oi! weekends always beat weekdays. that's the tip of the day. been mostly a lazy one.

first week of school was pretty much same-o same-o. it's nice to have less comp sci classes and instead some basic classes that people from other majors are in. plus i've got an ethics class with like 150 people in there, that makes me miss my earlier huge classes. for some reason i just love huge classes, it's so much harder to get completely bored in there. cuz no matter how boring it gets, you can always at least just watch people do whatever. plus you're lost in a sea of students, the prof doesn't really give a shit what you do. this semester i've got a pretty care-free outlook for all my classes, since i'm graduating in may. i just figure i'll relatively easily (based mostly on experience) be able to pull off something like 3.25, although the weird thing is i could score a 2.0 this semester and my job would be about 99% likely to still take me on. if i dwelled on that too much i'd really lose all motivation and prolly only go to half my classes, but i'm doing my best to just tell myself to tough it out and continue to do well in classes. my schedule this semester is pretty similar to the last, which wasn't really too bad. kind of a lot of coming and going back and forth to the apartment, but i'm pretty close to campus so it's no big deal.

this weekend was pretty typical of alayna and me. friday she ran some girly errands and came over, so we met up with the 18-year old terrors, lauren and laura, and hit up fazoli's. ultra-hip & chic lauren had never even been to a fazoli's before. i plan to next enlighten her with the holiest of chicken fingers at layne's. the goddamn plan was the come back to my place and let 4-player mario kart madness ensue, but like last time, it didn't happen. we ended up watching some tivo'd MXC eps, along with suggested saved by the bell episodes for nostalgia's sake. we ended up all blithering on like idiots (i've got some video captured to prove it if necessary) and there was no mario kartness to be had. it was sad.

saturday we actually had lunch at a decent time but for some reason i was just extremely lazy and couldn't motivate myself to do anything. alayna tried to get us a racquetball court from 2-4pm but they were all booked so that kinda ruined all the plans we had made. if i hadn't been so goddamn wiped out we woulda just gone to the rec anyway and lifted weights. instead i passed out for a while, so alayna went back home and ran her errands. ended up taking quite the powernap, which is why i'm still awake now ;). oddly enough, since we had had lunch at a decent time (in my college career on a saturday this has seriously happened only like 5% of the time) we could have dinner at a decent time, so i picked her up and we hit up texas roadhouse. it's sad when a "decent wait" is 45 fuckin minutes. the food was great as usual, just it always sucks having to wait so long, especially packed in with a bunch of other college kids. cuz of the rain and fear of huge crowds we talked ourselves out of bothering with the butterfly effect and instead played racquetball from 9-11. hours later, got that grocery shoppin out of the way at HEB at about 3am. that pretty much brings us up to speed, heh.

i've been sorta going back to wasting away on the net lately. it kinda ebbs and flows in monthly waves (kinda crazy that i've been online for now 8 years!) and right now i've just been spending a shitload of time just researching stuff and gaining useless knowledge. it's like i'll just set out to know more about a certain topic and bam, all of a sudden i'm completely tied up on a series of sites for a few hours. plus i upgraded to winamp5 the other day, and mentioning it to rick pushed him to do it as well, and then he checked out their new winamptv thing and told me to look into that. great, yet another way to entertain me.

i've been blowin a lot of time just researching what kind of setup i might want to try (or even afford) in the new apartment come may. you always wanna get off to a good start when you move somewhere brand new, so i just wanna make sure i don't buy anything i shouldn't have or waste a lot of money somehow.

i'm trying to research sort of the state of the union regarding HDTV. it's sorta hard to tell so far if 2004 is the year where it really starts to get more and more mainstream. 2007 is the year where the analog TV transmissions will most likely start to really come to an end, so it's difficult to understand whether if you're buying a new tv this year whether you should try to get an HDTV or an analog and just tell yourself when 2007 rolls around you'll either just use a conversion box or upgrade to an HDTV then. i haven't done enough research yet tho. my 20" sony wega will have to be shifted to my bedroom since that's just not really big enough to entertain a big living room. i come from a family that never really considered a big-screen tv or anything like that so it's not like i'm wanting a 60" LCD in my living room or something. most likely i'd be after about a 27" or 32", depending on how much those run for, especially in HD format.

every decision you make for those sorts of things will definitely impact your other home/tech decisions. if i got an HDTV, i'd obviously want some high-def programming, so ya gotta see what cable and satellite companies carry through HD. i hardly ever watch live tv anymore, so i'd hafta upgrade to a TiVo that could support HD, which doesn't exist yet but will be out this year. looks like the DirecTivo is really gonna be the next thing, so i could be looking at a satellite setup with integrated DVR over the summer, depending on the HD debacle.

even my dad suggested this, but in first outfitting a brand new home these days i'd really seriously consider everything you can that could be made wireless. so that's something i'll hafta look at, making sure any PC or device in the house that could support Wi-Fi made proper use out of it. a quick rant about wireless: y'know it's great that we can sever Cat5 ethernet connections and save some space, but what about the 3000 other wires i have running through my systems. sure i may lose that ethernet cable, but i still have so many damn wires connecting everything together, like all audio and visual sources.

most likely i'll finally be separating the computer from the rest of the system so i'll prolly hafta explorer a streaming media server for the living room to pipe the music through the main speakers. i constantly have little data-management and such projects going on but i think by far the biggest one i'll have is consolidating all my music within a few years. i'm really running out of room in my CD jukebox and it's becoming more and more useless to actually burn CD's. so at some point within prolly the next year i'm gonna end up having to move around a LOT of music to get everything the way i want it. whether it's a bunch of compressed mp3/ogg/etc to some sort of Hi-MD setup, somehow i'm gonna hafta wave goodbye to the concept of complete CD albums.

i think i gave ya enough useless news, right?

cheers,
justin