It was sometime during the youthful and care-free years of elementary school that my parents bought my sister and me a Sega Genesis. The system also came with Sonic 2... which might be one the best video games ever made... as I'm pretty sure that the hours of jumping and spinning a little blue hedgehog changed my life forever.

Even as much as hearing the shitty FM synth music on YouTube brings back memories... I also have played and beaten almost¹ every Sonic game on the Genesis. When the time of the old 16-bit system came and went, I even downloaded an emulator on my PC and replayed most of the games (or at least my favorite parts). More recently, I played them on my phone with a Smartphone-based Genesis emulator. Interesting how it took dedicated hardware back in elementary school to do now what can be done in software real-time on my phone...

Anyway... I regressed into my childish pastimes of playing console video games and recently purchased a Nintendo DS. First of all... I was amazed at how advanced 7th generation handheld systems are; the DS can pump out 3D graphics comparable to the Nintendo 64 and comes with onboard Wi-Fi... both for ad-hoc gaming with a friend close by or over the Internet to play with people all over the world. Badass.

One of the games I bought was Sonic Adventure Rush... one of the most recent additions to the Sonic franchise. I had high hopes and high expectations; the format was similar to the Genesis games... run as fast-as-hell to the right of the screen, pickup rings, and don't die.

I was happy to see that the new additions Sonic had seen since my first exposure to the series 10 years ago didn't take away from the game and render it an unfamiliar generic platform game-- it was the exact opposite actually. The new game on DS is faster and crazier than its little brother on Genesis... but it retains the same spirit.

There's enough in common with the old game to make me feel like I'm back in the prepubescent and innocent years of elementary school... and that's probably why I love playing it. It provides a small amount of escapism from the quickly-approaching "real life" that is less than a year away. I'm just glad that at 21 years old, jumping off of springs and collecting golden rings still has the ability to entertain me for a while.

Now if you will excuse me... I'm going to go play some Sonic on my DS.

So, it's been a while since the last update... but I'm refusing to let this blog die the slow and quiet death my blogs of the past have seen. Today, however, I think I realized exactly what has caused all of my previous sites in general to vanish into the dark nothingness of the Internet... and why I haven't updated in a while.

Basically, the life of a college kid is in constant flux; every 4 months, you have a brand new set of classes, a completely new schedule, and new professors. Or it may even be summer and you're either back at home, working at an internship, doing summer school... or maybe just lounging around for 3 months being a bitch.

Point is... each discontinuity on the life v. time graph has very little sympathy for old developed habits and the like... so things that I had gotten into a good groove for (blogging in this case) tend to fall by the wayside. Since my day-to-day schedule is so different than it was during the school year, my internal cron service needs a revamping. But, now that I've settled in at work, it's time to reinstate all the mundane and miscellaneous minutia I love to saturate my life with.

It makes me wonder how long I will have this site, and this blog. This current incarnation of the site specifically is relatively new (PHP/MySQL), but I have blog entries I imported from an old live journal (circa 2005), as well as the previous brandonvalosek.com site.

Will I be writing about my kid's first words some day? Or maybe how the Drrty Boiz are still rocking out at age 80... giving arthritis the finger and playing at our local retirement home... who knows? But for now, expect updates to return to their regularly scheduled frequency.

So a friend of mine sent me a link to a video of a guy that calls himself The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) rapping about good site design practices and SEO optimization. This guy is pretty ridiculous... and he has some more videos on his YouTube profile as well if you want to check them out. Here's the video:

Pretty damned funny, I think. In other news, I start working for Dell tomorrow. I'm looking forward to having (at least temporarily, before Fall tuition is due) a positive  derivative to my $/time graph.

I'll be working in the enterprise product group on a new family of servers with the board team, as well as doing some work for the firmware guys. My manager also mentioned that they need somebody to port an aging MS Access database to a MySQL/PHP solution, and since I've learned quite a bit about that stuff from doing this site, it would make a great side project.

I'm also very much looking forward to getting into a routine again... the next few weeks are crucial for getting my fat ass into a workout and running schedule. I'm hoping I can run 4-5 times a week and work out least twice, but hopefully three times.

One last thing-- today I basically just wasted away my life with Derek in what was a quintessential summer day:  woke up lazily at about 1 PM, then proceeded to make sandwiches, then read some out in the sun followed by a swim spot, and then Randall's for some grosh. We made some questionably-shitty frozen pizzas dinner, and then in a bit we're going to be making some Rice Krispies treats.

Does it get any better than that?

Unlike the care free celebrations, exciting festivities, and home-room parties of elementary school, the end of the semester in college only brings a suffocatingly large amount of work followed by an relentless battery of exams.

My status? Well, with ¾ of a Red Bull making its way through my guts, I'm continuing to charge ahead into the uncharted territories of compiler code generation and processor pipelining simulation (2 of my 3 final projects).

For the last few days, all I have been able to see has been a sea of C-code, expanding before me like a vast and endless ocean of line after line of absolutely unintelligible shit like:

int GetPointerSize (SYMBOL s)
{
    /* 
        let's hope none of these are null... 
        or we are completely FUCKED 
    */
    return s->datatype->datatype->datatype->size;
}

It's so hard to even care at this point... with the enticing allure of care-free summer days creeping into my mind, the last week of school seems to be waging a losing battle for my attention.

However, if given a small enough time frame, almost anything can have the appearance of being important. Right now, these projects are consuming my life, and are soon to be followed by four mind-blowingly difficult finals, but 5 years down the line... how much will all of this really matter?

Nevertheless, I've got shit to do.

And now that I've finished the Red Bull, it's time to wrap up this post. If Red Bull really gave me wings, I'd fly away from my computer to an island where the only trees are things that grow out of the ground and the only risk for storage leaks comes from old rusty containers.

So I, with my infinite capacity for continued procrastination, have recently added some new features to the site.

If you direct your attention over to the left, you'll notice some new items in the sidebar. Under the "Status" heading, you'll see that there are two sections: The first (very nerdily I might add) displays my current standings on the world-wide ladder for the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath. Wow.

More interestingly (maybe) is the next section, which displays my updates from the site Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, it's basically the same thing as the "Current Status" feature from Facebook... and that's it. Pretty lame if you ask me, but I guess the appeal is in the simplicity of posting short messages from your cell phone, etc. They also make it easy to post updates like that on blogs and websites.

However, there is practically nobody in my age group on Twitter, so it would be completely pointless except that I found a Facebook application that posts Facebook status updates to Twitter. So... in a very round-about fashion, my Facebook updates are now posted to my site.

The coolest new feature is found under the "Now Playing" heading. A small plugin for Winamp (Brandon Fuller's Now Playing app) pings my website with a basic POST HTTP request containing information about the current song every time I play something. On my end, some basic PHP scripting updates a database with the song info, current date, and play count. The songs under "Now Playing" currently just reflect the most recently played songs.

Eventually I will expand this feature, to display maybe the top songs played this week or something. I also will have a dedicated page that will show more info about what I'm listening to on Winamp.

Last but not least, I now am officially using the AMAZING Flickr API to interact with my photo site. The front page now uses this to display the first 60 or so recent photos instead of bastardizing multiple copies the frail Javascript Flickr provides to show random pictures.

Now that I'm using the real API, the photo page will eventually come back online in a MUCH crunker form that shows my favorite pictures and SHOULD integrate everything into my site.

Fun stuff... and more to come! A real update should follow in the next few days I'm sure, but with my last (3) projects of Junior year due this week and finals approaching... the outlook seems grim.

Of course, whenever there's a shit ton of stuff to do... procrastination becomes even more alluring...