do_While(True)

Feeling irritable after a long week on travel. I had two days of meetings on the west cost, which meant leaving Tuesday morning and getting back at 5pm on Friday night. I like traveling, generally, but I've definitely decided I do not like flying Southwest Airlines. I've never felt so cattle-like on a trip before, it was just borderline-degrading. Doesn't help that the whole second day of meetings was less-useful and much more like a big commercial for the contractors we were dealing with...

In my personal life, Meghan and I still don't have a date. Which, I guess, shouldn't really bother me much in that we've only been engaged for two weeks, but I wish it seemed like we'd made any progress. (It also doesn't help that it's the first question anyone asks when they hear the news, but I can't really fault them for that...) The biggest annoyance is that Meghan's parish office seems to be giving us the run-around as far as getting things started goes. We need to turn in forms and meet with a priest before they'll even let us look at a calendar, but no one seems very clear on WHICH priest we need to talk to, and no one seems terribly interested in helping us schedule a meeting with either of them. To be fair, we almost had a meeting set up with one of the priests last week, but then we were told that we had to meet with a DIFFERENT priest, so we canceled that meeting before it happened. Now it seems that this other priest can't meet with us any time soon and, what's more, can't do a wedding any time around when we're looking. (We're now at the point of considering pretty much any time between mid-April -- after Beth Harzold's wedding -- and mid June.) It's just... tiring. I wish they could just tell us what steps we need to take, but it seems all they're capable of telling us is what we're NOT allowed to do.

On a related note, it bothers me that it's so difficult to talk to a priest in this parish. I mean, it seems to me that if you're a parish priest, and someone in your parish needs to talk to you (for whatever reason), and it's nigh-impossible to get in touch with you, you're doing something wrong. I don't care how many great programs your running, if you aren't available when a parishioner needs you, you fail. Of course, I have to take a deep breath and take a step back and recognize that I'm probably more than a little influenced by the rather personal nature of my current issue, but still... I mean, marriage is one of the sacraments, and the sacraments should be more a priests' job than anything else. At the very least they should be readily able to schedule time with a young couple looking to get married.

Anyways. I should be sleeping. I'm full of nervous energy, though, and my internal clock is still skewed -- it's only 8:30 on the west coast.

So SanDisk, the guys who make all those neat memory cards you use in your
cameras and cell phones, have released a
"new" format for digital music, but I'm left wondering what the point
is. Apparently, for "the price of a CD" you can buy a micro-SD card (the
really little ones) that cames "pre-loaded" with "DRM-free" music.

First, if it's pre-loaded, why do I care? I actively dislike at least 50%
of what's out there, probably closer to 80% depending on how you decide to
count. The odds that your little chip has music I care to buy is slim.
Second, if it's pre-loaded, how much is on there? Assuming "the price of a
CD" is about $20, you're talking roughly the cost of 20 iTunes songs (since
iTunes' prices are the standard by which we measure these things). Either
I'm better off picking my own music from iTunes, or they plan on
putting loads of music on there, deeply under-cutting iTunes (which is
unlikely, as the lables seem to want *more* than what iTunes is giving
them). Twenty songs would be about 20 or 80MB (depending on the length of
the songs), and these cards are supposed to have 1000MB of space on them.
Yay for less than 10% usage. And if they ARE putting more music on there
(or, worse, there's a variety of different cards with different loads), the
odds of me reading the back of a box to see if it has music I care about
(when I can just find what I want on iTunes) is even closer to zero.

More to the point, third: why do I care about a new music format? Already
we have wma, aac, flac, mp3, ogg, and probably a handful of others I'm
unaware of. Of those, I only ever *really* listen to mp3s -- even my iTunes
purchaces, when they're aac, get converted to mp3 at the earliest
opportunity. Why do I want another format to worry about? Even more
to the point, if these songs are supposedly DRM-free... what's the catch? I
mean, why are they even *doing* this? Do they think people would rather run
out to target and buy a spray-and-pray music chip that, I don't know, buy
music from iTunes or Amazon.com the way they have been for the last few
years? What's so great about a small little piece of silicone and
plastic that we the consumer even want to consider bothering with it? I
mean, just as one point, I lose my car keys, and they're quite a bit
bigger than my thumbnail (the side of SD cards).

Anyways. Just seems like a dumb idea.

So, yeah. I guess it was quite a while ago when Quiznos was new and I spent
almost a whole summer eating nothing but. Probably four or five years ago
now. I loved the stuff. I was a hard-over convert from Subway which, while
it seemed good enough at the time, couldn't stand next to Quiznos' toasty
goodness.

As with all well-played revolutions, though, Quiznos has fallen to the same
flaccid decadance that fortold Subway's doom.

I mean, seriously, I think it's been over a year since I got a
quality sandwich from Quiznos. I've noticed lots of shops turning up the
speed of their ovens in order to manage long lines of sandwich-crazing
consumers -- and faster oven mean less time toasting which means squishy
bread. I've had sandwiches where were not only not toasted, but
where the cheese wasn't melted and the meat was still cold! That's just
disgusting! And it's easily 50% more expensive for me to eat at
Quiznos than, say, Wendy's or Chipotle ($9 average vs. $6 or $7,
respectively). It's not worth it to pay higher prices for a sub-par quality
product.

So I think today is the last day I will ever eat at Quiznos. Unless I can
be convinced that they've changed their ways and they'll love me the way
they did when we were young, I'm done. it's just not worth the pain.

So just to make sure I have all my bases covered, LJ post!

So as some of you may be aware, I started seeing a girl a little while ago, Meghan Donahoe. I'd met her about four years ago when I was taking dance lessons at Gene's school, Christendom College. We got along well from the start, but between my Master's program sending me to California and her own ordeal with school (she transferred a few times and ended up at Steubenville in Ohio, with Josh), we never got a chance to develop our relationship. Since I graduated a year ago and moved back into the area, we finally got and took that chance.

That's not the announcement, though. The announcement is that over the weekend I asked Meghan to marry me and she said "yes." So, we're engaged. I'm a simple man and never really had any elaborate plans for proposing -- no fancy restaurant or candle-lit courtyards or banners or anything. I didn't even really plan a "when." The only thing I knew I wanted was to proposed at her parents' house, preferably at the little gazebo they have by the pond by their house. And on Friday, with a light rain and a gentle breeze, that's what I did. It was a lot more never-wracking than I'd expected, considering I knew she was going to say yes.

We don't have a date yet, though we're thinking probably sometime next Summer (she's graduating from college in the Spring), and we're looking to get married out at her home parish in Front Royal, Virginia. But I wanted to write and let you all know what's what. I'm kind of excited.

Now, most of the preamble there shouldn't be news to anyone here, but if this is the first time you're hearing about the actual proposal and engagement that means (1) you don't have Facebook and/or we aren't friends there, and (2) I don't have your email address. I'd love to rectify either or both of those -- you can leave details in the comments, as I'll be keeping them screened.

As it's come up in conversation a few times: there are places online where
you can have custom t-shirts and hats and pins and buttons and all sorts of
things made on demand. Does anyone know of a site or service that will
print/produce custome bumper stickers?

Wow! New door
locks that can be controlled from the Internet! Why does this seem like
a supremely bad idea? Oh, right, because the Internet isn't a
safe place.

So, that was a bit of a rush. For about 8 seconds, I think my heart-rate
trippled.

I just got an email from my credit card saying my payment posted, and as I'm
opening it I'm thinking, "OK, mark another $100 off my checking." But when
I opened it, I saw that the listed payment amount was two thousand
dollars!! Suddenly I'm thinking to myself, oh shit, I don't
have two thousand dollars in my acount. How did I botch things
that badly! Decimals are important!

Then I remembered that I'd put in a balance transfer from that card to
another account with almost 1/2 the rate.

So, just poking around in what I can find -- I, for one, will probably like DnD v4 quite a bit more than any of the previous incarnations. Though I couldn't say exactly why...

Apparently this is an
ASCII art generator. I'ma check it out after work.

(For the uninitiated, ASCII is one of the computer codes used to represent
text; ASCII art is pictures formed from ASCII characters. It was really
popular in the old days, when grphical displays were... lacking. It's
apparently making a comback with spammers trying to get past
ever-more-clever spam filters. I found this generator on an article on that
subject.)

So apparently, you can now use Photobucket to have
actual prints made that you can pickup at your local Target. That's
kind of convenient.