Obviously not doing so well on Livejournal anymore. I'll be migrating to the stressless 140 characters or less brevity that is Twitter.

http://twitter.com/spradmonkey

I got accepted into the Stanford CS Master's program.

Ian and his girlfriend Britney each have a houseguest staying with us currently.

 

Meet John and Twilight (center).

Oh my god, Billy would not stop playing.

The Simpson's movie came out yesterday. I still have not seen it. This is all Mike's fault.

Today the Simpson's movie came out. I am not seeing it today. This is Mike's fault.

I went to Tahoe/Carson City/Reno with my parents two weekends ago and have been shopping for houses around here lately. But those are boring. So here's two stories about boogers and belly-button lint.

1) I learned a rather long time ago that shaving off hair is a bad idea. This was primarily reinforced when I shaved off my own back hair, which occurred sometime in highschool. First of all, this is hard.

There' s a reason devices known as back-scratchers exist. If you think about it, their very existence as a concept is rather mind-boggling. You see, they're sticks and not anything else on top of that. Just sticks, but people buy them and they have their own unique name. All in all, their existence serves to reinforce the point that one cannot easily reach his own back.

So I did not, as you might be now thinking, attach a razor to the end of a stick and run it down my back. (Patent not pending, apparently.) My arms were long enough to reach "most" of the back hair. In the end, it was awful, patchy, itchy, and rashy. Vive la back hair.

Forgetting the past, I recently decided to trim my nose hair. And by trim, I mean thoroughly ravage, via a nose hair trimmer (another unlikely invention). Through this experience, I rediscovered the true purpose of nose hair - snot regulation. Without it, one is apparently capable of generating giant uber boogers. Each morning after the nose hair ravaging, and I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of a snot rocket, I could generate an absolute snot ICBM. I'm sure you wanted to know that.

2) There are some concepts which seem to exist in the collective media/pop culture subconscious. We see them as commonplace references in TV and movies. In some cases, we have no contact with them in real life, yet we use them in everyday conversation as if we're familiar with them. We act like they are known to us because they are familiar in our entertainment. For me, one such item was garbage disposals. I didn't even see one "in real life" until I was at least 16. Despite this, I would freely converse on the topic as if I was an expert on them and their normal ability to accidentally chop up people's hands (which was, after all, what the TV lead me to believe).

Another such concept was belly-button lint. Before my added attention to exercising my belly was, I could only assume, an anti-environment for the cultivation of navel lint - I had just never encountered the stuff at all. After having started working out, though its still about the same general pudgy size, my belly is noticeably firmer. And, again apparently, this is a prime breeding ground for belly-button lint. So I'm now harvesting bushels of the stuff daily. Again, I'm sure you wanted to know that.

Someone should really study this stuff... nah, that would be a waste of research funds

(It was right.)

Chronically neglected, so here's a scattered largish update.

1) No one calls me Sprad out here. I'm now "Mike 1". This upsets me, though it is a logical way of dealing with an overabundance of Michaels.
2) I've been working out since last summer - weights and cardio, now just weights. I've been holding steady at around 195, eating what I normally do. My arms are enormous. That's a lie.
3) Indian food no longer makes me high; this is unfortunate.
4) Ian's girlfriend now essentially lives here. She's gotten me addicted to Starbucks. There are few other drawbacks.
5) My itchiness is long gone. I probably should have mentioned that earlier. It was either a Splenda allergy or mites. If the latter case, they, and their beh-bees, are all dead.
6) I'm drawing up plans for getting my CS masters at Stanford in either '08 or '09. While working. Get this: Cisco wants me to and wants to give me 10K a year to do it. That'll be about 2 small quarters a year worth.
7) Ever since I quit WoW, I've been trying to catch up on my video games. I'm not doing as well as I'd like. In my purchased but unfinished stack I have: RE4, Raving Rabbids, Thousand Year Door, The Two Thrones, Knights of the Old Republic, Justice for All, Beyond Good and Evil, and Hotel Dusk. (There's also a large list of unpurchased PS2 games, as I've only played one, ever, Ico.)
8) I'm working on my CCVP certification.

Is the mysterious stranger from the previous post happy now?