’tis the season

the holiday season is always kind of a mixed bag for me. i’ve had some bad, bad holidays experiences and so now i sort of look at the holidays with less enthusiasm as i used to. but to offset this moody blue that comes over me, i general apply shopping therapy. and so it’s usually around this time of the year that the deals looks even sweeter than they usually do. and so it’s usually around christmas that i end up getting this or that for myself.

i swear though, i’m going to stop. really. right AFTER the banana republic friends and family sale this weekend. really. i swear.

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trying to keep a positive attitude

the power of positive thinking is amazing.

that being said, it’s really hard trying to keep a positive attitude sometimes. i think lately it’s become more of a struggle than before. someone called me on it today and there wasn’t much that i could say about it. i guess part of the reason why it’s hard to keep a positive attitude is because every time i try to find the silver lining to a situation, that silver lining becomes gray.

but still, i’m stubborn, so i’ll try to find the silver lining…again.

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the bane of my existance

i’m talking about impulse shopping. it truly is the bane of my existence. today, having never had plans to purchase anything, i got something on an impulse. maybe it’s because i haven’t gotten anything in a while…maybe it’s because it only feels like i haven’t gotten anything in a while. whatever the case may be, today’s purchase was a little excessive. i think that i will have to moderate myself a little bit.

so because of my uncontrollable shopping habits, the people who really suffer here are my friends. cheap-o christmas gifts to you all! =P

the thing about impulse shopping is that you never know what you are going to get. i think this is my favorite form of shopping because i really do enjoy the cool finds that i do end up getting. it’s not as much fun to go shopping with a purpose because you know what you are going to get and after you get, it’s kind of anticlimatic because well…you’ve been expecting it this whole time.

uh oh…

’tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la la la la la.

i just bought myself my own christmas present. i’m not going to say what it is yet, but i guess this year, xmas will be super heavily happy for me.

ahhhh, finding comfort in shopping. this can become an expensive form of therapy.

click!

what is the very first thing i do to my new bundle of joy, the canon s400? i record a new sound for the shutter. i absolutely HATE how the default shutter sound is this really cheesy sounding fake shutter. i mean, if your camera doesn’t have a real shutter sound, why put in a fake one? really? it’s a big pet peeve of mine.

and because it’s so obviously fake, i swore that if i ever got a camera that had a feature to let you record your own sound i would change it immediately. so, every time i take a picture now, the camera’s recorded sound for the shutter sound is a recording of me saying “click!”

i love it.

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more pMachine stuff

the more i fool around with pMachine, the more i like it. i think as i understand it better, it makes more and more sense to me. there are still a few peculiarities about it, but it isn’t so bad. with each passing day i feel more and more confident that i made the right decision to build off of pMachine instead of some other blogging tool. what amazes me is that pMachine is relatively unheard of. i wonder why…it really is good software.

so the little pet project that i’ve been working on is making a pMachine-enabled blogroll. just a nice way to manage links. the big problem i had with this before was that i hand coded the list of links that currently is to the left. this is a problem. it’s hard to manage and a pain to deal with. that’s what makes blogrolling so attractive. but what i really hate about blogrolling (and most free services) is that they force you to advertise their service on your site….unless you pay them for the service. while this does make good business sense, i guess i really dislike using other people’s software and advertising it when i feel i can do it myself. i guess that’s just the inner geek in me.

i’m not so thrilled with the way it handles caching, but it isn’t so bad. i think that i may add on the built-in caching mechanism and make it a little bit more intelligent. the one big downfall i saw to pMachine was the fact that it has to do a database request for every page. i really prefer publishing to HTML instead of hitting the database all the time. i guess i’ll go install the caching system soon and see how it works.

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yeah, so i am a blogger now

i feel almost dirty. i feel like i’ve betrayed people. a few people have commented about liking the new layout, but there were also a few…no [url=http://www.geocities.com/sushisis/]just one[/url] voice of bloody murder for switching over to “the dark side”.

i sort of feel compelled to blog and blog and blog. but then nothing comes up. i think that’s why i liked waiting until the end of the day to put all of these thoughts together.

anyway, work was a little bit of a rough day for some and an easy day for others. my day sort of fell somewhere inbetween. we had pizza ordered in for the engineers because we had to be around in case anything bad happened for a server upgrade. the upgrade didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned, but i guess these sorts of things happen.

i’ve come to realize that i really hate the sysadmin type of work. it just doesn’t agree with me anymore. i don’t want to find out why hardware things are broken. why a router doesn’t see the internet or share its connection or whatever. i just don’t care. i introduce enough broken things in my code, having to deal with the hardware layer is just pure irritating for me.

but oh well. setting up the wireless router last night was already a bit of a chore for me. i guess i just don’t have the patience i used to have…which is weird because this was probably a whole lot easier to set up than anything else before. i guess i’m growing impatient with my old age.

i’m sort of disappointed with how the journal page looks, i sort of wanted to spruce it up a little…but i fear that i’m far too lazy so it may very well be that this is as good as it gets. content over design, right? actually, i’m more interested in getting some other functional stuff working here that i may very well not touch the look and feel for a while. the first thing that i’m going to have to add is a decent blogroll type feature. it is such a pain in the butt to update that list of links!

overheard today

girl 1: if i were a guy, i’d totally be checking out your boobs.
girl 2: no way! if it were me, i’d totally be checking out your booty.
girl 3: really? you know, that would make you an ass-man.
girl 1: i’m a boobs man all the way.

the things i hear…

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volleyball recap

we went 3-1 last night. it probably should have been 4-0, but that’s the story of our season. still, we played quite well and i was happy with how it all went. i was hitting particularly well last night. in fact, i was swinging the hardest i think i’ve ever swung before….and they were landing in. it was quite a sight to see.

i’m pretty excited about playoffs. i think both my teams have a good shot at making it through the ranks.

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But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?