Dead Week...

I guess it's not quite THAT bad...

if wishes were horses...

...we'd have a lot more problems than just the beggars who could ride.

time stands still

The clock on my desktop says 2:25 am, and I only just noticed that it's been saying 2:25 am for the last two and a half hours. For a long time, I just thought I was making really good timing on my project.

has this ever bothered you?

OK, bare with me here.

You go to the bathroom. Afterward you want to wash your hands so that they are clean. You go over to the faucet and turn the knob, touching it with you unwashed hand. You proceed to wash your hands. Then you turn the faucet off by turning the same knob you touched a few seconds ago with your unwashed hand. Are your hands clean now?

Maybe motion sensors in bathrooms are more important than we think.

Also, I'm not a germaphobe, I'm just the normal kind of person.

something I found out about myself...

I've discovered recently that I really enjoy eating apples. It's not necessarily that they taste that good or anything, I just really really enjoy the act of eating an apple.

especially in public.

figure that one out.

just a friendly reminder...

you have a week and a day until the end of the world. Anything you want to do before then?

official sadness day

Well the Dow is -5.1% and NASDAQ is -6.2% today, which means that you are officially supposed to feel sad. That's right! The industrial averages are nothing more than an official report of how happy you're supposed to be on any given day, which makes today official sadness day.

So if you're feeling a little low on happiness because of the stock market, I would suggest that you head on over to Best Buy because they've loaded their aisles with happiness!!! :)

(Going back to my problem with writing, I hope my sarcasm is obvious in the same way it would be if you heard me saying what I wrote above.)

on sale at Best Buy...

I like Best Buy's new slogan. "You, Happier. Best Buy." You see, I thought they were just selling stuff, but apparently now they're in the prospective happiness market.

Once I realized this, I proceeded to purchase two pieces of happiness.

Thanks for everything, Best Buy.

the unconditional finger

Two days in a row now, I've passed a car in a parking lot near my apartment that has a sticker on the back window of a frog giving you the big middle finger. To everyone!!! It doesn't matter who you are when you walk by that car. The frog doesn't discriminate, he just gives you the finger.

writing isn't as expressive as talking

The human voice has the power to bring words to life, and different voices can even bring the same words to life in different ways. The problem with writing is that the reader brings his/her own voice to table instead of that of the writer. With that in mind, how can I be sure that what you are hearing in your head while you read this is anything even close to what I intended it to sound like?

Anyway, school starts back up in two days, and I have to move into my new apartment today. um... wish me luck.

Oh, and one of these days, I'm seriously going to go on a long rant about Apple's Mac campaign "It just works" is a total crock. I'll have to find something about Microsoft and Google to complain about to make things fair.

what I did this summer...

I finished up my internship today. I think it went well.

at any rate, you still have 6 more weeks

I like how the scientists at CERN are planning unprecedented experiments with their Large Hadron Collider that just might introduce theoretical phenomena that might destroy our entire planet and no one even knows that it's coming up, let alone being worried.

I mean, who can blame everyone? It's not like I have fricking time to worry about this kinda stuff either. I've gotta pack my bags. I've got a plane to catch. I don't have time to worry about whether or not our planet will still exist after October 21.

But either way, we still have like 6 more weeks.

But seriously, I wasn't really that worried at all until I saw how huge it is. Seriously, I think I would be a lot more worried if I was living right on top of it like that. a 27km circumference!?!? That's pretty big.

why do they have to...

Why do they have to go around naming hurricanes things like 'Ike' and 'Gustav' and 'Katrina'!?!? All it does is give all the real Katrinas and Gustavs and Ikes an undeserved bad name. If my name was Katrina 3 years ago I would have wanted to change it, just for fear of association. I wouldn't have wanted to meet anyone for fear of having to introduce myself. That's not fair. That's why there should be laws against naming hurricanes after people. It's just not fair to all the good people it hurts, as if hurricanes didn't hurt enough people already.

Seriously, meteorologists are such jerks.

This really happened to me last week

I'm sure this happens to everyone once in a while.

are we all in agreement here?!?

Apple claims that Mac OS X Leopard is the "world's most advanced operating system." Are we all in agreement about that?!? I mean... I know it's unquantifiable and therefore unprovable (and therefore also impossible to prove that it's false), but still!!! Does that mean that we're allowed to just go around making bold and unfounded claims about our products just because no one can prove that we're not wrong?

I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm writing this blog from my Leopard boot on my macbook, and I have nothing against Apple (or Microsoft for that matter), but I really don't think the "Innocent until proven guilty" methodology is a good idea for regulating advertising. I think a more important freedom than the freedom of speech is the freedom from false information, and information about a product should not be advertised if it is obviously meant to lead people astray from forming rational opinions about products.

In short, I think most marketing schemes infringe on the inalienable human right of thought free from the bombardment of fallacies.

deletion inflation

I like how the meaning of the word 'delete' has changed over the past couple of years. Apparently, now it means, "move it to this other directory called 'deleted' and save it there forever just in case it's needed again."

Nowadays, when you want to delete something the way you used to, you have to "delete forever".

Just like how if you want a medium sized drink or order of fries at a fast food place nowadays, you have to order a 'large' (except for at Carl's jr., where apparently the forces of inflation work in the opposite direction), and like how if you want to get someone's attention you have to add an expletive or two to your sentence.

give it another decade, and you'll have to specify "permanently delete forever, no kidding, yes I mean it", along with clicking 8 or 9 "yes, I'm sure" buttons, and everyone who eats at Carls will have to specify "dinky winky drinky" just to get a normal-sized drink, and everyone else will be ordering the "super ultra mega large drink" normal-sized drink.

And then someone who frequents other fast food joints will try out Carl's for once and place his usual order, only to find himself in front of like a frickin' kettle of soda.

Seriously. Give it like 10 years.

my favorite advertising shenanigans

I've always been fascinated with the many ways TV advertisements trick and deceive their viewers, but lately, it's been even more amazing. Here are few of my favorite new gimmicks, with some classic ones thrown in for kicks:

4. "I'm trying my own sleep study between Advil and Tylenol!" says the guy who's being payed by Advil to do a commercial for them where it looks like he is, by his own motivation, doing a sleep study between two competing products, to see which one works better. Advil isn't the company going out of its way to make their advertisements look more like an unbiased experiment from an uncompromised third party than an advertisement of their own product. It's like a new (and more sinister) version of the paid testimonial.

3. "Now you can buy more of our product!" This comes from a recent trend in canned air freshener commercials, where they advertise, as an added bonus, the ability to make the air freshener automatically release itself every 9-18 minutes, as if it was a good thing. Clearly the long life of a single can of air freshener was hindering sales and they needed to find a better way to make people use more of the product, so they would have to buy more frequently. The amazing thing is that they actually market this new feature as an added bonus! They might as well just say "We made it easy to run out of our product as fast as possible so you can come back and buy more!" Thanks, Airwick guys.

2. Just showing hot girls making out with guys who use their product: I'm constantly surprised how often people pull this one, but I shouldn't be, because it's all over the place. Sometimes the point is really that simple, just a straight up lie. "Use our product, and hot girls will make out with you." it's demeaning from both sides, but neither the marketer nor the consumer can get over this one.

1. Inventing better statistics: This one has been around forever. For example, "9 out of 10 dentists recommend this kind of gum!" Everyone should know by now that this is an overt "lie". I can say that 10 out of 10 dentists recommend this gum even if I question 10,000 dentists and only 10 of them say they recommend it. I just take the 10 that did recommend it, and I say that out of those 10 dentists, 10 of them recommended the gum. You'll never hear any commercial say that 9 out of EVERY 10 dentists recommended anything. They only say 9/10 instead of 10/10 because it sound reasonable enough to have more credibility than 10/10, and I only put quotes around "lie" because they're technically telling the truth. Their intent is still to make you think something that is untrue.

I think the reason I'm so fascinated with marketing schemes is that it unveils a dark truth about humanity that corporations have discovered: it's more profitable to tell everyone that you're product is amazing than to make a product that actually is amazing and market that instead.

Ok I promise, I will never write a post that long ever again.

two things I've recently had the urge to do:

pull my cell phone out of my pocket and chuck it as hard as I can:
I'm not really sure why. It's not even that crappy of a phone or anything. It just seems like it would be really gratifying for some reason, although it does have the consequence of possible damage to my phone.

flip someone off:
Not anyone in particular, preferably someone I don't know. I've never done it before. I'd probably feel bad afterward though, which is probably why I haven't done it yet, but I do know the urge comes on the strongest when I'm crossing the street on a "go sign" and some car gets a little too close to me.

I must note that I'm not much of a believer in catharsis or venting at all.

oh, and... so much for the picture post.

that explains some things...

I found out this morning that one of the reasons It's been so hard to wake up this week was that my alarm has been disabled since last Saturday. I'm surprised it took a week to figure that out. I thought I was just really tired.

I'm feeling a picture-post coming up sometime this weekend.

nuclear twig reaction...

I remember a time in my life, back when I didn't understand molecular physics, when I thought that it was possible for someone to be unfortunate enough to step on a twig while walking through the woods and break it in such a way that it splits at a point within one of the tree's atoms (instead of breaking weaker bonds between the tree molecules), thus releasing the atoms energy and starting a chain reaction, leading to a freak nuclear explosion, and that the only reason that this had not happened yet in all the many years of people stepping on twigs and breaking them was that it was just extremely uncommon.

I like how that was all one sentence.

I also like how I say "back when I didn't understand molecular physics" like that isn't the case anymore.

because Dark Night was so amazing...

I'm only mildly pissed off that I don't have a free zune in my hands.

So I'm interning at Microsoft this summer, and they were having this summer intern celebration at the zoo, to make up for the fact that we can't throw a party at Bill Gates' house this year. I received the invitation earlier this week, but I didn't RSVP because I was covered in Poison Sumac and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be up to doing anything on Friday night. So only after the RSVP date do people start spreading rumors about how it's actually a ZOOn celebration, and they're giving out free zunes to all the interns at the event.

So I went back through my email, found the event, and accepted the invitation, even though it said that if I don't RSVP by the designated date (earlier this week), I will be turned away from the event. Long story short, my brother invited me to go see Dark Night, and I decided that I didn't want to walk all the way to the buses just to be turned away, and I really wanted to see Dark Night anyway.

So I did...

And it was amazing...

And now both of my roommates have free zunes...

But I got to see Dark Night first...

So I think I might win...

Maybe I can still get a zune for free somehow.

it must have been the 60 second cold shower

It was really the perfect way to start off an awesome day.

I'm not going to lie. The last couple of days have been really tough. The physical stress that comes with having the worst case of Poison Sumac (it's like poison oak) I've ever had in my life (and I've had it bad before), combined with the emotional strain of being 1000 miles away from most of my friends and family, has made it pretty hard to actually get stuff done at work. Under this kind of stress, I find it pretty easy to acquire a sort of defeatist attitude. But today, it was different.

It was extra cold this morning, and the shower had to be cold because a hot shower would irritate severe rashes that are covering large portions of my body. It was hard enough to get in, and it was definitely hard to stay in long enough for me to get clean, but it was shockingly also hard to turn the water off and get out. Usually, it's understandable that in a warm shower, getting out means getting colder, but today I discovered that it works the same even with cold showers. There must be some strange property of physics, kinda like the wind chill factor except when there's no wind but you're sopping wet and fresh out of the water, like the sop-chill-factor or something. Anyway, by the time I was dried off and back in my clothes, I had come to the conclusion that nothing in the rest of my day could possibly be any harder than what I had already done.

Some days are just like that. There's this feeling that any challenge that comes at you is insignificant, like all your challenges are little goblins, but you have this huge broadsword strapped onto your back and there's nothing that you can't take down. Sometimes I feel like I could just reach back there and pull it out and start hacking away, not at living people or things, of course, but metaphorically at my challenges.

That's what today felt like.

jokes of this kind are not ok

I just read a news article at ABC News about Presidential Candidate John McCain making incredibly inappropriate jokes about the Middle East. The only thing that infuriated me more than his comments was the results of a poll on Aim News in which more than half of the viewers didn't think the joke was inappropriate at all.

I want to make it very clear that I am not a Democrat and I have nothing against Republicans. I happen to be fairly conservative myself. I'm just a guy who wants to live in a world of peace where our political leaders don't sing "bomb-bomb-Iran" to the the tune of Barbra Anne, sending the totally wrong message to a country we already don't see completely eye-to-eye with. We're not at war with them right now, and we have no need to make enemies of potential friends.

I don't think people in America understand the importance of good foreign relations. We think we can say whatever we want about whomever we want because we have freedom of speech, but that doesn't nullify the repercussions of our actions. Too many Americans think that the rest of the world isn't important, that we don't need them because we're "independent". Where the hell did we get that idea, when we import so much more than we export and we consume nearly a quarter of the Planet's goods? This topic brings me back to 10th grade history class (in 2003, not long after the September 11 attacks), when during a discussion about 9/11, a student in my class seriously asked, "Why don't we just nuke Iraq?" Are you kidding me? Not only did Iraq have absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, but our country isn't wasn't even claiming to be at war with the people of Iraq but rather with the terrorists within the nation.

Seriously, it's times like these when I can't honestly say I'm proud to be an American.

masochistic alarm clock tactics

So, it having been the Fourth of July earlier today (or yesterday if you want to be picky), I was planning on writing about the movie I have all planned out in my head that I would definitely make in the future if my life were taking a different course, but I had this conversation today at a barbecue about alarm clocks that really got me thinking. We were all talking about what we do to get up in the morning, all the little alarm clock tactics, like placing them on the other side of the room so you have to run across the room to turn them off, perhaps combined with setting it as radio on the fuzziest channel at the highest volume so that you literally shoot out of your bed when the alarm goes off. For whatever reason, when my friend Tom phrased his sentence, "to help me wake up" something triggered in my head and I thought this thought: here we are, all talking about these somewhat painful things we subject ourselves to voluntarily, passing it off as "helping ourselves" in some obscure way. I know, I realize it's important to wake up and stuff, but if you'll follow me on my tangent for a moment, it seems like we (at least I) very willingly go to extra unnecessary (and notedly painful) measures voluntarily and call it good. Is that just some strange form of masochism in some way? After thinking about my "radio static" technique, it does seem to share a lot of qualities with good old-fashioned masochism. It does have that quality of "it's painful but I like it" or "it's bad, but it's actually really good in some way," in very much the same way that affinity for spicy foods (you know, the really spicy ones that hurt) works. This whole line of reasoning just brought me to wonder how many other painful things I voluntarily submit myself to in the name of its possibly unreasonably ascribed goodness, and go so far as to be blinded from its actual painfulness. If hot sauce and shocking static radio count, I'm sure there's others.

Then again, maybe I'm just thinking too hard and trying to find something profound in something that isn't profound.

On that note, I have observed about myself that I really really like profound ideas, so much that I'm biased towards wanting to find profound ideas as often as possible. This most likely causes me to consider many things profound that are, in fact, very ordinary. Ironically I find the realization of this fact quite profound.

I'm sleepy!

This guy just happened.

I like him

speed bumps

It's funny how when riding a bicycle, speed bumps change from slow-down indicators to go-as-fast-as-you-can-and-see-how-much-air-you-can-get indicators.

absolute truth

We know that the morals and personal beliefs we live by, despite how deeply and strongly we believe in them, are shaped by our experiences. This is clearly evident by the vast diversity of human beliefs. Now if we believe that there is an absolute truth, one that exists independent of our experiences, we must ask these questions:

1. How do we justify claiming our personal beliefs as absolute truths and the rest of the world's personal beliefs as illusions?

2. Is it really important that our personal beliefs closely resemble the absolute truth?

3. If so, how do we go about replacing our personal beliefs with absolute truth?

I am willing to admit that I don't know any of the answers.

book dedications

Once again I have decided not to publish the post the blog I just wrote, because I am wrong and I know it.

now I am over here

Sometimes, at the end of a long, eventful day, such as today, I think to myself that I have plenty of interesting things to blog about. But then, a half hour later, I find myself looking at a long rambling of unimportant, unrelated events, wondering to myself if anyone would even want to know about the weird mural at the airport or the curry chicken pizza. Maybe a better time to write an interesting blog is when absolutely nothing interesting is or has been going on, not a day like today, when things actually happened.

MGS 4

Gamespot giving Grand Theft Auto IV a perfect 10 did not make me happy, but Gamespot giving Metal Gear Solid 4 a perfect 10 did make me happy. Thank you Gamespot for making me happy! Thank you Hideo Kojima for making MGS 4 and for being so cool! No thank you Daniel's wallet for not being able to afford $400 consoles and $60 games...

hands-free driving

Starting on July 1, drivers in California (where I reside for now) may only talk on a cell phone while driving if they are over the age of 18 and are using a hands-free device. I just hope this doesn't segue into a law that requires hands-free devices for eating while driving too.

Anyway, someone's making money on this deal.

Some people (I'm not sure if I include myself yet) might call this taxing the poor.

"don't burn your bridges" or "burn the ships"?

Catchy wise old sayings are problematic. There's some strange property about them that their "apparent trueness" has more to do with their catchiness than with the actual truth of the matter.
It's almost as if the fact that it rhymes or sounds consonant has some bearing on the truth of its content, even though everyone knows that it doesn't at all. It's hard to live by the advice that people give these days, especially when it comes in these forms, and especially when there's a just-as-catchy counter saying. Both the sayings "burn the ships" and "don't burn your bridges" have equally compelling rings to them, along with equally compelling historical background, yet they argue the exact opposite points. the sayings, "absence make the heart grow fonder" and "out of sight, out of mind" work a lot in the same way, each sounding equally compelling and yet contradicted by the other.

Come on!!!

This picture was enough to get me through my Bioengineering class today. Here's what happened:

Today was about Biomechanics, and we spent a lot of time talking about joints. I have this thing about joints, especially joint injuries. If you ever want to send shudders down my spine, just mention the word... I don't even want to type it... dislocation. Anyway, actually please don't do that, I'd appreciate it. Any way, my teacher put a big diagram of the knee joint along with its ligaments up on the board. Then he proceeded to explain exactly what happens when you tear your ACL and I just about lost it.

I couldn't even look up, and even listening to him talking about it made me shudder. So I told myself, "I really need to become distracted!!!" so I just started drawing. I ended up with this guy. first, it was just the guy, but my teacher was still talking about tearing ligaments (he now had a graph of stress vs. deformation of the ligament, which, for a simple curve on an x y plane, disturbed me more than any other graph has). So I continued to draw.

I gave him the hat first, and then the balloon, and then the ice cream cone, and then the ice cream on his face. Then i pondered him. I hadn't meant for him to have so much stuff when I drew his mouth and eyebrows. But for some reason it made a lot of sense. I think I might have subconsciously drew a representation of one of my firmest beliefs, that stuff doesn't make you happy. I also have a related theory about stuff as a heuristic for happiness. Maybe I'll write about that sometime.

that's where the speech bubble came from.

I don't know what my deal is with joint injuries. The pictures weren't graphic or disturbing at all to any of the other 165 people in my class.

weightlessness and oatmeal

My bowl of oatmeal definitely experienced several distinct moments of nothing less than levitation this morning when it jumped off the counter, into my left hand, where it displaced the spoon that was there (which, itself, flew into my right hand but did not remain, although I really want to say that it did) and before I could secure it in my grip, leaped back to the countertop unharmed.

I'm trying a new thing today. This morning on my way to school in my car, I said to myself out loud, "I'm going to do my best today!"

I'll get back to you on how that worked out for me.

another productive group meeting...

is EVERY picture worth a thousand words?

if so,

lost belongings

I lost my wallet today and it took me an hour to find it. Now by chance (or maybe something else), the hour that it took to find it also happens to have been the same hour that I was supposed to drive to school and go to my second favorite class this quarter (multivariable calculus). All in all, though, I don't wish it didn't happen. I experienced a lot of things this morning that I otherwise would not have had the opportunity to experience.

On my way back to my house from checking my car (where my wallet wasn't), I followed a stray cat toward my front gate. It was watching me and walk/running away from me at the same time, and it totally ran into my gate head first. I've never seen a cat do that before.

I also found my old usb drive that I have been missing now for a few months. And, I found a sheet of paper where I wrote down a bunch of really creative ideas for a video game I was going to make but decided not to. It's inspiring me to rethink making that game, even though I have two on my plate at the moment.

You'd be surprised at some of the places I looked (more than once) for my wallet. Or... maybe you won't, if you've ever lost something and looked in the refrigerator more than once. It's almost as if you're drawn to recheck the places that you've already checked, just to confirm your creeping suspicion that it doesn't exist anymore no matter how hard you look. Or, maybe you're just hungry.

Anyway, just because I know you're wondering, it was in a really obvious place, under my dresser.

Actually, it's been a pretty good day so far.

Picture Post!

Yes, this is my closet.

In conclusion, everyone has the ability to bring something unique into the world. This is my contribution. =)

on the nature of justice in blogs

I've discovered something really cool about blogs, and it makes me think about Plato.

Apparently, you can go back and edit previous posts! That's not the cool part. The cool part is that when you edit previous posts, it doesn't change the post date OR make any note of the post having been edited.

This has pretty incredible implications. Say I made a huge mistake on the last post, like I said something mean or incorrect by accident. I can go back and fix it, and it won't even say that it used to be the old way! And that happened! Or, say I wanted to go back and change what happened when I woke up on March 31. I can do that! Actually I did do that. In my hands is the power to rewrite history without anyone even noticing!

Why does this remind me of Plato? There's this part of the Republic where Glaucon claims that all personal benefits of justice come not from being just but actually from appearing to be just to other people, and that when there is an opportunity to be unjust without anyone noticing, the benefits of being unjust in that situation far outweigh the benefits of being just in that situation (of which there are supposedly none).

I don't actually buy that claim, but it's an interesting one to think about.

And, I do also understand, I suppose, that the power to rewrite my blog posts isn't quite the same as the power to rewrite history.

sexual assault awareness month

My school has these thematic months where they promote their views on stuff on little picket signs that line the walkways. The theme usually corresponds to the time of year that it is. During February, they post signs promoting abstaining from sex (because of Valentine's day), During September, they post signs promoting abstaining from drugs and alcohol (most likely because it's a new year and people are adjusting to the dorm lifestyle or whatever). This month is sexual assault awareness month.

I don't really want to write about sex. Instead, I'm going to write about J-walking.

Let me explain. At another month sometime in during the year, the theme for the month is, "use the crosswalks!" The signs they post around say things like "Kenny died. He didn't use crosswalks." (with a picture of Kenny from South Park on it) or "Edna Parker has been alive a long time! That's because she uses crosswalks!" My favorite one is "Hi! It's me, the crosswalk. USE ME!!!"

For whatever reason, every time I see these signs, I have a serious urge to j-walk every street in my path. I really haven't figured out why. Maybe it's because I don't like crosswalks telling me what to do. More likely it's because whoever is in charge of these signs feels like I need to be coerced into doing things that I would otherwise do anyway.

It's like when you're about to clean your room by your own decision, and just before you're able to start, you mom or dad demands that you do it. At that point, you can take no credit in having instigated the cleaning of the room.

Not that it's all about credit or anything. I think it goes deeper than that.

The road that goes downhill both ways

I wrote a blog today, but it was wordy and boring, so I erased it.

I'm keeping the title, because I read it in a book this morning and I like it.

In conclusion, writing interesting stuff that people might actually want to read is hard!!!

They eye of the storm

It's raining today. it's also Wednesday.

Sometimes, I'll quiz myself on how to say trivial things in the various foreign languages I'm trying to learn. Today, my quiz was 'Today is Wednesday'. in German, that's 'Heute ist Mitwoch'. Mitwoch, or Wednesday in German, is translated literally into 'mid week' or the middle of the week. In Japanese, it's '今日は水曜日だ', pronounced 'kyou wa, suiyoubi da'. 水曜日, or suiyoubi, is literally translated as 'water day'. I don't know how to say it in Chinese yet. So the Japanese call it water day, the Germans call it the middle of the week, and I don't even know about the Chinese. What in the world does the English word 'Wednesday' mean, if anything?

I think The Japanese are closer to the true meaning of this Wednesday in particular, as I see much wetness about me, however, I might have preferred the German word three weeks ago during dead week of last academic quarter, more just for the sole reason of knowing that it was half way over.

Then again... my favorite Wednesday greeting isn't, "Happy Mitwoch!" or "Happy 水曜日!", or even "Happy Wednesday!" for that matter.

no...

it's "Happy Hump Day!"

more on Hump day another time maybe.

when I woke up this morning...

What happened when I woke up this morning and what didn't happen when I woke up this morning are two completely different stories, each with its own merit. I'll tell you one of them...

I woke up in a space ship. Actually, I only know that it was a spaceship because the owl on board told me so. He was very wise. Over breakfast, he told me that the moon had gone away and that we were on our way to bring it back. Then I brushed my teeth and went to a cricket tournament.

Maybe I'll tell you the other story sometime.

Here we go...

Let me begin by saying that I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing. I'm not even really sure what a blog is. That said, I assure you that this is going to be the swell-est blog ever. I can imagine blogs having been called compelling, provocative, or maybe even influential, but swell? I'm not so sure...

until now...

Then again, as I already said, I really don't know what I'm talking about.

This will be a journey for all of us, that's for sure.