My spider-sense is tingling, telling me that I have precious minutes before I let another month go by without a blog post. That would be criminal!

My mindspace (lol) has recently been filled to the brim with thoughts about a website I've been drafted to create for my work. Over the last week I finally got something that won't totally embarrass me (or the company). The site renders nicely in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and IE7 and 8.

Guess who's boss is still running IE6?

I spent five hours today getting the darn thing to look right in that stupid browser. I actually had to uninstall XP Service Pack 3 and IE7 from my laptop so that I had a copy of IE6 to test against (and I'm not even including that time in my "five hours" quote).

...

Tonight Sissi brought a video camera to dance practice, because she wanted to record her west coast swing for later critique. The only flaw in her plan was that she had to entrust her camera to us, her "friends," in order to do that.

Thus we recorded Daniel and Chris (male) dancing a Nightclub Two Step, while Jon, Janis and I provided color commentary in the nature of Winter Olympics ice skating. We also recorded some test footage from a show I quickly whipped up called The Ballroom. The idea is pretty simple: cross The Office with the OSU dance community. It would totally work, too.

Janis dragged Daniel onto the floor for a hustle, right after he and Britta finished dancing polka to a meringue (polka is usually fast, but this approached ludicrous speed). Not surprisingly, Daniel found himself out of energy halfway through the song. I took the opportunity to relieve him (though I sadly missed the perfect opportunity to use a classic Back to the Future line: "Scram McFly, I'm cutting in!"), and Janis and I found ourselves spending the last minute or two of the song chasing Jon and Sissi around the floor with a grapevine step (you know the move, even if you've never seen the dance). That got some laughs from the peanut gallery. Aside: it turns out that when you grapevine for unusually long periods of time, you start getting pretty sloppy about it.

...

Earlier in the month I went to Janis' vet school graduation party. It was a comparatively huge affair, where the entire class invited family and friends to drink and eat a roasted pig. The most salient part of the locale was a barbeque large enough to double as a coffin (and did so, in a way, for the pig). Seriously: that coffin barbeque was Serious Business big. The graduating class put on skits and video and whatnot for entertainment throughout the evening; most amusing to me was learning about the TTJ status, which apparently stands for Transfered to Jesus.

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Not much new in video game news this last month. Marin and I finally defeated [CENSORED] in Tales of Vesperia to finish that game; Nate and I finally gathered all the rainbows (i.e. perfected all the levels) on the primary island in PixelJunk Monsters. Nate and I also tried out Boom Blox, where I very nearly put my Wiimote through my TV for the first time (remember, kids, to Strap Your Shit). The game was good fun, but suffered from the wiimote needing to be facing the sensor bar when you let go of the A button, in order for the game to register that you actually threw your ball. This led to me adopting non-standard throwing motions, which ultimately resulted in my first case of Wii Elbow.

When you mess up your elbow playing Wii games, you mess your elbow up good.

1) There's one in every crowd.

2) It's usually me.

(To answer the inevitable question: I don't know. My clock-radio is tuned to KRKT country for some reason I cannot possibly comprehend, and a certain grey cat had me pinned in bed for a good while after my alarm went off.)

Stayed up until 3:30 am on Saturday night, and woke up at 9:00 am on Sunday, which kinda threw my ever-older body for a loop. Then, from Sunday night onward, I've had oddly interrupted sleep—waking up two or three times a night. This recipe? Disaster.

My balance and sense of timing failed halfway through dance tonight, in rather dramatic fashion. One dance I was fine; the next I was fucking everything up. Boom.

The timing of all this was tragic, as Emerald (now studying law in Portland) and Jessica (usually busy) made unexpected appearances. Poor Emerald, who is undoubted one of the finest follows I know, suffered through my stroke-inspired WCS. I did have at least one not-terrible dance with Sarah, though, which is pretty much the only good thing to come from this evening.

More horror awaits tomorrow, when I'll have to interact with potential clients (!) while trying to cover up my growing insanity. I'm skipping the Mountain Dew, in the hopes that being comatose will make a better impression than being jittery and paranoid.

...is that you do not post in April 2009. I'm so good at this!

I started the new year by sleeping in, and then watching three episodes of Azumanga Daioh on my iPod touch while lying in bed. After eating breakfast and showering, I then took a three hour nap.

Oh, I'm doing just great.

Now that I've actually been awake for more than two consecutive hours, I've started in on various housekeeping tasks: swapping my 2008 Hayate calendar for a 2009 Higurashi one, moving my email into a "2008" folder, and I've just started in on cleaning out my browser bookmarks.

I have over ten years of bookmarks. I don't think I've ever bothered cleaning them out.

That is just one front in a much larger war, though: I have too much stuff on my computer, and too much stuff in my life. Too much weight on my body, as well. All this stuff, regardless of form, just serves to slow me down and makes it harder to get to the stuff I really want... it's high time to change things.

(I'm not going to the "Steve Jobs sitting by himself in the middle of an empty room" extreme, though. I like having things; I just don't need everything I've accumulated over the years.)

Everyone at work today agreed that they were too tired to greet 2009 in style; we all just wanted to go home, do something quiet, and collapse in a heap when the feeling hit us.

In that spirit, Nate and I rang in the New Year by watching episode 3 of Giant Robo. Nate informed me, prior to watching, that Giant Robo is the most expressive robot ever, and he was right—in the most hilarious way. <Maybe I need to make a spoiler tag>Never before have I seen a robot cry buckets after smashing its fist to pieces.</Maybe I need to make a spoiler tag>

But, yeah: quiet. As I looked through The Big Picture's Year in Photographs a week or two ago, I was reminded of how eventful the last year really was. Personally, the last year was largely unremarkable, save for how quickly it seems to have passed.

I remember when waiting a month for a movie to come out felt like an eternity; these days I think of the time between when House ends for the summer and starts in the fall as a brief, pleasant break from TV. Part of that, I suspect, is due to my old theory that we accelerate to our death (as each day becomes an increasingly insignificant amount of the number of days we've already experienced)... but now I suspect another part of that is a side effect of information overload. Specifically: with all the stuff available to distract us, time seems to pass faster.

The internet certainly distracts me, at least. A noteworthy trend from the last year was my inability to be productive anywhere but at work. On the clock I feel honor-bound to not screw around; the rest of my life I'm apparently more than willing to waste by drooling on myself in front of my computer. That's something that needs to change; I (hope I!) have more to do with my life than what I'm getting done.