Whoa, three posts in three days…crazy! Anyway, Not a whole lot going on, but for whatever reason, I decided to write another post today, and here we are.

Anyway, check out this video. It takes a minute or so to get into the really cool stuff, but it would be an interesting art installation nonetheless, and could be reworked into some really cool applications.

There was a story on the noon news about the T-Rex coming back to the Carnegie, and I’m really excited to go and see it. I saw the new Dinosaur Hall in January (I think it was January) and it’s really well done (and lots of other cool stuff in the museum as well, pictures coming soon I hope!), and now, there aren’t time restrictions for when you can go into the hall, so I’m hoping it will be a little less crazy (granted, when the T-Rex room is first opened, I’m sure it will be a madhouse for a while.

Also, a quick badge, because I love 10 Items or Less (also, it’s funny because I was a stock boy at G. Thanks!)

Anyway, other than that, not a whole lot going on, hope you enjoyed the link, and for now, I’m heading out. Have a great one!

Here I am, back again. Pretty crappy day here at work, all kinds of things going wrong and I’m kind of caught in the middle trying to fix them. One of the many things that went wrong I feel like I should have caught, but the others, just happened to now be my “fault.” Oh well, goes with the territory I suppose, nothing we can’t handle, and besides, it makes life a bit interesting…

Remember the plane from yesterday’s post? The one that was flying through the halls? Well, it was given to me, and it’s now my mission to repair it and fix it up. Right now, it’s sitting in my storage room, almost like a trophy (I feel special!), hopefully I’ll have some time in the near future to see what I can do with it.

Remember last week how I was commenting on how I always forget and eat meat the first Friday in Lent? Well, I broke my streak and didn’t! Now we just have to see how the rest of Lent goes…

Also…Survivor update…I think I caught a glimpse of one of the production spotlights, and also, I’m still not convinced Johnny Fairplay is legit, especially with his track record, I just can’t buy this story about his daughter. I mean, I’m glad he’s gone, but he doesn’t get to go home like he wanted, he knows that they castoffs have to stay until production wraps. Something smells fishy…CBS marketing ploy perhaps?

Also, Joel (I think that’s his name, the Firefighter) looks a lot like my buddy Matt (although much bigger), the one getting married, not my roomate.

Happy V-D Day!  (Yes, I say it every year, why do you act so shocked?)  Here’s a No More Heroes themed valentine:

I think that’s it for now, short update I know, but for now, it will have to do (I had another thought, and I just lost it). Catch everyone later!

Hey all, back to a somewhat normal post, complete with an update and links (maybe just one, we’ll see what happens).

Things are going well, aside from transportation.  The roads were horrendous on Tuesday, and the weather was bad enough to close the office early and send us home at 2:30.  Going home I didn’t have any problems, but getting to work that morning I slid three times and ended up being 15 minutes late (even though I left extra early because I knew the road would be bad).

Today on the radio (both my station and my mom’s) they said the roads were even worse.  Which is strange, I thought they were easily 100 percent better.  Bedford (the road our office is on, ok really the hill our office is on) is never plowed and was again, a mess.

And I do have to say, as tough as a job as this can be (very intense and stressful at times, and always very busy), we do have our random outbursts of fun.  Case in point, a small airplane is being flown in the building and yesterday I was mock stabbed with a fork.  Good times.

In the world of advertising and media, readers will soon have lickable advertisements.  Yes, an ad in a magazine that you can peel off and lick.  How exciting, and gross at the same time, I can’t wait!  Also, the thought of all those potential paper cuts on tongues makes me cringe!

I have more pictures to put up on my site, more from SVC games, and my trip to the museum, so they will be up soon.  I’m going to Phipps again next week (my need to be cultural exactly once a month, any more than that and it would be culture overload for me), but I probably won’t be taking too many pictures (I think 200 was enough the first time), although I’ll probably take some since I’m going with different people this time.

Speaking of Phipps, the chandelier in the main atrium is going to remain once the show leaves, which is very exciting!  It’s not my favorite piece, but it will be a nice reminder.  Next year, I’d like to go see the Christmas show that they do, and in the coming months I’m hoping to go to the Aviary and back to the museum to see the T-Rex (maybe this time we won’t sneak into Dino Hall…whoops!)

Well, I think that’s it for now, catch everyone later!

Hello everybody, and happy Chinese New Year!  Welcome in the year of the rat (which, incidentally, I was born in the year of the rat two cycles ago, I believe), and to celebrate, I went out and had Chinese for dinner. 

The Myst community is still going strong, at this point mostly fueled by extreme cautious optimism because of a comment made my Rand about Cyan running URU servers.  Will it be Until URU or MO:UL or maybe something else entirely, who knows.  This is the first we’ve all heard of it, so I’m a bit skeptical, but still cautiously optimistic.

So tomorrow if the first Friday in Lent.  Typically, every year I forget that it’s Lent (even though we just passed Ash Wednesday) and I eat meat (even though we just passed Ash Wednesday, a day where I did not eat meat).  Will the streak hold true?  I’ll keep you posted.

So I think I’m going to head up to Chill Out on Saturday, and then a group of us is going to Phipps on the 23rd, so lots of exciting things coming up over the next few weeks.

The Format broke up, in a very strange way.  I’m still trying to figure it out actually, but through a long and drawn out post to their Live Journal, and subsequently my RSS feed, I was able to determine (fairly confidently) that they broke up.  It’s a pity too, their first CD was great, and the one time I heard their second CD I was also impressed (although I think I liked the first better).  But as always, it’s sad to see a promising indie band break up.

Otherwise, not a whole lot to report on, I’m still feeling tired from having the flu, so I haven’t been doing a whole lot, but that’s ok, I probably need to take it easy for a bit.

As someone in my office said (as I’m sure was murmured countless times across the country…), happy super fat Tuesday.  Enjoy the pancakes and enjoy the exit polls, I’ll probably be skipping both.

And in good news, 18 and one!

And in more good news, the rumor is that the writers strike will be over very soon (like Friday)!

And from the good, to the bad:

Very sad news today, Myst Online: URU Live has been cancelled.  No more season two, no more Cavern, no more URU.  I sometimes think it could come back again, but after two cancellations, I really don’t see it happening, which is very sad indeed.  So much of URU has been like Firefly/Serenity, and it was wonderful to see both get a second chance, but a third is probably pushing it.

URU really is (for 60 days at least) wonderful, in a day where critics praise Mass Effect for offering something new to video games, mainly a dash of ethical decisions, it’s funny that never once in those articles are URU or the Myst series brought up, when they are packed with ethical and moral choices (pride, slavery, domination of an entire race, power, corruption), but who am I to say what game critics are right about?

URU Obsession will stick around, we never go away.  Although it will be a little strange to say the least (but then again, we’re all strange anyway).  I’m sure we’ll change and adapt, we always do, who knows, maybe we’ll branch out into other games (GRIMM and Sam&Max are up there for me, well, if I could get Sam&Max to run…), although chances are, Cyan will come up with something else for us to obsess over (and the pending release of Myst DS in the US, along with rumors of Myst Wii and Riven DS).  But of course, I’ll miss the people, seeing them in The Cavern, talking with them on my lunch break, working on promotional plans (Grassroots 2.0 is now dead in the water, sorry) and discussing the newest Ages over the Lyst (ok, so I just lurk, but I love reading every bit of it, even if I only post once in a blue moon).

And of course I’ll miss going into The Cavern, if only by myself.  I always loved sitting in the Great Zero, watching it spin.  And the new Ages Cyan gave us this time around, I loved the team-building garden Ages, and the sandbox area of Jalek (and the sandbox of Minkata), and it’s sad to think of how the Guilds will once again fall apart (if they hadn’t already, Messenger meetings made my head hurt).

We’ll still have the original cd-rom URU, but it won’t be the same, and we know that, but it can at least fill the void if we ever need it.  I’m going to try to fill out my URU Live gallery before the end (so weird to think we’re coming up on another end, that wait is always awful).

But in the spirit of Atrus, let us not forget that while this is sad and heart-wrenching (funny how something can get under your skin and bring people together to form a community), new things will come about.  I for one and excited and hopefully that we’ll finally get to see latus (I also still think that it’s some sort of GPS device, like a KI, that puts people in the game in real time, in real space), or maybe something completely different, I’d love to see what Cyan could come up with, maybe something more futuristic.

But for now, we’ll digress, we’ll discuss, we’ll mourn and we’ll stay close.  The next 60 days will be tough, going past the one year anniversary (party still going on as far as I know) and even harder as URU draws to a close.  Maybe we all sleep a little sounder knowing that we were a part of something new and amazing, something that pushed the boundaries over and over again, and ultimately, was a success, due to the content, the choices we faced, and the fans.  Enter The Growers.

Hello everyone, my name is Mike and I have the flu!  Yes, those small people referenced in the title above gave me the flu at Winterfest (I know it sounds crazy, but I spent just about all of my time inside sitting next to the fire drinking hot chocolate).  So here I am, feeling like death warmed over.  Wait, that’s not really true.  Yesterday I felt like death warmed over, I feel so much better today, still a bit under the weather, but better nonetheless.

I went to MedExpress for the first time (up in Penn Center) and they were very, very nice, I would highly recommend them.  I had to get a nose swap to test for the flu, which was a strange sensation to say the least, but hey, it was a first, so that’s a plus at least!

A cool link you should check out if you enjoy photoshop, a series of "tutorials" at youtube called "You suck at Photoshop."  Watch them in order (up to episode four now), a story unfolds, and they are quite humerous.

Alright, I think that’s it for now, I’m heading out to eat some soup and crackers!  Have a great one, and hopefully I’ll be alive next week!

Real quick update for everyone:

Our neighborhood has two crossing guards.  They’ve both been there for years are their respective corners, although to be honest, one is more of a staple of the community than the other (mostly because she smiles and waves to everybody), but the second one is just as nice.  So leaving my neighborhood this morning, the crossing guard at the intersection of my road and Old William Penn stopped traffic so a kid could cross to get to the bus stop.  A passing construction worker did not like this fact and kept trying to run her over.  She held her ground and he finally stopped letting the kid cross, but not without rolling down his window and leaning out and yelling at her.  She kept traffic stopped as she yelled right back, and he eventually sped off in a huff.

So this morning when I got into work, I sneezed for probably ten minutes straight, I just couldn’t stop.  When I did finally stop, I felt so much better though!  I had trouble sleeping last night and just felt a little off during the ride in this morning, but all that sneezing must have knocked stuff back into place!

I’m heading up to Heritage for the weekend, and Sunday when I get back I’ll be crazy busy running around, but I’ll be back next week, look for more updates then!

Crazy case of déjà-vu today involving e-mails.  Strange.  Must be The Matrix fixing itself…

All the professional staff is at their annual planning conference the rest of this week, so the staff in the building did a food day.  Everyone either brought something in or pitched in money for food (I helped to purchase a sandwich ring and a pie).  The food was great, and it was a lot of fun to get everyone (just about) together to eat.

Over the three day weekend, my plant didn’t do so well, but I gave it some water and it bounced right back.  I’m going to need to get a new pot for it, it seems a bit cramped, but otherwise, it’s doing well.  I still don’t have a name for him (I think it’s a him), but for now, that’s ok with me.

I’ve been assigned a big project at work, and I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to go about it.  The project involves updating a lot of documents and making them all available for internal use.  I want to make it sustainable and easily fixable, so right now I’m trying to think a little outside the box and in a Web 2.0 fashion…a wiki.  It needs more thought and I don’t even know if we can do it (we don’t really have an intranet at work, just a national intranet), so I’m not sure if its feasible, but we’ll see…

Joomla finally released version 1.5 (on my brother’s birthday no less, not that he uses it, but happy birthday to him!).  I’ve been waiting for this release since June, and I did some beta testing with it, and overall I like it, although I’m very apprehensive about switching my site over, mostly due to the extensions and plug-ins that I have working (I’m looking at you book review system that took me like forever to get working somewhat right but now I’m too scared to fiddle with because I know you’ll stop working completely).  So sometime in the future, my site will be going down for a bit while I switch it over.  I’ll alert everyone in advance (I know, my millions and millions of readers) and hopefully it will be painless and quick.

Well that’s it for now, catch everyone later!

Quick update for everyone.  I can now officially declare that I am a lottery winner!  Nothing major, just 10 bucks in a scratch off game I got in a Christmas card, so don’t expect me to be buying everyone cars or anything crazy like that!  Still cool to say though!

I’m looking to put together a trip to Phipps for Chiluhy Nights, probably the beginning of February, if you’re interested (and live in Southwestern PA, sorry Tim) let me know.

Things are generally good, I’m doing well with my new years resolution, I’ve read over 100 pages in the last two days (it helps when the book really picks up too).  Soon though I want to read “Everville,” but for now “Lord of Chaos” is keeping me very entertained.

Work is going well, I finally got the program packets out so I have room in my storage closet again (soon to be filled with summer camp things).

And really in other news, I just don’t have much to report.  Sorry, I guess lately I’m all kinds of boring.  Anyway, off to a commissioners meeting tonight and I’ll catch everyone later!  Have a great one!

Quick update for everyone.  I decided to come up with some sort of new years resolution, but not in the normal sense.  I decided that I want to be through the first nine books of the Wheel of Time by the end of the year (so I can be ready for 2009 when A Memory of Light is released).  I think that it is doable, but of course, I left my copy of book six, Lord of Chaos, at work over the weekend.

Besides that, it was a nice weekend, relaxing and enjoyable.  I picked up a friend from the airport, which was a nice drive (didn’t even have to park, her flight got in early).  I was trying to get together with another friend, but our schedules just wouldn’t mesh, so maybe after he gets back from NYC.

More cleaning, and more cleaning, I’ll make it eventually!  And I started working on my project at URU Obsession (so the title almost applies to this post, how very inappropriate thank you), so look for that soon!

That’s it, I’m going to try to update this more regularly, since I missed that whole week, so we’ll see how that works out.  Have a great one everyone!