Sunstorm's log

It sucks that I update LJ so rarely that a lot of people I used to know online aren't around anymore, as far as I can tell from paging down my friends list. There's like 3 or 4 regular updaters left, and I don't even know half of you that well.

If anyone still wants to keep in touch, I'm a bit more active on Facebook, I follow Reddit daily and I very occasionally write about programming on my blog. It's all very 2.0.

I'd like to link up with people again in some way because it's been kinda lonely on the internet lately, and I'm not exactly the type to go out and meet new people. I've been adding people on Facebook from my old contact lists, so if you get a friend add from a guy with a funny name and goggles, that's me.

I've changed my personal email/Live Messenger address. My new address, no longer featuring the unfashionable number at the end is thus:

i a m s u n s t o r m @ h o t m a i l . c o m

Anyone interested in keeping in touch should update their contacts.

I should ellaborate on my last post now that I've had some sleep. Here's a much more comprehensive list of the sheer unbridled awesomeness that went on last night.

• Last day of Rock in Rio, the biggest Portuguese music festival. My connections at the music website I worked with arrange me a free ticket.
• Park motorcycle right in front of the entrance. Wearing all black with a glowing chinese dragon shirt. Hair down.
• Make my way through 80.000 people to about the center of the venue. Get a completely unobstructed view of the stage due to being taller than everyone else.
• Muse concert. They start off with Knights of Cydonia and make their way through all the favorites. Hearing them live is amazing.
• Using the between-concert shuffle, I make my way up to about 50 feet from the stage. All concepts of personal space become nonexistent.
• Offspring concert. The whole area turns into one gigantic moshpit. The ocean tide? It's got nothing on the crushing weight of a thousand moving people. Mosh I do. For Sparta.
• Between concerts, through sheer muscle and willpower, I push onward to the front rows, right up until I'm holding the fence. In front of me, the stage. Behind me, a crowd of a hundred thousand.
• Linkin Park concert. They play all of their best songs, and not just from their latest album, but from the older ones too.
• During Points of Authority, Chester jumps from the stage and comes up to the fence right beside me, and leans into the audience to let people grab and touch him. I go for it just like everyone else. Then he just grabs my hand in the air and shakes it. EPIC AWESOME.
• The concert ends, but everyone's going so wild that they come out again and do an encore of four more songs, making for a total of 22.
• My entire body hurts from holding back the crowd, my throat is burning from all the screaming and singing, and I'm thirsty and hungry for keeping my place for 6 hours, but it was totally worth it.

Today, after sleeping it off, I've scoured for the TV footage of the concert to see if this moment of glory was recorded. And here it is:


( Photographic proof )

These glasses cost 530€ in stores (that's $826 for you infidels). Worth it or not?

As a nice coincidence with V-day, I've been living together with 3k for exactly three months. We celebrated by going to Pizza Hut.

Aside from mentioning it in person to a couple of people, I don't think I've actually reported this on the internet before. Over her arrival, my real life got a lot more interesting, and because of that, my attention has been diverted from my feeble attempts at keeping an active online persona. My workload has also significantly increased recently, giving me even less time to spend on things like keeping a journal.

It's been good. Despite the language barrier, she's settled in pretty well, and we've got something of a rudimentary structure of a life going. I go to work and do my programming as usual, and she's taken to drawing and cooking. This is working out great for me because I actually get to have dinner every day now. I bought her some books on cooking, and dinner keeps getting better and better, to the point where it became a highlight of my day to look forward to. And she loves to bake all sorts of cakes and cookies, which I now never have a shortage of.

Her drawing activity consists mostly of Sonic pictures for her website, and that's just fine; I'm really fond of how much of a hardcore Sonic fan she is. I've been giving her some very serious pointers on how to get better at drawing though, like forcefully coercing her to learn to draw in perspective. We've also figured out that she's actually a leftie that got wrongly trained to write with her right hand. The quality of her pictures has been increasing dramatically since then.

We go to the gym together now, and that's also brought upon visible progress for both of us, especially since it's much harder to slack off.  I've worked up to pressing 160 pounds, which is just 15 pounds away from the milestone of pressing my own weight, and the aerobics classes I go to have made me quite proud of what I look like right now, considering how atypical it is for nerds and programmers to have abs.

In programming, I've made a few advances as well. I'm getting to a level where I consider myself an expert in PHP. What I have to show for it is a pretty powerful library of classes that I've built up and organized over time, that ranges from things like common functions that augment PHP, to drop-in HTML components, to MVC framework skeletons. I might eventually release it, when I feel that it's mature enough. I'm also thinking of starting a programming blog, where I can write about all sorts of programming stuff, since I'd definately be unable to find an audience for it here, but right now I'm just struggling with the problem of finding the time and patience to actually write some content. I also plan to make all of my achievements concrete by taking the Zend Certified Engineer certification in a not too distant future. I'd do it in a near future, but I simply don't have the money for it.

If there's anything I'm having problems with right now it's money. Money's going away at a faster rate than I'm making it, and it's not like I'm wasting it on things I don't need. Just the house payments, bills, and essential expenses, are enough to make sure that I spend more than I earn every month. This month, I've hit the limit on my credit card, which is troubling, since that was was keeping me afloat for the past couple of months. 3k's got a bit saved up, and I guess I could ask her, but I don't want to if I can help it, since she doesn't actually have a job yet, and she does pay for her share of the food and the gym membership. In any case, I've been working to remedy this situation.

Part of the problem lies in that the company I work for can't afford to pay me more. I feel like I should earn more, considering the work I've been doing, but, it just didn't work out how we all expected to. The whole music download business hasn't really caught up in Portugal, which has left us dry when it comes to profits (there are none). So, I've been working on various projects for other companies to scrounge up some extra money, which accounts for my increased workload. As luck gives it, one of the companies liked my work, and gave me an opening for a full time job. I took it.

I'm currently still in transition, but if everything works out, I'll be receiving the same money I did before by working full time, plus I'll get a support fee from the music website, plus any projects and modifications they need. It's a company that makes management software for opticians, and despite not being as glamorous, it's a well needed boost for my finances, and an oportunity to expand. I'm really looking forward to it.

My money problems don't really stress me much though. Since 3k came over, I find myself with dificulty in getting stressed at all, and even more so staying stressed. I feel full of energy almost all the time, even after the occasional all-nighter I have to pull over some late project. Or as it is the case, writing this entry.