Being Amber Rhea

I wonder if I should totally tear down the look of my blog and start over from scratch. I don’t know.

So, it’s obvious that I haven’t yet written anything profound. Instead, I’m been occupying myself with silly little things like the mood icons from Unkymoods (to your left) and Kung-Tunes. Hey, it’s fun!

I’ve also been planting some hardy perennials in our “yard” so that if whomever moves in after us is a slob, they won’t be stuck with a bunch of dead flowers that they’re too lazy to pull up. I planted a gardenia plant and two hostas. Today I’m going to get another gardenia, and perhaps some lantana.

More to come.

Apparently there are ultimately going to be a total of 37 bulldog statues around town! So far there are 10, and we have pictures of all of them. Today I organized most of the pictures; now I just need to put them up on the web.

I finished writing a paper today (for my class) on Tim Berners-Lee. Really an amazing man. The guy *invented* the Web, HTML, and HTTP, and yet most people have never heard of him! On the flip side, *everyone* has heard of Bill Gates, and he never invented anything.

Tomorrow I don’t have class. I plan to spend most of the day finishing/refining my webquest. (Aka, the final project for my class.) And also messing around with Photoshop some more, to try to hone (and hopefully expand) my limited skill set.

I guess my recent blog entries have been kind of boring. I have a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head that I would like to write about — it’s just that usually when I think about it, it’s 1:00 AM and I’m extremely tired. So maybe tomorrow I’ll also take the time to write something provocative. Or at least something that doesn’t put everyone to sleep!

We have 2 more months until The Big Move. I’m going to miss Athens, but I’m eager to get out there and start my job. I’m really looking forward to going out there in June to scope the place out! Tomorrow I’m going to call those Plano lofts (well, I guess I’ll actually be calling whomever *owns* those Plano lofts) to try to get some more information.

Guess that’s enough for now; I better get started thinking about what kinds of provocative things I’m going to write for the next thrilling installment! Stay tuned.

Ack, I have neglected my blog for the past few days! I’ve been occupying my time with a lot of various and sundry stuff. I feel like I should tell the story of how my iBook saved the day for two groups’ presentations in class last Wednesday, but I’m too lazy… and anyway, I think it’s enough just to say that it saved the day and leave it at that. Do I really need to gloat any further?

Speaking of my iBook, it (she? he?) now has 640 megs of RAM! As Ken would say: w00t w00t! ;-) (Hi Ken!)

The rain has finally subsided and it’s been a gorgeous weekend. Chris and I have been taking lots of pictures around Athens, specifically of all these colorful bulldog statues that have been planted strategically around downtown and Five Points. Hopefully I will have a “photo gallery” up soon.

We’ve also been looking at apartments in and around Dallas (online, and in a Dallas Apartment Finder magazine that I sent away for). We really want to live in these cool lofts in Plano! See for yourself: http://www.eastsidevillage.com. Anyway, now I have to call my grandmother and inform her of the impending move to Dallas. She doesn’t know yet, and I’m sure she’ll have a fit. But I have to do it!

A quote from an actual email I received (a “form letter” response to a resume I’d submitted thru Monster several weeks ago:

“To cut costs, we will outsource all major projects to India. They have very qualified programmers that make less than 75 cents an hour.”

The letter goes on to say:

“India’s competitive advantage allows us to get more code for the dollar. It is unlikely we will ever favor hiring a US coder.”

AWFUL!!!

It sounds like a scam anyway — they’re interested in “freelancers” who can “find clients” and “lead projects”. Whatever.

Time for me to go take a nap. I am discouraged with humanity (Americans in particular) at the moment and need to sleep it off!

Well, people are either trying to hit on you or trying to sell you something. The other night at Borders, Chris and I were just looking at books, and some guy comes up and starts talking to him. At first I thought maybe Chris knew the guy, from work or something. Then, he spotted me (I was sitting behind one of the bookshelves) and started talking to me, too. He kept going on and on about how he runs some e-commerce business, and they do this many billions of dollars every year, and they don’t have any debt, and he could get us set up if we were interested. I tried several times to get him to come right out and say what it is they actually *do*, but he danced around it every time. Basically, I think they’re a spam company. But anyway. He talked to us (*he* talked *to* us – we just stared blankly at him, wondering when he’d get the hint, if ever) for probably close to 15 minutes before he finally walked away – but not after giving us each one of his business cards. That’s what I should do – check out his business online. Well, I’d have to go dig the card out of my shirt pocket (in the clothes hamper) and I’m too lazy to do that right now. But I know they’re sketchy, whatever kind of company they are!

Oh my god!! Can somebody give me $8,000 to say that Steve Jobs is the founder and CEO of Apple?? -That was just the $8k question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. (Yes, the woman got it right – and she even gave a little spiel about being a “huge Macintosh fan.”) Life is so unfair!!

I found the CD with all my MP3s on it – it was in my CD book, which was hiding in the backseat of the car. I’ll still have to rip some MP3s from my Liz Phair CDs and a few others, but that’s about it – I’m very pleased. Just doing the iTunes organization thing now.

Also, I installed Mac OS 9 on my hard drive’s other partition. I wasn’t going to install OS 9 at all (wow, that sure is different from the tune I was singing a year ago!) since most of what I use is Carbonized, but there’s one Classic app that I cannot live without: MacEnvelope. It will run from a floppy, works with System 6, and hasn’t been updated since 1997 – because it hasn’t needed to be. It was excellent right from the start. It does things that M$ Word and other “modern” program only wish they could do. Simple genius.

Well, another dreary day weather-wise. (I just cringed mildly; I’ll always remember the adding of “-wise” to a word as a grammatical error we learned about [about which we learned - there's another!] in Mrs. Cody’s class in 9th grade.) I have to do research for my group presentation, and that’s about it. It’s nice to have some time to do things like read a book for pleasure; I’m reading The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. Also, I’ve been thinking through the logistics of moving, and counting the dollars and cents in my head and things like that. Moving is expensive!

So, we’ve been perusing the web for Dallas apartments. There’s a lot of information out there, including neighborhood demographics and all that kind of stuff. Almost information overload! Of course, there’s only so much you can tell thru the web, so I’m heading out there in June to look around in person. Just booked my flight today; I’ll be leaving for Dallas on June 21st, and Niki is meeting me there to accompany me on my apartment-hunting adventures. ;-) Then on the 24th she and I are flying to St. Paul to visit Jenny for several days. Good times shall be had by all. :-)

I’ve had an embarassing amount of sleep this weekend. The thing is, when you sleep too long, it only makes you more tired; that’s what’s happened to me. Plus, the dreary weather has made me feel lethargic in general.

After reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling OS X and all my apps, I realized that I inadvertantly “lost” a bunch of MP3s. I could’ve sworn I’d burned a CD with all my MP3s on it, but if I did, I can’t find it. Irritating. So I guess the opening of the iTunes Music Store was timely indeed. I also have to re-train my Mail junk mail filter. Oh well, that’s the way it goes. Today I reinstalled MySQL and it created a different directory structure than the one I’d had before. Strange. When it comes to a lot of the UNIX stuff, I still just let it do its own thing. So sue me.

I’ll try to get more MIT Graduation pictures up on my site tomorrow. I also feel the need to do some major site reorganization. (Maybe.)

All the stuff in the ‘Writing’ section of my web site is extremely old. I wonder if I shouldn’t just take it down. Does anybody read it anyway? (And even if they did, it would really just be a “read-once” experience, since it *never* changes.) What would I put as the link in its place? I really need to get that browsers page up. Anybody who wants to write a short review of a browser, let me know. It certainly doesn’t have to be anything fancy!

I’d like to make an online portfolio of web sites I’ve done. Unfortunately, three are currently “in-progress”, so it’ll have to wait.

I’m about to reformat/partition my iBook hard drive and re-install Jaguar. I realized I haven’t done any sort of disk utility maintenance or anything since I bought it last summer (and that’s the beauty of Macs – you don’t need to!) but, just like it’s good for a car to get a tune-up, I figured now is as good a time as any to give it some “spring cleaning” and keep it in tip-top shape. Then, I will buy more RAM, for a total of 640 megs!

My Maymester class started today. No problems there!

TRX called to officially offer me the job today… but after much deliberation, I have decided that no, I do not want to take it. -Yeah, I had pretty much already decided on Dallas anyway. But then when they called with the offer and I heard the salary, I was like, “DAMN, how can I turn that down??” But I know I wouldn’t be happy there. What’s the point in making a ton of money if I dread going to work every day and hate it the whole time I’m there? I’ll make enough money in Dallas. And I’m only 23, I have my whole life to “make more money.” As long as I have enough to pay my bills, eat, and live comfortably, I’m fine – life isn’t all about money, after all. I have to go with my gut, as they say. So… Dallas, here I come!