Sleep is the little death that brings total oblivion

Installed my new-ish mattress and box spring today. They're fairly nice, and at least a bit less worn out than my old mattress.

I'm not sure if I'm going to keep the box spring. I've got a mates bed (and a rather crappy one at that) so the combination makes things a bit on the tall side. I've also discovered that I'm going to need a new set of fitted sheets, as I don't think any of the ones I currently have will fit properly.

I took some pictures for your viewing pleasure. I look like a bit of a slob in the last one, but I was just taking the picture for a height comparison.

Edit: Yeah, I got rid of the box spring, it was just a bit too tall. I'm glad I tried it, though.

Xmas at Mother's

Xmas at Mom and Bob's place went great. I wasn't expecting much loot in my stocking seeing as I already got my 500G External HD, but I was pleasantly surprised!

I of course got a few calendars, some candy, and the usual stocking bric-a-brac (the bag clips are doing a nice job holding closed the bags of candy I got in my stocking at Father's xmas).

Then, on top of all that, I got a fancy new stereo headset with built-in mic so I can swear at people when I'm fragging them in online games, and I also got a copy of Super Mario 64 DS!

Dinner was a delicious roast chicken with lots of trimmings, and I also enjoyed poking at Bob's computer a bit more and of course the wonderful company.

All in all, a great way to wrap up the year!

Xmas at Father's

Xmas at father's went pretty well this year, all told.

Started off the day by taking a trip out to the farm to pick up a mattress and box spring, then on the way back picked up some pre-packed sushi and some sake. Fairly uneventful, but parking was a mess.

Once home we got started on the festivities by replacing the faucet in the upstairs bathroom. I did most of the work, with Father and Andrea lending moral support and handing me the occasional tools. Many pictures were taken, and the project was a success.

Once that was over and done with, we trimmed the tree and ate the sushi and I accidentally poured my (small) cup of sake down the drain because I thought father was pre-heating the glass with water in it, oops! I like my sake cold! Thankfully it was cheap sake and there was plenty more.

My haul was pretty good. I got a Shaw PVR, a bottle of Jaegermeister, and a whole stocking full of candy. Mmmm. More pictures were taken.

Now I'm sleepy and looking forward to tomorrow.

Reducing redundancy

Yesterday I finally managed to get the hang of idling with one foot on my unicycle. It's not quite as difficult as I originally imagined, once I got the hang of using my other foot on the frame to stabilize things a bit.

Still need a new unicycle. I don't think I'll buy this one though, it's a bit on the expensive side.

It's good to be me

So today I had an interview with Apple for a summer position in the iCal group, located in building IL3 of the mothership down in Cupertino. The interview went pretty well, and they should be getting back to me soon, hopefully with an offer. (For those of you in the loop who are somewhat confused at the timing, the interview was supposed to be tomorrow but got bumped up to today due to a scheduling conflict)

I also just got off the phone with Palm who will be giving me an offer shortly, which should net me somewhere on the order of $5k/mo plus some housing and relocation expenses that I didn't really pay attention to because I was trying to figure out how much that would be per hour (it's roughly $30/hr).

All in all, things are looking good. Now I just need to get that damn J-1 Visa.

Pining for the Fjords

Well, my recently repaired monitor has given up the ghost. No sparks or flames, just a quiet fade to black. I'm thinking that the filament probably burned out. Either way it's not worth fixing again.

Thankfully Bob had an old 19 inch CRT laying around that he kindly donated to my cause, so I at least have a replacement until next year when I plan on picking up a pair of 24 inch LCDs to replace 2/3s of my current crop of screens.

Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!

Done my exams for the year. Now I'm free! Of course, I still have to write a paper for Classical Mythology, but that's no trouble.

The exams themselves all went well. I did the 2 2-hour Atmospheric Science exams in 45 minutes each, and took roughly the full 2 hours to do my Intermediate Calculus mid-term. I did quite well on all of them, I think.

Now I get to switch off my alarm clock and sleep! Sleep forever!

I'm famous!

More so than before, even. A few weeks ago on Quirks and Quarks they did an interview with Gary Taubes where he basically just hawked his new book, and I was not very impressed. I fired off an email to Q&Q about it expressing my displeasure, and then on this week's show they read it on air!

I wasn't quite expecting that, but all the same I'm glad my voice was heard.