I don’t want to be forced to grow up. I don’t want to. I’m almost half way through college, I’m not sure what I want to do with my life, the little free time I have goes towards homework, and soon enough, in the summer time, my time will be given to a part time job. Soon after that, no doubt in the blink of an eye, I’ll be graduated from college, I’ll have a full time job, and responsibilities to people other than myself.

I could go on for at least a thousand or so more words about how I feel about turning twenty, or the new responsibilities that I may or may not have in the near and further future, but I don’t think that’s going to be beneficial for anyone, certainly not for me and my nerves. So what about resolutions for the new year? If things in my lie are going to change I may as well be the first to strike. For the new year, I plan on doing things a little differently than I have in years past.

1. Write more computer programs
2. Finish Real World Haskell, and LEARN it.
3.Work harder in school
4. A’s and B’s
5. End my streak of rampant procrastination
6. Watch more movies/learn about movies/appreciate film
7. Read more books
8. Keep up with friends
9. Have fun
10. Don’t let stress ruin anything

A list of ten things, I think, might be doable. Wish me luck.

The rest of the links will take you to the Google Video Pages of these episodes:
2. The Hunting Ape
3. The Human Zoo
4. The Biology of Love
5. The Immortal Genes
6. Beyond Survival

I thought this song worked brilliantly for the movie, and now it’s hard at work in my iTunes play list.

For your viewing pleasure:

It’s hard thing to explain to someone, but every so often when I’m walking around with my mp3 player, a song comes on that makes me walk with my head held a little higher. Even though this song is actually a little sad, I simply identify with every single part of of it. When I’m walking around the city and this comes on shuffle, it makes me want to start running and never stop.

For now I’ll just have to carry around my broken heart in my backpack.

Wilco – Hell is Chrome*

Also, I’m currently in the midst of a really difficult quarter at school. I don’t really have time for much at the moment; the more my free time suffers the more this blog suffers, obviously. With any luck, after this week I’ll have some free left over to get some reading done, as well as time to write something worth reading for whoever still reads this blog. I wouldn’t even presume to say hello to someone who I think might be a reader. Sometimes I feel embarrassed that this blog is still online – but how else am I supposed to feed my id? I don’t have enough troll experience to make it at reddit.

*Two things: I couldn’t find a youtube video of this song being performed, and my ‘wordpress flash audio player plugin’ doesn’t support m4a files.

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

A poem by Carl Sandburg.

I spent four long years of my life at a High School that shared his name; all that time I didn’t know, or didn’t care, or never gave a thought, as to why so many schools across our nation share his namesake.

Getting lost in poetry on your own is much sweeter than being forced to swallow it in English class. I’ve grown up since then.

My favorite contribution to the Kanye frenzy is by far this mash up:

It’s just so genius.

Now, upon my discovery of this – I flipped my shit almost instantaneously. I considered this bug as a problem that definitely needed an immediate fix. fortunately, through my earlier PHP hackery that I used to throw together this random thoughts section, I was able to figure out exactly what the problem was very quickly. Wordpress allows you to set the number of posts you’d like to display on any given page. This number had previously been set to ten, but I had moved it down to one so the Wordpress post display loop wouldn’t muck up my fancy new looking layout by trying to throw like 9 other posts on the page where the random thoughts are. That wouldn’t have been pretty. So I set it to one, not knowing that the same number affected how stuff was displayed in the category archives.

It was a pretty easy fix; I set the number back to a reasonable ten, and threw in a break statement at the end of the loop so it wouldn’t go looking for nine other posts to display after it found one that wasn’t in the random thoughts category to display.

While my fix could have likely been improved upon vastly, I’m sure, I’m still flooded with the feeling that I accomplished something awesome; it feels like I made an important discovery about something previously known to mankind – like I discovered a new tribe of Homininae and beat them all in an arm wrestling tournament. Fixing bugs is often like this. It’s a dirty bomb of feel good chemicals. I’ve had an opportunity to fix many of my own when I was writing simple little applications in school, or at home, and I know as my education progresses into a career I’ll have a never ending supply of bugs that need fixing. So that’s something to look forward to I suppose. I’ll be stuck in a cubicle the rest of my life, at least I’ll have something to do.