A sure sign of an active life is an infrequently updated web journal.

So I had a pretty crazy weekend. Here goes.... I left school on friday at 2:15 to go down to Rome, Georgia to watch our highschool basketball team (guys) play in the state semifinals for class A. After a four hour ride we got out and cheered like maniacs. We couldn't have occupied more than one sixth of that stadium, but we made at least half of the noise. Our school's cheerleaders are somewhat worthless, they often just follow cheers that are started by the students, my friend Michael Coenen in particular. So we won the game and that was cool.

Faced with another three or four hour ride on the bus back to Athens, i hitched a ride on Brandon VanDyk's (spelling sorry) Dad's plane. It was a little four seater, single-propeller plane. and the ride was great! there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so i just watched the continuous stream of suburban lights pass by as we flew over Atlanta and to athens. I was able to pick out my neighborhood, downtown, both Taco Stands, the Varsity, and a good number of my other haunts. A really really cool experience.

On Saturday I woke up at 8:00 to take John, my sister, and her friend Nelle to the J&J flea market. At the market the girls got some old toys and Nelle got a funky shirt, John and I both got Ataris (I got an 800, he got a 2600) but we need new adapters to get them to work with the TV. I also got an old NES, and it works like a CHARM. I've been playing too much Mario and Zelda for my own good. So after we did the dirt mall shopping spree, we went and ate at the huddle house, which to our great surprise was far better in food quality than the Waffle house. I reccomend the barbecue. We took Madeline (my sister) and Nelle back home, and then we went to the Waffle house just to have someplace to be.

There, the butt feces game was invented. John has these two little peices of paper one says "Butt" (it was taken off of a Butterfinger wrapper) and the other says "Feces" (that's a long story) and we discovered that they can provide litterally hours of entertainment when applied to menus and ads and signs. "Free hashbrowns with order" becomes "Free feces with order" "Best burgers in town", "Best butt in town" and so on and so forth. We have yet to tire from this game, and we are beginning to irritate people i think.

There was a party at Austin, Kemp, and Russel's house. That was fun. I got my car stuck on some railroad ties (I didn't know they were there when I parked) and this half drunk marine named something Miller got us unstuck. It reaffirmed my faith in America.

Sunday was much more low-key. I bummed around the house until that evening when I went to Michael's to shoot a scene for What's the Deal 3, Powell's next movie. (I need to write something about Powells amazing talent sometime) anyway, without giving any thing away, let's just say that the segment will be very surprising and extremely gory.

Next week is spring break and I'm spending half of it in San Fransisco! Woohoo!

Happy birthday, Amit. I went over to his house last night. Some people were over. We watched a movie, went out to eat, walked around the neighborhood. Had a good time.

So I've been keeping up with the politics lately. Gonna vote this year. McCain certainly has an exciting thing going on, and I would really be a true blue supporter if I agreed with him on more issues. I like the school voucher's program and I'm for campaign finance reform too. I like his tax cut plan better than Bush's, unless he really does start to consider a flat tax.

I don't like the Republican views on things like environment & conservation. I'm worried about who he might put into the supreme court. I am also avidly pro-choice pro-gay rights and pro-gun control, so that puts me at odds with him. I'll probably end up voting for gore, but If a Republican gets into office, I'd much rather it be McCain than Bush.

Bush just doesn't impress me at all. He would be absolutely nowhere if it wasn't for his family. He would have never gotten the govenorship, and certainly he would have never even been considered as a potential president. His campaign exists on name recognition alone. His stance on issues certainly isn't anything that sets him apart from the typical republican, he's a govenor yes, but not a very outstanding one, and even then there are a lot of govenors and senators out there. He isn't much of a public speaker. He's really unremarkable in most ways except he has the name of a president. And way to get that Dan Quayle support, Jay Ar!

the Governor's Honors interview went well. I think I have a reasonable shot at getting in. While I was there I ran into Madhu (possible misspelling - sorry) who I hadn't seen since July at Duke. We talked caught up and wished each other well. Hi Madhu if you're reading this, it was nice to see you, hope we meet again this summer.

crazy hippie stuff

DATA MATCH LIVES!!!!! We made about $130 and everything worked fine, except there were misspellings.

I don't think I've written about Data Match yet. I'm the president/founder of our schools Technology Club, TACO. (That's Technology And Communication Orginization) This year instead of student council paying some outside company, i think "Computer Fun" to run our anual valentine's day Computer Dating service, TACO decided to run it and keep all of the mondey for ourselves. Spencer Rarrick and I wrote the matching software; if anyone wants the source code just e-mail me (colmore@colmore.com). And we charged everyone $1 to participate. It's looking like we might get about $200, which is really great considering how small the school is.

Tomorrow is Charles Darwin's birthday. Just something to think about.

I've got to write a speach this weekend. it only has to be four hundred words and it can be about anything. easy right? there's one little problem. It has to be IN LATIN. so that's going to be rough

I've also got an interview for Governor's Honors, which is this state program. If I get it then I get to spend six weeks out of my summer taking math classes at some college in central Georgia. I've found that these types of programs attract interesting people, so I hope to go.

That's about it.

Usually I try to abstain from writing about "nerd stuff" here at CDC, but today I think I'll have to digress, read older entries to not have to look at tech-speak.

So John's computer is 100% Microsoft Free now, he's gone totally linux. Which is just so cool. He telnetted from school to his computer (he's got a dedicated internet connection with his cable modem) and set up a web page on apache, the web server running on his computer. Before I forget to say it, this computer is one that he and I built -- making us super nerds. I can't remember his IP address, which is necisarry to see the page, and it probably isn't something he wants given out to the general public so, you can't see it.

I'm learning windows and DirectX programming, Microsoft uses (i'm not making this up) a style called "Hungarian Notation" which fits right in with the concept of Microsoft giving things stupid names. Because Hungarian notation is actually something unique from that company: it's sensible and it is easy to work with, so naming it after a foreign language that nobody knows and has nothing to do with programming is a bit odd. Also "plug and play" should really be "plug and re-install Windows 98" and windows 2000 is not the sequel to windows 98, it is the sequel to windows NT 4. Confused? The next Windows 95 will be Windows Millinium, which makes me think that Microsoft chose the name to cover their asses if they don't ship till 2001, "hey that's the real millinium! Remember the movie?"

I was out with Anne and Johnathan this morning, we ate bagels and drank coffee and talked about how terrible everyone is for about five hours, it was lots of fun.

MAXIS SOFTWARE

So anyway, i've been playing The Sims a lot. It's really an increadible game. I hope you check it out. You control a household and you have to manage entertainment time and work etc. Which may sound boring, until you experience the immense satisfaction of being able to afford that big green couch or getting your couple to fall in love or watching Jr. burn down the kitchen.

I'd just like to reflect on what a great game company Maxis is. Since elementary school I've been a giant fan of all of the sim titles. The Simcity line is unbeatable, Simearth was a classic, Simant and simfarm were good, but didn't really live up. Simtown can be skipped. But the ultimate gem of the whole line is probably the least appreciated one, Simlife. Simlife was so amazingly great. You designed creatures and then let them loose into the world and let Darwin take his course. By natural selection and random mutation the populations changed and evolved. I remember once I had evolved the perfect grazing animal, somewhat of a flying sheep (in fact it might have been a flying sheep, this was in 5th grade so I don't clearly recollect) and then I corralled off a section of the world and set out to make a super predator. I populated the big world with just ten preditors and within minutes the population balance of the whole world changed and I was down to about 25 sheep. All but two predators died off (luckily male and female) and the sheep population came back up, it's just like the introduction of dogs to Australia!! I guess you had to have been there, but man was it ever cool. They need to make a sequal to that game.