ChrisWeb

Got back from vacation earlier this week and I just now got all my photos uploaded. Got four sets, the first is general stuff taken with my iPhone:

Portland Aug 2010

Next is Matt’s bachelor party, which was held at a rented house in Lincoln Beach, OR right on the coast. We drank beer, BBQ’d meat, and stayed up way past our bedtimes. Good times:

Matt Chorpenning's Bachelor Party

Now the main event, the reason we went up there in the first place: Matt & Anna’s wedding!

Matt and Anna's Wedding

Lastly, Maomao wanted to have her “American-style” wedding while Anna’s family was still in town, so she had her wedding the next day at a lovely boutique hotel in Portland:

Maomao's Wedding

Whew! What a trip! Congrats, you guys! May you have long and happy lives!

I made a promise to myself that if I ever missed a month in posting here, then that’d be the end of the blog. I’m not quite ready to close up shop yet, so here’s July 2010!

Tomorrow morning Megs and I catch a train (yes, TRAIN) north for Portland, Oregon. We’re going up for Matt C. and Anna L.’s wedding, which should be a blast. The reason we’re taking the train is because we had such a nice time on our last train journey, we wanted to do it again! Expect various pictures to be posted over the course of our journey; probably on Facebook and/or Twitter. There may even be free Wi-Fi access on the train itself!

In other news, Megs just finished her second-to-last term of law school the other day. One more to go! So close, we can almost taste it…

I’m still totally digging on my iPhone; it’s magical! I love it! The screen is so pretty and it does so many neat things! Megs hates when I call it “magical”, which I why I never miss a chance to say so.

Lastly, here’s an awesome drawing by someone on DeviantArt of the various Disney Princesses “posing” for a picture:

So I’ve done it. I finally joined the masses of Apple iPhone users, and I must say, I totally dig it. Megs hates it when I say so, but I swear this thing is at least partly magic. It is an amazing device, to be sure. The screen looks unbelievable, the touch controls are fun and quick, and the application possibilities are endless. I’ve already downloaded a few of the so-called “apps”: Facebook, Echofon for Twitter, a Wikipedia front-end, Cracked.com‘s app, SimCity, Words With Friends, the Google suite, Amazon.com Kindle reader, Pandora internet radio, Adobe Photoshop Mobile, TV Guide, a graphing calculator (why not?), TapDefense, Klondike solitaire, Glow Doodle Snake, and the WoW Armory. I hadn’t even realized how many apps I’d downloaded until just now when I wrote out that list there. This thing is hella fun!

Got bored with the beard, so I shaved it off again. I’ll probably stay this way until I get tired of shaving.

Another summer quickly approaches; a time for long sunny days and uncomfortably warm nights. Once again, Megs and I will be tempted to buy a free-standing A/C unit for the bedroom as we are every summer, but as usual we’ll likely not do so. Maybe this summer we’ll check out the pool on the roof of Jacques’ place.

Some upcoming events for life:

• This is happening and Megs, Jacques, Hanh and I are going to see it. I mean how could we not attend an event called “The Thrilling Adventure and Supernatural Suspense Hour”? With special guest Nathan Fillion!
• E3 is coming up week after next. Always a tiring experience
• Matt & Anna’s wedding up in Portland this August. Megs and I are going to be taking the train, which is a fun little adventure in itself.
• I desperately want to get to a forest and camp with a camp fire at some point. Any advice on locations an hour or two from The Valley?

That’s all I got for now. Megs is still finishing up a few classes in law school, and I’m still working for Disney. Oh, and we’ve both been playing a lot of the Starcraft 2 beta. The cat is well and our friends are awesome. I’ll try to write here more often.

For those who may not know, there’s a special sub-class of laptop computers out there called “netbooks”, which are designed to be small, low-cost, and relatively low-power compared to their full-blown cousins. I recently bought one of these babies used from an old high school buddy, and I must say I really like it. It’s an Asus Eee PC 1000, and I put Ubuntu Netbook Remix (a Linux distro) on it CUZ I CAN! I’ve always had an itch for a unix-y computer to dink around with, and now I got one. Also, I finally broke down and got a wireless router for the apartment. I know, I know, “welcome to 2004!” you’re saying. I’d fought the home wireless movement for a long time, but it’s just so damned convenient with the various wireless devices I’ve acquired over the years.

Anyways, the computer is really small, weighing in at only 2.8 lbs, it really is quite portable. Other specs include: 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 802.11n wireless adapter, Bluetooth, three USB 2.0 ports, and a built-in SD card reader. Has a little web cam, too!

Chris is watching you!

ChrisWeb is now hosted by the good folks over at Dreamhost. I made the move last week and things seem to going OK. I changed themes too, so if you see a green header instead of a blue one, that’s why. I was growing more and more displeased with my previous hosting solution, and I’ve heard nothing by good things about Dreamhost. Also, Kyle works there, so there’s that. =)

In other news, last weekend Megs and I went up to visit mom for Easter, so here’s the pictures:

Easter 2010

Well, it’s officially spring now, although going by the weather here in Los Angeles, it’s been spring for at least a month already. Still gets chilly at night, though.

So I poked around briefly at working with Winamp plug-ins and it didn’t interest me. I also tried to get Pidgin to compile in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 instead of its usual build environments, but was unsuccessful. I might still keep at that, but the end result is of marginal use, so I dunno.

I’m really having difficulty finding some kind of programming project that interests me. I like to solve problems, but most of my daily computing tasks already have solutions. It’s a conundrum.

In conclusion, here are three hoverball cats:

Wumm wumm wumm wumm wumm

As my previous post alluded, I recently turned 29. Here are some pictures:

I miss ChrisWeb; my posting schedule here is down from more than semi-weekly to monthly at this point. I’m tempted to ditch WordPress and go back to completely home-grown, but I’m not going to for a variety of reasons. For one, WordPress is a really well-put-together piece of software and anything I’d do would be re-inventing the wheel, and in a crappier fashion. I’ve done a lot of blog-type web development in the last 10 years (can you believe this blog is almost 10 years old?!?), and that was fun and educational, but that time is behind me. I’ve changed and the web has changed. All I originally did was to fill voids in functionality that I wanted. WordPress didn’t exist. Facebook didn’t exist. Hell, the word “blog” didn’t exist when I started keep an “online journal”. I just kept adding features like logging, comments, pictures, etc. as I needed them. Now there’s a plethora of free tools out there at my disposal with teams of people working on them full-time, so that need isn’t that driving force here anymore. Also, I have 10x as many people seeing my posts on Facebook than I ever did here, and now I doubt there’s more than half a dozen people who check this place regularly. Heck, this post will be linked automatically on Facebook and Twitter once I publish it.

Why all the web navel-gazing? No idea. Guess I’m trying to figure out the future of ChrisWeb here. I was thinking last night that perhaps I should try to have some kind of focus for posts here, rather than as a general journal. Facebook more-or-less fills the latter niche, but where FB is good for short life updates and quick picture-posting, the more traditional blog lends itself better to longer and more thought-out writings.

So, what to write about? Well, what I want is a programming project. Something short-to-medium term to start with. I was thinking about writing a plug-in for Pidgin or WinAmp to start with. Always good practice to work against someone else’s code base or API. But what to create? Generally, I’m at my most driven when I’ve got some kind of need to fill, so let’s see what kind of features I want to add/enhance.

No, I haven’t actually thought it through yet; I’ve been more-or-less writing this whole post as I think of it. If anyone has any suggestions on something neat to code up, please post any suggestions you might have. I’ll start writing about what I end up working on, and we’ll take it from there. Cool? Awesome.

It seems my 29th birthday is fast approaching and I have no idea what to do about it. Last year I was sick as a dog, so this year’s anniversary of me being born is already looking up! My last year of “twenties”, man, time flies. Seems only recently that I turned 20.

Not really much else to say right now. Life goes on, still workin’ at Disney, etc. Megs is nearing the end of law school, so that’s exciting. Also, Matt’s “Donut” is down for a visit this weekend, which is cool. I think Kim may come up some time, too. Always good to see family.

I feel bad for neglecting the blog here. Maybe I can write about more stuff no one cares about more often. Oh, I know; really technical stuff! Today, I wrote a nifty shell script that toggles a proxy on and off. I originally wrote it in tcsh, but then I came to my senses and converted it to bash. It actually runs in Cygwin, which is a unix-like shell for Windows, but it makes use of a Windows program called “Reg.exe” to make changes to the registry rather than have to go through a lot of Control Panel windows, which was the whole point. Anyways, I was pleased with how it turned out, so now I can share my joy with you!

And now, your moment of zen: