It’s been a little while since I’ve made a post.  A week ago my company had “Make A Difference” day.  It was entirely voluntary, but I participated.  It was kind of like an adopt-a-park thing.. we cleaned up a park.  It was warm out there.  Here is a picture of me carrying a large cutting device.  If I killed someone with that on a CSI episode, it’d be about 40-45 minutes into the show before they would figure out what the murder weapon was.

I also found these articles interesting.  They discuss trends in baby names and their association with economics (Christina was telling me about this last weekend).  I really like how it talks about black girls getting the most unique names, and it says that over two hundred were born with the name “unique” in the 90s.  I can just imagine the parents who did this.  They thought, “I want to give my child a name that is completely unique.  I know, I’ll name her Unique!!  No one else will ever think of that!!”

This Saturday Stephanie and I are getting a puppy!  It’s at my parents’ house right now.  Here’s a picture of Stephanie playing with her.  What Stephanie really wanted was a Norfolk Terrier or a Yorkshire Terrier.  We don’t know for sure what kind of puppy she is, but from looking at a book that has pictures of puppies of every breed of dog, we’re pretty sure that she is predominantly one of those two, which is amazing! :-)

We were thinking about names for her tonight.  I personally suck at naming things.  Last Valentine’s Day I built Stephanie a bear at Build-A-Bear Workshop.  When you’re done building your bear, you go to a computer and enter information, including the name of the bear.  I sat at that machine for at least thirty minutes.  I finally settled on “Mr. Hugs.”  Meanwhile about ten kids came through the computer terminals, thinking of names just fine.  They probably wondered what this old guy was doing just sitting at the computers in Build-A-Bear workshop.  And their parents were probably very unnerved by it too.

Back to the topic of puppy names.  We have narrowed it down to (in no particular order): August, D’arcy, and Pepper.  August because we are getting her in August, and because we started dating and got engaged in August.  D’arcy because: a) it is the name of a member of my favorite band (D’arcy Wretzky, bass player of The Smashing Pumpkins), and b) it is the name of Stephanie’s favorite male character in her favorite book (Mr. D’arcy from Pride And Prejudice).  And Pepper because Stephanie likes the idea of using the name of a spice/herb, and this was our mutual favorite.

To the guy on the quiet motorcycle that gave me the finger after I turned in front of you yesterday:

Next time you’re in the market to buy a death trap, make sure you get a loud one.  The rest of us can’t always see you, even when we look both ways.  Especially when your profile fits behind the trunk of a tree.

Sincerely,
The guy who almost killed you

We’ve got a new puppy!  Her name is August.  I put a set of pictures up on my photos page.  Check them out, she’s super cute. :)

Saturday, as we were bringing August back from Newton, I realized that it was seven years (to the day) since the first concert I went to.  Which got me reminiscing about concerts, and I thought that would be something interesting to put in my blog.  So here are the concerts I’ve been to that stand out the most (in no particular order):

The Smashing Pumpkins - August 6, 1998 - Oven’s Auditorium, Charlotte:  I was sixteen and this was my first concert.  It was cool that we got fourth row seats, even if they were off to a side.  If it had happened today I don’t know if I would have thought it was such an awesome show, since I am not quite as infatuated with any band as much as I was with The Smashing Pumpkins when I was a teenager (and I doubt I ever will be).

The Smashing Pumpkins - May 2, 2000 - War Memorial Auditorium, Greensboro:  I’m mentioning the two Smashing Pumpkins shows first only because they are the first to come to mind.  And no, I didn’t need to dig up my t-shirts to remember when and where these shows were.  This show was better than the other SP show, but we had much worse seats and the ushers were jerks (they told us to sit down--at a rock show!).  They closed the show with my favorite song (Mayonaise).

Our Lady Peace with American Hi-Fi - April(?), 2001 - Cat’s Cradle, Chapel Hill:  This show really stands out in my mind because I had one of those moments where it felt like Raine Maida was speaking directly to me.  It was during “Are You Sad?” actually..  it was during one of those relationship-turning-bad times..

Athenaeum - 2000-2004 - Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Winston-Salem/Charlotte:  We saw Athenaeum dozens of times during college.. those shows will always have a special place in my memories.  If any single show stands out in my mind, it was the one at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem, sometime during Christmas break of 2003-2004 I think.  I believe that was also the bass player’s last show with the band.

Thursday - late July/early August, 2004 - The Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh (I think):  One of the best shows I’ve been to, hands down.  I don’t remember any one thing that made it so great.. there was just lots of energy.  My inability to describe how awesome it was is really downplaying it.. so just trust me, it was awesome.

Blink 182 - ? - Alltel Pavilion, Raleigh:  We saw Blink twice here (or maybe one show was in Charlotte?), once during the “Take Off Your Pants And Jacket” tour, with New Found Glory, Midtown, and Mest; and once during the “MTV Pop Disaster” tour (or something like that), with Green Day and Jimmy Eat World.  Both times they put on great shows.  Definitely the funniest concerts I’ve ever been to.  Nothing beats a giant flaming F-word for pure comedic value.  If you’ve ever heard any of their live CD, you’ll know what I mean.  Unfortunately, New Found Glory was the only one of the other bands with them that was any good.  Not that I don’t like Green Day and Jimmy Eat World.  But I didn’t like either of them live.  And the guy in Mest took off his pants and walked around in his underwear.  That wasn’t so cool.

SR-71 - October, 2002 - Dorton Arena, Raleigh:  Almost forgot one of the best!  This show was at the State Fair, in a pretty small arena.  Everyone was sitting on floor seats, but there were about as many people there as you usually have in a club show, so Mitch very quickly told everyone to just come up closer and stand in front of the stage.  So we had the intimacy of a club with the acoustics of an arena, which worked very well.  It was just SR-71, no crappy opening band to sit through.  You could tell the band was enjoying the show, which made it even better.  I remember Mitch saying it was the longest set they had played in years, I think over two hours long.  If I really had to rank the concerts I’ve been to, I think I might give this one the number one spot.

Jimi Hendrix - August, 1969 - Woodstock, NY:  Just making sure you’re awake.

This has turned into quite a long post.  I’ve been working on it during spare moments at work since yesterday.  If you actually read all of this, congratulations.  Originally I was going to list some concerts that I felt most let down by, but I think I’ll save that for another post.

Ah, nostalgia

Having a puppy is so much fun!  I’m teaching her things!  I’ve never really had a pet that saw me as its provider.  Kind of weird seeing as how I grew up in a house with Snookums, Biscuit, Muffin, Toby, Grace, Ted, Boots, Oreo, and Sniddley.  But all of those animals saw my mom as their provider and me as someone else my mom let sleep there.  Or in the case of the cats, someone besides my mom that they let sleep in their house.

Unrelated topic:  I’m planning on redesigning my site.  I don’t like it now.  It’s too dark and “goth.”  A lot of my graphics were intended to be placeholders but stayed there for a year because I got lazy.  I really came up with the homepage logo and then designed my site to fit that.  Now I’m thinking about a very white, plain design.  And something that uses more of the screen--I don’t like how I restrict my text to such a small space just because someone out there still runs their computer in 640x480.  In fact, the inspiration for my next design will come from this nifty little picture Garrison came up with.  Not that I’m going to rip it off.  It might not even look like it.  It’s just going to be inspired by it.

I’m also considering updating my blog.  I’m thinking about using an actual database (this will require a small amount of learning on my part, which increases the chance that I’ll put it off indefinitely).  I’m also going to make it so Stephanie can make posts too.  I’m thinking of a format similar to Penny-Arcade’s news posts.  And I’ll probably add options to filter just my posts or just Steph’s posts.  And I wanna do one of those calendar views of posts.  I think that’d be useful.

Some interesting things I came across when looking at my site’s stats.  No one goes to most of my pages.. so I’m going to take a lot of them down.  Interestingly enough, Yahoo! will send you here if you search for “ssbm3” or “super smash brothers melee tournaments” apparently.  Those two search queries were my top two referring pages.  Although when I just tried them, I couldn’t find myself in the first eight pages of either (sidenote:  I think that was my first non-Google internet search in about four years).

My AIM-Profile blog view is apparently one of the more popular ways of reading my blog (I’m KipTheGreat on AIM, in case you didn’t know).  So I might update that a little bit.  But there’s really not too much updating to do there.

I never planned to fade... away

I just watched Say Anything (the first of several movies in my queue that I’d label “classic teen movies I’ve never seen”).  I really liked it, but it made me end up feeling depressed, even though it ends up happy (if I just ruined the ending for you.. you should have watched it sixteen years ago).  It’s really because it made me think about how that 18-20 part of your life is so short and confusing and once it’s gone it’s gone.  And throughout a lot of the movie I was thinking about the lyrics to the Good Charlotte song “Say Anything,” a title which may or may not have been inspired by the movie, but the lyrics could have so easily been the voice of John Cusak’s character in the movie.  Anyway I guess I’m done with my comments on the movie.  I’m not sure if anyone else enjoys reading these types of posts..

Please don’t walk away,
I know you wanna stay
If you just give me a sign
Say anything, say anything

Garrison was talking to me about 3d modeling and how he needed to build a portfolio.  “I’ve got you covered,” I told him, “they’ll never know.”

Well I haven’t posted in a while, and I don’t really have much to talk about.  So I decided I’d comment on something that most of you won’t care about (I used to think only about two people read my blog but apparently there are more because I’ll get an occasional IM commenting on something I said right here).

So what I’m discussing today is that I have recently changed my coding style on if-blocks.  This is how I used to do it:

  if (condition) {
    statement;
    statement;
  }
  else {
    statement;
    statement;
  }

After maintaining enough code written that way, I’ve decided that the following format is much easier for the person who comes back and has to decipher your code:

  if (condition)
  {
    statement;
    statement;
  }
  else
  {
    statement;
    statement;
  }

PS:  I hate it when people use tabs instead of spaces to indent their code.

This is funny.