Yesterday was a very good day, today looks like it isn’t going to be that great. My classes are really good (and small!) so far and my schedule couldn’t be better. Now instead of racing across the huge campus between classes I have leisurely strolls. My classes are at times when I never have to drive through traffic, nor must I wake up unnatuarally early.

I start each day with Human Situation, the liturature class that this semester is focusing on modernity. Then alternately I have either Intermediate Macroeconomics, which should be a breeze, or Ethics. My latest class on Mondays and Wednesdays is Politics of the Greek Theatre, which looks like it is going to be quite good, though challenging.

Still, I am amazed at how disorganized the campus is at the beginning of every semester. Parking could not be worse; the lines trail on longer than at the opening of The Two Towers; most of the important parts of the campus website are down due to the high load (you’d think they could predict when it is coming). All that, and I left my OneCard at home, which means I can’t do a lot of the things I need to do today.

There are still issues with the laptop(s), but that’s too frustrating to talk about right now. My weekend was great—more on that later.

One more day!!!

Several people have said to me, “Matt, you live in Houston and I’m way over in [insert place], and I don’t have any money, so what can I do for you for your birthday?” Well, I’ve thought about it, and recognition is always nice. I spend a lot of time on this site, tweaking things, adding quotes, pictures, and I think overall it’s pretty dandy. Not to mention, nominations for the Bloggies are now open. Now I know what you’re thinking, who is this guy to try and be nominated for a Blogggie. Who am I? Exactly! There’s a category just for people like me called “Best-Kept-Secret Weblog.” It just takes a minute to fill out and it would be a great present to be nominated for something.

If you’re still in a voting mood after that, I can highly recommend checking out PhotoBlogs.org where photoblog sites are ranked like based on voting. For a while I was in the top 50 but lately I’ve fallen completely off the front page, but if you like any of the more than four thousand pictures in the photolog please leave me a positive vote (click the plus icon in the top right). Thank you!

If feel so dirty. Maybe I should do BlogWhore 2 ;).

Well the geniuses at Best Buy think it’s something wrong with the battery, which if so is fortunate because under the extended warranty they just replace the battery. However when they pulled up the information for the extended warranty, it showed up as expiring in 2000. Which, as the guy put it, is “odd because you bought the laptop in 2001.” Indeed. So part of tomorrow will be spent on the phone trying to straighten this out.

That said, I had some excellent chinese food at Hunan River with Josh, Lucas, and Rebecca. I think we had Tso’s chicken, sweet and sour chicken, some noodle stuff (Josh?), and sweet peas and water chestnuts. All quite good.

Finally I’ve got the new business card design ready to go. I’ve shown it to a few people and the responses have all been good, so I’m going to go ahead and print up a batch tomorrow and see how people respond to it in paper form.

I’ve been working with Becca at Kaveh Kanes for a while now, and I feel like a lot has been accomplished. Almost done with a new website, and I haven’t done one from scratch in a while so it’s felt good. Of course now I have to go and take my laptop which they never fixed back to Best Buy. What a drag! Hopefully they’ll be more helpful this time. Laptops are more trouble then they’re worth. Except this one.

I am proud to announce that the vast majority of this site is now XHTML 1.1 compliant. It took some tweaking to get over a weird noscript quirk I didn’t know about, but after that it was smooth sailing. Thank goodness for Pico!

I found this through a AdWord on Google search for “What are we having for lunch?”. Sometimes life is too short.

It looks like today is the 7^th, which means it is a mere 4 days ’till my birthday. I will be turning a healthy 19 years old. At a loss for what to get? I have a wishlist available for those who may be curious.

Now is also a perfect oppurtunity to plug Kymberlie’s neat project I Wish, You Wish which is a collection of bloggers’ birthdays and wishlists, which i think is a pretty nifty idea.

It has been a while, but it seems like my laptop has finally been fixed. Of course, they took just long enough to mess my schedule up, and get totally used to this laptop. The good news is that the old laptop should have all my stuff on it, and it will be nice to get back to the 1600×1200 screen, but I will miss the built-in Wi-Fi on this one. Now it’s time to do the dance of transferring all my stuff over. Since my email is all in IMAP that usually isn’t a problem, but somehow I always seem to accumulate tons of junk all over the hard drive that is important for whatever reason.

I have a really funny story about the Best Buy people fixing it: My mom calls them up today to see if it’s ready, well the guy says they got the pesky power button problem working, but now there’s something else wrong with it. He wasn’t able to log in to my account (good) but he tried to guess the password anyway (Umm, why?). Apparently when he pressed the keys, it would type a different letter than he was pressing. When he pressed “a” or “m” it was fine, but every other letter was wrong.

Sound familiar? As everyone who has ever used my laptop knows, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature . I switched to a Dvorak keyboard layout two years ago and I haven’t looked back since. In addition to allowing me to type faster and more comfortably, it also has (as demonstrated above) a security benefit. (Unless of course you know the secret combination to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)

Aristotle said that excellence is not an act, but a habit. So is blogging. Over the holidays I’ve been away, busy, out, and I’ve fallen out of the habit of sitting down at the computer and writing the things that are important to me. My online time has only diminished somewhat, but my blogging time has diminished a great deal.

What the hiatus lacked in writing, I hope to make up in pictures. I have about five hundred pictures, in various stages of being posted, from the holidays. Once they’re all up I’ll post some highlights.