This week so far is a pretty normal week, with the exception of being at someone else’s house with a big dog for a large portion. amagdalyn was housesitting for the dog, so I spent a bunch of time reveling in nice cable and making sure that he didn’t chew up all their magazines.

The homework which was supposed to be due last week tuesday was very not done at the beginning of this week, which puts me in a state of stress. One of the group members hasn’t committed anything to CVS yet, so I don’t feel like I’m not doing my part, but I sincerely hope that this weekend we can nail this thing down. Another assignment for the same class materialized this week, and I need to get a lot of reading done in this same weekend in order to catch up to want_a_be in the subject, or at least get some cursory knowledge about it. It looks to be a pretty full weekend between those two projects.

I got some work done on my Debian packages last friday, which made me happy because the bittorrent package was old by a version. Hoping I can do some more of that soon. I’ve been thinking of trying to install Debian on my iBook, but I have been wary of it because I think that Linux really can’t survive without a 3-button mouse. I’ve been very surprised at how well the Mac works with the one button - almost all interface elements work fine and I haven’t felt restricted.

Okay that was a very geeky post. I’m happy tomorrow is Friday. It’s now officially the end of a long thursday. On a completely unrelated note, I’m not sure I know the real words to the song in my head right now. It’s probably one of the most misunderstood songs ever.

My cell phone battery is almost dead, and I don’t have a charger in the near vicinity. I won’t be able to charge it until at least 5:45 today, and possibly later. Here’s hoping noone wants to call me before then.

Wow, a whole week without a post. Not surprising from me, I suppose. Last week was fairly normal, except for the fact that I had a bunch of homework and midterms to get done, so I was a busy bee and couldn’t do too much of my normal fare, which is highly based on laziness. Of course, it was the week after spring break, so it seems like it was a lot busier than it actually was, and in retrospect, I should have done a bunch of this stuff during the break. Oh well.

Wendsday was probably the highlight of the week - Dan’s 30th birthday celebration took us to Bilimbi Bay for some light before-movie chatting and carousing. Since we had already seen the movie, we went back to Amy’s place and got some work done while Dan and buddies went to see Eternal Sunshine. Afterwards we all met up (+1 more) at The Independent, which has a cocktail and martini list longer than your arm. I couldn’t drink much at all because I was driving, but the appetizers were excellent. Amy was a bit drunk when we left, and regretted it a bit the next day. Dan had a good time (which is the most important part, being his birthday and all). The late night made thursday a long day. I wanted to curl up and sleep shortly after the end of work.

Tuesday I spent a little bit of time at th0rny’s grandmother’s place in order to help her install a new printer, which we discovered was too new for her OS, so this Saturday we returned and gave her an OS upgrade which took much longer than expected. She has a shiny new OS and a slightly larger hard drive though. Most of the time of course was spent in waiting - we ended up watching a bit of ice skating on TV.

Sunday was more computer installs at a friend’s place. I installed two new Debian machines, and put 2.6 kernels on both of them. Unfortunately one of them locked up, so I guess I’ll be taking that one back to 2.4. Last night I happily got the homework which is turning out to be the longest procrastination that I have ever done finished, at least for now. I still need to read a bunch of papers for that class. I feel accomplished for doing a bunch of stuff this weekend when I really didn’t get too much done that was on my list before this weekend.

One of the worst things about the way that I do things is that I never really get things done until the last minute. It’s just the way I prefer to do things I guess. Unfortunately, when I am expected to get a bunch of stuff done over a long period of time, I leave it until the last minute and then have a huge pile of work that needs doing. This means that during this time of heavy work, I need to neglect other things which I find much more enjoyable. I wish I had the willpower to just do what needs to be done early instead of leaving it. Now that I think about it though, if I went around and decided “I’m just going to do this now!” all the time, I would be able to stay in the “working on stuff” mode for a very long time. I tend to have things piled up that I could do at any time. Can I live my life without anything on my todo list?

In other news, Amy is housesitting this week, so I get to play with a big dog for stress relief. Hopefully it will be warm. Hooray!

Well, I’m waiting here for amagdalyn to pick me up and no one seems to be around to chat, so I may as well update.

Most of spring break was spent being lazy. I slept a lot, and played with my new toy a lot. The weather was great though. We went out for a walk a couple times, and came up with excuses to walk down to the convenience store.

Thursday I was feeling not so great in the evening. I watched some anime to get my mind off of things, but it didn’t work too well. I went to sleep surprisingly early considering I had no real reason to get up. I swear I was the happiest man in the world when I got a call on Friday afternoon (I had gone into work to get some things done and distract me) - so happy that I just got some flowers for my goddess on a whim.

Friday night we went to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie is excellent from a technical perspective - the special effects were very well done. The story is easily Kaufman’s best as well. The whole plot is a kind of question to the audience, because there are very few of us that haven’t been through a relationship that didn’t work out before. Would you sacrifice the good memories to get rid of the bad? Personally I think the idea of erasing them all is bad, because everyone grows from experiences. Amy pointed out that the movie doesn’t really wrap up everything at the end. I tend to like movies like that, because people can have different opinions on how it is “supposed” to end.

Saturday was mostly spent lazing around the place, but I got a little bit of the assignment I needed to get done. In the evening, th0rny’s aunt invited us to join her for her birthday at a place up in Rogers. It was quite the drive, but the Blue Cheese Soup was worth it. Afterwards there was ice cream and 50% frosting cake, and some chatting.

Sunday was a nice day outside, but we didn’t get to enjoy it that much. Ended up hanging shelves in Amy’s room and going grocery and amenity shopping, which took longer than planned. Then again, we started out a bit late.

The weekend was the most full part of the week, unsurprisingly I guess because Amy doesn’t have work those days. Today was the start of school again. Almost fell asleep in stats class, but I don’t think it’s because I’m missing something important, I think the professor was just taking it slow today or something. It was exciting before break, like he was hurried into matching a pace from previous years or something.

Oh well, I need to get working on the assignment that’s due tommorrow and supper seems to be ready soon. Just for kicks, here are a couple links to new designs I’m thinking about for my LJ: Style 1 and Style 2. They’re very much the same, but Style 2 has a more efficient CSS implementation I think. Tell me your preference, or if you like the one I have now better. The colors are not set in stone, of course (they’ll be variables). I’m hoping to nail this down the end of this week. Food! Yay!

I found out this thursday that my alma mater got into the NCAA tournament this year. It’s a smaller school, mostly a suitcase college for most of the surrounding area. That doesn’t stop them from having a great education program and business school. They played Friday, and while they lost, they put up a good fight if you ask me.

Posts about spring break and such coming soon.

Dear bike-stealers of last summer,

You took my bike. I liked my bike. Now that spring has come again, I want it back. I want to bike along forested areas and beside lakes in the great city that I have moved to. I want to be able to travel miles from my home and the worries of modern life to read a book in a cool breeze. I want to eat great picnics with amagdalyn on grassy hills in the bright warming sunlight. Look out your window and see the beautiful spring weather. I hope you’re looking from a cell.

Hatefully yours, jamuraa

There are no love songs for what I feel right now. Fortunately, there are no hate songs either.

This weekend was fun. Friday I went out for bad food at McDonalds with amagdalyn and th0rny and we went to satisfy my shiny new toy urge. That’s right, I went and bought a 12” iBook. I got it new from the Apple Store in the MOA with an AirPort card, 640MB of Memory, and the 3 years of service for around $1500. I’ll be paying it off for the next half a year at least I figure, but surprisingly, the interest rate on one of my credit cards was less than the rate on their dumb little instant loan.

Some may be saying “oh man, he has turned to the dark side!” It may be true - I actually love this new little thing. It’s amazing to have a *nix machine that works and has tons of applications ready for it. Almost everything that I try works automatically, and I haven’t had it lockup once. It’s nice and small, and the wireless works great. Pics of the shiny new toy will be forthcoming, but for now I can give you a screenshot:

Then we went and got some really good ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery (Amy and I still have some left - we got a bucket). We hung out for a while and I played with the new toy. Later we went to see Fight Club at Block E, which was really good on the big screen, but the theater next to us had WAY too loud speakers - I could hear them whenever big stuff happened. Maybe we just got a not so good theater for such things. Afterwards scary stuff ensued in the parking lot.

Saturday was a fairly boring day, lazing around doing not too much. Sunday I went to Triple Rock, and I typed a bunch of stuff while I was there. I’ll probably just post that text in a second. I also worked a little bit on a new format for my LJ, which I’ll polish and ask opinions on later this week.

Spring break rules. I want to rant a little bit about how it would be cool for LJ domain forwarding to work, but this post is way too long already. I’ll do it tomorrow.

Okay so now I’m sitting at Triple Rock, typing this on my new iBook (yay for new toys). We just ordered food and I’m at an interesting policital discussion group with. Amy is talking with Sarah’s mom about her car.

The group had homework this month, to find out what you actually care about on the issues. You were supposed to come up with 5 things that you care about outside of your personal life. I have serious issues coming up with these issues, because I really don’t care too much about things that don’t effect my life on a daily basis. So this means that my list of things consists of (in no particular order):

• Public transit
• Intellectual Property / Consumer Rights in the Modern Age
• Education concerns

This is only 3 items, you notice, because I don’t really have anything else I care about that isn’t personal - at least things that I actually care about.

This group is now semi-officially called “junta” (pronounced “who-nta”) which means something in spanish that I can’t really recall right now.

Okay, I’m typing this because I need a sufficiently long piece of text in order to text out the layout that I am creating for a livejournal/web page. One of the issues I have with LiveJournal is that you can’t use the domain redirection with people being logged in at the same time. It would be cool if you could just go to a random page (www.base0.net in this case) and not have to worry about “am I logged in?” - it would be cool to see the friends-only entries show up on sites that I visit. Not that I really read other people’s pages by their journal entries on their actual journals anyway. That is probably why this is an exercise in futility - most people won’t even see this page. The important page is the comments page - people will click on their page to leave a comment or view the comments and then they will see your style.

Paul is talking about how there are a lot of sexy women on the news and there are not many sexy women in the commercials. Sarah talks about how there are more car commercials on local news than national news - lots of investment commercials on the national news. She found that very interesting. Sarah’s mom makes a boomers comment.

Billy suggests breaking up the bill evenly. Some guy in a blue hoodie (Amy says that it’s Noah or Zach) says that he’s staying for some alcohol and suggests we split that too. No seconds.

Lately my days have been spent doing homework or just wasting time on the web. Anyone who knows my normal schedule can guess what I’ve been doing - it basically consists of school-filled days and various fun activities at night. I took a day in-house Tuesday in order to get some work done and also a bit more sleep than I normally get. I only missed one class, and since I had it again today, I know I didn’t miss much (or the professor was just being nice, as 2 of 6 were gone).

Spring Break is just around the corner - I have one more class to teach this evening (7pm-9pm) and then a class tomorrow, and then a week off from the daily grind. Unfortunately, I’m not doing anything special this year for break, just plan to hang around and do some homework and research, and get caught up on various projects (like updating my Debian packages). With luck, I may actually get some leisure programming done as well.

In other news, I want this iBook (edit okay that link didn’t work. It’s the 12” model of a normal iBook) badly for some reason. It could be that I’m spending more time away from my apartment, or the fact that lots of my colleagues tend to have laptops nowadays. I’ve wanted an iBook for a while now, but the desire to buy has increased lately. The fact that I can get an instant loan and pay $43 a month for it makes it just that much more attractive.

There is only one thing really keeping me from buying it right now - I’m not sure if I’d really be comfortable with it. It would be my first non-PC computer, and while I’m sure I can get it to mesh correctly with my other computers (which are mostly linux), I’m not sure how well I would work on it. I am a big fan of the iLife products – I’ve been looking for a calendar-type application to keep track of where I need to be for a while now, and iCal looks like a winner to me. I wonder if there is a rental place out there that I could get the same model for a week or so and play with it, see if I could get used to using the laptop for the tasks I want to use it for. Ideally, it would be installed as it comes from Apple, but I suppose I could handle reinstalling the system (I will probably try to get Debian on it anyway if I buy it).

I’ve had some other ideas bouncing around in my head, but this was the first thing that came to mind. Any comments from people who have iBooks or other laptops and could share their experiences? Maybe you know of a rental place?