Seriously…time to get your learn on:
You Suck At Photoshop Episode #1
You Suck At Photoshop Episode #2
You Suck At Photoshop Episode #3
You Suck At Photoshop Episode #4
Also, in case you missed this, albeit it old – Tom Cruise Killing Oprah
I was talking to a friend via aim the other day and went and looked up my favorite PA comic strip. Albeit this is an older one, it’s still hilarious.
Preface: If you beat Halo 3 on Legendary you unlock certain goodies. The problem with doing this is its time consuming. So Gabe had the great idea of coercing this little kid to do his dirty work for him (in the comic at least):
Penny Arcade could cure cancer with their comics if they choose to do so. That stuff above is gold.
What brought on the discussion about PA was their latest strip mocking WoW addictions:
Recently, a service has come to existence which will make figures based on your WoW character. The catch is, they print your characters as how you left them (with certain gear equipped) when you last logged out. In WoW, the more time you spend in your character, the better looking your gear. Tycho gives Gabe, a recovering WoW addict, a Figure Print coupon as a Christmas gift:
WoW PA Strip 1
WoW PA Strip 2
WoW PA Strip 3
Sounds like a pretty sweet Deal, huh? The flash drive I am referring to is this one:
SanDisk 4GB Cruzer Micro USB 2.0 Flash Drive – SDCZ6-4096-A10
Yesterday, at a little before midnight, when scouring the internet, I came across this Slick Deal – a 4GB Scandisk USB Flash Drive for $5.99. This is pretty phenomenal being that this typically goes for $50+ according to pricegrabber. I did get in on the deal before it went dead but then this afternoon I received an email stating ‘due to circumstances beyond Buy.com’s control’ the order was cancelled. I knew it was too good to be true.
Ever go grocery shopping after 7pm? It seems this is like standard code for single guys or something. I went to the grocery store, because I was out of stock on the fundamentals of life (cookies and soda of course) about a week ago, and saw all of your stereo type pedophiles, single middle aged bachelors, and a few college kids shopping.
What was mildly amusing was, not only the type of people at the Grocery store at this hour, but also what they had in their shopping carts. Your normal soccer mom typically trolls publix (grocery store chain in FL) from noon to immediately after rush hour, picking up bread, cereal, milk, sandwich meat, etc. At 7 and beyond, your average shopping cart is instead filled with really bizarre shit. I saw this one guy buying olive oil, hair spray, crushed pickles in a jar, and orange juice. I swear he had plans of making napalm or something. Everyone else’s cart was pretty much of a similarly weird compilation. Although, in retrospect, I had nothing but 3 cases of soda, oreos, sushi, and apples. Maybe it has to do with the time of the night; like people who shop during the day have a more normal mixture of stuff they purchase and then people in the evening are simply for specific things that together have no meaning.
Ok, so I am back from the dead. The long lack of blog posts comes from the Holidays combined with two very large dissertation related deadlines. Now that all that has passed, blog postings should continue at their regularly scheduled intervals.
What are your New Years resolutions? The ones I have made are as follows:
1. I would like to read through the Bible at least once this year
2. I would like to exercise more – my health has kind of deteriorated lately.
3. I would like to start logging my hours worked on my dissertation and seeing myself at least log 40 hours a week.
4. I would like to start attending the Tuesday night adult bible study classes. I have been meaning to do this for a while but have really been stupid about acting on it.
5. I want to limit my WoW playtime to 15 hours a week.
I have so far failed completely on resolutions 1 and 4.
I am doing pretty good with resolution 5; my play time has been kind of sporadic as of late: less than 5 hours some weeks and no more than about 15 during others.
I have been exercising, but not nearly as much as I should be. With these major dissertation related deadlines past, I shouldn’t have any more excuses not to be regularly running on a weekly basis.
Finally, I have been phenomenal about logging my dissertation hours and have been really productive both over the Holiday break and during the first two weeks of the New Year.
As far as productivity motivation, I must recommend the following Vista gadget: ‘Sphere Timer‘ This device has a bunch of useful features – count up, count down, track time, set alarms (mp3s), etc. The most useful to me is a count up feature. I start the counter when I am doing dissertation related stuff and then stop the counter when I surf the net, play video games, post on my blog (basically procrastination stuff). This way I have a metric for each day, week, month on how productive I have been. Having to pause the timer is really nice as the act of having to pause and then seeing what little time I have logged for the day motivates me to work that much harder. This is rather important for me as a lot of my dissertation is self motivated. And albeit it’s nice to only have to put in 20 hours in the lab a week and work the rest of the time from home, it’s really important that I have at least 40 hours a week doing dissertation related activity. Otherwise, my plan to graduate this year will quickly fall apart.
I just wanted to drop a quick note and let everyone know that I have not vanished off the face of the earth. I have had a lot of school related deadlines as of late and that compounded with the holiday season (which I did wind up doing an extensive amount of work during) have resulted in a lack of blog posts. I have two upcoming conference submissions which will have both passed by this Monday. So after this Monday, I will have a whole slew of things to blog about.
Until then, take care =)
