Over the past couple weeks, this server has been experiencing some major issues. As the guy who’s supposed to be running the thing, these major issues have been quite trying for me. **What follows is a rather uninteresting account of some nerd stuff**
That’s right–we finally have a home! After 8 months of bumming around Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, crashing with friends, and sleeping in my sleeping bag, I am the proud (if somewhat cynical and ironic) new resident of an old but well-kept apartment in Palo Alto. I’m living with 4 other guys from my community, as we were able to get two 2-bedroom places right next to each other, and indeed in the same building as our beloved married couple. ...
For our celebration of America’s independence this year, a few in our community went up to an apartment in San Francisco to hang out and experience the fireworks shows. While waiting for these shows, we had the opportunity to watch the critically-acclaimed independent film, Aliens vs Predator. It was truly amazing; I’ve never seen the mix-two-sci-fi-thriller-worlds-and-everybody-dies genre so full of promise! After the fireworks, we watched a slightly different film.
Welcome to my e4:online weblog! I am not sure what I will be writing here at the moment, but hopefully many things of great importance. I may also copy over some entries from my old Excelsis or jonathanlipps.com weblogs, just to have some data here. Well, stay tuned!
I’m sitting on a plane right now, from Dallas to San Jose. This is something I’ve done quite frequently in the past few months, between all the family events going on at home and flying back and forth for Teleios (the company I now work for–it’s the same one as before, we just got bored of our old name). I typically hate this particular leg, since it’s a decently long flight east-to-west (4 hrs), and since it consists primarily of businesspeople, who of course are all Platinum or Executive Platinum on American. ...
Tonight, after wandering around the streets of College Terrace in Palo Alto, looking for a 3-bedroom house for rent, it became dinner time. My wandering companions all had prior commitments, and none of the few others I called were available, so I ended up going to a small and reasonably-priced Chinese restaurant on El Camino, alone. I’d eaten there once before, also by myself on that occasion, and I remembered it as a place where I could relax, take my time over the meal, drink some soothing tea, and reflect without interruption. ...
I’m forcing myself to write, simply because I haven’t in so long. The ironic thing is, of course, that there’s no lack of things to write about. In fact, as an interesting historical note of particular relevancy, I even made a little sticky of some topics to blog about at one point, since I thought they were good topics. Now this is something I’ve never done, so I was pretty sure that I would get around to writing about these topics, seeing as I’d made a reminder to do that and all. No luck! ...
I went and saw Sin City last week with Nick and Justin, and the various stories of grotesque evil followed by equally-grotesque vigilante justice sparked a rather deep conversation about the concept of justice with respect to God (our particularly [orthodox] Christian view, that is), and how this relates to the justice actually (or propagandistically, as the case may be) being done in the world, including everything from incarceration to the death penalty to the invasion of Iraq to World War II. ...
In the last month I’ve spent some time every now and then working on a little Mac app project. The time has come to unveil it, along with its new website! Go there now: iRateTunes. Sorry, PC folks–this is a Mac OS X-only application. And moreover, I don’t imagine that it will be extremely useful for everybody. But, if you ever want to rate your entire library, it will save you precious seconds many times over, equalling a great increase in efficiency. I’ve found it to be so, anyway. ...
I ended up in Gainesville, FL this weekend to hang out with my brother Dav. We hadn’t recorded anything in a long time, so we decided to do a little project with a song I’ve been working on for an upcoming concept album. It doesn’t really have a title, but I figure it’ll probably be the second part of a story, so we’re calling it Chapter II. It’s kind of funny–I left my nice guitar in California, so we recorded using Dav’s cheap Yamaha, and we’re in a small apartment so we couldn’t record acoustic drums, hence the electronic ones, but it turned out to be one of our better recordings! I think we’re finally getting the hang of this process. No bass or anything yet; it’ll come when we record the song for real to go with an album. But for now enjoy it, and let us know what you think. ...