Chicago

This has been a pretty good day.
My mom's Christmas present was a trip to Chicago to see the Phantom of
the Opera! I've always liked the music, but it's a lot better
watching it live.

Also, thanks to everyone who sent birthday cards/text messages! I had
a good time yesterday spending time with family.

Christmas break

I always enjoy the Christmas season, and it's even better when you can
take time to relax and enjoy the company of family.

Today I was able to spend the day catching up with family that I don't
see very often. I hope that everyone is able to take time to enjoy
those people in your life that are truely important this holiday season.

Vacation

Well... Today's my last day before vacation. We're leaving tonight
after work to go up to south bend and michigan for the holidays.

Happy holidays and safe travel!

Changes

So... quite a bit of change currently in progress, first of all, I am in the process of updating the (badly out of date) website, and as a part of that change, moving to a new web host. 2mhost.com has been good for the past few years, but I've decided to move to nearlyfreespeech.net. Although there's been a lot of changes in the last year (wedding, graduation, new job, moving), the site hasn't really had it's fair share of change, so the goal is to have it updated, moved, and live with all the latest news by the end of the year.

This seems like a fairly good goal, which is on schedule so far, and should work out well assuming that the domain transfer goes smoothly...

It's been a while...

So, yet again, coming back for a long overdue update.

The job is going fairly well, and I'm looking forward to a nice holiday break coming up here in a few weeks, otherwise, there's not a lot going on.

I got to watch the Colts game last night, which turned out to be a pretty bad game (the Ravens didn't have a chance). Even though the game wasn't that good, it was nice to watch. Also, Amy and I did christmas presents early this year (new iphones). They're pretty amazing phones... I've been pretty impressed. They do have their shortcomings (crippled bluetooth and lack of a hard disk mode being the most annoying), but overall they're easy to use, and do just about everything you'd expect.

That's it for now, but hopefully I'll be updating this a little more often now.

Recent events

All around... things have been pretty good lately. Not spectacular by any means, but good.
Last week we went to the local library and got our library cards, so now we've got a good supply of free books and movies! Other than that, last week was actually a bit dull. We spent labor day at Amy's parents house with her family, which was cool, and I got to meet her cousin(I think), so the weekend was much better. So far this week has been ok, but I haven't been sleeping well... I'm sure after a few days like this though I'll have a good nights sleep... I'll definitely be tired!

As far as work goes, I'm still enjoying it, there are times (like when I'm looking through log files) that I don't enjoy, but overall it's been good so far!

Weather

The weather in Indy has been pretty awful for the past week or so, really really hot and muggy, but today it cooled down quite a bit. I'm sure the rain last evening helped. It's still fairly hot, but much nicer than it has been.

Spy Bill

I usually am not too interested in politics, but the recent "Spy Bill" has me interested, simply because I am not sure that such a bill is even constitutional. It seems to me that if it was illegal to spy on US Citizens before, that even if there is a way to pass a bill that allows such action, that bill is probably unethical, and is most likely unconstitutional.

Work

It has taken a few weeks, but I really feel like I'm starting to do some real, useful work now, which makes me even happier about this job. I've felt like it's a good choice from the beginning, but not I am really starting to enjoy what I'm doing. I still wonder sometimes whether this will be something that will last, or if I'll eventually get bored with it, but as for now I love my job and am looking forward to gettting more involved!

change

This past week or two has just been crazy, between graduation, moving, and starting a new job, I've been really busy. It's great though to be done with school, and I love the job so far (although it's only day 2).

HD-DVD

This week has been pretty interesting, especially on digg. It is amazing how much controversy there can be over a single hex-code. It's also really interesting to see the number of hits on google for the code to rise from about 250,000 to about 802,000 in just a few days. Obviously the cease and desist letters didn't work in this case.

link:
http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

College

Well... It's been a while, but I am finally posting again. For those who don't know, this is a pretty crazy time for me, I just finished my last finals this week! Graduation is Saturday, then next week we're making the move to Indy, where I'll be starting my new job.

Anyway, lots of things are changing, and I'm keeping pretty busy. For now I'm just enjoying my time and finishing up work in Muncie.

300

We went to see 300 yesterday, and it was pretty amazing. Even though it wasn't completely historically accurate, it was still one of the best movies I've seen in a while. They did a great job of showing the emotions of men that were born to be soldiers. Not a good movie for kids though... between the nudity and violence. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot though.

Update

So... the wedding went great, almost exactly as planned, and in some ways better. Our honeymoon to San Francisco was a great trip too, and we had a lot of fun sightseeing and relaxing, but now we're back to school. Even though we've got all our normal stuff to do, it's been a much less stressful week with the wedding out of the way. It's been really nice to have time to relax a bit.

All in all, it's been a great 2 weeks.

The Wedding

I'm getting married in about 4 hours. The best part, is that all the planning is over, and now I'm finally free to relax an enjoy myself. Everybody is asking if I'm nervous... but I don't really know why I would be... I mean... this is what I want, so I don't know what there is to be worried about. Anyway, I just got some breakfast, and I'll be leaving in a few minutes to go to the church for pictures, then the wedding, reception, then off to San Francisco for a week.

And to everybody at AU, Have a nice spring break!

sickness...

After about a week of being kinda sick, I finally feel healthy again. Although I'm still feeling a bit tired, that's it, which is a nice change.

So, today was actually a pretty nice day, I was feeling better, it's my sister's birthday, and with the exception of not getting up on time this morning, everything went pretty smoothly.

Good read

I just found a nice political manifesto written by Eric S. Raymond (one of the most well known supporters of open source software). It's a pretty interesting document, which basically lays out his thoughts about the war on terror, both the good and the bad.
I generally agree with his thoughts, and I feel like it is well written, so I thought I'd link to it.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/aim/

It's a bit long, but I think it's a pretty good read...

Snow Day

So, I couldn't go to work today... Blizzard warnings are usually a good reason to stay off the road. Also, for the first time I can remember, Anderson University actually closed. So, instead of work and class like usual, I had donuts with my fiancee, watched x-men, did laundry, and worked on homework... overall far less stressful than usual, which was nice, because I've been needing a break.

Laptop software update

The past couple days I've done some software updates on my computers, namely I updated from Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 on the server, and I installed beryl on the laptop.

This is the process used to upgrade from 6.06-server to 6.10-server:

cd /etc/apt
sudo cp sources.list{,.dapper}
sudo sed -i 's/dapper/edgy/g' sources.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Installing Beryl was even easier, because I used a script:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=338771&highlight=beryl+script

Also, I found good information at another site:
http://www.biodesign.com.ar/blog/?p=25

This week...

This week has been fairly busy, but it's still a lot less busy than the past few have been. Even though I 've got a lot to do for classes, and there's still a lot of details for the wedding, I actually feel a lot more relaxed.

Work, Class, and a Wedding

Second semester has started, and although I have 3 classes there is only one that I really need to put much time into... Which is good because I have 20 hours a week of work, as well as working on finishing details for the wedding in March. Speaking of which, thanks to everyone who has offered congratulations, as well as to those who have been visiting the website. I hope you all enjoy it!