I decided to make myself a cake this year. Nothing too fancy or involving; just a box of cake mix, a can of icing, and a pack of candles. Below are pictures of the process. You can click on any of them to go to the full gallery page where you can view a size bigger or the parent album for alternate shots of all the pictures (or smaller thumbnails). Enjoy.

( Picture heavy section )

I'm going to do something a little different this year. I'm going to make some resolutions for things I want to change or do differently in the future. I'm not going to go overboard by saying I'm going to run 30 miles a day when I probably couldn't even do half a mile right now. Nor am I going to say I'll never do things that is more than likely going to happen (Never date again? Yeah, right. I'd date again in a heartbeat in the right oppotunity). So without further comment, the start of my resolution list.

• Read more.
  • This includes books, magazines, articles, journals, and comics.
  • I have a huge backlog of programming and other similarly intellectual articles (300+) to read and digest, plus ones I've previously marked important to go over again.
• Initiate conversation more.
  • This includes responding to more journal entries, taking a chance on more online profiles, and even striking up conversations with people (especially guys) while out and about.
• Play more games.
  • This includes Wii games and online multi-player games (such as Left 4 Dead).
  • I want to start a LJ Wii night group. Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Mario Kart, etc.
• Exercise, at least a little.
  • Mostly this means just taking up Wii Fit at least two or three times a week for at least half an hour each time. I'm not going to go extreme again and aim for an hour or more session on Saturday, but just try to fit in half an hour after work and before bed.
• Better hygiene.
  • Just because I'm not going to go into work a day doesn't mean I shouldn't take a shower soon after getting up instead of late that day or even if at all.
  • Brush twice a day. Floss twice a week. I was doing good right after I had my lower wisdom teeth taken out, but am slacking again. I always brush once a day before leaving the house, though.

That's all I can think of off hand, but all these are important things that will get me far on accomplishments in my current life.

I downgraded my old laptop from Kubuntu Jaunty to Hardy because its video card isn't supported by the latest official ATI drivers now (which is all that Jaunty would support). It was causing it to use the open source version of the ATI drivers which weren't very good, thus most graphics processing was being put on the CPU and slowing everything down. On top of that KDE4 was just driving me nuts (that's a story for another entry).

Like a fool I didn't pay enough attention to the installation process and it wiped the entire hard drive instead of just the secondary partition. Now my entire iTunes library is gone, again. I had episodes of the first season of Ben 10 (the original series) downloaded I hadn't gotten around to watching yet. I do have an OGG version of all my music I had downloaded since the last time I did something similarly stupid, but still. I was hoping not to repeat that mistake. Huh.

I really wish it would have detected the existing Linux partitions and only offered to overwrite them. That I could have lived with, mostly. I also made another mistake; back in Linux I forgot to backup the localhost directory, which contained all my personal web development files. There went files for IK, previous freelance projects, framework ideas, among many other things I've worked on over the years. On the plus side I should have a backup of that on the old desktop (if somewhat outdated), but I have to get it working again first. A few months before my last move it inexplicably stopped responding so I turned it off until I could get around to hooking a monitor up and figuring out what happened. I plan on backing up any files on it and installing Mythbuntu for DVR ability.

Oops. Oops. Oops. Ugh.

Anyone else notice the HRC logo in the Orbitz commercial on the guy's shirt?

I've heard mixed things about HRC, but for anyone who knows what that means (And I'm sure more than enough people with mixed or negative feelings toward homosexuals do), that's kind of neat. The rainbow probably would have been more explicit, though, but also a mixed bag of messages. *shrug*

The human woman in my group on Mass Effect is hitting on me! Someone make it stop! *cringes*

At least I managed to get the Asari woman off me.