I have this bad habit of sticking things in my mouth and biting down on them. When I don’t have anything to stick in my mouth, I usually use my finger nails and apply some pressure to them with my front teeth. shrug Maybe it’s due to anxiety… who knows. =) I remember in CS310, when Van would decide to skip his equivalent EE class (forgot the number), sometimes he’d take my pen, throw it on the ground and stomp on it or something and minutes later it’d be in my mouth again. Oh well, builds the immune system I suppose. =)

There’s this touchscreen stylus I have here at work (I have plenty, actually) that I found myself sticking into my mouth recently and I probably shouldn’t… except today I accidentally broke it in half with my thumb. Doh…

I’m looking around my cube and maybe I should clean it up some, I look like some crazy hacker with electronics all over the place… and I’m guessing I’m probably violating a bajillion “POPI” rules (guidelines for protecting intellectual property or something). Oh well, it looks like I’m busy at least. =) Hey Andrew, are you going to drop by sometime before… tomorrow? Haha… or if you somehow smuggle out your badge, you should drop by after your exit interview. =)

Oh yeah, and this entire post is really just so I can post these…

“So when you feel like hope is gone.
Look inside you and be strong.
And you’ll finally see the truth,
That a hero lies in you.” - Mariah Carey

I’m not sure if I’m just fooling myself or what, but it seems like I wake up easier in the morning having gone to bed at 2AM and waking up around 8AM than if I went to sleep at around midnight and woke up around 8AM… maybe in that 2 hour span, I fall into a deeper sleep that’s harder to come out of?

The only bad thing about that is I get a lot more tired later in the day, especially a few days down the line of having only 6 hours of sleep. Hmmmm…

Ideas have been churning in my head for the next OWeb layout, especially after seeing Karen’s new Vox Veniae website design (which I will refrain from posting cause I’m guessing we want it to be somewhat of a surprise, haha). I’ve got a few things planned that I’ll definitely do, one of which is to move to WordPress and another is to make a two or three column layout with nothing to the right of the “main content” so I don’t have to worry about picture width. I’m thinking a “dirty” kinda feel (like splattered… stuff… on the page) but with a high-tech spin… I’m not sure if I can do that or not, but we’ll see. =)

Speaking of which, does anyone use the RSS feeds I show of non-personal blogs? I’m talking about the BBSpot, Gizmodo, etc. etc. things I’ve got below the friend blogs… cause I’m considering dropping those since I don’t use them. I think it is possible that Mark does though… so we’ll see.

“Oh I, I just died in your arms tonight
It must have been something you said
I just died in your arms tonight.” - Cutting Crew

So Andrew says the “no jeans” thing is my trademark, and I guess it kinda is, but it is time to move on I suppose, haha. I realized that I never once wore a pair of jeans while I was at UT, and I wore them almost exclusively in high school until I switched entirely to khakis. And… I never really had a solid reason why I decided to do so. So I guess now I’ll wear both…

This is my public announcement that I am now wearing jeans and will accept pairs gifted to me that fit. Haha. =) Kathy got me pair for my birthday (early) and the girls apparently are happy…

Oriana: GAUGAU
Oriana: IN JEANS
Oriana: YAY

Ran again today! Keeping up the streak… I’ll work my way up to 5k eventually… any other lifestyle changes I should be making while I’m at it? Haha…

Well darn, my right Sony headphones just died on me and are muted… stinky… I wonder if I can still get them replaced under warranty if I don’t have the box nor the receipt anymore…

“Woke up this morning kinda blue,
Thinking through that age-old question:
How to exit a whale’s digestion?” - Newsboys

So an intern here at work showed me this Snakes on a Plane site where you can customize a message from Samuel L. Jackson to send to people via phone or email. It’s pretty entertaining. I tried sending some messages to a few people, but I’m not sure if they got through. Oh well. =)

Have fun and a stupppeennddous day! Lol…

“Beautiful day,
wonderful feeling,
this reason to sing,
psalms meaning songs singing praises all day long.” - FIF

There’s one thing to note about that picture above (which was taken in February)… other than me looking all goofy kinda bent over (like someone kicked me between the legs)… and that is that I’m wearing jeans. I think the last time I wore jeans (before that) was in high school sometime, and after that, I’ve never had/worn a pair. The only reason why I wore jeans that day was that our volunteering “theme” was “construction” and construction workers apparently don’t wear khakis. =)

I’m not quite sure why I started not wearing jeans… but I’ve kinda made it a point not to just because. Is it time to change?

Edit: Oh! Almost forgot lyrics!…

“Baby, baby, I’m taken with the notion
to love you with the sweetest of devotion…” - Amy Grant

Figured I should keep up the blogging streak even though I don’t really say all that much, but if it wastes a few seconds of your time, my job is complete. =) I’m just sitting here at work twiddling my thumbs waiting for IT to come setup my new laptop, which is a very frustrating process. Ugh ugh ugh.

Actually, the main reason why I wanted to make this blog post is so I could throw up the lyrics at the end of it. But you’ll have to wait for the end to see that… did you just cheat? Cheater. I think I’m going to start throwing short lyric excerpts at the end of my posts cause they’re fun (and make people call me a fruit bag, which is fun too - being called a fruit bag, that is… not actually being one… uhhh…).

There are a lot of things I want to buy, but I need to stop my spending in hopes of actually saving money for a house or something like that. A few things… iPod nano (gotta wait for the next upgrade though)… then if I got the iPod nano, I’ll probably get sucked into getting a Nike+ eventually. I want a Dell 24” too… and have been slightly itching to upgrade my Mac mini, if only for the gigabit ethernet… haha. Anyways, I’m holding off pretty well on all of that right now, cause there’s no way I’m getting all of it. One thing I will definitely be getting though is Adobe Photoshop CS3 when it’s out and a universal binary. Mmmmm…

“Round, round, get around, I get around… yeah… wa ooooo…” - Beach Boys

I cooked some bacon for Chad and I yesterday and made a massive bacon cloud that filled the entire apartment. I had to finish off the rest of the bacon today so I did it again. =)

This all reminds me of that one commercial for those dog treats where the dog ran around with “BACOOON BACON BACON BACON BACON!!!!”… I did a brief search for that, but I couldn’t find it. Oh well. Haha…

After informing Nancy of my Nancy: why are always attracted to terrible things

Hehe, thanks Nancy.

So today was the fourth time in the last five days that I ran around Town Lake… it does feel good I suppose, haha… and I guess I gotta start curbing the diabetes onset sometime. =)

I finally got my new laptop at work, however, it wasn’t configured to log onto the Freescale intranet, so I was kinda stuck not being able to use it all day. Kinda stinks to have it just sitting there next to me and not be able to use it. I hate corporate bureaucracy. =)

“No mountain’s too high for you to climb.
All you have to do, is have some climbing faith, oh yeah.” - Celine Dion

That’s some wisdom there, folks. Haha… I’m just joking. ;)

Has anyone ever been to a dine-in Sonic? I went to my first one today and it was… weird. Haha…

I added an RSS feed of my YouTube videos so you can view the latest shenanigans I catch on video. Enjoy. =)

I started working on the new Vox Veniae site (linked site is a temp blog) on my desktop and had a strong urge to have multiple displays, so I took out my MacBook Pro, setup Synergy, and was off working on the new site with the ability to test with Firefox, IE, and Safari all with one keyboard/mouse! Yay! I had Photoshop running on the desktop cutting up the site design given to me by Karen, and smb mounted that directory on the MacBook Pro with two terminal sessions running vim open for the HTML page and the stylesheet. It was an enjoyable development session… ideas are churning in my head for OWeb ‘07. =) The only thing is that missing the “windows key” on this IBM Model M keyboard (which is otherwise awesome) is sometimes problematic… haha. Speaking of which, if anyone is looking for birthday gift ideas for me… cough ;) ;)

Edit:: Aaron asked me how I was recording the videos, and I just realized that I never really blogged about one of my latest purchases. I recently bought a Casio Exilim EX-Z750 almost exclusively based on its video-recording qualities. The photo quality is supposedly decent, but I honestly haven’t really tested it much. The really nice thing about it is that it encodes into MPEG4 instead of Motion JPEG, which results in 3x or 4x file size reductions… so instead of maxing out at around 10 minutes on a 1GB card, I can get over 30 minutes on the highest quality, which is nice. It records in VGA at 30fps… and looks significantly better than what you see on YouTube because they reencode it down to QVGA I think. I’ve been meaning to test if they reencode if I actually upload a video at their desired resolution (and thus have higher quality than what they do), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. There are newer versions out of this Casio (like the Z850), which I think has improved photo-taking qualities, but Casio apparently gimped out the MPEG4 encoder settings and thus the quality isn’t as good as the one I got.

After I copy the MPEG4’s to my MacBook Pro, I use mencoder (well, with ffmpegX as the frontend) to reencode the MPEG4s into H.264, giving me another 3x to 4x file size reduction. It’s nice. =)

“Tonight, I’m gonna have myself a real good time… I feel alive…” -Queen

… so Chad buy big toy!

We have lots of fun with new toy!