Most of the people I keep in touch with already do so via my LiveJournal, which I never really stopped updating. I don't make the "this is what happened on Monday, and this on Tuesday" posts there, and I'm not sure if I'll ever return to that format.

The archives of this blog will remain online. Eventually, I want to reorganize this domain to have a list of links of all the sites I work on and host.

Comments are disabled permanently. The comments script is effectively unreachable, so it won't even cause any more undue server load. I started this post by cleaning out about 7,331 spam comments.

I'll also probably update this blog whenever my home IP changes, since that's the easiest way for me to keep track of it. (So far I'm doing pretty well with it not changing since October.)

See everyone on LiveJournal! ... or IRC, or IM, or ICQ, or MSN, or Yahoo, or...

Yeah, I'll get around to updating this more often eventually. I'm thinking of moving it to either WordPress or MT 3.x, since I'm getting really tired of having to clean up spam comments manually every time I log in here. This time it's only around 150... last time, I had to clear off close to 1,500 of them. >.>

Bleh.

A lot of things have happened the past few months, but I've simply chosen to either update LiveJournal about it, or not update about it at all, because LJ is easier to update but I don't like to put more in-depth journal entries in there. I prefer to have them here, where people are more likely to look only if they are actually interested in these entries.

So, in a nutshell, I've changed jobs again, now working as a technician (for a slight pay increase). I went to the Mid-Atlantic Bemanithon 2 this past Sunday with Maizie. I've resolved myself to transfer to UMBC by Spring 2006, and graduate by Spring 2008. (We'll see how well that works.) I went to AX. I banged up my car, but managed to fix it without breaking budget.

Can't think of anything else. And AX I definitely have to elaborate on... but later, and it probably won't be very detailed since it did happen a month ago. >.>

And since I lost my old IP in the cable outage, I have to do the RIP routine: 69.140.225.245, I'll miss you too. (Dang it, I had finally memorized it...)

Anyways, journal type stuff. I can't even remember how much stuff I haven't written about yet, so I'll cover the past few weeks for now.

Way back on April 17, it was quickly decided that I would be attending my cousin's wedding... and AX, since the two events are nearby. Plan is for me to fly in on Thursday night, stay at AX for the entire trip except for the excursion to the wedding on Saturday, then fly out back home late Monday night. The flight times really are ick, but the tickets were really cheap, and they get me there.

On April 22, I went out to UMCP in the morning to interview for a job that Christian had talked me up for. It turns out that instead of the technician job he expected, I ended up coming in to interview for Classroom Support. All the technician positions were filled apparently, but at least they'll consider me if one opens up. Classroom Support itself is a low-skill, low-paying job of boredom, where you're not actually allowed to do much in-depth repair work, but just basic troubleshooting and dealing with the irate professors that can't get the computer display to show up on the projector or whatever. For the last few weeks, I've been arriving at 8:30-9:00am (originally I was to come in at 8:00, but traffic patterns and my like of sleep made this impossible). This will change on the 31st, when my summer classes start; I'll be in class at 8:00am instead of working, but I'll be working part-time in the afternoons. It's pretty much a paid study hall, since there aren't really many requests from faculty for computer stuff over the summer. I'll probably start bringing in DVDs to watch or work on fansubbing stuff at work over the next few weeks, since I'll have absolutely nothing to do. (My finals for this semester are today and tomorrow.)

Working at UMCP means I can actually go to the Stamp Student Union and DDR without having to drive extra to go to CP or SF. I really do want to try and get myself back into the game, if not to try to get into better shape. I've been really lazy and immobile as of late.

On April 23... we threw the big surprise party for Chris. His birthday is April 26, so we picked the closest weekend to give him a great time. Not only did we manage to buy him a new slimline JPS2 and have great barbecue, but we also pulled it all off without Chris knowing. We pretty much just kidnapped him from his house in the morning and drove him all the way to my house. =p He didn't even know it was for his birthday until the end of dinner, when we pulled out a cake. =p Other festivities included a mini-LAN party that we set up on the ping-pong table (with no CRT displays!), chasing baby rabbits, and playing IIDX on the widescreen.

After some issues coming up due to Chris not being able to get the Sunday off of work, we ended having him, Alison, and David staying overnight. Chris ends up calling in sick in the morning, and after watching a few episodes of Robot Chicken on David's craptop and messing with ARMJOE, we go to the Wendy's near my house. David and Alison go home, while Chris and I went to Best Buy to pick up a memory card, then went to Billy's house to hang out for the afternoon. After playing IIDX for a few hours, we drove over to Chipotle for dinner, then checked Walmart to see if they had a copy of CvS2 for PS2, since Billy wanted one. No such luck, so from there I just drop off Chris and Billy at their houses and go home.

The next weekend (on April 30), Alison, Chris, and I went to the mall briefly to visit Kevin and the others at the SF DDR tournament. We didn't stay long, and ended up going to Billy's again (with Pedro joining us). I slept most of the time (since I was on major sleep dep that day), but we ended up not joining the others for dinner as planned, and just ordered pizza for ourselves. (Even though I only got one slice...) It got ass hot in Billy's room, but aside from that and my RoD the TV DVD6 getting scratched up - and on the very day I opened it - it was a pretty good day. Did the usual Pedro/Chris/Alison dropoffs, and went home.

And we're finally into the month of May!

I had managed to put off working on three programming assignments until the very last day the professor was taking late assignments. So on Friday, I spent the day frantically coding while at work. Unfortunately, thanks to some ridiculous bugs that took me and mashadar way too long to track down, I only managed to finish one of the three assignments. Argh. Hopefully, that will give me enough credits to not outright fail the course. (Thanks a lot for your help, mashy!)

This past weekend (yay, I can finally talk about it!), I picked up Alison and Chris as usual, and after a short stop at Popeye's for lunch and a re-stop at Chris's house for a bathroom break and dropping off the leftover chicken I couldn't finish, we left to go to SF. Unfortunately, the bumper-to-bumper traffic I saw in that direction on the way to Chris's had not dispersed by then as I had hoped, so we took ages to go just four miles to SF. Argh.

At the mall, we found one of the Tekken 5 machines to have a broken left punch button. To fix it, we brought in Chris's arcade stick from the car and plugged it into the machine. It was rather hilarious, having brought in an arcade stick to play on an arcade cab. =p Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it to the car and back in time to get a photo of this. (I'm going to make Chris do it again next time we're at the mall probably.) Alison and I went off to shop for clothes, since she had some things she wanted to buy, and I pretty much needed a new set of shorts. There was a bit of a dressing room mishap at Aeropostale - Alison went nowhere to be found after buying what she wanted, and I needed her opinion on the shorts I was wearing, so I spent a bit of a tense moment waiting at the dressing room door until I finally saw her outside the store and flagged her down.

Since I'm truly without any fashion sense (or clothing shopping sense, for that matter), Alison pretty much sticks to me and picks stuff for me from that point. I still feel bad that she had to do that, but I'm thankful since I actually have different stuff to wear now. (Just a slight bit too much brown, though... ^^;) After she picked up a far-too-expensive belt at Pac Sun, we finished my wardrobe shopping at Target (yay, cheap), with three shirts and three more sets of shorts. When we were done, we met up with Billy, Kevin, Pedro, Chris, Brice, Ek, and Kevin's little cousin, and drove ourselves Wangan speed-limit obeying style to Starland to get Billy's PS2 fliptop installed. He decides there that he'll just install it himself, and didn't buy anything since they didn't have the swap discs in stock. Somehow, we end up browsing without buying anything yet again.

Kevin and the others carted over back to the mall to drop off his little cousin, while Alison, Chris, Ek, Billy, and I headed over to Billy's house (wow, how many weekends in a row now?) to just do stuff with his new TV. There was a bit of a fiasco with the phone calls, with gameplay not being paused while we attempted to order Chinese delivery, and Billy's phone line not working properly which led to our order getting cancelled because they didn't have Billy's address. We ended up splitting up, with Alison, Chris, Ek, Brice, and I heading to Pedro's house, Billy staying home, and everyone else going to pick up the food from the restaurant. After a cold walk to Pedro's house and waiting out a bit without a jacket (and I wish I had a spare one to give to Alison at that point, but I didn't think we'd be in the cold so I didn't think to bring one with me), we ate in Pedro's kitchen, then stayed a bit to watch some Star Wars Episode 3 videogame action. The infinite force cheat made things somewhat ridiculous. After a little bit of gameplay and watching all the cutscenes from the game (and spoiling half the movie for ourselves, though none of us really cared), we all headed home.

Or tried to. We took a short bathroom break at Chris's, then I dropped off Alison at around 12:40am. This time, I loaned her my Kaleido Star and Super GALS! DVD boxes. I was kinda hoping that we'd get to watch them with (or maybe without) Chris, but I had to do with just leaving the boxes with her. Tentatively, we made plans for me to drop by for a bit on Sunday (yesterday), and I left to go home. Fell asleep on the couch before I brought all the new clothes in, but woke up at around 4am to do that, then got back to sleep at 5.

At noon, I get a call from Alison saying she's too tired to hang out. Apparently, she had started watching the DVDs when I dropped her off, and didn't get to sleep until around 5. She said she would get more sleep at that point, so we ended the conversation there. I spent a few hours getting stuff ready (and blanking on what to put on the Mother's Day card, so I just draw a few hearts and a smiley face), then headed to the library to do the really stupid Library Skills Workbook that was required for my English class. Finished it an hour later. Called Alison (it would be around 5:40pm now), no one picked up so I figured she was still sleeping since she wasn't on AIM.

Shortly after getting back, we all headed out to the Sushi place in Kentlands for Mother's Day dinner. Aside from getting beef noodle soup (what an odd thing to have on the menu at a sushi restaurant!) instead of udon, we pretty much had the exact same menu items that we had the last time we went to this particular restaurant.

Getting home... after some odd AIM signoffs that made it seem like people were avoiding me, I find that Alison had not gone to sleep, but watched even more of the DVDs. x_X I need to talk to her still, but this makes me feel like it is my fault for robbing her of sleep. And for both Alison and Chris to cut off contact from me for the night was not cool. Again, thanks to David for listening. I would have gone completely nuts otherwise.

This entry took an hour and a half to type. Need to head to work now. Finals today start at 2:45pm and 7:15pm, each expected to take two hours. Tomorrow, my last final starts at 12:30pm. Hopefully everything will go well...

And checking the activity logs, 64.136.26.228 made a lot of odd searches... 3 for "alison", 2 for "vj", and 1 for "pedro". This concerns me. Who was this?