David was pasting hotornot pictures and stuff, and I noticed that underneath each picture it says “You can share this with a friend” and then has a link underneath that… But how can we be sure that they mean you can share the link?
I think that what it’s actually doing is saying all women are objects. Objects that you should share with your friends.

That’s almost certainly what they really mean.

So, MSN has had custom emoticons for a while, so you can put little silly pictures of your choosing in your messages. Unfortunately you’re ony allowed to send 5 different custom emoticons per message.

That didn’t stop me from doing this though:

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It doesn’t seem like I’ll be spending my money now… I’ll most probably be saving it for the summer so I can get a bunch of stuff I’ll be needing at the time. Oh well. At least the summer will be lots of fun.

I had a nice Easter meal yesterday with Laura, her family, and some more extended family. It was good. Very tasty.

Laura and I played chess too, which is something we’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. I like chess.

Well, it’s definitely summer now. I keep opening my blinds in the morning expecting to see fog or rain, but it’s back to how it was last year. Every day it’s sunny. It’s still amazing to me that the weather is so reliable. Imagine waking up in England and expecting it to be sunny every day for more than 3 days in a row.

Also, the sunburn on my neck isn’t painful any more. So that’s good.

I still don’t know for sure what I should spend my $200 on.
I saw lots of cool thing yesterday because Laura and I went to Best Buy and the new Fry’s that just opened nearby.
I could buy a bunch of DVDs, a few computer games, a 250GB hard drive, a DVD writer, a cell phone, Final Fantasy XI with a 40gb Playstation 2 hard drive…
But they all seem like kind of a waste of money.

Then of course, there’s a trip to Los Angeles. I was looking up lots of information o nthe costs of getting to LA and it seems that I can get there and back for $90 by the big grey dog. It would cost $44.99 per night to stay at Motel 6 and I could go on a 6 hour tour of LA for $51…
So after 1 night there and that tour I would have to return… But I would have seen most of the sights by then anyway, so that’s not a problem.
The journey down there is just over 8 hours… The same to get back obviously. 6 more hours on a tour bus… That would be 22 hours sat on buses in 2 days. Loads of fun, oh yes.
One of the annoying things is that I have to sort out my return journey so that I arrive some time in the early morning so that I can still catch a bus back up to my house when I finally get back to Walnut Creek. So that means leaving at around 10pm the night before or something.

Do I really want to be hanging out in Inglewood at a greyhound station by myself at 10pm? Sure, go for it, what’s the worst that could happen? I don’t want to think about that actually.

Yesterday I was awake at about 4am, and so by the time it reached 7 I was bored.
I asked people to suggest somewhere for me to go on the BART system map. David suggested fremont, and so that’s where I decided to go.

First off I looked up some stuff in Fremont, to see what I was letting myself in for, and to come up with some sort of visit plan. I found a place called Central Park and I even got a current picture of the place thanks to a webcam there.

So, I decided I would go to Central Park, and I would find this webcam, wherever it is, and be on it.
I left at 7:50am and spent a bunch of time on BART traveling there. 🙁
At about 10:09 I finally arrived in front of that webcam 😀

I hung around in various stupid poses (10:18 and 10:36) and then headed over to Network Associates Coliseum and picked up the tickets for the game.

With the tickets now claimed I got back on BART, again, and went back to Lafayette and proceeded to walk all the way to Laura’s house from the BART station, via Baja Fresh for a nice chicken quesadilla and some Sierra Mist. Mmmm, tasty.

After hanging out in the front yard for a while on their tree swing Laura’s mom got back from shopping and let me in. A few minutes later Laura arrived back from school. A couple of hours after that Jenna came over (her birthday was the same day as mine), and it was time to eat some birthday cake 😀

Laura’s mom made an extremely tasty cake, polkadot cake mixture with home made icing on it. It was very tasty indeed. Especially with ice cream.

After that Laura and I headed back over to BART and caught a couple of different trains back to the coliseum.

The game was great, we were sat in the bleachers with a bunch of crazy fans, it was cool.

For quite a while the A’s were losing, and that was annoying, but they came back to win the game 8-6. So all was well, unless you’re a Seattle Mariners fan 😛

I took pictures of lots of stuff yesterday, I’ll upload them at some point soon.

EDIT

Pictures can be found here:
Fremont
Fremont – Central Park Webcam
Network Associates Coliseum

And one picture which I put in the random directory as it doesn’t fit anywhere else. It won’t mean anything unless you know Mansfield at all. The pictures was taken yesterday in Lafayette.

Also, in case anyone wonders how I managed to save webcam pictures of myself several miles away from my house… I wrote a really quick and easy Perl script and ran it from Cyon’ server. Thanks Cyon.

Yesterday was my birthday, as I’m sure you all know.
Laura came over after school and we headed over to Oakland/Berkeley for Fish and Chips! Yes, you heard me, fish and chips, fantastic.
Of course, they were a bit different to the ones in England, the chips were thin and stuff, the fish batter was different, but it was still excellent.
Also, today I’m going to a baseball game with Laura 😀

I spoke to my dad on Skype for an hour, after a few hours of trying to get everything working for him. I’m so glad that remote desktop connections work.
My dad said to take $200 out of my account and spend it on myself for my birthday!
I could .. buy an Xbox or something… Half a video camera… I dunno, they seem like a total waste at the moment. The video camera would be nice, I guess.

I don’t know what to do today, I kind of feel like catching BART to San Francisco or something, but I’d be going alone because Laura’s in school. Plus, I don’t know what I’d do there. It’d be cool to just browse the shops and stuff, but then I’d spend all of my $200 on complete crap, or more clothes, and I have enough clothes for my liking.

Hrmm, the moer I think about it the more I think a video camera would be cool. Get some videos of stuff out here and send them back home on CD or something. I lvoe the way a CD is international and it’ll definitely play on any computer (with the right codec). It’s so much better than video cassettes, and DVDs are annoying with their stupid region protection.
Oooh, I could buy a DVD writer… Now that option has potential. Or a second hand laptop… Blah, I don’t know.

Meh, bye.

So, I’m 20 years and a few minutes old.

I’m not a teenager any more.

…

Wow.

I didn’t sleep at all last night. So I watched 24 instead. Then I showered at about 6:45am, shaved a little later, got ready and then sat and spoke on IRC. Fun fun fun.
I jokingly suggested to a guy on IRC, who goes by the name of mowgli, that he should come pick me up (he lives about 40 minutes away) and drive me to the DMV… And he did. o_O Crazy.

I’ve now met 6 people in person that I first spoke to on IRC.

So, mowgli is cool 🙂 He studied in his car while I was in the DMV (over an hour).

I had to pay with cash using only $1 and $5 bills, which was annoying because I only had a 20 and also the fee was $24. So I walked over to a gas station and asked the guy behind the counter to change two 20s (got one more from the ATM in the station). Unfortunately he was being a complete dick, and he would only change one of my twenties. So I changed one and then bought a pack of gum with the other 😀

I went back to the DMV, payed my fee, gave my thumb print, had my photo taken, took the test… Got it graded…

I got 5 wrong :'(

Luckily you’re allowed to get 8 wrong, so I passed :D:D:D:D:D:D

I now have a permit, yay me!

When mowgli drove me back to my street he surprised me by letting me drive his car. 😀
I didn’t drive far and certainly not very fast. I drove down my street, took a left onto another court, turned around and went back up my street again. I was driving! Amazing.

After that mowgli and I sat and spoke about computers and stupid people and AOL … and Linux, and then he went back home to study some more and I came in and typed this.

And they all lived happily ever after.

I was in the process of finding out which tax form I need to fill out, as the people in college still have not got in touch with me and I keep forgetting to go there in person. Hopefully they’ll email me in the next few days or something.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure I have the correct form now, there aren’t very many and this seems to be the only one that fits me.
All of that isn’t the reason I’m posting though. I was reading what constitutes the United States because I was bored and I read this:

The term United States includes the following areas.

1. All 50 states and the District of Columbia.
2. The territorial waters of the United States.
3. The seabed and subsoil of those submarine areas that are adjacent to U.S. territorial waters and over which the United States has exclusive rights under international law to explore and exploit natural resources.

I added the emphasis myself so that you know which part I found most interesting.
Why the word exploit? Surely they could have thought of something with better connotations than that. :\ “use” perhaps, that sounds better.

Oh well, I thought it was interesting.

Craig, I figured the easiest way to give you the picture is like this:

Hope that’s good enough for you. If not then just let me know what you want a bit better, or create the picture yourself from one of the pictures at the proper site.