck. People just weren’t hitting the On in time. Dave was out, I spotted him some chips. He was out again. I was barely holding on to my initial, Dave comes back from the ATM with MORE MONEY. Then I hit some hot dice on my turn, I had about 7 or 8 rolls, but no On. If I had been betting the other numbers I may have come back to break even. But it was my first time…anyway…we thank David, and walk away…I kept a Souvenir though…

…So I spent $99 learning how to play craps. Fun times.

…and a new day dawned. I had one problem with Las Vegas. Maybe it’s not like this other then July, but 115 fucking degrees? Seriously? Couldn’t they have built it somewhere OTHER than the middle of the DESERT? It’s not too bad, for the most part you really are just walking from air conditioned building to air conditioned building to air conditioned transportation to air conditioned building. The only other complaint I have is the question. Everyone knows prostitution is legal in Vegas. As soon as you hit the strip there are people handing out these cards. Cards with girls on them, thier prices and thier numbers. Direct to your hotel room in 15 minutes or less! Dave and I made a trading card game out of it, and I created an art project out of the 200 or so cards we brought home. It will look nice on his dorms wall.

I had to shrink the image to about 10% to get away with posting it, at 300X zoom it’s way to pixilated to make or more than just…well pixels. So back to the question. Numerous people, not eveyrone, but many, have asked, “So did you get a prostitute?”. That’s when I utter the cheesy “whathappensinvegasstaysinvegas” line. It’s really not your business, or anyone else’s business about that sort of thing. Most of the questioners are satisfied at that. But then you get the persistent ones. They don’t drop it for days, and i usually relent and say, “Look, I wouldn’t tell you if anyone in our group got a prostitute, their sex life is their business…but I will tell you Dave did go Whaling.” The questioners take that to mean, yes, we did get some hot Jenna and Gina $125/hr hot special action. That has been pretty damn annoying.

The next day we had one of those all you can eat brunches, with never ending champagne! I didn’t really see what was so special about it. We went gift shopping, I picked up a display bong for my mom, and a nice lighter for Nana, some things for my little cousins. We checked out the insides of some of the hotels, jumping fountains at Bellagio…burlesque girls,

Obscene slot machines…Greek Fountains

While at the Bellagio I was waiting for someone to finish in the bathroom and I slipped $5 into the Video Poker. I didn’t mean to hit max bet, but I did, and my hand came out…heart…heart…heart…club…heart…HOLY CRAP! I said to myself…well, 20% - 25% chance or something right? Hold…hold…hold…draw…hold…and blam-0! I got my $5 Flush which turned into $20 winnings. I hit cash out, took my winnings and my initial and ran to find a cashier/machine. While I was online Dave runs into Chad. Yes, that Chad. An SJU admin was in Vegas while we were. I thought it was freaky how we also ran into each other. No one got a picture though…ah well…it would have been pretty neat.

Finally we wind up at Gallagher’s steakhouse for dinner. I ordered me’self the Surf and Turf, which was listed at “MP”. Market Price.

3 pound Australian lobster tail with a 10 oz. filet mignon… so that’s what $81 tastes like. I can tell you, it tastes really, really good. Anyway, we took a group photo, $22 for that…and it came out really nice. Scanned and posted for you.

Eventually Dave sat down at a roulette table. It was a bit more random then craps, but with much less confusion involved. I put down $20, walked away with $40. Dave did really well on that table, made up a bit from the craps losses. Myself, I’d leave a stack of min on black, switch it up to red. I’m boring like that, but hey I won 4 or 5 times like that, and only lost my min twice.

There’s a whole lot more, I’m leaving out another day, but really I’ve hit all the awesome stuff. Las Vegas is going to be a once a year thing for me now. If you want to see more pictures head on over to my Facebook Albums, I posted all the pciutres I deemed worthy enough to not delete, about 120 in all. (Album 1 here)

So now that the Vegas story is over and done with, I have some splanning’ to do. Hopefully I’ve tucked this away underneath all those images and no one like B will come down this far to read. Anyway, as per my last post I told you how someone who is mentioned once in a while on my blog wanted me to censor myself and take down certain pictures and allusions to drinking. Like we were doing illegal things or she was being sworn in by Congress…anyway…so the blog went down.

Now some of you may think I caved and sold out my ethics and moral principles for a sports buff on my trivia team. Alas lies! I would do no such thing as edit my entries. I did that once and I still regret it, many, many years ago, like in 98′. Back on track however, so if I didn’t voluntarily edit myself, did B hold me under pain of death or some such? No, no conspiracy there either. So what really happened? Well, the truth is my DNS hosting time expired on June 23rd, Network Solutions gives you 30 days to renew or they will let someone else scoop up www.jhaf.org. I texted B and asked her if her situation had been taken care of, telling a half truth to her asking, “Can I bring my webpage back up now?” Turns out she got the new job, any references to her drinking legally or being tossed in the sand were temporarily gone. And I didn’t do a damn thing about it either way.
So what’s the moral of this kids? Procrastination will work things out, it just needs time. And Las Vegas is good.

Current Mood: Lazy

Nooooooooooo!!!!

There goes the internet. Odd thing is I was just talking to Kym about this bullshit a few days ago.

You may want to ask me right now, “B b b but, Justin, that article had lot’s of big words and stuff in it? What does it all mean?”

I’ll tell you what it means, it means your internet is FUX-XERD. Maybe not today, most likely not tomorrow, but soon. And why o’ why didn’t anyone listen to me and Ted Kennedy when I first posted this?

Anyway, make a long explination short, I’ll quote a FARK forums user, Krunk, “Basically, Net Neutrality means that “all tubes are created equal.” It doesn’t matter where your data comes from, it has access to the same paths as everyone else’s data. Basically, what the telecoms want to do is create a ‘premier’ tier of the underlying infrastructure, that hosts would have to pay extra money to be able to use. This is a bad thing, and is at odds with the overall purpose of the internet.

A hypothetical example: You may be able to get to Amazon.com a little more quickly than you used to, but now barnesandnobles.com is unbearably slow. That’s because B&N wasn’t able to afford the outlandish fees AT&T are charging for the Premier tubes. And thus, B&N’s business slides invariably downwards, leaving Amazon free to raise their prices.”

Let me put into a different perspective for the denziens, say you like browsing AllAsianSlutsAllTheTime.jizz, but they aren’t paying your ISP extra $$, those hot Asians you want to see are going to take a long time to load. I’m talking 28.8kbps! You remember what that shit was like? I do. The telcomms will tell you “But you get OUR content even faster?” Well sorry AT&T/Verizon/TimeWarner but I’d rather take AASATT.jizz over your SlammingSexyGrannies.fap.

It boils down to this: Your going to pay a company to tell you what you can and can’t view. Fuck, if I wanted to do that I’d get the combo whipping and latex package.

Current Mood: Angry