I'm a Lucky Idiot

It's only appropriate that I start out this post saying, "Praise the Lord." Allow me to explain. As my regular readers no doubt already know, I've had a stressful couple of weeks. School has been consuming me and the stress has been piling up with my sleep time reduced. I literally started packing after my last final, moved my stuff into storage on Saturday, and then headed back to Houston. Little did I know that pushing my body to the limit would result in a car accident. After about 45 minutes of driving on 290, all that drowsiness started to kick in. Usually, I'm very capable of waking myself up, but this time nothing I usually do was working. Finally, I started to drift onto the gravel shoulder of the road, and as I turned to go back on the main road, my car spun in a circle. Then, it headed to the edge where it hit it at the perfect angle to launch me upside down into a ditch on the side of the highway. Definitely the singlemost terrifying experience of my life. When I opened my eyes, I figured that I was dreaming or about to die. Either way, I felt it was best to get out of my car. So I unbuckled, fell onto the roof, and rolled out. A few nice people stopped over to help me, and someone with a first aid kit cleaned up my minor cuts. Physically, I was perfectly fine. Emotionally, I was a wreck. Every time I approached my car, all I could do was sob, and I could barely get in words through all the crying when my dad spoke to me. They didn't yell at me, but I was disappointed enough in myself. What sucks is that I was thinking about stopping over and resting or getting some energy drinks, but I was still in the process of brainstorming ideas. Just a few more minutes and I may have made it out alright and been alright. Just a split second ruined my weekend. I was happy for the first time in months for all of two hours before being miserable again. My car's body has a lot of dents and scratches, but the interior is perfect. When my brother came to get me, after I broke down right in front of him, we emptied out all my belongings from it. I couldn't be more grateful that the accident happened in the best way possible: no one was hurt and my stuff was ok, and now I'll never forget opening my eyes upside down on the side of 290. I can't imagine that you'll find a safer driver for me. Not that I was reckless before, but this shouldn't have happened, and was a result of my own incompetence. Please, learn from my idiocy. Come up with several more strategies than I did for keeping yourself alert on long drives.

Though E3 is over, there are a couple of items left. It turns out that the cheaper PS3 will not support wireless controllers, among other things that I've brought up before. That one takes the cake for this cheaper version: why would you rather pay $100 less for so much less important features? Speaking of that controller, Engadget did a little comparison of their hands-on time with the PS3 and Wii controllers, and they were definitely more confident in the latter. However, they didn't bash the PS3 one as you may have expected, so there's hope for it yet. As you can tell from reading my blog, my life can get pretty stressful, and it looks like things are going to go downhill from here because IT is the most stressful field according to one study. I think it's hard to title any profession as being the most stressful, but I'm sure that technology can get rough because deadlines have to be really strict for really intensive projects. A prominent Google blog has a post about why we trust Google, and it's just a real interesting read. By the way, Google lost their case against the search box in IE 7 with the court deciding, and rightfully so, that changing the default isn't hard enough to be prohibitive. When you read stuff like this about Google, you kind of realize how funny it is that just a few years ago they were a little search engine with word of mouth publicity spreading like wildfire. Now, they've become so big and complicated. Lastly, Sony is planning on their own Ultra Mobile PC, and you can see what scarce pictures we have of it over here.



This big movie opener this weekend, Poseidon, got totally manhandled by MI:3 with only $20.3 million compared to the former's $24.5 even thought it was in its second weekend after a lower than expected opening weekend. It got pretty bad reviews anyway, but I just don't think the story was much to get excited enough about to go out and see it, whereas MI:3 was such a great experience and I'm sure that word of mouth spread. I think it's safe to expect big things next weekend out of the Da Vinci Code, especially since controversial movies seem to drum up even bigger audiences. Do you remember the third installment in the Fast and the Furious series? Tokyo Drift? It turns out that the reviews for it so far are pretty good when considering it as an action movie since the plot is obviously not going to be very strong. It sounds like it's a very fun movie to watch though, which is what really counts. Lastly, an extremely low quality, Spanish version of the trailer for Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is online, and it looks like a pretty far out and freaky movie. Hopefully, we'll get an official American one soon enough.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Immune :: System


2. Together :: Again


3. Blank :: Check


4. Professional :: Killer


5. Thousand :: Stab (move from Devil May Cry 3)


6. Penetration :: Sex (too easy ;)


7. Shutter :: Speed


8. Upside down :: My poor car :(


9. Neck :: Break Your


10. Unlisted :: Army

One more thing: all this has made me realize that my life must have some inherent worth to it. God must have some big plans for me to have saved me. It would've been trivial for me to die right there and then, but clearly I'm going to be part of something imporant someday. I hope I can do some good for the world in exchange for being given a second chance.