Ahh, another beautiful Friday.

Okay, so maybe not. The weather outside is pretty disgusting, at least compared to yesterday. I went out for dinner with a bunch of the NESIC crew (Kris, Jim, Chuck, Justin, Tara, and others), then out to play pool at Jillian's in Manchester. Quite a good time, and only a few nice patches of rubber laid down in random places around the city.

My dad should be getting out of the hospital today, so I'm headed home to Rhode Island to see everyone. It'll give me some time to mess around with some of my external car video rig, which should see some action at the ice races on Sunday morning. Some home-cooked meals will be another major bonus.

Until around 4:30PM or so, I'm just going to chill out here at work, do a little more code, browse a little more i-Club, catch up on my paperwork and journal readings, and groove to some good tunes. Apparently, BBC Radio 1 has resumed streaming of their material in Ogg Vorbis sometime last month. This means that I have wonderful, high-quality electronic beats coming from Pete Tong's decks, over the pond, and into my office. So nice.

Ahh, here we go. A picture of me enjoying a Friday afternoon:

Back at work. Again. Whee.

Just installed BlogBuddy, a neat little tool that makes updating a Blogger site a lot easier and less obtrusive. That means I'll be making updates a lot more often.

Otherwise, news in my life is both good and bad. I did very well at the ice races this weekend, taking first and second place runs, with an overall second place finish in class X. I'm hoping to head back up to Stinson Lake this weekend and manage a first or second place finish to secure a trophy at the end of the season.

I managed to sell off the old engagement ring, finally. It feels good to finally get it off my hands, and have an extra few dollars floating around as a result. As soon as I file my tax return, I'll have enough to get a new up-pipe for my WRX. Sweet.

More disturbingly, my father had a small stroke on Monday morning. He's in relatively good spirits, and he didn't lose any mental bits, just a little bit of drooping on the left hand side of his face. It scared me a lot, though... you always expect your parents to live healthy and happy forever, and any suggestion of mortality can be quite jarring. My mom seems to be pretty shaken by events, but she was so busy taking care of everything on Monday that, by the time I talked to her Monday night, everything finally hit her all at once. While it felt good to give her support over the phone, I know that getting down to Rhode Island and giving her a hug or something would be even better for her.

It's hard though, especially now that I've really started to form a life up here in New Hampshire. I actually have friends local now, and I'm usually busy with work or hanging out with friends, or some kind of event, almost every night of the week. I'm going to try and trade off Friday from work (maybe eat up an early vacation day) to go down and see my family.

Speaking of being stuck at work, I'm still at the office right now. I was programming until about 9PM, cranking away on a piece of code that I've been fighting with for days. It's been a really long time since I've had a real challenge with a piece of code, and Microsoft's DirectShow API (in conjunction with DirectX and COM) certainly provided a worthy adversary. Finally, I taught myself the ugly bits of DirectShow filter graphs and managed to cascade everything together to get video into OpenGL textures. Non-trivial, though, that's for sure.

I think I'm too tired to go home and cook, so I'm just going to swing by McDonald's or something on my way back to my apartment... I hope they're open.