Well, now that my bills are paid off, and I’ve successfully paid for school, I bought a DVD player/recorder with money I had saved up but wasn’t sure if I would be able to use. But this is no ordinary DVD player! It’s a DVD-VCR Combo! Not that I have any tapes, but my better fraction most certainly does! Oodles of tapes! But it’s no ordinary DVD-VCR Combo. It’s a DVD-Recorder VCR Combo! Not only that, but I can add more bold tags and say it’s a DVD-VCR Combo with built-in Digital Tuner! This will let me do three things:

1. Watch DVDs
2. Convert VHS tapes into DVDs for later viewing
3. Lament that I’m broke for the next few weeks

I know I’m a few years behind the curve, but truth be told, as much as I love consumer electronics, I’ve settled into a nice boring lifestyle where I’m happy with what I have. My love of that new-electronics smell has been superceded by my love of eating food with a higher nutritional content than Ramen. Well, not love per se, but at least happy indifference. I’m sure that once (if?) I graduate college and have enough disposable income to better boost the National GDP, I’ll live in a squalidly tiny apartment with enough electronics that I could probably acquire a Radio Shack franchise operation off of what’s in my living room.

So far, I’ve spent about as much time configuring my website as I have writing posts to go on it. Probably more, in fact. This is par for the course for me, I spend so much time making a backend that I can use quickly an efficiently that, in the end, I’ve spent more time that I would have to begin with. I prefer to think off it as being robust, rather than being a needy perfectionist who’s never happy with anything, ever. But I’m trying to change that.

In another bit of trivia that no one cares about, I’m debating going through with changing my life in a way that’s uniquely my own. By which, of course, I mean following a manual. I highly recommend purchasing one of these books; even if you don’t follow the instructions, it’s a great read.

And it looks like my personal goal of not yammering on about unrelated topics in a single blog post lasted precisely six posts. Hurrah!

After class today, while surfing the web with a fierce series of clicks and unnecessary double-clicks, I happened upon a comic called The DM of the Rings. The title itself is a bit of a giveaway as to what it’s about: a retelling of Lord of the Rings, in which the characters are Player Characters in an RPG.

Read the rest of this entry »

It really is a gorgeous day as I stand outside. Nary a cloud in the sky, a wonderfully light breeze and a decadent aroma is wafting down from the fafe a few blocks away. It seems that most people don’t appreciate the simple things quite as much as they should. I shall have a quick spot of lunch on the green grass before class today, it seems a shame to waste it. Alack, I have no blanket and pic-a-nic basket with me, which would make the day that much better.

Stop. Take five minutes to enjoy what’s around you. If there’s nothing around to enjoy, then you need to re-evaluate your life.

I kinda like the prospect of bus blogging. It’s not entirely nauseating to type in a moving vehicle, and it helps pass the time quickly. It also lets me look like I have a lot of friends that I’m texting, when in reality I have few friends, none of whom I ever text. The downside is that the bus has the suspension system from an 1852 Mennonite Horse Carriage, so there are quite a few bumps that can easily move my finger over to the next key. But since I touch type, I don’t actually have to read what it is 3′m saying, and so long as no one reads this, no one will be bothered. Just me and the Google Bot, friends forever. He’ll always come to visit me.

Anyway, this is rather therapeutic, I can almost see why everyone has a blog. It’s where you can talk to yourself without having t dress like a disheveled hobo on a street corner. If I had any sort of creative output, this would be a lovely place to get together ideas and musings. But since my average creative output is to lovingly craft puns at a loved one’s expense, spontaneity is required, so this won’t be as much use.

Well, I’m still looking for a purpose for this blag, who knows, there might be something entertaining that I can do with my fifteen minutes of downtime on the bus besides counting the number of cars we pass.
The preceding was posted via mobile phone. Typos may be numerous. The author takes no responsibility for hilariously offensive mistypings.

Every morning, I ride the city bus to school. I get to the bus stop about 15 minutes before the bus is scheduled to arrive. It’s during this time when my mind wanders the most. As anyone who really knows mr can tell you, my mind wanders a lot (man it’s a pain to write bold on a phone). But standing here, alone, watching the migrations of the American Landscaping Truck (Automobilis botanis), I get to think about my life. Not about wanting to become a landscaper, mind you, just in general. What will I be doing in four years? I hopefully will have my degree by then, but will I be applying it? What sort of job do I want to spend the rest of my life doing?

I have quite a few interests, and a Computer Science degree will open a lot of doors in a wide array of fields. Heh, computer arrays. But what do I want to do with computers? Programming, design, graphic design, databases, teaching, cube farmer… no idea. But my mind keeps coming back to teaching.

Hopefully everyone’s had that one really good teacher. The one who loves what he’s doing and loved who he’s doing it for. The teacher who shows up in a toga during a lecture about Rome. The one who asks questions that get you to think, not to think about getting a good grade. The one all the students love but all the administrators hate having to deal with. Robin Williams from “Good Will Hunting,” but less hairy. I think that’s the guy I want to be. Shame that it took me halfway through my degree to realiE that.

I’ve looked casually at what it’ll take to become a teacher in Texas, and it seems doable. But… will I be in Texas in five years? Why would I want to stay here? Conversely, why would I want to go anywhere else? What does it have to offer than is better than here?

Note to self four years from now: don’t worry as much about the past as I’m worrying about the future.
The preceding was posted via mobile phone. Typos may be numerous. The author takes no responsibility for hilariously offensive mistypings.

Just a test post on my way to work ti see how posting from my phone goes. As I type, I’m dodging traffic, so I take no responsibility for typos.

I love my phone. It’s a Cingular 8525, bought days prior to when Cingular became ‘the New AT&T.’ It has a slide out keyboard, 3G internet, and a nice QVGA screen. I use it as an alarm clock, a to do list, and sometimes even talk yo people. I spend collectively about one hundred dollars for mine and Jenn’S cell phones, but only use about 20 minutes of talk time a week. A bit wasteful, but when I was debating of canceling my cell phone and accidentally left it behind one day, I was stuck at work for four hours in the cold trying to get ahold of a ride, walking two miles to the nearest payphone I couldn’t afford. Okay, that may be a sentence fragment, but the point is, I realized phones are indispensable. So I bought this one a while back, and use it more than ever. Just not for talking.
The preceding was posted via mobile phone. Typos may be numerous. The author takes no responsibility for hilariously offensive mistypings.

Well, I’ve finally re-activated my website. It’s a blog now! Or, as I shall call it, my blag. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what I shall do with it, but we’ll work that out as time goes on. I just have to remember to update it in a timely manner. And hope no one ever reads it.

What’s the impetus behind this? Well, designing a graphic for my WoW-friend Tamori, my curiosity became piqued as to Wordpress. I’ve seen it talked about all over the internet, but never really looked at it beyond a stray Google search result while searching for, say hovering cats. I have to say, thus far… I’m impressed. Seems very robust, and without diving into the code too deeply, it looks to be very modular and easy to write plug-ins for. Why, I can even post or view from my phone should I choose to! All of my previous websites have been hand-coded from scratch by me, so it’s nice that I was able to just steal the code and have it “just work.”

So what’s going to go here? Absolutely no idea. In theory, it should just be a journal. But why keep a journal? Am I going to have any profound insights that will want to be studied by future generations? Am I so desperate for attention that I’ll spend an hour writing something and then demand that everyone go look at what I read? Will I offer useful advice, witty rejoinders, or something unique that nowhere else has to offer? The most likely answer to all these questions is… no. I have no idea what this will be. I’m not even sure it will last. Anyone who’s known me for any length of time knows that my interests are fickle and passing. I’ve started a comic, let it die, restarted it again, killed it before it began, and then started a new one, which was meted out a timely abandonment (I dare not glance ‘pon the visage of my misbegotten progeny, lest their memories fill me with sorrow and lament). I pick up a vintage Mario game for a console of yesteryear, intending to play it to completion, only to get frustrated 3 deaths in and give up. Truly, my interests are not long lasting.

And yet I just had a four-year anniversary with my fiancée, and have spent most of that time playing the same character in World of Warcraft. So perhaps there’s hope for me yet. For all my dropped endeavors, I do have some ability to settle into a routine. So, perhaps this website will outlive its predecessors! Perhaps all I need is a little motivation to work on it. Who needs a purpose? Pfft.

From: Melita Jacqualine
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New template. It’s shiny? I’ll finish it later, I only spent about half an hour on this. Bed time now.

Wow, life’s so rad. I got online to email an old friend I haven’t heard from in well over a year, and she emailed me on the 31st! Awesome!

Niko is awesome.