Happy Holidays, New Year, and Birthday.

First thing's first, children: Watch your speed and don't try to run through a yellow light when heading down Clarkson road. There are phototicket machines up there now.

Second thing's second: the freaking Ellisville, MO police department issued me a $100 ticket on my birthday. This is jive, man.

Third thing is, predictably, third: I haven't been on here in a while now. First it was work and school, then it was finals, then it was all the family stuff after finals, then I was actually physically in St Louis for a while. As for the last 2 weeks, I'm all out of excuses. As it is, I haven't read or made a blog post in well over a month, so I imagine I've got all kinds of back reading to do.

So, things that have happened with me lately:

My job is considerably easier now, since the veritable angel who is my boss was kind enough to cut my hours down to 20 per week. This is twice the favor given that January is our busiest time. I might have even overestimated exactly how much free time I actually need to stay current in my studies, but frankly it's my last semester, I'm burned out, and I would rather err on the side of having all the resources I need, especially time, to make sure that nothing goes wrong between now and May 7th.

After that, I will be Master Smith. I've never heard somebody with a master's degree insist on such an honorific, but if people with doctorates get to call themselves doctors, then by god I'm going to take the title that is rightfully mine come this Summer. Speaking of Summer, I have two missions during the months of May, June and July: prepare for and pass the CPA, and find a decent job. Ideally, I will do so in that order, but if promising work comes, I will jump on it and just make time to finish the exam in the course of things. If anyone works for a company that might be looking for a newly graduated Accounting Master/CPA I'd love to hear about that.

Saw Avatar last weekend. For the most part, I agree 100% with the reviews. Beautiful CGI, exciting action sequences, and the message was crammed way too far down our throats. Let me just stress, however, that what most people consider "putting too fine a point on it" usually comes across to me as a subtle undertone, so for me to feel like the moral lessons of this movie were oversold means they were really oversold. Still, the visuals really are like nothing we've seen before, and the 3D is actually pretty damn cool at certain points. I'd never seen a 3D movie before, and while it is most definitely a double-edged sword with the eye strain, I think this move was more enjoyable for it.

One other thing about Avatar, although this paragraph contains SPOILERS. I can accept that we found a planet inhabited by the Blue Man Group. I can, at a stretch, accept the premise that their capital village is sitting on top of a mountain of ore that actually bears the name "unobtainium." I can definitely accept that an interstellar mining company would visit genocide upon indigenous population to get at that ore. But when the big ending to the movie is that this interstellar mining corp is fucking with the one indigenous population in the universe whose god actually exists and gives a shit about them, the immersion was completely shattered. My suspension of disbelief goes a long way, but it has its limits. The movie was long enough anyway, the tribe should have just won that battle the normal way.

Christmas was awesome. I got a memory foam pillow, a one-hour massage coupon and a ps3, thanks to the price drop. Between my older brother gifting me all the games he doesn't play anymore, Steam's absolutely insane series of one-day deals and Gamefly, I have substantially more electronic information at my disposal than I have the time or even inclination to indulge in. What's really nice is that it doubles as not only a blue-ray player, but a portable netflix streaming device, which means I can watch online netflix movies from literally anywhere with a TV and a wireless internet signal.

And the random bit of praise for a minor technological marvel brings me to an observation that I'm surely not the first to make. We nerds really turned things around this decade. Back in 90's, we were the outcasts. We were the ones that couldn't get dates, didn't fit in, and got made fun of in the movies. But now the entire world knows the name of google. Video games are starting to rival movies for opening weekend revenues. A Star Trek movie was made that the general population liked. Animation is now an acceptable medium for entertaining people over the age of six. Technology is cool, and knowing how to use it is something people actually value. There is more than one television station dedicated largely or exclusively to technology news. We may still have a hard time finding dates, but you can't deny that this has been a nerd's decade, and it has been glorious.

And of course, we sent the decade out with an appropriate bang at Evan's new pad. It was a great New Year's party, and I'd like to thank whoever it was that woke me up for the ball drop. I'd also like to thank Evan and Theo, for letting me crash during the weekend of New Year's and my birthday. And Andrea, before that Sunday night, I'd never in my life set foot in a limosine. For a few moments, I felt like a rock star, and I'm damn grateful for the experience.

My birthday passed with a minimum of fanfare, mostly because I'd celebrated so much the preceding weekend that I simply had no energy left. I got a couple of lovely tidings from my friends, for which I am, again, thankful. I also apparently got an uncontestable ticket from the Ellisville police dept, although they waited until I was out of town to inform me of that. However, the world is so frequently unfair in my favor that I'm not even going to bother getting annoyed at one undeserved ticket. But seriously, light was yellow.

Well, I've covered the Christmas post, the New Year's post, the end-of-a-decade post, the birthday post, and a short movie review. I think I'm about caught up.

May the new decade bring good times to us all.



PS: Go donate some money to Haiti. Let me put it to you like this: The most powerful nuclear device known to the public record, the Tsar bomb built by the Russian military, has an explosive force equal to approximately 7.1 on the Richter scale. This quake was at least a 7.0. Haiti got fuggin nuked. I don't know whether to be scared that something that powerful can just happen out of the blue, or that man has the power to visit that kind of devestation on demand, but in either event those people need help.

For the price of a nice bottle of liquor, you can keep somebody from dying.