Most of you know that I have a particular weakness for all things gadgety. If it's shiny or has lots of buttons, I probably want it. Here are a few things I've been thinking about wasting my money on:

• Camera phone - If you've ever talked about cell phones with me, you've probably heard my "I just want a phone that's a phone" rant. However, I find the instant gratification of a camera phone very, very appealing.


• Canon EOS 20D - 8 megapixels, 0.2-second start up time, 5 fps burst shooting... Now I know that a nice camera does not a photographer make, but this camera is so cool. Plus, it is probably the best affordable <ahem> dSLR camera on the market.


• TiVo - I don't watch that much TV anymore, but how else am I going to make sure to catch The O.C. every week?


• iPod - I, too, want to be one of the cool people walking around with white earbuds.

In other, completely unrelated news, I saw Garden State last night with Buddy and enjoyed it quite a lot. ("it" being the movie, not Buddy. Not that I don't enjoy Buddy, but his soundtrack isn't as good.) Mad props to Zach Braff for an amazing first movie. Plus, Super Bonus™ for writing into it making out with Natalie Portman. Let's be honest here -- who among us, given the chance, wouldn't do that?

On the subject of Natalie Portman, (not making out with her, just her) I thought she was very good in the movie. Now this came as a bit of a surprise, given the craptastic performances she gave in the last two Star Wars movies. Was this merely a fluke? Or was Star Wars the fluke? It is important to note that Haydn Christensen also gave a sucktacular performance in Star Wars. However, his performance in Shattered Glass was widely praised. Thus, we can come to a single, inevitable conclusion: George Lucas makes good actors bad. That's gotta suck. Being totally ignorant about both the art of acting and the art of directing, I always assumed that good actors were always good actors, regardless of who is directing them. But I guess this proves that indeed, directors actually do something. Who knew?

I was in Portland for most of this weekend. The main reason was to attend my cousin's wedding reception. But the Super Bonus™ of the weekend was that I got to have brunch with none other than Domi, med student extraodinaire. It was great to catch up with her, and I was glad to be able to provide her with some non-medical-related conversation.

Afterwards, my parents and I went on a drive along the Columbia River gorge and saw some nice waterfalls. My mom got impatient with all the nature, though, so we headed back to downtown for some shopping.

Since I was missing our Saturday training run, after we got back to the hotel, I went on an afternoon run along the Willamette River. It was nice, although it did smell like sewage in places. Mmm...sewage...

The wedding reception was in the evening, and it was quite nice. Got to hang out with the family, which is always a good time. It was quite entertaining to see my 90-year-old grandma busting it out on the dance floor, too.

I came back to California on Sunday morning. Didn't do too much during the day, although I did get my car washed, restoring it to its previous shiny shiny glory.

In the evening I was fortunate enough to attend a concert by Lila Downs. For those of you who have seen the movie Frida, you would have seen Lila Downs singing during the infamous tango scene. It was an amazing performance. It took place at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, which was a small, intimate performance space. Her songs were sung mostly in Spanish or Indian languages of Mexico, but she always took a moment to explain the meaning of each of her songs. She is an incredibly expressive, passionate singer and she also had an extremely talented band backing her up. I felt lucky to have been able to see her perform.

I am officially lame. This is because although I remembered to call her (with a gentle reminder,) I didn't do a proper online shout-out to Domi for her birthday! So I hope this is acceptable, if not a little late.

Whew.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Steve for authoring this website's 800th (!) comment!

Friday night Buddy and I went to the Beastie Boys concert in the city. We were supposed to be joined by Cort, but he unfortunately had to work. We were able to sell his ticket to some British punk girls, though.

The first act was, strangely enough, Bob Moore's Amazing Mongrels which is exactly what it sounds like -- a performing dog troupe. There were a dozen or so dogs onstage doing tricks like jumping through hoops and walking on tightropes. The highlight of the act was when a shaggy dog named Scooter balanced on a rope on his hind legs. It took him a couple tries, but when he did, the entire crowd was chanting, "SCOOTER! SCOOTER!"

The real opening act was up-and-coming rapper Talib Kweli. I had only heard one of his songs before last night, but I thought he was really good. He had a lot of energy and interacted a lot with the crowd. Plus, he could actually perform live. Imagine that.

But of course we were all really there to see the Beastie Boys. The show started with a video feed of Mix Master Mike standing outside the venue, and it followed him into the building and onstage. The rest of them joined him onstage shortly afterwards. Overall, the show was awesome. They did several songs from their new album as well as some older favorites. They messed up the lyrics a couple times and had to restart the song in places, but nobody seemed to mind. They also did a few songs playing instruments, which was pretty cool. I had sort of forgotten that they really started out more as a band than an rap group. But for the most part they were backed by Mix Master Mike, who has some mad DJ skillz.

There is one thing I have to say though: Beastie Boys is OLD. MCA turned 40 last month, and boy is he showing it. Fortunately, their age doesn't seem to have affected their ability to rap, nor has it brought Mike D's voice to a post-puberty range.

All in all, it was a great concert. If you ever get a chance, go see the Beastie Boys! Even if you don't like their music, they put on an amazing show.

If any of you wonder what I work on, wonder no more! (Or wonder slightly less...)

Go to this link on Gamespot and watch the third "Behind the Scenes" video. At the part where he is talking about looking at the Balrog in x-ray mode and showing the model animating with all the bone names (about 1:30 in), the software he is using is the tool I work on! Woohoo! We're famous!

Hung out last night with Camila and Captain Compassion himself, Ryan. Camila gets food really cheap from the school she teaches at, so I came over for portobello mushroom ravioli and garlic bread. It was quite good, especially considering the fact that it came from a school kitchen.

Afterwards, Camila had to go home to do some grading (in RED pen, none of this purple pen shit), so Ryan and I busted out Burnout 3. It was fun! I'm not sure I agree with Buddy's "Best Game Ever!" assessment, but I can definitely see how one could become very, very addicted to it. However, I would like to make a motion to rename it from a "racing game" to a "crashing game", because really, not much racing and a whole lotta crashing going on there.

WARNING: This will be a nerdy entry. Yes, even more so that usual. There, I said it.

So...I'm okay at web-y stuff. I don't think I'm the bestest ever, but sometimes I do stuff that I think is kinda cool. Today I did one of those things, and I'd like to share it with you.

You may or may not have noticed that I created a marathon log recently. It's been live for a few days, but I'm still in the process of hammering out the details. One of those details was that, for each day I had an entry on, I wanted to keep track of which day of training it was, how much money I had raised, and how many days I have left to fundraise. At first, I was typing them in manually into each entry. This quickly became tedious, so I started looking into a more automated way of doing this.

While reading about PHP time functions, (hey, I said this would be nerdy) I happened upon this comment which gave a code snippet to calculate the elapsed days between two dates. This was perfect for what I was trying to do. So I created couple new templates which have something like this:

$firstdayoftraining = "18 September 2004";
$fundraisingdeadline = "26 November 2004";

echo "Day " . $dayselapsed . " of training";
echo $dayselapsed2 . " day" . $s . "left to fundraise";

I include them in my Movable Type templates right after the date. I also have to add this before the includes:

$today = <$MTEntryDate format="%d %B %Y">;

This way, the elapsed days are calculated automatically from the date of each entry.

The last thing I needed to do was some way of keeping track of how much money I had raised so far in each entry. It wasn't as simple as including one file because the total would (presumably) be different for different entries. I wanted to able to look back and see my progress. I thought about this for a bit and came up with what I think is a pretty clever solution. For each entry, I put the current fundraising total in the "Extended Entry" field. Next, I created a new daily archive template that only had the following:

<MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryMore$></MTEntries>

I set the archive file name to be: fundraising/<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y_%m_%d"$>.php. So for each day that has an entry, a file is created in the fundraising/ folder.

So for each day, I include that day's fundraising total in the template:

include '[path]/archives/fundraising/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y_%m_%d"$>.php';

The last thing I did was to leverage those new fundraising total files for donation box on the left side. I added the following code:

Total:
<MTEntries sort_order="descend" lastn="1">
<?php include '[path]/archives/fundraising/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y_%m_%d"$>.php'; ?>



Assuming the fundraising total for the last entry is the current total, the donation box on the left side will automatically update as I create new entries.

So...all that was probably only interesting to me, but I was quite proud of myself. And now my site is quite easy to maintain. Woo!

Besides this thing, nothing much has been happening with The Sha. Saturday night Walter, Justin, and Manish had their housewarming party at their swanky new crib. Much food was consumed. Sunday, Peter and Mike hosted Eric's going away party. Food was consumed.

Last night, I had dinner with Steve and Jerry. They are in the middle of a cross-country road trip and found themselves in the area, so we met up at Cascal. Way too much food was consumed. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) It was good to see them, but I have to admit that I didn't really remember what Steve looked like since the last time I saw him was at my brother's wedding 5 years ago. And...I just realized he'll probably read this. Oh well. Hi Steve!

Consuming a lot of food seems to be the current theme song in Sha Land. I'm sort of banking on the fact that all the training will even things out, but if I'm a little squishy the next time you see me, well, you'll know why.

http://marathon.shashachu.com/

I will be the first to admit that I am drawn to shiny things with buttons. And what is shinier and buttony-er than an iPod? Nothing, I tell you, nothing.

So Buddy showed me this site: FreeiPods.com (yes, there's a referral number in there; see title: "iPod Whore") which will give you a free iPod, albeit with a bit of work from you and 5 friends who owe you favors and/or money.

The deal is that you sign up for an account at the FreeIPods.com site, then sign up for one of several "offers", which include things like an AOL trial, BMG CD clubs, Columbia DVD clubs, stamps.com, etc. (I signed up for the stamps.com trial. Most people seem to sign up for AOL, then cancel their account well before the 40 or 50 day trial is over.) After that, you have to get 5 of your friends to sign up at FreeIPods.com and complete 5 offers themselves. Once those 5 referrals are complete (i.e. they not only signed up for a FreeIpods.com account, but they sign up for one of the "offers"), I gets my shiny button-y goodness.

Sounds pretty scam-y doesn't it? Well it's apparently not, according to this Wired.com article, as well as many other online sources such as this one.

Apparently this makes economic sense because a great number of people will a) never get the required 5 referrals and/or b) not cancel their trials. So each of those people = cash money for both the company who runs FreeIPods.com and the companies making the offers.

So....if any of you would like to help me get my little bundle of digital happiness, feel free to sign up here. Don't make me beg.

I'll be participating in the American Heart Association's Heart Walk next Thursday. If you can, please consider donating to support me in the walk. My donation page is here. Many thanks in advance!