I've been waiting all symphony season for tonight's performance!  MTT is conducting Mozart's Requiem Mass!  It's going to be absolutely brilliant live.  Anyone else going?

I turn 26 today at 4:18pm.  This has been a perfectly awful year for me...pretty much the worst one I've ever had in my life.  Contracted a macular edema in my only eye, had to take a 7 month medical hiatus off of work, have been driven into a really bad depression because of my eye issues and the future of its health.  That subsequently has driven me away from people...kept me distant from dates and friends.  A constant feeling of not wanting to burden others with my own drama; being walled up and unable to relate to anyone.  Going 7 months without being able to even see peoples' faces will do that to you I guess. 

My vision has gotten better and is finally stabilizing, even though I have to go through a horrific procedure every month now to keep it that way.  I've been slowly getting back into the paces of my work, and am also trying to reach out to people again.  I've just been hit with a tremendous string of bad luck and it just keeps continuing, so I'm not too surprised when anything I plan or do doesn't go well anymore.  Tried to get a big group of friends together to go see Harry Potter tonight in the IMAX theatre.  Set up the event a little over a week ago and all 32 people I invited couldn't make it, so I'll be by myself in the theatre tonight.  I went to Las Vegas by myself last year for my 25th birthday; spending it alone just seems to be a recurring trend now.

Life is just a constant Catch-22.

Your concept of "Matches Well" and "is close to you" seems to be pretty broken.  Should probably get to fixing your matching parameters at some point...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sxXVcQzHA

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer, 3rd Rock from the Sun) started a collaborative artist network called hitRECord.org.  They had a few films and a booth at Sundance, and just before the festival, some of the creatives there got together and decided that they wanted to create a Schoolhouse Rock style animation about the Prop 8 Trial, pleading for it's televisation and posting on youtube.  They put out a call for animators, and I signed right up when I found out about it.  I ended up pulling 3 all-nighters in a row, getting not but a few hours of sleep in 3 days, crunching to get this done by Thursday (Jan 28th). 

My shots: Bill of Rights being trampled, "Day before the trial supreme court intervened...to Business as Usual Machine", the shot after that with the paper ripping apart and the main characters interacting, the guy texting in the courtroom all the way to the America Bulb with the red lights appearing, the paper taping back together and pullout, then comped together the finale and animated the kid, Reverend, and Green shirt guy in the midground and added confetti.  It was a ton of work and a lot of waiting around for other artists to get in their assets.  Collaborating with a rag-tag team of people from all over the country to finish this was fun, though all of our different skillsets made the outcome interesting...I was the only dedicated After Effects character animator, while all the other animators were fluent in Flash.

The Courage Campaign president loved it, as did Joseph and the other celebrities who saw it, and they are trying to spread it around as far as they can to get the message out!  :)  Was definitely worth the lack of sleep!

I am in all sorts of pain from 12 solid hours of heavy moving.  Thankfully, my new place is just a few doors down from where I currently live, but it's mired by a curved flight of stairs and some of my furniture has cantankerous geometry.  My Dad, brother and I got it all moved all the same, and the next few days will be spent migrating the little things over and doing a deep clean.

The new apartment is awesome, and I can't wait to see it all come together after everything finds its place!

So, I've been part of this site for a looong time, and in my time here, I've managed to answer 1500+ match questions.  Mostly out of boredom, but actually interested in the results they produced.  Now, it seems that I've changed quite a bit since I answered them, so I've had to eradicate all of my answers and start from scratch.  I probably shouldn't answer so many next time.

Plus, the questions system seems to be broken.  I have Answer Publicly checked, but it's not recognizing it...rather odd new system. :P

I'll be on my way to Vegas tomorrow to celebrate my 25th birthday.  It will be my 20th time in Sin City, but the first time I've ever gone by myself for sole leisure.  I'm seeing Beatles LOVE on Friday night, but don't have anything else planned but relaxing, gambling, maybe hitting a club or two and checking out the massage services at the MGM.

Wish I had someone to go with, but ah well.  Should be interesting just by myself.

I just shaved my goatee and mustache down to stubble for my costume.  I'm going as Dr. Mark Green, Anthony Edwards' character from ER!

I haven't seen my upper lip since 2005...it's so weird being nearly clean-shaven.  o.O

Here's a new animation I worked on that just went live.  It was for IDEO, on the back of a speech that their CEO just gave at the TED conference.

http://livingclimatechange.com/index.php/2009/09/our-invitation-to-you/

I did the rotoscoping/line illustration animation of Tim Brown, the IDEO CEO in the video.

Plus, if you've seen the Charles Schwab commercials on TV lately, I was a team leader for one of the spots, though there was inevitably a ton of drama in their creation.

As I was pouring through the Fark.com comment sections during a break from work, I came across this little snippet written by a user. The board was commenting on a news report about a dumbass "angry guy" who screams about the government screwing everything up when he himself has been collecting disability checks for the past 4 years.
http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1250178009215370.xml&coll=1

Anyways, I found this comment to be amazing and worthy of one (1) internet awarded to the writer:
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This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

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I posted this on my Facebook page, and a dramatic but well thought-out debate opened up between me and a few friends that is Still going on...to the point where some of them had to actually go out and blog about their responses due to the response character limits in the facebook comment sections.