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Friday, December 31, 2004
 
Now seems like as good a time as any to make a final post of the year. I'll be having a few buddies over to waste away the time, watching Lord of the Rings and munching on snacks. I might even watch the countdown. Who knows??

I finally managed to pick up my comic books today and am sorting through the rather intimidating pile I've amassed from a few months of backlog. If I get myself to sit down for it, I should have a few enjoyable hours of reading material for me.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004
 
Christmas has come and gone, and now I have to clean up my mess. Actually, it was a bit strange this year. For the first time that I can remember, we didn't go to church. I think part of this is that we had a sudden schedule change which meant my dad's side of the family came over much sooner than usual. We started the day later than usual, so we only got to open half our presents before the relatives arrived. My aunt wanted an early dinner to accommodate her children's schedules. Not exactly the most in-control thing for a parent to do on Christmas day, but then again, it's not my judgment call. Although I can understand the sentiment behind arriving early, as my older cousin had to start work later in the day. But leaving early because my younger cousin wanted to hang out with his friends? They were gone by 6, so we opened the rest of the presents.

Brittany had the runs over the weekend, which meant cleaning up some rather foul-smelling stains early Christmas morning. We took her to the vet and the medication she received is making her feel much better and much less lethargic. The same can't be said for my grandmother on my mom's side. She's had some shallow breathing, trouble staying awake, and swollen feet. Turns out she might have congenital heart failure going on. I just found this out about ten minutes ago, and I'm really rather uncertain about what the future will bring. Hopefully we caught it early enough to prevent any serious problems.

Thursday, December 23, 2004
 
Heh, I guess I let the webhosting bill lapse. In-between theme park visits and Christmas shopping, I neglected to check when the payment for the host expired. Hopefully that's all fixed now for another year.

You'll probably notice that I haven't updated much in the past week. Well, the site lapse was a factor, but mostly I've just been busy. See, on Monday I went to Universal and on Tuesday it was Disneyland. I never really have much to say about these visits as I think other sites keep the theme park news reported better than I could do. Needless to say, I think all the decorations look quite pretty, and the rides are still fun. But now that just about all the kids are on Winter Break, the lines are killer. I take pictures mostly for my own private amusement.

Thursday, December 16, 2004
 
I did some driving yesterday, first to Irvine to pick up a gift card for a Secret Santa thing for mom's work, then to Westminster to pick up Ken, then to Anaheim to spend a few hours, back to Westminster to drop off Ken, and finally back home. Disneyland was fun, bright and shiny with all the Christmas decorations, but California Adventure was still boring as hell. Hardly any decorations up when compared to the other park.

Anyways, the big news was when Mike called me as we were waiting in line to get Ken's ticket. Turns out that Mike finally got accepted into a medical school. It's in Missouri, though. But now that we know he has somewhere to go, we can relax as we hope for an acceptance to a college a little closer to home.

Monday, December 13, 2004
 
Lucky me, I managed to escape jury duty today. I did get selected to appear in the courtroom as they selected jurors, but I wasn't actually picked there. If I did, I had a few reasons I could think of to get out of it, though. One of them was that one of the already-selected jurors was the bane of my junior year at Troy: Mr. Wahl. However, as fate would have it, he got selected, and I got to go home. Aw, sweet victory, thou art most glorious.

Sunday, December 12, 2004
 
Nammy dropped by on Friday, and by Saturday morning, I had my computer back, running like it should. It's nice to get some functionality out of this new chipset and motherboard. I really don't know why we didn't just wipe the memory in the first place.

I start jury duty tomorrow; it'll be a new experience for me. I'm trying to think up a legitimate excuse to get our of it, though. I don't know if they'll accept the true response of "I can't sit still for eight hours in one place!" I need to find a book to pass the time with if I'm gonna survive tomorrow.

Thursday, December 09, 2004
 
For the past few days I've been slowly going mad over trying to get a new member ID and password for our DSL line. You see, there was a time when we needed a second phone line for our house because the dial-up internet access was used so frequently. Shortly after we got our second line, we upgraded to DSL, making the second line useless. Fortunately, it was shortly afterward that dad started working at home, and his second line became the business line. Well, dad no longer works at home, and that second phone line was starting to drag us down. Dad's solution? End the DSL on the second line, and bring it onto the first. The problem with this was that, even though it was the same company, we needed to get a new ID to use it. We've gone for a bit using the old ID and password, but we finally got around to establishing a new one. The trouble lay with the installation disk. The installation on the home computer yesterday corrupted somehow and prevented the computer from booting up. We only fixed that problem a few hours ago. In the meantime, I tried setting up on my computer. The installation went fine, but the program couldn't find the DSL modem and wouldn't let me continue. Never mind the fact that I could access the internet! We finally called tech support to find an online URL to register the connection, instead of having to go through the installation disk. It's been trying, to say the least.

Monday, December 06, 2004
 
I'm back at home having bravely survived through two hours of business as usual today. For some reason, I seem to be the only one who doesn't have to deal with finals here at UCSD. I don't get it. Other people in my major are complaining about all the work they have to do, and here I am talking for a few minutes about a tiny little project I threw together that's worth no more than any of my previous ones. Mind boggling.

So if you couldn't guess from the text above, yes, I did present my final project for Vis 1 today and it didn't suck as much as I thought. I also managed to finish my 5 page paper early for my stage management class, so that was turned in a day ahead of schedule. What's become of me? I used to be this expert procrastinator, now I do my assignments early!

Friday, December 03, 2004
 
I'll be staying in San Diego over the weekend, trying to finish up everything so that I can leave by Monday. Since I'll be gone for a couple of weeks, I need to make sure the apartment's clean, and any perishable food is taken care of by the time I leave. I'll also be bringing my computer back with me, do hopefully it won't be malfunctioning so badly by the time the next quarter starts.

Thursday, December 02, 2004
 
My last day of classes for the quarter is today. I already know what my finals week is going to be like, and it looks very easy. I only have a 5 page paer to turn in (non-research, just a reaction to the quarter's work, really), and I have to show my week 10 assignment in Vis 1. I'll probably do the paper tomorrow, and the Vis 1 project on the weekend. Then I present on Monday, and I'm done. Let's hope it works out that way, huh?

Wednesday, December 01, 2004
 
Wow, it's December already. Seems like only yesterday I was complaining that my Summer Break was almost over. I have to worry about jury duty soon! In any case, I still have to get my computer running. To that end, I've decided to wipe out my hard drive and start from scratch. In order to do this, though, I've been burning disks of all my important data I want to save. It's taken hours, mostly because I was finishing up a final edit of my Vis 180B film. I didn't have to re-edit it, but there were some things in it that I wanted to fix, and since I hadn't taken out the source files yet, it was an easy matter. Between disc burns, I've also been helping Justin out with his last Vis 145A project of the quarter. Maybe now he won't have to ask me for help any time he has to make a Shockwave program.

 


The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of Phillip Donnelly. Unless explicitly stated, all statements are those of Phillip Donnelly. So there!

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