Waiting on the world...

School can be frustrating.  I'm behind in at least two classes, both of which are core to graduating and only offered every other semester.  I love learning, but I'm just ready for this semester to end.  And for some reason I can't stop listening to "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol.  It feels like I'm missing out on the good parts of being here in school; instead, I'm caught up in a long grind, aggravated by lack of motivation, just trying to slog it out to the end.  Ugh.

In related news, I'm working an internship at a company called T-System in Addison.  It's a nice place to work, and it's definitely making me more confident in my software development skills.  I'm not sure I want to do software development for a while, but it's reassuring to know that I can, if I need to.  To a certain extent, I wish I was studying music.  It's a bit late for that, though.  Maybe I'll pick up lessons sometime in the near future.

This has been a most incredible few days for me. The monitor for my desktop has been finicky at best for the last month or so, and it really began to start dying around a week ago.

Then Sunday afternoon, the power supply on my desktop fails and who knows what other parts it took out when it went. I can't get a new one in until Friday, so I'm without my desktop until then.

Luckily, I have the Macbook that the university issued me as part of my job. Everything appears to be working great and I'm editing some video for one of the organizations I'm in, when OS X begins complaining that my "Bluetooth audio failed." Apparently my headset isn't within range.

But you'll be surprised to find out that I don't have a bluetooth headset and bluetooth is actually turned off. Even rebooting the computer doesn't cause this message to go away. So now I can't listen to music or edit video (well, I can edit the video, but I can't do it effectively without sound). The way things are going, this Macbook will probably die before the week is out. >.

This is just a simple test to see how blogging from Google Docs works out. When typing a document on Google docs (http://docs.google.com/), you will find a tab marked "Publish" in the upper right corner of your window. When you click on this tab, you are given the option to publish your document to a unique URL provided by Google or send it directly to a blog. The service has support for many blogging sites already built in, and you can define your own if necessary.

Could this replace other blogging solutions?

1. It can be used from any computer without installing any software.
2. It works both Firefox and Internet Explorer (To my knowledge, Safari isn't supported, but I haven't tested that in a while).
3. If this posts correctly, then it's convenient for publishing to a blog.

In short, this could be one of the best underrated tools on the internet, at least in regards to blogging.

So one of my friends was married Saturday afternoon at First Baptist Church in Dallas. Considering that I do not live in Dallas, at least during the summer, this required a small journey on my part, but it was well worth it. The wedding was absolutely incredible, and the reception was equally great. Unlike the last wedding reception I went to, this one had a live band and dance floor, which simply made it awesome. Plus the groom's cake had a Rubik's Cube for the top layer, which fit him perfectly.

I stayed at my room mate's house up in Frisco, so I drove up to his place and then we carpooled to the wedding. It was a pretty good trip, overall, as I made it to and back from the metroplex without any major incidents.

Tomorrow my family is leaving to go on a (late) vacation. Hooray for relaxation!

So I'm making good progress on my summer project. My plan is to finish it up on Friday, but I'm not yet sure if I'll be able to have it completely wrapped up by then. My parents and I are planning for a vacation next week, so you can understand why I want to be done with the program.

In other news, my Dad and I went to Best Buy on Sunday and got a Wii! I've been playing it a little bit every day, but I think today I actually spend more time using the built-in news reader than I did playing the games. In short, Wii is fun. I could probably be a bit more descriptive if it weren't after 4 in the morning and I hadn't just finished a coding marathon.

And my Wii can go online more reliably than my laptop :\

So I've spent around the last hour not really doing anything. I've just been going around to the same three or four internet sites in this half-aware state, occasionally writing a post or stopping to read a news article, but mostly just listening to my music. Now, there's nothing strange about listening to music, but I keep finding myself using the music as a reason to not turn off the computer and go to sleep.

I'm really quite tired, but for some reason I'm just sitting here jamming with air guitar, keyboard, and drums every so often and just generally getting into a nice music groove. It's kind of nice, despite how tired I am.

Tried to do some work today, but really didn't get far.

Today was much less productive than yesterday. Last night I stayed up until around 5 AM, then quietly got into bed before either of my parents got up to get ready for work. I got a good deal done, but am not as far along as I want to be.

After getting some sleep, I just haven't gotten back into a groove where things just work the way they're supposed to. I spent a good part of the morning and several hours this afternoon fighting against some things that just didn't want to work the way I thought they should. In the end, I really don't have anything to show for nearly a full day of work. To top it all off, I started developing headaches from so much time on the computer, I haven't done my workouts at all this week, and I'm running out of time this summer.

So I did the most logical thing and took the night off from work.

So I've changed my layout after some two years or so of the last one.  The only reason I know it's been around that long is that I could no longer see the post where I mentioned putting up that theme, and there were posts from the last two years ll on the front page.  Shows you how much I've actually thought about this thing in the past two years.

Anyway, I had wanted to further integrate the style with that of my website, but I'm not sure if I'll be going about that just yet.  The layout for my site isn't completely finalized, yet, so it might be a bit premature to start working on jumping through the hoops that LiveJournal puts up for non-premium users.  I wonder if I volunteered to design some themes for them if they would upgrade my account to a permanent status.  I highly doubt it, and I doubt I'd be able to find the time to do something like that.

The last few days I've been working extra hard on my main project for the summer.  Of course, seeing how little I've posted over the last few years, much less the last few months, no one on here who hasn't spoken to me in person recently will have no idea what I'm talking about.  In short, I'm doing some programming work for a company owned by one of my classmates.  Originally the project was meant to be a group effort, with both the owner and myself working together on the application; however, time constraints on his end have prevented him from having the time to work on the project, so he offered me a raise to do the whole thing myself.

The original target completion date for the entire thing is this Friday.  Needless to say, I don't think I'll be meeting that deadline, but I should be close.  It will take a good deal of work, but I've worked under much worse conditions (remember that post where I told of deleting an entire project by accident the night before it was due?).  At least I can't do anything like that to this, since the code is backed up in multiple places.

Anyway, I should probably get back to coding if I want to get anything more done tonight.  If I were on my own, I wouldn't have any problem staying up all night, but my parents aren't so keen on the idea while I'm at home for the summer.  Of course, my sleep pattern has been so off recently that staying up all night and then going to bed at a normal time tomorrow might help jump start me back into a regular pattern.  Can't start that too early, considering I'll have to wake up for an 8 AM class the first day of classes.

So I had the strangest dream last night.

Somehow, I was wandering around Paris in a suit, with no tie and the collar unbottoned, drunk. I repeatedly passed out and woke up to continue wandering about, although I wasn't actually impaired while "awake". At some point, I passed out on some grass and later awoke with no wallet, passport, or any sort of valuable item. My suite, however, was still completely intact. I then somehow found myself attempting to go through airport security and explaining where my passport was. Then I woke up.

It was just bits and pieces all jumbled together, but it still created quite a strange series of events.