Here are the rules for days and dates. Something so simple shouldn't be so complicated, but every damn time someone says at the stroke of midnight "Hey! It's (insert next day of the week here)!" I just want to hit them. Hard. So, without further adieu, here are the rules:

At the stroke of midnight, the next day has not begun. If you went out on a Friday night and you're still out after midnight, it's still Friday night. Even if you stay in, it's still Friday night until you crash out. If you are part of a collective, it is not the next day until the overwhelming majority of the group has crashed (i.e., lans).

The other rule is that the next day officially begins when the sun rises.

Questions about the rules are welcome, but if you have issues with them you can suck it, but after midnight tonight.

Greg's newest post is hi-larious. Go read it. And promptly get into the cocaine trade.

I really think I've been hooked on Mozilla. I tried Firefox over Spring Break and loved it: minimalist interface, Google access, maximum screen space, easy migration from IE. Next time I format I'll probably switch over.

So the people around me this week have realized something isn't quite right. I'm really, really edgy. Well, it's because I have a research paper to do, and I hate having research papers hanging over my head. That alone is the kind of thing I can get over once I make some progress, but then the bad news came along and it turns out my grandfather died earlier this week. (Consolation comments aren't necessary.) So that made things worse because I was going to put some effort this weekend into that paper of mine, and then the weekend disappeared since I'd be going to Oklahoma for a funeral. Well, turns out the funeral is on Friday and not Saturday. Even worse. So, really, I had a choice to make:

Go to the funeral and miss the Something Corporate concert, an experience I was really looking forward to as a) a good show b) good bonding time with all these wonderful folks here on campus c) an all-around memorable college experience.
Stay here, work away, see Something Corporate, and probably feel a small pang of guilt for the rest of my life for not having gone to this funeral, this one-time event to pay my final respects to a truly good guy who's going to be missed.

That said, my bags are packed and I'm leaving this afternoon. I'll be back here late Friday night. I want to say a big I'm sorry to the people whose heads I've ripped off over the last few days, because chances are you didn't deserve it. (Except Jeff, who tried to grab my manboobies.)

Spring Break 04 can now be found on files.snagger.org by clicking that link over there -> on the right. I took a picture of my setup just because all the other techies did, and that's thrown in with the road trip to Padre, some of the chillins that happened there, the trip home - oh, and there's a surprise or two from my Spring Break and from Soph (but she'd kill me if I ruined her element of surprise). So go check 'em out.

Oh yeah, before I forget. This album doesn't have a thumbnail / caption page, so I just renamed all of the pictures as a kind of caption. My apps backup CD apparently went to shit so I've gotta get my hands on Dreamweaver MX all over again. Sorry if this bugs any of you - and if it doesn't, then I might start always doing it this way.

Yeah, so there's awards for these things, and they're called Bloggies.

How cute.

Head over to Blogger and they're linked from the front page. There's some really cool stuff on those awards, from really good reading to really funny stuff to really good photography for sale. The really cool award is the "best new trend" award (not the exact name, but that's the gist of it). The winner is the Friday Five (which can now be found at aroon's) and has some other cool ideas if you're wanting to explain just how your quirky little personality works.

Does anyone else feel a great joy when you switch from heating to AC (or the other way around)? The AC just came on for the first time in this house this week and it's like summer's just around the corner all of the sudden. Works the same way in fall - the heater comes on and it's like Christmastime out of nowhere.

Also: incoming UT kids: the parking department is a bunch of bitches. If you look up "UT sucks" on Google, that's the only valid complaint you'll find amidst the A&M/OU hicks who are capable of making shitty "UT SUCKS!!!!!@@!@!@@#@!$" pages on Geocities.
BUT!
I feel great today because they dismissed my $50 ticket.

And: tonight is my second time to go see Four Day Weekend - let's hope I don't get a flat tire this time.

Console party tonight, I'll see you guys for some you-know-what at you-know-where later on tonight.

I have a ticket to Something Corporate on Thursday.

So I think I've figured out my plan for my degree. I'm going to major in P2 (just P2, probably not a double) and triple-minor in Spanish, Japanese, and perhaps Chinese.

Why, you say? Well, for Spanish, I'm good at it and already know it pretty well, and it not only comes in handy but can boost the career, especially in Texas and California (which are the likely places where I'll end up). Japanese is mostly for me - I really want to find out about the Japanese gaming life and knowing the language is kind of important. If I go into the industry, I can be one of the guys that travels over there fairly often, which would be really fun (I think). Chinese is mostly to appease all the outside pressures, but I don't mind learning another language. Mandarin is growing by leaps and bounds in the business world (since China's an emerging market) and moreover the government is desperately in need of people who can understand it, especially in the realm of national security. So it's kind of a fallback job security kind of thing. Anyway, it's another language to learn, which I like a lot.

I'm just happy I can go without declaring a second major. That would mean I'd have to write a bitchass thesis in 3 years instead of writing something really cool.

So Blogger says it's Friday morning, which means I went over a week without updating. Bad me, slap on wrist, etc. etc. So here are some thoughts from over the break:

Know what I said about playing through Twin Snakes? Haven't made an ounce of progress. I first started my game over pretty early on since I didn't pick up enough items (tip: if you're going to play this on anything besides easy, explore every nook and cranny you can find) and ever since then I've been too tired to play since I can only play at night to not have this humongous glare on the TV screen. But man oh man, is the 5.1 surround beautiful. Audiophiles *cougharooncough* should totally pick this up just for the sake of the sound effects and music. It's truly amazing.

I've finally managed to catch up a little in SSB. Gus threw a great tournament on Wednesday night (which was followed by an equally great St. Patty's bash at Thomas's, cheers to him) and... after being up 3-1, I blew it. Killed once and two stupid deaths from not handling the controller right. And that was in the first round. How sad.

Went back to Pei Wei, cause it's just that good. The Mandarin Kung Pao isn't quite as good as the Pei-Wei Spicy or the Honey Glazed stuff. Importantly, I was wrong about the prices being lower - it's still pretty steep for a college student, $20 for two.

And how about the irony gods, eh? I went and had coffee a little while ago with a chick named Monica, who went to Oakridge but was class of '99 (she graduated when I was in 8th grade). We met up at the Oakridge choir reunion back in the fall, we've been emailing since January and we finally got to hang out in person just now. And... wow. She's quite the impressive little girl. Hopefully her acting career won't take off too much, or I'll never see her again and that would make me a sad panda. Here I thought I'd have to get as far away from Oakridge as possible to really start living my life the way I wanted to - turns out doing the exact opposite let me do what I want: let my jaw hit the floor.

But overall, I'm quite the happy panda. This break is a great experience.

Off I go tomorrow to Padre! It's sure to be crazy in the Casa de Greg this weekend. I'll be getting home late Sunday and in town for the whole week relaxing and playing through Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes (it's amazing already). If you didn't pick up a copy, well you got screwed, cause they were $30 at Fry's today. I'm bringing my laptop and mouse, so I should have adequate computer use for anyone who wants to get their CS ownage on. It's gonna be a nice short week of R&R along with some great moments with the old-school amigos. See you in A-town, kids.

Update: I'm home! There was much insanity, many cool things happened, and many new experiences that will long be remembered. Kinda crazy how much action you really can fit into a 48-hour road trip. There are some photos of the good clean fun that took place which will go up once I'm back in Austin, since I didn't bring home the camera gear. It's great to be home - after sleeping 10 hours (at last!) I managed to spend the whole day indoors - chillin on my mom's computer, watching G4 (which I missed a lot) and playing some Twin Snakes. Now that the glare's out of the living room I'll be checking it out tonight on the 5.1 system and bigger-screen TV down here. Oh, and the food I get to have here! My mom really likes to go out so tonight was Pei Wei down by the Parks. Insanely good food, great (and fast as hell) service, and not as expensive as a typical sit-down restaurant. It's from the guys who own P.F. Chang's, so you get the idea. Highly recommended.

So a P2er showed me this: AllofMP3.com. It's a legal-mp3-download site based in Russia - so you can buy your music (lots of it American and European) by importing it - and not importing into a library, I mean importing from overseas. It follows Russia's copyright law and you're paying for your music - the 'unlimited download' rate comes out to $10 per GB of music, and you can choose the bitrate at which you download (anywhere from 128 to 392 I believe. I searched for a handful of popular artists I like and I got some pretty decent results: most of the really good artists (BT, Orbital, etc) don't have complete collections, but the albums they do have are complete.

So, if you want a cheap alternative to iTunes and like MP3s, give it a shot.

-Drive
-Drive
-Drive
-SSB tourney
-Drive
-Get new boxers
-Catch up on Anime (more Initial D / Naruto / start Final Fantasy Unlimited)
-Start some more games (Twin Snakes, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell mission pack, finish DX2)
-Ridiculous amounts of chillage with the amigos
-Drive

So just when we had awful SG elections, the Diversity Task Force, and tuition increases out the wazoo, I finally experienced a silver lining.

Gaming: The Housing people opened a lan center in the basement of Jester. It's surprisingly cool. 16 very well done Dell boxes with Logitech headsets and 21" monitors on Radeon 9800s, along with a couple plasma screens and vending machines as well as Bawls coolers. I went to a soft-opening party courtesy the TGA (of which I'm working on becoming an officer) and walked home with a flash drive worth $30 at Fry's. That'll almost buy me a copy of MGS Twin Snakes, which is out real damn soon. While TGA used to host weekly game nights in a lecture auditorium every Friday night (yeah, taking over projectors and plugging in consoles is awesome), they've been moved downstairs to what they're calling the LanCave. It's $5/hour, which is expensive as hell, but I'll show up for cheap-gaming specials and tournaments for sure. The place is quickly becoming a sort of safe haven / hangout for gamers all over campus, which is what I always wanted to see happen with TGA's help. I'm glad to be getting involved with it all.

Just to be sure, this puts my winnings this semester at $270, after knocking off the $10 I paid to enter the Mario Kart tournament.

Bawls: The University started selling Bawls in cafeterias and snack shops. At $2.25 a bottle, we really don't care how expensive it is since most people have excess dining money anyway.

Filesharing: Someone on campus started a DC hub that works across the whole University network. It's a crazy network they have here - you can only see computers in your own dorm, but you get internal transfer speeds (roughly between 600K/s-1MB/s) between any computers connected to the University at all. So, now all the l33t people who live in dorms are hooked up by DC with insanely fast transfer speeds that don't count toward our bandwidth quotas (between 4 and 8 gigs a week, depending on how much you pay). There's maybe 50 users connected on average, and there's roughly 2TB of stuff going around already - and this hub just got started. Since I found out about it earlier this week, I've managed to get 10 gigs of stuff I needed, including:

-another copy of Splinter Cell (old CDs got scratched)
-BT - Ima (a good rip)
-The full Cowboy Bebop soundtrack collection
-Initial D (which I couldnt fit over Christmas)
-Swordfish
-Two Eddie Izzard routines
-Two episodes of Extreme Elimination Challenge (I LOVE this show)
-Squarepusher - Music is Rotted One Note
-first two episodes of Final Fantasy Unlimited (haven't watched)
->Daft Punk - Daft Club - a brand new remix of Discovery, and it's awesome. Grab it.

But, yeah. Lovin' it here.

We (brown sound will want some credit but we really did it together yo) proudly present to you:

Four new GI Joes.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. October 19th.