so it's been a while....no big deal, just nothing i really wanted to type about. this week started out pretty busy, but now it's the complete opposite. wednesday was kinda interesting. i traveled up to hattiesburg for a "convention" for GIS day. it wasn't a true convention in that we weren't trying to sell anything or recruit anyone. it was just a series of booths of gis-related companies that high school kids came through to find out about gis and see what kind of things gis companies do.

so that was that. jessica's been working quite a bit with the added bonus of homework and other school-related headaches. i don't miss that one bit. school is such a distant memory to me it's hard to believe that i only graduated 6 months ago. anyway, enough of that. let's see...what else has been going on.

ah. we rented Spirited Away on sunday and i have to say it's my favorite of the director. i've seen it twice now and it's now one of those movies that i'll have to own at some point because i can watch it a lot...in fact, i want to watch it a lot. the animation is excellent, imaginative, and the kind of surreal scenery that you'd find in a video game...except much more beautiful and detailed. the music is outstanding and really fits the feel of the movie. the story, while being translated from the original, is humorous and entertaining...much, much better than many of the disney movies i've seen or seen the commercials for recently...especially that "lion king of the pacific northwest" one...you know, the bear one with the moose. anyway, it's a good movie and you should see it.

so i rekindled my interest in mindless self indulgence's music again and it sounds so much better in the new stereo system. i haven't listened to them in close to a year and...jeez, i just realized that i first heard of them in my freshman year, 4 years ago. that's longer than i was thinking. in other music news, i got streamripper for winamp not too long ago because i kept hearing really good songs on shoutcast, but couldn't find them in stores or for download, so i figured i'd just rip the stream and that would get me the song. well, it doesm but i haven't had a chance to use it because (a) at work all bandwidth is monitored and charged if we use too much and (b) i don't have nearly enough hard drive space at home to use it right now. i figure i can work on getting that set up over christmas, or at least try to clean my system so i have a little room to breathe.

last night i remembered one of the first true ventures into html i had. it was back during my sophomore year when i was in a dorm room, but not there that often and i was taking it easy with blake, sidd, bobby, and brad. the old pages were devoted to the "infamous beta movie night" and i recounted the happenings of said movie night. well, i found some of those pages...the site, hosted on some crappy free server, lasted a whole 3 weeks. it looked like your typical, run-of-the-mill geocities site with some kind of textured background and those wonderful animated gifs. in my defense, though, i had no experience with writing html at all. i'd made one page prior to that in early high school (devoted to the sega cd game series Lunar) and that was completely automated. the movie night page was created with frontpage (with the proprietary tags deleted because i was ashamed that i was using frontpage and being a compsci major...good thing i've learned a lot since then) and i took some javascripts from those ubiquitous tutorial sites, but didn't give them credit. anyway, i think i'll put an area on here devoted to those crappy old pages i made. they usually lasted a total of a month or two before i lost interest and created another one...this current site is no exception, either, coming from shades of grey and, before that, godemperor: goodness abounding. i wish i could find my really crappy old lunar pages, but that's too much of a wish. imagine trying to find a site that hasn't been touched since a week after it was made in 1996.

well, i guess that's i can stand to write right now. i'm surprised i found this much to discuss, but it has been a while since i've posted, so i guess it's not completely unexpected. for now, out!