In the atrium of our building, EA has a 3-month rotating gallery of artwork by EA employees. I submitted some of my photos, but never heard anything back (the show is next Friday,) so I figured that they hadn't been accepted. But yesterday afternoon, I received an e-mail saying "Congratulations! Your art has been chosen for the next EARS Employee Art Show!" Woo! The only thing is, I have to get everything printed and framed by next Wednesday. Oh nos! Looks like I'll be busy this weekend...

In other news, Kotaku has screenshots up of MySims. Check them out. The captions are pretty funny.

Here are some shots of the prospecting feature I worked on:

Uploaded to Flickr on 28th March, 2007.

Birthday pictures are up!

If you're not watching the Discovery Channel/BBC series Planet Earth, do it. Run, don't walk.

I've recently started to plan out a budget for myself. Don't worry Mom and Dad, this isn't because I'm poor and starving, but rather because I have too much disposable income. I know, wah wah. My problem is that I've never had to worry about money, but this doesn't mean that I shouldn't worry about money. So I downloaded the free trial of Microsoft Money (and Peter eventually got me a copy), and started making up my budget. I'm still tweaking numbers and trying to figure out what works best for me, but hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

A big chunk of my income goes into what Money likes to call "Committed Expenses": rent, groceries, utilities, cell phone bills, etc., so that's not really something I can change. But one big money-saving area for me is to not eat out as much as I have been over the past year, so I've been trying to be good about bringing my lunch and cooking dinner at home. We'll see how it goes, but so far (i.e. for about a week) it's been going well.

Finally, a couple more MySims writeups:

• Wired
• Qj.net

Yesterday afternoon I had a birthday barbecue in Cuesta Park. After some shenanigans regarding finding a free grill, we claimed a table and set up camp. Much delicious food was consumed, and the weather was warm, but not hot. I also got a Charlie the Unicorn piñata, which we drew kidney scars on. Thanks to everyone who came out, and also thank you for discovering my Amazon wishlist! Special thanks to Amanda for planning the event, and to Peter for salvaging my poor coal arrangement and doing most of the grilling. Yum.

Uploaded to Flickr on 25th March, 2007.

Going through some old photos...

Uploaded to Flickr on 25th March, 2007.

Going through some old photos...

Uploaded to Flickr on 24th March, 2007.

Come to think of it, not too happy with this one, either.

Uploaded to Flickr on 24th March, 2007.

Not particularly happy with this one, but oh well.

Last night, MySims had a press event in San Francisco to give the US press a first look at the game. If y'all have been wondering what the heck I have been working on, check out the 1up review. I'll update this post as more come online.

In unrelated news, regular expressions rule! I used one in MT-Blacklist to block some weird comment spam I've been getting recently, that basically consisted of strings of random characters. Fortunately, the length and number of the strings were always the same.

Edit:

• Gamespot writeup. One of the features I'm working on, barriers, got a little mention: "For instance, in our earlier task, after building that new sofa and advancing the town to star level one, our character gained a crowbar, which was used to unseal a boarded-off path to a new forest area, which featured more empty lots to be built up into new custom houses."
• WorthPlaying writeup.
• Wired
• Qj.net

Uploaded to Flickr on 22nd March, 2007.

Another take on the previous shot.

On black.

Uploaded to Flickr on 20th March, 2007.

Trying out some more extreme post-processing. Better on black.

Here we go again:

Happy Birthday to me
Happy Birthday to me
I got cookies from Levain
'Cuz now I'm 27!

Okay, even I admit that was stretching it. But you try rhyming "27"!

Or down, as the case may be. I took Enzo to the vet on Wednesday, and some of his kidney values are a little lower than they were a couple of months ago (a good thing.) GoooooooOOOO ENZO!

On a different, but also happy note, my cable magically fixed itself! For several months I had been missing a big chunk of channels from about FX until Oxygen (this included MTV, Animal Planet, CNN, and Comedy Central, among others), but since I am so lazy, I never called Comcast about it. However, earlier in the week, I decided to give them a try, and they're back! Just goes to show, procrastination pays off.

...Right?

Uploaded to Flickr on 15th March, 2007.

Right out of the camera, except for straightening.

Uploaded to Flickr on 15th March, 2007.

From the roof of our parking garage.

Uploaded to Flickr on 15th March, 2007.

At the vet's office, waiting for them to bring Enzo back from his blood and urine tests. Probably my first earnest attempt at a self portrait.

Uploaded to Flickr on 13th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 13th March, 2007.

Probably wishing he had a dog biscuit.

Uploaded to Flickr on 13th March, 2007.

Definitely inspired by Nate's sky and cloud photos. If I were more talented/less lazy, I'd clone out the light pole.

Consider these three scenarios:

Scenario #1:

Scenario #2:

Scenario #3:

In an unrelated note, Ann Coulter really REALLY needs to just go away.

First things first: Happy Birthday Brendan and YGB!! Here's the traditional dancing bunny:

Anyway, as evidenced by the title, I saw 300 this weekend. More on that later.

Saturday I went to the Sutro Baths, which I had passed by many times, but never visited. That area stirs a painful (literally) memory, as the hill that runs by the ruins is the exact place where my IT-band first started to hurt when I was doing my marathon training over two years ago. But the ruins themselves are very neat, and have really nice views of the water. The day was pretty clear, and we could even see the Golden Gate bridge through the fog. Pictures here. I had a hard time contending with the light there, so I'm not super happy with any of the shots, but oh well.

Saturday evening we took out Brendan for his 27th birthday. First we had dinner at Market Broiler, where I explored my love/hate relationship with crab: so much work, but so good. Afterwards, we headed to The Saddle Rack, which was an interesting experience. Early in the night, it was a strictly country-western club with all country music, and a dance floor filled with middle-aged couples in cowboy hats. As it got later, they started to play more mainstream country, and some classic rock. As the clock ticked past midnight, the music shifted to normal club music as the hat and boot crowd left, only to be replaced by the bump and grind crowd. Brendan, Matt, and Justin all gave the mechanical bull a spin, and those pics are up on Facebook.

Despite going to sleep at 2:15 am (pre-time change), and despite the clock leaping forward an hour, I was up at 10 to meet Buddy at Planet Granite Sunnyvale for some climbing. I tackled the 11a I had been eying in the Ice Box, and also did a few 10as, a 10c, and a 10d that verily kicked my behind. Afterwards, we had a late lunch at Maru Ichi, and headed over to catch an afternoon showing of 300.

So, back to the movie. 300 can be summed up in one word: gratuitous. Gratuitous:

• Violence
• Boobies
• CG
• Growly shouting
• One-shot characters that serve very little purpose
• Abs. I have a theory that it was some intern's job to paint in everyone's abs in every frame.
• But most of all, gratuitous use of slow-motion. If the movie were played at normal speed, it would probably be about 30 minutes long

That all said, it was definitely entertaining, and the battle scenes are very, very cool. Visually, a stunning movie, but don't expect too much in the way of plot or clever dialog.

Uploaded to Flickr on 11th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 11th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Rahul loves him some fries.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

Uploaded to Flickr on 10th March, 2007.

I just uninstalled and deleted my account with Mozy. Not because there was anything wrong with it, but because, as Nate pointed out, it doesn't do what I thought it would do. I thought I could use it as an online hard drive, but it turns out if I were to delete a file from my hard drive, it would be deleted from the Mozy servers. I think I may try out Omnidrive, an actual online storage service instead. Unfortunately, it's quite a bit more expensive than Mozy. Oh well, I guess it was too good to be true.

Things I am super duper into right now

• photography
• rock climbing

Things I think are weird

• When couples in restaurants sit on the same side of a booth
• Christina Ricci

Things that annoy me

• When people leave shopping carts in parking spaces
• When people stop liking a band/movie/TV show just because it's popular

Things I have done that you might not have

• Hugged a koala and a wombat
• Been offered a Porsche...and turned it down

Things I am surfing

• Neatorama
• Flickr

Things I am procrastinating

• Doing my taxes
• Cleaning the floor in my apartment

What are your lists?

As you might have noticed, I've decided to start cross-posting some of my Flickr photos on this site. I think some of my loyal (?) readers here don't check Flickr very often, and I've been happy with what I've been doing there. Also, those of you who don't have Flickr accounts can now post comments here. Yay!

Uploaded to Flickr on 7th March, 2007.

A very strange thing happened tonight. I picked up this glass from my coffee table, and the bottom stayed behind. It was an extremely clean break, and I have no idea how it happened. It was actually really cool, and I would have kept the base if it wasn't so sharp.

Uploaded to Flickr on 7th March, 2007.

Dogs looking up are cute.

Uploaded to Flickr on 6th March, 2007.

David is one of the few people I've ever met who has a better monkey face than I do.

Apologies for the extreme noise in this picture.

Uploaded to Flickr on 7th March, 2007.

My pet cactus was sitting on my desk at work (it fell off of my cell phone) and a sliver of light came through the blinds and fell right on it.

Running out of hard drive space has always been a problem for me, but especially since starting to shoot in RAW, disk space has become a rare commodity. I had a 250GB drive in my desktop (which I never use), so I bought an external drive enclosure and last night I put the 250GB drive inside of it. However, partly because my friends at work convinced me that Western Digital drives suck, and partly because of the buzzing noise the enclosure makes, I was nervous about moving my pictures to be stored solely on the external drive. So after shopping around a bit, I decided to sign up for Mozy, an online backup service. For $5/month, you get unlimited space to backup your computer files. The only problem is that now I have many gigs of files to backup, and a DSL line. So I'm currently backing up only my pictures from 2004 and 2005 (6.5GB worth) and the estimated time to completion is about 1 1/2 days. But once the huge initial backup is done (I'll probably have to spread it over several weeks), I can have the software run scheduled incremental backups, which should be much faster.

In other news, I made my first trip to Keeble and Shuchat Photography in Palo Alto, which is a super fun place. I had them clean my sensor (I'm too wimpy to do it myself), and I also bought a 35mm f/2 lens, which I'm going to return because I found out I could get it way cheaper at B&H.

Finally, Happy Birthday Amanda! Friday night was her birthday party, which was lots of fun. I made a cake, which actually turned out excellently, if I do say so myself. We went to Massawa, an Eritrean restaurant, which was delicious, then to Hobson's Choice for drinks afterwards. A few pics up on Facebook, if you're on that.

(Photo is not mine. Read more about the Meatcake.)

Made it one month! Who wants to go out for prime rib?