Not that anyone was going to, but I learned with my last birthday that leaving stuff you have acquired on a wishlist is VERY BAD.

So let me reiterate. I have a new digital camera. It is a Canon Digital Elph S110 and it kicks ass. It is very small. After I got it at lunch I went nuts taking pictures of the boring stuff in my cube. I hope nobody thought I was an industrial spy or anything. Mucho thanks to dad for the wherewithal to get it.

Lots of cool pics coming soon.

Thanks to a generous gift of a tank, I now again have a fishtank! So far I only have 1 fish (named Fred) in order to let the tank chemistry stabilize, but I’ll probably get another one to keep him company in a month or so. Sorry no pics yet. (Man I wish I had a better camera, mine is seriously obsolete.)

The Winamp plugin I wrote now has 967 (edit: 4000 now) downloads off of winamp.com! I hope people are using it and like it. Hmm what should I write next.

I have discovered the musical incredibleness of Ableton Live. Wow. I posted the first song I wrote with it on my website. The song certainly isn’t polished but I did it start to finish in 5 *hours*, starting from a bunch of guitar riffs my friend Jason laid down. Still a long way to go — I listen to some of the tracks produced by other amateur musicians on the web and they’re really good!

My problem with Cubase was always its extremely steep learning curve, hopefully the use of Live will be less of an impediment to creativity. As a bonus, it was also only $299, so now I can compose music without feeling like a criminal! 🙂

Finally, I’m really pondering what I should do after I take my sabbatical, after 7 years at Intel. Intel’s been pretty good to me…should I stick with it or try something new? I’ve been debating going to graduate school (law?), or perhaps working for a smaller company, or even starting my own.

Go see The Incredibles. I loved it.

Yep, I’m 30. Don’t see what the big deal is…

On an unrelated note, my friend Oliver notes here that it is much better to be buried in a biodegradable fashion than like a mummy. Well I totally agree. I think if you haven’t made your peace with the fact that your physical remains are pretty much irrelevant, then now’s the time to wake up. That said, I can certainly understand why people feel a certain way about their remains. Clearly the least selfish thing anyone could do is donate their body to science, the most likely result which would be being dissected by medical students. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t feel comfortable making this contribution intellectually, but at a deeper level my reptilian brain just can’t do it. Cremation is always an option…

Finally, another unpleasant thing to think about is living wills. If I were in Terry Schiavo’s condition, a persistent vegetative state, would I want to stop living? I don’t think a weblog really the best place to talk about this (which is obviously a very personal and private decision) but let me just ask that IF this should happen to me, please take a look on my computer for a file called letmediedammit.doc. 😉

You are now reading what I wrote *after* I deleted the rant I wrote. 🙂

Let me just say this: George W. Bush is now the president — and responsible not just to those Americans who voted for him, but to everyone. Including me. I hope that he is fully aware of that.

Let’s see you work to better the lives of *all* Americans now, George, okay?