happy new year

Yeah, yeah, only one (real) post since Christmas. Quit your whining.
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Every year my family does this big Japanese New Year's Breakfast thing. It's quite tasty. And none of that lunar year crap either. But we do use the Chinese zodiac. Anyway, I just ate some of that うどん soup. It's got long noodles, supposedly symbolising long life. I think. Either way, it means lots of good food for me tomorrow.
Ooh, I get to open up the first page of my Non Sequitur daily calendar. How fun. And I really do plan to post some pictures of the Bose SoundDock or whatever it's called, and maybe some other stuff. I've just been relatively busy until today.
And I might think up a resolution (or a few) tomorrow. I generally don't do that until January 1 anyway, so I'm not actually behind...

listing thingy

I've revamped that blog list thing. It's now fully XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS vaild, if anyone happens to know what that means. It's a good thing. Also, in case you didn't notice, it's on my domain now. So update your links.

Feedster Claim Tag...

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Feel free to ignore this link.

merry christmas

Woot it's snowing! I hope we have some on the ground tomorrow.
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I hope everyone (what celebrates it) had a good Christmas. I got a lot of cool stuff. Like a domain name (nothing much there now), a watch, the way-expensive Bose iPod speaker set thingy, Civ 3 Conquests, and many other cool things. I'll post more stuff tomorrow. It's a bit late.

political stuff

Well, since I don't have much else to talk about, I'm gonna talk about politics. Whee.

New York Times - Bush Tries Again on Court Choices Stalled in Senate

So anyway, Bush is re-nominating a dozen judicial appointees who failed to get through Senate hearings (or whose nominations were successfully filibustered) during his last term. But as they say, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again when your party is 4 votes closer to being able to break a filibuster. It's strange how people seem to leave off that last part. Also quite interesting:

Among the candidates the president said on Thursday he would renominate is William J. Haynes IV, the Pentagon's general counsel, who has been deeply embroiled in controversy over memorandums he wrote or supervised that secretly authorized harsh treatment, even torture, for detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq. Mr. Haynes's nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., was suspended when the issue erupted and he was asked by the Judiciary Committee to provide material about his role in the issue and failed to do so.

So now that there's solid evidence of abuse at Guantanamo, it's not such a big deal? I don't get it. On the other hand, if he's getting nominated to a Virginia court, it would surprise me if he was the liberal judge there. Virginia sucks.
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I'm still not done with my history paper. It's kinda confusing since I have a few books that conflict slightly with each other. Oh well.
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EDIT: Did some fiddling with the margins on the <blockquote> tag. Also justified quoted text.

Site updates

I put up a new favicon... Unfortunately, its ugly as sin. 16x16 pixels is not a very large workspace.
I've been working a little more on a new theme. I wanted to have it up by Christmas, but I'm still wading through the vast mess of CSS that I've tacked on to the Rounders theme. All that's really left is the header background image and the profile containers. And the comment sections on individual pages. It should be done by the new year. Provided I don't forget abut it. Or get lazy.

I also seem to have a cold again.　めんどくさい　だな。。。
Fortunately, Christmas is soon. And that mean presents. And there's nothing a good capitalist kid loves more than expensive presents.

Christmas tree w/ lights.

Christmas tree - Now with lights! And presents. And the camera's flash on.

I'm not dead yet

My apologies for not posting. This last week before break has been pretty hectic, despite getting an extension on my history paper. Now that its break, I should have more time to write here. Or maybe I'll be more lazy and stop posting. Who knows.
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Gundam SEED Destiny had better find itself a moral plot twist soon, cause right now good an evil are pretty clear-cut. My favorite part about the original SEED is that neither side is morally right. But the only theme I've seen so far in Destiny is that Americans are racist dumbasses that like to nuke things. Which I guess is true enough, but not nearly as interesting.
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OMFG AN ARIANE-5 ROCKET ACTUALLY LAUNCHED WITHOUT CRASHING INTO SOME OCEAN! MAD PROPS TO THE ESA!
Reuters has the pretty pictures.

QDB.us

VOTE!

http://www.qdb.us/43464 [UPDATE: DENIED!]
http://bash.org/?452211 (If it gets accepted... Which might take weeks. Or months.)

cations and anions? whatever.

Still totally tired. I think I did bad on chem since I didn't have those cations and anions very well memorized. Oh well. Music club recital Wednesday; I think I'm playing.
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I've started watching Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai. I've found it to be relatively interesting, if a bit... perverted. But it is GAINAX, so I expect the show will turn ot interesting enough.
Although I guess GAINAX did Mahoromatic... I don't think that was supposed to be all that interesting. Oh well. Just 12 episodes, so no big loss if it isn't that good.

blargle

I enjoy non-descriptive titles for my blog entries.
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I can't believe I'm still tired... I lost like 7 pounds too, since I haven't eaten anything since Thursday. Fortunately, I'm more or less caught up in schoolwork. I've got nothing actually written on my hsitory paper, but I think I've got a good idea what to say. Chem should be oka, but I need to find out which ions we were supposed to memorize... Otherwise that's fine. Math I need to finish 2 assignments for. History testiz I think I'm set. Prolly won't take it until at least Tuesday though.
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Christmas tree is nicely decorated. Also, I noticed that it didn't have a very good scale - the tree is actually pretty big. Now to find some gifts that my mom will get me... She's decided no video games, since I should be spending my time studying... Or anything else that might actually use my time. So, it looks like clothes and SAT study guides all around this year! Yay!
This just in - sarcasm isn't as effective in text form.

Konfabulator

This Konfabulator program is pretty cool. It puts little XML/JavaScript apps called widgets on the desktop. [Official FAQ] I used it at one point on the iMac, but the always-there registration window (it's shareware) got pretty annoying, so I stopped. It was a pretty nifty idea though. In fact, the next release of OSX, 10.4, will include its own (likely superior) widget program. As a result, the makers of the program ported it to Windows. Seeing as I don't have Apple Developer access to Dashboard, I decided to start using it (and doing my best never to quit the program) on the PC. Its worked really nicely so far. [Screenie] I've also started learning some JavaScript for use in one of these things... Which I just put online for your enjoyment. All it does is change the transperency of the little "K" button. You can decrease transperency by clicking the "-" button or pressing [Ctrl+Shift+PgDown] and increase it by clicking the "+" button or pressing [Ctrl+Shift+PgUp]. You can also bring it to the front with [Ctrl+Shift+F4].
Download Konfabulator here.
Download my test widget here.
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Ah, I just realized I missed candygrams by being sick. Darn.
On a brighter note, Marquis and I submitted our Cell Game class to the Agora Days Supreme Comission. Yay.

sick AGAIN?!?

Argh I missed school again today. So damn tired. Looks like I won't be in tomorrow either. Ugggh. I haven't finished math or hsitory essay... Not thinking coherently at all.
I think I've missed 5 days of school this quarter now. Very bad.

We've got our Christmas tree up. No lights, but its pretty nice. There's no good way to take a picture of it either: it's too far for the flash to work well, but the chandelier is too bright... Oh well. Use your imagination.

1.0 final already?

Thunderbird 1.0 is out. Pretty quick, since the release candidate was only from this weekend. Read my old post or something for features. I suppose if you use Eudora there isn't much need to switch (although I personally prefer it).
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I got my new 160 GB harddrive installed. More to come. Sleep now.

civ iii

OMG Civilization III is so addictive. Its the reason I didn't post anything yesterday. Or work on any homework all weekend.
I really did just start doing homework. So I'd best be going. My target is to have 4 pages of history (with cites) done by Friday. We'll see if I make that...

Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 Release Candidate 1 is out. (It's not officially stable, but seems to work fine for me. A few nice additions since 0.9 - Winstripe theme to match Firefox, and Saved Search Folders (a weird name for it, its like Gmail's Label system. Pretty useful.)

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I'm really tired, so nothing more for today. I might go to StudProd tomorrow afternoon. I'll write up something interesting tomorrow... Maybe.

words of the year

Merriam-Webster has their top 10 most looked-up words of the year. "Blog" is number one, blah blah blah. Semms pretty dumb to me, seeing as it isn't even a real word. Go read something else for discussion of that. It is rather interesting that they added "blog" to the online dictionary due to the number of searches for it. (It'll even be added in the next print edition.) However, I like my idea better. If that gets put in the dictionary, I will cry for the English language.
Also interesting is number 9 on the list... "sovereignty". Maybe they weight the President's searches higher? (For those who don't know what I'm talking about.)
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Also, Illini men's basketball (#3) totally pwned #1-ranked Wake Forest. Which should translate to #1 in next week's poll. I think the real question is how long we can hold on to that title though...