A Farewell to Harms

Well I did it: I survived the semester from H-E-L-L! I finished up my last final on Monday morning and have spent the last day and a half deprogramming. Now that school is over for another semester, I have more time to enjoy the finer things in life:

- Sleeping in until the afternoon
- Crossword Puzzles
- Chocolate Milk
- Wine tasting
- Contemplating writing a novel
- Continuing my ongoing search for the lost city of Atlantis
- Skeeball
- Finishing my movie (actually Becca's and my movie)

Yes, the winter break brings with it a period of relaxation through high activity. Aside from Christmas shopping, Christmas wrapping, Christmas music performaning, Christmas unwrapping, Christmas eating, Christmas well-wishing, Christmas clean-up, as well as New Years, our annual Mammoth Ski Trip, and the continuous college football bowl scene leading up to the National Championship game on Jan. 4th, I will be spending my time in movie production. I can't really say where we are in terms of this film and how much we have left because I keep changing my mind of what it should be about and what we should put in it. I'm also experiencing some major techincal problems with my computer which will slow us down considerably, but we hope to have something to present to people before school starts back up again.

Now that school is over, I will be away from the internet more often (dial-up at home) so this may be my last post of the year. But when I get back, it will be the one-year anniversary of this webblog and my plan is to spruce things up a bit (especially since I'm planning on having more time next semester). Feel free to offer suggestions to daily/weekly columns for me to create. I'm already thinking of doing a weekly column explaining my progress in my Film Symposium class as well as possibly "Anecdote Corner". I might do one more post to wrap up the events of 2004. We'll just have to see how dedicated I am....

How To Create A Post

I occasionally get harassed by some individuals about not posting more often here. Normally I am understanding about it all because what else would I be doing to prevent me from posting all the time? However, under certain circumstances, other things do get in the way and I do end up neglecting this side project from time to time. It's completely unintentional, but it does happen, and it makes posting later seem more like a chore. But what you may not know firsthand is that it is a chore; there's a process that must be followed to construct a concise, well-thought out post. This isn't something to be taken lightly so I've created a simple four-step process to ensure that my posts are well-planned and grammatically correct:

Step 1: Planning Session
The secret to successful blogging is successful planning. Sometimes you have to work hard to find inspiration. For me, I find that inspiration best works through elbow macaroni. It’s like working with an edible jigsaw puzzle!

Step 2: Rough Draft
Once the thought process is completed and the idea thought out, a rough draft is created. This is a crucial step to refine the post and to make sure ideas and thoughts are fully developed. Here the elbow macaroni is converted into hieroglyphics, which is a much easier form to work with in terms of rough drafting.

Now did I want bird-eye-hand-hand-basket, or basket-hand-hand-eye-bird? Or should I go with water-snake-bowl-arm?

Step 3: Program
Once a few reams of papyrus of hieroglyphics have been completed, the whole mess is then converted and programmed onto the computer in binary for smaller storage and faster travel.

The easy part is that there are only two numbers; however, the thing to watch out for is that 10111001 sometimes looks like 10110001, which ends up translating the whole thing into Portuguese.

Step 4: Convert
Finally, the whole mess is converted from binary to the text that you’re reading right now. It’s a grueling 17 hour process, but at times it’s almost worth it just to read the comments. Wait, there are no comments! Well screw this, I’m gonna watch TV.