Full weekend. Fish and chips at the Duke of Perth is so good, along with the beer. Yum, Belhaven. Life Aquatic is a very funny, very good movie. I loved it. Then a quick game of TtR before heading home, thanks for the ride, KK. Ended up late for my eye appointment on Saturday, there was some random 4 to 2 lane merging on 290 that slowed me down. No need for new prescriptions, which is good. Bad because I didn't get new glasses, but maybe next year. Then back to Woodstock, stopping at the Huntley Prime Outlets. Managed to get a $9 pair of cords. Off the clearance rack. I kinda get this buying stuff on sale deal. Ended up at Dr. Monje's for a memorial service/party for the evening, and then 9 hours of sleep. I haven't slept that much in a good long while. Very nice. Then back into the city, and got to see Tracy last night. Didn't realize that it snowed last night until looking out the window this morning.

Tracy made dinner and we watched Anchorman last night. Damn that's a lot of deleted scenes. We did not check out the additional, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy! which is probably made up of some of the deleted scenes. Duke of Perth and a viewing of Life Aquatic tonight. Still got that spring league draft app to work on. Found another scale to weigh myself, and with all the exercise, I'm not losing weight, I'm actually gaining weight. Which is not what I am aiming to do. Crazy.

Happy Anniversary to my parents, and a Happy Birthday to my brother. And moving on. Laundry was done, and, oh, maybe 3 shirts were ironed. Only 33 more to go. I have trouble watching Unwrapped on the Food Channel because only recently have I learned that the host, Marc Summers, previously hosted Double Dare. I keep expecting green slime to come down from somewhere. Watched a bit of Starsky & Hutch. Gonna try and see Tracy, but she's feeling a bit under the weather. Hanging with the boys tomorrow night. Probably headed out to Woodstock after the eye appt. on Saturday.

Finally went swimming again this morning. Good times. Actually much nicer now that the sun rises at a decent hour, which means the pool is actually lit by natural light. Made some Rice Crispie Treats last night. Easy schmeasy. Probably end up making another batch tonight, with laundry. Took a peek at the 2005 Subaru Legacy while waiting for my car last night. They look pretty sweet. Wagon too. I think an Impreza is a little too small for me though. I also got caught watching WB's dramas last night: Gilmore Girls with its post breakup fallout and One Tree Hill because it's a soap opera. I couldn't help myself. Still no reason to get a new iPod, even with new mini's and a cheaper iPod Photo released today.

Guess what Art+Science is having a mere week after I get my hair cut? Right, a model call. Wouldn't even know if I'd qualify, but still. That just sucks. Definitely under the weather, but not full on sick yet. But it's creeping up on me. Odd to have a slow burn flu going on, at least that's my guess. But still no exercise, but plenty of sleep. Also really need to do laundry. Again. Some addendums from the weekend: good to see Ryan, Lisa, Carlo, Sally, KK and AJ on Friday, Joe and Bryan on Saturday, Sarah and Russell on Sunday. A long way from me holed up in the fortress of solitude. Watched Harold & Kumar again, and I've got the craving for White Castle. Also watched Desperate Housewives for the first time. Quality soap opera. I keep waiting for the gay guy from Melrose Place to come out to his wife from Sports Night.

Good time hanging with Marla in Bucktown. Usagi Ya is alright for sushi, nothing special or anything though. Dancing with Tracy and gang was fun at the Artful Dodger Friday night as well. A nice lazy Saturday, no work on the Draft App, dinner courtesy Bryan. Finally got to see Best in Show. Sunday brunch at Silver Cloud, dinner at Penny's. Lots of good rainy day couching with Tracy. Might be coming down with something, scratchy throat and all. Gotta work out tonight, that's for sure. Almost been an entire week since the last time. Oil change for the car tomorrow, eye checkup on Saturday. The little things are starting to pile up again.

Birthdays are sort of like little personal New Year celebrations. I like that idea. Haircut's good. I'll post pictures soon. But Mel, my stylist, doesn't use scissors, just one of those blade type things. First time for me with that. Dinner at Silver Cloud with Bryan, Tony, and the Russells. Ice cream from Cold Stone. I finally walked by the new Cold Stone that opened up in Evanston yesterday as well. And then ended up playing Ticket to Ride (slightly timed speed version) and losing pretty handily. Speed TtR is much better for my MTV attention span. Dinner at Usagi Ya, I think. No working out yesterday or today. Finally cleaned up the kitchen this morning, ended up sleeping instead last night. Planning on working on the Spring League Draft App this weekend, maybe converting to a client-server architecture, or maybe even rewriting it in Cocoa. We'll see. But in Bucktown for the weekend.

Dinner went well last night, even if I was a little out of practice. Ended up watching a bit of 40 Days and 40 Nights (my Lenten movie). Still not sure what's gonna happen with my hair. Possible Karaoke at Piece tonight, but I've got a mess to clean up at home. Otherwise, no other new plans. Wow, this is a short one.

Haircut's set for tomorrow night, post work. Kind of exciting. I'm leaving my head of hair entirely in the hands of Mel, my stylist. Should be interesting. Hopefully. Tentative plans for some dancing Friday night. I've also tentatively agreed to work on the Ultimate Chicago Spring League Draft App, which would be my 3rd year working on it. But we'll see if that pans out or not. Running was extra hard this morning, not sure why. Maybe it's the lack of sleep. I've also just discovered .kar files. They are midi files with lyrics embedded. Which means, I have my very own piano bar karaoke machine. Awesome.

Bah, valentine's day yesterday. No exercise this morning. My dishwasher does work, it just needed to get wet. New Veronica Mars. Making dinner for Tracy tomorrow. Getting a real hair cut, or I guess, a style session at Art+Science. I've been wanting to go there since college. And since they seem to have stopped with the hair model thing, I guess having it be a birthday present to myself isn't a bad thing. Sushi on Friday, as usual for Lent, and Marla sitting on the weekend. Still got some cleaning and ironing to do.

Busy weekend. Friday night Blue Fin with Akira and Russell. Very good, along with the sake. Then the Double Door with Russell. Of the 4 bands that went on, the last two were decent, Trim (with quality female lead singer) and June's Arrival. I'd catch either of them at a show again. Saturday finally went through my mail, dinner with the parents at Joy's, and drinks at AJ's b-day party. Lazy Sunday until people came over for my mom's cooking and Ticket to Ride. I also figured out how to get midi working well with the piano. I've got to use QMidi for the playlists, and use MidiPipe to coalesce all the channels to 1 (so the piano can play them all). Makes for some rather interesting sounds though. But it's fun. And very cool. Quite easy to do something like karaoke at home. But add another software project to my list: creating an iTunes like midi player.

Try and sneak in some more sushi tonight pre Double Door. Blue Fin anyone? Again, up way too late for no particular reason. Figured out that MPlay can create bookmarks to jump to particular scenes in ripped DVDs. Also managed to rip only the english language version of Serendipity, I just have to manually put in the chapter stops is all. Need to get Puck's oil changed. I should also add a photo of my hair to my hairstyles gallery. I'm probably not gonna keep up with the late night updates, and move back towards morning. The time shifting screws too much with my head. Taking the day off tomorrow from going to the gym, headed to the Golden Olympic instead. Yum, breakfast.

Sushi is soooooo good. Sai is sooooo good. I've been away from sushi for too long. Away from good sushi for too long. You know what else is good? Sapporo. Don't think there's anything I can do about the multiangle credits for Serendipity, but we'll see. I'm thinking of chopping the hair again. Besides the hair all over the bathroom, had at least 2 people think it might be better shorter. Again, we'll see. Doing some volunteer work with the company tomorrow night. Friday night going to see Luke's band, June's Arrival at the Double Door. Might go out for some drinks and dancing afterwards. And again, we'll see. Parent's coming out this weekend. Oh, and it's now Lent. Instead of giving something up, I'm thinking I should turn it into something like a resolution, like New Year's, something to better myself. Like playing piano again. And again, for the last time, we'll see.

No idea why. Did laundry though. That video floating around of the new easy way to fold t-shirts? Works like a charm. I'm really impressed. Mardi Gras was yesterday, Lent starts today, or, tomorrow. This late night posting is really screwing with my scheduling language. I'll probably hit mass at Mt. Carmel before catching up with Remy and finally getting some sushi at Sai. Yummm, sushi. Getting colder again. And if anyone doesn't have a gmail account, let me know, I've got 50 or so invites. I'm guessing Google's moving on to stress testing their beta service. Oh, and the Google Maps service? Sweet. Vectors rock. Oh, should probably catch a viewing of my Lenten related movie, 40 Days and 40 Nights. And I'm having issues with my rip of Serendipity, because of the multiple angles (they were nice enough to include the credits in both english and french).

Katie Kelly came over tonight to finally watch Eternal Sunshine. And you know what? That's a great movie. A wonderful movie. Amazing movie. Wow. That and Garden State in about 2 weeks. Impressive. So good. As for working out, I think I'll stop the 2-a-days, and just alternate swimming with running. And start doing some pull/chin ups instead of just inverted push ups. So that means no more evening gym runs. It's the little things that make me happy. I'll try and do laundry Tuesday night. Had some random computer networking issues (DNS problems). It'll be nice to get a newer cable modem hopefully when the digital cable comes in, hopefully.

Couple computer things I managed to pull off this weekend too. Got MySQL and PHP installed on the desktop. I used to remember when there were unsupported binary installs of both, and it was a little sketchy getting them working on OS X, but these days? Easy schmeasy. I did it to get a working development environment at home for this site. I'm thinking of adding comments and maybe direct linking to posts as well as upgrading the gallery. Besides that, I also used Gimp for the first time. Also, easy schmeasy. I used it to create 82x82 icons of DVD's for the Roku interface. Free stuff is pretty cool.

Huh, late night Sunday post. Odd timing. Friday night played Ticket to Ride with Bryan, Carlo, and Russell. Came in dead last, not making 2 of my destinations. Not so good. Saturday, got some odds and ends cleaned up, the Roku front end for ripped DVD's is working well, cleaned up some HD TV stuff. And then went out on a second date with Tracy to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. I really liked their red sangria. Another good time. Long table wait though. Worth it. Found another fan of the bacon wrapped dates. Also made some cookies for the pot-luck Superbowl mini get-together. Game was alright, definitely felt that the Eagles lost rather than the Patriots won. Need to do some laundry this week. Try and talk my brother through a little tech support. And Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday this week. And I'll try and get to the gym more that 3 times this week.

It's February. Full force. No exercising yesterday. More sitting around. MIDI is a rather interesting beast, I need to do some research to figure out how to get it working right with the piano. But a couple I downloaded did work great, like a version of the Piano Man. Maybe, if I'm especially courageous, I'll write my own playlist front end for MIDI playback, just for me. I'll just add that to my list of personal software that I'm supposed to write. I did succeed in getting the proper Samba shares off the desktop and to the Roku, and setting up a script to call MPlay to watch the entire extended edition of the Lord of the Rings. Super easy. And now I really need more disk space, because the Roku is now my preferred way to watch movies. No load times. Headed out to Bucktown tonight to hang with the boys. Catch up on some TV tomorrow. Headed out to Bucktown for the Superbowl. Pretty much sums up my weekend. Oh, and Lent starts next week. Sweet. Forced sushi on Fridays. Awesome.

Went on a date last night. First first date in years. Tracy and I went to Angelina Ristorante for dinner, then came back to my place for some more conversation. She ended up staying for my annual viewing of Groundhog Day and a Jasmine. I thought it went pretty well. Wait and see. Besides that, got a USB-MIDI adapter so I can now make the piano (Yamaha Disklavier MX-80) play any MIDI files I download. It rocks. Just have to find the MIDI files and a decent MIDI Player to external devices with playlist support. Probably means I should get the piano tuned. Been almost 2 years since the last tuning. Not so good.

And you know what that means, a viewing of Groundhog Day sometime soon, maybe even tonight. I love that movie. No running last night, too tired. Had to do some cleaning too. Quinn's Uncles is awesome. Great stuff. Catchy too. Although good music almost has to be catchy to be good, doesn't it? Dells pictures are up in the gallery, finally. You know what other music is also good? Martin Sexton. Random folksy singer found in my iTunes collection. Old Lost tonight, one I missed in HD, and no Alias because of the State of the Union, and that's not the movie. Drove to work this morning, and when I do, I've started taking Wilson or Lawrence over and coming up Broadway rather than LSD to Sheridan. Not sure if it actually saves me any time.

Did go running. Didn't watch Endless Sunshine. Didn't have my Horoscope correctly plot my evening. Did get Quinn's Uncles cd. Didn't get Wonderfalls Complete Series DVD set. Okay, enough of that. Got some more pictures from the Dells from Sally, so I'll finally be putting up the gallery tonight. Got a shower drain that isn't draining. Ripped the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to disk for possible Roku enabled marathon. Thinking of replacing the disks in the home firewall/server box, since the hard drive whine is pretty annoying.