Greetank.

[bows]

I'm still alive, however improbable that is. Alive and cold. Not in the sort of mean-tempered and cruel definition of "cold" so much as the directly physical sense of lacking any sort of thermal exitation of the corps. Put in more vulgar terms, I'm freezin out here. It was 44 degrees indoors yesterday. INDOORS. That's just ungodly.

Now why is it that a nice young man would let himself freeze so badly? Well, the house I live in is very nice, but it's really just profoundly, wildly inefficient. I mean, one solid wall of our living room is nothing but single-layered plate glass. You really couldn't have designed it to leak more heat, short of putting a giant fan and a hole in the wall. Mind you, it's great stuff. We've got just a mindnumbingly beautiful panoramic view of forest and bay, but I find myself getting sick once a month instead of once a year, which kind of can put a damper on the cheeriest of dispositions: the Sword of Damocles in effect and all.

On the brighter side of things, I finally broke down and got a projector last week. It's been really fantastic: we've had a few "movie nights" (indeed, nearly every night of the week) where we'll sit down and watch some spiffy movie. Just yesterday I decided it was time to go and buy some appropriately cool movies for it, many of which I have yet to see: Cool Hand Luke, Jesus of Nazareth, Silence of the Lambs...classic stuff like that. I'm really delighted: I've always hated television and loved film. I think a lot of that has to do with the point of television being to sell you advertisements, while the point of a movie is to tell a sufficiently compelling story that you'll watch it again, tell your friends, and buy it when it comes out on DVD. One is just meant to glue to inaction, one is meant to compel you to act on your enjoyment. This differentiation in the stimuli required for profitability mean that film can, in my opinion and experience, achieve a much higher level of art, insight, and introspection than television.

Back to more melancholy things, my dang car's broke. =( My Mazda 626 DX, gotten for $2000 before I even had my driver's license and which served me flawlessly for a year and a half, started having problems around a year ago -- the alternator belt broke, then the alternator itself died, then the battery had some problems and I got replaced. Finally, even with a new alternator, alternator belt, and new battery, it's decided to die, putting out electrically. Doh! So I'm in the market for a new car.

Work is going alright, but it's amazing how just about everyone there gazes out the window with glazed eyes, mumbling about how they hope to go somewhere else as soon as the economy picks up a spate. I don't know how long I want to let myself be negatively influenced by a relatively despondent environment. I wish people there were just a lot more excited about their jobs, about what they were doing. It makes me sad to see dispassionate living.

My non-profit project is coming along, very slowly but steadily. We're nailing down our Terms of Service, we've got two servers in there, and we'll make it happen. We've even got an alliance with CalTEG going.