My family is pretty serious about the Christmas holidays, and this includes finding the perfect tree each year. Yesterday, my mom, dad, and I ventured out to the Quick Farm in Great Meadows (real close to ’s parents). As it is a bit early to actually take a cut tree home (it would dry out before the holidays, this farm allows you to tag your tree now (reserving the perfect tree while the pickin’s good) and have it cut down closer to Christmas. I made sure to take some pictures of the event.
I cranked up Xcode today and fixed a little aspect of iJournal that drove me crazy. Actually, fixed is a strong use of words, I hacked it to work the way I wanted… :)
I like tagging my entries myself. I wrap my paragraphs in <p></p> tags, thinking that if some day I bother to update my website and LJ styles to be standards compliant, at least a good number of my entries will be more compliant than if I let LJ insert <br /> tags for me. Anyway, in iJournal, if I selected “preformatted”, and also selected “reset after posting” (to reset my music, mood, and security settings). As part of its “reset after posting” protocol, iJournal would blow away the “preformatted” option, which usually meant that my next post would go up with tons of extra spacing until I realized and fixed it. So I chose NOT to use the “reset after posting” option, which had the side-effect of having the same mood/music settings for many posts until I noticed it. Either way you slice it this is a pretty annoying thing.
It took me months of this annoying me before I decided to undertake the herculean effort of changing that zero to a one in the “reset after posting” method. This whole time, I would start to fix it, then convince myself that I needed to find a more elegant way of solving the problem, which would sidetrack me for the rest of that evening, ending with me ultimately losing interest in the problem and resorting to lazyness. I convinced myself today that I wasn’t THAT interested in the problem, and just flipped the bit (actually, the code for resetting that stuff was implemented in two different places, so I changed it in both places. Dunno why this isn’t broken out into a seperate method).
After getting past that particularly shitty level mentioned a few posts ago, I rallied through the rest of Super Mario Sunshine. I finished all the levels, and beat the game tonight. Purists would say that I haven’t truly beaten the game, because I haven’t hunted down every single “shine” in the game. While I understand their point, it is my opinion that since I have completed every level in the game I am “done” with it.
I finally beat the mission I had been stuck on in Super Mario Sunshine. I hadn’t tried to beat it in awhile, but when I was first playing the game a year or so ago I was stuck on this mission for a week or so before I gave up (Ricco Harbor, Mission 8). It was this annoying Yoshi mission where you had to turn fish into moving platforms… Boy did it suck.
As much as I want to buy a new car, my budget (or lack thereof) pretty much eliminates this as an option. Fortunately, I have friends, and yesterday and today I was able to live vicariously through . He finally pulled the plug on his junker and decided to get a new car. He called me on Tuesday for a ride down to Denville where there are a string of dealerships. After haggling and failing with a few dealers we finally ended up at Hyundai. My family has bought two cars from this dealership in the past few years, so I knew that they weren’t particularly shady or anything. Plus my family and everyone I know has been satisfied with their Hyundai, so he gave them a swing.
After some negotiations they eventually came forward with a price that met Chuck’s needs on a 2004 Accent. It’s about as bear bones of a car as you can get (it’s only option is Air Conditioning) but it is the perfect car for his driving habits. Plus it’s cheap, efficient, and has enough pep to get around.
This morning we went back to the dealership to pick it up, and we caught breakfast (on him) on the way back at Victoria’s Diner (which is soon to be renamed to “Roxbury Diner”… A crappy change IMNSHO). The rest of the day I cleaned up my room, talked on the phone, and hid in my room to shield my family from my grumpy-ness as much as possible. I think I did a decent job, and now i’m feeling better, so hopefully after a good night’s sleep I won’t be mr. cranky anymore.
Thanks to for pointing this out to me: Fox Sports Net is going to be showing a 6 hour poker tournament on Thanksgiving. What’s interesting is that they are televising the tournament the day after it takes place. I didn’t think I got the channel, but it turns out that you need a cable box in order to get it. I will have to hijack the family cable box or something that night so I can make DVDs of the tournament!
Some of you might remember that I lost a friend to a violent robbery about a year ago. I just heard on the news that they arrested three suspects in connection with the homicides, so hopefully the fuckers that did this will get put away…
Because some of you readers are insecure feebs and feel the need to email me about this issue:
Not being listed as one of my LiveJournal friends (or being de-listed) doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not I consider you a friend. I use several methods to track my friends journals/weblogs, including my friends page, NetNewsWire, and manual page loading. Let me be frank and say that these can be considered 3 tiers, with the people who’s writing I find most interesting listed on the friends page. Again, to state the obvious, finding your writings interesting has no bearing as to whether or not I find you personally interesting.
So before you shoot me some insecure email about whether or not “I STILL LIKE YOU”, calm the fuck down and get a life. Sure, I may not like you, but a stupid entry in a database is not an indicator of that whatsoever.
I forgot to mention that I took Corinna to Tom’s Diner on Friday for lunch. Corinna loves Cyndi Lauper (as do I), so I felt compelled to take her to eat at one of the filming locations of the “Time After Time” video (as well as a kick-ass, old-skool converted trailer diner with cheap, good food). She loved it.. I rule.