Peter Wooley’s Blog

Again I come to you from my a lab at school. Over my shoulder is this wonderful illustrator doing some amazing work in Flash. Of all programs, I wouldn’t imagine it for character design, but she’s using it amazingly well.All around me, school is being done. Whether that is homework, studying for a test or just playing with programs, there is a lot going on. It has nothing to do, unfortuntely, with the six page paper I have to write. I am not going to lie about it, I have it all to write tonight. I now have the material I need, and a fair amount of research has been done, but I just need to write it.The paper is on Art Deco and its impact in the 21st century, proving Art Deco architecture has a place in the public’s mind, where painting is not accepted in quite the same way. It’s not my favorite topic, but it’s different than everything else I’ve heard. Plus, I didn’t know – up until this year – that the Empire State Building is one of the sco. This puzzled me and caused me to write this paphining stars of Art Deco. Or, it will cause me to write it, once I get to writing it.In other news, it was not icy this morning as forecasters had forecasted. I was quite upset. When I have to get up at 7:00am to find out I do have to go to class, I’m not a pleasent person. Granted, I’m not much better any other Wednesday; but, today I had hope – and the first thing that happened was that hope got slashed to pieces. There are some rumblings about five inches of snow tomorrow, lasting all day. They are just rumblings, but they give me hope for a better tomorrow. Of course, Jesus Christ gives me actual hope… but you see where I am coming from.

Hot Diggity Dog. For those of you with browsers that can have “live bookmarks,” rejoice! I have just spent two hours finally figuring out RSS. Now, I know what everyone is thinking, “How could Peter Wooley, of all people, not already know about RSS?!” Well, it has been a very busy summer/fall for me. With a new job and a new web language, I could only get so much done. Granted, it only took me 2 hours to get to where I currently am, but it wasn’t until Tom and Tyler made me do it. Tom’s a terrific designer and professor and has been showing me what he’s been doing for a client. Well, I stole that and used it for myself. And Tyler… well, I would really like to be better than him at everything, and he said he had already used RSS. That made me do it. I’ve got a ways to go before I consider myself better than Tyler, that includes learning how to illustrate like this.

2 hours and 15 minutes should have proved ample time to finish up some of my homework, unfortuntely, it was spent sitting in my car listening to Christmas tunes. Outside of my car, traffic was crawling along. This would have been pretty normal for a Monday evening, but this was no normal evening. Located directly before the I-205 Bridge, an obstruction had blocked part of the highway. Where it had fallen was the perfect spot to block all northbound traffic from getting out of Oregon and into Washington. Honestly, it couldn’t have been in a better spot for perfect blockage.A House just sit there, not knowing what to do. Somehow, this happy home and jumped off of its truck and landed in the road. Surpised, it sat there for at least 6 hours, just chillin’. I am unsure if it is still enjoying itself there on the bridge, but it definitely had enough time to enjoy its freedom before it got hauled off to Mobile Home Villa, USA.

It has come to my attention that it is no longer Thanksgiving. Rather, it is the day after. I think we all know what that means, but I should probably still say it: Black Friday! Some people feel today is a great oppurtunity to buy nothing at all. Others, that I actually know, disagree. This has made me think about the importance of Black Friday. I can understand why it is so great for retailers and those taking our money, but I also know I get many-a-thing for free* (*after mail-in rebate). I understand the rebate ploy, but I’ve had fairly good success in paying just the 7.8% tax for Washington, and that I know is going toward the fixing of my highways and biways. What I have not seen is someone go into, say Wal-mart looking for an extremely good price, and when they don’t find it, they go and buy normal priced merchandise. If anything, I see my family and friends buy only what is on a sale and quickly bypass everything else. Maybe it is something I am missing. It does get me to the store, and it does get me to buy stuff, but I can’t imagine that Best Buy is making enough money on my free* $2.99 Computer Wipes. I must just not fit into their category, or perhaps they are eating away at me in other unforseen ways.

At any rate, I will be dragged out of bed at 6:30 to head to Fred Meyer for half priced socks. It’s a good time for socks, I must say. Who knows… maybe I’ll buy a full priced Plasma TV?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I think when I say “everyone”, I am referring to the 3 other people that I’ve told about this site. According to my logs, I’ve hit the site about 3000% more than anyone else—go figure.It is 12:51am here on the West Coast, and that means it’s Thankgiving! I’d just like to say that I have a lot to be thankful for this year, as many others do. I’ve been blessed with a terrific fiance, a wonderful family and an amazing job oppurtunity. I’ve also had the recent fortune of going through spiritual struggles with God. I’ve never stopped believing in Him, but through some classes at school, it’s thrown things into question. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve basically seen the distance I’ve walked away from God, but through it I’ve prayed a lot and talked with a lot of close friends. Some of them may not know they helped me through anything, but if you’ve had positive contact with me in the past two weeks, you probably helped me.

The real turning point was this last Sunday when I had an actual fruitful interaction during church just pouring over the Gospels (Sorry Pastor Arden, I wasn’t totally paying attention.). Some things I was looking at just didn’t make sense, Matthew 7:21-23 was really sticking me. I’ve heard this verse that says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven.” For some reason, I couldn’t see how this aligned with simple salvation through grace, and then I realized that the Will of God does not consitute works, but rather the actual message of Christ, acceptance of Mercy through Christ. It took me nearly 20 minutes to come to this decision, but I know that it wasn’t me who finally figured it out.

In the same way, a class I am taking at the Art Institute of Portland is trying my faith. Each week I struggle to, if not prove then, stand up for Christianity. While I was doing that, I was not even prayerfully considering what God might be asking of me. Well, through this ordeal, I’d finally prayed and found words tonight. Granted, they weren’t perfect as I am sure the Holy Spirit was guiding me to actually say, but I felt emboldened. And when I started to question what I had said and thinking of what it might be like to believe in nothing, I felt God say, “It’s easy.” And it all came flooding back to me! Of course it is easy to believe in nothing. To such a mindset, you can get away with anything. It was at that time tonight that I realized I am moving forward—moving from Milk to Steak, if that makes sense.

I am now sitting in between classes, waiting for my day to end. I have History of Material Culture in 2 hours and 15 minutes and I can’t wait for it to come and go. I have so many plans tonight, none of which I have thought through. So far they consist of:

• Seeing my Honey-Bunny Fiance
• Playing some World of Warcraft with Serenny, my level 27 Gnome Mage
• Finishing up this site and peterschristmaslist.com
• Sleep

I doubt I will get all of these done, but they will go in that order. I am excited for tomorrow being Thanksgiving, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it. Sitting in here in school the day before is unsettling to me. I think I’ve always been at home or at least not at school on the day prior. Soon, though, I will be free.

This morning was a sad time for me. Not only was I subjected to the typical Wednesday rigors like getting up before the sun was up and not remembering where I was, but I also had the misfortune to not be in traffic. Yes, there was no traffic today. Not only did I know that everyone else in the world has taken today off, but then it had to go and reinforce itself with zero traffic and me getting to school 30 minutes before it started. Normally, I would look at the bright side of things and say, “Hey, I saved gas and I got time post on my super-cool blog!” But, before 11:00am, I’m a different person, twisted and dark. I did have some tasty Black Tea, though – and that pretty much made up for the whole ordeal.

I now sit in an entirely clean room. I even vacuumed! Currently, everything is in its place and everything actually has a place! I threw away tons of excess computer parts that may have worked, but fate was against them. I feel so good!I have class in 7 hours. For some reason, whenever I have an early class, I have the desire to stay up longer. Perhaps it stems from my late night homework habits. In any case, my homework is done for this class, so all I have to do is go to bed, wake up, drive to the MAX, ride the MAX, walk to school and learn! It’s that easy. But, honestly, I’d rather stay up and play around in the World of Warcraft, on this here Blog and listen to my favourite tunes!

Ahh, what a splendid life I live! And Thanksgiving is coming! Perhaps I will just sleep in tomorrow…

I am currently sitting in my comfy chair, looking at a relatively clean desk. As a matter of fact, the desk top itself is very clean. Around me lay a few random sticks of RAM, a wireless router I am testing and a Mickey Ear hat. This is the first time in a long I’ve had a clean desk.Last night I spent about 3 hours cleaning my room, then my car, then my room again with all my car stuff in it, then my desk, then my backpack, then the inside of my desk… and now I must finish cleaning my room, again.

I must say, while I do not like living in filth, I do enjoy the transformation from very dirty to very clean. I got to drive my car to school and actually see my back seat. That’s right, I could even have taken 4 other people with me anywhere I went. My backpack was also light as a feather with only the essentials for the day. I suppose I’ll have this same feeling next month, when I clean once more.

Last night I became the proud owner of the newest OS for my Apple PowerBook. With 10.4, named after the ferocious Tiger, some shiny new features have redefined the way I compute. Spotlight, by far the prettiest new feature, takes command of indexing the hard drive and searching your entire system on-the-fly. It is quite fast, faster than I had thought it would be. Next would be Safari 2.0 and its awesome ability to parse RSS data. No longer will I be using Firefox on my Mac. On the PC, Firefox all the way, but the way Safari presents the RSS feeds is too good to pass up. As opposed to just having a Live Bookmark or the like, it gives you a beautifully-designed page complete with gradient blue header, the name of the site, the number of posts and a sidebar with several functions for making viewing easier, including search. It’s just… wonderful.

Several other aspects make it wonderful too, but I believe most people are aware of Tiger, so I feel I don’t need to delve into it. Aside from that, I’m one happy Mac-boy!