Late last night I learned about letterboxing and geocaching in an article from a local magazine, the Oklahoma Gazette. Basically, both of them are modern day treasure hurting activities. I believe I may have heard about geocaching, but I guess never gave it any thought because it requires a GPS. My family did this similar activity ages ago where we hunted for golden tickets as part of a radio station contest. Anyway, I checked out the websites for both of them and I surprised as to how many treasure boxes are hidden near where I live. This sounds like fun and I plan to hurt for a few of them myself whenever I can get someone to come along with me. I’ll totally have to feature this in my documentary series as part of a free thing you can do.

I just wanted to post what I learned about today. I’ll have to take pictures whenever I go searching for these boxes.

I haven’t shared any Legally Free Friday goodies in a long time, so I’ll make up for it by sharing over 6 BG of music.

“The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the fifth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-free, RIAA-safe collection of songs totaling 6 GB, which can all be downloaded for free, thanks to BitTorrent.”

You can read more about it here or just get the torrents here.

There has been stuff going on in my life, but I haven’t felt comfortable sharing it here. I don’t want to get too personal or talk about other people in my life. I wait the focus of this blog to be on my projects and how I’m accomplishing my goals.

Though I will mention that my lab manger is no longer with us as of yesterday, which I was off. I had heard about everything via text messages and so I haven’t really talked to anyone about it. I go into work in a little bit. I am rather nervous about today. Granted, I’ve been through this before. Four times as a matter of fact. I’m going to follow the advice of my work horoscope today, which says: “It’s more than subliminal heavy business that’s weighing you down. Don’t get upset. This time it’s not just you. That bad vibe in the air makes it a good day to put off all decisions.” Our general manger actually called me this morning and assured me that everything would be fine. Even though I’ve been without a lab manager before, I still don’t know what’s going to happen. I do know that I will not be be offered the position and if I was, I don’t know how I would feel about it. I could do most of it, except for handling upset customers, which is important. I also worry that if I did get too involved that I would get myself stuck there and unable to move forward with my personal projects. Though, I would have more money and paid time off to use for them.

While the matters of work are all twisted, I am straightening out plans to go forward with a documentary series showcasing interesting places in Oklahoma. I’ve been wanting to do it for awhile now, but I’ve always held back because there was always the question, who would host the show? I recently realized that Charmaine and Tristan from work would make great hosts. They’re both very talkative. I talked to them about the show and they both agreed to do it. I’ve been sharing my ideas with everyone at work and they are all excited. We’ve been coming up with places to feature for the series. It’s going to be a great show. I could go on, but I’ll save that discussion for when we get closer to finalizing the project.

Just a quick post to share a new item for Legally Free Friday. I bring you a comic, Josh & Imp. The story’s about two kids in love — Josh, a high-schooler with a rocky home life and a job bagging groceries after school, and Imp, a teenaged costumed crimefighter chafing under the tutelage of Guardian Devil. Their lives are radically different, their dates are logistical nightmares, and their own neuroses, insecurities, and suspicions undermine the tentative closeness they share; Imp thinks Josh is only seeing her because of the novelty value of dating a superhero, and Josh, besides being overwhelmed and humbled by her stories of thwarting plans for apocalypse and world domination, is embarrassed that he doesn’t even know Imp’s real name. They’ve got issues they need to settle, to be sure, but most of the time they can just forget about that, because of all the fun they’re having together.

Just reporting that there were several tornados in my area today. I was at work and we had to take shelter once. When we took shelter, the power surged a few times. I believe because of that, that our curing unit at work died finally. The rest of the day was just a mess, getting back to work and all. We didn’t get much business that day, so we tried to refocus and clean up the lab because we have a visit on tomorrow (Wednesday), which I have off from work.

The weird thing about all of this was this morning I had a dream I had to take cover from a tornado.

For this week’s Legally Free Friday, I got a creative Windows game. Tag: The Power of Paint is a free, first-person puzzle platformer which focuses on the players’ ability to modify their environment as they see fit, simply by painting it. Enjoy a unique and emergent gameplay experience, as you traverse each highly stylized level, using your endless supply of paint and all the power that comes with it to make your way to the goal.

For the Mac users out there, how about Quinn. Quinn is an arcade-style tetromino puzzle game written and designed specifically for Mac OS X. It features a clean, elegant user interface, beautiful graphics, and smooth, subtle animations for fluid gameplay. Instead of reinventing the game with yet another variation of the rules, the goal of Quinn is to combine the simplicity of the original idea with the genuine Mac experience for perfect user enjoyment.

Well, it’s been awhile, so I’ll start with things I’ve discovered the past few weeks. The big one is how many people care for SoaH. I made a post a few weeks ago asking what people thought of the site and what we should do in the future. It’s inspired me to start updating the site weekly. I’m also going to do a big push on improving the music collection and remix section.

Charmaine recently critiqued the first four chapters of The Crashing of Heaven and Hell. She made some valid points and useful suggestions that I’m going to add to the book. We were supposed to have a discussion back on Monday, but she had to cancel because of some matters with her sister. She did enjoy the book, so I’m glad about that. Still, I can’t help but feel that’s there’s some awkward tension between us. I’m probably just over analyzing.

I guess I’ll wrap up with some quickies. I brought the first two seasons of Dr. Who last Saturday at Buy.com I should get them any day now. In the meantime, I’ve been watching season 2 of Buffy. My sister and her boyfriend broke up (I didn’t care much for him). She’s moved back in with our parents though she’s looking at getting a two-bedroom apartment with one of her friends. I’m rather disappointed by MacWorld. I was really hoping for news about the new OS and iMac, so I would know when I could get a new computer, but none of that information was released. Still, the insider sites say “soon.” Circuit City is going out of business, which is sad to see anyone go down. I’ll have to pick some movies and video games when they go on sale. Still, 34,000 people are out of a job. I’m learning some great advice and tricks to running a strong business with all of these closings. I think that covers everything for the past two weeks.