i could go on and on about what i’ve been doing for the last three months but that would be boring. the two highlights are below, more to come later (perhaps, assuming i get back to paying attention to this site):

Jury duty – i had been waiting for a jury duty summons since the day i turned 18. actually, i got one in june 2006 but it was from texas and i had just moved up here to chicago. while i was really excited about it going into it, i’m now not that sure i’d ever want to do it again (i lie, i so would). i have never met 11 other people who were so stupid (i was okay with the other 2). the biggest problem was that it was way on the southside and not convenient to public transportation from where i live. since i have no car, i relied on the bus and it was about an hour and a half journey each way.

New job – I accepted a job at an AWESOME digital agency in mid-december. tomorrow is my last day at the city of ideas and monday is my first day at the new place. it’s a bit weird to be leaving a place that i’ve gotten to know so well over the last four and a half years. but on that note, i’m also beyond excited about the new position and getting to try and challenge myself a bit more.

more to come later when i get around to having some free time to waste on this site.

so yeah, it’s been a while. i’ve been off working on ryanlovestv.com so much that i forget this even exists sometimes. it’s taking a lot more time to manage everything and get things to a point where i’m somewhat satisfied with them. i’m hoping that by january i will have a better feeling for if i am going to abandon it or not. i have a wacom tablet on loan and it’s making things a whole lot more fun so i’m starting to think this might be a bit of a hobby that i might keep up.

beyond that, a lot of my life has been centered around work. it has it’s high-points and it’s low-points. i’m trying to keep my head held high and make the best of everything.

yeah outside of those two things, nothing terribly exciting going on. i had a cold for like three weeks. that was sort of exciting.

i’m about to embark on a battle with apartment building management. what i thought was somebody smoking in the stairwell/hallway and leaving a foul smoky odor, which was luckily vented by an open window during the summer, turns out to be an odor coming from the lady across the hall’s apartment. it’s insanely horrible and now that colder weather has arrived and the stairwell window stays shut, apparently the odor now seeps in under my door and into my place. luckily it isn’t that bad yet but it’s rather disgusting. i was more hopeful of a victory when i thought that it was somebody smoking in the hallway but now that i know it’s someone smoking in their apartment, i fear i won’t have much course of action but to wait until my lease is up and then move. blerg, i have bad luck choosing apartments apparently.

so yes, my life is my website, work, and playing the role of smokey the bear.

the other big thing i spend my time doing is trying to decide if i want a kindle, a nook, or to wait and see if apple plans on releasing a tablet w/ e-reader capability next year. i really want an e-reader now but don’t want to regret it later should something better come around in the very near future.

that is all, for now.

i’m beginning to discover more and more that i’m just not a day person. i very well might be a vampire. i can’t seem to function between the hours of 6am and 11pm. when i’m at work i’m most productive from about 11pm onwards. i’m also starting to wonder if i don’t have a touch of ADD. all the noise and distraction has been effecting me a bit. i’ve been working best when i have my music on (particularly with headphones in) and can tune the outside noise out or after everyone has gone home for the day. oh how i miss they days when we each had our own office and could tune out the rest of the world and just work away.

work on my other site [ryanlovestv.com] is progressing along nicely i suppose. it’s sort of a bit exhausting, much more exhausting that i could have imagined. we shall see if i will keep up with it. i would like to but three weeks from now i might be thinking otherwise.

beyond that life has been pretty boring. lots of work. that’s about it.

i’ve been a bit bored in my free time and looking for a fun challenge. i thought my site/hobby was going to do it for me but i still am looking for a new challenge. drastic measures might be in order to find one.

something i really want to do is catch up on tons of reading. i’m really starting to want a kindle just for the convenience of being able to carry around a whole library in such a small device. plus the fact that most books are under $10 is pretty awesome. every week i find myself convincing myself i want one more and more.

okay i’m off to bed before i lose the ability to fall asleep for the night.

so i’ve been wanting a new project to work on recently. i’m happy to announce the initial launch of www.ryanlovestv.com. it’s still in its infancy but for the last three days i’ve spent several hours getting it in the shape it is in now. i’m rather excited because it’s turn out much better than i had thought it would. my only issue is that it probably wasn’t a good concept to execute. i initially thought there would be some level of novelty to it but i’m not even interested in the content and i’m writing it. i’m going to give it a 30-60 day incubation period to tweak it to where i would like the content to be but if i don’t get there i’m abandoning it. as it is now it’s turn tv watching into a bit more stressful ordeal, although as i had hoped, it has also definitely made me feel good about watching so much television. the real test will be the next few weeks as my tv schedule gets ridic.

in the meantime, i will continue to seek out another new project to work on.

other than that life has been boring. a whole lot of work and not much else. i’m rather excited that summer is coming to a close. there’s something about summer that just doesn’t appeal to me as much. fall and winter are definitely the most exciting.

the two most exciting things to happen in the last 7-10 days are: 1. installing snow leopard and 2. hanging out with some friends yesterday evening. beyond that i’m at a lack of exciting things to talk about. until next time.

well it is official. i have lost my battle with sleep. it has conquered me. i seriously just can’t win. i’m on this sleep cycle where i go two nights of only being able to sleep 3-5 hours and then having the following night of about 8-10 hours of sleep. then the cycle starts all over again. i am clearly not meant for a normal sleep schedule. i can’t even remember the last time i was on a normal sleep schedule. it seriously must have been back in sixth or seventh grade and that was about 13 years ago. 13 years of now sleep, i suppose it has just become second nature to me.

i wish i could sleep, it would sure come in handy. work has been rather busy lately. the good news is that while it has been busy i’ve caught up on the majority of the outstanding items i’ve been putting off. three more items that i need to get off my list and i will be 100% caught up. victory on my to-do list is near.

i don’t enjoy that i have been getting hungry at the most inopportune times lately. i wasn’t hungry all night and then all of a sudden, at 11p, i get really hungry. oh well, i will have to hold out until tomorrow. i would have gone to bed an hour or two ago but i’m waiting for midnight to hit so i can download imogen heap’s new album (ellipse). listening to the streaming preview for the last week was awesome but i’ve been dying to get my hands on the real thing.

in my free time this evening i started working on my self-performance review for work. i loathe having to do these things. if i could, i would just write “i am awesome” under each section and be done with this thing. but alas, i suppose i will have to put something more substantial than that. perhaps this year i won’t procrastinate four months before actually doing it?

i have decided i need a project. i need something to work on. something exciting and challenging. i’m not sure what it’s going to be though. i think my next big thing is to further my flash development skills but i need something even more exciting than that. i sort of miss grad school but i just don’t have the time to deal with classes at the moment. hmmm. surely there must be something else out there to keep my occupied. i will just have to figure that out i suppose.

in more exciting news (at least for me). i finally received my 1TB TiVo external hard drive. A-MAZING. i just hope that this thing doesn’t fail like that last one did. the expanded capacity that this has afforded me is going to be a lifesaver once all the new shows have premiered in the fall. after the old one had failed i was having to go through the tivo recordings everyday to make sure something that i really wanted didn’t get accidently deleted because of it running out of space. with the additional 1TB of space added on it can now record a total of over 165 hours of HDTV without any issues. so far it’s recorded a full week of programs (so far 231 shows) without having to delete anything. of those 231 shows about 90% of them are in HD. i am slightly concerned as to how excited this makes me.

that is all he wrote. for now.

i think this has been the never-ending week [month, quarter, year also?]. the good news is that i’m finally getting caught up on a whole lot of work that has kept getting put on the back burner. this will leave room to grab some more exciting things and throw them onto my desk. one thing i can’t seem to get enough is web analytics and reporting. my mind just boggles thinking about all the data that can be gained from online analytics. it’s becoming an obsession. the next step in this obsession will be to figure out a life plan based on it.

in order to make my commutes a bit more enjoyable, one thing i’ve been considering as of recent is acquiring a kindle. i have several internal conflicts over this item though. right now i think my hesitations will continue to hold out. while i would greatly appreciate the freedom of having thousands of books readily available at my fingertips for less than the cost of most paperbacks, i don’t know if that is enough to overcome the significant initial investment and the lack of being able to physically handle a book. such a toss-up. needless to say, the jury is still out on my decision to invest in a kindle.

and now i can’t remember what else i was originally going to say.

so i’m on the red line going home from work this evening around 7pm. when i got on the train there were these obnoxious girls, who were either pre-teens or early-teens, making lots of noise at the tiny compartment at the end of the car. well, by the time the train gets past addison these girls have moved closer to the door of the train and one of them ends up singing and dancing with one of the poles in the train. and she’s not dancing dancing, she’s full-on stripper dancing and humping this thing. this whole time while she is doing it i had to put 110% effort into not just start bursting out laughing. i did this not because i wanted to be nice and not make her feel bad but because had she gotten pissed off i’m sure she could have beaten me up. 12 year old girls could probably beat me up. my name is ryan and i am awkward.

[this has been the first test installment of the "ryan is awkward" series ... more to come]

… but don’t worry, i only lie about the funny/meaningless things in life.

the moral of the story is that i got to sketching out some redesigns for the site but every time i did, it ended up that i like what i have better anyway. so, in lieu of a big redesign i’m doing two things. the first would be that i’m making minor tweaks. nobody will really notice these except for myself, but there are a few things here and there that i need to take away and a few i need to add. i need to work on the background in particular. i didn’t realize i had repeat off and the image is so large that i didn’t notice that it looks weird if i am at my computer at work which has a much higher resolution. i can’t handle the bars on the sides and when i turn repeat on everything just looks odd. so i will edit to make it seamless. not that anybody cares, but whatever.

the other big change will be that now that i’ve finally got the design headed in a direction that i’m comfortable with, i’m going to go out and start developing some of my other tangent sites that i’ve been wanting to. i’ve bought a few more domain names and hope to start making something of a few of them. on the priority list: asseeninchicago.com (a photo blog/gallery, if i can get into snapping photos more often), hugecanofawesome.com (not quite sure what i want to do with this but i have a few ideas and it will be something fun), and ryanisawkward.com (a daily/weekly collection of all the awkward incidents that happen in my life and make it so amusing).

other than that i’ve been working. working like there’s no tomorrow. i did so well trying to keep my hours as close to 40/week for a while but i am ramping it up so i can stay on top of as much work as possible. the good news is that as much as it is stressful, i am still enjoying it quite a bit. sure there are some downsides, but overall my transition to the new team is progressing nicely.

okay, laundry is done and i am exhausted. more to follow soon. (okay i seriously just went through and read it for clarity’s sake. i have the worst grammar and spelling ever when i’m typing these things out. go me!)

okay i’m in the middle of re-imagining this site so updates might be sporadic for the next month or so (not that they haven’t been already).

the last month have been a bit crazy. actually, that’s sort of a lie. it’s been rather boring. i’m trying to inject some excitement into life but have failed at doing so thus far. small successes here and there but a few big failures. ah such is life.

overall, summer has been rather uneventful. i’m quite ready for summer to wrap up and for fall to set in.

that is all for the moment. more to come soon.