I prefer the Summer season because I love the sun and warm weather, but Spring is cool because of the flowers. All of the pretty flowers are in bloom this time of year, which make for wonderful viewing. I thought I’d share a couple pics of flowers that grow in my front yard. These pics were taken exactly one year ago today—while there are currently flowers blooming in my yard, they don’t look like they did this time last year. The batch of flowers you see are no longer there because they grew wildly in the cracks and have since been cut away.

The roses bloom periodically during the year.

These flowers are no longer allowed to grow, as the gardener cut them like weeds. Pretty though, aren’t they?

Posted at 5:59 PM | (2)

WOOHOO! I just used Military Victory for the first time to beat Civ 3. So far I’ve won using Cultural, Space, Score-based, and now Military. I may have won another way, but I can’t remember at the moment.

Anyway, this game took me 16 hours to achieve the victory, but when all was said and done, I still didn’t rank very high on the Historical Scale. I guess it’s because I neglected some aspects of my Civ in my quest to build a huge army. This was the first time I waged war—all the other times I felt too guilty attacking people who were at peace with me. I felt bad this time too, but I have to admit that it started feeling pretty cool to destroy these people and ignore their pleas for a truce. Oh, the power! Heehee. In case anyone is interested, I played as Germany. The other times I played as the Babylonians. Germans kick ass. :)

I guess next time I’ll have to work on better strategy, or at least how to be a more powerful player in terms of the Historical Ranking. I JUST finished the game a few minutes ago, and now it is time for bed!

Goodnight!

Approaching my car upon leaving work, I was VERY disturbed to notice a NEW gash of paint removed from the trim of my rear right passenger door. I am not sure when this incident occurred, but I am guessing it was either yesterday or today, since I do not recall seeing it before. I am pretty sure it probably happened this morning, actually.

Why can’t people LOOK and carefully open their door, instead of just swinging them open at full force like barbarians. I mean, it’s common courtesy, not to mention that it also saves your car from incurring loss of paint. I now have a matching gash on each passenger door, which could easily have been prevented if people used a little common sense. Grr, it makes me SO mad!!

I suppose this is could be a sign that I need to actually use that touch-up paint I bought and fix those blemishes

*Sighs* Bunch of savages in this town!

I guess I decided that I’ve been teased enough about my choice of footwear, because I decided to go shoe shopping yesterday at Robinsons-May. If anyone knows me, they know that I wear the same pair of thongs practically 365 days a year (there are rare occasions when I wear tennis shoes or rarer occasions when I dress nice and then wear boots or nice strappy dress shoes). I know that they don’t REALLY match everything I own, and that they probably look downright silly with most of my outfits. However, I am lazy and also have a strong aversion to socks and closed-toe shoes.

The conflicting feelings of knowing I need variety and yet hating the confinement of “real” shoes and the problem of having to find shoes that match are what kept me from wanting to deal with it. However, I finally broke down yesterday and spent half an hour buying 3 pairs of shoes. Since I hadn’t bought any in like 2 years, I decided to buy a variety. I bought Sketcher tennis shoes that should go with most things, Steve Madden Loafers to wear when I want something nicer that aren’t boots or strappy, and Steve Madden Sandals for an alternative to my regular thongs. These purchases should tide me over for another 2 years or so—at least, that is my hope. I wouldn’t want to become TOO girly! ;)

Posted at 9:11 PM | (2)

Some of you may notice some subtle changes to my new layout. The font is bigger and there are a few different options on the left column. All of this is the result of switching to Moveable Type.

Switching provided the impetus for me to make the font a little larger (sometimes I felt it was a bit small) and add a little more functionality like individual archives, better comments, and a search option. I think the search option is the niftiest feature, btw.

The conversion turned out to be a bit of a pain in the ass. There is an import utility, but unfortunately I did SOMETHING wrong and it wouldn’t import the text—just the dates. I tell you, it does little good to have a blog solely documenting the time and date that I wrote something, but then doesn’t tell you what it was that I wrote!

After some trial and error I finally decided to manually import each entry. This took me a few hours over the course of two days, but I am finally finished, and I think that I am pleased with the result.

Feel free to look around and let me know if you see anything not working properly. Welcome to the “New and Improved” Icyshard.com!!

Posted at 8:28 PM | (1)

In the spirit of the upcoming Easter Holiday, I would like to share a few links with you. One of my favorite sites, X-Entertainment, has written an article entirely devoted to the Cadbury Creme Egg. I think I like this site so much because the guy who runs it is about my age, and thus we share a sense of nostalgia for the same items from our childhood.

I also came across a recent article discussing the popularity of Peeps. Also, a site that has been around awhile, but is still pretty amusing is this one, in which people have performed “scientific research” on these yummiest of marshmallow confections.

In other other news, I thought I would share that I purchased a new laptop—an IBM Thinkpad T30. It is way better than my current desktop, although I have no current plans to rid of this old system. I wanted one for a while and finally decided that even though it’s expensive, that my wanting one after so long was worth the expense. After all, I rarely buy anything nice for myself—I usually only purchase necessities and gifts for others; never for myself. I made sure it had wireless so I can web surf from the comforts of my bed. So far it’s pretty cool!

It’s been one year to the day since I started my blog; it hardly seems like that long. Anyway, I know that my updates have been scant lately, but that is because I am working on switching to Moveable Type. It has a lot of functionality and will allow me to keep better track of things; currently I use a program call Blog.

For instance, the comments program I use is cool and all, but I really have no way of knowing if anyone posts unless I look—and what if someone posts on an OLD entry?? This way I’ll know when someone posts. The other cool part is that I now feel really smart because I was able to get Moveable Type working! It requires Perl, CGI, and a database such as MySQL. Although I didn’t write the scripts myself or anything, it seems like if you can figure out how to get the thing running properly that you are practically a genius. The instructions are well-written, but there are so many variables that can go wrong during set-up. I would just like to say that they have an awesome support forum on their site.

Anyway, I’m still configuring to get it how I want it. Once I do, I will try to import things and hopefully be posting more regularly. I just wanted to post something so everyone would know I was still alive!

Thanks for visiting!

Welcome to my new home!!

Some of you might be a bit surprised that when you went to my site, you found out it has moved. After pondering it off and on for a while, I decided to finally register my own domain name. This will allow me to do bigger and better things with my site, as well as give me a bit of longevity should I ever stop using Cox for my cable internet.

Everything should be functioning as usual, but if you find anything wrong, please let me know! In the meantime I will be working on improving my site with features such as the ability to post comments. :)

Well, I didn’t include a couple days of play in the NCAA Tournament. Ultimately it doesn’t matter though because Texas lost on Saturday, effectively eliminating me from the pool. Oddly though, I didn’t finish in last place.

Today I came across this article, and even though I knew a little about this already, it’s still pretty interesting.

The following link is pretty funny. It is a Guide to Safety in Wartime, and basically it makes fun of all the ambiguous images that appear on government sites regarding what to do in case of terrorist attacks. I saw this a few weeks ago, but just thought of it for some reason and figured I’d share, in case a few of you have never seen it.

Not too long ago I got the Norah Jones CD “Come Away with Me.” Normally this isn’t my type of music and I probably wouldn’t have discovered it if I didn’t notice that it was consistently being highlighted on places like Amazon.com and Gracenote. I decided to give her a try. I put the CD in and let it play a few times. The first time I was hesitant since it’s not my style, but after awhile it really grew on me and I think she’s pretty cool. It’s hard to be in the mood to want to put her on over something more up-tempo, but once it’s on I don’t mind listening to the CD a bunch. Good stuff.

I’ve noticed a lot of blogs talking about their opinions on the war and government policy. You won’t find that here. I like to stay pretty out of the loop because I don’t find the News to be very interesting. It all seems the same to me, and ultimately it doesn’t matter if you’re informed or not because what’s going to happen is going to happen whether you think it should or not. I guess I’m more a fan of the “ignorance is bliss” mantra. I’ve always been that way. The only parts of history that interest me are the Medieval times, the era of British Royalty in the form of the Tudors and Stewarts and some others, and colonial America. Oh, I do have some weird fascination with Hitler—not in an approving sort of way, but in a “wow, it’s amazing what he got away with and how he did it” sort of way. I studied him in a bit more detail when I minored in German and I just found it fascinating for some reason.

OK that was my little rant, and the only political one you will hear. Unless Santa Barbara comes under terrorist attack, there will be no more mention of such things.