Andrew and Jen leave Austin Sunday morning to get back to Florida. We went bowling as our last activity with them in Austin and it was pretty fun except that I forgot to eat dinner and was really hungry at the end of it… haha. Hope you guys have a safe/fun trip back!

Finally got around to washing my car too, which is nice… there are a decent chunk of scratches on the hood of it though (I think from rocks flying up behind trucks)… grrrr… oh well. =p

Oh yes, and I got a haircut (thanks Mom! =) which was also quite needed… I don’t like being shaggy. =)

“Dear God, surround me as I speak,
the bridges that I walk across are weak.
Frustrations fill the void that I can’t solely bear.” - Jars of Clay

I went to Olivia’s to use her microwave, eat some food, play with the dog, etc. etc… and she finally got that darned High School Musical song stuck in my head.

I must say it is rather catchy and similar to a lot of other songs I own… just that it being one of those “Disney original movies” rubs me the wrong way. =)

“This feeling’s like no other
I want you to know
I’ve never had someone that knows me like you do
The way you do
I’ve never had someone as good for me as you
No one like you
So lonely before, I finally found
what I’ve been looking for…” - High School Musical

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

Happy moment of the day: Solving Rubik’s cube repeatedly listening to “I’m Your Angel” by Celine Dion and R. Kelly (yes, I believe Mark would call me a “fruit bag” for this).

Unhappy moment of the day: Losing sister while jogging.

Andrew and I finally got around to getting Van’s birthday present: two ostrich eggs. The above video is directly after walking out of the place.

I also uploaded some pics of the eggs to my flickr.

Oh fine. Haha… I went to Fiesta Texas today with fellow ERPs and had fun, but it was very tiring. Haha… it is very hot. =( I paid $15 for lunch because amusement parks are like that and $10 for parking. Curses!

I like the Superman ride, but not the Rattler… it is… very shaky. I have no pictures, but I think some people might have some (and I’ll even be in them!) so I may dig them up later. =)

Went back to Nancy and Julie’s at 4 something (got to park at around 9:45) and slept for a long time…

July 4th was kinda uneventful, especially in the fireworks department for me, haha. Some of us went down to visit Julie and Nancy on the 3rd and drove back up on the 4th. It was a nice visit, I think. =) I fell asleep on the recliner and got really cold because I had no blanket and attempted to warm myself with a small square pillow. Needless to say, that didn’t work out so well so I snuck into Julie’s room and stole her bed (she wasn’t there, that’d be scandalous ;).

I woke up a few times when Munchie would walk all over me, lay on my chest and pur in my face. The previous day, I wrapped up Zoey in a bunch of rope that I guess Nancy rescued her from (or did she get out herself?), but I think I was forgiven because she sat on my shoulders for a while without trying to rip my head off. Apparently cats like me even though I tease them so. ;)

On the way home, the sky was dark and I think I drove threw a few spots of heavy rain, but I didn’t die, so it’s all good. =) Weather wasn’t so happy, but I think I had a nice time rockin’ out to overdramatic love songs on the way back by my lonesome. Ahhh… vacations are nice.

Edit: Oh yeah, I remember a dream I had while sleeping in Julie’s bed (I think I was too concerned with being cold to remember anything I dreamt of earlier). I dreamt that I was at some cabin/lodge eatery place that was supposedly some college study hang-out. Then, I realized that I was graduating soon and I had one week to finish two self-study classes that I was horribly behind on (physics and…. Japanese?… I think my head must have meant Chinese, but I’m pretty sure the class I was “taking” was Japanese). So I was feeling incredibly stressed out and dreaded waking up, until I actually started waking up and realized that I had already graduated. Then I went back to sleep with a happy smile. =)

Thanks for the trip, guys… was lots of fun.

I think I’m losing my voice because of all the singing my car did on the way to and back from the beach… was lots of fun, guys. =) Umm… more later. Bed time now. Uploading pics while I sleep…

I think I’m ODing myself on over-dramatic 80’s/90’s love songs, haha. Yesterday, Chad suckered me into buying the 7+ minute version of It’s All Coming Back to me Now which I initially missed because it was incorrectly titled on iTunes as It’s All Coming Back to Me Know. Bums! Well, that song is utterly awesome because it’s so dramatic and Meat-Loaf-ish. When you have lyrics like this, there’s not much that can stop me from smiling and being all giddy:

“there were nights when the wind was so cold”

“there were days when the sun was so cruel”

“When you touch me like this
And when you hold me like that
It was gone with the wind
But it’s all coming back to me”

Then, later, Kathy got me into listening to two other Air Supply songs which I promptly purchased as well. I leave with you with an excerpt from Lost In Love:

“Lost in love and I don’t know much
Was I thinking aloud and fell out of touch?
But I’m back on my feet and eager to be what you wanted

So lift your eyes if you feel you can
Reach for a star and I’ll show you a plan
I figured it out
What I needed was someone to show me”

To balance out this swarm of love songs, also in my playlist are some songs from Top Gun in order to bring some manlyness to the equation. I mean, that movie has lines like:

“That’s right! Ice… man. I am dangerous. “

“You can be my wingman any time.”

“Too close for missiles, I’m switching to guns.”

“You stink!”

“Splash that sucker, yeah! “

“Great balls of fire! “

Uhhh… I think there’s something wrong with me…