111708

Yup. It started snowing yesterday. It isn't the first snow of the season, however. It's just the first snow that gave real ground cover and required me to scrape off my car the next morning. I'm so giddy. I love the snow. Sure, the cold is shitty, but who cares? You can bundle up!

Remember that mid to late 90s show on MTV "Daria?" I've started watching it on YouTube. I've watched all 5 seasons over the past 3 days. It's such a funny show. I miss it. The only thing I have left to watch for it is the second movie, "Is It College Yet?"

Speaking of college, I've officially been accepted into Ferris State University for Graphic Design! I'm so excited! I can't wait to see what lies in front of me. I love playing around with graphics programs; as an added bonus, the program at Ferris also teaches web-design using Dream Weaver. Not that I actually like to use DW, I find it frightfully difficult. I'm a hardcore notepad coder for websites. I just hope I'll be happy with this as my career path. I'm worried that I'll get to FSU after having just spent a ton of money, and ending up hating the damn thing. Or, even if I love it, what if I graduate and end up failing in the real world? I know there aren't any jobs in Michigan for graphics, but it was never my goal to stay here anyway. So even if I leave, I can still fall flat on my face. I'm so scared. When I think about the possibilities, my stomach drops. It sucks. I'm so damn happy, and yet so terrified at the same time. I think I have confidence issues.

I've been toying with the idea of moving this blog to another site and renaming it, using Flytrap Productions as an on line portfolio. I have no clue in what direction to approach the task of building the portfolio. I mean, it took me like, 3 months just to build my blog into what it is right now, and that's with the basic structure already having been laid out from its previous state. Ugh.

111108

Well, my cousin has stage 4 lung cancer, and it's metastasizing. Not too good. No. Definitely not too good. One of his lungs is completely collapsed. But I won't dwell on such things. I want to be happy.

Yeah... so not much else is going on. I've been tempted to start playing my Xbox again. I was thinking of starting up again with Shenmue 2. I don't know why, I just felt like it a few days ago and I've been wanting to since. I don't know why I don't just sit down and play it.

I have a theory as to why the Asians are better than us at math. Sure, it probably has something to do with their educational funding, but I think it might also have to do with the fact that they still teach the abacus. Yes- I think they are superior because of the abacus.

But why? Well, because if you know the abacus well enough, you can build a model of it in your head and do the math on your mental abacus because it provides a tangible process for arithmetic that calculators can't. As a result, calculator-emphasizing countries resort to memorizing multiplication tables, and that doesn't work too well, in my opinion. Why teach content when you can teach process? They don't teach the meaning of every word in the dictionary, do they? No. They teach how to get to the word your looking for, the process of finding the information. If we were to teach the abacus, we'd be teaching no-paper required algorithms for multiplication and division, so that the pupil can do math in their head.

But enough of that. I have homework to do.

110608

Also, I have to wonder why some people are better at introspection than others. Is it nature or nurture? If you're forced to write daily, like the kid was in Butterfly Effect, will you be better at considering personal thought and verbalizing it in the future? Or is it more along the lines of either you are or aren't, and that's it. It makes me wonder if that's why I have problems with my blog.

I'm having problems maintaining a constant update schedule, and even when I do update, it isn't so much about me, but what I'm doing. And yet, it still isn't me. It isn't my emotions or thoughts. It's just like "Here I am. Here's what I'm doing." No internal commentary what so ever.

So, what am I going to do about it? I'm going to start telling you more about myself. Starting with demon #1.

I'm gay. I haven't told a whole lot of people yet. Just some friends. I haven't told my current college classmates or my parents yet.

Actually, the only person in my family I told yet is my sister, and I think the only reason I'm telling you guys is because "you guys" don't exist in my reality. You're a faceless audience. I'm still trying to figure out the safety rating on telling my classmates, particularly in biology.

That's all the delving for now. Check back later, maybe I'll post a RSS/Atom feed.

103108

I garnered myself a Flickr account where I will be uploading my photography. I haven't abandoned my deviantart; I'll just be uploading to both flickr and deviantart. Flickr, however, will be strictly my photography.

And for all you who care, yes- school is going fine.

Happy Halloween.

090708

I'm never going to learn PHP, so forget it. I'll learn it later in life, but not any time soon. However, I do have a plan that enacts what I consider a web-design sin. This would be implementing framesets. On that note, I've been having issues implementing the new layout.

So, because of this, I've designed a new layout that will require more drastic redesign, and a very possible sin. The drastic change will be a switch from a line length of 72 characters and a content width of 578px to 95 characters a content width of 770px. The design itself abides by the golden ratio. If you don't know what that is, do some research.

Now about this "sinning" I've been slinging around. Like I said before, I'm not going to be learning PHP for quite some time. So instead of creating a structured content delivery system, I will be continuing to update multiple pages of content individually. However, these pages will be far less bloated because they will be stripped of most of the layout content and placed into frames on a page that contains all of the layout information. All without using PHP. There is a possibility that I can avoid using framesets, but its very slim and requires verification of what I think SHTML is (and then figuring out if what I'm trying to do is doable with it).

I really want to learn flash so I can fuck all of this annoying layout bs, and maintain what I'm trying to do. But we all know that's never going to happen, so don't expect anything.

In reality news- college started! WOO! As a result, I've found a wonderful new obsession- calendar software.

I initially downloaded it so that I could set up a class schedule for myself, and I immediately fell in love with it. I was using Mozilla Sunbird. But then I found out that I didn't need it and instead could install an extension into Mozilla Thunderbird so that it acted as a Thunderbird/Sunbird hybrid. So I uninstalled Sunbird and now am using the Lightening extension with Thunderbird. I'm happy. I never knew how nice it could feel being organized. I have all of the categories color-coded. I think I might be going crazy, but it doesn't matter because I'm enjoying myself.

Classes are looking good so far. I know nobody in any of them, which I'm finding quite annoying, but not totally unexpected. So far I've had Speech, Biology, and Psychology. All I have left to attend is English, which will be taking place this Monday.

I went to Wal*Mart yesterday and had no fun whatsoever. Now I know why my mother hates that place. I spent like, 10 minutes looking around for the school supplies, and there was nary an employee in sight for me to ask where the hell I should be looking. When I finally did find the supplies, all but one of the 1" diameter 3-ring binders were sold out. The one remaining being the 93¢ variety that will probably fall apart mid-year. I bought it anyway. I also bought one of those half-gallon water bottles that look like those jugs they have on office water coolers with the sports-top. I'll be using that for tea. I loves me my tea. It's going to look a little odd though, me carrying around a jug filled with a brown fluid. I don't care. If I'm going to be healthy, why not be healthy in conspicuous half-gallon quantities? I don't see any reason why not. I also bought a 4-pack of mocha StarBucks cappuccinos (in the glass bottles) and a tub of Bryers cookies and cream Oreo icecream. I needed to get rid of a gift card I had gotten for graduation, so why not?

So I have a hobby now. That hobby is photography. It sucks, though, because we have a film SLR camera. Yeah. A film camera. That means its an expensive hobby. But at least we have a nice camera.

Film isn't too expensive. It's like $7 for 5 rolls. What is expensive is developing the film. It's like $7 per roll you want developed. Oh, what I wouldn't give for a digital SLR camera. I need a job.

So, over labor day weekend, I went back up north with Alyssa, her uncle Rodger, and her aunt Linda. We had the same goal in mind as last year- to walk across the Mackinac Bridge. This time, we actually did! Hurrah! It took us about an hour to cross. Afterwords, we walked around Mackinac City and eventually found our way to this amazing polish restaurant called Legs Inn. If you ever find yourself in the northern reaches of Michigan's lower peninsula, I definitely recommend attending this wonderful establishment. It's even AAA certified! And then we found our way back south into the magical place I call home.

Well, I'm out of things to talk about. Talk to you all later.

080808

For starters, today is the beginning of the Olympics. They start broadcasting the opening ceremony at 7:30. I just can't wait.

Secondly! The traffic ticket for disobeying a stop sign got reduced to a ticket for "impeding traffic," which means that the ticket stays in town. No one will find out about it at the insurance company, meaning our insurance wont skyrocket, and no points are on my license. Hurrah!

Thirdly! I was poking at my code some more and I found a few more bytes I can shake loose concerning lists. Some say stupid, I say bandwidth spike. I also have some intents on implementing a smoother layout by the end of the month. Check out a demo here! My implementation of the new layout will also force my hand in implementing permalinking. It's going to take quite a bit of tweaking to get it to work right. In one eventuality, I might have to skip permalinking for this layout to work. But we aren't going to loose hope! I might just define a strict placement for the individual tables. I do know that I, for sure, will be removing the use of TinyUrl and implementing Bit.ly links. That's 5 bits link I'm saving per link! Woot!.

Fourth! My birthday is tomorrow! You don't have to buy me anything. Please, don't buy me anything. Instead, just marvel at this list of things I want assuming my family wanted to get me anything this year. I know they wont buy me anything because of the laptop counting for both as a graduation present and a birthday present, but I don't care. I'm happy I have my lappy.

• A firewire card for the ghost hunts I go on, so when I film things I can upload them to the computer without having to travel over to Lauren's.
• SBCG4AP
• A lens cap for one of our SLR lenses. It went missing a while back.

Sixth! The photos that I had taken at the graveyard the day of the accident have been developed. Also on that roll of film were some pictures I took about a week or so ago of some things around downtown. I've stuck them up in the Photography section of my Deviantart account. My mom says a few of them could be postcards. I was very happy to hear her say that.

Well, I'm out of things to talk about. TTYL kiddies.

072407

Last Thursday, I get fired. Last Sunday, I get in a car accident.
Yes- a car accident.

So, there I was. Sunday afternoon, bored off of my ass. Then I thought "Hey, I've free time. Why not gather up Lauren and Nick and we can all go to the graveyard and take some photos!" So we did. I didn't get a lot of great shots, but we did see some interesting tombstones. So then it starts to rain and we head back to Lauren's house. In the side streets of our town, there is a magical little occurrence called "Not every street is a 4-way stop." It's not that annoying, because usually the stop signs are visible. However, today this was not the case. You see, there is an intersection where the stop sign is not visible from 20ft away, which at 25 miles an hour would be a good distance to start stopping. However, I could not see the sign because it was obscured by trees.

So here I am, in the middle of an intersection. My car won't start. My door won't open. It's raining. "Fuck." I ask if everyone is ok, they say they are (we later find out different) climb into the back seat and get out. Nick goes to check on the passengers of the other vehicle, which is occupied by 2 old ladies (bigger fuck). They were not hurt at all. Nick calls 911. I call my parents, again, and again, and again. No answer until long after the cops arrive and take down all of my information. I was freaking out.

In the end, Lauren said she hit her head on the window and it hurt a little, so she went in the ambulance. Nick, who was in the back seat, rammed his good knee into the back of the passenger seat (his other knee got sliced open at work a while back) and also ventured to the hospital. She got a few x-rays and cat scans and pain pills. Nick got x-rays and pain pills. Nick is fine. Lauren, on the other hand, has a concussion.

So that's the end of that. It's all cleaned up, my car is in the body shop, and we've obtained an attorney to fight the ticket, since the stop sign really is invisible. We could get the city to pay for damages.

But that's just the beginning. The next day, my lab results came back for my blood test. I have an abnormality! Go me!

I have increased levels of Bilirubin. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you!

When the Spleen destroys dead red blood cells, a yellow pigment is created as a biproduct. This yellow pigment is known as Bilirubin, and once it amounts to a certain ppm in your blood, it can be toxic. Now, normally Bilirubin is processed by the liver, and then it is excreted harmlessly when you piss. However, when the liver stops functioning properly, Bilirubin stops getting processed, and you start to turn yellow. This is why Jaundice is characterized by a yellowing of the skin.

Lucky me. So yesterday, I had an ultrasound of my liver and then I had another blood test. We see the doctor on the 30^th to find out what all the hoopla is about. I hope I just normally have abnormal levels of Bilirubin.

As a result of this, I've opened the shades in my bedroom to let in more natural light. It turns out that Bilirubin is mildly photosynthetic, so exposure to UV light, it can destroy it. If a baby has high levels of Bilirubin, they put it under lights to help destroy it. So that's what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll go one step further and move my laptop outside. That would be wonderful, but I don't think the router would send wifi out that far.

So thats it for now. More new on its way.

072008

For starters- I got fired from my place of employment. Something along the lines of this happened:

1. I was working
2. Brian, the manager who dislikes me, says "Well, Mark is going to be giving all of the 18 year olds only 2 days a week."
3. I said "Oh well" in a purely even, standard conversation tone, no real attitude present.
4. Brian interprets it as attitude anyway and therefore sees a reason to fire me.
5. He fires me

So as soon as I got home, I showered, changed, updated and printed off 15 copies of my resumé, and then left to the mall to obtain applications. I think it went well, overall. There are a handful of places, however, that don't accept applications in-store. They require you to go online. And this can be a bad thing. A very very bad thing. You see, there is this online application distributor called "Unicru." It is evil. Not only does it not give you a chance to explain any of your answers on the personality exam, it is also a total mindfuck. 144 questions of pain. There are really only 50 questions or so, 25 of which are repeated an endless number of times in different wordings. An example:

• "Do you assume the role of 'leader' when in groups?"
• "When in a group, are you a leader or a follower?"
• "Do you like to work in groups or alone?"
• "Sometimes, even if you don't want to be, you have to assume the role of leader. Would you be ok with this?"
• "Some parts of the job require teamwork. Do you like to work in teams or alone?"
• "Given the choice, would you rather work alone or in a group?"
• "Would you say you make a good leader?"

Speaking of medical, I might have liver problems! It just so happens that my mother thinks the whites of my eyes are starting to tint yellow. This could be caused by any variety of things, but the main cause is Jaundice. So I went to the doctor, and he said that since I don't smoke, drink, or do drugs of any sort, that the cause could be the Adderal that I take to control my ADHD. Adderal is pretty much speed, only in controlled doses. So, that being said, my liver could be failing because of it. Yey. So I had some blood work done. They're going to run two tests for various liver issues, as well as tests for Hepatitis B and C. I should get the results back by 072308 at the latest.

And just when you thought I couldn't get any more anal about site size, I just learned about a TinyUrl alternative named Bitly. Bitly works just the same way as TinyUrl, and has the exact same concerns for reliability. However, its site is much better looking than TinyUrl's, and it shaves off at least 5 more bytes than TinyUrl does because of the smaller link. I think I'm going to be switching over. Yes. I'm that crazy. The only qualm I have about using Bitly is that it doesn't immediately show you the character count difference between the shrunk url and the original, so it's going to take some counting between the two if the urls are really close in size.

Back to reality. Last night, Lauren and I went ghost hunting with her friends Niccole and Nick. It was fun. I don't believe in any of that stuff, but it was nice to get out of the house, even if I couldn't decide which was better- sweating a lot in my long clothing or not wearing long clothing and getting a bunch of mosquito bites. Apparently, Lauren and Alyssa got some interesting readings. I kept saying that it was because I was with them. Then, at one of the graveyards we visited, the police showed up. We almost got caught. That isn't a good thing, because we can get arrested and fined for being in the graveyard after hours. It's considered trespassing. Either way, I've decided that I'm going to go back to the graveyards in the daytime to take photos. I'm good at taking artsy shots, as the photos I took from the wine tour reveal. I'll post them later, once I get them scaled, anonified, and captioned. It's nice that I won't have to scan them, because the photo place gave us a CD with all of the pictures on it so that we can easily do whatever we want digitally with them. If you're confused right now, I shot the trip with film instead of digital. We have a really nice film SLR camera, and we hardly ever use it, so I went out and bought some 800 speed kodak film for the trip and had a blast.

Well, that's all for today peeps. Talk atchya later.

071608

So. Last Wednesday I got a cellphone. It's pretty. It's a black Motorola W315. I'm quite happy with it. Especially because it's free.

Another thing, one of my oldest (longest time, not age) friends got a hold of me yesterday. We used to be really close, but since high school started, we've drifted pretty far. But we're probably going to hang out sometime this summer, hopefully.

I want to go see Hancock, and I'm thinking of taking Lauren, and possibly my ex-coworker, Mike. I'm having issues getting in touch with him, however. Maybe I can get Shae to come.

Well, there you have it. My short post. Talk to you later, my loyal zombies.

071208

So, I finally got around to watching "Stay." I must say, it was an amazing film. It's a psychological thriller, which is one of my favorite genres of film. I liked this one in particular because it required me to think about it after the movie was over for me to successfully piece it together. The ending was a bit odd though. In a normal movie, an ending such as that would be considered a cop-out. However, due to the nature of the film and the way the psychological aspect was levied unto the viewer, it fit quite well, even if a bit confusing. The soundtrack was amazing, too. So much that I obtained a copy of it. You can check out one of the tracks on my Muxtape; the one called "Mahlus Gardens."

I also saw "The Butterfly Effect" over at Lauren's place. That was an ok movie. I've seen better, tho. It was also really easy to figure out for a psychological thriller. I asked her to show me a more difficult film next time. She laughed, but I suspect that she was slightly annoyed on the inside. We sat and talked a while after it was over, and I learned that I've lost my ability to hula-hoop. Lauren is quite good at it, tho, which I find odd considering her back problems. She kicked me out around 6 so she could make dinner in peace.

It's been about 3 months since I signed up for the Pogo browser beta, but they finally contacted me. And so I downloaded it and installed it. The UI is interesting, but I'm not really a fan of it. It feels a lot like Mozilla, which is to be expected since it's based off of Mozilla code. I decided I'd give it some time for me to get used to it. I don't like it at all still. While I do have to say that it's style of modular browsing is unique, and a good idea, it just isn't working for me. I like tabs too much. I've given up on Pogo and have reverted back to using FireFox. I love the look and feel of FireFox3. It looks just right in Vista. I also tried to give some love back to Microsoft and download the InternetExplorer8 beta. I have nothing to tell you about it other than it routinely caused vista to crash. I removed it from my system within 2 hours.

I picked up my student ID for the college which I will be attending in the fall. I also received a new drivers license, which has the restrictions removed from it. Yey!

I poked at the HTML a bit more and noticed some redundancies between the HTML and CSS code, which were promptly fixed. For a while now, I've also been using the FileZilla FTP app to update my site. I was using the PortableApps version, but when it told me to update, it reinstalled it with the standard version. I'm perfectly fine with that. I think their update engine in general could be a lot smoother. Each time an update is released, it has to completely uninstall the previous version of the app, and then reinstall the new version. It's so annoying, and it's starting to worry that it might be decreasing the life of my flashdrive that much faster.

I read "The 26 letters" by Oscar Ogg. It is about the growth of the alphabet which we used today. While it did contain some interesting info, i have some complaints that don't need to be addressed, but I would like to make them known anyway. First of all, it wasn't consistent with what it was trying to convey. It started off with explaining the etymology of western script. However, by the end of the book, it was talking about fonts and the printing process. Secondly, the personal style of writing reduced the feeling of factuality of some of the statements and, in the end, caused me to question some of the statements directly. But my biggest problem with the book by far was the diagramming. The diagrams were quite well done, however, they were poorly placed, and even more poorly explained, if even referenced by the text at all. At one point in the reading, at the bottom of a page the sentence stopped mid word, which is generally bad form anyway, and (seemingly) continued on the next page. The next page actually contained a 2 page spread of some random diagram that was no where mentioned in my whole reading. I was thoroughly annoyed. The diagramming of the work was just so terrible. It was seemingly designed to slow down the reader at all costs, which was extremely annoying.

At the start of this month, Alyssa's family and I went up north for 3 days on what is called a wine tour. A wine tour is where you drive around to different wineries and sample their various wines, while all of the underage folks just stand around awkwardly, or wander around the grounds taking fun photos. I don't remember all of the wineries we went to, but there was this really cool one in Traverse City called Left Foot Charley that was built inside of an old mental hospital. I loved the interior design of the tasting area. It was really post-modern in style. Apparently, they had good wine too. We also stopped by Black Star Farms' wine-tasting room, which was near Left Foot. It was more like an outlet store for the winery. The actual winery is off the highway, but we didn't stay because it was way to crowded. I think the one we ended up going to was "Tastes of Black Star Farms." While there, I purchased a bottle of sparkling white grape juice. I plan to save it for a special occasion, or until my parents force me to get rid of it because it's taking up space in the fridge. It was a fun trip, and while I would love to go again sometime, the next time they will be going is when Alyssa turns 21. This means that if I go, I will be the only one not drinking, meaning I will be wandering around the winery by myself, which is no fun at all.

So that's pretty much all that went on in the past few weeks that I'm willing to discuss with the general public. I'll talk at you all later!