Memory's a funny thing

I found an old blog of mine yesterday. My first blog was an OpenDiary -- that's long gone since they only kept things around if you kept updating. That was also in an age where I backed up to my local disk in case something I put on the internet was lost. Ah, what an age.

Anyway. No, I'm talking about my Xanga, Which I seem to have used throughout the later years of high school. And despite all my last few entries being along the lines of "Sorry I haven't updated more often" and "You should really read my livejournal, I update that all the time", there's some quality content in there. Not only was I a struggling adolescent, but I was also a struggling adolescent with moments of literary genius. I was trying posts of different structures, different narrative tones, and an absurdly large amount of personification and metaphors. 

I still do the personification thing, but rarely. Metaphors are all but gone from my blog posts.

Well, actually, my blog posts have been gone as of late too. But this is a first step towards fixing that. Anyway.

Point being, I read through all of it and was up til like 4am. It was pretty awesome. There are some sweet quotes I salvaged that may once again see the light of day. But more than that it was amazing to read something from the perspective of a 17-year old me. I mean, of all the other people in the world, I'm really the only one who can truly understand the experience this writer is speaking from. Because I've walked in his shoes. Because they were also mine.

More amazing was the fact that my brain still stores all the memories I had from high school. All of it. Every single flippin detail. It just needs to be prodded to remember. Every little experience I wrote about I could almost relive as I read it. It was actually tough to read some of the bits about I had to go to Tahoe again for a goddamn week because my folks wanted to put me to work and--- GAH my parents suck. And if it weren't for the internet, I might've forgotten just how much they suck. I also could've done without remembering my senior prom. That was a house Tragedy with a side of Death Threat. 

Anyways. Point being: I need to write more about the mundane things. A: because once I lower the bar of blog topics to mundane things I'll have to get better at writing again to make them interesting. And B: because I might look back and see that this was the important part of my life that's worth remembering. 

Not really though. It's pretty mundane.

Weaksauce

I wrote this long entry about how cool I is to blog with pictures from
my iPhone, an then I go so fast the iPhone loses the email entirely.
Way to go, Apple.

Test

Let's see what happens.

Not Pants Steal

Aw snap. I'm a published video producer now. For one video. On YouTube. Remember when frat boys wronged Anna and she had a plan to get them back? Well, like a man balancing on a basketball with his head, it's now on YouTube. Enjoy.

Life was waiting for me.

Holy crap. I had my last undergraduate class, indeed my last academic-oriented class for a long time, on Tuesday. When class ended, the fun began. There was a champagne reception for graduating engineers in the Mining Building. I had 8 glasses of champagne with various cookies, treats, and other food-type dealies dipped in chocolate fondue style. It's good to graduate. After an hour of having dinner & playing Wii, I showed up all decked out in formalwear for my last Playa's Ball, the annual formal party for Cal Ultimate Frisbee. I talked with a lot of people. I had about 6 or 7 drinks. Squirt reminded me that kisses while intoxicated are roughly half as good (or less so) than sober smooches. Twice. I discovered that Mary is a naive romantic, just like Scott likes. I also, for the first time ever, drank so much that I puked. I was mostly helpless. Scott & Mary helped me home. Pradeep drove. I threw up some more, and went to bed. wherein, i peed. As the hours passed today, i slowly recovered. The more I recovered, the more i tried to test myself from the experience. Do I remember everything? Did I pass out? I do. I didn't. I did come to the realization that this is the college most people hear stories about. This is the kind of experience I have been wanting for the last four years. To momentarily lapse my sense of responsibility and the fear of embarrassment. To be out of control enough to require someone else to take care of me. Realizing that makes even the worst of it feel good. Altho I for-sure won't be doing it again anytime soon. damn.

lethargy trumps productivity.

I'm in my poetry class now, and for about the 3rd consecutive time I find myself paying absolutely no attention. But it's worse than that. For the last few weeks, since I dropped my software design class, I've been designing the user interface for a web-based team management site. And in lieu of paying attention in class, i've decided to work on it. But now i'm not even doing that, i'm just sort of looking at it, making changes, and being generally displeased with the appearance of it. Madeline leaves for Brazil today. We haven't spoken in weeks. It's a complicated situation made simple by the fact that now there really isn't much else to do but maintain. Perhaps revisit & rebuild in June, but no sooner. I forget how much hugs mean to me. I need to meet more girls who give good hugs. i'm done.

This is my first tryout of the new document system
I think this will be the new way to take notes in class with any wifi connection
Google is too good.


that is all.

the kitchen says my bread is molded

i'm having a case of the thursdays when I get to my car to drive to work this morning, i notice my left rear door is a bit sticky as I open it. I close & reopen it again, looking to see why it's sticky. Oh, look at that. there's some goop or something on my car door. sticky with white specks. weird. but wait, there's more. there's also a smattering of some of that goop all along the left side of my car, the side facing the street. Is there more of this stuff? I look a little more left and find loads more goop covering my left mirror and frozen dripping down my door. but there's so much of this stuff, it's yellow that's right. someone egged my car. I do a quick csi-themeatic analysis of the evidence and figure there were 3 eggs that hit my car -- one on my back door and two on my mirror. They were done drive-by style: I can tell by the pattern of splashed egg guts. There are some leftover chunks of shell on my hood. And it's all sticky. no biggie. there's no chance i'll find out who did it. and at the very least, some kids actually had fun late night in San Jose. heaven forbid. oh, and then on the way to work i spilled my drink on myself and didn't realize it until i asked myself "why does the underside of my leg feel warm? weird. oh well. ... wait, it shouldn't feel warm, should it? hmm..." crank it to eleven

you're going the wrong way

unfortunately all i seem to ever have time for is the long-story-short stories. Anyways, long story short, this past weekend was spent with Debbie in Redlands, and it was truly amazing. Working today felt a bit weird. It was back to the pre-weekend grind, except with the lingering memory of the weekend. Everyone acted like nothing had happened. Like they didn't know how awesome the weekend was. Well, i mean, they didn't. And it was an enjoyable secret to keep. like the inside joke that you can't help but laugh out loud too but it's too complex to explain. inside jokes rule.

much ado about

nothing. nothing. that's what i'm doing, and that's all i've done today. I've definitely had those moments when i'm just totally unmotivated, but this is going on being a whole day of no motivation. There is a meeting late in the day, which will in theory give me more focused work to do, but until then i'm really just having a no-brain day at work. until then, my thoughts: Google Checkout This doesn't make much sense to me. I don't see how this fits into aggregating the world's data. So really it's just another avenue for revenue. Which could be put to some good use. For instance, what if based on your purchase history, Google was able to recommend things you might like across various online stores instead of closed to a single amazon.com store? Better yet, leverage that Google database and incorporate things you've searched for, emails you've recieved, videos you've watched, etc etc etc. I love and hate this idea. ... hmm. i thought i had more points to make, but i guess not. it's a slow day.

well, i think you're crazy.

My office building has become mostly full. When I began here, the only two people in cubes were myself and some other guy named Jun who I had met at orientation. Now there's only 2 cubes free on the whole floor. When everyone gets excited, it gets pretty loud. So I've finally resorted to listening to music at work. Yeah, I really don't have much to post. I just needed a break from learning. That's right. Learning. I was assigned two projects when I came to VMware, both of which looked like something I had a reasonable amount of technical expertise in. However, this is what's known as Phase 0 of like a 6-phase process (where the second half is betas and release candidates) which is a nice way of saying we don't really know what we're doing yet, but we're trying to figure it out. Unfortunately in figuring it out the project keeps spinning off into realms of technology everyone knows will work great but which I've never used before. So I have to keep learning them, changing my design, and so on. It's odd. Designing software is less thought-intensive than development work. I like it, but I'm begining to miss the ability to actually create a program that does something rather than creating a design that looks like it should do something. But that comes next. Alright. I'mma go get myself a snack or something and try and get back to learning.

all your base-10 are belong to us.

I was thinking of my usual thought process and I came across the newfangled concept that there is no such thing as an absolute fact. Everything known to be certain is really only known based on some underlying context or bias. That old chestnut. An internal conversation ensued. "What about math? Math is always consistant." "Only within consistant axioms. What's 1+1?" "Two" "Why?" "Because that's what it means to add 1 to 1." "That's what it means to you. And to anyone using the standard meanings of both "one" and "plus"" "What?" "Let's say I make my own base-10 numbering scheme except each number is mapped to the name and symbol of the following number. For example, my '4' would be your '3'. Thus, '1' + '1' = '1'. " "That's ridiculous." "Better yet, keep the numbers & symbols, and just change the base. What's 1+1 in base-2? 10." "Base-2?" "Yeah, it's where you only have digits 0 and 1. not 2 or above." "Well that's a strange name." "Why's that strange?" "Because if all you knew was base-2 then you wouldn't have a concept of the number '2' to describe the base" "Interesting" "What do you call normal math?" "Base-10" "There isn't a single digit to describe 10? You use base-10 numbers to describe the base of a base 10 number?" "I suppose." "Why don't you do that for other bases, then, what makes 10 so special?" "Fine, we'll do it for other bases as well." "Good. Now what does that make base-2?" "Base-10."

time = $$

i never used to believe that time equals money. but it's true. i'm at work for x hours. for every hour i'm at work, i gain money. i travel around, and for every hour I travel, i lose money. everytime i eat, i lose money. unless I didn't pay for lunch. really, what I'd like to do is sit down and figure out when i should work, when i should travel, when i should sleep, etc, etc, etc. but the problem is i don't really have enough time. so i do ad-hoc things and i'm probably losing money. case in point: i slept in berkeley sunday and tuesday night. i drove to work. not only did i use gas instead of bart, but i had to pay the $3.00 to use the dumbarton bridge. I also spent $8.00 doing laundry (coin-operated machines are total rip-offs). so i've decided something. I'm not really going to be able to keep all my money. My hands aren't big enough, my grip isn't tight enough to keep it from paying for food, gas, and evil greedy gnomes. so i've decided instead of making this thing a battle between me getting money vs. losing it. it's now become a race to spend my money on fun things faster than i spend it on the needed things. so i bought two t-shirts. (1)(2)

what can I say, i'm a busy guy

that's right. I haven't been posting. I've been busy. "But Chris, the point of the schedule was that, despite being busy, you had a real schedule with real deadlines that you had to meet despite how important you thought what you were doing was" Who said that? Who? That's what I thought. Seriously, nobody has been on my case about writing. Nobody. It's not like you all said "oh yay, more chris writings! I can hardly wait until his next update of carefully arranged words, yum!" No. It seems to me you all laughed to yourself, rolled your eyes, condescendingly wished me good luck, and went back to sleep (behind my back, no less!) Shame, shame on you! You're letting me get away with this. It's people like you who let people like me get away with not writing. You should be ashamed. ok, i gg now, i got stuff to do.

it's late. it's really late. i saw debbie again tonight. it was the third time in two weeks. long story short, i'm the king of mixed signals. it was exactly what i wanted, exactly what i needed, but exactly what i was afraid of. this time after hugging we went back to her room and made out. i was trying not to get involved thinking "she doesn't need this -- she's about to go away again. gahhhh we agreed to keep in touch and have a quasi-open relationship. i know i'm just going to end up waiting for her. and now i get to deal with asking if she's found someone... i don't know. i wasn't cut out for this. she leaves in less than 4 hours. i'm tired. and i can still taste her Dr Pepper kisses and her scent still lingers on my clothes. ok. i'm passing out now.

what a night i spent the evening at debbie's. it was a doubl fature of mean girls and when hrry met sally. in that order. it was good. we definitely spent pleanty of time talking before, during, and after the movis had started. that was really one of the best parts. she really listens to me and cares about what i have to say, and she asks the questions i ned to hear. it was good. the only thing that was better were her hugs at the end. man, does she give strong hugs. i felt so safe and secure there... i hated to leave. but it's 3am and i've got work tomorrow if onlly it were college i probably would have stayed over. sleeping on the floor or whatnot. because damn, i really didn't want it to end. but it had to and so it did.

late for my first post.

oh snap. it's 3:40pm. I swear I was thinking to myself at 1pm, "yay italy winning at futbal, double yay watching tv at work, oh yeah i have to write a post, i will when I get back to my desk." which did happen before 3pm, but unforutnately by the time i got back that thought had been long buried by other, more recent thoughts. anyhoo weekend was good. saturday i played sticks, a game I haven't played in over a year. it was ridiculously fun. then I went to my brother's graduation party, which was really for my parents. As soon as I walked in I was paraded around to say hi to everyone -- old family friends, old family, and people who I don't know but who clearly really know me. By the end, I had a headache, and they ran out of eggrolls. Boo on no eggrolls. I spent practically all of sunday starting, playing, and beating a game known as FutureTactics for PS2 (my brother won a mini PS2 at his all-night on-campus graduation party. you know, the one where they have fun stuff to do all night immediately after graduation to prevent you from going out and finding booze and driving drunk or other fun things.) It was my first turn-based fighting game. And it was the first video game I'd played in a while. It was addicting, but only for a day. one hour late. close enough. "Weighed down with words too over-dramatic"

written on Bart

Hey, hey. okay. what about, i mean, remember that time when you were like "what do you wanna do" and i was like "i wanna write everyday" and you were like "awesome, you should totally do it" and i was all "yeah i totally will" man, we were so baked. I've thought about writing. I really have. On and off for these last few weeks. But I haven't. That's a fact. I've been trying to think of a schedule on which i could regularly update without it making a huge negative impact on my schedule. And I think that's currently just been a stall tactic for me not writing. So here's my new pledge to you, the faithful^* reader. 1. Daily updates to my blogs Monday - Friday by 3pm. I plan on doing this daily after lunch, but sometimes lunches can go pretty late in the afternoon... Also, these will be small nonfiction updates. Don't expect much 2. New writings at midnight on Mondays. By the end of monday night I'll have something new written. It'll be pretty substantial. Like a Dan Brown chapter. 3. Published writings to my blogs every Wednesday. This could just be an extra-long post or it could actually be the thing i wrote for Monday. It depends on what I feel like publishing. So really all you care about is #1 and #3, but it's good to have my personal deadline of #2 written down. I'm hoping I can talk with Olivia or Debbie and get some literary criticism between Monday and Wednesday. That or I might have to tweak the days a bit depending on my schedule/the schedule of my editors. "hey, do you kiss on the first date?"

summer plans

The Downcast I've never really felt in the mood for blogging when I've been at my computer. But I have spent a substantial amount of time away from my computer with the urge to do something more than just travel from place to place. The result is numerous posts to my Downcast blog. (I like the ring of Downcast Podcast as opposed to Downcast Audio Blog. Which will also be more suiting if I ever actually make a Podcast.) The Phone I also got a new phone. A black RAZR. As much as it's better than my phone in about every conceiveable way, it feels much less rugged. But then again a credit card always feels less rugged compared to a 6-inch-diameter steel ball. I've cuztomized it with a ThugMo background and a Code Monkey ringtone. And as much as I think the camera on the phone sucks to my 3-year-old camera, it does mean I always have a camera with me. So I'll probably take pictures more now. The Hair For those who haven't already found out, I cut my hair. That's it. It's short now. Although not that short. It's almost back to the way it was, although it still feels kinda long for the way it was. The only major difference now is that all those months with me combing it back and/or tieing it back have caused it's basic shape to change. My old side-part doesn't stay anymore. Now I have a weird M-shape to my hair if I don't comb it. But I think it looks good. The List There's a lot of things I want to do this summer. There's a lot of things I want to do always. And for some stupid reason I always give work the priority. And since I want to do so much, I end up having a lot of work. Regardless, here's a list of things I could do over the summer. There's no priority here. Hopefully I'll actually do some of them.

1. Read more. Like creative reading. Not always practical reading.
2. Write more. This is a start. But like serious creative writing, not just blogging.
3. CTFO. I gotta stress less. Less stressin' = less depressin'.
4. Get next stable release of Layout Ultimate out. We've just got bugfixes to do with 7v7.
5. Leave prizes in public places. It makes the world more like a videogame.
6. Design a large-scale puzzle adventure. This could take some serious time.
7. Ultimate sometimes. Because it's fun.
8. UGMO site redesign. Make it teh cool.

There's probably more. Oh well.

i think something snapped.

you think that it's a point. a point you reach where suddenly the stress and strain of life is too much. The realization that you have too much to do hits you. And something gives. You freak out, and... i don't know what. I don't know what because it hasn't really happened. Or rather it has happened. Or that i have no idea if it happened or not, but it certainly feels like it must have. i can't seriously work anymore. i've only recently been able to actually hold a clear mental focus for more than 10 minutes. Most of that is due to illness. I've been sick for the last week with what turns out to be a bacterial infection. I had a high fever, and it is to blame for most of what's been messing with my head. You stop walking and ask yourself why you're in the kitchen, and subsequently why you were walking. And then you remember you have to pee and you meant to go to the bathroom, but you walked to the kitchen instead. stupid fevers. but even before then i had no interest in working. The last time i worked furiously was for the code generation project on my compiler. A project which i tested the crap out of, only to discover 3 major flaws a week after the due date, when i worked on the next phase of the project. I think that's what broke my spirit. no matter how hard i worked the work will never be done. i'll just at some point stop working. and if that's my eventual action, why waste time now working when i'll just stop working later? i had two papers due this past tuesday. with the fever, i had absolutely nothing finished come the deadline. the professor called me and gave me a 2 day extension. It wasn't really enough time to do anything well, but it was enough time to get something done. and i did, again with the light at the end of the tunnel being that i could simply stop working again. and whatever grade i got was fine as long as it meant i didn't have to do that work again. and now all that is done. i have 2 finals on wednesday and thursday next week. and i haven't done any work studying for them. and i really really don't want to. dammit.