I happened to check the Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam just now and noticed the following image:

The images for the five minutes before and after that shot are:

I wonder if that’s lava from a dome collapse…

I have been neglectful of my “blogishness” lately – my apologies to my faithful readers.

All three of you.

I shall be writing about the stuff I’ve been up to shortly. Have no fear, I am still alive

I’m headed up to Bellingham tomorrow afternoon, stopping by my parent’s house in Snohomish on the way to pick up some stuff. This’ll be the first long-distance drive with this car, so it should be an interesting experience. I will likely write about it. To date, I’ve put 59 miles on the car, not including the miles for today. I still have to go to class and come back, so I’m not quite done yet. The trip up will probably be about four hours. I’m going to have Amanda’s dad do some stuff with the tire pressure and have him show me some basic maintenance so that at least I know how to check some of it. Friday, I’ll be taking Amanda down to Seattle for her orthodontist appointment, then we’ll both hightail it back down here to good old Olympia. Depending on how long Amanda intends to stay down here, I’m debating a drive down to Mt. St. Helens sometime this weekend. I haven’t yet decided.

The class I’m taking, Computers and Human Reason, is going very well. The faculty is awesome, as are the people I’m taking it with. So far, much of it is review, but we’re beginning to cover the topics that I’m not as intricately familiar with, starting with database design. I’m probably going to leave the apartment a little early today so I can sit down with Microsoft Access and do part of the assignment that I haven’t been able to do here at home, since I don’t have Access here at home.

If I find out that Amanda has Access, I’m basically going to kick myself. I don’t think she does, but if she’s reading this and she does, my reaction is as follows: oh.

We also just re-signed the lease on our Olympia apartment. We now have it through June 30, 2006. Go us.

I go home this afternoon to visit my parents. This is basically the only summer break I’m really going to get, which I’m actually okay with — most other summer breaks, for me, have just been sitting around doing very little.

Admittedly, I will still have plenty of opportunities to do just that, since I’m technically only working 10 hours/week. Of course, that doesn’t include any of my web design clients outside of Evergreen, so I’ll probably end up doing more like 12-15, depending upon whether I try to land any new clients or not.

Of course, I probably will try to land new clients, though I’m probably not going to be looking for any huge projects. If anyone reading this needs work done, feel free to contact me.

On a Prius-related note, Toyota of Kirkland had not one, not two, but three used 2004s listed yesterday (which has since gone down to two). It’s a shame that they’re all $26,850 and up, or I’d so be all over it. Same with the one 2002 Prius sitting at Titus Will in Tacoma — $18,000, I think they told me. Still way outside my meager price range.

One can dream. Speaking of that, I should think about sleep, but will probably write something more.

My Netflix queue now has exactly 500 movies on it. I won’t add to the list again until it hits 300.

Hah. Yeah, right. But I’ll try anyway.

Oh, and I posted the first screenshot from my "new" laptop. Enjoy.

School Stuff
I’ve been working on closing off this quarter, and I finally have a date: Thursday at 1. That’s when my evaluation appointment is and when my creative writing contract is officially complete.

I’m going to be working closely with the Writing Center this summer to do some web site revisions. One part of that is implementing a new database for the Center’s handout library, which is currently managed by hand and is a pain in the ass to keep accurate with updates. I’ll be doing the database work in PostgreSQL using ADOdb as a frontend to the DB work so that if we switch databases, the change will go seamlessly.

I’ve learned quite a bit from David Metzler, head of Network Services for the College, about how this should be properly implemented. I already knew quite a bit, but he’s helping me think about the system with slightly newer approaches and ideas that I haven’t considered before. I’m also doing the official documentation for the whole thing. The project is a test bed to see if Network Services can maintain an application successfully after the original maintainer leaves, so that should be cool to see.

Web Design Stuff
I’ve been working with a client in Florida to revamp an existing link management system. This has also been a learning experience, and I’m pretty sure the client will be satisfied with the final result. I’m going to make a big push this week to get that done. Hopefully, I’ll succeed.

Random Mentions
Congratulations to Jerry Chiang on his graduation from the University of Washington. Props to ya, Jer. Congrats to all members of the class of 2005!

Posted this over on LiveJournal, but I figured I’d post it here.

Okay, so like, I know there are already a ton of web sites that allow you to see area apartment rentals and stuff and that let you rate apartments (not all the same site — most sites do one or the other but never both). Think of rent.com, forrent.com, and apartmentratings.com.

Anyway, it struck me that most of these places don’t list a lot of apartment places in Oly. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a web site that listed all the Olympia-area apartment complexes and let you rate them in the same place?

Stupid idea, maybe, but I thought I’d ask the question.

I’m prone to crazy ideas.