Words fail to describe how lucky a person I am.

I’m in Valencia. Clare is right…… here… actually she’s right over there, ——->

She wants to say hi, hang on a sec, here she is.

“hi!!!”

Apparently that’s all she has to say. Though she swears she’s enjoying herself here. She’s awesome.

Anyway. We just finished watching The Day After Tomorrow. Er… Lance… Wtf? I… uhh. Yeah. It’s one of those movies that makes you sit back and wonder – “Just what is the speed of cold, anyway?”

We did just watch The Color of Paradise, though. It’s a good flick. Here’s Clare’s take on it:

“uhmmmguhph.”

Actually, she says she might have more to say later. I guess you’ll just have to ask her yourself.

Oh! So yeah. We’re driving from Whulian to Valencia right? Yeah. And it seems like the ride is a little more bumpy than I recall. Well. See. It turns out that my tire had a big gaping hole in the top layer, and the top layer was starting to come off. Two and a half hours and seventy bucks later, we were on our way again. The trip took 6 hours when you factor in the sitting around time. Wheee. It was alright though. The company was pretty good.

So I got an iPod for Christmas from my dad! It’s pretty freaking cool. 40 gigs. I think I’ll have to get an FM transmitter for it, so I can use it as a stereo in my car on long trips.

Anyway, that’s all for now, I guess I’ll add more later… I still have some stuff to write about from Christmas! Yeah.

For future reference, the following movie is the one that I can’t stand cuz its terrible: “Disturbing Behavior”

edit: fixed the link. Oh yeah, this one sucks too: “The Night We Never Met” and :oP Mollie.

whoa.

Craziest. Night. EvAr.

Clare’s Work -> Left Clare’s House @ six -> Mt. Helix -> INO -> Hotel Del -> Mission Beach -> Clare’s house @ midnight

Ok… where was I…

Ah yes. A good book. So I started on Illusions, by Richard Bach, and finished 90% of it that night, with just a few more pages to read the next morning. Fabulous book. It kind of reminded me of what I used to believe… the basic idea is that it’s a novel about a philosophy, almost. If you’ve studied philosophy, you’re probably familiar with Plato’s philosophy of the cave. The book is based on that idea, with a twist – rather than the cave being the creation of some outside force, we create our own “cave”. The book follows a pair of characters, one is the next Messiah, who has discovered that the idea of mortal reality is only what you want it to be. The other is a ‘potential Messiah’, a guy who could learn the truth, and have the power to tell others that God merely wants us to be happy, in whatever way we can be.

At any rate, its a good book. I’m going to reread it fairly soon, I think. After finishing that book the morning after starting it, I had the most fantabulous day. It was just like everything was going great, and the day was beautiful. I finished my Christmas shopping, drove to Lakeside to drop some stuff off, and on the way there every song on the radio was just awesome. I dunno, it sounds dumb, but it made me happy.

Speaking of Christmas shopping that day… I bought Lance a couple Gameboy Advance games for his Nintendo DS (since the DS’ launch titles aren’t much to write home about). I picked up Advance Wars, used and Fire Emblem, new. Well… at least I thought I did. Turns out, christmas morning when Lance opened up Fire Emblem, it was just the box – no game. Apparently the guy behind the counter at Gamestop sold me the display box. And since Bri and Kyle were feeling slightly cleaning-nazi-esque, there was no chance in finding the reciept which was still sitting in the original bag. Thankfully, when I did go into Gamestop the day after Christmas, the guy behind the counter was pretty forgiving. He checked the shelf and saw that the display box was missing, checked the computer and saw that they had sold one copy on Thursday, then checked behind the counter and saw that they had one more copy than they should. Not bad.

Speaking of Christmas presents, though. I couldn’t decide what to get Melanie, so I got her a $40 to Kohl’s. Now, that seemed a little too bland, so to liven things up, I took another plastic card out of my wallet (a PetCo card) and cut it up into tiny slithers, then wadded it up with some tape, and put it at the bottom of a gift bag with some confetti stuff. Then I taped the actual gift card to the bottom of the bag, on the underside. The result was pretty amusing. Bri got me a cool Altoids tin, which was very thoughtful of her, and appreciated… except that the three flavors of altoids it came with were Ginger (gag), Cinnamon (choke), and Spearmint (insta-migraine). :o/ I was just glad she got me something, really. I ended up giving Eireann the tin, maybe she’ll like it.

And what did I get for Christmas, you ask? Oh… Not much. Just a most excellent Ruby Red Acoustic/Electric Ovation Celebrity, with preamp and cool guy builtin digital tuner. Complete with gig bag, stand, music books (DMB and Lynyrd Skynyrd), and spiffy guitar strap that they chose because it ‘matched my tatoo’. Heh. Yeah. It was awesome. I didn’t really get much besides this stuff (which is perfectly ok with me), and so as I was opening presents, I kept opening guitar stuff, but no guitar. Til finally all the presents were unwrapped, and I was beginning to think that perhaps my dad had the guitar at his house, and my Mills family had just gotten me all the accessories. Then Bri started pushing me to unwrap the coffee table. See, the night before they had gotten a bit on the loopy side with Christmas present wrapping… and decided to wrap the coffee table. Apparently this had some significance with a certain holiday commercial – I didn’t get it, as I don’t watch TV. Well, I was feeling lazy, so I didn’t want to go unwrap the coffee table and besides there was no where to put it but where it already was, but Bri kept insisting. At that point I realized where my guitar was. They had taped the box it came in to the underside of the coffee table. So upon unwrapping it, I found my new guitar. Pretty funny. The rest of the day was rather uneventful… we went to my step-grandma’s house, and hung out there for a while. I had Chevy with me, whom everyone adored and she adored in return… but she wasn’t terribly impressed with my aunt’s poodle-type dogs.

From there, Chevy and I went to visit Tom and family, but Tom ended up leaving so I got to spend time with Angela, whom I hadn’t seen in a forever. So that was good.

Alright, its totally 2:30 in the morning, and I think my psuedo-insomnia is going away now, so I’ll finish this off for tonight, and add more tomorrow

Ok…. soo…. updates n stuff. Lotsa interes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstuff has happened since my last update!

For instance, I finally had my bake-a-thon! It turned out pretty well, overall. I didn’t get to make all the recipes I’d brought, but thats alright, the stuff we made turned out alright. We started off with the uber-moist chocolate/peanut butter -chip cookies, which weren’t supposed to spread much. Well, turns out they do. A lot. So the first batch ended up as two huge (well, cookie sheet sized) cookies, with burnt edges. The next couple batches turned out good, though still not quite as soft as I would have liked…. guess they just cooked too long. Then we started up the Ultimate Cheesecake, which turned out a little too soft, but still tasted quite good… Timmay took the whole thing home (minus about a slice). Then we started the Cinnamon Apple Crisps, which we were afraid weren’t being made right, but actually turned out excellent… close to perfection, I’d say.

Then it was onto the main course – Fajitas! I was quite proud of the fajitas… and surprised we were able to feed as many people as we did. I had planned on five – Clare’s family plus me – and we ended up with those five, and what seemed like almost another five, though I can only recall David, Heather, and Tres, so I’m probably quite wrong. Anyway, the cooking turned out to be a success, and Clare’s mom seemed impressed, which made me happy. Then we watched movies… Benny and Joon, and Almost Famous, the director’s cut. Good movies. Still didn’t get to watch Memento. Good times anyway, though. After the movies, Clare, David and I just sorta hung out in the living room, with David playing a bit of guitar. Then after a while he left, and Clare and I just sort of wound up laying down talking on the floor in the living room for a few hours. Well, it was probably mostly me just babbling, but thats ok. Then the next morning we went and hiked up to this nice view in Julian that she called Upper Meadow. It was a good hike up and back over barbed wire and fallen trees and stuff…. and abandoned mines we didn’t get to explore. Then she went to tea, and then she came back and gave me my Christmas present. Two books, one of which I finished in almost one night and was very excellent, the other I haven’t had a chance to start yet. I got her a rose made out of Legos, and something else, which she hasn’t received yet.

I think that’s all for tonight… I’ll update some more about other stuff tomorrow. I should never be allowed to drink coffee when I’m tired… it just makes me more tired.

In the meantime, I’ll be pondering about implementing a color-selector in CGI, using perl, CSS, and maybe a splash of Javascript for a couple of fancy frills. I think its possible… I just need to ponder it to figure out the best way to do it.

Merry Christmas/Yule all!

I’ve got an entry coming up later on, probably tonight. So stay tuned, and enjoy your holidays and associated goodies.

The extent of my Christmas spirit to be expressed on this journal:

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus < north pole > town

cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty > nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice > giftlist
santa claus < north pole > town

who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good
}

If any of that made sense to you, kudos, if not, well, I can explain ;o)

/me waves his bullshit flag

So I’m taking my Javascript midterm. No problems. Easy as pie. Talking to Clare online at the same time. then I get to one question on the exam.

“The date object begins on…?”

The two (well, the two most logical of the four) possible answers are January 1st, 1970, and current (local) time

The arguments are these

If you just have these lines in your actual code:

var myTime; //initialize an empty variable
myTime = new Date(); //this fills our empty variable with the default of "Date()"

The contents of “myTime” would be the current time, whenever it is run.

the 1970 bit, on the other hand, is a reference to the way computers in general store time.. that is, they store it as a big ass number. Usually the number of seconds (though sometimes its milliseconds) since January first, 1970. Then whenever the computer is supposed to display the date, it simply does the math. Right now, the date in seconds is: “1103165492” So you’d take that, divide by 60 (seconds in a minute), then divide by 60 (minutes/hour), then divide by 24 (hours/minute), then by 365.4 (days/year) and you get “34.942….” which means 34 years (and some change, almost 35 years) since the epoch – January 1st, 1970.

So, it’s a frame of reference. Like most programming languages, the “Date()” function of JavaScript starts at the beginning of the “epoch”, January 1st, 1970.

So at first I chose the 1970 answer. Being a full on nerd, this answer made the most sense. But then I second guessed myself, and said “well, it does output the actual date…” and picked “current time” – which happened to be wrong.

Long story short, I think the question should have been worded a little differently. So here I wave my bullshit flag, with my 24/25. But hey, at least I’m all done with JS.

You are a Maine Coon! You are larger than life, a
gentle giant. You are independent, but very
affectionate with your friends and family.

What breed of cat are you?
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