A Summer Passed

Somehow it is now August. I cannot even begin to tell you how that one happened. It flew by so fast. I should start calling this Matt's Seasonal Blog so people at least know not to come back until 3 months down the road after each post.

Just to bring things around from the last post. The train trip up north to Sacramento and Chico was amazing. I loved Sacramento and unfortunately cannot say the same for Chico. Sacramento has a transit system that is cheap and very effective, not to mention it is a fairly large hub for rail travel. Those two factors are very important to me at the moment since I do not feel like be attached to my car with no alternative, which is the average situation in Southern California. I am sick of it and Sacramento's rail travel seems to put it a few points ahead of other places. While there we walked around the city and just enjoyed ourselves. It was much needed relax time to say the least.

Now to get into the details of Chico. There was next to nothing to do in town except for a few key bars. They had this cool park there with a swimming pool built into a natural stream. The town had a main street with some shops, a little reminiscent of Ventura's Main Street especially since they all closed around 5pm or 6pm. Those were about the only things to do in the entire town. Getting back on the train in Chico left me with a not so good impression either. The depot was lacking a passenger platform and was basically an old worn down building with tracks next to it. There are only two trains per day there. One goes north and one south. Did I mention the hoard of cockroaches we had to keep at bay before the train came. Well all in all that place was stuffy, boring, and unimpressive. I don't think it has my name on it.

The train trip home was a pleasant one though. We played some card games and board games. Made a decent lunch and had a few beverages. All in all a great time with great people.

After about a couple days of rest and doing laundry it was Vegas Time! My dad and step mom flew out from New York to take Chelsea and I to Las Vegas for my 21st birthday. It was nice to spend time with them since that doesn't really happen more than a couple times a year at best now. I got to see my Uncle Rob for the first time in forever, that was great too. He seems to be doing pretty good. The best part of that trip though had to be The Beatles: LOVE Cirque du Solei. That was perhaps the coolest thing I have seen in my life. I cannot even begin to explain how incredible it was. I am not even able to pick out a favorite part because it was all just that good. The only way I can see somebody not liking that show is if they didn't really care for The Beatles in the first place. I know my parents weren't quite as excited as Chelsea or I but I am glad they decided to take us. On return from Vegas, the vacation has sort of ended since. I started some classes which takes me where I am now.

I just finished my summer classes up. I now have finished up both Statistics and Managerial Accounting. Two very boring classes that luckily only took 6 weeks instead of 12 to 18 weeks or however long a normal semester is. I started doing contract work for a company around June and am still doing projects for them at will. It is nice because it keeps me at least a little bit on my toes with programming, even though the difficulty level of the work is easy.

I made a couple behind the scenes changes with the website. Most of the changes have to do with the Google Blogger Data API and my HTML Template Reader. Prior to today the module I wrote for this blog was only capable of choosing one blog per user authenticated with Google. My next goal with this is to get comments working on my blog posts and perhaps some sort of archive page to look back at previous posts. Following that will be the gallery since I already have a small portion of code written for that.