Just real quick, before I go to bed, I wanted to share this with you all:

This was my summer.

Nearly 8,000 miles not including stops, getting lost, or detours to the world famous Corn Palace.

Spending 20 days on the road,
Crashing in like 7 hotels, 3 National parks, 2 relatives’ places, 2 friends’ places.
Something like 30 major cities, with tons in between.

Seeing Chicago, Omaha, Rapid City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Mountain View, San Jose, Ridgecrest, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Studio City, Universal City, Laguna, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, San Clemente, Costa Mesa, Albuquerque, Roswell, Carlsbad, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Nashville, Atlantic City, and State College, not to mention tons of little towns in between.

Eating Chicago Pizza, Drinking Omaha Microbrews, Driving in the cloudy Mt. Rushmore weather, Getting stuck in tourist traps that brainwash you, hanging out in the garden of the gods, climbing pike’s peak, viewing vast amounts of nothingness, witnessing the great salt lake, marveling at Yosemite national park, driving through san francisco, shopping on Haight st, trampling through the mojave desert, bordering death valley, spending the day amongst the great sequoias, hiking around the joshua trees, attempting to surf the pacific, longboarding every day, spending 2 months in long beach, frequently shopping and skating beverly hills, meeting amazing californian people, learning as much about southern california as possible, cruising the real route 66, hunting aliens and surviving storms outside Roswell, pissing off cops in Texas, crashing their parks at 5am, doing the whole bourbon street thing, beers and music in nashville, Braving DC/Baltimore/Philly Traffic, Casinos in Atlantic city, Having my feet in two oceans within a week of eachother, and making all back in one piece to good old State College. Seriously, that’s about as short as I can put it, and there’s a whole lot of stuff in between all that…

I love summertime, With the way things have been going, I’ve got one hell of an adventure to top.

How was yours? =)

UPDATE: Steve thinks that changing his site (which was wonderful, by the way) is going to deter this post. Not true. I’ve updated the links to more/better ways to acquaint yourself with him. If he changes those, I’ll just start taking pictures and hosting them myself

—

O Glorious competition! I would like to take this opportunity to thank my great friend and roommate, STEVEY G for his seventh-place victory in the HPTi PROBLEM SOLVING COMPETITION. Steve and I had competed, and he bested me in the ranking by three places.

Our apartment is known for many things. One such thing is that every weekend, there must be a baked-good. One of the three roommates will bake something for the weekend, and we go in a rotation. Last night, as per our previous agreement, I baked brownies in place of Steve “I’M A RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUAL” G. having to bake something, because he placed higher than me in the HPTi PROBLEM SOLVING COMPETITION.

The competition, geared towards students of information science & technology (IST), computer science, and computer engineering majors, was held yesterday. It was designed by HPTi, High Performance Technologies Inc. YET it actually had no high-performance-technological requirements whatsoever. It was about emergency management, and let me tell you, nobody manages better than Steve, which is why his team placed 7th out of the 15. Regrettably my (extremely skilled) team of a project manager, a security expert, and a systems developer simply did not have the skills that FRIEND STEVE has, and I simply have to accept the fact that he is, overall, a better person.

Ah yes, but there’s more! Steve “NINETEEN-SIXTY-FIVE, WHO CAN SAY THAT?!” G., is a compassionate individual. Steve took time out of his busy schedule of stealing inflatable dolphins from student centers to decorate my room. Below are the photos.

I tip my hat to you, Steve.

Dear far-and-few-between-hoot-giving-readers,

I just wanted to give a quick FYI about my photoblog. Along with some bugfixes rolling out sometime between Friday morning and Friday evening, there will begin a constant flow of new photos. One new every day for I’d guess like 2 months at least. Once I finish processing the last dozen or so, they’ll update every morning at I think maybe 3am or so (this server lives in California, so 12am pacific time). This gives me enough time to get out and take some nice, domestic pictures around here while you guys see some of my artsier attempts from Europe and the Caribbean.

I really hope you like them all. I definitely had fun taking them.

Also, thanks to my friend Z for prompting me to get off my ass. Congrats to him for just launching his blog, too. You should check it out if you’re into techy stuff.

Update: I just finished adding photos to the in-pile. There’s 86 total that I think are photoblog material and a picture of a slice of cheese that smiled at me, which is nearly 3 months of photos. Jubilation.

Another Update: I’m questioning using Flickr on the side here. Would it make more sense to pipe the PB’s RSS feed and display the past four posts of that? They sure update a hell of a lot more considering my last photo in flickr was added like a year ago. Your thoughts?

Ignore this.
Image!

The blog’s going to be undergoing some changes today. I’m really fed up with the current theme so I’m making my own, hopefully it’ll be mostly done today at some point. Then I can tell you all about my trip.

You know, it feels good to be back. And with that, I’m leaving for Michigan. More to come when I’m back.

PS Enjoy the new site (e-mail me with bugs, and yes I know it’s not validated yet but most of it should). If you know anyone who could be in need of my services, send me a line (my portfolio is pathetic right now, anything will help).

Best wishes,
Tim

All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy. All work and no play makes Tim a dull boy.
No sleep, no peace, and a handful of unresolvable problems make Tim feel awful.

Sometimes when I look in the mirror I feel like absolutely nothing is staring back at me. The dark circles just serve to remind me that whatever I’m facing, I’m losing against.

…

“You can’t do this forever.”

…

Yeah, I know, but I don’t know what to do anymore =/

Well, I’m having a rough time cutting 6 months down into a readable entry, but in the meantime, I’ve devised this list of stuff that sort of explains me to the new readers here.

One last thing — if you want to add something about me, or affirm/argue anything that I’ve put up, slam it in the comments section!