Back to school

The first week of school is now almost over! And that means that the effective summer now seems long gone, even though the scorching heat is relentlessly beating down our heads.

In retrospect, the summer has been very productive. Although I haven't touched the multitide of mini-projects I was planning on touching, what I did spend time on turned out well. And as much as I can help it, I will try to make the upcoming semester feel like the summer did. Easy going, productive, and sweaty. So far, it's looking good - at least I've been sweating. I also managed to schedule all of my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means most of my weekdays are relatively easy going. And on wednesdays I get to rehearse once again with the wonderful Scorpius Dance Theatre for their upcoming production of Vampire Tale.

The big happy news is that Jessica and I are going down to Tucson for the weekend to celebrate our first anniversary. We will be staying at a bed and breakfast with a massaging jacuzzi in our bathroom and lined up massage appointments. Yay :-)

The big sad news is that a wonderful faculty member of the ASU dance department has been denied tenure!!! I am sad and disheartened, and in the process of writing e-mails about it to people.

Summer of Code

The conceptual summer is hitting the last 1/3 of it's existence and I am nowhere near being ready for it to finish. Even though this summer has been horrible in two aspects, that I was not able to go home to Croatia at all, and that I had to spend 95% of it away from my girlfriend, I have grown quite fond of it.

My primary occupation is my Summer of Code project, which has brought new friends, new knowledge, and new skills. It also brought a new lifestyle which I thoroughly enjoy - I do whatever I feel like all day long. I have had to use the alarm clock twice this summer, and I am yet to deny myself a nap. I am trying very hard to find out whether there is any way of keeping this lifestyle past the summer's end.

The coming year will also be a new experience for me - it will be the first summer I am not getting paid by the Arts, Media and Engineering Program, but instead through a teaching assistantship from the Computer Science department. I am yet to find out what all that will mean. Hopefully it will be a good thing.

More rambles to come.

Website Moved, Life Moving

It's been quite a while since the last time I posted anything, and a lot of things have happened since. Some of the happy things are that I am now in a happy relationship with a happy girlfriend, I have potentially finished my coursework for my Ph. D. degree, and I have had a paper accepted to a good conference.

Some of the unhappy things that have happened is that another good friend passed away... but I will write more about that later. Also, I am now unable to return to Croatia unless I plan to stay there until I finish my military service.

But overall, life is good, food is good.... And Global warming is NOT good, go see http://www.climatecrisis.net/ and DO something about it. I have started with not taking long showers any more.

aDDictiOns

Sometime in January, if I remember correctly, I developed an addiction involving Dungeons and Dragons Online, which is a multiplayer online version of the fantasy role playing game. If you don't know what I'm talking about, imagine a virtual world where people from all over the world log on and gang up on unsuspecting monsters. My addiction with this game has recently had (another) flare-up, to the point where I got absolutely nothing done for weeks except for pissing off a whole bunch of virtual monsters.

Yesterday, I found an ingenious way to turn the addiction into a source of unlimited productivity. For each day, I now make a To-Do list. And my rule is, until it all gets done, no Dungeons and Dragons. The result is incredible! - I have gotten more things done in the past two days than I have in the past month. And now, whenever I think of something that I should do, I just mark it down for one of the upcoming days, and I know it will get done! It's like magic!!! As long as this addiction keeps working, I can use it to fuel the rest of my life!

So, the last thing on my list for the day was updating my blog. And hey, it's done! OK, off to D&D land :-) I'll try to do this once a week from now on.

Phoenix-Cologne-Amsterdam-Cologne-Pula

I am now home in Croatia, after spending a week with my brother's family in Cologne, and getting to meet/re-meet my three beautiful german-croatian nieces. It is worth noting that Mac OS X is a big hit with children, with the Dock animations inciting much laughter, and Expose sending them into an absolute frenzy. However, taking photos with Photo Booth is the ultimate favorite - during the course of the week, the girls took about 400 of what has been termed "Kwatsch Foto". I will put up some examples, so that those of you poor people that don't have the luxury of Mac can see what I mean.

I have to say that it is simply wonderful to be home now, especially not getting paid and not having any committments. Well, no committments is wonderful. As the lady from my dream said the other day, "In this room, flying bullets turn into scribbles suspended in air, and the sounds of bombs transmute into casual conversation. It's what makes it a room." (At the time, I was being chased by a heavily armed police squadron for what I believe was a case of illegal parking. From an incredibly ingenious cinnematic cut following this scene, I was lead to assume that I emerged victorious from this enconter, and proceeded to lead the robots onto some unknown satellite where they became the inferior race. Don't ask.)

Turning 27 on the dance floor

As my friend AJ says, the big 2-7 :-).

My birthday was on the Monday the 3rd, but with the time zone difference I figured it started on Sunday at 3pm. Strangely enough, precisely at 3pm on Sunday I was on stage, performing in the undergraduate concert at ASU. Rather poorly, admittedly, but that's OK, at least the earlier night's performance went pretty well.

So my birthday started on the dance floor! And even more strangely, around the time I was actually born (which turned out to be around 11/12 in this time zone), I was on a dance floor again! I was at a fancy wine bar with friends, watching a flamenco performance, and following a trip to the bathroom I came out to cheering and applause, apparently since my birthday was announced while I was taking a whiz. I was taken to the dance floor, and supposedly did a decent job at following the flamenco dancers in their birthday dance.

Meanwhile, some random woman that was also celebrating her birthday stuck a silly hat on my head. I'll try to post some pictures if I get them.

This blog needs a cheerful entry

That's right! I think I've been taking the world way too seriously recently. But today, this wonderful worm crawled out of my head, mounted my forehead, and dangled a big sign that said "Whateva' - I do what I want!". It was a Southpark worm, OK?

Soo, I got to spend a week in Lake Tahoe recently, with my mostest wonderfulest friend Maria, and boy, was that a treat for all the senses! It was like seven days of foreplay along about seven different dimensions. We event went skiing one afternoon!! It's been ten years since I went skiing. It was great, and I found that now that my fear of hights has largely gone away, I have to go a lot faster for the same amount of thrill. It's too bad that great times with great friends can only last for so long....

I feel like dancing tango... I don't really know how to dance tango, but that's OK. Maybe I can move to Argentina some day and learn how to do it properly. Or maybe I could just go visit sometime soon?

OK, off to bed. Post not long enough for you? Whateva'... :-)