Happy New Years to all my friends. 2005 has been quite a rollercoaster and I survived it relatively intact (well, as intact as one can be when gaining a new lung). I'm also glad it is over because I'm ready to start fresh again now.

2005 was all about healing. 2006 will hopefully be about rebuilding. I'm actively pursuing a new job. If I get it, it will mean moving back up to Boston and living on my own. It will really be almost starting out from square one again. It's all kind of scary and exciting.

I don't do resolutions because I never seem to actually get around to them. So instead I'm just saying I'll just keep working to grow stronger and stay healthy.

As seen over on Swirlychick's LJ, the ColorQuiz. Give it a try.

Gregory+Blake took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Takes easily and quickly to anything which provide..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

As usual with these quizzes I take things with a grain of salt. I think the one thing that really rung true for me was the line "Anxious to experience life in all its aspects, to explore all its possibilities, and to live it to the fullest." This has definitely been a big issue for me post transplant. And I'm still kind of rediscovering myself too, the whole experience has definitely changed me a bit.

I've been meaning to post something about New Orleans and the hurricane for a few days now. For me the big positive news is that my sister is safe. She got out of town Sunday and stayed with friends in FL. Now she's up in the Baton Rouge area and trying to keep busy (she volunteered at the Red Cross the other day). My nephew is with her and doing just fine also. He'll hopefully be attending school up there while they wait for school to be available around his father.

As of right now, she still has a job at the Tulane Medical Center. Though there's been no word about when she might be back at work. Something that's true for just about anyone who works in NO.

It also looks like her apartment may be safe. We can't tell for sure, but it seems to be right on the edge of some flooding. Her apartment is on the first floor, but it is up a number of steps, so I think she's got something like 4 feet before the water would get into her actual apartment. Our fingers are crossed.

Also, via LJ user Tenzil, a really good article over on CNN about The Big Disconnect. Good, but a bit disturbing.

So I finally got my turntables set up again. It's been over a year since I spun. And pretty much all of my records are stashed away still. So I've decided to celebrate with a mix. This morning I went down and just randomly grabbed records from the ones that were easily accessible and I'll see what I can do with them.

The interesting thing is that a lot of what I spin has changed since I first started. There's a lot of old progressive trance in there that I probably wouldn't touch these days. Some of it is pretty good, but I'm sure there are more than a few things I picked up over the years that are trash. So it is definitely a tossup as to the quality of the tracks I'm working with. I guess this is a good time to go through and weed out any of the records I'll definitely never spin.

Hopefully I'll have a new mix up within a few days.

It's snowing again. I wish it would just stop. Normally I probably wouldn't mind, but I'm already feeling cooped up and alone since my parents are out of town for a few days. Hopefully we won't get so much that I can't get the car out of the driveway. Bah.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I've been a bit slow posting lately, so I'm just finally getting around to posting about my Turkeyday. It was a great holiday this year. My cousin and his family came to visit. Which was nice because I always like it when there is more family around. We ate lots of food and followed by passing out. They also brought their dog, which was great and reminded me how much I think we should get one.

And as for things I'm thankful for:

• My parents. These past few years they have been wonderfully supportive. And if it weren't for them I don't think I'd be able to handle this whole lung thing.
• My friends. They always seem to be there when I need them. Especially when I need stuff carried for me :).

One thing I've been finding lately is that I just don't watch quite as much TV. I blame it partly on the TiVo. I like being able to record something and watch it at a later time. The thing is, this is college basketball season. And since my parents, dad especially, is a UConn Women's Basketball fanatic that takes priority over anything else on TV. Including the one hour of prime time TV that I watch (Joan of Arcadia). I think what is most annoying is that I end up having to watch it in real time, suddenly having to run (er well, my version of run) to the third floor at the last minute. Oh well, at least whining always makes it not seem so bad.

And Joan was good this week. I hadn't gotten to watch last week's until this afternoon and it was a bit harsh to say the least. The show needed and episode that ended up an up note like this. This season has just had quite the dark cloud over it.

About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I've been doing for a neighbor. I've long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I've been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking "so what's so great about this Flickr thing anyways?"

Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that's been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn't really get into it until the new camera. I'd fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.

But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag 'squirrel', or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag 'squirrel'. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.

One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).

The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it's this easy I can't help but want to post stuff all the time.

Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there's unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.

The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called 'sky'. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.

Oh, and no, Flickr isn't paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it's one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.

A few friends of mine have been getting trackback spam for a while now and I still didn't quite believe it really existed. Until today. The spammers have finally discovered that I can be pinged. Luckily mt-blacklist seems to be catching at least a bit of it. It still annoys me though.

I posted a bunch more pics to flickr tonight. My mom had asked me to pick up some apples so she could make some apple pies. I took the opportunity to play around with my new camera some more and try out some of the things I'd learned about it. I took a bunch of pictures of this one brook (complete with squirrel), and pictures of the first two houses I lived in.

Excuse the ad, but I'm just doing my part to help promote Full Metal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Crisis start on Cartoon Network tonight. In general Cartoon Network has done a pretty crappy job with promoting anime, so I thought I'd help out a little. Yes, I'm a geek.

To folks that are just sitting around tonight doing nothing, I highly recommend checking these out, even though they come on a bit late. They are two of the better shows that Cartoon Network has picked up as far as anime goes. Also, don't be mislead by the beginning of Full Metal Alchemist, it gets pretty intense at times.

Here's some info on both Full Metal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

A picture of me that I don't completely hate. My friend Brian took this while playing with my new camera.

I just wanted to put out a big public thanks to some of my friends online. Thanks to MWF for succumbing to my blog begging for the Looney Tunes collection. To Ellen for the gift certificate, and to Izumi for the stuff soon to be received. Also, a big thanks to my parents for the Peanuts book.

Has it really been 36 years?

I am so full of sushi. Must nap.

I've been scanning in more pictures for my mom. Both of their trip to New Mexico, which was stunning, and a bunch of old family pictures she had (like ones her father took during World War II), and ran across this old school picture of me from what must have been 2nd or 3rd grade. So I figured I'd post it here.

And on the subject of scanning, I'm still amazed at how much detail the scanner pulls out of those old black and white photos. When you look at the picture itself you think there's just not much there, and then after scanning. WOW. I'll post some more as I get to them.

Sequential Tart has a nice article with pointers to various retellings of fairy tales. I was happy to see it included one of my favorites, which is Sheri S. Tepper's Beauty. And now I've got a few more books to add to my book list.

I was just looking at Amazon.com and noticed they had a little ad up for the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 2. I loved the first collection, it was a great start to them releasing many old old cartoons that I hadn't seen in their entirely in ages. This one looks to continue the trend with a lot of early material. And even better, it comes out on my birthday next month (November 2nd)! I've added it to my wish list, anyone wanna pick it up for me?

I was looking through the list of places where Ghost in the Shell:Innocence was playing in the next month and Hartford, CT was nowhere to be seen. Heck, there wasn't even anywhere in CT it is showing. I guess I'll have to see it in the Boston area (where it is showing at two different places). Anyone up for going to see it next Wednesday afternoon?

I tend to stay away from discussing politics on this site, but my friend John just IM'd me a link to a pretty nifty site called PartisanProject..

What We Did. We invited 15 designers and artists to each create one, two-color poster (18.5"x24") urging a vote against the current administration. The posters were printed, stacked together, folded in half and in half again - like a newspaper. These poster packs are being distributed much like a free newsweekly - dropped in bookstores, coffeehouses, restaurants, grocery stores, libraries, etc. throughout the city of Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas of southwestern Pennsylvania. people can choose a poster (or posters) they like and hang it outside their home or somewhere in their neighborhood. The posters can also be downloaded at this website. We are also wheat-pasting the posters in various locations through the city. And in September, we will host a gallery event where each poster will be displayed en masse along with speakers, voter registration booths and live music. [Partisan Project. INFO]

Neat idea. Given that I'm not a fan of the current administration, I thought this sounded pretty cool. I also think they're a bit short-sighted and should also be pushing this for other areas beyond Pittsburgh. And someone needs to tell them that you really shouldn't have all the text in your site be images. It makes it impossible to quote things easily.

I just fired up iTunes because I wanted to listen to some music, but also wanted to hear one song in particular first. So I hit shuffle and then searched for the song. The scroll bar barely moved and I noticed that it was the second song in the shuffle. Coincidence? I think not.

The parents are going away again for the weekend and I have made absolutely no plans. Anyone feel like a road trip to CT?