It's been a while since the webcam went away, and I really don't see it coming back (that part of life is in the past), but I have missed having a little photo content scattered around my site. Well, no more will I have that tug on my heart every time my browser finds its way to this site (which is often... I think I use my site more than anyone else combined).

I mentioned recently getting a camera phone (Sony Ericsson T616). The next issue was how to get the pictures that I liked off my phone and out to you. The answer: Buzznet, a site I first became aware of because Marc Brown's blog.blog.blog. is listed as two miles north of me by GeoURL. Finally today I quit being an object at rest and checked it out, creating my own photoblog. The site does have a ton of features right now, but it has exactly what I need. You email your entries in, and buzznet takes care of everything else. This is one of the areas that really fascinates me right now as I start to explore what it is that I'm going to be doing after I graduate.

I just fixed a nasty little bug that might have been preventing people from posting comments. It was an ugly thing that could only happen in mod_perl, so tracking it down was a bit interesting. The fix itself was, as usual, just one line. All the nastiest bugs are one-line fixes.

So I was a little preemptive the other day when I thought I was rounding the corner to good health. It definitely got worse before it got better, but today I'm finally down to a throat that feels like I just got my tonsils out and a bit of a head cold. That much I can live with. I think today I'll finally get to venture outside the house for the first time since midday Thursday.

So I got home Tuesday and promptly got sick yesterday. It started as a scratchy throat, and then became a nasty headache and a full-on upset stomach. I think I'm rounding the corner with it, but getting sick on Christmas just isn't cool.

I wrote the other day that I was thinking about getting a new phone. Well, I did. I've had a lot of phones over the years, so I'll give my thoughts on the Sony Ericsson T616 so far.

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I fly to MI at 9:55am, and what am I doing right now? Downloading stuff to my laptop so that I'll have work to do on the plane. I have a fun new project for this site that I'm hoping to wrap up soon, and I hope to knock a good bit of it out tomorrow. To do that, though, I need to have apache, mysql, etc, all set up locally. Tonight I'm downloading rpms, tomorrow on the plane or in the airport I'll set it all up and get to work.

I'm giving up on keeping a seperate thing on movies... I never update it enough, so I'm just going to roll my movie viewing up into here.

We went and saw The Cooler at the 4plex on Saturday night. From the previews, I pretty much expected a comedy. William H Macy is a really funny guy, so I thought that it would be good. It was, but it most definitely wasn't a comedy (though it was funny at times). Go to IMDB if you want plot, I'm not going to rehash that here. What I will say, though, is that this is a side of Macy that I hadn't really seen before. I knew Maria Bello from Permanent Midnight, and she did a great job here. Alec Baldwin was born for his role. Be warned, it's a violent movie, but worth it.

About to make a trip into the heart of hostile territory. We're off to see Michigan St vs. UCLA in basketball at Pauley Pavilion. I'm wearing a MSU t-shirt and a USC hat. Pat's wearing MSU shorts and a USC sweatshirt. D4's wearing a USC BBall t-shirt. I think they'll notice us.

Last night we were having a debate about populations. I can't remember what brought it about, but I took a guess that LA county would have a greater population than the state of Michigan. This morning I looked up the numbers... I wasn't right, but I was really close. According to 2000 census numbers, LA county has 9,519,338 residents. The state of Michigan has 9,938,444. LA county's growing faster, though, so I don't see that edge lasting long.

Yes, I did. And yes, it was.

Because I can't get myself to study for stretches at a time, I end up getting random stuff done in times when I shouldn't. This time I reworked the looks page. I added eWorld 2.0, from April of 1999, and added more realistic home page content for eWorld 5.0 (October, 1999) and eWorld 11.0 (August, 2000).

I'm debating whether to get a camera phone. Cingular called me a month or two ago and said I was eligible for a free upgrade (obviously conditional on signing a new contract... my two years were up close to a year ago), so the thought's been kicking around my head for a while now.

Read on to hear my thoughts on digital cameras, camera phones, blogs, and visual culture...

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In twelve and a half hours I'll be done. Finally I'll be able to leave this semester behind for good. Two more finals. Ten hours between them. I'm not really stressed. The first final is a COMM final. This post reassures me. I still can't believe that people make a life out of studying some of this stuff...

I found my auto insurance card today. I had taken it out of my car a while back to fill out a form and just realized a couple weeks ago that I really didn't know where it was. Though still fully insurance, and just without current record of it, driving around without my card I was close to being part of a large undocumented segment of the driving population. I think I heard in a commercial the other day that something like 20% of cars on the road in LA are uninsured. Trying to support that with statistics, I find this release from 2000 that says "California has an estimated 5.3 million uninsured vehicles, and 2.2 million to 3 million of these are in regular use."

The debate these days has been about licenses for "undocumented workers". Davis passed a law granting them the ability to get licenses, then Arnold came into power saying he was going to take that away, which he promptly did. Now there are protests that have been going on about that. Granted, I'm being a little theoretical about the whole thing, but shouldn't these people be arguing for getting illegal workers legal, and not just for giving them licenses? If you're going to argue that these people are a critical part of the southern california economy, that's a valid argument. But don't take that to say that we should give illegal immigrants licenses. License citizens. Don't work around the real problem to cure a symptom.

But that's just me...

For a project that I'm working on, I need lon/lat coordinates assigned to every post in my blog. That's about 800 posts right now. Actually, looking a little closer, there are exactly 750 top-level posts, and 50 comments. Though, by the time you read this I'll have posted again and thrown the whole thing off. Oh well.

Every six hours you have to take a half hour break and I wasn't hungry, so I just spent the last 20 minutes implementing a new "On This Date" feature. Click on This Date next to archives to take a look. This "blog" is a couple days shy of 5 years, two weeks old, so odds are good that a couple years will have a post from this date. Eventually I'll make it where you can input a date, but hey, I only had a half hour.

Paper and final done... Now to not fall asleep at work and I'll be all set.

Tonight I'm headed to Hollywood (King King, specifically, which I've never been to) to see Jim Bianco perform with the Tim Davies Big Band. I've mentioned Jim before. I really enjoyed him then, and I'm really excited to see him now. Just like the end of the last show, it'll be him sans guitar, just having fun with lead vocals. I'll be sure to post a review, and hopefully I can get some pictures (not owning a camera, that relies on getting someone else to bring one).

These days I get stuck on the last page of papers. I don't think it matters how long they are, just that I won't be able to resolve the ending in a satisfactory manner. That last page keeps me up. That last page holds itself away from me. Tonight is no different. One more page and I would be sleeping. But no... It hides. And I sit here, waiting for it.

I feel literary today. In the past few days I've read more than I think I must have in the last year. First it was Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Then yesterday I started White Noise, by Don DeLillo. Today I finished it. 320+ pages in maybe 5 hours.

I'm not sure what it was that engrossed me so in White Noise. It felt like I was watching a movie. This movie was subtitled, and the words didn't really match up with what you know the characters were saying. Yet, the words you're reading on the screen touch you more than those you know are being said. They sound wrong, but they work beautifully.

Now I'm going to do a quick read of The Great Gatsby and then write a paper. The prompt: "Write a short and coherent essay to show how the first-person narrators in the fiction of Fitzgerald and DeLillo serve as a vehicle for romantic displacement and/or a disguise for paranoia." I'm looking for a spark.

Saturday a friend and I were talking about music at a party. We were asking about different bands we thought each other might have heard of or might like, and the process involved a lot of "have you heard of xxxxx? no." In the end we agreed to make sampler cds to exchange, to more adequately reflect what it was that we each listen to. Today while taking a break from reading I put a little time into putting mine together. I really enjoy the process of selecting songs, balancing out not only the songs that are favorites of mine, but also the ones that accurately portray the musician. Click to find out what ended up on my cd...

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I'm sitting in a discussion section for my cinema class, bored as he rehashes the lecture. My roommate, D4, is giving me a hard time about not using this time to buy Lord of the Rings tickets. I shut him up by ssh'ing to my machine and starting a simpsons episode. Just like a baby with his mobile... Muah hahaha...

It is freaky when all of a sudden a passive computer starts playing something.

One of the things that spurred my to get a laptop, as I've mentioned before, was USC's installation of a wireless network on campus (big, but cool, coverage map). I love the idea of working anywhere on campus, free from the restraints of my apartment or a computer lab. Today I feel like I finally sort of got a piece of that. I've been on campus since 9:30am. In that time I've been online in Doheny Library, sitting in a hallway in a hallway in Annenberg, in an Annenberg classroom, back in Doheny (where this time I found a power outlet), and now outside, sitting by a fountain. That's really cool to me.

My laptop battery's been a champ, too. In general I can expect a good 3 hours out of it, a little more if I really crank down power usage. If I got a second battery, I think this thing could really last me all day without having to carry around a cord. I'm fascinated by watching my power usage. Right now ACPI says I'm using 1.1A, which isn't that bad. I can squeeze it to about 0.8A if I'm not using wireless and have the screen brightness down low.

So my paper's now done, and The Counter-Cultural Voice of Cinema is now posted in verbal intercourse. Now to print it and head to class, where tonight we're watching The French Connection.

I've written a little over three pages of the paper I mentioned yesterday. I feel like I'm wandering a bit, but on the whole I'm pretty satisfied with how things are going. I headed back to that same room in Doheny to write today, and I really was productive, so I think there might be something to a place like that improving my ability to work. After the class I'm in right now I've got four hours before the class in which the paper is due, so time shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Part of my challenge next semester is to completely overhaul how I do schoolwork. I'm not a good student. I hate taking notes. I have an issue with doing reading, going to class, etc. But I've got three semesters left in which I need to bear down and make use of the advantages available to me. For instance, since I got my laptop I've been trying to figure out how to better take notes. Right now I'm using a program called hnb, which I like but which isn't perfect. I think best in outline format, so an outliner like hnb definitely works best for me. I love being able to export these outlines to HTML, which I can then access easily peruse later. The interface has some things I don't like, but it's the best I've seen for Linux for now.

This is the part of the year where all of a sudden the bad choices you've made to put things off come back to haunt you. One more week of classes, then finals, then a break and a chance to start things fresh all over again. I changed the site look to add a little color. I think the grey reflected my general dislike of doing any work. I'm not saying my website colors influence my mood, but you've got to try whatever's there.

I'm sitting in USC's Doheny Library right now, in a high-ceilinged room that to me looks like the very picture of what an old library should be. This part of Doheny is grand and ornate. I'm here in the hopes that it inspires great work out of me. I love the quiet and the scale of everything.

Tonight I need to write a paper on how the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s influenced the films Five Easy Pieces, Day of the Dolphin, Midnight Cowboy, and Dr. Strangelove. I've got a bit of outlined notes, but in the next 21 hours those need to turn into six pages that really engage the films. My goal would be to get a full outline and a couple pages written tonight, and then to write the rest tomorrow in between classes. We'll see how that works out for me.