A lot has happened since the weekend before last. I actually had a long smart-ass news post last weekend but one slip of the mouse and it all went poof. Lost my motivation, heh. Well, it's back.

My brother and I had such a <sarcasm> wonderful evening the Friday before last. We went to Best Buy in Altamonte Springs to purchase a TV. They accepted our CompUSA coupon with a "match-and-beat" gaurantee. It turns out, however, they didn't carry those TVs in the first place. Damn.

We went to the Best Buy in Waterford Lakes the next evening. They carried the TV but refused to let us purchase it at the discount unless the local CompUSA stores had them in stock, which they didn't. Crap.

So we're stuck without a TV for awhile longer. With that aside, this past weekend I went to Disney World with some of my friends. We had a blast! We went to Epcot in the morning, went on a few rides like the Test Track and that Mars ride. I gotta tell ya, the Mars ride was pretty damned realistic. You actually experience extreme gravity while blasting off in a rocket into space and conversely, lack of gravity while you're floating through space. It's apparently done with centrifugal motion, different speeds and angles produce varying gravitation levels within the capsule. Awesome, isn't it?

In the afternoon we went to MGM and went on many rides there, including the famous Tower of Terror, which they had just "improved". I believe this is the 4th version of the Tower of Terror, but I digress. For those of you who didn't know, the Tower of Terror is a very tall building with a single "elevator" (which seats like 16 people) and is dropped at a height of something like 10 stories right down to the bottom, picked up and dropped again (Earlier versions only had a single drop.) I think it still needs a LOT more, like a much longer drop. :P And the Aerosmith Rock n' Roll Coaster really should be longer, heh. Oh well. I firmly believe that they should build a high-speed roller coaster like thing between Melbourne and Orlando, right on SR-528. That'd be fun.

With the weekend aside, I took my last final exam yesterday, for Astronomy. My final grades came out: 2 As and 2 Bs. Do you know what this means? It means I graduated! YAY! You guys already know that my 21st birthday was recently. Well, my parents got me a new cell phone, a T-Mobile Sidekick. I can honestly say that it's the most kickass phone I've ever beheld. Has Internet, AIM, Email and Text Messaging. What sets it different is that the screen pivots out to reveal a full keyboard. I know it may be old hat to people familiar with the offerings of Japanese phone companies such as NTT DoCoMo with 3.5G, video conferencing and the like. But isn't America always behind Japan in technology? :P

As for graduation, my dad bought me a 17" LCD Monitor. I was so surprised. This will replace the 6 year old 19" CRT that's been slipping away. What sucks about CRTs is that they decay relatively quickly; after 5 years you basically lose a third of the brightness and about a half of the sharpness due to shadow mask decay. With LCD you basically have the same consistent quality for 15-20 years before the fluorescent backlighting discharges completely. You know, I wouldn't touch plasma displays for TVs with a 10-foot stick. Plasma is extremely volatile; if you tilt the dispaly more than 15 degrees in any direction, the display would be screwed up forever. And if you manage to keep it right side up, the plasma would have to be recharged every 2-3 years, which costs several hundred dollars. Not worth it for a display technology that's by nature fuzzier than CRT and not nearly as vivid. But I digress.

Oh damn it. I just realized, I haven't spoken to Keisuke in months. I feel like such an idiot, probably made him worry about me. I better go ahead and send the damn present I've been trying to put together since Christmas. I'm so terrible.