Reading back in my journal archives (especially my first journal) is interesting, amusing, and often cringe-worthy. I was such an arrogant bastard back then.
Reading back in IM logs (especially to middle school) is even worse.
Anyone else done this and felt similarly?

Other things in life (which mostly follow from each other in some weird convoluted manner):
Work is awesome.
API is hard.
Airfare is expensive.
Yay for (tenative) Christmas plans.
Airplane meals are look tasty.
Domestic first class airplane meals look stupidly easy to make.
Cooking helps me relax.
Cooking for just one person sucks.
Groups make me uncomfortable.
“Group” now seems to be defined as more than 4 people.
Dim sum is tasty.
Tiny, cheap cameras are awesome.
Everyone is getting married.
I’ve never been invited to a wedding. But I have gone to one as a guest with a friend who was invited.
Facebook is creepy.
Love is awesome.
Sleep should happen.

Edit: How is it 3 AM? :(
In any case, I should make more entries like this. Blorp.

This weekend, I went through and tagged (on my computer) all of my photos from middle school and freshman year of high school, as well as about 1/4 of the photos from sophomore year.

I also posted random selections of the middle school photos onto Facebook.

Overall, this has left me with a huge sense of nostalgia, and a feeling of jealousy that kids today have access to cheap cameras to document their childhoods.

The first part, I suppose, is expected. It seems like not too long ago when we were eighth graders, feeling excited that we were soon growing up and going to *gasp* high school. Yet, it’s been 9 years. Some of the people I sat around the lunch table with are engaged or married. Most have graduated with degrees and gone to get jobs. It’s amazing how much can change in a decade.

Even high school photos, which somehow seem significantly more recent, are now remnants from a time long past. Going back and seeing the first photos of some people I now consider close friends… seeing all the relationships grow and change and end. It seems strange to consider that there were times before you knew the important people in your life. It seems even stranger to consider that some of your closest friends then are people you rarely, if ever, communicate with now.

I suppose this entry is rather disjoint and I’m not really sure what I’m writing any more. At least I don’t find myself missing the past as much as simply reminiscing on it. Hopefully this means that my life is such that I have no regrets about where I’ve ended up.

Yay life.

There was an awesome weekend. Other people have already summarized much of it, so I won’t do so here. Instead, I will post this, courtesy of Tim:

But mainly, I wanted to say that SF transportation is epic failing. Fares have gone up and BART workers are possibly going to strike starting this Thursday.
Tip for all of you trying to get to/from the airport… the SamTrans 292 costs $3.50 from SF to SFO, and $1.75 from SFO to SF. Better that than the $8.10 on BART (WTF $4 airport surcharge?!). You can also take it to San Mateo in lieu of the Caltrain (for $0.50 less on the Southbound trip, $2.25 less Northbound) if you don’t mind taking an additional 30 minutes to an hour.

Photos from Thailand, Europe, and this past weekend will be posted to photos2 at some point. I am just being lazy about going through them.

Am I alone in thinking that Michael Jackson’s death doesn’t merit all of the media attention it’s getting?

This morning all of the top-10 stories on CNN were about his death. This seems like overkill.

Why is our culture so obsessed with celebrities? Thousands of people die every day, yet somehow celebrity deaths are always big, front-page news.

Why does it always feel so weird when you do the right thing?

In fourth grade, I got back an exam that was marked with a 100% at the top and a sticker. However, several of the answers were marked as incorrect (and, indeed, were incorrect). I took it back to the teacher, who thanked me and corrected the grade (it ended up being a 91% or something).

This month, we get our bill for rent for June, which states we have a credit of $140 and, besides that, our rent for June is about $150 lower than it should be. We call the “customer care center” who tells us that someone made a mistake when entering the new lease (since we had just renewed our lease for July 2009 through July 2010, at a lower rate) and changed the rent starting May 6 instead. They tell us not to worry about it, but I go into the rental office anyway and point it out. The lady there thanks me and corrects our June/July rent and goes back to fix May, so we end up with no credit and the full amount due for June.

In both of these cases, I feel like the guilt (or even paranoia, in the second case, since they have a signed lease with the correct amount) alone made them worth correcting.
But I can’t help but feel a bit of regret.

What are the odds that someone would have looked at one particular lease in a huge filling cabinet and noticed that the amounts between that sheet and the “official” amount in the computer were wrong? Probably more than the odds of the teacher asking for the quizzes back and noticing that mine had been graded incorrectly… but still remarkably small. But what it is that makes us decide that, regardless of how good the odds are that we could get away with it (and, really, we’ve done nothing wrong, so why are we worried?), we have to get the issue resolved?
I’d like to think that it’s because humans are fundamentally good and honest but, given how I’m feeling right now, I don’t really know if I believe that.