An Update

Despite our most interesting conversations About melons. I have decided to give you all an actual update. Several things that have gone on lately

I have had to two meets with my cross country team. At the first one (On Tuesday) I beat my record by 6 minutes, and today I beat that by three.

I have been making videos. My first youtube video is up and I have been editing a video for church tomorrow.

Well that's all this week.

Hello my bloglings a lot has happened. Two weeks ago was liefest. The big fancy nearly weeklong Christian music event. Yeah Wednesday through Sunday. Monday I had a picnic with a few friends that could have gone better than what actually transpired. It was a little weird having both my friends of the male gender desert me with two of the not so male gender to say the least. But altogether a good time.

Right now I'm blogging as you may well have guessed. That makes sense doesn't it. Well it does to me at least. As for you I have reasoned to be concerned dare you disagree. Seeing as the feasibility of someone else writing this blog post in similar fashion to how I would is highly unlikely. Moving on from this paradox I would like to confront you all with the future of my current endeavors. Or the future of what is to become my current endeavors. Indeed a slew of endeavors to come that certain. Need they even be endeavors and not simply enduring actions in canon of my life. Certainly ones that w- Okay I'm confusing myself. On to it.

. I have recently ordered both a very nice digital camcorder, and software. Here's hoping both are good considering their origin only traces as far as ebay. Hopefully they will arrive soon anyway.

Here is a ridiculously huge picture of my new very orange camera.

Certainly has some legitness there. Though the orange kind of gets inside my head a little bit. But I am not going to fret. A wise cousin told me once "Never doubt the grandeur of something orange". Actually that was like 10 minuets ago but I already think of it as a cherished memory.

here is the software which I am excited to earth's end over.

You have no idea how much of a great deal i got on this stuff. Dwight even pitched in half for the software. Which i figured is only fair considering he'll get to use it whenever he wishes anyways.

However my week can be as lazy as I wish until it comes. Your probably wondering what I would do with such contraptions. Well i already wrote up an interesting script this morning so I'd have to guess that something pretty cool will come of this.

Next week my friend Paul from Michigan comes to visit for a ... WHOLE WEEK. I cannot doubt this will be one of the most incredible weeks of my life. Maybe Paul can help me with this new technowonderrainbow of devices headed my way. I feel now as I should introduce Paul and tell you about him though I can only imagine that would sound somewhat retarded and make me feel stupid. The fact is Paul and I are just really good friends. And we have been for a long time. I doubt things could be weird since I haven't seen him in a while. Paul isn't really that kind of person. And considering I basically live to the outdoor YMCA that we refer to as the "park" is waiting for our constant enjoyment. Seriously my park is a beast with a beach and lake, zoo, basketball, tennis, and let's not forget running area.

Well I think I have you up to date now blogglings. I must investigate some issues now.

-Woody (Or wubi is you really prefer.)

Update Explosion.

So much has happened in the last week. I really don't want to write it all out now so maybe I'll grant each subject 3 sentences. That's still a paragraph right?

So on Sunday of last week Grandpa and Grandma Lorain came up to WI to visit us. They stayed until Thursday morning, and we had a full week of fun stuff to do. I was kind of sad they had to leave.

While they were here we went to the EAA air museum. They had a special deal where students could go up in a two seater plane with a pilot. Me an Dwight both went up with this cool pilot who let us steer a little.

My neighbor's sister owns the house next to my neighbor. She has hired me to mow the lawn and keep it up. I have another possible lawn job too.

For fathers day my dad got a basketball hoop. It's taken him a week but he finally got it and set it up. Lots of fun.

Pops came to visit on Saturday and left yesterday. He helped fix the front porch. We thought it was a good idea to wake him up in the night with a pillow fight.

Well there it is my for FB statuses worth of a post. Maybe more later.

Got it Together

Oh ok I admit it. This summer I have indeed slacked off with my summer goals. I have been many things up til now: lazy, tired, and complacent. But I hope today marks a turning point. I got out today and ran for a while. I didnt get as far as I would have like to. I kind of lost my steam when I saw that my path was blocked by a tent full of people preparing for something. Not wanting to bother them I turned around. Unfortunately I had more surprises ahead. There seemed to be a mama bird that had decided to go Kamikaze on any unfortunate soul that should walk between her trees. She didn't scratch me or get leave any surprises in my hair, but scared the tar out of me. I tell you people if you need some motivation running their is none better than some mysterious wing-flapping animal going through your hair. I shot off like a street thug getting chased by the popo.

I came home and took a shower, and played my drums. Write now I'm sitting here writing and it feels good to know I got some stuff done today, may this be a habit forming for the rest of the summer.

This week I signed up for a tech class to help out with some plays that a family at our school runs for junior high and high school kids. Tuesday was our first day and it we mostly talked, and planned. Thursday was optional because the group was just moving stuff from a storage center. I opted out of this because it would be easier for Dwight and my mom's schedule. All the same I'm excited to go get to do that. It should be a fun experience.

Even though I actually didn't go to the tech class yesterday, I still had fun. Me my friend Alex his sister/personnal driver drove down to the Fonduloc mall for some smoothies that my friend claims are the best on earth. I had to say they were pretty good, but the ice wasn't crushed and kept coming into my mouth as little watery bacon bits. Me and Alex stopped into Game Stop for a few seconds while his sister went to go look at shoes. We drove on back and I arrived just in time to see my dad get home and let me in the front door. It was a good day.

WHHOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOO Summer

Well so far my summer is awesome. I saw Prince of Persia with two of my buddies today. Me and dwiterz have just been hanging out. That is kinda all there is to say.

That Time Of Year Again, The Best Time.

Well, friends it seems we have come to the end of our school years rope. I have two more days of school to take my finals and then it's time for us to cast of our lady the S.S. Freedom with a good classic bottle of wine for a journeys good luck. The only question of this oh so epic of journeys starts here before we cast off. Shall I proceed to climb this rope to the top or simply burn it off? I feel incredibly impatient now and feel as if studying is in sorts a bit of a waste of time. I feel confident in most things, but at the same time I feel like if I don't the very balance of Karma itself will come to roundhouse kick me in the face. So is it wise to cast off our lady freedom, the finest ship in the fleet with such clouds over-looming? (Pardon my poetic overuse.)

On the brighter side of this situation are my plans for this summer. I plan on a very productive summer. My daily plans include running every morning to train for cross-country next year, going to the library once a week, and teaching my self new technologies.

I have tons of ideas for fun projects too:

I have great ideas for a short movie.

I might write a song or two.

I'm going to learn how to make some cool games.

But I don't want to be a shut in this summer so I want to have lot's of time with friends, and lot's of activity going on. I don't want for one second to feel bored, so I've come up with an armada of ideas to combat it. This is a great summer for making stuff and hanging out so I'm going to take full advantage.

Here is my thoroughly unimpressive palm tree. I spent very little time drawing and too much time trying to make it look cooler than it really was.

The Ides of March - How to Edit Yourself Anywhere

Well let's face it. March was a pretty cruddy month. I have had lot's of crazy late and unfinished homework that I am not even going to talk about right now. (For the sake of space and my personal dislike of feeling like a total retard) This month has left many bad tastes in my very hygienic mouth, depression, anger, tiredness, and more spring fever than I thought I could handle. There are tins of things I can blame for this seemingly malevolent month, but instead of writing my hate letter to March, which I had previously scheduled for this blog, I think I shall take this outstanding opportunity to talk about what is going to make April a better month. (In your face March)

1 April 1st (Starting at the begging) At the time of this writing April 1st is coincidentally the same day as tomorrow, which can only mean one thing: APRIL FOOLS DAY! And I love my April fools day. I am just foaming at the mouth with all of tomorrows opportunities. I won't go into great detail with all of my next-to-pure-evil schemes but I would be more than happy to help you with yours if you care to facebook message me.

2 Spring break! After tomorrow at 3:30 I will have 10 days of Delicious FREEDOM. That's right, and there is nothing you teachers are gonna do about it. This just makes me want to run around my house like there is a million dollars in my pocket.

3 In April we will be totally refreshed. I have a good feeling that everyone (My self included) will feel a lot nicer and more tolerant after spring break. Yeah it will be like that one clever commercial with the guy with the empty battery screen.

By the way what are the Ides or March? I looked it up and didn't help me much.

Looks like it's time for todays Technical Tip: Fun with Pictures

I love pictures they are just awesome. I like taking them, drawing them, editing them, messing with them, and most importantly tricking them out, so for the reader of mine who enjoys fun little cool projects welcome to my first little how to.

Step 1: your gonna need something good for this. Maybe you have noticed some people have taken some pictures and made put themselves in different places, or done something physically impossible in a picture. Like this

I made this one a while ago using my very favorite editor paint.net. (Not to be confused with tragically boring ugly o'l ms paint that comes pre-installed on any windows) Paint.net is one little cool program I'd recommend to anyone, along with gimp or any other decent free-ware image editor. I prefer paint.net for it's ease of use and flexibility. I'm not rolling in the benjamins right now so I can't really say I am a Photoshop guru. I also can't say I'd like to lay down like 500 bucks to get an adobe product package. But I can still be awesome with this stuffs and their is nothing wrong with that.

Step2: A project. Let's try making something simple putting ourselves somewhere else. This will look great on facebook. To start you'll need the aforementioned image editor (You can download paint.net (virus free) here Paint.net does have a few requirements so make sure you have those if your going to download) So let's begin by opening it.

Cool huh?

step 3: Get your images. Press open and get a picture of yourself from your files. (preferably next to a blank wall) Next get another image from the internet where you would like to be. (A fish tank will do nicely I am thinking bigger though http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aquarium_tropical_-_bac_marin.JPG) Copy the image from the internet, where ever you find one. Press the new layer button on the layer window.(It's the one with a green plus sign) Once you have the new layer paste your fish tank in on this layer. Make sure that you don't expand the image if the picture is too big. Just move it around. It should look like something like this:

Step 4: Shaving. Once you have your pictures. Go to your top layer. It's time to delete your background (hopefully a wall if you were smart enough to take my advice) Your gonna want to grab the magic wand tool from the side bar. Select an area of the background and delete it by pressing the delete key. If you select part of your skin you've gone too far adjust the tolerance level at the top of your screen to a lower level. Keep doing this until you have deleted the background. While you are doing this you can see that new background behind you. (Note: If you find this process going too slow try adjusting the tolerance to a higher level.) It should look something kinda like this:

Once you finish getting what you can our of the the background you can go through the rest of the debris with the eraser tool.

Now that is awesome. But We're not quite done yet.

Step 6: Finishing touches. Now that I'm done with the shopping out background I have some options. I could edit my appearance, or change my background. Let's do both. First I'll change my size. I want it to look like I'm really in this ocean aquarium. First I selected my self with the box selection tool and then sized it down with the dark blue pointer.

Wow. I'm in the aquarium. But that's not good enough. I'd rather be in a different place so I changed it. I saved my file back when I was bigger so I could change it to another place.

Waterfall!!!!!!!!

Well that completes my little how-to. Hope it was helpful. Keep coming back for more awesome stuffs.

Have any questions? Facebook me about it.

I Am Such A NERD!!!!

Yes it's true. This may not be news to some of you, but alas tonight I fear I have hit a new low. This is the sort of thing that would happen to some kid on a commercial. Just read.

Today I was cramming in my 5 page state report on Michigan. Everyone had to chose a state. (See how I took a short cut here?) And we had all month to finish this report, but I had of course better thing to do (And by better I mean awesome) Yeah It was pretty bad. When my mom asked how long I had to finish this project, I told her I wasn't even going to answer the question. So I went a-writing away finishing page after page until I finally got to my industry section. As you might have known Battle Creek Michigan is the home of a Post Cereal plant and one of my favorite cereals: Honey Bunches of Oats. Being in the spirit of being a nerd I took the time to elaborate on this fascinating history. Just look.

"Michigan is the birthplace of several cereal manufacturing plants. Battle Creek Michigan is home to both Kellogg and Post Cereal plants. It was in Battle Creek that Vernon j. Herzing created the predecessor of Honey Bunches of Oats (this author’s favorite cereal, which he recommends to anyone.) After becoming the facility manager Vernon combined several post cereals at the plant he worked for in Battle Creek and Created a combination of 3 cereals, sold them as one and outsold all of the other cereals. The people at post originally wanted to call it the “Battle Creek cereal”, but the name didn’t stick. They eventually decided to name the cereal “Honey Bunches of Oats”. Honey Bunches of Oats is one of the top selling cereals of today."

Maybe that doesn't look so bad to you but if you only knew how I felt. I was all excited to be able to write about my favorite cereal. I was all like "Cool now I can write about my cereal, Cool Bean curds!" If that wasn't bad enough for you, my bibliography page read something like this:

(Link1)

(Link2)

(Link3)

The back of a Honey Bunches of Oats Box.

Yeah. I regret this nerdyness but somehow I would have done it again if given the chance. Someone help my weird self.

Stuff

So here's todays stuff.

• I asked my English teacher if I could use this blog for my monthly journal project. She said that I could. Hooray now I won't feel like a total failure if no one even reads this blog. It will also be nice for her not to read the random sentences I write about mythical creatures in my regular journal. ('Cuz after all we can write about whatever we want.)
• The long awaited cousins left yesterday. Now my house feels very empty. It feels emptier knowing I probably want see them until this summer. I miss you guys so much. So glad I got to see you.
• 3rd quarter seems to last forever. If only there was someway to break this almost never-ending cycle of weeks that haunt the back half of our school-year. If only there was some big school event or break that could break up this monotony.
• Right now I am very confused about my current project. I always like projects even if I don't finish them. I recently took down my website and I hope to install the new and improved version later (as soon as I figure out a decent hosting situation and a way to use my new app.) I've also been messing around with some other stuff lately. I've kind of whimsical played with the idea of making some games.
• English class has been interesting lately. We've been talking about ideas for 8th grade graduation as well as the next junior high chapel.

Tip of the Day: Using Other Programs

If you have a windows machine you know that every PC comes with some standard programs that you can use for your various computing needs.

• Internet Explorer
• Windows Media Player
• Microsoft's Paint
• Media center (for you newer users)

I'm not saying that if you should change them all out but if you don't like one of them just use a different program. This is where the beauty of windows shines through. There are plenty of open source geeks, hobbyist programmers, and businesses that would love you to use their services. The best part is it's all free.

Let's look at an example: I personally hate internet explorers slow loading guts and I use Google Chrome for all my standard browsing needs. I also keep both IE and Firefox on my comp for web testing. Is anyone Charging me? Absolutely not. It's just as easy as downloading. I hate Microsoft paint with a passion. So I fired it and hired three better graphic programs to take it's place. (Paint.net, Inkscape and Gimp2) The same goes for web products. If you hate your email service change it. If you dislike things about your favorite online encyclopedia and think it has some pretty inconstant facts then go to another.

I think that this is window's (and Linux's) greatest strategy. Make programming open to people, so they can make programs open to people. This is why as trendy(and virus free) as mac is the code has them beat. I can't get my favorite programs for mac. Although I am not myself a mac owner I know that most free programs are not available on mac.

A Long Awaited Arrival

Because today is so extra super specialicious one young man will dare to write 2 blog posts (Insanity) just to cover the awesomelisciousness of it all.

Yeah that's right 2 blog posts in one day. I went there. (Oh no you di-'nt woody. Oh, but I did) If you had subscribed to me right now you could be really mad at me now. But thankfully it's my first day of blogging and I am assured that you will most likely forgive me of my rudeness. Now in the future of my sure-to-blossom-into-complete-awesome-sauce blog I will be sure to mind my internet manners and not spam out anybodies subscription reader. Now on to the matter.

My cousins are coming up to see us in our (kind of) Grand state of Wisconsin. And I am undoubtedly assured that this will be one two our most awesome days ever. Not sure what we will do then but I'm sure it will involve amazing things like staying up late, playing games, shopping, being awesome, and making dessert drinks with my 350 horse power blender. (That's a different story for a different day) It is really special to see them because we cousins are super close. We have been waiting for this day for a long time and it's finally here (Actually tomorrow, my bad. Just got so excited)

So here is my dramatic quote for the day:

"Keep your hands of my mama. Keep your hands of my Doritos"

as seen here