Yea, I know… I’ve converted to the dark side.

I just finished upgrading to the newest version of WordPress. So far, I must say that the administration back-end has received a fantastic overhaul and I’m enjoying the new features so far.

Read [this page][1] and you might be a little confused. Apparently the author wishes to bring monarchy to the United States enough to write a web page (in some form of what appears to be Middle English) all about it. Go read and then bring me your thoughts (in the form of comments).

Good heavens, the last post I made was two weeks ago! I suppose I have a little bit of explaining to do.

I may not be able to explain how cool this is, but I’m going to try.

Yes, it’s now one day into my spring break. What am I doing? Why, staying in Macon and spending all my money on the BMW!! It’s time for the 100,000 mile overhaul, so I will be busy in the garage (once my parts arrive). If you’re in Macon, be sure to call!

Shortly after midnight on Saturday (2/16/2008) morning, my grandmother passed away. I will soon write a longer piece on this, but for now I’m just posting her obituary.

Over the next few days I’ll be (finally) working on the gallery to get it in shipshape (if you haven’t noticed the complete mess that it has been since summer). You may notice the gallery link is missing. When it reappears, hopefully things will look much nicer!! Stay tuned…

A few days back, I mentioned that I wanted to [query my Facebook social graph][1] in order to pull out a list of my friends’ websites. Why? To put the in my blog roll. Anyway, I was doing a little light reading today and came across some interesting posts centering around a topic I’ve read of before (but somehow forgot to put two and two together): The Open-ness of our social graphs.

Just to throw out a little plug for Adam and myself, we’re “spinnin’ on the ones and twos” this Friday at the Rookery for downtown Macon’s monthly “First Friday” event. We’ll be playing a smooth blend of rock, rap, old(ish) stuff, and whatever else pleases our auditory palette.

Ladies and gentlemen, today I would like to direct your attention to the new link in the right side bar entitled “[Programs and Scripts][1].” This page will contain handy bits of code developed by myself (or any of my esteemed colleagues) and presented here for your programming gratification!

But I can’t. Let me explain.

This has been a busy but great week. I’ll be back with more detail on some of these events, but I gave a presentation last night (which went really well, and the video and other information will be online soon), helped a friend assemble a new computer today, I’ve been in the gym three days this week (and tomorrow will be the fourth – getting back into shape), I’ve done a little homework (love only taking 12 hours of class), and I’ve been working a few hours a day to boot!

I was doing a little searching on Google for some scripting documentation and ran across a funny DNS redirect: http://thesource.ofallevil.com, which points to Microsoft’s website.

On January 16, 2008, I, Matthew Smith, will be delivering a presentation for STC on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects. This presentation will be based on a shorter presentation I gave for one of my technical communications classes last year. I don’t have the final details on the presentation yet (aside from the date), but I’m assuming it will be in the auditorium room 201 of the new [Science and Engineering Building][1] around 7pm at 6pm(that’s on Mercer’s Macon campus if you didn’t know). I hope that the presentation will be informative and inspire people to find new ways to employ the versatile wiki. If you’re not busy, I’d love it if you dropped by!

On New Years’ Day, I woke up around 2pm and decided to go skiing. You might call that quite a feat for someone located in the middle of Georgia where the temperatures rarely go below 20F and the snow flurries show up once a decade (sending the good people of middle Georgia into quite a panic, to say the least). However, my aunt lives in north-eastern Tennessee, about an hour from [Ski Beech][1] and [Sugar Mountain][2] (both located around [Boone, NC][3]). A phone call later I was scrambling around collecting my stuff, and by 6pm I was on the road for the mountains.

[View Pictures][1] / [View Video][2]

My friend David just sent me an interesting email about the Apple MacBook and its hidden wireless capabilities. From David:

I just watched [Steal This Film II][1], an internet-only downloadable film discussing the issue of “intellectual property.” It’s about forty minutes long and has some great points. Recommended watching!

Merry Christmas everybody! We hope you all had a wonderful holiday and are wishing you the best new year yet!