I just cancelled two credit cards, with another one or two being cancelled tonight. It's awesome.
(No, that doesn't mean we're debt-free. Just consolidating, and closing unused accounts to make credit record look better.)
I should've looked into a card with a good rewards program long ago, because we've been missing out on a lot.
Sigh, live, and learn.
Photos taken May 20, 2007 by both me and Asma. Surprises await you inside.
Can't wait to see his reaction(s) whenever he gets back to his desk.
In today's Express:
Attack on Baghdad Market Kills 25
Car bomb strike may signal a new wave of sectarian violence
So if this attack might be a sign of things to come, how would one count the bombings for the last few months? As outliers?
It's been three months since we joined the gym, which is a good milestone to look back and reassess. My two goals were to go to the gym regularly and not feel unhealthy, which have been achieved (though I still need to work consistency with working out). Since I've been tracking my workouts from March 17:
Not too shabby for the last two months. I'm not sure if my weight's gone down or up (last I checked, it was up), but I guess I've slimmed down a little, and have more muscle development than before, plus I'm slowly getting stronger and gaining more endurance with cardio. So that's all good.
My diet hasn't shifted, but I'll work on that in a few months. For the next three months, I just need to lock down my workout routine and get to the gym no less than twice on any given week (hopefully three times) and add some compound routines maybe once a week. I should also look into a pilates or yoga class for stretching and core [ab] strength.
Although it'd be nice to focus mostly on shedding some body fat, I think I'll work towards losing body fat and getting stronger and more muscular. The combination wouldn't be as effective as focusing mainly on one or the other, but I guess I'm more interested in overall development.
Then again, it would be nice to fit comfortably into clothes. I've got a few nice shirts lying around because they're a bit…snug. Wouldn't it be cool to have like 15 shirts to choose from instead of 5?
Yay for iMovie.
This morning I kept hoping and thinking that there would be some treats waiting for me when I go for coffee. I get down there and there's a huge basket of assorted muffins. A cornucopia. It was wonderful.
What wishful thinking won't fix: Mishti's pink eye.
We noticed significant irritation around her left eye yesterday morning, so we made an appointment with a vet for yesterday afternoon (not our normal vet, someone in a terrible location because it hits rush hour traffic both ways). The left side of her face now looks deformed because her fluff has been matted down with eye drops, human oils, and possibly some discharge.
We've been given a topical antibiotic to put on twice a day. I hope she gets better soon, because she definitely isn't enjoying the squinting or the messed up fur or, most importantly, the irritation she's probably feeling from it. If this doesn't work, we'll have to go to full antibiotics, or maybe do a culture test on whatever is in her eye.
If Mishti doesn't continue to grow, she will forever be a smaller chinchilla.
Mommy and baby were both napping on the way back home. It was cute.
Remember when I quipped that it'd be nice if my mom could stay for a few hours for dinner?
It so happened that she missed her flight. By five minutes. Dulles was extremely busy, and passengers had to use a shuttle to get to the gates, something I wasn't aware of until that day. If my mom's shuttle had left when she got on, she might've made it. Or we could've left early.
So guess what? We all ate dinner together. My in-laws were super helpful and let my mom stay at their place since our apartment was in no condition for any sort of parental visit or stay (nor was there any real space). Maman even took the next day off and they all hung out and went to the National Cathedral. This is the first time ever that my mom and Asma's mom got to spend any real time together outside of the wedding.
All in all, a good mishap.
My mom has one too many stories about me as a baby, I think.
After driving with a license that expired on September 21, 2006, I finally got my stuff together to get a Maryland license after Asma's exam yesterday. It's probably over one and a half years overdue, but I've been really stubborn about giving up my Illinois license. I've had it for 11 years.
But the future is right now, and even if we don't settle down in Maryland, it's the final cut to Illinois residency. I'll still consider myself a native, even if I only moved there at 14.
I also registered to vote here while getting my license. Not sure what that means now, except that I can be one of several million that casts a popular vote that really has no meaning since an elite body of individuals makes the decision on president. Yay.
It's so gorgeous outside. Sunny and high of 70°. I like how most days following rain are cooler than usual.
Oh, and I get to see my mommy today! Even if it's only for one hour. I haven't seen her in nearly a year. I wish her connecting flight to Huntsville had a gap of a few hours, so that she could join us in the mother's day meal we're making for maman.
Asma, Mona, and I went to see Ben Gibbard (with Johnathan Rice [who?] and David Bazan opening) for an acoustic show. And during the openers, there was a constant sea of chatter. Like a school cafeteria.
It was so fucking annoying.
We paid $30 a ticket like most everyone else. And not everyone came to see Ben (I wanted to see David). But that aside, the least anyone could do was be polite. If you want a good spot, fine. But remember that there are people on stage that actually want to play for the audience. So shut up!
Of course, everyone did for Ben. I guess I never noticed until now how people acted during openers. Not sure if I want to go to another show again.
Is concert an old-fashioned term now?
Right now I'm sitting outside McKeldin Library as Asma takes a final. Since I'm not a student, I can't get into the library this early. I don't think Grainger or any other big UIUC libraries have this lame policy.
But there's a wonderful breeze, the clouds are obscuring the sun just enough, and birds are chirping (there must be at least 10 different types within earshot). I'm content, even if I need to pee.
It was still going just a few weeks/months ago. Someone either got lazy and didn't renew the domain, or they decided to call it quits for good. Or I misread the date of the last post and it was actually dying slowly.
Can't say I'll miss it, but still… it's weird that things do die on the internet (only to be possessed by spam). The internet is supposed to be forever!
How do I make this boring story quick?…
Well, in Windows, I was able to access our digital camera as a drive, so whenever I copied the files, they kept their creation date. When I tried downloading the images through iPhoto, though, that information was lost.
Or so I thought.
I asked Yonas (officemate, co-worker, etc.) this morning if he's able to keep the date created info through iPhoto, and he said yes, but it wasn't in the way I thought.
For several years now, digital cameras have been using Exif to store metadata with image files (it's not limited to cameras, obviously). I've seen the acronym before, but he opened my eyes to what exactly it was.
That makes my life so much easier when it comes to organizing pictures by date. I wrote a PHP script that crawls through image files and creates a directory structure of Year/Month/Day, adding the time the picture was taken to the beginning of the filename.
So I reorganized every camera pic within a few minutes. And given that I had probably 800 pictures sitting in vaguely named directories waiting to be put into a directories formatted as ‘Year-Month-Day’, it's a huge time saver. I don't have an excuse to not organize pictures [by date] anymore.
At some point, I'll have a nifty photo app to do other sorts of organizing…tags, albums, and all that. For personal use. And to be totally redundant, I'll have it interface with flickr.
I've gotten so bad at writing anything amusing/entertaining.
From today's Express:
Extremists Attack U.N.-Run School in Gaza
Muslim extremists attacked a children's festival at a U.N.-run elementary school Sunday, killing a politican's bodyguard and wounding seven people in the latest incident of lawlessness in the Gaza Strip.
The gun and homemade bomb attack on the U.N. school in the southern Gaza refugee camp of Rafah began with a protest by Muslim extremists in long robes, who said a sports festival the school was hosting was un-Islamic. Protesters also accused the top U.N. official in Gaza, John Ging, who was in the school, of leading a movement to weaken people's Islamic faith.
Zionism: -100, Muslim Extremists: -1000.
I used to check my site stats a ridiculous amount of times back in the day, but since somewhere around 2004, I've more or less stopped completely—not sure if it's because the number of hits I got from search engine crawlers outnumbered anything else, or that I wasn't interested anymore in unique visitors.
So I'm a bit bored this morning (listening to the Final Fantasy [VI] soundtrack) and decide to see if anyone is linking to me (haven't done this in a couple of months). In the last four weeks, I find one interesting link to me, from Disarranging Mine.
It took me a few seconds to realize that I know this person: when I used to read other peoples' journals more often, Marie was in my bookmarks. It was almost like stumbling onto an artifact from the past, even though this was less than five years ago. Equally as cool is that I've been given the honor of one of the first bloggers in Springfield (at least in her journal).
Kind of an odd thing for a city of 100,00 people? I used to hand-code every page of every entry and manually update the archives, and now there's an endless supply of blogs that get started with a few clicks. I was probably the only kid in my high school that used or even knew what a BBS was—there were relatively few of us in the entire city, a huge contrast to the more ‘online’-savvy community in Gainesville, FL that I moved from [and missed].
Now Springfield has a site for its bloggers. Which is cute, because Springfield doesn't have all too much going on. The same boat I was in, but there's a community for that. Now that Starbucks has finally come to town in the last five years, maybe it's a sign of bigger and better things happening?
It's just odd how things have changed so much in fifteen years, to go from being an early adopter of the online concept to one of the last to hear the the latest innovation. And how the perception of time has shifted during the internet's growth. I wonder if all this information and innovation glut will lead to a truly better world at some point, or just be the new distraction?
The approximate number of junk emails I've received since February 7, 2007.
