General Life Update
The house that my roommates put in an offer for that I mentioned in my christmas post was accepted and they’ve gone all the way through the entire process to where they’re waiting for the closing date. The deadline in the contract is March 16th, so there will be a house by that date assuming all goes well. Just need to wait for the relevant people to get together to actually close. I’ve been spending time packing and such the past couple of weeks so that’s been fun. We’re moving out of this hell-hole of an apartment at the end of the month.

As it turns out, so is everybody else. Our downstairs neighbor moved out over the weekend and the people across the hall are looking to move too. Must be because of our neighbors from hell. Ugh. Anyway, it’ll soon be over with.

School Stuff
We’re in the middle of another school semester and as I think I may have mentioned here, I’m taking General Drawing this time out. It’s going about as well as expected considering I don’t really have any drawing skills to speak of. Half the class is perspective drawing and the other half is still life. The perspective stuff is a lot of fun for me since it’s all creating a composition, measuring and then drawing it out. I can do that sort of thing. Still life is…touch and go. Some weeks are better than others.

In other news, two of my photographs from last semester ended up being shown in the MVCC Faculty Select student art show.

I was hopeful that I could get something in but the deadline had unknowingly passed and the show was coming up. I spoke with my instructor and she managed to sneak these two into the show. If you’re local and want to swing by, it’s in the Information Technology and Theather building on the Utica Campus on the second floor. Tuesday-Friday 1pm to 6pm until April 7th. My roommate has a lot of stuff in there this year as well.

New Toy
And last, but not least, I have a new technological toy to play with! If you’ve seen my facebook status updates at all, you’ll probably know this already, but I’ve purchased a brand new Apple Macbook Pro.

My old laptop was the original Macbook Pro from 2006, bought a week or so after they first came out. It was still performing all right, especially in non game tasks but it was starting to fall apart and the wireless was REALLY spotty (aka, works fine one minute, next needs to be within 3 feet of the router in order to pick up a signal). It was time to put it out to pasture, as good of a laptop as it had been for me over the years. With Apple being rumored to update their laptop lineup relatively soon, I hunkered down and waited.

Finally the day came and I pounced on the store as soon as it came up and came away with an order for a new laptop. The spec bumps in the 15″ MacBook Pros were…incredibly impressive. I came away with a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.2ghz quad core sandy bridge i7, 4GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon 6750m with 1GB of memory, the 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive option and the high res (1680×1050) anti-glare display.

It was delivered on Wendsday and all I have to say is, OMG this thing is FAST. I haven’t been able to find anything I do that really taxes it yet and when I boot into windows for games…wow. I’m playing Half Life 2 with everything enabled at over 100+ FPS at 1680×1050. City of Heroes with ultra mode enabled for almost everything works silky smooth. I’m REALLY impressed by the graphics card they put into these as historically apple tends to skimp on graphics.

I’m VERY happy with my purchase. This thing should last me another 5 years. Sure they’re expensive laptops, but if I’m only getting a new one every 4-5 years, it works out pretty well.

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And that made me think that there’s just about 3 years of my life archived on this website and there’s no way for me to get at it if the worst happens and Vox goes down. And I’d hate to lose a lot of these postings. So I’ve decided I’m going to start transitioning over to hosting my blog on my own website.

Back when I first started with Vox I tried wordpress hosted on my own site and didn’t like it quite as much. It wasn’t as smooth, didn’t have as good support for multimedia stuff and I had to really deck it out with plugins in order to get it working how I wanted it to. But I tried it a couple days ago again and it’s definitely come quite a long way.

Right now I’m posting in both places at the same time while I go post by post and transfer 3 years worth of posts over to my own wordpress. It’s currently located at http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/, but that’s not the final design at all and there’s a bunch of fine tuning I need to do to make it work right. I’m still going to post both places for the time being…going to take me a while to transfer everything over. I’m 1/10th of the way done now.

Even if I don’t make the transition entirely, I’ll at least have a backup of what has become my online journal. I definitely don’t want to lose some of these notes and experiences.

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Just a lot of odds and ends to report today.

First off, my car. I can't recall if I mentioned this or not but the airbag light turned on again on my Rogue, so I took it in for service last week. They had to order a couple parts which came in yesterday. So tomorrow morning I'm going to go sit at the dealership again so they can finish the repair. I do really like my car a lot, but I'm not sure I'd buy another new car the first year the model was out. There's a lot of little hitches and bumps along the way. Thankfully it's all related to stuff that's not essential for making the car move so far, but it is a little annoying to have to take it in for service so often. Really happy with it otherwise.

Second, my room at the new place is in desperate need of a nightstand which has been finished and I'll be picking that up this evening. Hopefully it'll help me tame the random bits that are sort of floating around in my room looking for a place to rest.

Third, it seems I have a 32 dollar credit on my account at time warner because, apparently, I wasn't supposed to pay my entire bill last month since I canceled my account. So now I need to figure out how the heck I can get that money back. Moving is such a hassle…

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It seems like we're pretty much all settled into the new apartment. We've got some wall decorations going up now around the various areas. I need to do some more organizing in my room and in the spare bedroom/office but we've got a fully functional apartment now. I'll try to take some pictures once the wall decorations are more finalized.

It's weird. It feels like we've been living here for longer than a week. But this past week seems to have gone by very quickly as well. So…time is just all screwed up in all sorts of ways.

Last night we had a little party deal to celebrate being settled in. We broke out the Rock Band and played through Perl Jam's Ten album which was purchased for the evening. And a late night abandoned game Trivial Pursuit (we started it a bit too late and then ran out of energy about an hour in) rounded out the activities. A fun and much needed evening of relaxation.

This weekend I want to finalize my room and get some of my various art stuff hung around the apartment. I also want to get some work done on my C++ chatbot that I'm making. I finally got the basics working and now I hope to actually get it to do something resembling actual chatting soon. Hopefully this weekend. But first, the cleaning.

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Last night was a very important part of the process of moving into a new apartment. We have…the internet. The cable guy was there by the time I got back to the apartment after work and after some little hiccups regarding the stupid way the old cable company in the area did the wiring for the apartment, we ended up having cable.

He was a good cable guy too. Sometimes the installers can be very hit and miss, but this guy knew what he was doing and he did all the wiring and stuff too, including my room which was difficult because of the location of the cable outlet. He even stapled the wire along the wall over the closet.

Yes, that's right…for the first time I have cable on my personal TV. Yes, it's just standard cable and it's a little fuzzy since it's not digital. But it is cable. I watched Futurama last night! I'm very much enjoying this new apartment for it's little conveniences. Cable, the ability to control the air temperature, dishwasher, garbage disposal.

So far so good. We're actually way ahead of where I thought we would be in the organizing department. Pretty much the entire downstairs is set except for the wall art and things of that nature. I might end up doing something with the chest my 6 gallon fish tank is on as far as securing it to the wall. it's a bit tippy because the floor is slightly uneven so I'm feeling a bit apprehensive about it tipping over if somebody runs by or vibrates the floor in just the right way. I've been researching some things that might work for it though, so we'll see.

Upstairs is a different story. My bedroom is almost organized, as much as I can without having access to my night stand. The spare room is a bit of a mess, but we'll get it settled eventually. That's the next project in line. It was looking organized but then I moved my 20 gallon fish tank into there and there ended up being a lot of associated crap that I haven't quite found a spot for yet.

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It's about time I posted an update on the move. For the past 4 days I've been carrying heavy things, loading and unloading boxes and moving fish tanks. It has been an exhausting experience that I'm quite ready to have end.

As of right now, all my stuff is all moved in and mostly somewhat organized. Wassy and Jay have all their stuff moved in but much less organized than my stuff, mostly because I moved everything in all at once and they were moving stuff all weekend due to schedules and stuff. The kitchen and bathrooms are all organized, the living room is about 80% there, but the dining area (or Jay's office area as we have decided it to be) is still a mess with boxes everywhere.

Tonight is the first night where we might be eating something that isn't take out as we finally have a usable kitchen. And today is the first day where my arms and legs haven't been sore from moving all of the heavy furniture stuff Friday.

Still a couple of things that need to be taken care of. We need to get the Time Warner guy in tomorrow evening to set up our cable/internet service and we need to get a maintenance guy up to look at a bunch of little problems we've found with the apartment as we moved in. Mostly the doorbell is semi-busted and one of the outlets in the kitchen won't let us plug anything into it.

So far so good though. I'm quite tired of thinking about move stuff now and I'm hoping things can arrive at some sort of normalcy very soon.

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Whew….ok, it's been quite a long time since I posted. 

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Busy busy busy! Or at least I was. Not so much anymore.

The last couple days have been spent working on move preparation. I'm trying to get the stuff I don't use quite so often out of my apartment to make it easier to keep clean. So I've managed to box up and relocate most of my books and some spare computer bits that have been hanging around the apartment for a while.

Also got my exercise bike out of my bedroom and things are starting to look a lot emptier and echo-y. It's really starting to sink in that this is going to happen.

Initially I was a bit nervous but now I've come out of that. I really hate change, you see, and this is a pretty big change no matter how you slice it, so for a few days it sorta felt like I was free falling and there was a little bit of panic while everything got put back together in it's proper place. Now I'm looking forward to it.

We just got word that we can move in starting Wednesday next week, so we're probably going to be moving all the big stuff friday and spending the weekend getting everything situated as best as possible. Bah to moving, but I think it'll work out nicely once all the moving is done.

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I may be posting very scarcely over the next few weeks. Well, more scarcely than I have been posting anyway.

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As I thought yesterday, every muscle in my body is not very happy with me today. Getting out of bed this morning was really, really hard. My normally uncomfortable office chair was especially unbearable today. Oh well. I had planned on cleaning up around here a bit this evening, but I decided that probably wouldn't be such a good idea right away. Maybe tomorrow.

Instead I just sat around and relaxed. Watched my fish a bit. I think I've finally figured out the correct quantity of food to feed so that I'm not under feeding or over feeding them. My water has stopped being a little cloudy between water changes and the fish are swimming around happily, so that's a good thing. I was thinking about getting a slightly larger centerpiece fish to replace the two zebra danio's that I lost, but I'm not sure what I want to get. Something that hangs out near the top would be nice because it seems most of my fish prefer the bottom half of my tank. I made a slight planning error when it comes to fish types it seems.

And now, from the sad news department…one of the members of the mikeportnoy.com forums passed away today. KeithK, who fell victim to a sudden illness, was a well respected guy, never afraid to speak his mind or tell it like it was. Probably the most genuine person I've ever had contact with on the internet. I didn't know him personally beyond what I read of his posts, but he touched a lot of people and the forums are never, ever going to be the same again. He was a friend to many and was always willing to lend a hand or an ear when somebody needed to talk. Sigh.

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