Monthly Archives: July 2009

Heading To Urbana: The "I've Lost Count" Edition

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I’m heading back to Urbana for a couple days (most likely about two weeks) to tie up some loose ends. My lease ends on August 5th, so I’ll have a place to stay until then. It was the plan all along since I couldn’t fit everything in my car. As we all know, that DDR pad is important to me.

The blog has fallen quiet over the last couple of days, so here’s a quick rundown.

Over the weekend was Gamecation, a two day event, featuring games, more games, and… Snowbawls. I somehow found out about Gamecation as I started looking around for an indie video game store called Game Junkie, only to realize that it had closed down a year ago. It was the crew that ran Game Junkie that put together the shindig, and it was a blast. This definitely ate the better part of the weekend.

I also picked up a little freelancing gig around mid-week last week, finishing up a site on web accessibility. The interesting part about this project was that the developer for the site was blind. I had to help in making sure that the site looked properly, as well as behaved properly for screen readers. Definitely a new experience, not only in manipulating the code, but also in reading some of the content.

So that’s that. I’m looking forward to yet another rousing day tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll be packing up in the morning and making it into town just before the gym closes on campus. You see, I have some goals I’d like to meet by the end of my stay at Urbana, and it’s not necessarily just business goals.

  • Boot Camp: Gym. For the next two weeks, I will be spending some quality time at the gym. Protein intake doubled, lifting time also doubled. I wonder if I’ll end up puking sometime in the near future.
  • Boot Camp: Code. My Ruby skills are not where I want them. (And yes, I just said Ruby, and not Objective-C… I’ll blog about this later.) As I continue with the first internal project via HanMeta, I’m sure my skillset with grow with it.
  • Blogging: Meh. Everyone talks about how much they should blog. I won’t. I’ll just keep going at the pace I’m going.
  • Guitar: I’ve missed it so, ever since I couldn’t fit it into my car on the trip to Cincinnati. I already have another electric guitar player and a bassist… Just need to find that magical drummer, and I’m ready to go on the world tour.

Ah goals. Let’s see what I make of this list this time.

Ctrl: A Refreshing Online Comedy Series By NBC

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Randomly going through the Popular Episode list on Hulu, I found this little gem.

It’s called Ctrl. If you’ve seen anything with Tony Hale in it, you’re going to want to see it. It’s just very surprising that I haven’t heard about it yet, seeing how awesome it is. This is actually why I’m posting it, because at least now, someone that I know would have talked about it.

Oh, and consider watching another show called Better Off Ted, with yet another Arrested Development alumni, Portia de Rossi. It’s like the Office, but funny. ;-)

Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes

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Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes

If you’re extremely thorough (anally-retentive) like me, your iTunes library is probably in pristine shape. And if you happened to have spent a couple of weeks downloading the entire catalog of a certain dead composer, you may need to clean up the ID3 tags a bit to fit your needs. About 15 GB of rar files.

At such an epic proportion, I couldn’t help myself but to seek a better solution to my problem.

Here’s a link to just a few of the tools I found extremely useful.

There are plenty more on that Top 100 download list which I’ve been messing around with. Hit up the comments if you find anything more useful.

New Category: Roadblocks

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Starting today, I will write about the roadblocks that are standing in the way of being awesome instead.

I hope that by bringing out these fears and face them in this public setting I will realize a couple of things, including:

  • What is actually standing in the way?

    • Okay, what part of me is it this time?
    • Is it really a roadblock, or am I just making it up?

  • Is it just me?

    • How commonly do other people struggle in the same way as I do?

  • How will I solve it?

    • Can this solution help others?

I’m hoping that I’ll keep this category grounded with actual examples. Let me know how I’m doing when I post on the subject.

Seeing Things To Completion

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In the course of writing and finishing this blog post, I hope to have not switched out of this window.

All too often I’ve left things undone, because of my tendency to try and be as efficient as possible. Because of this, I keep attaching myself to something newer and awesomer.

This, and a whole slew of other reasons, make up the litany that are my excuses for not getting anything done.

Today, I’m trying something different. Blogging a lot more often is one thing, but I want to make some headway into a project.

So here is the first of many posts today. This is also a nice way to check to see if my feeds aren’t screwed up. I have this feeling I’m going to be parting ways with feedburner sooner than later.

Quick Update

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Because of the worsening wrist/forearm problem, I purchased an even crazier ergonomic keyboard. The first one that I got turned out to be a bit of a lemon, so I had to send it back and get another. It’s scheduled to come in tomorrow, and I’ll be situated properly here in the basement.

Yes, the basement. Pics or it didn’t happen, I know.

I’ve been putting off the building of the desk due to the unclear situation about where I’m going to end up in about a month. Seeing how I still have a little corner of Urbana rented out to me in apartment form for that time, I really haven’t moved anywhere.

Turns out, with some interesting movement of funds (long story: finding out how to borrow money from Dad’s 401(k) and paying off that loan monthly while using the borrowed money to increase the down payment in the mortgage to get rid of the PMI and maybe even refinance the house at a lower price, as well as adding a less than entire sum of my remaining runway) I’m still able to move to a new city with a little bit left of leeway. I’ve decided a couple days ago to not do this, at least… not until I find a job or finish a project.

In summary: I’ll be in Cincinnati for the next couple of months. This isn’t to say that I will not be traveling. I will have to visit Urbana, IL in about a week to pack up and really say good-bye. I will probably be returning again for a music festival and to meet up with the few people that I know in town.

It looks like almost everything has been moved properly off of Slicehost and onto NearlyFreeSpeech. The daily posts have been not so frequent, and here’s to changing that somewhat.

And that’s my update. Do leave a comment if you notice something awry with the blog, and I’ll try to fix it.

Here comes another long night. Good thing I have a TV with Conan on in about 30 minutes.