this year is just flying by. it’s already the end of february and summer will be here soon (wishful thinking). i seriously can’t take much more of this cold weather. it’s great in small doses, but after it having been freezing outside for almost two consecutive months i’m about to go crazy.

of course monday was president’s day. we didn’t have the day off at work but i took it off anyway (at the persuasion of joe). we ended up going to the field museum and had a freaking great time. so many fun moments. while we were in the pacific northeast section of the historic americas area there was this video of native americans doing their thing … all of a sudden we spotted this man sitting down on a bench, he looked very transient-esque. anyway, he was wearing something that resembled a track suit and underneath it something that looked like a scout leaders shirt, but it really looked like it was native american in style. anyway, we ran into him like five more times as we wandered around and it was all rather coincidental as though he had just walked off the screen. hmmmm, yeah … that was supposed to be funny. i guess you had to be there. THAT GUY FROM THE FILM!

and the most exciting part … i finally figured out all the exporting and conversions that needed to happen to get this to work finally. i have transferred content from my tivo, converted it to .mpg and then to .mov and then to a flash video file, and i finally got it uploaded, posted and steaming correctly. the goal is to make this video posting a regular thing, depending on how much of my alloted bandwidth i use up. although, i have a significant amount of bandwidth so i should be okay. it’s a medium-sized file (1.5MB) but it’s so worth it (i’ll work on optimizing compression quality & file size soon) …

i have made the ultimate purchase! a 46″ HDTV. i’m beyond excited about it. i didn’t have plans to get one for a few months but i came across an amazing deal and i just couldn’t resist. this could quite possibly be the best purchase i’ve ever made (right after the HD TiVo). as if i wasn’t addicted to tv now. i can’t freaking wait to watch nat geo & discovery channels in HD.

saturday was a lazy day. and then today was filled with trying to walk around in the slush/ice that has covered all of the sidewalks. i went to the grocery store earlier this evening and i stepped in what i thought was just snow but actually turned out to be a pool of ice water covered by snow. this weather needs to disappear as soon as possible. i’m so very ready to bust out the shorts.

i thought i had more to write about but i’ve clearly since forgotten everything temporarily. later perhaps.

yeah, i can’t even remember the time i had insomnia like this. i’m saving my last ambien pill for tuesday evening so that i can make sure i get enough sleep prior to returning to work on wednesday. i think i probably had too much caffeine this evening which didn’t help matters any. i’m trying to be as productive as possible since i’m up anyway. i was able to add a couple of new features to the site, relatively small but somewhat useful.at this point in the holiday break i’m actually looking forward to getting back to work. one week of sitting around and doing nothing isn’t all that great. i’m starting to get a bit restless.my boredom says hello: 

so i’m trying to figure out what the weather is and my two different operating systems are providing different temperatures. thanks to the wonderful parallels virtualization software i can run both windows vista & mac os x at the same time and as per the first picture below the apple widget claims it’s 25F here in chicago and 45F in austin. however, at the same time the microsoft widget claims it’s 29F here in chicago and 35F in austin. they just can’t agree. wow, i must be pretty bored if i have resorted to writing about that.

okay. the sun is coming out now. i guess i should try to get to sleep again. i think i’ll call this my mid-morning nap.