Matt’s News / Blog

Merry Christmas!

I’m home!  I took Friday (today) off from work and came home last night.  It’s nice not to have to work on my birthday.  This morning I’m going into church to talk about their new website I’m going to make for them.  You can see it at www.stclairumc.org.

So I got a new phone line for my apartment.  It’s through Vonage, so  it’s harnesses the coolness of VOIP.  Alisse is going to Ireland for the Spring Semester, so I needed to have a ‘normal’ phone for making international calls.  With Vonage, I can call Ireland for free. Also, I can get a virtual Irish number, so it’ll be cheaper for Alisse to call me.  Any VOIP also has high tech coolness factor.

It’ll be different with Alisse being far away but it’s a good opportunity for her.  I’m planning on taking a trip out to Ireland to visit.  (It’s a good reason to visit Europe ).

I heard this on the radio yesterday.  It’s interesting and sorta funny (in an odd sort of way).  Curious George takes a Dante-esque trip.

That’s right, CBS is filming a reality TV show in Muncie called Armed & Famous.  Yesterday the celebrities were sworn in as cops. I sorta want to get pulled over now to see if it’s one of the celebrities :). The stars of the show are: singer La Toya Jackson, son-of-Ozzy Jack Osbourne, pro wrestler Trish Stratus and “Jackass” star Jason Acuna (aka Wee Man).

I can’t think of a better thing to happen to Muncie then this…

My blog update cycle has really slowed down — not sure why. Anyway here is an update:

For Thanksgiving, I went to Alisse’s house.  We had a good, relaxing time of hanging around, sleeping in, ordering Starbuck’s and trying to help as little as possible with the Christmas decorations :).    I had a good time with Alisse’s family but I did miss my family (and green bean casserole ).

This weekend Alisse and I went to see the Taylor Chorale and the Marion Philharmonic perform some of Handle’s Messiah.  We got dressed up and went out to a fancy restaurant err Fazoli’s.  The Chorale did an excellent job.

Saturday, was Alisse’s wing’s Pick-A-Date.  Guess who Alisse picked ?  We went to play Laser Tag here in Muncie.  There were only 4 couples, so we had pretty small teams.  It was a lot of fun!  Afterwards, everyone came back to my apartment, we ordered pizza and play moose-moose.

Lately at work I’ve been using this cool little programming language called Groovy. It’s a scripting language for Java.  So, the scripts run dynamically in the Java Runtime Environment.  The syntax is similar to Java  but simpler.  The other very cool thing all Java classes are available in Groovy. The folks in my group at work who are children of the 60’s and 70’s love the name :).

About an 45 minutes ago finished upgrading the RAM in my Macbook.  After watching the RAM prices jump considerably right after I bought my laptop, I decided to wait till the prices went down.  They didn’t.  So, about a week ago, I got tired of waiting and just bought some.  The jump from 512MB to 1GB is very big.  Everything is a ton faster!  512MB is really not enough for the Macbook.  I did have somewhat of a scare putting the memory in.  After my first attempt, it wouldn’t turn on.  I then tried to put the old memory back in — no luck.  After a few more tries and a few Internet searches I realized I need to push the RAM in further.  I did that and it started right up!