I learned yesterday from Chowning that Martin and Chowning are engaged to be married! Congrats, Martin! Being married is fun.

Apparently they have been engaged for 2 months -- way to keep it a secret, Martin. slacker.

quite a crazy rigmarole to use one's google account instead of the age old blogger account. but it all worked out. first post. nooch. actually, more like first post from me in months and months because i am lame. noonch.

let's work top-down:
- i went to ilm last summer, decided to quit the phd program
- i deliberated for 8 months, decided not to quit the phd program
- i blew off quals in fall 06 because i thought i was quitting
- i decided to tie my playmotion work as closely as possible to the phd program
- i just finished off spring semester 07 and now work "full time" for playmotion
- i finished the semester by failing to submit a paper that i slaved away on, quitting a mere 6 hours before the deadline
- i failed to submit because we "discovered" a fundamental flaw with our technique
- i will resubmit once we have vanquished said problem on bending kung fu fighters to one's will when kung fu fighters exhibit self-occlusions (arms in front of body)
- i hope to finish grad school by dec. 2008, making my tech tenure last just one semester over a decade.

there is a crackhouse visible from our apartment. it is a condemned building next to the dialysis clinic at the end of our street. we survey it from our living room using binoculars. it has that old fortress of chocolatude feeling to it around here and i love it. but i also miss peachtree and trinity. good times a plenty were had there.

martin, it seems you've started a new chapter in your life. exciting!

it's fun to go to a job every day and work with jeremy. we eat girl scout cookies all the time. and blast music. i plan to start drinking more beer at work.

the new aqua teen hunger force movie is fantastic. all the mindrot i was hoping for and much much more.

Moving this to a hosted account I have unless I fuck everything up.

Edit: I didn't fuck anything up. Enjoy no longer being tied to the whims of my own server.

Tweaked NAT settings, should work now.

Check - test - hello etc.

Just making sure this crap still works now that banana (the server) has been moved behind crapbox (the firewall).

I believe I will not be returning to grad school this year. There isn't funding for the professor I want to work with to pick up more students, so it will not be spending the money to go. This is good and bad. It gives me another year to be with my homeroom, watch them graduate and do whatever the fuck else I want to do with Harrison before I leave. It gives me another year to re-build finances that will soon be destroyed by buying a condo. I does greatly hinder my ability to get a PhD, and it does mean that if I do it will be very late in my life when I am done. I go back and forth between being unhappy and happy about this.

I am happy about how things have been going with the Emory women's ultimate team. They continue to work hard and develop well. I wasn't there for their disappointing loss to arch-rival UGA at Mardi Gras, but I have confidence that we will beat them when it matters.

There is a new game out for the 360 called Crackdown. It has no plot, however it is a great mixture of GTA and Hulk in a fashion that really works. It is segmented enough that I can play for a few minutes then stop, and addictive enough that I want to play all of the time. This is the dangerous combination that makes Guitar Hero 2 the most played thing at my house. While zelda requires time to really go anywhere, I can play crackdown for just a few minutes and be happy . . . clearly this why I find myself up at 2 in the morning playing . . . right?

Speaking of Guitar Hero 2, Jason and I are going to play Guitar Hero at Brewhouse tonight on a big screen using the bar's audio system. It is going to fucking rock, especially because according to Jason he's better than most of the guys there, and I'm better than him. So I'm going to go pick up some groupies tonight and OD on herione after a blistering set of metal songs.

There is plenty more to talk about. My infatuation with podcasts grows more and more. I physical status is improving only slowly. Chowning and I are getting a condo on peachtree near Myrtle (hey jeremy!). I've finally figure out how to teach AP and feel good about it. Etc.

so there's this place. called india. it's crazy there.

it's not as dangerous as i'd feared. it's also not as easy to get around as i'd been led to believe. let me clear one thing up right now: not everyone in india speaks (a little) english. especially the taxi/autorickshaw drivers in mumbai.

they also don't necessarily know where the hell they're going. oh, they may act like they do. they may even fool you into believing they do by stopping to ask for directions if you're trying to get somewhere and they obviously didn't understand when you began your journey. but there's exactly no guarantee that these guys ever understand anyone, apparently. or that they have a particular interest in taking you to your desired destination.

in india they have tigers and cheetahs and cows. on college campuses. who knew?

i'm currently writing up as much as i can remember from my adventures on the subcontintent. once i get stuff assembled i'll start a serial. or maybe i'll just post 35000 words to the front page all at once. who knows.

Last night/this morning I finally finished Zelda: Twilight Princess. After the original buzz of the game people started saying it was the best Zelda game ever. I don't know about that, but it is very good, and it finished strong also in a classic multiple iteration boss fight. Perhaps one of the most interesting things about the last fight is that it forced you to use skills that you were tought in the very beginning of the game. Regardless, it is a great game, the question now is what will I play on the Revolution. A new game (Wii Play) comes out tomorrow with a packed in controller. I'm going to go get it for the controller really, but hopefully it will be good game.

Today I'm headed to Gwinett (sp?) to play a day long game of Diplomacy. It should be fun. The idea was started by Bruckner because one of his friends at work wanted to play, so he called me since I own the game. We are going to finish it all today, which made it particularly interesting. So Bruckner got his people (which is a lot since most people are coming with their significant other) and I "got" my people. I knew Bruck was bringing people, so I didn't put out the big APB for everyone. After calling Mark and Jeremy and talking to Mike, and getting some committment from each person, I think only Mike and I will be making the trip today. Mark is out for whatever reasons, and after not talking to Jeremy yesterday, it is up to me to track him down if he is going. At least Mike lives here, but not last night. He was out with Rich last night and didn't come home.

Long ago I realized that unless my friends and I are doing something together (school, sports, living, etc.) the amount of time we see each other is reduced greatly. That isn't a problem, as it has worked well in the past whenever we get together again, but it does make me realize that the people that I see everyday are highschool students, then after that I see college students (at practice), then I see the people at the bar, then I see my girlfriend, then I see my friends. I don't know what I think of that order. As people's lives change it is interesting to see how social networks change. It is something we all have experience with (at least since High School) and could lead to some fun discussions, but I need to drive up to Marietta to go get Diplomacy. Jeremy, give me a call if you read this before noon today.

Recently my friend Dan Heacox referred to this blog as "[my] video game blog." Not to bash on any of the other content that gets put up here, but I do spend a lot of my time here writing about video games. I wonder what percentage of the posts on this blog have at least one word about video games?

Tomorrow my trip in NY will come to a close. There haven't been that many great stories about my times here. It has been a blast, but nothing like last year. I almost went out clubbing tonight in the city. Almost. That's where my story lies, in the realm of potential.

I'm potentially in my last semester as a high school teacher. I don't know if I like that appraoch to the subject, but that is one way of looking at it. Dr. Prilutsky has found a fellowship through Tech that I can apply for, but it only gets me $4000 over the course of a whole year. I'm not sure if I will be able to swing this Ph.D. thing without going in the red, while is something that I'm not quite willing to do.

On the videogame front (+1), FFV is still getting mad play, and that will continue until the 8th. Zelda is second on the list, as the Revolution has been a hit at every house it has plugged into this trip. That should also be done by the 8th. School starts the 8th . . . notice a trend. Jeremy, I hope you like your Christmas present. I'll bring it over Friday.

It's a new year so I decided to buy a new car. That's how I roll.

Hoi from somewhere near Trenton. My second annual NY/NJ trip has now included a new stop in Philadelphia. Allow me to quickly recap:

I found out that I was leaving a day earlier for NYC than I originally thought, and I was leaving at night on the 22nd not the middle of the day on the 23rd. This created a housing situation because I wouldn't be able to take the bus to Tom's River where my cousin Sharyl is. Solution! I run into Dan Heacox in Atlanta and get the keys to his place in Queens. So I fly up there, take a cab who requires directions from my GPS enabled phone to get to Dan's house and spend the night.

Next day, after walking a few miles to go to a Barnes and Noble (again using GPS phone). I take the subway to Port Authority and go see my cousin. Spend the next few days seeing the family, hedging on when I was going to tell Chowning about wanting to play ultimate again, and hearing/seeing how Sharyl's life has gotten MORE stressful (she is now caring for 3 generations of our family, her Dad who is stubborn, her sister who has severe brain damage requiring 24 hour nursing, and her modertaely autistic son). It is good to see the family, but I haven't seen my cousin Billy. I hear that he is taking Logan (his son) back to school in Philly on the 27th, and talk Sharyl and her daughter (Jessi) into taking me to meet then in Philly for a special birthday treat for Jessi (she likes chinatown). Meet Billy and Monica (logan is MIA), and then pull a transfer. But I'm not going back with either of them, I'm going to rondevous with my old friend Beth on her way back through Philly to her parents house. It is a crazy plan, requiring exact timing, and it works flawlessly. Ride with Beth, Jenn and Tracy back to the Porecca family abode, where I get to have a dinner with the wonderful Porecca clan and we go wee the coolest house light display I have every seen. This house is super phat! They have the whole lights on timers set to music, but the music is piped over FM and you play it on your car stereo. That shit was sweet. The only thing that would make it better is to allow people to call in, press a button and add a song to the queue of what is going to be played. Jeremy, Matt, start working on that, interactive visual entertainment ala your work for Reuters but on a smaller scale. Then package that shit, sell it to Home Depot and fund all of the crazy projects you want.

We're going out tonight, to some random bar that will hopefully let me experience going out in a different part of Jersey. Last night's Jessi Birthday extra was an interesting affair of a live cover band playing Bon Jovi, Green Day and then a host of teen angst anthems (SUM 41 and My Chemical Romance). The highlights were a rendition of Since You've Been Gone by Kelly Clarkston sung by a guy trying to sound like Kelly Clarkston, a redition of Sweet Home Alabama (I was the only southerner) and an encore of Killing in the Name Of. Tonight should be different, but I doubt I will hear anything similar to what I would hear in Atlanta (all of the hip-hop in the intermission last night was 3 year old mainstream affairs like Ja Rule and Big Pun). Tomorrow I'm on my way back to Queens, where I will have a one day advance to try to download all of the podcasts I've been missing (I feel cut off from the flow of video game info) and I can try to make some serious headway into Twilight Princess.

I've been listening to a lot of The Two Tone Collection . . . I assume I have Ted to thank for that. I've been playing FFV Advance non-stop. This might be the best Final Fantasy I have played yet on the basis of length and depth of job structure. I hope your holidays are as eventful as mine.

Ah, Hitler. History's most misunderstood street mime.

umm.m... apparently, we heart hitler.

Fuck you and your drought.

I'm in UAE, bitch!