Monday, 28 May 2002
11:59am

G

irls can do some really stupid thing sometimes. But anyway. This holiday weekend Helen came down to visit us here in San Diego and we had a blast going to Old Town, Balboa Park, and to Miramar Lake... I'll put some pictures up, probably tomorrow. Cami and I are trying very hard to convince her to move back down to San Diego. What fun that would be!
In other news... I did manage to get an HDTV decoder box (and not from that stupid Best Buy that never has anything), and I gotta say... it's pretty amazing technology. I don't think it's worth the money (yet), but it certainly is pretty damned cool knowing that these digital signals are flying through the air and you can grab them for free (once you have the appropriate hardware)... it's like... imagine if all the regular TV channels were as clean as DVDs... and that's sort of an idea of what it's like. Unfortunately, the lack of good programming in the HDTV format is what it makes it not really worth it, and that's coming from me who lives in San Diego which has quite a bit of HD programming, actually. Still I like it... but unless you are some die hard home theater fanatic... I wouldn't recommend making the switch just yet... stuff is going to keep getting cheaper, and it's not really worth the money at this point in my opinion.
Today there was a BBQ over at Ben and Jeff's place, it was fun, and boy did Cami and Jeff make some damned good sausages. Num num nummy. And I guess... that's about all I got to say for now. Have a good night y'all.

Friday, 31 May 2002
10:00am

S

ome weeks ago I acquired a program called "Sierra Home Architect". You basically draw out the floorplan of your home, and you end up with a 3D model of it, in which you can change colors, place furniture, etc. etc. etc. I got this program because I decided that I wanted to rearrange my bedroom, but I have so many computers and other electronic stuff in here that I knew it would take all day just to move stuff around. So I made a pretty detailed model of our apartment and all the furniture in my room so that I could arrange things in the computer before I actually move everything in real life. I didn't want to do all this work to move, say for example, my desk which has two computers and three monitors on it that need to be attached to two printers and a scanner, only to not like the new location and have to move it all again.
I was able to make a remarkably accurate version of my room, and all of the furniture and everything is the right size because I measured it before entering it into the computer, and after trying a few different configurations, I settled on this one:

While the computer simulation is fairly accurate, it certainly doesn't include any of my mess, and well, I'm a pretty disorganized guy. But I like this setup a whole lot better. Under the old setup, as soon as you walk in the door you walked into my desk which was basically a big wall of computer equpiment. Now with my desk in the back, the room seems a lot more spatious, and it's nice to have it near the window as this is where I spend most of my day, and it's nice to get some natural light. I also like it because there's a much stronger delineation between my "living" space and my "work" space which I think helps not so much visually, but more psychologically for me. I'm not looking into computer monitors from the moment I wake up anymore.
But it's also pretty amazing just how messy my room still is even though I essentially packed everything up, threw out a bunch of junk and reorganized everything. Old habits die hard, I guess! Tonight we are going out to an all you can eat seafod restaurant to celebrate Cami's birthday... I can't wait! And oh yeah, there are now a few pics from last weekend up at pix.twentysix.net.