This is crazy: I swear just minutes ago I had my books, my three Ethics books and Arabian Nights for Human Situation. Yet when I just opened my backpack they aren’t there, even while my laptop, palm, camera, and various other electronics are. I may have left the Ethics books in my car, but I had Arabian Nights for class this morning, and I haven’t been that many places since then.

If you see an art magazine called “Consortium” pick up a copy because I wrote a short review for this first issue. I haven’t seen it yet myself, but the launch party is tonight so hopefully I’ll get a good look at it then. I’m very excited!

I’m so happy that I found a version of Blogtimes written in PHP and designed for b2. This comes courtesy of Sanjay’s Coding Tips, a very interesting site that I’m going to keep visiting. For those of you wondering what this is, it is a post of what time of the day I blog using data from the last thirty days. As you can see I’m not a morning person.

The font was Perpetua, and it is now the more playful “Chronicles of a Hero” from BlamBot. Now I am tempted to go back to the tasty serif Apollo, which as reviewed by Jon Coltz has me salivating. In fact all of the fonts he reviews are outstanding. I must visit there more often.

I was listening to Nas’ new album the other day and this stood out:

Pre-trial hearin is over, it’s real for the soldier
Walks in the courtroom, the look in his eyes is wild
Triple-homicide, I sit in the back aisle
I wanna crack a smile when I see him
Throw up a fist for black power, cause all we want is his freedom
He grabbed a court officer’s gun and started squeezin
Then he grabbed the judge, screams out — nobody leavin everybody get down!

For some reason it really reminded my of Eldred vs. Ashcroft and the whole Free the Mouse campaign. That is all.

If you haven’t checked it out, there’s a new (to me) service called GeoURL which allows you to put GPS coordinate meta-tags on your webpage and it will tell you who your website neighbors are. I’ve had it on my sidebar for a little while though, but I’m never sure if anyone looks at that.

A neat trick for finding out your latitude and longitude if you don’t have a GPS is to map your address on Yahoo Maps and zoom in all the way. Then in the address bar you should see your exact coordinates, or at least as close as the mapping system has you. There, now you have no excuse not to go add yourself.

Currently putting the final touches on two new websites, which I hope to link to here soon. One is for a single musician, the other is for a awards ceremony for a large organization, and I find the dichotomy enjoyable. For some reason when I work on projects in twos it keeps me balanced, from the manner in which the client is dealt with to the artistic freedom each project allows. One is usually a little on either side, and in the middle is me. I seem to do this with a lot of things in life.

The next two projects are lined up already, one for another musician, this time a lovely vocalist, and the other is going to be a national resource for Catholic educators teaching about the Holocaust. Links to come when they’re ready.

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.

I hope everyone had as nice as a holiday as I did. It feels good to be back though.

About two years ago I went and picked out a new frame to go with my new prescription. I wandered all over the store, but the ones that caught my eye (so to speak) were, in hindsight, terrible for me. I have an ovular face, and these were skinny and rectangular. The color was a deep brown, I put them on and felt a little taller, and things looked a little sharper, despite the fact that the prescription wasn’t in them yet. The design was fairly basic, but they had a brand name on them (I think Polo) so they were hideously overpriced. My judgment was influenced by Antitrust, a movie where the handsome main character, Milo, had dark glasses much like these.

Once the lenses came in I wore them to school, and the reactions were mixed, to say the least. Even the same people seemed to vary their opinions throughout the course of the day. It was different yes, but I don’t seem to remember it being that big of a deal. As my love goggles began to fade, I started to see why. They were skinny, and the way they sat on my “Roman” nose made them tilt oddly. One of my best friends summed it up later is that with the old glasses I looked like a doctor and with the new ones I looked like a lawyer. How should that be taken? I still don’t know. I’ve seen Ally McBeal, there are attractive lawyers. I’ve met some nice lawyers. But does it have an implication of moral tinge? When someone says you look like a lawyer in high school, it makes you think.

Anyway my mind wandered down this path today in the glasses shop by my house. I stopped in to get a “tune-up” on my current old glasses. They’ve been bent a little funny, thanks to me sitting on them a few times; the nose-pads needed to be replaced; the screw on the left was about to come out. The prescription is a little old, but that’s to be fixed later. The dark rims were there, and they called out to me. I flirted with them, tried on a pair or two, and laughed at the mirror at someone I had forgotten.

Don’t you hate it when you’re working on a really nice post through the web interface and you lose it? Bah humbug!