where will you be when this is through

Much quieter today with no family xmas events. I even managed to divert the CTS for the purpose of going to Gregg's for lunch. I am trying to pull down the last Top Gear of the series but the time zone difference is not as favorable here. I dug around my local book collection and found Player Piano by Vonnegut, but it's not great. My family has finished wrapping presents but we still have to wait another stinking day until we can unwrap them.

I'm sad I'm going to be missing the Detroit auto show because they will have both a Corvette ZR1 and an R8 convertible. Audi might also bring a V10 R8 if they can figure out how to make one that doesn't burst into flames. My extended family is praising the virtues of upcoming 'clean diesels' but I still have my heart set on the last bastions of petrol, before the new MPG laws ruin anything interesting.

I am continuing to apply labels to the archives as I see fit. It's somewhat bizarre because for the most part I am going backwards, so a post about 'went to see the Hard Lessons' is followed by 'Hard Lessons in one week!'. A minor disclaimer is that I am also engaging in some limited revisionist history, mostly tweaking hindsightedly stupid lines and removing italics applied for similarity to Tycho's writing style.

I also ran this URL through a blog readability tester and I've apparently been upgraded from high school to genius, despite my continuing to rant about cars and technology as usual.

template

More screwing around, this time I upgraded the template that governs this site. I have no idea if that actually did anything.

Still working on the labelling. I have 344 posts to get through. I was also going for a couple more achievements in Orange Box.

Last.fm is gone now.

labels

I decided to break down and start filling in the labels section for all my posts. So far it seems the most applied tags are "gaming", "cars" and of course "rant". It's kind of an interesting undertaking because I have to go skim all my old posts, and this thing has been running for the entire duration of my Master's degree.

these missiles you bubble wrap

Well I just figured out why the font is always so freaking tiny when I post. Something to do with the stupid template. I don't really want to mess with it but I can try and correct for it from now on.

Tomorrow is Friday! I have a much greater appreciation for them now that I am working full time. I even get to wear jeans.

My boss gets back tomorrow, this will be the first time he's been around since I started working. I think I have gotten quite a bit accomplished, but I couldn't do the main task he set out for me because the manufacturers are being snooty.

I finally got access to test data yesterday, but it's in another building so I've been running back and forth to upload the latest copy to the network. This isn't going to work if it starts pouring so I wrote a batch file to automatically copy the file to the network every 15 minutes.

I also started writing up some of the basic framework for my final report. My thesis. It's kind of scary because this is part of the end. It's about time.

Unfortunately I have yet to see the best part of having a real job (or something like it), a decent paycheck. My first payday isn't until next week. After that I might head down to Fry's to spend a bit of it, but mostly I need to start saving back up again after the move, especially since the financial aid office at OSU is being bitchy about the last part of my student loan.

Car sighting of the day: Lotus Elise.

googled

Well I held out as long as I could, but Google finally refused to let me log in until I had migrated to something or other. I don't like messing with stuff that is working fine as it is.

status report

I've been running this blog for a couple of weeks now. I'm pretty happy with it because it's easy to manage and it looks nice, so I'm going to keep doing it. I'm thinking it might be nice to always have at least one picture on the front page, but if I don't have a really good picture from recent events that means I have to dredge up something random from my files. What do you guys think? Who the hell is even reading this, anyway?

I'm on CD 4 of the Half-Life 2 install, so I'll find out how well Freeman can run soon.

status report

It's been a few days now and I think I'm liking this blog thing, it's pretty slick. I'm still working on the pictures thing though.

My iPod is fully charged and that gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. I wish I had an FM transmitter for it.

I was at the MSU SPS site today and I found I've been a member of it for exactly 14 months. For all the good it did me. Or anyone. I already fired my last salvo at those fools, I just go back for amusement and old time's sake.

I have some stuff to work on this week, but lots of time to do it in and I'm slowly getting my motive power back.

system booting up

The news part of my website is basically a blog anyway, so I figured I may as well break down and start an actual blog. I might do rants and news this way and keep the other website for different things. I don't know. Bear with me as I conduct this experiment.

I'm trying this out for a couple of reasons. I ran across a blog belonging to an old friend of mine and I liked the looks of it. I've also been playing around with Picasa, which is kind of like iTunes for images. Picasa integrates with some other program which can talk to blogs. I've been looking for an easier way to do pictures so i'm interested to see how that works. It will take some trial and error.

I never remember that I have Picasa installed, so I haven't played with it too much yet. I also have some new hotkey software I'm trying out but I forget that's installed too. I am a tech-savvy guy, I'm just so stuck in a rut of how I do things that I've forgotten how to adapt. I'm slowly coming around though.