People feel lonely all the time, it seems. They get into relationships hazardly, limit themselves, bow under pressure, etc. etc. out of fear of being lonely. Should Christians feel lonely? If you’re close to God (which you should be, or at least trying to be), why should you feel lonely? It seems to me like that shouldn’t happen, but it does. I suppose it’s because we’re never as close to God as we should be and loneliness comes out when we long for something physical (I don’t mean sexual) we can connect with on a more basic level in an attempt to find comfort.

I find myself getting pangs of loneliness sometimes (not right now =). I usually don’t let them last long, but it puts me into a state of solemn thought where I end up thinking about the friends I’ve had/have and where I could be in the future. I realize that I shouldn’t feel lonely and God should be enough for me and end up praying about whatever’s on my mind a the time (uhh… other than being lonely), so maybe it’s not so bad of a feeling afterall if you don’t let it consume you. Maybe it’s not so much of “should Christians feel lonely?” but “what should Christians do when they feel lonely?” Loneliness isn’t the problem, it just depends on how you handle it and what you do as a result of feeling it.

When it comes to single people feeling lonely, a lot of times people get into relationships to “cure it.” I don’t think that’s a good reason to get into one and kinda puts a shakey foundation on the whole thing as a primary motivation to get into it was “just to have it.” Of course, what do I know, I’ve never been in one. ;)

So yes, these are some thoughts going through my head right now as I switch back and forth between writing a sentence here and there and working on a presentation about image processing units, MPEG4 encoders, MBX 3D modules, Linux board support packages, and the like. =)

On a lighter note, guess who has andrewapproved.com. =)

I wanted to find lyrics to post that were completely disjoint from the rest of this post…

“Life is like a hurricane here in Duckburg
Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes - it’s a duck blur
You might solve a mystery or rewrite history

Duck Tales, Oo-oo
Tales of daring-do, bad and good luck tales, oo-oo

D-d-d-danger, watch behind you - there’s a stranger out to find you
What to do? Just grab onto some Duck Tales, oo-oo!
Not pony tails or cotton tails but Duck Tales, oo-oo!

When it seems they’re headed for the final curtain
Bold deduction never fails, that’s for certain
The worst of messes become successes!

Duck Tales, Oo-oo
Tales of derring-do, bad and good luck tales, oo-oo
Not pony tails or cotton tails but Duck Tales, oo-oo!” - Duck Tales

I know my previous post is going to drive some of you crazy. You can contact me for the password… or you might figure it out. =) It’s really not as exciting as it seems though. =p

I haven’t blogged about this much, mainly because my blog is a bit too public and I don’t want this leaking to too many people. However, I discovered the password-protect post feature of WordPress, so I figured this is a good time to test it. =)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve grown… mmmm… tired (?) of my job. There are a ton of interesting things and I like the group, but I don’t think it’s pushing me in a direction I want to go. Web design/development has always been a hobby of mine and I now think I want to push towards that as my career. I think it would be really cool to work on something like Flickr and I think someday I’ll have the skill and experience to back me up to pursue such a position. For the time being though, I want to stay in Austin around my family and friends. I think the roots of that is I’m afraid of being lonely if I moved away, but I really do like Austin too and there seem to be no shortage of techy jobs here, so it’s not too much trouble to stay. Maybe someday I’ll move elsewhere, but I have an urge to stay right now, so that’s what I’ll be doing.

Anyways, I had an interview today with a company called Loop One which is owned by neopost, a rather large French company that does shipping/mailing stuff, apparently. Loop One, is the more high-techy/web part of neopost and they develop a web application that handles shipping… they gave me a demo and it’s all AJAX-ified and everything, which is neat. I think it went pretty well and it seems like a pretty exciting place to work. It’s not as flashy or exciting as Flickr, but I think it’d be a good launching pad for me… if they give me an offer, I’m thinking I will probably accept. Now, usually, I laugh at the French because they’re funny, but there is one major benefit of working for a French company. France has a freakin’ crazy amount of holidays and thus, are pretty lenient on Loop One when it comes to that. They had Columbus Day off for crying out loud! The PTO there seems to be pretty comparable to Freescale too, so I’m happy with that. =) We’ll see how this goes…

I feel a bit sorry for my interim boss at Freescale (my previous one left to another company). I told him last week I was looking around for other jobs and he’s trying to give me reason to stay by giving me projects that are “web related” because I told him that’s where my interest lies. Unfortunately, “web related” in an embedded systems environment is still pretty low level and merely means you push some data over a network (either wired or wireless)… so the projects he suggests, although interesting, are not really “web applications” which I’m mainly interested in. The group is already pretty swamped as it is, and it is going to be tricky to find a replacement for me (maybe even just to get a req open to try to hire someone), so my leaving is probably not going to help things, but I don’t think I can let that stop me from going.

Uhhh… that’s all I want to say for now. Tata.

“I wake up every mornin’, I stumble out of bed
Stretchin’ and yawnin’, another day ahead
It seems to last forever, and time goes slowly by
Till babe and me’s together, then it starts to fly

‘Cause the moment that he’s with me, time can take a flight
The moment that he’s with me, everything’s alright
Night time is the right time, we make love
Then it’s his and my time, we take off

My baby takes the morning train, he works from nine till five and then
He takes another home again to find me waitin’ for him” - Sheena Easton

How much energy should you put into behaving based upon what others think? How much effort goes into doing something a certain way or not doing something so that people will think a certain way of you? I think one of my problems is that I put too much effort into this, or I simply bottle up and I don’t let any information about me leak out. I’ve been told I’m a good interviewee… interviewing is pretty much all about putting on a show and giving the impression that you know your stuff and you’re confident and would fit well into the group you’d be working with. Maybe I’m too used to doing this and too much of my focus in life is put into making other people’s opinions of myself satisfactory to me.

Maybe I do this to God too. I’ll do something, pray something, say something, think something in order to “make God think I’m a good person.” I know it doesn’t work this way and all I’m doing is lying to everyone including myself, but that’s the feeling I get sometimes. Being a “good person” isn’t even enough, I know that too, but I probably still try to convince God of this “fact” to gain his favor.

Sometimes, I can’t tell if my actions are truly genuine or if I’m acting under some ulterior motive. Am I doing something just to feel good? Or just not to feel bad? To make someone think I’m a good person? To make someone not think of me badly?

Ah well, thoughts to ponder, and character to improve upon…

On a lighter note, this song is dedicated to OMan, wishing that he finds his very own Liv Tyler on the oil rig:

“I could stay awake just to hear you breathing
Watch you smile while you are sleeping
While you’re far away dreaming
I could spend my life in this sweet surrender
I could stay lost in this moment forever
Every moment spent with you is a moment I treasure

Don’t want to close my eyes
I don’t want to fall asleep
Cause I’d miss you baby
And I don’t want to miss a thing
Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream will never do
I’d still miss you baby
And I don’t want to miss a thing” - Aerosmith

Ahh, good ‘ole petroleum engineers saving the world from complete doom.

Yay, shin doesn’t hurt so much anymore! =)

In other news (and the main point of this post), iTunes 7 is the lame. Whenever I play music and start up Frozen Throne (supposedly other things can trigger it too), all the songs start getting distorted and have static/noise. Even when I quit the game, iTunes still continues to play songs horribly. Looking around, this seems to be a pretty common issue and I think Apple knows about it, but they’re taking a while patching it. Changing the sound output in Quicktime from 24-bit to 16-bit didn’t help me. Meh, now I’m trying to decide if I want to try reverting to iTunes 6 or just waiting around until iTunes 7 is fixed. You would think they’d do a bit more testing on the audio playback portion of a program whose primary function is to play music, eh?

“Hello, good morning, how ya do?
What makes your rising sun so new?
I could use a fresh beginning too
All of my regrets are nothing new” - Switchfoot

I don’t know if I ever blogged about Planeteers, but it’s pretty much just like my Pointless Junk email list way back in the day. I really wish Google had some better stats on the groups they hosted, as what they currently have is pretty limited (hire me, I’ll do it ;) haha). I believe I have all the emails sent to it saved, so I could probably write something to parse it and generate stats on my own (and I may one day), but that’s just another thing-I-want-to-do-but-have-no-time-for. Anyways, for the time being, I thought these were amusing:

I think the list started when we first got our gmail accounts around when I was interning at Metrowerks. A bunch of other people were also interning and it was the summer, so the list did pretty well then. After that, it kinda died for a bit with a pretty good revival the following summer. That stayed strong and we actually peaked in February (why is that?).

The following is a bit inaccurate, because some people have switched email accounts since the list started (I think I’ve switched at least two or three times, so my total email count is probably ridiculously high)… anyways, fun regardless:

So I went to the February archives to see what we were talking about to hit that 2000+ emails mark and found these:

————————————————-

From:         Aaron Jacobs
Date:        Thurs, Feb 2 2006 12:24 am
I AM A GIANT BUCKET!

From:         Aaron Jacobs
Date:        Thurs, Feb 2 2006 12:26 am
I AM A GIANT BUCKET WITH A LIFETIME OF KNOWLEDGE!

From:         Viraj Bhagat
Date:        Wed, Feb 1 2006 2:54 am
@!#!% %^#@ face, didnt i tell u to stop @&^%(! callin
me that, u dumb #@$^

From:         Nathan Tsui
Date:        Mon, Feb 13 2006 10:45 pm
Hey everybody, I’m starting a new thread about suns!
Our sun is great. Isn’t this nice and informative?

From:         Andrew Joseph
Date:        Tues, Feb 14 2006 11:47 am
“Random is better than math”….I love robotics.
I have at least 10 girls here that want to meet Oliver.

From:         Chad Wilson
Date:        Thurs, Feb 16 2006 11:53 pm
Viraj isn’t Muslim?

From:         Viraj Bhagat
Date:        Fri, Feb 17 2006 12:08 am
Go Durka urself

From:         Van Nguyen
Date:        Mon, Feb 20 2006 9:15 am
Sorry to hear that man. =( Every morning when I get
up I say “Van is single…again” also.
Van

From:         Andrew Joseph
Date:        Fri, Feb 24 2006 12:11 pm
Quick send the ninjas to the future to intercept and destroy!!

From:         Nancy Wong
Date:        Fri, Feb 24 2006 7:46 pm
awwww guys!!! another problem to add onto my list
of diseases… I’VE GOT LACTOSE INTOLERANCE! I AM SO SAD
=( =( =(

From:         Sam
Date:        Tues, Feb 21 2006 10:34 pm
wouldn’t it be funny if I come back from the hosptial and like
Oliver just has a gf.

From:         Van Nguyen
Date:        Thurs, Feb 23 2006 4:24 pm
Lovely. I’ll buy it!
Van

From:         Katherine Fan
Date:        Mon, Feb 20 2006 12:06 am

: I’m STILL STUCK AT THE TEXAN BECAUSE SOMEONE
CAN’T GET A HOLD OF THEIR

SOURCES. OMGOMGOMGOGOGMOMGOGM!!

From:        Oliver
Date:        Mon, Feb 20 2006 4:42 pm
I can play Command & Conquer
-Oliver

Haha, there’s a ton of other stuff, but I won’t post a lot of them for… various reasons… haha.

Edit: I think I have a shin splint. =(

I had to wake up at 6:30ish this morning to make a call to India for work. Man, I’m so not used to this and I’m very sleepy right now so this post is an attempt to wake me up a bit. My shin is still hurting so I poked around and part of it feels bruised when I touch it. Hmmm… maybe I should give the running a rest today.

Does anyone know if McNeil locks up their track at night? I have a strong desire to calibrate my Nike+ (yeah, ok… just a little bit of running =).

This one’s dedicated to Sam, who gave me this really fruity song that somehow wound up on my iPod:

“Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day, you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I’ll give it to someone special” - Wham! / George Michael

I went home today and ran around the neighborhood. My left shin is really killing me for some reason… maybe I did something to it yesterday when I had to suddenly stop for a dog that got in my path. Poo. It hurts. =( Tomorrow, I think I may try to hit up McNeil’s track and calibrate my Nike+ thingy-ma-bobber.

Both Oriana and my dad are sick… I hope I don’t catch anything…

Oh, my love, my darling,
I’ve hungered for your touch a long,
lonely time. Time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much.
Are you still mine?

I need your love.
I need your love.
God speed your love to me.” - Righteous Brothers

I remember when I used to have nothing to do and got bored and lazy all the time. Now, I’ve got all these ideas and proejcts in my head that I want to work on, but don’t have the time or energy to do them all. I want to write a better system of handling the Nike+ data on the iPod. I glanced at the XML files stored on it and it looks easy enough to do. One of these weekends, I’ll write a quick Perl script or something to grab all that data and throw it in a database, then later maybe I’ll do some things with it like have charts/graphs, a button to switch from metric to Imperial (or vice versa), and some other random things. I wish there was some kind of API Nike provided to get data from their site, but oh well.

I’ve also got some ideas for owiber.com, but not sure when I’ll get around to that either… I really wish a universal binary version of Photoshop was out.

“Now sit right back as I bust a rhyme
I’ve got the freshest beats and I’m always on time
I’m the baddest of the best, yeah,
I’m the king, word.

Master of beats, and the cross-fader
I’ll cut off your hand just like Darth Vader
Step to me,
and you’re gonna get dissed, homeboy” - Brave Saint Saturn

Here’s my second run… had Elements to go to so I didn’t do a full run around Town Lake. I decided to push myself on that first mile and I think I did pretty decent, but I was dead afterwards, so ended up walking a decent chunk of it. Probably would have ended up faster if I did do a full run around the lake but kept a decent pace… hehe, oh well. =) I’m gonna try to improve my one mile time.. it’s fun. =)



I officially will be leading an Elements with Sarah Lau now… a little nervous about it, but a little excited too. Ummm, that’s about all I have to say about that for now. We’ll see how it goes. =)

Ok, large block of lyrics this time…

“I look beyond the empty cross
Forgetting what my life has cost
And wipe away the crimson stains
And dull the nail that still remains
More and more I need you now,
I owe you more each passing hour
Battle between grace and pride
I gave up not so long ago
So steal my heart and take the pain,
And wash my feet and cleanse my pride
Take the selfish, take the weak,
And all the things I cannot hide
Take the beauty, take my tears
My sin-soaked heart - make it yours
Take my world all apart,
Take it now, take it now
And serve the ones that I despise
Speak the words I can’t deny
Watch the world I used to love
Fall to dust and blow away
I look beyond the empty cross
Forgetting what my life has cost
And wipe away the crimson stains
And dull the nail that still remains
Steal my heart and take the pain
Take the selfish, take the weak
And all the things I cannot hide
Take the beauty, take my tears
Take my world apart
Take my world apart
And I pray, and I pray, and I pray
Take my world apart
Worlds apart” - Jars of Clay

Haha, I just accepted a distance challenge from Van… there’s no way I’m winning this. =p