It’s soo hot outside today. But I got a nice start on my tan while washing the Scene Machine. It still isn’t completely clean (since I haven’t washed it in a long time) but at least I proved that it is yellow! I’m probably just going to say that it is fine how it is and then take it to have it professionally detailed inside and out later this month. That is unless I get super motivated and decide to do it myself.

The Pudge isn’t liking the heat at all though. He can’t seem to get comfortable unless he’s laying directly in front of the fan. We’re going to put the air conditioner in tonight, so that should help out a little bit. His problem is that he just has so much fur. But if you get anywhere near him with anything that suggests bath or hair cut, he freaks out. Such a scared little thing.

So I’ll end this post with a couple more plugs.. First, SEX MB, because the people there are just plain awesome hands down, and secondly, Vertigo MB, because (most of) the members have restored my faith in the board and it is becoming a nice place to be again.

And some nice little words of wisdom: NEVER underestimate the power of Livejournal virtual gifts. They’re a great way to cheer someone up, bring in the lolz, or get dramatic results that you never might have achieved otherwise.

But I don’t really know what I wanna do with PyroWinter. It’s kinda just sitting around now being all blah and static and I hardly even think to look at it. Nobody comments anymore, so it has kinda just ended up being nothing. -shrug-

Well, 2.5 isn’t driving me insane.. It’s not even technically a Wordpress issue. It’s Wordpress Multiple-User (WPMU). We use it as a blogging tool at Juniata for our various student bloggers. But the problem is that 99% of plugins won’t work with WPMU since it is about the equivalent of Wordpress 2.1 in development. So finding the things you need to make it work how you want is like pulling teeth.

Right now, all I want is a way for users to subscribe to blogs to be notified when updates are posted. Subscribe2 works with WPMU, but unfortunately not in the way that it needs to. Since S2 keeps track of registered users, it then emails EVERY registered user and EVERY public user when a new post is added. This isn’t good, because frankly I don’t care when other people update their blogs - I just care about my friends and my own. So for now the hunt is still on.

One good thing to happen this week was Lee telling me that Rocky Horror is going to be live in Endicott on May 31, so we’re definitely going. She’s thinking about going as Columbia, so of course, I have to dress up too. I probably won’t go as a specific character, but outfit will be very much Magenta inspired. So it’s time to get started Goodwill hunting for costume elements.

P.S. If you’re around in the PA/NY area and want to go with, just let me know. The more people the better. I will be driving from T-Town up, so if you’re around there, hit me up and I can drive.

P.S.S. John, I really wish you could figure out a way to come. It would be MUCH fun.

As somewhat of an aside, I just wanted to let you know, pretty soon I’m going to be starting up paid blogging. Now before anybody jumps on me as a hypocrite or a sell-out, I should probably explain the whole situation. I’m not going to be endorsing products, or inserting unwanted oddly-linked words into my posts. I’m just going to be blogging. It won’t be here at pyrowinter though (but I’m attempting to figure out how to syndicate posts from Wordpress MU to Wordpress so that they will show up here). I’ll be blogging about my summer living and working down here at Juniata. I can blog as much or as little as I want to, and my choice of topic is 100% up to me. Maybe it will also remind me to blog more here too.

Other than feeling blah and being crazy busy, I’ve gotten to see a couple movies over the past few days. We went to see Made of Honor, What Happens in Vegas, and The Chronicles of Narnia last week and all of them were pretty good. Narnia was MUCH better than I expected it to be, but now I’m kinda blah after what I heard on the radio Saturday. There was some dumb news lady talking about how they’re already filming the third movie in the Chronicles of Narnia trilogy. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she had not acted like this was just another Lord of the Rings thing and that there are ONLY three parts. Chronicles of Narnia is a 7-book series. It’s bad enough that they skipped the first book when making movies, but now they’re only making the ones with the kids in them? I can understand why, but way to kill a series people: skip all the good stuff.

I guess I’m going to take off now. I’ve got a lot of work to be doing. But on a complete side note, don’t freak out if you try to comment and it doesn’t show up right away. If you do, that just means that I’ve decided to moderate comments. I’ve gotten a couple of obnoxious / borderline spam comments here the past couple of days, and I don’t feel like having that shit cluttering these pages since people I know / my family reads this page.

P.S. Got my grades and somebody is finally back on Dean’s List
Marketing Strategies - A
Cyber Marketing - A
Innovations for Industry - A
Project Management - A
Quantitative Methods - A-
Technical Writing - B

Yep, that’s right kiddies. The Whitters got hax0rd. I made a mistake, and this time my project got fucked for it. Now our backend deliverable for the project is completely undeliverable because I know it isn’t safe, and at the moment, I don’t know why. So today after our presentation, I am basically removing myself from my group and offering myself up as a sacrifice to the powers that be in hopes that they will take pity on my group members. We’re still delivering a pretty spectacular front-end website and a promise that I will personally fix and deliver the backend to them ASAP.

Here’s to hoping that they pity me. Or at least my group. I don’t want them going down for something that I did.

Since I got my new laptop, I’ve slowly been falling out of love with my desktop simply because the laptop is much more powerful. It has a bigger hard drive, more RAM, etc. The only thing my desktop beats it as is CPU speed in GHz. But now my desktop is a little better, because instead of having Sama send back his RAM, I put it into my computer. Now instead of a measly 1G of RAM (NO WONDER WOW RAN SO SLOW), I’ve got 2.5 and I am a happy Whitters. I’m also planning on purchasing another hard drive to slave in my desktop.. That is unless I can convince the Sama to build me a new computer too *hint hint*

Other than physical computer life, my virtual life has shifted gears too. My roommate Amy has once again gotten me addicted to Sims, but thats okay because I got her back by re-introducing her to NeoPets (yes, I’m evil). But I finally updated my collection of expansions so now the only things that I am lacking are the Family Fun, and Kitchen Stuff Packs. I have all the expansions, and let me tell you Bon Voyage and Free Time are absolutely AWESOME! I love being able to send my Sims on a nice vacation before I smite them. Wait, did I say smite? I mean cherish and adore!

And since no Geeky Friday can be complete without some shameless endorsements, I’d recommend that ANY Sim-head whose into custom content to check out Mod The Sims 2 and Decorgal for some absolutely awesome custom content. I’m also planning on putting up some of the paid custom content that I’ve downloaded on here (since selling custom content is against EA TOS so I really don’t care about the developers TOS) soon.

This week to start us off on the right foot, I’ve decided to shamelessly promote a new game which I found through one of my friends here at college, and that game is called AudioSurf.

Now by this screenshot, you can already tell that AudioSurf is filled with bright colors (and they’re customizable too). You are in control of a small jet-car which is rocketing down the “music highway”. Personally, I equate this more to the “acid trip with soundtrack highway” but regardless, you’re going to be bombarded with a multitude of colors from the beginning to end in each and every round.

The object of the game is to collect the colored squares while avoiding the gray ones. You have three lanes, and each time you hit a colored square, it moves into the queue on that lane. Touch three or more of the same color in your queues (blocks can be in multiple lanes - i.e. 2 in first lane 1 in second), to clear them and receive your points. You don’t automatically clear them once you’ve gotten three because the game gives you a grace-period which allows you to potentially pick up more blocks of that color and increase your bonus. If you hit a gray block, it gets suck in your lane queue, and only disappear after a certain amount of time.

Sound fun yet? If yes, hang on tight because it’s about to get even better. The best part about AudioSurf is that rather than dealing with a mundane game soundtrack that you eventually get bored of and quit playing, AudioSurf lets you choose your own music. Thats right you pick your own songs. As long as the song is in a compatible format (mp3, m4a, etc), you can have AudioSurf load it up. The game automatically detects the rhythms, vocals, etc of the song and generates a custom musical highway for you to play on.

The speed your car moves at is directly influenced by the speed of the song your playing to. If the song is slow, the track tilts up and everything slows down. If the song is fast, the track tilts down and you rocket along at breakneck speeds. Throw in some random banked curves, more gray blocks than you can imagine, and in-opportune speed-ups, and you’ve got yourself one wild ride.

The game also comes with several different modes such as Mono (only have to deal with one color), Eraser (gives you the ability to erase blocks of certain colors from your lane queues, Double V (you control two cars), and many more. These options are also available on different levels (beginner, pro and expert) which all come with their own little quirks and bonuses. If you’re feeling really brave, you can check Ironmode at the bottom to add in some extra hardness. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve been told it’s quite difficult. I’ve only really played Mono and Eraser modes, but I do look forward to trying out the rest.

You can get a trial version of AudioSurf from the website, but it only allows you to do 5 songs before it expires. But the nice thing is, the full version only costs a measly one-time fee of $10. AudioSurf also requires you to download and install Steam, which is a high-powered gaming server which lets you download games, add them to your account, and then access them from any computer. If you have games such as Half Life 2, or The Orange Box, it’s likely you’ve already got Steam installed. The Steam panel will keep your game installations up-to-date automatically, and give you information on other games you may enjoy.

All in all, I’m not ashamed to say that I am now completely addicted to AudioSurf and may be ignoring everything else for a while while I play. Yes, I’m a bad person.

No, just give me 10 minutes of being belittled for my ideas regarding a project (which is a web site might I add) because the professor doesn’t understand what we’re trying to explain to him. And rather than realizing that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, he’d rather tell us we’re wrong. Um, no we’re not. You are, and it’s about damn time you admit it for once in your life.

Also, what the hell is up with people acting like their problems are my fault. I am absolutely fed up with hearing the “thanks for screwing me over” guilt trip. Let me lay this out for you. I am in classes 18 hours a week. I work 10+ hours a week on top of that (usually more like 15). I have to make time for things like eating and sleeping in there somewhere. I have at least one major project in every single class I’m in that I am currently working on. And these projects are on top of the daily homework assignments which can take anywhere from 1-2 hours each to complete. So considering all that, I am most definitely sorry that I’m not willing to drop everything I’m doing to rush to your aid every 10 seconds when you supposedly need my help. I’m sorry that I’m not going to take 4 hours out of my day to drive you God knows where. I’m sorry that my life, my job, and my schoolwork are the most important things to me right now. I’m just sorry. Sue me.

School is going pretty well, aside for a few bumps I’ve hit along the way. Got some good feedback on a document today that I didn’t expect to go over that well so it was a pleasant surprise. We’re going to do another revision and the professor is letting us come back in again and meet with her (we requested it) and hopefully this will be another A that Dusty and I have been able to pull off in this class. It’s a technical writing class, and our professor is the director of the writing center, so she’s a pretty tough grader, but happily enough I’ve only gotten 1 B so far and the rest have been A’s (one of the other projects was a partner one with Dusty - we make a good team).

I’m not going to get to present my project for I4I at the research symposium because the directors of it refuse to accept the fact that they messed up. They insist that there is no possible way that I registered for it even though they KNOW people were having problems with registration and I had someone sitting there watching me register because I was registering for both her and I as we are partners. But thankfully my professor is letting us out of that class requirement. We’re going to do the symposium poster anyways and hang it in our IT/Business hallway.

Speaking of summer… The closer it gets, the more I find myself remembering back to the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. I had the job on campus and was primarily living with my aunt. Problem was that I also had campus housing and all my stuff (including my computer) was there. I didn’t get many chances to be online after that first month, but oddly I didn’t mind it. I think, in a way, I was actually happier that I didn’t have to keep up with both ‘online life’ and ‘real life’ at the same time.

This summer I’m going to be living with my aunt and working full-time on campus again. I don’t have to stay on campus, but I decided that it would be better for me to be down here in the office than at home procrastinating about the work I need to do. I get way too distracted when I’m sitting in my own house versus when I’m in the office and the boss could drop in any second. So I’m going to be living with my aunt again and even though I’ll be able to have my computer with me I’m thinking about not using it much.

The desktop is definitely going home – m y mom can use it and I can use it when I go home on weekends. But I’ll have my little HP laptop down here with me so I can do the online thing if I want to, but I really think that I’m going to be withdrawing from my ‘online life’. I don’t talk on messengers much (except to Mike who is going to be down here too), and I’m positive that nobody on Facebook is going to miss the application-denying party-pooper. I just need a break from the Internet that’s not a forced one (due to lack of time). I need to have free time but choose to spend it somewhere other than in front of a computer.

I’m going to attempt to blog more though so that I can continue to prove that I haven’t died. But please don’t expect much else in the way of contact.