Okay so this is the inaugural post for my blog. For those of you who may not be familiar with the “blog”, it is short for “weblog”. I’m still not sure if I’m gonna keep using the term on the site because it’s kind of seventh-grade-girl-ish. I might end up going with something more manly like “journal.”  Yeah, that’s much sexier. But that’s irrelevant really. The basic idea is that it’s kind of like a diary that anyone with access to the internet can read.

I don’t know how many people will actually read this with any regularity, but I’ll try to keep it updated for those who do. Plus this will give my website some regularly changing content.  I made this whole blogging script in about four hours, although it’s kind of crude right now.  I didn’t use any high-tech “databases” or “SQL queries” to do this, just PHP and ASCII text files.  Take that, America!  Right now functionality includes the following: print the posts from the last thirty days.  That’s about it.  Eventually I’ll have an archive browser, but I’ve got thirty days before that’ll be needed so I think we’re good.  More immediately important is some means of posting without writing a text file and uploading it.

I’m not sure how much I’ll end up writing here, since I’m normally not the type to share anything of importance with any but my closest of acquaintances, and even then with reluctance. But then again I don’t even know what I’ll talk about here. A lot of my life now revolves around work, and I’m scared to mention anything about work here since I signed an NDA and I’m legally prevented from discussing anything that could be considered a “company secret.” Not that I think anyone is going to read my posts and subsequently overthrow my company, but its best to be safe... I’m also not sure what kind of format this will end up taking.  I’m trying not to copy the design of Garrison’s log too much, but that’s going to be largely unavoidable.  But in my defense, he borrows from Penny-Arcade somewhat... at least that whole italicized-song-quote-at-the-end-of-the-post part...

I suppose that’s enough for a first post.

This is the first post made the “easy way”; that is to say, without requiring an ftp client.  Now I’ll be able to make a post from anywhere with internet access!

So as of nine-something this morning I completed my twenty-third trip around the five billion year old thermonuclear bomb you might refer to as “the sun.”  As usual, I didn’t really feel any different than the day before.  Plus the only people I know in Charlotte are the people I work with, and I didn’t tell anyone there that it was my birthday today.  I already celebrated my birthday with my friends in Raleigh last weekend... Stephanie got me Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind on DVD (great great movie...) and Garrison got me season 1 of Upright Citizen’s Brigade (which is way more hilarious than I remembered it being when it was on the air).  This weekend I’m heading home to celebrate my birthday with my family.

So at work I have this cabinet thing in my cubicle that’s like five feet high with translucent plastic sides (except the door which is opaque).  The plastic sides are made up of kind of a grid.  I decided I’d made that grid into a chess board, so last night I found a chess pieces font and created this chessboard.  Except that image is about one-tenth scale, the original was 300dpi and each image was 2 7/8 inches wide, so the whole board was a 46 megapixel image!  Of course it was a two-color image, so memory-wise it wasn’t too big...  But it took eleven sheets of paper to print it.  Anyway I stayed an hour late after work to put it up (each square had to be individually placed).  I’d like to take a picture of it because it looks super-cool, but I’m pretty sure taking photographs is against workplace policy (I know it was a big no-no at IBM).

Since Garrison explained to me that the italicized quote is kind of how everyone does blog postings, I think I’m gonna start doing it, at least some of the time.

And that’s about the time she walked away from me
Nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three

So it’s the day after Thanksgiving and I actually ventured out to Best Buy this morning.  Not at 6am, mind you, but at 9:30.  Suffice it to say, I won’t try that again in the future.  I was drawn there by the allure of a 160 GB 7200 RPM hard drive with 8MB cache for 29.99 (after rebates).  Now, that’s a pretty good deal, and I think the hard drvie I use for Windows and MP3’s and My Documents stuff is about to go.  The other week I caught it making scraping noises, which is never a good thing to hear from a hard drive.  Somehow I knew deep inside that they would be completely sold out of the hard drives at that deal by the time I got there (and they were probably sold out at like 6:30).  But I made the mistake of going anyway.  Had I stayed, I would have been in line for no less than an hour, probably more like two hours.  The moral of the story is don’t go shopping the day after Thanksgiving.

In other news, yesterday was Thanksgiving which is one of the best holidays because there’s so much food that’s so good.  I think I ate some of everything last night except the squash cassarole (sp?).  Then of course was the traditional thanksgiving football game with my brothers, dad, uncles, and cousins.  All in all a really fun day.

What else do I have to mention from the last week...  I’m in the middle of Metroid Prime 2, about eleven hours into it as of right now.  The whole light world/dark world thing is really cool, very A Link To The Past.  But apparently one of the same guys was involved in the conceptual phase of both games.  I’m not sure if the game is shorter than the last one of if there are just a lot more items to collect, because it seems like I’m collecting them faster than in the last game.  And it seems like some important ones are coming pretty quickly.  Like the light and dark beam, and the dark suit, come fairly early in the game.  The maps don’t seem as big in this game, but there are a lot of really big rooms compared to the first game.  And I guess since there’s a dark version of almost every room the maps are actually pretty big.

Well I think I’m gonna go play the game now that I’ve talked about it for a while.  This is my first post from a computer other than my own, so I get to see how well my scripts work.  If something screws up, it’ll be Sunday before I can fix it.