i'll be in colorado with the family until december 30th... not sure if i'll be able to post while there or not. if i can't, happy holidays everybody...

--justin

gathering today's interestingness --

delivering internet by airship
yahoo can track traffic reports for major US zones
FCC denies request to censor satellite radio (a good thing in my opinion)
yes, bill parcells hates drew henson *that* much
as soon as i stop going to his a&m comp sci building, the poor bastard croaks
boston rob and am-buh to be amazing race 7 players?

and the quote of the day, "the only difference between brown-nosing and asskissing is depth perception." i swear i hear the best shit from random fuckers up at work.

let's do this again soon. yes. let's.

--nitsuJ

hey another boring day at work! better post!

so the spike tv video game awards aired last night, although i didn't bother to watch. better just to read people's criticism the next day, right? apparently it was as expected, a ridiculous event of blatant sponsors and obviously-paid celebrities. glad i didn't bother...

amazing race [TWoP recaplet] was okay last night, actually bothered to watch it live since i was having dinner anyway. still gotta catch up on that damn survivor finale, gotta find some time for it. somehow cube, ps2 and anime seem to outrank it lately...

i'm hoping this doesn't become a pain in the ass soon...

plus i'd take ellen's gift to her audience over oprah's pontiacs anyday. even if she's dating portia de rossi... but shouldn't they kill subscription fees already?

so sprint bought nextel, huh? can their first order of business be to get rid of that fucking annoying nextel ring that i've come to associate with carpenters and building contractors? top vote for new name so far: Sextel.

i have no ending for this, so i take a small bow.

--the damaja

thought it was interesting that blockbuster is getting rid of their late fees in hopes that the increased sales from it will offset lost revenue from late fees. so now you can keep movies/games an extra week without any late penalty, which sounds like a good idea if you *have* the movie/game, but i bet it kills their selection when everything's already been rented. oh well, i can't really remember the last time i went into a blockbuster anyway. not to knock them, just that renting games from them is typically like $6, which is a little high, and a lot of times i can find dvd replicas of any movie i'm interested in rather than actually going to out to rent it.

speaking of movies, we actually bothered to get out and saw ocean's twelve last night. man we had looked forward to seeing that in the theater (at this point we prolly only see a quarter of what we want to out) for several months and both of us were falling asleep during the whole thing. i dunno if it was just cuz i didn't have enough sleep or if the movie actually was *that* boring, but man i couldn't get into it. it had a few cool scenes here and there, but damn it just wasn't the same as the original. i think as soon as they weren't in vegas some of the appeal was gone. it had some cool style and a decent ending, but i guess how much i like clooney, damon and pitt couldn't overcome how much i dislike zeta-jones and julia roberts. i dunno, bottom line: too much star power, not enough plot/action. imdb says 6.5, they're not far off.

i finally finished star fox adventures last night. it's insane to think that i originally bought that game in october 2002 along with super mario sunshine and my gamecube itself. i think at one point i prolly went a year to year and a half straight without playing it at all. ended up taking 23 hours in all, as was somehow one of the easiest and hardest games i've ever played at the same time. it's not really known as a particularly popular game, although it was known as a great underground zelda-knockoff. i'm just glad to be done with it, as easy as it was some parts took roughly 12-15 attempts to get through.

i was a little pissed to see last night that EA has secured exclusive rights to the NFL. i've never been much of a football gamer, so it doesn't really affect me *that* much, but it really sucks that ESPN/Sega can't use the NFL anymore, especially after everyone loved that they released a $20 suite of quality games. yet another example of how EA is the evil empire of the video game industry...

the stats continue to look shite for my favorite little purple console this holiday season. xbox was reporting 41% and PS2 at 39% of console sales, so that leaves GC at a distant 20% of sales. although i really don't know how to interpret those numbers that much, since all those consoles are like 3 years old, i don't really know who's still buying them. it's kinda funny that sony didn't expect their new thin PS2's to sell so well and are now having a shortage of them.

i don't really know how the PS2 continues to just beat the shit out of everything (in the grand scheme at laest) every year. i bought one, so i'm not gonna bash it, but graphically it's really nothing compared to the cube if you ask me. i think if nintendo could just prove to everyone that they're not the kiddy brand everyone thinks they are they'd move a lot more merchandise. being a cuber is starting to feel a bit like being the last guy to support minidiscs, heh.

you'll have no more.

--the damaja

the moral of the story is, "watch your ass on december 25th."

in an unrelated note, you have no idea how hard it is to really motivate yourself to work when every day that goes by someone else is walking out of the building saying "well see you guys next year!" i think i worked for maybe 3-4 hours pretty hard this morning, then paid some bills and lost all motivation to give a crap for the rest of the day. blew an hour in a meeting at least, heh.

hard to get into the holiday spirit so far here, man. i always get into it way too late, like as we're going to colorado. by the time i realize i'm supposed to get into it xmas has already passed. being from a non-religious family i think i see it more as 2 weeks with no fuckin work rather than celebrating the birth of "jeee-zuss" anyway. as long as alayna gets her fill of christmas music, everything's fine.

this concludes my random post. thank you for your time.

--justin

[this space will more than likely include more random rants for your reading pleasure]

work
so this is december up at work, huh? only ever done that once before, and it was 5 years ago, i was in high school, and the girl i started dating that month has since been married. so in other words, it was a long time ago. december's just goofy cuz you've got a lot of people with all this PTO to blow so random people just don't seem to show up on certain days, so productivity naturally suffers. i've actually done some pretty good work this month, but it's about to come to a screeching halt with the big giant break coming up. then of course it'll take a week to remember what the hell i was doing when we get back in january. at least there's some sense of festivity in the air, people throwing holiday parties, special events, etc. sure as hell beats the insanity that hits you in the face when december comes in college. i think in college the first 2 weeks of college can best be describes as hardcore exams mixed with rampant laziness. usually at some point during that period you slept for like 15 hours straight at one point, but then went 48 hours without sleep at another point.

so i guess i've been a software engineer for roughly 6 months now, so i should prolly have some sorta opinion on it, huh? maybe it's just the typical job -- sometimes i hate it, sometimes i love it, it's bad, it's good, etc. it's kind of like (at least in my situation) you have to be a team player and an individualist at the same time. it's the right kind of job for me in which you have to be able to take criticism and guidance from others but 75% of the time you're working on something yourself. i know a lot of people can't do that -- they just can't be by themself and be productive for too long. i can be just as bad at times, churn & burn for a while, then end up googling/surfing for an hour off task. hell, right now i'm writing a blog, right?

i can't really bitch about my job too much cuz i've just got it too good compared to too many other people. i wear jeans to work 95% of the time, an untucked shirt prolly 80%. i've totally come to realize that i can actually work better when i just put on a regular shirt & jeans rather than come in and wear slacks and a button-down shirt. it's just not comfortable to write & compile code, run down to the lab, crawl behind shit, etc in that kinda gear. i think that's kinda how it should be: if you're coding and "engineering" all the time, you need to be more comfortable than anything, but if you're tap-dancing for the customers all day you should grin & bear it in your suit & tie.

as far as the people i work with, they're mostly good compared to what i've typically seen. they can be pretty laid back, which really helps a lot when it comes to how secure you feel about your job. you have to admit you see these people more than your own family a lot of times, so you almost have to like them to really enjoy what you're doing. we could use a bit more young blood in the group, but they're understandably reluctant to hire recent grads lately. in general, there isn't a particularly strong young group here. i mean there's a group of college hires that have come in within the last year or so, but it's kind of the usual hodgepodge of dorks and antisocials, heh. just kinda seems like it's gonna be sorta tricky making a ton of friends up at work.

dork news
the latest tivo doomsday article came to my attention off of lost remote today. i can't completely disagree with some of it, although it is a little unfortunate. us proud tivo owners could very well see the company go completely belly-up within the next couple years. their flaw (although they have a terrific product) is that they refuse to believe they'd be better off as a pure software company. their boxes could easily be made by motorola or samsung with tivo software loaded on it, and it'd prolly be just as good.

i'm a tivo supporter, i've had my subscription for about a year and a half now and hardly had a complaint. but i can't really argue with those (typically tech-adept do-it-yourselfers) that say that paying $13 a month for their service is a crock of shit. that is pretty goddamn high, and the article states that it only costs tivo 94 cents a month to provide each user with guide data. the only way i justify it is that it's spent to help save me the trouble of recording things more manually and wasting a bunch of time watching everything live. plus, it looks like directv might drop them for dvr support sometime in late 2005, which doesn't exactly make me too eager to buy the HDirecTivo i've eyed for a while. if anything, tivo has taught me that shaping your entire life around a television schedule is dead and gone. no matter whether they flop or not, that's for sure.

there's also an article on there about HD penetration in the marketplace. they predict 50% of american households will be using hdtv's by 2007, which is so fucking wrong it's unbelievable. we'll be LUCKY if it's half that. as expected, so far my 6 month foray into high-definition television has been full of highs and lows, the biggest problem being it's lack of penetration so far. it's just too obvious at times that there's no real huge demand from the general public for pristine HD. directv has started to heavily compress their feeds quite a bit, and you can actually tell that they're hurting the signal, the picture doesn't look quite as good as it did at first.

content's also been pretty shitty in HD. HDnetMovies is a completely worthless channel, HDnet occasionally has good stuff, UniversalHD is largely suckage, DiscoveryHD Theater is typically pretty as hell but not very interesting and ESPN HD doesn't yet show enough events in high-def. over all those channels there's too many shows from like 2000-01 that got cancelled in a year, and HDnet or whatever bought the rights to the show and now try to hype it like we care. i think my general rule is, if a show sucked in standard-def, it ain't *that* much better in high-def. i can pull in NBC and CBS HD feeds over satellite and antenna, but most of the shit on those channels isn't really worth watching in HD.

plus, why the hell is gaming so far behind HD tech? i thought games were *the* new industry, if so, why isn't it following the current adopter curve? people are playing these games on huge HD monitors with 5.1 audio support, why the hell aren't the games using it yet? very few games in this generation can do better than 480p, so why do we have tv's that'll support 1080i and 720p? it's the same thing with dvd's still being so hot. dvd's are still a great idea, but they're way behind what's flying thru the air and into your antenna/dish. as soon as you get a 50" hdtv be sure and tell me how NOT excited you are about 480p dvd's anymore.

homelife
i finally had to move the ps2 into the living room with the gamecube, cuz it wasn't getting enough play in the bedroom. so that was kind of a failed experiment, but at least i got a modded ps2 out of the deal. i'm so much more a cube guy than a ps2 guy, but they're both great consoles.

in a few days i'll hafta start preppin for the annual big colorado trip, which means sorting out all the music/games/etc i gotta bring just to stay sane, heh. so it's just another 4 days of work and then off for a few weeks to sleep weird hours and blow time on video games, tv shows and movies. actually that kinda just sounds like every other week, i dunno.

in one last note, i'm officially fed up with my integra. it drives like complete shit, putting the new distributor in didn't seem to fix it. i've got the distributor cap & rotor plus new plugs & wires to install, but something tells me that's not gonna make the thing run like a champ. i think come january i'm just gonna hafta suck it up and leave the car in an import shop for a week to sort out all the damn kinks, cuz god knows i fuckin hate driving that thing now. the closest thing i'll make to a promise is that i won't be driving "the teg" in july 2005. if i can get it fixed up and running somewhat properly i might put some more effort into the car, but if i continue to have issues i'm trading the fucker in for something else and never looking back. 5 years is long enough to have a car, especially when a supposedly reliable car has had as many weird issues as mine has.

thanks for making it thru that one, i only spread it out over like 5 hours at work, heheh.

rgds,
justin

oops, went a month without posting again...

which pretty much brings me to my conclusion that as soon as you graduate from college, it's decided by some higher power that your IM and blog are gonna dry up within a year. that's pretty much what happened, and i don't really know what to do about it. i remember in the middle of college i had a decent number of people on my buddy list, which meant checking away messages was a bit of a hobby. but as soon as everyone starts to graduate, they all move off to their own lives and understandably they can't be online all the time like they used to. at this point i only get online to talk to a *very* limited number of people, which makes it seem even more lame that i bother at all. i think i only ever even talk to alayna, lauren and rick actually. alayna and i will move in together within the next half-year here, so that'll be gone obviously. lauren's not really an email type person, and i'm not gonna call her every time i find some link or fact to send. most of the other people on my list are online every now and then, maybe a couple hours a week at most, which prolly just means they're catching up with old friends now and then. after last year i really got sick of asking people over and over to get together over email and IM, so i've pretty much cut that shit out. i'm not a big fan of chatting with people once a month and catching up over IM, i'd really just rather trade a few emails or something if you don't wanna bother to get together.

as far as the blog, i think i just keep it around for when i kinda want to vent or discuss something "out loud." i don't really know who my audience is anymore, given that i used to advertise it most prominently on my IM info, but if i hardly talk to anyone anymore, who's gonna see it? i'd love to have a network of friends who all provided RSS feeds that let you know when they update their blog (such as a once-every-couple-of-days type update), but i don't know many people that would bother with that.

it's... kinda depressing, sorta.

--justin

rounding up the interesting news of the day --

the nba's washington wizards have planned singles nights for this season. sounds like a ridiculous idea to me, although prolly mostly cuz it's the wizards. i have a hard time believing that any decent NBA team would bother with something like this, only a city with a perennial godawful team.

XM finally decided it made some goddamn sense to produce a portable player. a somewhat crafty idea, it's basically a portable delphi satellite radio with some flash memory that can hold about 5 hours of digital radio. only problem is it only holds XM content, you can't load mp3's or AAC's on it. that'll prolly be what kills it. if XM or sirius partnered up with apple and put out some kind of ipod that could connect to satellites, they'd empty the shelves i bet. my guess is with the hefty ~$350 + $10/mo subscription, they won't sell all that hot.

apple decided to put out a photo-capable ipod, although i guess i don't really see the appeal. now instead of just using your ipod for portable music, you can... carry pictures around on it too. and you can... look at them. you can't take pictures, but you can look at them. sounds like yet another way to fuck up the ipod's already abysmal battery life. i just don't really see what the use is here. unless a 1 gig flash card isn't enough for you to store your pictures on or something, but if you're that serious into high quality digital photography, wouldn't you just use a laptop or something. who needs to whip out a collection of photos from your pocket, or at least enough to take advantage of a hard drive instead of a flash card on a PDA? as much as i still love the idea of a having an ipod, i'm still interested in a joggable mp3 player and still waiting to see if Hi-MD goes anywhere to go out and buy one. i'd actually be more likely to buy an iBook with a reasonable raytheon discount. still pretty impressed with those customized color ipods though.

good to see firefox making some headway into the market. i may be writing this from XP, but i support open source software such as this. you may hate to admit it, but you'd love life just a bit more if we were all using firefox and OpenOffice on an open source Linux-based OS. keep in mind though that while i support OSS, i do kinda like getting paid to write and maintain proprietary embedded real-time software, okay?

--j

sundays have gotten pretty damn formulaic for me lately. they typically involve sleeping way in, not leaving the apartment and refusing to make 10 minutes to bother showering. i passed out at like 4am last night, face down amidst pillows and tivo remotes, only to wake up in my own drool an hour later. got in bed and slept till like 2 something today, thus completing the "i've slept in for the weekend, i can now begin another week" sequence.

been pretty lazy overall the whole weekend. i took friday off, didn't really have too much to show for it, slept in and did some laundry, fucked around. i felt like applebee's friday night, so alayna and i went there, had the obligatory mudslides. even at 7:30pm driving north on 75 to mckinney isn't exactly suggested. saturday we were actually up at 10am to go work out, so we were proud of ourselves for going out for that. we rounded out a "crazy" saturday afternoon by hitting the mall and grocery store. yet again we drove farther than we usually would for a dinner to pick up popeye's over in plano to eat while watching game 1 of the world series. that was decent, but somewhat embarrassingly we both fell asleep (her on the chair, me on the couch) for like 45 minutes right in the middle of it, heh. she eventually woke up in time to see it end, heh.

we were quite the loners this weekend. what the fuck's happened to the rest of ya's? i swear every weekend my buddy list completely shrinks and i'm left wondering if everyone else is in on something i'm not. sunday night comes and everybody and their mother's online.

basically been filling my free time with tv eps and games lately. we just noticed we haven't even been to the theater in 2 months, that's started to make us look kinda bad i guess, heh.

as far as tv, i've been catching up on season 3 family guy eps, went back to some old simpsons and king of the hill eps for nostalgia's sake. my futurama eps don't seem to get deleted quite as fast, it's a decent show but nowhere near as consistently funny. still enjoying curb your enthusiasm eps here and there, as well as cheap seats. i'm also still salvaging one episode of kiss me kate, a great britcom from '98-00 that was showing on pbs for a while. i'm starting to feel a bit guilty for not watching any of the animes i devoted a lot of time to downloading a few months ago, but... still got a few movies i gotta watch, like shrek 2, cowboy bebop, dawn of the dead and trainspotting.

the games i happen to have going at this very second are halo for the PC, beyond good & evil for the PS2 and star fox adventures for the cube. i've got tons of good shit to play on the PS2, but lately i think my plan of gaming in the bedroom isn't working as well as i'd hoped, mainly due to not having as much fun gaming on a 20" tv compared to the 50" that the cube claims. as recommended, beyond good & evil has been good so far, can just be a bit tough on the smaller tv when i'm only half sitting up, heh. the halo single player campaign has still been fun, think i'm almost on level 7 out of 10. for the cube i'm kind of in the mode of going back and getting my money's worth out of my older games before i start buying any more. i had been playing pikmin for a while, but was losing some interest so i went to metroid prime. problem with MP is it's too frustrating to have *that* much fun playing it, so i went to star fox adventures and now i'm having a decent time with that. alayna's official position on that one -- "it looks fun to play, but i don't wanna watch you playing it." prolly couldn't argue there.

as far as the week ahead, not taking any time off this week, so i'll prolly be there still at 4pm on friday unless i really grind the early part of the week. i'd imagine i'll watch 2/3 of each of the WS games this week, so that'll prolly take up the bulk of my evenings. glad i didn't plan to watch that whole cowboys game today, what a waste. no new ER this week, and i'm still a bit behind on survivor. so i guess that leaves lost as my show to look forward to this week.

best'a luck,
justin

man i've spent 10 years hating the goddamn yankees and it finally paid off. they lost the world series in '01 to the diamondbacks and in '03 to the marlins in 7 games but seeing them up 3 games to none and then lose it all is even better. i'm typically not much of a red sox fan, but for the next week i sure as hell will be. although admittedly if houston can pull out game 7 and move on to the series, i don't think i'm gonna know who to root for.

all in all, while the division series wasn't really all that great, this has been one helluva baseball postseason. it's too bad we're missin the NHL right now, but this is the next best thing to me.

bring on the world series in HD... bit of a step up from watching the NY subway series of '00 on a 13" tv in my freshman dorm room.

always a sports fan,
justin

(16:12:51) Justin: i really have no idea how that company is still in business
(16:13:07) Rick: b/c its cool to hate msft
(16:13:31) Rick: its all these mac users driving their damn vw's around
(16:13:58) Rick: i only know one vw driver that doesn't use a mac
(16:14:04) Rick: but he is catholic so that doesn't count

...and stereotypes fly.

--justin

faithful readers! sorta ran out of things to do at work so i'll post...

it's kinda been a bad october so far. health issues have kinda gotten me down and i can't really say i've been myself for a week or so. already hit the doctor and everything, doubt it's serious, but it's a pain in the neck, quite literally. back of my head and neck just have a dull pain most of the time, if i exert myself too much the pain really grows into a serious headache. so i've had to stay out of the gym/track to see if that helps, which combined with taking celebrex and a muscle relaxant just makes me feel so damn lethargic. so far i don't think any of the drugs i'm taking are really doing much besides giving me more and more side effects. 3 aleve's (the max) a day were kinda helping a bit, but they gave me all these sores on my tongue and lips, almost not worth it. so at this point i'm kinda just hoping the ol' immune system will do its job and fix whatever's up with me. don't even know if it's all related to tension/stress or if it's a strength training based neck/spinal strain of some sort.

having a cubicle-based job really doesn't help for those kinds of things. yeah i know if i was in like construction or something it'd be even worse, but having to sit in a chair and look at a monitor all day just isn't gonna help you for head/neck type aches. i wish i could take some time off to see if it'll help but i'm really trying to spread out my paid-time-off to maximize 3-day weekends and stuff. 75% of the time lately i just don't wanna be at work, which at some point is prolly gonna start coming across to anyone's peers. i've been bringing the pda to work and listening to music for about half the day which seems to sorta help me take my mind off the pain.

i really wish i could figure out how to get tired from like 10-11pm. most nights i'm completely wiped at about 8pm and usually end up passing out somewhere in the house for half an hour or so. problem with that is, i'm tired in the evening but then i wake up for the night. believe it or not, prolly half of my weeknights are spent thinking that i'll try to get to bed around 11 or 11:30, but that's hard to pull off for me. i just can't go to bed knowing i'll be sitting there bored for half an hour. so most of the time i end up being tired for a while in the evening, either taking some kinda nap or getting thru it, doing whatever for a while and finally getting tired around 2am. then a lot of the time i get in bed and realize i'm not quite as tired as i thought, so i end up watching an episode of family guy or something. so realistically, i'd say i probably average sleep from 2:30-7. so 4 and a half hours every night. i wouldn't really say i even get *that* tired at work, it's just i wonder sometimes if that affects other aspects of my health.

in some ways that's kinda why i think living alone is somewhat dangerous for me. i think as soon as i went to a&m, i forgot how to really have any self-discipline. after 5 months of work it's starting to hit me more that i haven't regained it yet.

when you live alone, there's really no reason for anything you do. you have no one else to frustrate, disappoint, excite, etc. you don't have to work around anyone's schedule, you have your own schedule, whatever you make that. sometimes that just burns you that you can do so much without consequence. i think that's part of me not getting very good sleep, i don't have anybody else in the apartment to shut up and be quiet for to facilitate anything other than halo at 1 in the morning with work the next day.

hmm, i'll slow down on the mopeyness...

the show of the new season has gotta be 'lost.' so far it's been terrific, and in HD it looks phenomenal. finally a reason to look forward to wednesdays, although i can't pull in ABC in HD, so it's kind of a moot point. luckily HD rips are posted at alt.binaries.hdtv, so you can wait a few days and see it in pure HD.

survivor and ER have been so-so thus far. everybody in the world is starting to feel like they've gotten their fill of survivor and the format's wearing thin. they've had one too many competitions that were exactly like those in the past for the whole experience to really feel all that enthralling anymore. ER looks good in HD, but i think the show has a shitty slate of characters right now. i'm not planning on giving up on it or anything here soon, but they need some new exciting shit to happen.

the networks are getting more and more pathetic every year man. i remember in the late 90's being completely in love with NBC, and now i think they're such a fuckin joke most of the time. scrubs and ER are still worth watching, but holy christ i can't believe what crap they (and the other 3) are playing these days.

at least directv put up the MLB playoffs on fox in HD. prolly not the best postseason i've ever seen, but it's been alright considering we'd usually have the first games of the NHL season by now. i'm not even gonna go all into the NHL lockout, it's such a crock of shit that i'm somewhat embarrassed to be such a hockey fan.

times are a-changin, man. alayna and i hardly ever go to the theater anymore. when we're likely to be able to get the dvd rip a couple months later anyway, there's not that much motivation. if she's gonna fall asleep halfway through the movie, she might as well do it when i'm not paying $15 at cinemark. it's the same reason my blockbuster card is gathering dust.

lately i think tv dvd's is where it's at. i'd say if a show's been on within the last 10 years, it's still mostly current, it's got the same sense of humor to it. we're always so obsessed with the new shows on tv, we have to see what's just come out, to the point where the networks now market it so heavily. how many times now do you see a promo for a show where their tagline is "all new?" and what the fuck does "all new" mean anyway? as opposed to half new? imagine watching the first 15 minutes of a show, knowing you've never seen it before, then finding the last 15 oddly familiar. my point is you can watch sex & the city from 1998, curb your enthusiasm from 2000, home movies from 1999, whatever, and it's still new to you, it's just as good, if not better, cuz you're watching something you sought out, not just what happens to be on when you're bored.

i've found that's pretty much what i do when i just wanna sit around and i'm too lazy to play a game or whatever. i've got these long queues of shows i like to just burn off one by one, watching them at whatever pace i want. whether you burn through sex & the city in a manner of weeks like alayna, or indulge in a home movies episode every few weeks like me, it still works.

tonight's a celebration of mom's birthday, with the family + sig-o's going to see everyone's favorite clean comedian brian regan perform. alayna and i saw him in houston and enjoyed the show, so we're ready for another round. i figure my parents will prolly like him, since he's not ridiculously profane or anything.

thanks for riding that one out,
justin

i've noticed my own new personal trend regarding tv... it seems to be i can't seem to bother watching tv unless it's high def or previously recorded. like last night the cowboys game was on... but it was on ABC, which i can't get in HD. so i didn't even bother to turn it on. since i've got the tivo in the bedroom, i still tivo just as much as i ever have, and frequently watch stuff in bed or in the evening. i think when the HDTiVo comes down in price, that should work itself out. so far there's just been shows here and there that i like, like say las vegas or something, but i can't bother to watch them live in HD.

i've done quite a bit better with gaming lately, gettin a lot more use out of my consoles. i played a lot of mario golf a few weeks ago, then went back to pikmin some. added in some f-zero here and there. since i got the ps2 modchip in, i've played some GTA3 and NFS: Underground. so i'm doing a little bit better about spending less time at the pc's and more time on a couch or bed, heh...

--justin

hey guys, just lettin ya know i updated my toolbar on the right to reflect most of the links i hit up on a slow day at work, heh. most of 'em are tech, but i'd recommend them all if you'd like to have the maximum content to talk to me about. ;)

i'll update for real within the next few days.

--justin

wooooo it's been about a month.

within about the last month and a half lauren, alayna and i haven't posted on our blogs. lauren didn't wanna post when she was away from school with seemingly nothing good to bother with, and alayna didn't think anybody was really reading it. me, i was just too lazy to post i guess. what we really should do is pair our blogs with an rss feed to let everybody know that we've posted something new. looks like hoang basically quit his old blog, but he's apparently got a new one going.

in the process of throwing down close to $700 goddamn bucks for a new distributor/ignition for my integra. i figured a 52k mileage car wouldn't need a new distributor, but i guess since i don't really have to do that much maintenance to it overall i've been in pretty good shape. although it is sorta curious that in the 2 years alayna and i have been dating my car's been in the shop for repairs (radiator, tires, distributor...) more than her '90 buick, heh. i was in the mood to throw a bit more money around on random techy shit but after having to spend on the car i don't entirely feel in the mood. at least i get paid this friday... although rent's also due this week, so that's not gonna feel like the biggest gain.

work continues to just be completely off & on regarding workload. i still have way too much time to keep up with websites and just sit and surf. sure it's nice to sorta get paid to surf part of your day, but the bottom line is the day's a lot more fun when at some point you look down at your watch and say "whoa shit, it's [x] o'clock already?" now and then it'll happen, but not often enough yet. i think i'm gonna see how things go till the end of the year and then if things haven't really picked up i might try to put in for something else in my dad's organization. i've been working for close to 3 months, and i still can't really say i like my job. i mean i think it's secure and i'm lucky to have it but it's pretty easy to say 2 or 3 days out of every week i just don't really wanna be there. i've made a few friends up there that make things much better, but i learned a while back that you can't depend on good work friends to make your job worthwhile, people are just too busy to keep you entertained 100% of the time. in 3 months i haven't really formed too many significant bonds with other people, but admittedly i haven't exactly been laying it out there on the line. i dunno, like i said, i'll really just hafta see how it goes. i've been so used to leaving a job after just 3 months (co-op), it'll be interested to actually keep going here into september (something i haven't done since 1999).

i decided i needed a better dvd player for my bedroom, something that could play dvd-r and rw's, since i burn those a lot now. sure you can get dvd players that'll do that for a good $70 or so these days, but i figured since ps2's can play those and are only $150 now, hey why not? so after a few days of searching locally i was able to snatch one up, and ordered a modchip the following day. so i've got a load of burned games just waiting for the modchip to come in for installation. sure, i didn't need a more games to *not* get around to playing, but i liked the idea of a gaming system in the bedroom, something to sorta motivate me to at least get in bed earlier. so for now i'm stuck with my $9 used copy of gran turismo 3 until the chip comes in. oh well, GT's still a great series.

lately i've been on pikmin (yes, pikmin 2 just came out...) and mario golf for the cube, which are both relatively easy but nice laid back type games. i've also been onto halo for the pc, haven't really played too much doom 3... kinda too hardcore for my current "gaming mood" heh. so yeah everything i'm playing has been out for a few years, but i don't really care.

let's see... finished up big brother 4 australia, which was terrific. been watching [rewatching] episodes of the office and a few season 1 eps of reno 911!, as well as watching futurama, family guy and coupling episodes for the first time. still got a couple episodes of samurai champloo that i keep meaning to knock out, and i add seasons of chobits and full metal panic! to my inventory. still plenty of other tv to go back and watch...

still not sure what to do regarding several possible purchases... i might go ahead and buy a joggable mp3 player to help motivate me to run a bit more often, and presumably have more fun when doing so. that model's got an expandable SD/MMC slot so i like the fact that i could take a memory card usually used for my pda and use it for extra music. as far as my "main" portable music player... damn, i really don't know what to do there. i've got several options, but none of them really seem perfect for me... the leading candidates...

-- the ultra-trendy ipod... i consider these sex-on-a-stick type design, but the battery life is what kills me about 'em. i've already tried a 20gb portable format with my old first generation creative nomad, and i've discovered it's just too much music to have on you at one time, it's fun to have so much at your disposal, but you just don't need it, nor is there a situation (that i've come across) where you need your entire music collection away from home for long enough to enjoy most of it. so i wouldn't even consider the 40gb model really... i like the ipod mini for its size, but it's not economical at all really.

-- sony's new network walkman... man it sure is fuckin sexy, but it's that native ATRAC3plus format that just makes me (and thousands of other fanboys) cry. basically it can play mp3's, but it has to convert everything to ATRAC3plus format to play, which is sony's proprietary format, not all that widely accepted. the battery life is triple what the ipod's is, which rocks, but that format and the $400 price tag is what would hold me back.

--sony's high-end HiMD player... also fuckin sexy with terrific battery life... but the HiMD format's an even bigger risk than ATRAC3plus encoded files. sure you can store 8 hours of quality music on 1 disc, but the biggest drawback to me is sony's complete lack of support for automobile HiMD solutions so far. i think it'd be great if you could just unload the HiMD out of your portable and play it in your car, sorta like a CD, but with more space and durability. looks like that was just wishful thinking on my part, cuz nobody has heard *anything* about HiMD car decks.

--rio's new limited edition carbon... kind of an ipod-wannabe with better battery life and no cult following. this just came out, so nobody knows too much about 'em, but they look promising. small hard drive, but like i said before, 20gb is just too damn much, 5gb could be okay.

i'm basically using my iPaq right now for portable music/video, which isn't very often, just been a few plane rides so far. i still feel like i need/want a good portable music solution, and i'm not completely sure using the pda for it is the best solution. it has ~okay~ storage using SD cards, but using such a high end unit just for mp3 playback is... kinda dumb in some ways. what i'd really like is the sony network walkman's sexy chassis with an LCD remote and pure mp3 playback with about 20 hours of battery life. i'm looking into an upgraded audio system in the car and i'm finding more and more that mp3 has NOT advance into the automobile like it has into portable settings. the phatnoise system still looks rather promising, but there's really no way to conveniently sync it with any portable or home mp3 collection, which could be rather time-consuming. picture it like this, all of a sudden you get a brand new album you really like, you put it on your home setup, copy it out to a portable device, maybe onto a workout-ready portable, AND a car audio setup? shit man that's really starting to complicate the idea of just bringing the same CD to your car or walkman. right now i'm unfortunately leaning towards some kinda medium-level head unit that can play mp3's on cd-rws, which i think is kinda messy, but might be the most configurable. my cd-changer has held up well over the years (in a lowered car with low-profile tires, yes) but i'm so damn sick of burning full albums only to play 2 or 3 tracks on each CD, makes for too much work while driving.

between that, some bluetooth equipment (cell phone, usb key, stereo headphones, etc...) and the usual high-tech shit i'm researching, should be an interesting few months leading up to christmas. ;)

suppose that's enough out of me for now...

--justin

another week, samo samo.  went on a bit of a credit card binge and ordered up some posters from AllPosters.com, dvd's/games from buy.com, and games from half.com.  the posters are just for more wall-filler for my extra bedroom/study/den/computer room, i should be able to fill post of the space i've got left with the 6 i bought.  i also finally ordered coupling series 3 and the entire series of the office.  due to some pretty good price selection i also ordered tony hawk underground and prince of persia, a couple of games i'd wanted for a while but didn't wanna spring for 'em... but for like $20 each it's too good to pass up.  i also tacked on used copies of sega soccer slam and eternal darkness for decent prices as well.  for those games i was just happy to get them used, i've tried several times to auction on them on ebay but the bidding just starts to go behind what i wanted to pay for used games.
 
haven't even played GC much lately, only some soul calibur by myself recently.  lately i seem to be watching more tv, although i'm watching maybe 5% of it live at this point.  and because of my scenario right now where the tivo's in the bedroom, i'm actually watching more tv from torrents than live or from tivo.  i guess at this point i no longer really care whether i watch something off the tivo or through a torrent, the quality loss with the compressed torrented video rarely bothers me much.  i'm still trying to come up with a more automatic system where tv torrents that i want are automaticaly downloaded to my linux box and fed over the wi-fi to the HTPC at night or while i'm at work.  i'm still researching how to do it tho.
 
lately i've spent my time mostly watching:
 
big brother 5 US -- you saw my rant last time, right?
big brother 4 australia -- i'm about 2 weeks behind, gotta catch up
amazing race 5 -- best show of the week
PTI -- yes, still tivo'd religiously
MTV2 rock -- currently tivo'd daily, about to stop cuz it's starting to just recycle
reno 911! -- just as good as last season, if not better
good girls don't -- uneven, but still worth watching
the 4400 -- a little hokey, but a drama with mild sci-fi mini-series is a good change of pace
the grid -- good series, authentic feel
samurai champloo -- hoang referred me to a new fresh anime, good so far
the assistant -- looks funny, haven't started yet
i love the 90's -- typical vh1 trendytrash, but lauren turned me onto it, oddly addicting
extreme dodgeball -- get it on tivo now and then, dodgeball just rocks
airline -- a little better than last season, decent reality show [no dating :)]
 
so yeah i guess i've pretty much been spending most of my free time tv'ing instead of gc'ing, pc gaming or dvd watching.  i've been meaning to watch shrek 2, but haven't gotten to it yet.  as far as actually getting out and seeing something in the theater, i prolly should have bothered more to check out i, robot, technically it does look like my kind of flick i guess.  i'm interested in the bourne supremacy and the village for the next couple weeks, maybe i can see at least one of those.
 
well this weekend's all about moving alayna into her apartment in plano.  and thus, a new era begins...
 
--justin

oh, 'ello. it's been about 10 days, figured i should post.

same-o, same-o lately, been trying to listen to some newer stuff lately. hoang and i both agree the new prodigy is surprisingly catchy, listened to that a lot lately. also burned franz ferdinand, jet, some other stuff. the secret machines are worth a listen. radio seems to be on a bit of a high lately, so take advantage while you can. also trying to catch up on a bunch of dnb vinyls, so been slowly pullin those in from #dnbmp3 on efnet. i got "samurai champloo" that hoang recommended and it's pretty good, something different. i'm currently torrenting the shrek 2 dvd since i didn't bother to see it in the theaters.

i'm on day 65 now of big brother 4 australia. i gotta say i think that's pretty impressive that i've stuck with a tv show that long that i don't even technically receive here. that's over 60 episodes i've watched of that show, and it's been pretty good, no regrets with getting into it. i'll be happy when it's done with though, just cuz the series starts to drone after a while. i'm usually about 10 days behind the live shit the aussies see over there, but i can't really completely download every single episode up to the second cuz i've gotta burn newsgroup quota just to pull 'em in. unfortunately, as i knew would happen, it's now overlapped with big brother 5 US.

so we've finally reached that 3-month period of the year in which big brother is on, and starting last year for me, amazing race as well. so we're now on the 5th series of the show, and i've actually never missed an episode of any season. i'm not really sure i can pinpoint which season exactly has been the best, but it was certainly one of the first two. in my opinion, generally the 2nd series improved on the 1st, and the 3rd in some ways improved on the 2nd, but the 4th started to go downhill and unfortunately so far i think series 5 has continued that fall.

i'm always a little lukewarm at the beginning of every BB season though, but this time around it's been a little tough keeping interest with it. i understand that CBS wants to do everything they can to keep viewers coming back every season, but it's just gotten ridiculous now. well, i mean it had kinda gotten ridiculous starting last year, but now... man they're just hitting some new lows really. a lot of times i give alayna a hard time about watching those god-awful lovey-dovey reality shows that i absolutely can't stand and now and then with BB i'm starting to feel the same way about it.

i've always been a big fan of the show because it's always been interesting to see the mindgames people play and to see how things pan out and who ultimately wins. sure, there's always been a bit of cheese to wade through, and it's prolly a combination of my tv tastes evolving a bit and the show really piling it on, but now and then i'm embarrassed to be watching.

some of my specific complaints so far:

--"Project DNA"... that is the lamest fucking thing i have ever heard of in my life. it stands for "Do Not Assume" and i'm only *assuming* the crack BB staff took 3 whole minutes coming up with that little gem.

--"the twists"... the DNA comes from the fact that a couple of the houseguests were unknowingly related and several of the houseguests have identical twins. see below:

--"two housemates related"... god, are you serious? this was so goddamn stupid, man. i feel bad for them that they had to find out that way, and it's a stupid idea for a twist, really. i think putting people together on a tv show like that is just starting to fuck with people's lives just for higher ratings, which comes across as utterly lame.

--"the identical twin theme"... either 3 or 4 of the hamsters have identical twins, and according to what CBS has aired so far, at least one set is going in and out of the house without telling the other housemates that they're 2 different people. as goofy as it is i've now known of a whole slew of big brother setups from 3 different countries, and this has to be the most unfair setup i've ever heard of. i dunno where they send the other twin when the other is in the house, but whatever they're doing they shouldn't be allowed to win the fuckin game that way. from what i've read online people are hating this idea a helluva lot more than liking it, that's for sure. zing on another whiff, CBS/endemol.

--"the lamest cast yet"... unless i just haven't warmed up to them or something, this has gotta be the worst damn cast yet selected for the show. they're really getting pretty stereotypical with their selections and it's hurting the entertainment value of the show. my brief opinion of each:

jase -- give me a goddamn break. he's listed as a "volunteer firefighter" which means he doesn't actually have a job, and you can kinda see why when he opens his mouth. i dunno if i can even say he's a good lookin guy or whatever, he's got semi-cool hair but is a complete dick in the house. the guy never puts a fuckin shirt on, and lauren was right on the money when she said his chest was as smooth as her ass. he's completely full of himself and he'll be long gone halfway through the show.

scott -- just as bad as jase really, only that he didn't win the first HoH and thus comes across as less of a dick. then he won PoV though, and he's almost just as bad. he's a little more rational than jase and not quite as surly, but i still hope the asshole's gone in a few weeks. and while i'm on it, soul patches suck. either grow something or don't, you pussy.

michael aka "cowboy" -- overall not really a bad guy but it's so damn hard to take him seriously. like i said i feel bad for him that he learned he had a half-sister in the house like that, but the guy's mostly a joke. why do they always have to have some idiot from oklahoma? i don't really have any friends from OK, and i'm sorry if i offend anybody from there, but why the fuck do you all come across as such goddamn morons? hell i'm from texas, i thought that was supposed to be our job to come across as half-wits. but somehow the accents are twice as thick up there then they are down here. for future reference BB, pick somebody from another state. any other one.

mike -- he'll be evicted the first week, for being "the don." yeah, which is crap. unfortunately he seems like he'd be somewhat entertaining due to his extreme political views and representing the older crowd in the house, but no point in waxing it, he'll be gone tomorrow i'm betting.

jennifer aka "nakomis" -- yeah, you're a fuckin joke. too bad for alayna she's from san antonio, yeesh. it'd be one thing if she had weird tattoos and freaky hair but was kinda cute and quirky, but yeah she's not. she's not interesting at all and i think she was only brought in just cuz of the twist i mentioned above. i'm sorry, but i wouldn't fuckin call her by that indian voodoo name she likes to be called or whatever.

holly -- yeah, one of the worst BB selections i've ever seen. i could justify it more if she had a bit more sex-on-a-stick appeal to her, but she just doesn't. she has an alright body but if they really wanted guys to fawn over her CBS should have covered some huge fake knockers or something to make up for the idiocy that comes from her mouth. i know she's playing up the ditzy blonde thing but for christ's sake, what a waste of a housemate.

drew -- thus far i really have no other options but to root for drew. he's a bit of a prettyboy and all, but he doesn't really do anything all that awful. he's 22 and just graduated so alayna and i relate to him pretty well... if he makes it more than halfway i think we'll root for him.

adria -- you have a cool name, you do not have a cool ass. i can't believe anyone associates you with fitness, cuz you may have muscle but i know for a fact i would have trouble carrying you over any threshold. your accent (alabama) is just awful and the less you are on my screen the more i love you.

diane -- kinda hot i guess, but she doesn't bring much. as far as i know i wouldn't mind her lasting till the later stages, just as long as she doesn't play up the girls vs guys crap too much.

lori -- she's kinda hot and all (she's basically just a lisa [bb3] or erika [bb4] stand-in. i half no idea why she took the $10k bribe but whatever. can't believe she wasn't nominated for that crap.

karen -- another i wouldn't mind going far in the game, i like how she's somewhat subtle and not all up in our faces.

will -- token gay dude, looks like he came straight off of the set of 'queer as folk' with that hairstyle. not an overly bad guy (especially for a tosser, bunky and marcellus were far more limpwristed) but still annoying enough to not really rally behind, mostly due to that god-awful gay fashion he loves.

marvin -- i still think he's kinda creepy. he's funny in a... black way, i guess? is it wrong that i think he might be a registered sex offender somewhere? and what kinda mortician wears a spiked necklace? you're in your mid fuckin 30's man, lose that shit.

--"our fair hostess"... oh, julie, what have you done? alayna calls her the lollipop, which is pretty accurate. i find it difficult to take the woman seriously. i dunno if she picks her own clothes for the show but she has worse style than will does. after watching BB4 australia i realize what a host should be, and she ain't it.

don't get me wrong, if i really think the show is all that awful, i wouldn't watch it, believe me. the biggest part i like about it is that alayna, lauren, my mother and myself all watch it religiously, which makes for something good to talk about for a while. at this point i think it's a complete guilty pleasure... nothing on it is genius, i watch shit like arrested development or the office for that kind of brilliance. we'll get through the season, don't worry. unless everybody else loses interest, that's when i say fuck it and give up on our old summer mainstay.

amazing race is awesome though, i look forward to that more actually. i won't go all into it like BB, but it's really easy to watch. the characters are interesting and aren't on screen long enough to really bug you, and the challenges are clever and well thought-out. tuesday nights this summer rock, yo.

so this is pretty much the downtime before alayna moves to her apartment up here next weekend. we'll prolly end up pretty busy getting her settled and all that, but it's well worth it to get her up here.

work's been a lot more slow than busy lately, which kinda sucks. the days have been going by semi-slow, so i know i'll be happy when the week's over. if things are slow enough in a week or so i'll blow a few days of PTO to help alayna out with her place instead i guess.

we actually made time last weekend to hit up kathryn's surprise birthday party. i can't really tell if she wanted one thrown for her or not, but she's pretty good at not showing that to anybody. thank god she just left for a trip to the bahamas so we don't have to keep hearing about her goddamn birthday, heheh.

guess that sums up enough for now, eh?

till next time,
justin

another 4th done with, this one was as good as most. first time i've ever actually stood between 2 firework shows simultaneously, so that was the cool part. still scratchin the damn mosquito bites, though.

friday night was kathryn's housewarming party, which in some ways was awesome, just that we stayed prolly longer than we should've. she has a ridiculously nice house for an almost-26 year old, and they had plenty of booze to pick from. a single guy certainly would've enjoyed the eye candy there. hell, i guess a single girl would have too. fuckin meat market in there. it was a lot different than we expected though (i took alayna) in that not that many people showed up from work (couldn't have been any more than a dozen) although a good 40+ were invited from work, so i was a little surprised by that. once it got past 11, midnight though things just totally changed, not completely for the worse or anything but it just completely changed into a rowdy college party. hell those are fun too, just that i didn't really see that coming. kat's friends from florida all came in town for it and they get pretty damn rowdy after enough booze, so we got to the point where we just sorta felt like we didn't really fit in anymore (after a while all we really knew was kat). but it was mostly cool, alayna and kat finally met after many failed attempts and luckily they liked each other. the highlight of the night was kat and laynie salsa dancing on the hardwood floor in the kitchen. i'd easily say that was sex-on-a-stick, heh. we'll hafta see if their desire to go salsa dancing sometime actually comes to fruition. it was a well executed party though, good drinks and food and pretty much everybody i talked to threw out good vibes. i'll be surprised if kat remembers most of it though, heh. and props to alayna for throwing back so many jello shots and not being a pussy with the brew.

at least the gamecube's gettin plenty of love lately. a few weekends now lauren, alayna, sometimes zach, and i break out the mario kart shine thief battle mode and consume the obligatory liquor simultaenously. if people weren't driving afterwards you could easily make a drinking game out of that one, heh. due to how long we can play it straight i'd say it wins as far as everybody's favorite party game, at least from my selection. luckily lauren picked it up today for her cube too, which can only encourage yet more 150cc mirror mode racing and shine thief madness. mario golf has proven pretty damn fun by myself, but thus far nobody really all too interested in playing tournaments with me that much, mostly just cuz mario kart is more engaging. alayna and i have played a lot of SSX3 lately, which is just as fun as tricky. it's pretty hard and a little frustrating (at least in my opinion) but pretty fun, and it's always good when she takes some interest in a game. at least for now i'm not really in the market for any more games, i've got enough to keep me busy for now and everybody seems to request cube playin when they're here.

i'm still at a crossroads on my portable music solution really. the Hi-MD units keep getting pushed further and further back, latest i've heard is late july for the top-end portables to street stateside. i'm still in the air on whether i even wanna go that route, i dunno yet. still semi depends on how much car support sony shows for their newest minidisc shit. sony also just announced their NW-HD1 which is a good idea and quite sexy, but executed all wrong. just doesn't have native mp3 support, only plays ATRAC encoded files and that's just wrong man. hell i've grown up on ATRAC with all my MD fetish, but asking someone to convert all their CDs/mp3s to ATRAC to use the unit is ridiculous. it's awesome how small it is for having 20gb, and it's got better battery life than the iPod (which is the biggest thing holding me back from getting one hands-down) but the mp3 incompatibility is insane for a digital music player.

for now me broadcasting my own shoutcast station to listen to at work (alayna does as well) has worked pretty well. it's a 5 minutes pain to queue it up in the mornings, but i'm working on trying to get it somewhat automated or remotely accessible (through the tricky proxies/firewalls at work). i feel like i still need a good portable unit tho, partly for travel and just general use here and there. might still go for the Hi-MD, but i don't know yet.

other than that, business as usual at home. roughly a week behind in big brother 4 australia, but it's still holding my interest pretty well. only problem is i'll prolly fall behind a bit since BB5US is starting tomorrow, along with amazing race 5. i've watched all those good girls don't episodes, which is hot and cold. have one episode left in coupling season 4, watched a few season 3 eps but then tivo'd dumped the rest when they expired and i forgot to keep 'em. so i need to get coupling season 3 and both seasons of the office on dvd soon anyway. just picked up reno 911! season 1 the other day, that was eagerly awaited.

but eh, should be a decent week with only 4 days of work. alayna will actually be back friday (3rd straight weekend, heh... free tickets, goddammit!) and we'll prolly go apartment hunting to see if we end up getting her her own place up here or not. she actually got her internship with richardson just today, so we haven't even fully digested the good news yet.

--the damaja

well... at least in the blog world here, everybody really seems to be in their own zone lately. alayna doesn't post too often anymore, lauren hasn't posted in a month, hoang posts every few weeks when he starts to feel guilty, and i don't seem to put any effort into my notoriously long posts anymore, not to mention countless other examples of tumbleweeds blowin by on other blogs i occasionally check.

i think that's prolly to be expected though. i'm not sure yet if everyone will suddenly come back and we'll see a surge of posts or if it's yet another trend that's slowly dying.

i can't speak for everyone else but for whatever reason since i graduated about 6 weeks ago even though i've had a lot going on i haven't particularly wanted to bitch and moan about much of it. luckily most of what has gone on has been pretty positive so i really don't have that much to even get on and just incessantly whine about. but like i said i think everybody's just really in their own zone and this just isn't the time of year to be posting everyday i'd imagine.

in those 6 weeks since graduation it really has been just a ridiculously busy time, and it's only now getting to the point where things are sorta settling in and there's not so many things i've gotta get done every minute of the day. moving to my new apartment here in dallas was obviously a way bigger deal than just moving between college and home like i had gotten so used to. i won't say it really took any more time than i thought it would, but it really was such an exhaustive process that took a lot of patience. i've still got minor chores still to do here and there to really get the place 100% lived-in, but for the most part it easily passes as my home.

living alone has been pretty good so far, haven't really missed my old house or being down at college station much. it's nice to not have a roommate, i'm sure you remember all my bitches about my last one, if not, check my archives. it's a completely different dynamic to just live on your own and do everything by your own rules. i haven't really been *too* lonely so far or anything, like i had told a lot of people in my senior year, i really have enough stuff queued up over the past few months/years to keep me entertained for quite some time, which i actually proved for a couple weeks in may without a tv, phone, internet, etc at times.

work is obviously mostly what my life entails these days. expectedly so i was pretty bored at first and everybody around me knew it, but now i'm settling more into the role they've given me which for the most part has kept me pretty busy, which i prefer over being bored and dreading coming to work everyday. i've worked a couple 9 and 10 hour days, so while those can kinda drain you they really do help as far as cutting down your hours the rest of the week. i've gotta hit 8am meetings monday through friday, so that's pretty much the motivating factor that helps me get there at 7:45 usually. so yeah it sucks i gotta wake up for those but it's not so bad once 4pm rolls around and you're free to go home if you want. 3 days a week i work out at the gym up there, which is obviously a puppy compared to the behemoth that is the texas a&m student recreation center, but eh it's got enough to allow you to make you good and sore.

it really is hard though when you leave for work at 7:30am and after working and then lifting weights, you find yourself getting home sometimes a good 12 hours later. i mean i expected it and everything and it's nothing to really bitch about, it's just unfortunate that yeah it doesn't exactly leave you that much time for other things you might wanna do. i've had to grow up obviously, i run my own ship here, nobody's gonna cook dinner for me or do my laundry. so i usually have to combine chores like those with a few things i like to do when i've got the time.

not sure whether i need an excuse or not, but that's pretty much my excuse for my relative disappearing acts on both this blog and on AIM. i had wondered in that last semester how much i'd use AIM after i graduated and joined the real world and now i kinda have a good feel for how much and when i like to use it. i leave it on a lot at work cuz alayna and i can make good use of it if we're not both swamped with work and i don't mind trading a few messages with anybody that needs a few minutes of my time online. at night though, at home, it's a bit harder to motivate myself to have AIM running even half as much as i did all throughout college. for one thing, my XP box has some sorta issue where it just cannot run AIM without disconnecting then reconnecting at least a couple times an hour. i have no idea what that is, i'm sorta the master at troubleshooting shit computer problems, but i don't have the motivation to really probe that one quite yet, so a lot of times i drop too many messages and get too many disconnects that i elect to just leave it off. combining with sorta this down season in everyone posting on their blogs, it's the same kinda vibe for instant messaging. i'm still pretty fresh outta school where it at times really was a way of life for a lot of us, but i have yet to find anybody up at work that gives me some silly AIM s/n to contact them away from work, heh. i won't bash it cuz it's really been the communication crutch i've leaned on for a good 4 years, but i'm not totally sure people out in the real world (post 22 years old) really rely on it all that much.

plus these days there really aren't that many people that i seem to chat with online anymore. everybody you know really starts to take on a certain vibe online after a while that's easily predictable. as far as a few of the people i talk to the most online, it's like alayna just gives me random tidbits at night that we both feel is a bit of a waste given that we'd rather just wait till 9pm and use free cell minutes instead, with lauren i've talked to her on & off throughout the day so we don't really even have that much left to say anyway, and mostly with hoang and rick it's either random links, tech-related geekspeak or troubleshooting questions. i don't really have a problem with any of those and i've grown pretty used to it, it's just after a while you start to feel like you're only getting online just so people see you're there, not really to purposely talk to anybody in particular.

hell, i see the value of instant messaging more than most people, but admittedly there are actually times where i'd really just rather trade a few emails. that would work fine in theory, but let's all just admit it -- it's easier to put off emailing somebody than to just respond right away to an IM that popped up on your desktop. i'm as bad as anybody else really, i get an email from a friend or something and often don't respond for days, if anything just to make sure i don't look too needy. but you've heard me bitch on here countless times at how flawed today's email system is and i haven't changed my opinion. just like ~6-9 months ago when i started to have problems emailing people and getting nothing in return, the same thing continues to happen, albeit less frequently mostly due to the fact that i'm too busy to spend all my time sending out random emails to people asking how they're doing. basically from now on though i'm taking everything like that with a grain of salt and just saying, hey if somebody doesn't get back to me within a reasonable amount of time, it's time to take them out of my list of contacts on the cell/pda/outlook, simple as that.

all in all, i'd prolly say (although not entirely hands down) life is better than it was senior year. i miss a lot of the ability to be a kid back then, but a lot of other things have improved in the meantime. alayna and i have coped really well with being separated 300 miles apart and things are as good as they've ever been, just had some minor bickerings on the phone that get cleared up pretty quickly. plus we've had some setbacks with getting her up here as smoothly as we wanted, but she'll most likely still get up here in the fall, although we don't know yet if she'll live with me or not. i came back into the same general group up at work, and the transition back to the working world couldn't have been much easier. i've got a huge unfair new college hire advantage in that i know about 10x more people than the average newbie would and i've really fit in much easier than they would since i've been working there since '01. it's nice to be seen as an equal (at least by fellow software engineers) instead of the collegeboy co-op that i had been before.

it'll take some time before i get a really good feeling about friends and stuff up here though. i've still got contacts from both high school and college that still work pretty well but for the most part i assume i'll meet the bulk of my friends through work. so far it's been pretty good as far as other young people i can connect with up there, mostly with guys i knew as co-ops. at least so far i'm not really all that interested with hanging out with a bunch of thirty and forty somethings from work. nothing against them, it's just that lack of common mindset and maturity that i'm not really interested in. but like i said i've been around the company for a while and i'm constantly running into a lot of cool twenty somethings. my buddy from last year, kathryn, she's still in the same group and we're still pretty tight friends. she's kinda on that outer threshold where we get along pretty well but if she were any more mature or settled we prolly wouldn't have anything in common to joke around about or anything. i can't really determine that on age, but she's almost 26 (3 and a half years older than me) and she's dating a guy that's 30, so for some reason at times i question how well we can actually hang out together successfully and stuff. it's funny though that occasionally she has to play the role of standard co-worker to me like when we're trying to solve some software-something-or-other together and we have to be all serious and shit. it's like i can barely take her seriously, heheh. she's just one of those people that i consider her much more my friend than my co-worker, which can at times make things a bit awkward in the office. i think that just shows you that you've reached a point where you're better at having a deep conversation over a coffee than actually working together.

as far as this weekend, alayna got a surprise hook-up standby ticket here which somehow we lucked out and her flights in and out worked perfectly. we had a great weekend though, used some coupons and certificates and shit to eat out and stuff on the cheap. we checked out the terminal saturday cuz we both thought that looked interested. we were... sorta right, it was... kinda interesting. i walked away from it thinking my parents would have liked it, heh. i dunno, it had funny parts and for the most part it didn't *entirely* drag on, but eh, nothing was really groundbreaking in it. i mostly thought it was a cool plot/scenario that wasn't really done the right way. kinda one of those films where if some trendy up and comer had directed it in some new-age risky way it would have been more interesting than the way spielberg did it. and like the whole thing with zeta jones... wtf for? she didn't really add anything to the movie and nothing in her role was really realistic at all, at least from what i know about pretty flight attendants. hanks did a fine job and all with the foreigner routine, but nothing in the movie was just really all that moving i guess. after walking out alayna gave it a 6/10 and i said 6.5/10. IMDb says 7.2, but i think that's a little bit of skew from people generally loving hanks' movies maybe. saturday night we ended up having lauren and zach over for a while to eat, play gamecube and make use of the foosball table some. it was pretty fun for the most part, the 4 player mario kart battles felt just like old. today was mostly just a mellow day for the two of us where we stayed in all day and even fell asleep on the couch together in the afternoon, a bit of a rarity.

we did watch the triplets of belleville today though. we both thought it was weird, but kinda fresh and new and at only 80 minutes not really a waste of time or anything. it was just cool old-style 2D animation, and the fact that it was 95% silent with only bits of french (no subtitles) in there was kinda cool. some of the animation was very well done, i was kinda more interested in the visual than the somewhow weird wandering slow plot. i'd recommend you check it out if only to just appreciate some oft-forgotten 2D goodness.

not really sure why but i've got some high hopes for this week. alayna will be back on friday (a planned flight this time, in for the 4th) and we know we've got kathryn's housewarming party to hit friday night. plus we'll do something for the 4th, just not sure what yet. this week i've gotta get caught up on the last ~10 days of big brother 4 australia, been missing out due to being maxed out on newsgroup quota and the aussie that was torrenting it decided not to bother anymore. i see that the harry potter and van helsing telecine DVD-R torrents are out there, so i might check those out.

so i guess until next time... ;)

--justin

unfortunately, it looks like i lost access to the TAMU server that i was using to host images. just took it a little time to take effect after i graduated. not exactly sure what i'll do about that yet, i'll hafta try to host 'em somewhere else, but that might not happen for a while. might be able to serve 'em off one of my own boxes, but we'll see.

so in summary, sorry the "My Photos" link on the right is now dead.

-the damaja

sheeeeit, sorry for the huge lack of posts, but i think it's pretty excusable given that i made the big move and was actually without any internet access for several weeks, heh. i'll try to make some time in the next few days to make a decent post, but i don't really have time now. i'll get back as soon as i can.

--justin

i thought this was particularly worth copy & pasting...

regarding the recently announced ridiculous specs of the 2007-2008ish microsoft longhorn project, which will be the successor to XP:

Those specs will still be for your more expensive PCs (i.e. $1500+ in 2004 dollars), but it seems Bill is pursuing his vision of making Windows be everything to everyone. For any of you classic SNL fans... Longhorn is supposed to be a floor wax AND a dessert topping. Longhorn will be your media server (replacing the cable box, VCR, Tivo, and DVD player), play games via your television (replacing game consoles), interface with any networkable appliance in your home (refrigerator, heating and cooling system, alarm system) and provide a centralized control panel...

That high-end PC will sit in a closet and be accessed via 5.8ghz wi-fi through a set-top box attached to your HD capable TV, thin client portables, and touch screens on your "Longhorn Enabled" appliances.

Your Longhorn PC will be on the net and everything connected to it will be accessible (i.e. check your refrigerator inventory via a personalized web-based panel so you can prep a grocery list to pick up on the way home). Eventually, you'll walk into your house on a 48 degree (farenheit) winter day, and your home will be a sweltering 95 degrees (farenheit) inside, courtesy of the W64.HVACdemon virus, written by some pointy-headed 15 year old in Holland.

That's Bill's ultimate goal: to squeeze Microsoft "technology" into every nook and cranny of your life until everything you do has some Microsoft code enabling it or making it inaccessible unless you pay Bill. And that's why such huge specs are needed.

obviously from a dude on slashdot. just thought that was a funny/interesting perspective.

please, go on with your daily lives.

--the damaja

ladies, gents.

well, it's fuckin... may, dude. may is like, the month. it is the month of all months really. may's a little scary cuz i know i'm done with college and that means i'm about a month away from working as a real employee, although i've kinda done that for a while. although i've got a lot of little shit tasks and crap to complete this month, i'm also making sure that i still collegeboy it up this month since i ain't no collegeboy after this. this week should be good for that since i've got one lecture tomorrow and then nothing for a week. and you can kinda imagine with 3 finals and graduation on the horizon no ass-busting will occur for those finals, boy.

so this week's gonna kinda be half productive half lazyass really. i've got some things on campus i gotta do, as well as some shit around the city, but other than that i'll be fuckin around at home. the only real good thing about having actual tasks to complete is it will at least sorta prevent me from really shifting hours and sleeping all day. don't really bet on seeing me awake before noon though i'd imagine.

i never really have any problems keeping busy during times like this. i'm almost halfway through ender's game, which has been okay so far, not really spectacular but not boring either. i've been really slow on, which never helps. i had intended to read that and pattern recognition before i moved out of CS, but that's not gonna happen. i'll be lucky to finish ender's game in the next week or so at this pace.

it's funny how i've got all these tv and anime series to watch, but when i find something i really like i watch it way more than everything else. sorta outta nowhere i just watched all 6 episodes of the first season of the office, and enjoyed the hell out of it. at first i didn't like the show, and most people i know don't really seem to "get it" either, but if you give it a bit of a chance and get thru the thick british accents i'm sure you'll enjoy it. i've just got the 2nd season and the xmas specials left to watch, but i'm debating on scrapping my tvrips of it and just getting the dvd set, both seasons. i also enjoyed the hell out of the significant others semi-mini-series, at least the 4 out of 6 episodes i could grab. luckily, bravo decided to make a few more episodes, so i'll keep an eye out for those.

now and then i'll watch a home movies episode, those don't really get old. i have plans to start watching alias from season 1 to see if it's any good, but i might save that little endeavor for the middle of the summer if we're at a real lack for decent tv. i have an assload of MST3K episodes to watch, which will take fuckin forever given that each ep is an hour and a half long. i still say i'm gonna try to watch that traffic mini-series that hit the USA network a few months ago.

i've been pretty bad about anime lately. although to give myself credit i think i needed a bit of a break from it since i went through the whole cowboy bebop series. i'm over halfway done with hellsing, but i've found that's not a great series to watch spread out over a long time cuz you kinda forget about some of the overall plot and lose interest in the characters. it's a solid action-based anime but i'm glad i didn't fork over all the cash for the dvd set, woulda been mostly wasted money. i've got a few other series (that i've mentioned here before) that i could tackle if i really wanted to, but for now they're kinda on the backburner, since i've still got hellsing, noir, gun slinger girl and possible full metal panic! shit to tide me over for quite some time.

as far as tv series, i'm mostly content to kinda catch up on a lot of stuff over the summer when there's a lot less new programming on. i might try out a few episodes of the shield to see if it's worth the hype. i intend to go back and watch the entire maxx series since i thought the animation style was so damn brilliant. i've also got the first season of strangers with candy, chappelle's show, first couple years of mr. show, dead like me, curb your enthusiasm and sealab 2021 to fill my time.

but believe it or not, i am trying to get myself to do what i can to get off my computers and do something else. that kinda narrows it down to 3 options: tivo, reading, or video games. as i mentioned above i haven't really been reading that much, although i think i'll knock out a few books this summer since i'll need something to put me to sleep every night when i have to hit the sack at such ridiculous times. i've found that tivo actually works perfect if you want a meal in front of the tv and need like 20-30 minutes of definite entertainment while you eat. i've gone back and played a few more hours of star fox adventures, with a strategy guide luckily it wasn't too tough to get back into the flow of it, although i wouldn't be surprised if it had been a year since i had last saved my previous game, heh. it is sorta depressing though that i've put like 6-7 hours into it and i'm only like 22% or something finished with it. i think as a kid i prolly coulda accomplished that over a day or so. and last week at one point i played a little f-zero gx, so i'm trying to get my ass off the web and in front of the cube.

it's completely backwards given my difficulty in convincing myself to sit down and play a game consistently, but i'm actually strongly considering purchasing another console, maybe not quite right now but within a few months. i really never would have thought i'd be saying that like a year or 6 months ago, but it's kinda true. it's not really even about me being at all unhappy with the gamecube or anything, it's just i'm seeing more and more this drought the cube's going through as far as big releases. in some ways it doesn't completely affect me as i still have plenty of shit from 2002 and 2003 to tide me over, but it does sorta suck knowing that if i did wanna go out and buy another game there's not much to choose from currently.

it was for that reason that i used a rent 1 get 1 game coupon at blockbuster -- and got 2 xbox games. normally i like to bash the xbox just cuz i'm a former playstation fan and a current nintendo backer, but with the gc drought and an xbox in the apartment, i had to seize the opportunity. i rented ninja gaiden and max payne 2. only played ninja gaiden so far, and it's been really nice. it's tough getting used to the controller (i've really barely ever played xbox or ps2 ever) but it's a fun game and that's a good sign that i've already put several hours into it. i love my cube and look forward to future releases on it until this generation of consoles rolls over into the next, but i'm also thinking if i can convince myself to up my amount of gameplay, i shoulda prolly invest in another console in addition. i like some of the things i've seen so far in the xbox and i know the ps2 would rock as well. what really attracts me to an additional console is cost. ps2 will prolly fall in price soon, and an xbox can be had for a relatively cheap $150 these days. i'm also really interested in ps2's greatest hits series, which a lot of games are between $20 and $40, which beats $50 for almost every damn gamecube game. it's taken me about a year and a half to see some of the holes in nintendo's offerings.

as cute and innovative as the cube is, it's a bit troubling that 3rd party vendors are somewhat rapidly dropping support for it. i'm seeing more and more games come out for ps2 and xbox but NOT for the gc, which is sad. gc's mainly missing out on a lot of sports and adult-themed action games, which i kinda feel i'm missing out on a bit myself. the cube is still all around the best match for me, cuz i like to play a lot of nintendo's own franchise games, as well as some of the multiplayer games their famous for. but more and more i play video games by myself, sorta from a growing lack of interest in other people i'm close to lately. so that kinda tailors my tastes to more single player type stuff, of which i think those more adult and sports games are geared to. i'm also a little peeved at nintendo's decision not to try out anything online yet. at first i didn't care cuz i didn't think i'd be interested anyway, but this xbox live shit is really starting to get popular, and i'm seeing more and more online games that just look fun. that would be the biggest thing to provoke me to add an xbox to my entertainment arsenal, the ability to play great online games if i so desired.

i don't get some of nintendo's decisions, man. i'm a big supported of theirs and can't stand reading about other people constantly bashing them, but their decision to push gameboy advance - gamecube connectivity is just... weird. it sounds novel in theory, but the biggest problem is... i don't fucking have a gameboy advance. that's like asking me to go buy a $100 accessory just to be able to play a game properly. GBA's are cool and all, but where the fuck would i use one other than for that connectivity? in my cubicle at work? in bed at night? portable gaming has its place, but it's typically for the under-18 crowd in my opinion. i'm not buying a $3500 DLP tv so that i can sit on my couch and play GBA games. i bought final fantasy crystal chronicles knowing it was really hyped and shit, but not realizing several other people all with their own GBA's was required to really have fun with it. nintendo's fucking ridiculous for thinking that a high percentage of their cube owners have several friends willing to bring their own goddamn GBA's just to have fun with a game.

i think the bottom line is the gamecube is a hell of a little system, and i've loved all the legacy-based games... mario, zelda, f-zero, metroid, etc. that's why i bought the system. great graphics, cool technology overall. but i'm thinking more and more if i want much better game selection i need the cube with something else in addition. it would really all come down to which system has more games i'm interested in, ps2 or xbox. i haven't done that research, so i don't know who'd come out on top there. like i said, i don't see it as happening within the next month or so, but don't be surprised if it's the end of the summer and i'm going on and on about some great game i just played on ps2 or xbox.

heh, it's funny how i've just been a little too high-tech for too long. it's harder and harder for me to break things down for people when it comes to explaining something i'm doing remotely high-tech. seems like several people i've told so far about building my home theater PC don't seem to understand what the hell it's for. i can only really hope that they'll see exactly what i'm trying to do when everything's actually set up.

it's not gonna help being a full-time software engineer, but i do plan on making a conscious effort to spend considerably less time on my computers, at least online. i have all these internet and AIM problems lately (not sure if they're related to the recent worm) and it's funny how disconnected i feel when i'm not connected to AIM. when you've relied it on for so long and it's your main method for communicating to other people, you're not really entirely sure how to find out what everybody else is up to, heh. it's hard not to just sit there now and then and wonder what everyone's away message says or at least what they're generally doing.

the thing that scares me is that i have IM access up at work, and i can pretty easily punch through the firewall to have AIM run as part of my work IM service, i've done it in the past. but i kinda wonder if i *want* to do that, y'know? sure, i can be at work all day and be online, but... why? the main people i talk to will most likely be busy themselves, so why bother? i would kinda prefer to at least seem unavailable during the day while i'm at work, even though i could prolly often field messages during the day. i'd kinda rather make up for my always-on status throughout college and just be online every night through maybe like 7-11pm just for casual conversations and shit. and i'd prolly hafta make an effort to go offline more often than just put up away messages, in the interest of trying to keep myself from having the AIM excuse to sit at the computer.

i don't know if i'd go as far as saying i'm addicted here. that could either be me realizing i'm not addicted, or that i'm actually denying it. it's not so much that i think i'm doing anything particularly unhealthy being online and at the computer so often, it's moreso that i feel it detracts from other things i could/should be doing instead. it's not even so much that i have more productive things to do, like cleaning or anything, i get that done pretty well, it's more like the watching/playing/reading alternatives that i mentioned earlier. as corny as it is, i think that'll be my main "resolution" for the summer.

guess i'll take my own advice now, huh? ;)

peace,
justin

well i'm doing everything i can to avoid doing automata homework, so i figured i'd post.

i was talking to rick today and i came up with a realization that it's one thing to have senioritis (i'm kinda sick of that term so i'm not gonna say it much more) but it's like so much harder when everybody you talk to everyday has it too. hell, i wish i had a bunch of fish friends or something to motivate me to really kick ass in everything.

it comes up fairly often. i'll be talking to somebody about something academic i'm having trouble with, and their reaction is often: "why do you care, man?" and i can't come up with a good reason other than to help my ego. most of the time i'm only really putting forth effort in a class this semester just to please other people: parents, employers, colleagues, etc. it's no big secret that i don't really care what grades i make in classes at this point, but i have to care a little bit just to make sure i don't come out looking like an ass. i'm not even really completely slacking off, i could do it a lot worse i think.

like when i have a hw due in a class now, and i try to ask somebody for help, they don't care. they're graduating like me, they've got a job lined up, why should they struggle over an assignment at this point? i can't really disagree with 'em.

the only reason i care that much is i'm just making sure it doesn't show a really negative characteristic about me, like i quit too early or something. in high school i did it way worse than most people, it was pretty awful. i just sat down one day after being accepted to A&M and calculated what scores i could get in classes to still be in the top 100%. as soon as i figured that out, i went and purposely flunked my calculus course. i knew i'd be in cal 1 freshmen year anyway, and i could fail the class without dropping out of top 10%, so i did, and i had fun doing it. i made a 15 my last 6 weeks and like a 50-something in the class for the year, and the teacher knew what i was doing and yet had no control over it. i ended up somewhat easily within the top 10% and went to A&M without really ever thinking twice about it.

my biggest reason for not going that far again is that i can't -- employers might look at it funny, parents would have a right to be mad cuz they're throwing in the cash for the education, etc. but i've done what i can to slack off within my means this semester. i've put everything i could off to the last minute, i've turned in assignments late, i've skipped like 3x more classes than ever before, and what's gonna be the consequence? i might get lower letter grades in a few classes, sure. but beyond that, how is that going to impact my life at all? will raytheon suddenly tear up my acceptance agreement and forget the great job i've done for them for 3 years? will my girlfriend dump me over it? will i lose the respect of family and friends? no to all those.

i ended up with a 77 in speech. i should have gotten a B, but i did bad in the class the first few weeks. it'd be nice if the prof had a little sympathy and bumped me to a B, but honestly, how much am i gonna remember about that class 2-3 years from now? i'll prolly vaguely remember my grade in there, but will i remember what i spoke about, the names of people sitting around me or what the professor looked like? prolly not. i think it's unfortunate, but i just think i'm that kind of resourceful person where if i'm given a scenario that i'm allowed to put forth effort less than absolute best, i seize it. the way i look at it, the worst case scenario for slacking off a bit is i pull off a 2.5 this semester, and my GPA is still pretty similar to what's on my resume already, a number that my employer had no problem with.

i'm not really even sure if this situation is ever gonna arise again. when else in life am i gonna be in a position where what i do right now doesn't impact what i'm gonna be doing in the next few months? prolly not very often. it strikes me that nobody wants to see me struggle or stress out over any of this undergrad shit anymore, so why should i disappoint them and bust my ass for nothing? so that i can put on my resume 3.3 instead of 3.25? i really doubt that will ever impact the rest of my life in any way. you only go to college to get a good job anyway, and you only bother with a high GPA to try and make yourself look better to get that good job. then once you've worked for a few years, nobody's ever gonna care what your GPA was.

at my graduation and related events, my whole family is gonna be extremely proud of me graduating from college, especially those that never went to college themselves. but they're gonna be proud of that whether i have a 3.25 or a 3.75. i'll spend more time telling people about my job in the next few months than i will about the last 4 years. it's just like when we're in college we don't sit around and talk about our successes and mistakes in high school. you complete one era of your life, you move on. you have funny stories to tell about each era now and then, but you've changed since that time, thus, it's not entirely relavent anymore.

i feel a bit guilty saying it, but hell, this semester is awesome in a way. i still go ace tests her and there and work my ass off for an assignment, but i also spend a lot of time just doing whatever i can that's not academic. i can do some things now that in my middle years of school i was too busy to do, so it's kind of vindicating now. some people would disagree, but i say if given the opportunity at the beginning of the semester to be given automatic C's in all my classes i prolly would have taken it, just to sorta live here and enjoy life a bit.

it's painfully obvious, but school's a bitch. sure a year from now i'll be saying work's a bitch, but for now and the last 4 years, school gets in the way of a lotta cool shit. we always say "college would be great if it weren't for all those classes and shit" and it's kinda true. living this way is fun for me. but school just invades on your personal life constantly. there are times when alayna and i are hanging out and i can tell she's having fun and doesn't wanna go, but she has to cuz she has an 8am class. or when i sit and wonder why i never go out on thursday nights like everybody else, then realize 9 times out of 10 i have something due on friday or whatever. they're just examples of how school prevents us from having as good a time as we can. yeah, the only reason we're really here is to get an education, but we also gotta live our lives here for 4 years. that's why it's meant a lot to me my senior year to go out of my way to make sure i don't spend too much time stressing over academics and do what i can to have fun. i've slept in more weekends and gotten drunk much more often just to make sure i come out of here knowing i enjoyed the college lifestyle like i was supposed to.

instead, i'll bide my time anxiously awaiting all my FedEx and UPS packages in transit right now. then we'll have some fun building a PC. as my ex-gf said, eeeeeek. as my current gf says, eeeeee.

--the damaja