Percussive Maintenance

Jeans...no, wait...Genes, yeah, that's right

2007-03-06T11:21:00.000-06:00

Oftentimes you find yourself in a situation that you never expected. Such is my plight. Life has taken many unexpected twists and turns on my little road, some of which enjoyable, some not so much. All in all however, those twists and turns are what made me who I am today. But my little road had to start somewhere, that somewhere was my genes (you know those little building blocks of life that are in your DNA, we all have them, some of us are just more...blessed than others in that department). So, my genes. I got half from mom and half from dad...yeah, thanks.

My genes have me related to some crazy people. My parents for one are very odd. Yet on a wholelly different level is my brother. Sure, I may be related to him, but man, he's ODD. No, really, he is a strange person, and while I may not have much room to talk in that area, I can still make fun of him. First off, I would like to say that my brother is in the military, intelligence even. While I'm not going to go out on a limb and call him a "hero" or anything, he is part of the force that defends the country. Which for those who know him well is something of a funny topic. Needless to say, I am happy that he isn't on the front lines with bullets whizzing by him while he screams like Rambo. Because, given the chance, he might just go there, red bandanna and all.

Yes, he's odd, but in many ways, he was a direct contributer to who I am today. Things like part of my taste in music (he was my main punk influence), my love for video games (I don't know how many hours I spent watching him play X-COM: UFO Defense), and movie quotes (we have held entire conversations in movie quotes before). So, because he is odd, I am odd, and it's not all that bad (even if Erin disagrees). He even has a hippy lovin' hybrid car now, another thing I aspire to own. Alas, I have one final jeer to throw at my brother: "Thou shalt be careful wherest thou downloads pictures from thine digital camera, for they may return to bite you in thine rump."

Brad, The Defender of Our Country!
Happy Birthday man, your present is in the mail, it's for your hippy car.

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Things That Make Me Happy

2007-01-19T09:19:00.000-06:00

Too many bad things have been going on recently, time to get the sugar plum faeries dancing in my head. So I think it's about time that talk about things that make me happy, not sad, angry, or jaded. Here's to hoping this is a long list. So, in no particular order, here we go:

Erin: Ok, I said no particular order, but she really is the #1 thing that makes me happy. Someone I work with today commented on how she can understand my explanations of all things technical, in turn I told her it was all because of Erin. You see, Erin's been trying to beat the geek out of me for the better part of 4 years, and she's done a pretty good job, let's all thank her for the progress she's made so far. But more than that, I really really like her.
Musetta: She's small, she's furry, and she's slightly bitter about not being larger...like tiger-sized. But she's very nice when she's sleepy or asleep, which luckily is about 16 hours out of every day. Cats are probably the ultimate role model of relaxation.
The Irish: Not the Fighting Irish, the real Irish, the drinking Irish. Why? Well, they have a funny accent, they live on a pretty cool island, but more importantly, Irish cream and Guinness, either separately or together a la Irish Car Bomb.
Guild Wars: So far, there have been 3 chapters, Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall. Prophecies was great, then came factions, and that was damn fine too, and Nightfall blew me away, I can't wait to see the 4th installment. I really like that once I buy the game, I don't have to pay a monthly fee, that just feels right. It can be a bit of a timesink if I don't watch myself, but hey, everything in moderation, right?
01/20/2009: Presidunce Bush's last day in office. I have a countdown timer on my homepage that ticks off the days to his presidential end of days. It can even be easily updated in case of impeachment!
Photoshop: Much the same as Guild Wars in that it can be a veritable timesink, but there are fringe benefits of me playing around in PS, namely the increase of my skills in design.
Syntax-Highlighting: I would say Dreamweaver, but I don't use any of DW's features other than syntax-highlighting and code completion. Coming out of "The Zone" from long sessions of productive coding is one of the best natural highs out there.
My new website, AProteanDesign.com, which I will use to promote myself and myservices in hopes of generating a little bit of cash. Eventually, I hope to have a full fledged business simply doing design work that I want to do and still have time for life.

YAY! Reasons to live!

Luckily that wasn't so hard, but I will admit that it wasn't so easy. Maybe after this Sunday, I can add a Nintendo Wii to my list... But, as I refuse to abide by the irrational mindset of camping out at the store hours before it opens, I may not have such a good shot. Let's add my patience to the list of things I like.

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The Life and Times of Vincent Dunne

2007-01-12T00:49:00.000-06:00

Vinnie was quite possibly the best pet I have ever had, hands down. He will be hard to beat. Everyone in my family has said at one point in time "When I die, I want to come back as Vincent", and for good reason. I don't think a Care Bear would have loved us more. He was just the shortest member of the family that happened to have four legs, a tail, and some fur. He actually fit in quite well with his weight problem...

I have always been an animal person, specifically, a cat person. As a young child, the family had Dopey, whom my brother named after the dwarf of the same name. She was an outside cat, but she never ran away and she knew who and where her family was. Whenever I was feeling lonely, I would just go hang out with Dopey, be it after school, or at eleven o' clock at night. She was always ready for attention. I think I liked her so much cause she would just sit in my lap and purr. She lived to be 14 I think, one winter she got sick and didn't recover. She spent her last days in our laundry room in a basket full of towels with Vincent, who wasn't much more than a kitten, watching over her. It was a kind of changing of the guard, between the feline protectors of our family. It was his duty to give us love and affection, and to harass the dog. He upheld his duties more faithfully than anyone could have predicted.

Throughout his life, Vincent spent countless hours nestling between us and whatever chair we were sitting in at the moment. If there wasn't room, he would just get on top of you and give you this look that said, "Look, you need to pet me cause it'll make both of us happy". So we did. If you were sitting at a table working on something, he would sprawl across your work because he knew you would rather be petting him than whatever it was he was covering. He knew when you were having a bad day and needed to be comforted and would readily offer his services. To Vincent, the greatest thing was to love, and be loved in return.

So attached to the family was Vincent that he couldn't sleep alone. While I lived at my parent's house, he slept with me. It was like sharing the bed with your little brother, except it was OK to cuddle. In fact, it was mandatory, if you didn't, he would sleep on your head in retribution. So it was generally best to let the furry white ball of sleepy love curl up where he chose. Which for me was generally right behind my knees or under my armpit. My parents had to provide quarters for him once I left, but I don't think they minded. Luckily, he was kind of a rubber doll, if you picked him up and put him somewhere, he would stay there until you moved him or he got hungry. Once I moved away, there were many occasions where I went home not to visit my parents, but to see how Vinnie was doing. I generally gave him just as much, or more attention as I did my parents, and they had to share.

In the end, Vincent led a good life, and through him our lives were improved, we will miss him more than any one can put in to words. While there will always be a Vincent shaped hole in my life, it seems fitting that a few months ago I got a kitten of my own, Musetta. She is a bit younger than Vincent was when he took over from Dopey, but she seems up to the task. Maybe a changing of the guard occurred again, and it was just more subtle than we had expected.

PrayForHannah.org

2006-12-21T15:28:00.000-06:00

A good friend of mine's child seems to have Cardiomiopothy, a heart condition that can be either caused by a virus, or a genetic defect. There's really too much to say other than go to www.prayforhannah.org and give some support. Myself and mutual friends of the family are working on getting the site fully up and running. Unfortunately I believe that these great people are going to find themselves in a hospital ICU for the holidays, and Hannah may need a heart transplant if her condition doesn't significantly improve.

Anyway, Greg and Lori are in my prayers, even though I don't pray all that much. Sometimes God gives people more than they can handle, and that is what I believe friends are for. So,I'm going to be a good friend, and do everything I can for them, in the mean while, I'm gonna find other people to help.

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Finally, Truth in Advertising

2006-11-27T17:51:00.000-06:00

Not too many people take the time to examine exactly how dependent on Windows they really are. Think about it, MS Windows has about 90+% of the market share, the rest going mainly to Mac OS and all the different flavors of Linux that are out there, with Ubuntu being the heavy hitter. I can almost guarantee that you use Windows at work, that's where it shines, I know, I'm an IT guy. Now, for all of XP's shortcomings, it works. It's been around for long enough to get polished fairly well, and for the most part is crash free-ish. And here's the main reason it's all the rave at work: it's easy to program for Windows, and most people do.

Vista: (noun) a distant view or prospect. Why yes, I do plan to look on from afar to people using it...how'd you know? There's a popular maxim that many of us in the IT industry live by: "Microsoft? Don't use it until it hits Service Pack 1". Why? Well, Microsoft seems to insist on releasing beta software and calling it retail ready. It's buggy, unstable, and generally missing features (sometimes they're there, just not turned on), and then 6 months to a year down the line, they release SP1. That's when you use it, once they've fixed everything. SP1 is probably the product that you were supposed to buy when you bought the original software.

So why the truth in advertising title? Cause I'm gonna be a good distance away from this thing watching for nuclear explosions. Once they fix it, I might jump on the band wagon, I don't know. I find myself trusting MS less and less these days, but that could be because they have enough money to purchase a small country. What is it they say about power and corruption?

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I don't need it, but I want it

2006-11-22T14:49:00.000-06:00

Right, so I find myself in an odd position, that of wanting something that I don't need that I haven't wanted in a very long time. Nineteen-Ninety-One. Yeah, that was quite some time ago, 1991, also the same year that I discovered palindromes and silliness ensued. That was a long time ago, yeah, lets see, we had the Operation Desert Storm, some random spectator getting killed by a bolt of lightning at the US Open, Tim Berners-Lee releasing files on his idea of a "World Wide Web", the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the release of the Super Nintendo.

So, which one of these am I hearkening back to? Yeah, while Tim Berners-Lee is an important person and all, and the fall of the Soviet Union is important too, it's definitely the Super Nintendo that I'm talking about. No, they aren't coming out with the Super Nintendo again, much to my chagrin. It's the Wii, quite possibly the oddest named console ever, but it looks like fun. Actually, it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. More fun than should be allowed. It has some of the oddest controls ever, but that might be to it's benefit.

I think it's biggest draw is that to play games, you have to move. No sitting catatonic in front of the TV only moving your thumbs. With a controller in each hand sensitive to motion, you'll be flailing around like a crazy attempting to accomplish things in game. I see injuries in Wii owner's futures. Still, sounds like hella fun.

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Browser Hacking

2006-11-20T13:09:00.000-06:00

No, not hacking in the bad sense of me stealing your stuff through the manipulation of code (seriously, I'm not that good), hacking like modifying something to more suit your needs. Once upon a time, some dude thought it would be a good idea to put wheels on his chair so he could move around his office without getting up (although it is entirely possible that his wife just suggested it to him and he just followed through, I dunno). I hack the hell out of my laptop, desktop...not so much. I have so many things going on with my laptop that generally if someone other than me uses it, they think that they broke it. My browser of choice (Firefox) is so heavily modified, I don't let my girlfriend use it because I think if she did, it would start "acting funny" so much that she might throw my laptop...which would be bad. So I make her use IE, I know, it's mean, but it's not so bad since the advent of IE7. Which, by the way, is almost good enough to have me switch back (go Team Oppressive Monopoly).

On to ye olde browser, the fox. Extensions, they are the bread and butter of browser customization, if there's something funky you want your browser to do, there's probably an extension for it, and if not, you can "roll your own" as the saying goes. Right now I have almost 30 extensions, and almost all of them are used daily, if not simply integrated into my browsing that I'm at a loss without them. There's about 3 or 4 that that I am still testing out, and if they make the cut, they stay, if not they go (them going is much easier than trying to get rid of an IE add-on). Since I surf the web a lot, I like to surf as close to light speed as possible, here's how (extensions in no particular order, maybe I'll alphabetize):

Adblock Plus (and Adblock Filterset.G Updater): I'll cover these as one, even though they are separate extensions. Basically allows you to dynamically block advertisements that are loaded in webpages, you can choose to hide the ads or remove them, hiding ads still downloads them, so you can continue to support sites (like your local newspaper), removing them does not download the content at all. The Filterset.G Updater synchronizes your filters with the well Filterset.G list, so you don't have to do much work.
All-in-One Gestures: One thing Opera has going for it is gesture navigation, hold down the right mouse button and move your mouse from right to left = go back one page, left to right = go forward one page, and many more, on top of that, it is highly customizable. I have simple gestures set up for a slew of actions.
All-in-One Sidebar: Sidebars are common, good sidebars are not. This is a good sidebar, works like a toolbar (if you want to put buttons on it) and opens up specific things in the sidebar to avoid extra windows (like bookmarks, addons, downloads, history, and this cool MultiPanel thing), and some other extensions can be configured to use the sidebar to boot.
Browse Images: It's name is a little misleading, yes it does browse images, but what it really does well is auto-increment numbered urls, makes browsing through well organized (folder structure wise) sites a breeze when the designers are lacking in the navigation department.
ColorZilla: Need to know the hex value of some color a website is using more accurately than eye-balling it? Absolute must have for matching colors cause digging through the CSS files of a site just takes too damned long.
DOM Inspector: This comes with Firefox, it allows you to look at the HTML of a document in a collapsable tree view. What do I use it for? Well, if you have it open, and click on an element, it will blink on the webpage. That's just incredibly handy for coding, normal people will probably never use it, ever.
ErrorZilla: You know that "Error 404: Page can not be found" page that you get when bad things happen to webpages? Yeah, it's useless. This version isn't, it adds buttons for retry, ping, trace, whois, and 3 different web-caches so that if the page really isn't there, you can still see what was on it.
FaviconizeTab: Absolute necessity, Firefox 2 introduced a tab bar that scrolls left to right when you have too many tabs open, whereas everything previous just shrank the tabs to make them all fit. This lets you shrink a tab down to it's favicon (that little 16x16 pixel image that some sites have) and you can also set certain tabs to always open at that size. Works great with sites that have easily recognizable icons, on the downside not every page has one.
FireBug: Beautifully streamlined page and script debugger, makes finding out what you broke with your greasemonkey script (more on that later) relatively simple. Definitely another one that the normal person will never use.
FEBE: Firefox Extension Backup Extension: First, it's great that they fit the word extension in the name of an extension twice. Second, it does what it says, it backs up all of your extensions, and basically your everything else. It has a sister extension, CLEO (Compact Library Extension Organizer) to put all of everything into one file instead of separate extensions, but I don't use it. What happens if I installed an extension that nerfed all of my other extensions so badly that I don't want to reinstall it? On a side note, I use FEBE to synchronize my extensions across 3 computers (more or less manually).
Firefox Showcase: Like IE quick tabs, or any number of similar tools. This makes a thumbnail of all of your open tabs and allows you to click on them to go to them or close them. I use the hell out of it when I'm giving presentations at work, cause I have the thumbnails in my sidebar, which I keep off screen, and the page content on the projector. If you've ever seen CNN go to different websites and the correspondent has thumbnails of the sites off to one side, you've basically seen this in action, same concept.
Fire FTP: Just a sweet XUL FTP program that runs in the fox since there is no bidirectional FTP support built in.
Fission: There's a little bar that shows you what progress you have on loading the page you're on, generally it's in your statusbar, but it's small, and it takes up space in your statusbar. Fission turns the whitespace behind the url in the address bar into your progress meter, it's big, and it utilizes space that wasn't being used while freeing up your statusbar.
Google Browser Sync: Synchronizes bookmarks, cookies, and saved passwords. Trust me, logging in once to where ever you log in is a wonderful thing. It will even synchronize open tabs and history between browsers.
Google Calendar Quick Add: This one adds a little shortcut that pops up a box so that you can add events to your Google Calendar by hitting CTRL+; and say type in "Dinner with Mom and Dad tomorrow night at 7" and it makes an entry into your calendar at the right time. It uses Google's natural language input methods, it is not, however, without it's quirks.
Google Notebook: Handy. This is just a nice way to jot down notes that is synced to my Google account. I would use another extension that would be completely local, I bounce between computers, so storing notes online is more convenient for me.
Greasemonkey: This is simply the most useful extension ever. People write little functional scripts that change a website or surfing in general, and post them to userscripts.org and you install them. The real power of this is being able to write the scripts yourself, but barring that, there is still a repository of about 30,000 scripts online, so you don't have to be a codemonkey to use greasemonkey.
IE Tab: Because not every web developer is courteous enough to design with web standards in mind, and some even go so far as to require IE for the page to even work. This is a solution, not a permanent one (they need to fix their damn page), it opens up IE within a tab in Firefox with one click.
Linkification: http://www.google.com I didn't make that a link, it's a url, but you can't click on it. With linkification, you could click on that like any other normal link.
Organize Status Bar: After you've installed all this stuff, your status bar gets cluttered, this lets you organize it. Simple huh?
PDF Download: Firefox unfortunately doesn't handle PDFs so well, this is partly the fault of Adobe that helped to write the plugin. See, when you open a pdf, you can't use any other tabs, or do anything else in Firefox really. With this, you click on a pdf link, you get options, save, open, view as html, and another option...that I can't remember because I never use it.
Tiny Menu: mmmmmm....interface consolidation. Once you get rid of all them perty 'lil words on your menu bar, you can move your address bar and navigation buttons up there. Now look at all that rendering space you just gained. Sexy.

Personal Menu: Personal Menu has taken over there, it adds a button on the menu bar instead of the word "Menu" and it is more configurable, like you can hide things you don't want to see. Tiny Menu is still good, I just think this is better.

Uppity: Just a little button that lets you navigate up in the hierarchy of a website. Small and useful.
VideoDownloader: Nothing productive about this, just straight up enabling the of wasting your time. Download embedded videos on sites like YouTube, Google Video, lots of 'em. Sometimes you need to waste time.
Web Developer: Ridiculously useful tools, too many things to name. This is not a normal person extension.

So that's what I run on ye olde laptop, plus a couple of others. Power surfing is damn fun, but now that I've customized The Fox this much, not many other people can use it. Right now, this build that I have going is stable as hell, even though only 9 of my nearly 30 extensions have reached a 1.o milestone. Why can't all coding be this solid?

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Red State Much?

2006-11-06T09:40:00.000-06:00

So tomorrow I need to go vote. 8 amendments to our constitution, and a bevy of congressional candidates to choose from.

Yeah, so my choice of congressmen is quite limited. The Republican incumbent was voted in in '86, a Democrat hasn't represented my district since '75, and his opponent is a Libertarian. Oh, and his opponent hasn't actually campaigned at all, or have a website, or have any articles written about him. But he's against the war in Iraq...I think.

I'm all for getting the Republicans out of power, I mean, they need a swift kick in the danglies, but I don't have much of a choice here. I would love to vote against the Republicans, but I can't with good conscience do it here, and I've got two reasons:

I know nothing about the incumbent's opponent, this guy could be the next Hitler for all I know, just a WHOLE lot worse on furthering his own agenda, cause he apparently couldn't even get a blog. I have a blog, you're reading it, it was easy, took me all of 5 minutes to set up. Fact is, he is forcing my hand to not vote for him by not supplying any information to the public about his views or himself.
I will not vote against a person/party. I won't vote Democrat because I don't like the current Republicans, and I won't vote against a Republican I think is good for the job just because he is a Republican. I vote FOR someone who I believe is the best person to represent me given my options. You have to take responsibility for your civic duties, and voting against someone is not doing that. Bush is a dickhead, but I voted for him because I honestly thought he was a better choice than Kerry, and if Kerry had won, I think that there would be a whole slew if issues to deal with other than Iraq.

So I suppose that come tomorrow, I will further redden the color of this state, but hey, I don't have much choice, and the guy actually carries a lot of clout and could do good things for the state. Here's hoping so.

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To game or not to game

2006-11-03T21:06:00.000-06:00

Games have always been a bit of a necessity in my life. When I was young, it was how my brother and I spent time together. Odd, I know, but I distinctly remember playing Excitebike as a kid and never being as good as my brother at that and all sorts of other games. Whatever it was, Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, Street Fighter, it didn't matter, my brother was always better than me at games when we were younger. I suppose it helped that he was 4 years older than me, but hey, I can complain. I was always trying to overcome him in games. Sibling rivalry, yay!

So, eventually I overcame my brother in games. How? He discovered girls, and it would be some time before I would, so for a brief period of time, I kicked his ass in video games. But, much like my brother introduced me to video games, he introduced me to girls. Not like, "Sally, this is my brother Dylan, Dylan, this is Sally", I mean more in the conceptual way, like how he introduced me to games. So gaming took a side seat to both Brad and I, they were still active in our life, we were just trying to impress girls at the same time. Brad was much more successful than I in that department at that time. So how did I deal with that situation? Well, I became a Zen Master of Gaming. There was a Christmas one year when I got nothing but computer games, which my mother, being the deranged person that she was, wrapped in clear colored cellophane so I could read the backs of the boxes...

Anyway, time went on and my gaming progressed, by this time my brother had been in the Air Force for quite a while, and we were playing similar games online, just not together. So one night while talking on the phone with my brother, he convinced me to go out and buy World of Warcraft (herein referred to as Warcrack), which really wasn't all that difficult to do, since a few of my friends had it and miraculously everyone was playing on the same server. So I dove headlong into the world of MMORPGs in a genuine effort to play games online with my brother. It might have worked too, if we weren't separated by a 2 hour difference and Warcrack wasn't quite possibly the most addictive game that I have ever encountered. Warcrack ended for me when the auto draft $15 monthly fee hit me at a bad time, overdrafted my account and ended up costing me $60. That's when I took a step back and thought to myself, "Self, if I play WoW for a year, that's gonna cost me $180 barring overdravts...that blows". Cierra Sune, the Night Elf Healer, exit stage right.

Enter stage left, Guild Wars. I got into the public beta for it and played I think 36 hours the weekend that the beta was running. Bought it when it came out, and all of the sequels so far. Why did I like this game so damn much? Well, there's a long list:

There is a plot, and it was actually good, AND it progressed in a reasonable manner.
It's mission based with map travel and easy to put down.
Seriously, I can pick it up, play for 40 minutes, accomplish something, and put it down.
No fee, buy the game and play, don't play, whatever, your account is still active when you log back in six months down the road.
Level game play, 20 is the top level, it doesn't take all that long to actually get there, and you can only have 8 skills at a time.
You have to think ahead, not being able to take everything into battle with you requires you to do some interesting planning, it can be very strategy oriented in higher level missions.
The add ons are playable as separate games or can be linked to one account, allowing access to multiple continents.
The community is cool, since you're not rewarded all that much for playing ridiculous amounts, it's a great place for casual gamers, and casual gamers have social skills.

So I went from Zen Master to casual gamer, most of the time I turn on my Xbox to watch a DVD, not to play a game, but sometimes I grab one and play. At some point in my life, I think I figured out that the options in "To game or not to game" are not mutually exclusive. I go to work, go to school, hang out with my girlfriend (as much as possible), and in my free time I play video games. They help me look at the world in a different way, and keep the creative juices flowing. The friends that I have made online in games are actually pretty cool people that are not obsessed with gaming, they don't ridicule me for not having the best equipment, if I need a hand with something they're willing to help. Above all, if I log in and say I'll only be on for a little bit cause I have other things to do, they're cool with it.

So, to game or not to game? Both please.

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C8H10N4O2

2006-10-28T20:33:00.000-05:00

You know what that is? I do. It's a friend of ours, a boon to productivity around the world, not to mention a requirement for my mind and body to function properly. So, I have a bit of a love for caffeine...what can I say? I write this all while drinking a Latte at Perks Coffee and Tea, a local filling station if you would. Why am I writing about caffeine? Well, I was stumbling around the internet, and I happened upon this article on Lifehacker.com, and when I say "I happened upon" I mean the RSS feed is on my homepage and I check it almost religiously. Anyway, it lead me to this site which has all sorts of things about products with caffeine in them.

In particular, it has a tool that lets you calculate exactly how many bottles/cans/cups of your favorite caffeinated drink it would take to KILL YOU. Which I found interesting needless to say. Here's my thing, I am willing to bet that some moron kid is going to use the information on that site to commit suicide by overdosing on caffeine. Consider this, the average social outcast depressed teen probably tops out at 55Kg (~120 pounds), and at that weight, it would only take about 30 cans of that wonderfully controversial Cocaine energy drink to kill him (according to that tool). Might I point out that that's plausible, I mean, some kid could drink that. Now, it would get digested over time, and probably wouldn't kill him. But, it would sure screw up his world, add to that something like half a box of No-doz, and poof, you've got one dead kid.

So, this site gets blamed for making this kind of information available and accessible to the masses and this poor unfortunate kid. The media grabs a headline that says something like "Site tells kid how to kill self" (which is pretty long, and would never be used in the real world) and bam! All of the sudden, this site is getting sued by the parents of said kid for telling him how to OD on caffeine. All of this, and the public would agree too, people would say things like "Putting that kind of information on the web is just wrong.", "Why couldn't they just think about the children?". And the site owners are left thinking, "Huh, I just thought it would be funny to see how many cups of coffee would be enough to kill you..."

Looks like it would take about 66 cans of Rockstar to put me down, so if any of you see me at a gas station buying up all of their Rockstars, don't tell my parents, just give me a hug. And tell me it's not worth it and that everything will be all right one day... Or, get the hell out of my way cause I have some serious amount of gaming to do, and only a limited amount of time before I have to be at work the next day. Remember, if you don't sleep, you can play longer.

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So, here's the thing...

2006-10-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

I was born and all, and then somehow, I managed to meander my way to where I am. Where that is, I'm not quite sure...But I'm working on it. Why the blog? Not quite sure, for starters, let's chalk it up to my being a bit of a Google fan-boy, just not so bad like. What can I say, I'm a sucker for a well designed anything.

Topics I'll cover? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's see, for life, there's the woman I love, Erin (we've been together for quite a bit of time now), school (and its many terrors), work (I may bitch and moan, but I do actually like my job, well, most of it), and video games (which I guess is more of an escape from life, but hey, it's a great way to zone out and helps me get the creative juices flowing). Liberty...well, see, both of my parents are journalists, and I have these ridiculous ideas and whatnot. There was this thing called The Constitution (see, it's even capitalized, it's important) and it seems that it has been getting The Finger recently, and that bothers me. Oh, and politics in general bother me.

The pursuit of happiness gets its own paragraph, it's important. See now, this is what life is all about, "Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'" as the saying goes. I prefer the former, so I do things I like. What are those? Well, my girlfriend for one, design (hey, it's what I want to do with my life, so it's a good thing that I like it), thinking (took some philosophy classes, and now I'm hooked), and efficiency. Yeah, efficiency, I don't have much of it, but man oh man, I work on it. I find little programs scattered over the 'net, and different ways of doing things, because I am convinced that there is always a better way of doing something, and generally, I don't know it. Oh, and my cat, Musetta, she's really nice when she's asleep, she just wants to be a tiger, and is taking it out on the world as best she can because she isn't.

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