Cameron's Thoughts

I finally ordered all the parts I need to repair my computer. I got a nice deal on a Antec 650W power supply at CompUSA's going out of business sale. I also got a new case that Brian had suggested, a motherboard and a new hard drive. The hard drive wasn't really NEEDED, but it will be nice to have. My dead Seagate is covered under warranty, but I want to try and recover the data off of that drive on to a new one. Then I can ship the damaged drive back for replacement. If I go ahead a stick all my SATA drives into this new box, I will have a total of 2TB of storage. I'll probably actually do this as the motherboard has eight SATA connectors and the case has five drive bays. Since I have two 160GB drives that are currently in RAID0 setup, I think I will convert them to a RAID1 so I have some reliable storage space.
In other news, spent the weekend assisting in the production of a short film for the 48/5 competition for the East Lansing Film Festival. This competition involved creating a five minute short movie over a 48 hour period. There was a long long night of writing Friday night, filming all day Saturday and editing that started Saturday night and went through early Sunday. It was completed ahead of schedule today. I'd have to say I'm fairly impressed by how it turned out. I didn't end up being as involved with this project as I have in some prior film stuff I had done, but I did get to play as an extra in one scene.
Finally, I made some further decisions on how I am going to proceed with the future of this website. I was planning to do a full rewrite and had Jan 1, 2009 set as my goal release date for that. After thinking it over, I think I am going to put that on the backburner and further work on the current code. This includes adding more features that I have been wanting, plus rewriting things in their current place. This actually worked really well with my comment system rewrite. Also, about the comments, currently you need to login to my site to post them; this will not be the case in the very near future. I've always wanted the comments to be completely open to anyone, but this of course opens the door to spam. I was using Movable Types built in comment support for the longest time, but now I am running off of my own code. I didn't have everything in place to prevent spammers from posting so I had removed the option for open posting, but I now thought of a simple idea that I will setup soon.

Near the beginning of January, I bought myself a weight bench. I've been tinkering with the idea of getting into shape for a while now, but things I tried haven't really panned out. I was walking for a bit, but it takes a lot of time and I wasn't really seeing much results for all the time I was investing. Plus, due to the climate I live in, it's not really practical year-round.
Amazingly, I have created a workout program for myself and not only followed it, but in most cases exceeded what I set forth to accomplish. Based on past history, this is quite amazing. I often will try things and they will fall apart within a weeks time. At this point, I've been working out every other day since Jan 17th missing only a few days here and there for important events. Last week I had worked up to a full hour of weight lifting and tonight I got this up to an hour and fifteen minutes. I really didn't expect to notice anything for at least a couple of months, but I can already tell that I am in the best shape I have been since high school. Yea, I still have quite a bit of fat around the belly, but underneath there is some decent muscle at this point. I'm expecting much of this fat to slowly turn into muscle within the coming months. I hope to have some good follow up reports on this. Right now though, I am going to bed cause I am pretty destroyed at this point.

My mind is quite out of control for the most part. It's something that seems to disturb me more and more each day. I used to be someone who felt in complete control of my mind and body. At one point I was able to easily mentally block out pain and hunger and such. Then something happened and I have lost this control. Not only that, but I have had actual emotions and feeling overcome me in ways that I can't change. The worst parts of this seem to come about every six months. I remember quite clearly about a year ago having major depression issues and also again I had a couple of weeks of these issues over the summer. This also happened a bit in the past too. The problems seem to have returned this past week. Today is the first day that I feel more in control. It's hard to really explain what is going on, but I just get this overwhelming sense that I am worthless and alone. Then I start to become really paranoid. The worst part is, I am completely aware that the paranoia is unjustified and I try talking myself out of it, but it doesn't really seem to help. Nothing seems to help really. I tried sleeping it away, drinking it away. No help. Anyhow, this isn't meant to be a pity post or anything. I avoiding posting anything while I was being most affected as I didn't want to sound like an asshole or anything. I really just wanted to get my thoughts out in writing to try and help deal with them.