ah, cold morning in january, and trash day in my neighborhood no less. a thin layer of snow on the ground, the distant beep beep of sanitation trucks, and up and down the sidewalks used up christmas trees line the curbs. what christmas means to me! post christmas that is. i think the practice of having a christmas tree is such a waste.

hooked up the kensington webcam to my office mac and everything worked fine. the kensington webcam won't allow me to change the refresh rate, so when i move around in front of the camera, it leaves a ghostly blurry streak. the colors on the kensington is much better than the krittercam though (more light sensitive, just the refresh rate is too slow). i want to upgrade to the new version of oculus as well, v3.1. the version i currently use, v2.5.8, crashes everytime i close the application for the second time.

all day long i felt weird. january 8th. the feeling you get when you know it's some sort of anniversary or something important happened on this day. turns out today is actually elvis presley's birthday. it's also david bowie's birthday too, but he's not in the same league as elvis. i told amanda it was unpatriotic to not love elvis, he's just as symbolic of america as cowboys, mickey mouse, and coca-cola. it's strange that i was able to sense something was amiss today. maybe my subconscious memory is a really big elvis fan and wanted to let me know about the special occasion. it's belated, but maybe tomorrow will be an all elvis songs kind of day at work.

when i came home i looked for the dead christmas trees lining the streets, but they'd been all removed along with the trash. it's just so sad. maybe if people burned the trees in a huge backyard bonfire, that wouldn't be so bad. but to toss it out along with the garbage doesn't seem like a fitting ending for what use to be a dignified living evergreen. i did see the trees, but i did see a heating oil truck refueling the oil tank of a neighborhood house.

while waiting for the start of a repeat episode of the gilmore girls, i visited the official gilmore girls website of the wb network. guess what? you can talk to rory gilmore on aim at rorygilmore1008! it's freaky, i tried it (what this means i'm not sure, i was talking to an ai who claims to be the character of rory gilmore on the show). i asked her questions like "do you like max?" and "what's your favorite book?" the answers start to appear the same after a while, it's not a very sophisticated ai, it looks for keywords and spits out a canned response that's either very related or somewhat related to what you asked. nevertheless, i think it's kind of a weird and somehow eerily sophisticated marketing tool. i'd love to get an ai of my own that i can press into aim service and pretend to be me when i'm not around. i think have enough personal quirks in the way i talk that a robot can do a pretty good impression of me.