Nothing really interesting to share at this moment - just thought that it would be a good idea to post something before the end of this month to let whoever's reading this blog know that I am still alive.

You know, it's good to be alive: breathing rocks.

Also, finished reading Hamlet today. It and King Lear (which I read a week or so ago) were pain in the neck to read/understand. I know what exactly happened in the plays yet I have difficulty understanding its full, deeper meaning (if there's any, that is). Without the understanding of those meanings all I find in these plays are just plain stupidity.

Perhaps that was what they were all about - they are tragedies after all.

Ah... I did not intend to have this post be this lengthy (not really that long but longer than that I have originally intended), but I think I should note that school started this past Wednesday (the 27th) and it just gives me quite a bit of headache but I guess I will (have to) live with that.

One last year of high school and I will make it memorable (in a good way).

Picture taken during the trip to Cedar Point in August 2005

<rant inb4="childish"> I felt really depressed (/like crap) for most parts of the last few days, emotionally speaking. I have never felt this way before, not for a good couple of years anyway. It sucked. I knew that I shouldn't put too much emotion into that in the first place but unfortunately I failed to do so. Well, screw that, since it's something that will make me go so fucking depress and that it will be buried under the Atlantic pond till the next millennium (unless someone digs it up), this shall never be brought up as a conversation piece. I am just writing this now because I want to remember that on this week of 2008 I am not the happy person that I have always been.

However, I believe in "tomorrow is a new day" so I won't let any of these things affect me. xD </rant>

Now for a few things that are of a bit more positive nature:

1) I went to the juvenile court on Tuesday and they dismissed the case of that car accident that I unfortunately got involved in in mid-May.

2) Started going to a Summer Engineering Program at the Ohio State University. The program is pretty fun and exciting, except that the "side-effects" (not related to the program itself) are the above mentioned sadness. :(

What a week (and it's not even over yet).

It's really small and fragile actually, about the size of a kid's palm (guesstimation).

The sunflower my mom planted a while back bloomed for the first time today. I think it's really beautiful, may it not be quite as beautiful as those that are fully bloomed, it gives me a sense of peace and calm at this (kind of, but not really) chaotic time of my life.

It was pretty shy yesterday. ;)

Side note: I have a small project underway that I have been planning for the last couple weeks/months, but never got around to post about it but I hope that I can get to it ASAP. Stay tune!

The (screencast) video embedded here is 7.4MB (click the little icon on the left of the volume control to enlarge). The original video is 1MB in WMV format.

Finally got around to empty my overwhelmed Google Reader which has OVER 9000 unread items. Well, I don't really know the exactly figure* of the unread items, but it should be pretty close to 9000, or perhaps it was indeed OVER 9000, given that the feeds from Flickr alone has 2102 items (most of them were tagged with "google") and the items in the "mark-as-read" folder usually have at least twice/thrice as much as Flickr.

Took me a bit over 3 hours to go through all 3829 of them that I didn't "mark as read" right away. To be honest, it was quite boring, but there are a couple of really interesting posts from the "Googler" folder and from the Flickr blog that posts collections of amazing photos from the site itself (of course, uploaded by its members).

Yihaa!

* This helped me figure out that Google Reader doesn't include items that were "mark as read" into Google Reader's Trends.

Phew, finally.