plicease

i can vote now.

getting into debt was a mistake (It’s not always, sometimes you do it for a worthy cause, but in my case I did not). It took me about a year to pay everything off once I decided that I was going to do it, and I’m be much more careful about living beyond my means from now on.

Uh… ego surfing.

I have been on several extended road trips. If you connect the different sections on which I have taken road trips, then I have driven from Bangore Maine, all the way to LA, California. I am looking forward to going back to the states and filling in some of the states I missed on the first time.

When the land lord cut out free cable to my place, I made a conscious decision not to pay for it myself, and all I could get over the air was a staticky version of The Religion Channel. The cable company threatened and threatened, and finally… after about a year… they turned off my cable. I’ve been free ever since. Actually I do sometimes watch TV, but in moderation.

I wrote a story about a grasshopper once. It’s true.

I went to church once. Since I don’t usually go to church, this counts as having gone more often (at one time).

2 is still my fave. I was sad when Spock died, but happily death is never a certain thing in Star Trek.

technically I haven’t seen every episode of TAS, but they are often not considered cannon anyway. I heard they may finally be coming out on DVD, so this may change in the future.

People are who they are and it isn’t worth wanting them to be something else.

This is sort of the task that never finishes, but since moving to Sydney, I haven’t bought a car to replace the one I sold in America, and I’ve slimmed down my possessions a lot in the process of moving.

I signed the lease on Friday, I move in on Tuesday!

I put a deposit down for an apartment in Artarmon. Assuming my references check out, I will be moving to the new DacCave in early July.

I like my iPod, it holds nearly my entire CD collection, plus other music that I have acquired (legally) since I stopped buying CDs. It’s not very reliable though. A few months after I bought it, it stopped working in one of the ear buds. Yes, I tried different ear phones, it was the iPod, not the earphones. I sent the iPod back to apple, and they sent it back to me saying that it worked to specification. I tried to talk to Apple technical support, but they wouldn’t do it without me paying for the extended warrantee. Once I paid, the best the guy on the phone could do is “send it to apple and we will fix it.” I wasn’t so sure this would accomplish anything, but I had nothing to loose. This time Apple actually fixed the problem and I was happy… for about a year.

Last February, my iPod locked up and was unable to find any of the music I had stored on it. Looking at the iPod like a hard drive, I could see that the music was still there in hidden .mp3 files, but the configuration file appeared to have been corrupted. I was able to retrieve the music and reformat the iPod (Apple calls this “initializing” – be careful because “initializing” is a destructive process), then copy all my music back onto the iPod. This is a time consuming process, and a huge hassle. I was happy again, for a while, but it’s locked up again, and I am not sure if it is worth fighting my iPod anymore.

The photography classes I took were the best of my formal education. I enjoyed being around others who are passionate about photography, and developed a real appreciation for photography as an art form.

I’m pretty close, and I have plans to visit Perth and Tasmania in the near future.

This is harder to do now that I live in Australia, but I am planning on making several return trips to the states. I’d like to spend some time in the South next time I travel up that for north, because I’ve never been there.

For me, perl started out as this programming language that I didn’t like because someone I didn’t respect liked it (I realize this isn’t a very good reason). I had a boss in my summer-job days who liked perl though, so I was forced to use it long enough to realize its power, and now I sometimes joke that English is a second language to my first language: perl (yes, I am a computer dork).

HTML is a dysfunctional, poorly evolved markup language. My pet peeve is when people call it a programming language, which it isn’t. Its popularity has led to the use of ugly standards, such as XML. Still it is the most broadly supported way to communicate content on the Internet, so it’s a good thing to know.

I’ve started by developing a budget. Unfortunately I just moved to Sydney from the states and I don’t yet have an intuitive sense about how much it is going to cost me to live here. So it is an evolving budget.