Go sign up. Do it. now.

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator.
It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Looks like UNIX has some personality. Honestly, I have no idea what I’m doing. But the bit about the “usual lecture from the local System Administrator” makes me laugh. Forgive me, Mac OS X, for I have sinned!

If it was yesterday I would say that I last posted on this blog three months ago. I guess that makes yesterday my (rather accurately put) three-month slackiversarry. It’s a shame I didn’t celebrate; I could have had cake, or sponsored a parade or something

Oh wait.

Three months since I last posted something?! That’s a bad thing!

But not as bad as you might think. I mean, in the time you would have wasted reading my blog, you probably now have done a myriad of more interesting and exciting things, like catching up on your taxes, saving buildings from burning babies, commiting yourself to the ideals of modern Astronomical research, or maybe even participating in a ’round-the-block-dash while carrying a watermelon over your head. The possibilities are endless, really, and I’m sure my former readers have made the transition from feeling bitterly bereaved and betrayed by my lack of posting, to blissfull, euphoric sociological progress quite gracefully.

However, for those of you who feel emotionally scarred by my lack of activity on the blog, you may rest assured that your chronic depression is quickly coming to an end. Your tear-stained pillowcases can now be conveniently sent off to the cleaners. You’re broken hearts can be mended. You can now pick up the pieces of your life again, and live with confidence that Andrew Has Posted Something. Ahh, the relief! Life is sweet again!

So now that we have that pressing matter cleared up, the next thing to address is the big question. The question which has been filling your minds with curiosity, and almost inexorable anxiety…

Just what have I been doing lately?

1. I worked on, and am still working on Viddler. It should hopefully launch this month!
2. I can now ride the unicycle, it’s a blast. I have a pretty sturdy 20″, but I want to upgrade to a 24″ sometime.
3. Oh, I worked on Viddler.
4. I visited a Limelight data center here in Phoenix.
5. I decided that Mister Rogers was not an alien spy from Pluto after all (give me a break, though, that pamphlet they handed out was convincing, darn it!)
6. I’m getting my hopes up about CSS3.
7. My computer got a brand new hard drive today! His other two are experiencing… rather disconcerting technical problems (read: hard drive failure).
8. I would gladly give my left ventricle for a 24-inch iMac.
9. I’ve been experimenting on and off with Ruby. I love it.
10. That’s basically it (I’m sure my regular readers aware that most of my general activity is not disclosable, as doing so would jeopardize national security).

Yep. That’s, um, all I have to say. Don’t have more words for tonight. Be nice and leave me a comment, if you would…

By now you should realize that’s my name, and hopefully the more clever of you have deduced I’ve been busy working on the project. Anyway, TechCrunch gave this project some great press.

Be notified when it launches. For real.

Andrew out.

However, I don’t have anything good to say about the venue itself, or what we (meaning myself and my two sisters) had to go through in order to see The Fray perform.

Complaint the first
I live in Arizona. I live near Phoenix. Which, by implication, means that it is normally hot in the Summer. Apparently, there were a lot of people who wanted to see the Fray, which, by implication, means that the line to the theater was, well, very long. By now the more observant of you will have deduced that my sisters and I stood in line while the sun, even as it was on its way to set (think late afternoon), broiled us to a crisp, tasty delight.

We stood. We talked. We sweated. Repeat.

Of course, it’s unreasonable to blame the theatre for the temperature outside, so I won’t do that.

Complaint the second
The auditorium, if you can call it that, was really a large, rectangular room, complete with concrete floor and a very poignant lack of seating. If you squeezed people together so there was a minimum amount of two inches between them, you could probably fit four hundred people in the room. And that’s what they did.

I’m a friendly person. I don’t mind talking to people. But I need my space. There was not enough space. The lack of space was so exorbitant, that it would not be far-fetched to claim it drove you to claustrophobia. It also made the room considerably hotter.

So here we have several factors. First, we’re all very warm. Uncomfortably warm. Hot, even. Second, we’ve been standing and waiting an hour for the opening band to play. Not The Fray themselves, the opening band. Third, we’re unacceptably close to people we don’t know.

Complaint the third
I should have brought earplugs, because I really don’t like music so loud you can’t hear it, or decipher the words, or even recognize notes and chords. This equals hearing damage. Hearing damage isn’t cool. Neither is loud music. Turn the dang speakers down!

But of course they can’t do that, and of course it’s not really reasonable to request it, and of course I didn’t know beforehand it would be that loud. I mean, I still enjoyed the songs The Fray played because I’m familiar with them. I know the words. I sang along. But I like sound to be clear and crisp, not overbearingly loud and boisterous. You’d get better sound quality by listening to the record.

Complaint the fourth
I really, really wish I knew what the theatre was like before I went there. Of course, their website doesn’t give me a clue what the building looks like, what the inside looks like, whether or not there are chairs or some kind of acceptable seating so that you can wait conveniently for the show to start. Of course, I guess they’d never put something on their website that says…

When you arrive at the theatre, you will wait in line for a very long time underneath the blazingly hot sun, and stand helplessly as the ultraviolet rays discreetly give you skin cancer while you hope very sincerely that the ants on the sidewalk don’t crawl up your shoes, on to your legs, and onward to places they shouldn’t be (and you don’t want to find them).

Our demeaning staff will frisk you and have you take off your shoes so they can be sure you aren’t carrying knives or popsicle sticks. Once you finally get to the auditorium, you will stand and wait as other people of unknown and possibly questionable character squeeze in way too near to you.

Afterwards, you will stand, do some more standing, and stand again. Additionally, you will stand and, after a bit of quiet consideration, you will decide to stand some more. After the standing, you’ll stand again, and, while looking at your watch, you will see that there is still half an hour to go before the opening band plays.

After both performances by both bands, you will walk out of our shady little joint, your ears ringing, and your back and feet screaming in agony. You’ll be completely beat. Tired. Exhausted.

Won’t that be fun?

The moral: know what you’re getting into before you order tickets.

The florescent lights hurt my sleepy eyes, and I squinted at the man and his pet. He put the flask back on the table and giggled at his good fortune. He had the perfect ingredients. The experiment would continue, and his fame would spread throughout the scientific world. “Aesop, my old friend”, he chortled to himself, “You will be the first to successfully produce a genetic union between human and garden snail! How the world will gaze in awe at your knowledge! How the nations will submit to your absolute power that is soon to come!” His current activities, which up until now involved operating a very complex and sophisticated amount of machinery and electronics, soon melted into a fit of hysterics.

The man needed serious therapy. I, on the other hand, needed a plan and an escape route. I was under custody of some organization masquerading to be under the administration of the Federal government. I was also soon to lose my brain to some quack scientists’ idea of the “ultimate weapon”; a genetic hybrid of man and garden snail. Of course, my brain was considered “the most suitable” for such a task and I had been apprehended. In my sleep. With the aid of chloroform.

Aesop Trimpleton, the man in the white coat who had been formerly obsessing over his snail, was the brains of the whole operation. The idea? Create and clone an army of vegetable-eating snail-humans, and terrorize Earth’s farms and small herb gardens, bringing the whole civilized populace to its knees. Without eggplants or carrots, the vegan population is sure to revolt, inevitably causing mass panic and economic upheaval. It was the start of the apocalypse: a veritable garden snail nightmare, and my brain was the key component. Why does stuff like this always happen to me?

In any event, my brain’s habitation in my body was coming to an end. It was only seconds before that lump of grey matter that my psyche calls home would be liberated from its house of bone.

And then the ninjas arrived.

It was havoc. After the fire (in which most of the snails burned), and the FBI cover-up, I was, as it is to be expected, simply too tired to write a blog. I’ve spent the last couple of days recuperating from my close brush with death and the end of Western civilization as we know it. You’d think I had dreamed the whole thing up, but I still have bruises and I can’t get that iridescent green dye out of my hair.

Some 200-ish years ago, Ben Franklin and Tom Hanks officially rebelled against King George and his crew of red-coated miscreants, while simultaneously inventing electricity in a lightning storm (with help from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course). Afterwards, the whole gang was taught how to plant corn by the Sasquatch, and they had a rock concert by the Plymouth rock with the sound system they brought on the Mayflower. George Washington impressed everyone with his Fender Stratocaster, and The Beatles ran away scared, spoiling the whole British invasion.

And here it sits, dusty and unkempt. The cobwebs are starting to collect in the dark corners of its html, and the stylesheet is growing mildew. What can be done for this poor wordpress install, which is always first to lose priority when its author gets busy?

Maybe I should stop being so poetic.

It’s simple, right? I haven’t updated my blog in a while. I’ve gotten busy. I haven’t felt the need to say anything. That’s life, right? So deal with it.

But I’m afraid it isn’t much fun to deal with life. Things slip away and before you know it, you may have become a robot trying to fulfill various mechanical and joyless tasks, forgetting such things as Fun or Art, along with all that bring satisfaction. That is an easy and tempting thing to do—to surrender all goals and ambitions except for one, which clearly and logically states in your mind, “Endure the day and go through it until tonight, for you will be able to fall between the sheets and lose consciousness as you slip into sweet and blissful ignorance, an apathy that gives peace.” Sleep is short lived and intolerably temporary. I should not live for sleep, but rather a brilliant and bold consciousness. For life—real life—is much better than the melancholy, lethargic lull that constitutes psychological (and physiological) rest.

I will not discard hopes. I will not discard ambitions. I will not simply give up.
I will not be a robot.

I am free to open up my Bible and call myself a follower of Jesus without being sent to the Colosseum in Rome to face disgruntled, savage (and rather hungry) beasts.

If I’m not too lazy, I’ll walk into the kitchen and find food in a machine called a refrigerator, which is always stocked with edibles of some sort, ensuring that my stomach is always full.

I spend much of the day on a machine called a computer, an astronomically complex electronic device that can plays back my favorite songs through a competent pair of headphones while I type away with reckless abandon.

I walk around house that is relatively cool when the temperature outside is over a hundred degrees.

And while I have everything I need to exist (and much, much more), there are a billion people who go without food occasionally. They don’t have stylish, stone-washed blue jeans and have probably never heard of The Beatles.

I’m stating this, not to heap a gigantic guilt trip on everyone including myself, but to simply put things in perspective.

Should I really be disappointed that I don’t have a bowl of ice cream sitting in front of me right now?

I think not.

Then again, “no one went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”