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...

Earlier this week I ran for the first time in months... and the phrase "out of shape" doesn't quite capture my pathetic level (lack) of fitness as well as "fatass lard" does.

So it started out like any other run, and I could only prolong the inevitable so long by stretching and whatnot before it was time to get down to business. Starting out felt great, but I'm sure it always does for anybody. Besides the absolutely shitty humidity.. it wasn't a bad night and there was a nice breeze.

After just the first little bit, the out-of-shapeness hit me hard. How long have I been running? Wow... 80% left to go. It wasn't long before my lungs and legs all hated me. It was a lot easier when all they had to do was keep me upright with the minimum amount of effort... but now they were shouting for a break.

While running, I saw a homeless man almost passed out on a street corner. I must have seemed foolish to him... running for no reason. To him, energy was precious; when you live meal-to-meal... doing something like voluntarily expending large amounts of energy seems pretty unimaginable I'm sure.

I must have looked like that spoiled rich kid... having so much money he could just blow it on so many superfluous amenities without a care in the world.

Anyway: the post-run endorphin-induced euphoria was great... at least my brain was masking the utter contempt the rest of my body had for me... a grievance I would later pay for the next morning.

So basically, I'm a fatass. I've promised myself I will attempt to run as much as possible until May (at least). May 3^rd my friends and I are going cliff jumping at Pace Bend Park (badass). So that will be amazing. More importantly though, I don't want to look like any more of a fuck than I already am as I'm jumping off the rocks.

I've got a way's to go...

I guess you could say I'm a fan of an entropy-driven life.

The concept of entropy for anybody not familiar with it, is that everything in the universe will tend to a disordered state over time, and that any system with a high amount of order is more than likely going to turn into chaos soon. Basically-- order is fragile and unlikely.

An example is a pyramid stack of crystal wine glasses. The system is highly ordered... it takes only a small amount of energy input before the system reaches a state of high entropy (in the form of shattered glass on the floor). Also, we would never expect broken glass to fall into the shape of stacked wine glasses; entropy is a one way street.

In fact, on of the bleakest potential fates of the universe what's known as the "heat death", in which the universe enters state of maximum entry... basically perfectly distributed heat in all space. With no perturbations, there is no potential for information or information processing, so no life of any form. But you'd have to wait around for another 10⁴⁰ years... when all protons will have decayed and all that's left in the universe is black holes.

Anyway-- I say I'm a fan because... order is boring. I also have the 10-year-old-kid tendency of doing my best to help the universe out by adding my own entropy to things. For instance:

I like to knock over, spill, break, destroy, and generally mess up lots of things. I never really grew out of that I guess?

But also-- order is boring in regards to people. I like to stir up people's ideas and long-held ideals by challenging them to think about why they think certain things. I don't like to persuade people to change their minds as much as I like to just poke around their brains a bit.

I also enjoy saying things in conversations purposefully to get people rilled up. All in good fun though... nothing that will deeply offend anybody (usually), but just enough to set about a chain of events that will lead to a slightly more interesting outcome than if I had stuck to the norm.

Why? Because order is boring. So do your part in helping the universe along its destined path and add some entropy to your life!

I'm on the phone in the living room when I hear a tremendous crash from my room, and immediately know exactly what happened. But first...

Backing up a bit further to set the scene: Derek, Anita, and Nate are in my room jacking around, horse playing, etc. on my bed. I get a phone call so I step out to the living room to try and escape from the childish yelling and screaming.

My desk... was a great deal at the time. Twenty dollars via craig's, and it fit exactly in my room and exactly for my equipment. Unfortunately, it had the structural integrity of a straw hut in a category 5 hurricane.

So anyway, I hear a spectacular crash from inside my room, and quickly the three of them fall silent. When I walk in, my worst fears had been realized...

And that would be the aftermath. Actually that's the next morning, in the process of cleaning up... this picture is the real aftermath. My room is supposed to look something like this, but somehow somebody got thrown (?) into my desk hard enough to cause the middle section to collapse, taking my stereo amp, mixer, PodXT, PS2, picture frame, etc. with it.

Luckily, nothing was damaged besides a few scrapes on the equipment and wall. And yes, I was pissed.

But like I said, nothing was really damaged, and I took the opportunity to take all of my crap out of my desk and dust/clean it before reorganizing it.

The moral of the story? The robustness of your desk should be proportional to your friends tendency to be rambunctious.

Lesson learned.

I recently fixed my roomate's old laptop. It's a hefty Compaq Presario 2200, with a 1.3 GHz Celeron M and 480 MB RAM. It's underwhelming power in no way justifies the 5.2 lbs of flimsy plastic, but for working on my C and VHDL programs anywhere, it does the job.

The thing is, it would overheat within minutes after turning it on, so I replaced the fan because it would never spin up.. and it worked! When I first got it from him, however, I was messing around with it and re-installing the OS, and the only way for me to get that to work without it turning off due to the processor overheating was with a very creative use of my floor fan.

Everything was significantly easier once the new fan arrived, obviously.

In a completely unrelated event, I randomly starting bleeding from my forearm the other day. I was talking to my roomate when I felt my arm was really wet, and when I looked down I saw that it was soaked in blood. I ran over to the bathroom and washed it off, while trying to find where it was all coming from.

There was no cut or gash or anything, just a small pin-prick sized hole from which blood was gushing out. And it wouldn't stop for about thirty minutes. It wouldn't bleed if I kept preasure on it, but even after leaving preasure on it for about five minutes, it would continue to bleed. A LOT. Eventually it stopped, and the only reason for it that my roomates and I could come up with was that a bee had stung me (we were around a lot of bees earlier... this isn't entirely random), and the stinger had just come out, and that maybe it hit a large vein.

I am completely aware that that sounds extremely impropable, but there really aren't any other good reasons as to why I would just start gushing blood out of my arm.

In parting I leave you with a YouTube video that'll make you laugh, about buhLOOD! (it's funny, not gross you wimps).