I reached my goal of 1/3 completion for tagging today (55237 tagged out of 164076) at around 4, so I had some time free.

life.alanv.org is the site mentioned in yesterday’s entry. I hacked it up in around an hour and it’s now up with the beginning of Freshman year. Feel free to view and enjoy.

If you’ve been following my status updates on Facebook, you’ll know that I’ve been going through and tagging every single photo that I’ve ever taken (all 164,076 of them) in Adobe Photoshop Album. I’m currently at 49,973 tagged. With some luck, tomorrow I’ll break 54,692 (not an unreasonable goal, given that I did around 3600 today) which would be the third-way point.

In any case, this averages out to approximately 50 photos a day, every day, for the past 9 years and 3 months, which is when I got my first digital camera. This means I have a good record of almost everything that’s happened to me since I was 13. All of this is making me feel extremely nostalgic.

I feel inspired to create a site that posts (at least) one photo from each day that I took photos from the past 9 years, along with a small description of the day. I would probably end up starting with CMU Freshman year (that way I don’t have to wait until I tag everything) and going through graduation before heading backward to high school and such. I guess this would be similar to Mark’s photo journal, except the photos would all be from the past.

I don’t know. It just occurs to me that the majority of my photos (large, large majority) have never been seen by anyone other than myself. Perhaps this would be a good way to share some number of them.

If I do end up doing this, there’s a good chance it will be password-protected (like the Student Wars site)… because having a public journal is one thing, but having documentation of your life public on the internet is much, much different. I guess the question then is if anyone would actually be interested in seeing such a thing. Right now the motivation is more personally wanting to have the photos laid out in some logical manner, but it’s probably not a worthwhile project just for that.

I also started tentative work on a board game today that constantly changes (both in terms of rules, goals, and the physical board itself). It was one of those random things that I thought of and was interested in trying. We’ll see how much of it gets done (most of my ideas end up dying in the creation process, unfortunately).

Stumbled across this today and for some reason it’s really pissing me off.
What kind of society are we where the message “You must get your wife/girlfriend/prospect diamond jewelry for the holidays/her birthday/an anniversary or she will be upset with you and hate you and exile you” is an acceptable one?
Are Americans really so materialistic that there are people out there who expect jewelry (cost being irrelevant here) or even any gift at all on holidays and would be upset at not receiving anything?

If you watch the video, there’s a guy that got thrown in “the doghouse” for giving his wife a gift of RAM with a note, “Thanks for the memories.” This is a far better gift than jewelry… not only is it cute and punny, but it’s likely he also noticed her complaining about her computer’s performance and wanted to improve it. It’s thoughtful.
What about the guy who got his wife an abmaster? His speech seemed to indicate that he had listened to the fact that she was worried about her weight/size and wanted to help her out. Perhaps his speech itself was overdoing it, but the gift itself was thoughtful.
What about the main character? He got his wife a very practical gift: a vacuum cleaner. Maybe she’s been complaining about the performance of her old one. Maybe the old one broke.
These are all gifts that I personally would be happy to receive, and that anyone I would consider dating would likewise have to be happy to receive… because it’s not the gift, but rather the fact that they got you something that isn’t a horribly generic gift means that they took the time to think about you and what you mean to them.

I don’t know. I understand that it’s just a stupid marketing message for JCPenny, but I still think it’s disgusting. This past Christmas, I didn’t ask for anything and didn’t want anything. I got some gifts for people because I came across them and thought of them, and only chose Christmas as the distribution time for convenience sake. The best parts of my recent birthdays have been spending time with friends/loved ones… indeed, most of the last few have been devoid of gifts (the last one involved a few small gifts, but meant a lot primarily due to the effort involved and the thoughtfulness of it, the hand-baked cake waiting at one portion, and the person waiting at the end). It bothers me that there are people out there who can’t be content with this and insist on materialistic things instead*.

*Except for kids, who may be too young to appreciate the time spent with family over the shiny new fire truck. But kids should be taught to appreciate sentiment and thoughtfulness over the material object, and in general to appreciate people more than things, so this should disappear as they grow up.