TocciOnline

Another year bites the dust. I don't feel like I accomplished enough in 2008, so I'm calling a do-over. With the economy the way it is, we all should be recycling our old years instead of springing for a brand new one anyway.

Incidentally, I noticed something peculiar about the famous New Year's Eve Ball in Times Square. Apparently this is not the first year it's been like this, but I knows me a triforce when I sees one. This means that at some point, a young adventurer from Hyrule may come to claim it and restore balance to the universe. Maybe that's how the recession will end.

OK, enough. This blog entry is getting ridiculous, even by my standards.

In other news, Bush's Shoe Dodge has well over a million plays already, despite being just another game that parodies the famous shoe throwing incident. There have got to be at least a dozen out there.

MiiCharacters.com has been getting a lot of attention recently, presumably because lots of people got a Wii from Santa this year. Jenny and I were inspired to create the cast of The Big Bang Theory, and we're pretty happy with the way they turned out.

And now just a few links to kick off 2009: (I'm pacing myself.)

• Photo Funia - This site is a lot of fun. Upload a photo of yourself (or someone else) and select the type of photo you want from the large list of options. You end up with something like this.
• Dear God letters - These are supposedly letters from children to God. Funny stuff.
• HD Wallpapers - If you've got a widescreen monitor, here are some decent background options.

In case you've been under a rock, this past Sunday President Bush was at a press conference in Iraq as part of a surprise visit to the war torn country when an Iraqi reporter stood up and threw both of his shoes at Bush's head, one after the other. There's video and write-ups all over the web about it. I was out shopping when I got an email on my phone from my main man over at atom.com, Peter Ignacio. Ever with his finger on the pulse, he knew that if ever there was a situation that called for a game to be made, this was it. Apparently others had the same idea and games have been popping up all over the Internet in the past few days. It took me until today to finish mine, so I now proudly present Bush's Shoe Dodge!

My game differs from the others I've seen in that you control Bush and not the shoe-throwing reporter. The goal is to dodge as many shoes as possible as the reporter hurls them at you faster and faster until you eventually catch three in the noggin and the game ends. Losing is half the fun actually.

Incidentally, Bush's reaction time was quite impressive at the press conference. It would have been even better if he caught one of the shoes. And it would be better than that if he had thrown it back at the reporter... and missed... and hit an old lady sitting next to him. Now THAT would have been priceless.

You may have noticed I've made some updates to the site recently. I'm in the process of converting my old ASP pages into my PHP components. There aren't a lot of visible changes, as most of the benefits are behind the scenes, but some noticeable enhancements include:

• Tocci's Polls are now AJAX enabled. No more refreshing the whole page when you cast your vote. There's one on the home page, or head over to the polls page and have a ball.
• The random quote at the top of the homepage also uses AJAX and should now show a new random quote when you click it.
• The TV has been replaced (again) by a little Flash scroller thingy powered by Actionscript 3 and XML. It's a lot more flexible and allows me to include little animated effects for each feature. For the complete list of creations, visit the new creations page.
• TocciOnline is now valid XHTML strict! What does that mean for you? Pretty much nothing, but it's really cool to me and maybe a few other web developers out there so it's worth mentioning.

This is also my first post with my newly coded blogging interface as well, so hopefully it all goes well. If you can read this, I guess it did. I might as well test out an image while I'm at it. The thumbnail here is Three Mile Island as seen from an outlet mall in Limerick, PA. We did a little shopping with Diane and Damian this past weekend, and were amazed to see the massive cooling towers from the parking lot. If you click it, it should show you an enlarged version using the spiffy lightbox script.

If I were a carny, this would be my Lizink Lizist:

• XBox 360 Funeral
• There isn't a solution for drunk dialing problems yet, but Gmail's mail goggles can help you drunk emailers out there.
• Kittenwar - A battle for cuteness. And incidentally, not a bad place to go if you're looking for cat names.