Now all the demons look like prophets and I'm living out / Every word they speak... It's funny how the smallest thing someone says can really get to you. In good ways, as well as bad (although more often the former, I guess).
For instance. The other day, I got a voice mail message from someone... not a personal voice mail from someone who directly called my phone, but a voice mail that was sent out to a somewhat large group of people. The message, for the most part, didn't even pertain to me. But at the end of the message, there were four words that made me feel really really good (which is completely nonsensical, based on the distribution of the message, etc). "I'm thankful for you". A very small thing... but it really made my day. For the rest of the day, when I got tired or was having a rough time, I thought back to the message... and the fact that someone was thankful for me. Not for my work, or my skills, or what I had done... for ME. And that, for whatever reason, means something to me.
Six things I'll never get tired of hearing:
I love you
I'm so glad you came
I appreciate you
I miss you
I'm praying for you/thinking about you
I'm thankful for you
Seriously... it's all the little things that keep me from drowning in the vast chaos of life. Without them, I would truly be lost.
You were handsome / You were pretty / Queen of New York City So Chad and I spent Thursday through Sunday in New York City. I had a class to take for Work (Friday and Saturday), so Chad decided to come with me and see the city. We had a great time! And did a great deal of the touristy stuff available in Manhattan. Our hotel was at Lexington and 48th, which made everything really convenient (We were about five blocks form Grand Central Station).
We saw a play on Broadway - Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart. Fan. Freaking. Tastic. Seriously. (Chad also saw Phantom of the Opera, while I was in class).
We saw Rockefeller Center, Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, 5th Ave, and Central Park.
While on 5th Ave, we went to FAO Schwartz, which is only the most awesomest toy store eVar. Toys-R-Us at Times square is a close second.
We ate New York style pizza, deli sammiches, and food form a pub, but skipped the hot dogs from the hot dog vendors (when we were ready to eat, we almost always wanted to sit down).
We road the subway from grand central station to the downtown area, saw the Statue of liberty (this took two tries, as it was foggy the first time), the World Trade Center (it's a big hole in the city, you can't miss it), and the American Stock Exchange.
We took the subway uptown a bit, and went to the Met. We only spent two hours or so there, but it was awesome. I could have easily spent weeks there. Easily.
All in all, the trip was a success. And we arrived home safely. Yay!
In other news, Music Choice on demand has a special this month: Snoop Dogg: Does Starkville. Seriously. I had to watch it, just because Starkville is NEVER the subject of this kind of thing. It's only six minutes long, an it manages to make Starkville look like a hell hole, full of poor people and run down houses, and two drunk frat boys. *sigh* I'm not sure what I was expecting. But that wasn't it.
For what it's worth / It was worth all the while So we drove to Denver this past weekend, which was awesome (which is to say, being in Denver and visiting people was awesome, having a captive audience in the car for 36+ hours was awesome, the driving itself was not so awesome). I got to see all kinds of interesting things for the first time on the trip though:
Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado. Ha!
Giant windmill things (in Kansas)
Tumbleweed
Prairie dogs
Oil wells (the kind that look like those bird-looking perpetual motion things... not sure how to describe it)
The Rockies
I also learned some things on the trip:
Kansas is the birthplace of Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill, and William Chrysler.
The first patented helicopter was in Kansas.
In spite of all this, Kansas is lame.
Apparently, real trees don't really grow where there's no water, so you get stuck with these little weedy trees... which are funny. But not really trees.
Those windmill things are bigger than I could have imagined.
Traveling to Denver while trying to get over a sinus infection will make your ears hurt. But they won't actually explode. Which is good.
We got to visit Krys, Manda, and their boys, play Shanghai (though not the last couple of rounds), eat pancakes and sushi (not at the same time), tour Boulder, appreciate the awesomeness of friends who have known you forever and don't manufacture their own drama, run around Pearl St. mall, and Manda introduced me to a store that sells happy-hippie eco-friendly natural soaps and shampoos and stuff. And they are opening one in Houston. Yay! I might have to buy stock in them or something, seriously.
All in all, the trip was a success. I would definitely do it again, with less car this time, and more airplane.
You wait and see when the smoke clears Lessons for the day (more for archival benefit than because you guys will be interested...):
You can't use relative path names for images that you want to load from jars. You have to use a ClassLoader to getResource().
It takes about 3 hours to determine this, if you forget that you can see the console output *if you run the jar from the command line* instead of trying to load it through Java WebStart.
It takes about 10 minutes to fix this problem, thanks to Find/Replace.
You cannot load files into a File object by their filename (even if you use getResource) if they are stored in a jar. Apparently, jarring them cause them to not be files any more (I know, it makes no sense to me either, but that's the best answer I could come up with from the forums). You need to use ClassLoader.getResourceAsStream() to put the jarred file directly into an input stream, skippign hte file object all together.
It takes another three hours of [Run the program in Eclipse. See that it works. Jar the project. Sign the jar. Run the jar through WebStart. See that it's broken.] repeated, ad nauseum, and googling various variations on the theme of "jar read from file" before you remember that you can run the jar from the command line. And get the exception output, with the error name, and google that.
It takes about 30 seconds to fix this problem, once you know how.
And, if you spend all day debugging all this stuff... you get no real quantifiable work accomplished.
Went to RenFest last weekend. Going again this weekend. It's awesome. :-)
I didn't buy the like, eight Egyptian statues they were selling that I didn't have... But I did buy a cool Egypt dagger. And a shirt. And a ring. But not a jingly ankle bracelet. I'm gonna hafta make that one.
It's still really hot in Houston. For some reason, this is upsetting me less and less the longer I stay here :-) Although it is a bit weird to wear shorts and tank tops out Christmas shopping.
Family drama is always interesting, and kind of odd. Christmas will be fun, all around. I'm just sayin'.
I am hopelessly behind in my writing. But I caught up a little yesterday. Sort of. We'll see how it goes this week, as we'll have house-guests from Thursday until Tuesday.
I hate NetBeans. With the fiery passion of a thousand suns. No really, I hate it that much. Even more than I hate Internet Explorer. Which is amazing.
Here I come back from the dead! (holy craaaap) I'm not dead. Seriously. I mean, I could have died, from the head cold I had, but I didn't. I have just been way busy and stuff. (and by way busy, I mostly mean lazy).
So. New things (and some old ones):
Finally doing NaNoWriMo this year. At least attempting. Since I always said I would when I got out of school, and hey, I’m not in school any more. No more excuses! As such, I spent I don’t know, maybe a hour today trying to figure out how to friend people on the NaNoWriMo site… I mean, there’s no search or anything. Turns out, they disable the search during high traffic times (like you know, two days before the thing kicks off. Yikes, the site was slow), so as to make the site faster. So, those of you WriMo’ers out there, friend me if you like… I’m lydaaleaxander (bet you wouldn’t have guessed that one). Funny note: WriMo’ers, in my head, sounds like Rye Mowers. Which brings to mind images of lawn mowers mowing a lawn made up of loaves of bread. Which, in my head, is funny.
I have a bread machine. And, I managed to make a loaf of bread, which turned out pretty nicely, considering I tried to screw it up at least a dozen times in the process (who knew it would be so difficult?). Now that I’m over the learning curve, I might have to make another loaf… but that would require finishing off the loaf I made last night, which will take a couple of days (in theory). The greatest part? I only paid $15 for the machine. At a yard sale. About two hours after I told Chad I was going to put one on my Christmas list.
I have fallen on and off the “good habits” bandwagon so many times that I think I’m going to install a spring on my behind. It would make things easier. Plus, I could sing Tigger songs, which would be fun. At any rate, I’ll be jumping back into Smart Habit Saturday this week (that’s the plan). My new habit will be to write every day (bet you didn’t see that one coming, either).
I’m working on cleaning out my feed reader. See, when I started with feed readers, I said, omg! This is the best thing eVar!, and promptly subscribed to the whole internet. Or, at least, 20% of it. As such, if you suddenly start getting a million emails from me, linking to sites that you saw on Digg about two months ago…. That’s why. I have like 200 things starred to go back and read/watch. But, I have reduced the number of total feeds I subscribe to by an order of magnitude (and still reducing). So it might get better.
I think we have nailed down our Christmas plans, so if you want to know when we’ll be in Huntsville or Memphis, ask and I’ll let you know. I do not, however, know when Family is going to take up our time in either city, although it’s a safe bet that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are taken. Also, while in Huntsville, we’ll be staying at my brother’s, in case that matters to anyone.
Angleton, TX<, isn’t a particularly interesting place to kill 3.5 hours. I mean, they have a Walmart, and a Kroger, but not much else. (Why was I killing time? I had to report to Jury Duty at 8:30am, and once they sorted everything out (around 10am) they asked my panel to come back for a case at 1:30pm. But at about 1:29pm, the case settled, so they never got around to picking a jury/going to trial. It took them another 20 minutes to figure out that we weren’t really needed there. Awesome stuff).
Got up on the wrong side of life today... I'm in a really odd, kind of rant-y mood today. No idea why. Really. These are (a few) of the random things that have bothered me today:
The word data is plural. Data is literally a bunch of "things" not just one. So why do we say "the data is on the server" as opposedto "the data are on the server"? You would never say "The dogs is onthe porch" (unless you were from some geographic regions, in which case you probably aren't concerned with whether data is singular or plural.
Why is the world so concerned with having "stuff"? You know, things, stuff, toys, items that you don't need that cost extra money and then you may or may not use them... I'm fast becoming less of a "stuff" person (we'll assume books don't count, here). I'm really tired of the materialism, the "how much do you make?" implying that making more money makes you more valuable as a person. And when did living within your means go out of style?
I think the pop-up previews that outlook puts up when you get a new message are the worst invention ever. Not because I don't use them.... I do, all the time. But because too many people overuse them. Read the whole e-mail before you respond, not just the one line that displays. I try to keep it short, but really, you could take the time to read it.
Scrum uses the most bizarre terminology ever. I dislike being dubbed a "chicken" (although the alternative title, "pig", wasn't much better). And what are "sprints", anyway? Why can't they call them "iterations", like everyone else?
I'm annoyed by "news" that isn't newsworthy (imho). Bridges collapsing = news. Pregnant celebs choosing county lockup over city lockup != news. Especially when the story ran yesterday, and was rewritten (with no new information) for today's news. Stuff like this is what clogs up the tubes of the intarweb. Srsly.
I really hate the term "starting a family". Um, I already have a family started, yo. Chad + Deedee = family. If someone asked me, "do you have any family?" I would say, "yes, I'm married, my parents/siblings live in Alabama, and my in-laws live in Mississippi". Not "no, I haven't got around to starting one yet".
And since that rounds out six points, I will stop ranting.
The Mississippi's mighty, but it starts in Minnesota/ at a place where you could walk across with five steps down
My keywords are not working exactly as I would like them to. So weird. Don't know how to fix it.
Settled on a d20 character idea. Already having fun with it. (and we haven;t started playing yet). Chad says I'm evil, but he's enjoying it, too.
I will never never never understand women. So don't call and ask me for advice on how to figure them out. 'Cause yeah, I don't know. Don't have a clue. On the other hand, if you figure them out, by all means let me know.
It's funny, when you're used to coming in to work for like, 3 hours at a time, how much 8 hour days kinda suck. But that's ok... 80 hour paychecks sure beat 10 hour paychecks.
I need to learn XML, which to this point I've never bothered with. I'm considering renewing my Safari subscription to gain access to some books... but not sure. It's kinda pricy (about $20 a month for the base rate, $40 a month for unlimited). Maybe I should check out what ACM has to offer, as I've already paid my dues for the year (ouch! I forgot how much dues were once you added in SIG memberships and transactions, etc).
Um. Yeah. Still totally addicted to LotRO. Started running quests with my secondary... the thing that annoys me the most? It takes freakin' forever to get somewhere. Like, anywhere. I spend more time running than anything else.
Back at work full time, starting today. Yay for work!
Finished my First Year Project Paper last night at about 7pm. Also finished my stats final, and ran the exams I need to grade through the scantron machine. Double yay for being done!
Played more lotr online... not sure if I like it or not, but I can't stop playing. :-)
Fixin to start playing in a d20 future campaign. Have almost zero workable character ideas. If you have any ideas of dynamic female hero-type people I can model after, by all means let me know. Out of the running already: Lara Croft (already done), Tank Girl, and Ameila Peabody (couldn't seem to figure out how to port her from 1900's to the 2100's), and Grace Hopper (because, alas, computer scientists aren't heroes). I am severly lacking in inspiration.
Someone asked me on Friday if I could live anywhere, where would I live? I shocked an entire table of people by saying I'd live in north central Mississippi. Apparently, this is weird, as no one actually wants to live in Mississippi.
I miss Abner's chicken, and lots of otehr back home food, but I'll be back in the south somewhere around the 25th of this month... in Memphis for a couple of days, Maybe Thursday evening through Sunday morningish, then in Huntsville part of Sunday, all of Monday, and maybe part/all of Tuesday. Yay for travelling!
Who ever sinvented Peach & Mango Salsa should be sainted. Or granted god-hood. Or something. I would write the Vatican and suggest this (the sainting, I don't think they handle bestowing god-hood), but I'm not catholic. So in leiu of that, I hope they make a million bucks.
Who ever invented finals should be stabbed in the eye with a really hot french fry.
I might finally regain my sanity... after May 7th. But don't count on it or anything.
My hair is long anough to manage braided pigtails again... but I'm thinking about cutting it off again, too. Decisions, decisions.
A couple more weeks of Iron Yoga & pilates, and I'll have the most awesome abs eVar. Seriously.
Lord of the Rings online is terribly addictive. As is ice cream, and caffiene, and the aforementioned peach & mango salsa.
Tests are the bane of my existance ... At least at the moment.
So yeah. Studying for a test. Which could be easier, I guess, except (return of the 6-point entry!):
I have no idea what this teacher expects. And it's only 5 questions. I mean really, that's a lot of room to screw up, you know?
I have recently lost my vocabulary. Seriously, I am reduced to having conversations about "the things with the stuff and the people"... which doesn't fly at Rice, suprisingly.
I hate tests. Why can't I just write a paper instead? (oh... right, the vocab thing. dammit.).
I have to make a good grade on this. Good grade = 87 or better to pull me to a B in the class. I'd settle for anything above, like, an 82 though.
This stuff shouldn't be that hard! I have no idea why it is! it's not technical or anyhthing, I guess I just don't get it or something. Stupid names and dates and studies. Can someone give me an algorithm, please? Or an equation? that would be awesome.
If I *weren't* studying for a test, I could be doing lots of way awesomer stuff. Like hanging out with people, or going to Karate, or sleeping. Sleep... now there's a thought...
Yeah, so I'm sure I'm not as bad as I sound, and really... I'll be doing a whole lot better about noon or so tomorrow. Assuming, you know, enough Mt. Dew exists in the world to keep me alive that long. :-)
At least I don't have to drive to school tomorrow. Yay for carpooling! :-)
I'm in love with my mobility... But I'm not in love with my car. *sigh*. My car is old and busted, and long past the point of repairing it... so I'm stuck with an oil leack until I can buy another (January, methinks). So if you hear of a cheap car for sale... point me in that direction. The requirementas are as follows:
It has to be low maintanece. Not like me :-)
It probably should be low mileage. See #1.
It has to have a driver-accessible cup holder that will easily hold a 24 oz bottle. Two cupholders is a bonus.
It has to have a cigarette lighter port that isn't blocked by the ashtray, so I can actually use the damn thing.
It has to be a manual. I'm serious. No automatics.
If it happened to be sleek and sexy, or cute, or would make me look hot, that would be an added bonus
Yeah. In other news, I rode the Metro rail for the first time evar today. Yay for public transportation! (Not that it goes to my house.... but I had a ride into downtown, and the rail stops right next to Rice). This may become a much more regular occurence. Which is awesome. Somehow, carpooling and then riding the Metro makes me fell like a "city girl". Which is funny, as I've never really been a city girl.
PS... 10 cool points (would have used blog points, but those were taken) to whoever can name the song that my last three post titles (excluding the RenFest one) came from. I predict David will be the only one to guess it... but I know that at least one more person out there has access to a copy of this song. :-)
My regrets become distractions when I cannot do them justice So I dug up my old laptop hard drive tonight, in search of a couple of mp3s. Yeah, my hard drive from like, years ago. Talk about a blast from the past... Found some funny, funny stuff though, including:
About 6.5 gig of mp3s of my favorite songs from my u-grad years... and I still know all the words :-)
The start of a short story based on a character that I developed from Chad's D&D players handbook back when I was still avoiding playing D&D like the plague.
Mathematical proof that Chad is evil.
A meme type list of random facts about me at the time.
Chat logs from forever ago. Funny funny stuff. Including a conversation I had with "John Glenn". Ha. Bet you didn't remember that, did you? Well... it is saved for all posterity. On my hard drive.
Pictures of people (Willer Lite, Sbbn, Mikie (pre marriage and children).... among others).
Proof that Chad is evil (I can't help it....)
**** THE PROOF THAT Chad Hammons IS EVIL ****
C H A D H A M M O N S 67 72 65 68 72 65 77 77 79 78 83 - as ASCII values 4 9 2 5 9 2 5 5 7 6 2 - digits added \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_________/ 4 7 2 1 6 - digits added
Thus, "Chad Hammons" is 47216.
Turn the number backwards, and add 38 - the symbol of slavery. The number is now 61312.
Subtract 5181 from the number - this is the year first commercial cheese factory was established, written backwards. It gives 56131.
Subtract 1964, the year Beatles with "Can't buy me love" topped the charts in a very mysterious way. The result will be 54167.
Subtract 1927, the year Fidel Castro was born. The result will be 52240.
Turn the number backwards, subtract 1904 - the year Oppenheimer, the man who created the atomic bomb, was born. The number is now 2321.
This, when read backwards, gives 1232. This is 666 in octal, the number of the Beast...
Chad and I bought a house. We are now the proud owners of a gianormous house, plus the gianormous mortgage payments to go with it.
We started moving. Sort of. As in, we can't finish moving until we have Intar-Web at the new place, which will be like, Saturday.
Steve Irwin died, which was sad. (I hope the american media leaves his family alone for a while).
They finally annouced the date/time that the evanescence tickets for houston go on sale. (ironically, it when I should be at the new house waiting on the cable guy. Chad can take first shift waiting, I guess, whilst I sit on ticketmaster until they start selling).
I bought the most awesomest china cabinet eVar at a garage sale for $75.
I convinced Chad to let me paint a wall in the living room. I bought awesome blue paint for the wall... and should maybe start painting tomorrow, assuming I can find a suitable ladder (didn't think about the whole 9-foot ceiling thing ahead of time).
That is all. I mean, I'm sure it's not, but I have to be up in like, 6 hours. So it is for now.
It takes way longer to get to Rice at 8am than it does to get here at 9am. Like, more than twice as long.
Although Rice students are called to "blaze their own trails," these trails should not be blazed across the grass by the music building in an effort to save some walking time. They water the grass there until it's something like a swamp. Used the Pebbled Pathways instead, even if they don't go exactly the way you want to go.
Never call the Pebbled Pathways "sidewalks."
The West Lot really is about as far away as you can get from the psychology building. For $210 a year, I have the privilege to park here, and to walk for 15 minutes to get to my building.... or wait 20 minutes for the bus.
Professors that let you make up quizzes that you miss due to dire illness rock.
For some weird reason, my turn signal ticks faster when I accelerate. Is this really as odd as I think, or does everyone's do that and I've just never noticed?
Greeting someone with "Aww, sweetie, you look like shit." will not make their day, nor will it make them feel better in any way shape or form.
That's it for the moment, I guess. Maybe more later.
Yay for the rediscovery of information on old hard drives :-)
Not yay for people who change White Wolf schedules at the last possible minute, thereby throwing chaos into any plans people might have made on the weird assumption that these things were somewhat static.
Yay for sleep. I don't often get much of it, but I've slept for basically three or four days now, and I think it might be kind of addictive. I dunno... maybe I should break the habit before it gets worse :-)
Not yay for doctor's appointments. Because they suck.
Yay for good grades, and a good class schedule (tenatively) for next semester.
Not yay for having to deal with stupid people. That has to be like, my biggest pet peeve ever... stupid people really really get to me. I don't think I can stress this one enough...
Ok. All I can think of for the moment.
Thinking about going to sleep. Somewhat hyper, but not the fun kind of hyper that makes you jump around and do things... more the edgy kind of hyper you get from lack of sleep... or too much sleep, I guess. That's prolly it. I've slept too much. I should boycott sleep tonight... heh heh heh.
This is my brain..... in part, at least.
