Well, we’ve been settled in Tallahassee for about a week, so I guess it’s about time for something to come along and shake things up a little, right? Tropical Storm Fay is on her way, plodding west from the Jacksonville area at a paltry 5 to 6 miles per hour, bringing her gusty wind and buckets and buckets of rain with her.

The good news is we’re on the third floor of this building, and this building isn’t standing on low ground, so I think we’re okay as far as flood risks go. Assuming nothing catastrophic happens to the building, we’ll be okay.

Now if I could just get Comcast to fix this fucking cable modem (it goes down every night, at 11:00pm on the nose, for at least fifteen minutes), I could get back to work full-tilt.

Technorati Tags: Life Weather

Woohoo! All our stuff’s here, we’re in the apartment, and everything’s a mess. But all the utilities are now activated, the site’s back online, and we’re taking a good shot at going all “normal” again. I still have the big Vegas writeup in the works, too. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Life Site

We’ve returned from Las Vegas. Big writeup coming; lots of good fun stuff happened and very little bad (though Rio loses points for killing their Masquerade Show in the Sky on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays — booooo!) happened. It’s always nice to see my family, and you really never do get tired of the weather out there

More to come!

Technorati Tags: Happy Life Vacation

After two weeks of waiting, faxing paperwork back and forth, and gently “nudging” the agent, I finally received the phone call I’ve been waiting to receive since we toured the apartment complex and filled out the first round of forms. It almost seems anticlimactic after days of phone tag and last-minute “quick, can you initial this little spot where you crossed out something and fax it back to me?” to receive the simple news I got this afternoon. We’ve been approved, and we’ll be given our permanent address and details on August’s move-in specials in a week or two. Since the move is still over a month away, this next dose of waiting isn’t going to sting nearly as much.

Woohoo!

Technorati Tags: Happy Life

We’ve returned from Tallahassee, Florida, having successfully found a good apartment to hurl ourselves into (we decided on Banyan Bay in case you’re curious), and with my friends surviving the ordeal that is Florida State University’s (mandatory) orientation program. In honor of my buddy Shannon formally joining Florida State University’s Class of 2012, I’ve updated the site’s theme to use the school’s colors. Yeah, I know the logo doesn’t match, but trust me, it looks better than the green one did. I’ll work on finding a better graphic for the corner logo in a day or two

Congratulations one more time, Shannon, for your achievement in getting into the university!

Technorati Tags: Florida Happy Life Site Tallahassee

I’ve never seen more cops on a single stretch of road (specifically, the 10 miles east of Tallahassee on I-10 was absolutely swarming with them — highway patrol and county sheriffs, at least a dozen cars writing tickets in different spots). Heh.

But we’re in Tallahassee now, about 3 miles from the hotel and the college. Woohoo!

This place is very green, much more hilly than out on the coast in Central Florida (heh, go figure). Shitload of churches, too. Sigh. This is definitely southern country. Sure is pretty though

Technorati Tags: Life

This afternoon my friends and I are heading off to northern Florida, to visit Tallahassee. My friend Shannon was admitted to Florida State University (woohoo! Congrats!) earlier this year and one of the mandatory steps the college requires of its freshmen is that they attend a (non-free, of course ) two-day orientation “thingy,” wherein they cram all their new students into uncomfortably small dormitories, push all sorts of unnecessary (and revenue-generating) products and services, give a tour of the campus, and finally help the students figure out what classes they want to register for their first semester.

Since I can work from pretty much everywhere, we decided it’d smartest/cheapest for me to move up there to Tallahassee with her — we can rent a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment (which really won’t change my expenses much at all anyway since rent is about the same there as it is where I am now) and she can live off campus for much less (and in much greater comfort) than if she’d moved into a dorm room.

It took half an hour in the car (her father is driving — relax, folks, I wasn’t screwing around with a laptop, a GPS receiver, and a cell phone while behind the wheel) to get this crap working, but it does work finally. I was amused to discover that the wired (USB-to-PC) internet sharing option on my phone (which runs Windows Mobile 6.1, “unofficially” flashed onto my T-Mobile Dash, which now calls itself by its proper name of “HTC Excalibur”) doesn’t work with Vista at all. Heh. There’s a shocker. Because the unofficial ROM (it’s only “unofficial” because it’s not sanctioned by T-Mobile, but this ROM is the real one that HTC ships on the unbranded version of my device) implements a full Bluetooth stack, though, the “Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network)” option does work. That means it works in Linux, too; woohoo!

Shannon and her father both have to go to the orientation stuff. Technically he doesn’t, but he wants to While they’re off doing that, I’ll be romping around Tallahassee looking at different apartments and applying at the ones that actually impress me enough to be worth living in. This should be a fun trip

Technorati Tags: Life Shannon Travel

As a graduation gift, I gave my buddy Shannon (congrats, by the way!) a Wii Fit this morning. We’ve been using the living hell out of it ever since. This is by far the most entertaining peripheral for a game system I’ve ever used, and it’s definitely an absolute blast to exercise with.

We’ve both put in 60 minutes of “exercise time” (i.e. it’s given us 60 “Fit Credits” each) on the game so far. This thing is kicking our asses (probably mine more than hers, as she’s in better shape than I am). Unlike the folks who got offended when this thing called their kids “obese,” I blinked and realized it’s officially time to lose some weight when this thing sized me up and said “overweight,” with the line just barely hovering beneath “obese” (less than 1 point away from the obese line according to its BMI calculation).

The way this game is put together and presented in a lighthearted, goofy, and entirely non-threatening style. It permits multiple participants to create their own profiles, and the game tracks daily progress (your recorded weight and your daily activity in the game) for everybody. Each player can set a weight loss goal and track their progress towards it.

It does a pretty good job of creating incentives and motivation to keep going, both by unlocking new games and modes as you put in more time (it doles these bonuses out pretty frequently, too — in just a “credit hour” of exercise, at least five things opened up for us) and by unlocking more difficult/advanced options for the modes already available (more reps, longer routes, etc.).

This is definitely worth the price of admission. And yes, I lucked out in finding one — Wal-Mart had just set out a whopping two of them (ugh) during the nightly restock and I happened to be looking around that section at the right moment to spot it. I scooped it up the instant I saw it. I am proud to report I did not scoop up the other one to scalp on eBay

Technorati Tags: Happy Life Video Games

I do believe they make suppositories that are smaller than these things. Thankfully I have never had need to take a suppository, nor are these current monsters actual suppositories, either. It’s a good thing, too — it would not be fun to fit these things rectally.

Several years back I had a bunch of cavities, so over the span of a month, I’d go to the dentist’s office once a week to have a quadrant of my mouth deadened, drilled, sterilized, and refilled. I maintained fairly good dental hygiene habits for years, but I’ve apparently fallen lax in recent years since I found myself in a dentist’s chair this past Wednesday to have a bit of swollen gum inspected. Not just puffy — there was a good quarter-inch bubble of angry gum tissue hovering above one of my front teeth and that tooth was starting to wiggle a little bit when I touched it. Not good.

The verdict is pretty nice, though — very early-stage periodontitis, caused by gingivitis. The treatment? Pop three of these insanely pink (and big) pills per day, brush my teeth more gently (ironically, I’ve apparently been too rough on my teeth and gums … whoops), floss, and rinse with warm salt water instead of an alcohol-based mouthwash. In two weeks I go back for a cleaning, but even after just two days of these pills the swelling’s gone down and my gums aren’t red anymore. Woot!

Still, do you believe how !@#$ing big these pills are?

This post is also a shameless excuse to start putting the new gallery to use; click that thumbnail to be taken to the little album I created for these pictures of the pills. They were taken with a brand new camera I just got today, that I’ll be gushing about in a future post.

Woooo! Willfe.com’s poor, overworked backend now contains exactly 1,500 nodes in it. That includes pictures and posts, but it’s a nice round number that I think deserves a bit of commemoration.

This “iteration” of Willfe.com is powered by Drupal, a surprisingly powerful CMS written in PHP. I have no love for PHP, but for an app written in the language, Drupal’s pretty damned good.

Yes, incidentally, I’m painfully aware of how generic the site actually looks since it’s using the “stock” Pushbutton theme (barely modified), and I’m pondering ways to make it look better. Read the full story...