What a holiday. I think that was the broadest range of emotions I’ve ever felt in such a short span of time.

I fucked things up more than I’ve ever done with anything before, and unsurprisingly I don’t think I’ve ever felt this much regret. If I could do it all again, it would all be different, and I would do anything to make that happen. It’s completely my fault that I let things turn out the way they did, but there doesn’t seem to be a damn thing I can do about it now. I don’t know what else to say except that I’m sorry for screwing up.

The good news is that I’m the only one that feels this way, which means that this whole thing is good news for someone else.

Speaking of fucking up, I only have a job right now because my boss kicks so much ass. I was a little upset about the above and did something that was completely irresponsible. I’ve never done that before and I’ll never do it again.

Oh yeah, I think one of my close friends might have a drinking problem.

So, I’m not exactly feeling like I’m on top of the world anymore. But like Sorush says, the lows help you appreciate the highs, right? For the last four months, I’ve felt like I’ve been living a charmed life. I guess feeling like shit was long overdue.

Yes, I know that’s over 20 I‘s, but this is a public post, and I want to respect the privacy of the people involved in everything that was mentioned.

I hope your holiday went much better than mine.

There’s nothing I can do to repay Joseph and Justin enough for being there when I needed them. Thanks guys.

Joseph, Donald, and I are having the biggest party Auburn has ever seen for New Years, and YOU are coming. Yep… whatever plans you had are officially canceled. This will be much more fun anyway.

Click here for directions from anywhere… Ignore the estimated time — it’s usually only takes a fraction of the time it says. Kegs, indoor hot tub, and heated pool will be provided… bring a sleeping bag if you’re gonna crash here.

That’s all you need to know… Oh, my cell is (205) 401-4081 in case you get lost. Seeya Friday.

Just finished watching The Terminal with the family… I thought it was awesome. Spielberg is the man.

Yeah, so anyway, I’m in Birmingham for the holidays. Hung out with some old friends last night… that was alot of fun, even though it was like negative 70 degrees outside.

I’m not sick anymore. I went back to work Thursday…

So, yeah, tomorrow is Christmas… So Merry Christmas!

So yeah, I’m sick as a dog… Starting at 3am I’ve spent about 5 hours in the bathroom hugging the toilet. I can’t keep anything in my stomach. I ate a damn pop sickle and promptly puked it all up… a fucking pop sickle! I mean, come on.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to keep things down soon so I can go back to work tomorrow. =/

Alright, I’ve finally got some spare time… So, I moved to Auburn last weekend, and I love it here so far. I love being on my own. I love this house. I love my new job. My roommate is cool. Life is good.

I think I’m going to like working for my current employer. I’m enjoying work a little more than I expected, now that I’m finally getting a better handle on the computer language I’m using. My boss is pretty cool, too. He’s younger and a little bit more laid back than my last boss, which is a welcomed change. He also has a background in I.T., which means he’s more likely to understand what it takes to make things happen. A realistic view of things is a welcomed change. Of course, people at the office don’t know I’m here yet – so, I haven’t had to deal with the, uhm, well, let’s just say people aren’t coming to me with questions yet. I’m afraid that could turn into a strain on my productivity, not to mention that I’m not exactly the most patient person in the world, but if you’re reading this, you probably already knew that. Maybe I’m just worried about nothing; I hope so. We’ll see.

Anyhow, Donald left for Birmingham today, so I’ve got the house to myself for a week. Auburn is vacant right now. I hope it doesn’t get too boring.

Brittney is coming visit tomorrow. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her, so it’ll be nice to catch up.

The thought of spending my New Years with a certain someone makes me happier than all of the things listed above combined. We haven’t called each other yet tonight, but I hope that wherever she is, she’s enjoying herself — I’m thinking about you. =]

So, whether you wanted to know or not, that’s what’s on my mind. I hope all is going well for everyone else too.

I’m gonna go try to find something to do in this ghost town. Later.

I’m way too tired to say much about this right now, but tomorrow I’m moving to Auburn for a semester of work, for those who didn’t already know. I’ll be living with Donald and Joseph, and I’ll have the house with a hot tub, heated pool, and big screen HDTV to myself for two weeks while they’re in Birmingham for the holidays. =] You should come check it out.

Okay, don’t get me wrong… Life has been great lately for the most part. But… I would like to take this opportunity to get some things off my chest.

Gripe 1:
As many of you know, I’m moving out soon. So, I switched my house from DSL to Cable for our broadband pipe… It’s cheaper, a little faster, and tends to be a little less reliable. The reliability makes DSL worth it for me, but my family will never know the difference. So yeah, I made the switch about three days ago, and like clockwork Charter started having city-wide outages. Every fucking 15 minutes the cable TV will go out and, unlike before, take my internet connection with it. I can’t begin to explain how annoying this has been.

Gripe 2:
Silence is Defeat is a free shell project that I co-founded and have been running with a friend in California since the year 2000… The primary server has been up for over a year now without any major security breaches, which is *incredible* to those who completely understand the technical side. Basically, there are hundreds of very talented active users, some of which who are aggressively trying to take over the box, and to this day no one’s been able to do it. Since we haven’t had any problems, I started to get a little lazy and forgot to set certain file permissions back to the way they should have been set. So, some douche bag decided it’d be fun to abuse apache’s file permissions and delete everything apache had write access to. He or she ended up deleting all of the PHP files on chrisbrunner.com, silenceisdefeat.com, and wordsfromiraq.com/forum. Naturally, the latest backups from silenceisdefeat.com are a month old and I hadn’t yet backed up chrisbrunner.com or wordsfromiraq.com… That *REALLY* sucked. I was ready to break something. I thought everything was gone. I was so pissed.
It sucks even more for the idiot users who chmod‘d their entire home directories to 777 out of ignorance…
Well, I (obviously) ended up being able to recover chrisbrunner.com since very few files had their permissions set incorrectly. We are in the process of recovering silenceisdefeat.com from backups, and I was kind-of able to partially recover the WordsFromIraq forums. Anyway, I’ll live.

Gripe 3:
For those who don’t know, most of my programming experience is with C++ and PHP. I knew BASIC when I was 6 and learned QBASIC pretty well at some point in elementary school, but I haven’t touched those much since. I love C++ and PHP. They’re excellent languages in my opinion. Well, I agreed to learn ASP.NET for a new job that’s coming up. In all honesty, I don’t really want to touch ASP. I like PHP a lot and would much prefer not to learn a language that was invented by Microsoft. But, I figured, no big deal. It’s just a language. I’ll pick up a book, spend a few days on it, and add it to my list of experience. The problem is that in order to use ASP.NET, I need to learn either VB.NET or C#. C# has a good bit of support in the OSS community, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. Since I already know and dig C++, C# would be an easy next step, and it seems cool that I’d be able to develop stand-alone apps with the same language that would enable me to code web apps. In addition, there is lots of support for C# in the OSS community. So, I could code apps for both Linux (my primary OS) and Windows with the same language.
But, the people that I’m going to be working for already stated that all code must be in VB.NET. As a C++ programmer, this really sucks. Instead of being able to spend my time learning the “next step” that would be ultra-advantageous and of interest to me, I’m going to have to take time to learn an inferior language. It feels unnatural… like I’m taking a major step backwards… I want to puke.
Of course, I’m going to do it anyway. I’m sure it’ll pay off. I’m sure it’ll be easy, so it won’t be so bad, and it never hurts to have another language and more experience on your resume.

Gripe 4 (Bonus!):
I’m starting to question the merits of a CS degree thanks to slashdot articles like this one.

Wow, I hope you’re not still reading. If you are, thanks for listening. That had to be boring as hell. Anyway, that’s all for now. Later.

So, uhm, yeah… this weekend was great. It was Donald’s 20th birthday. So, of course we had to celebrate. It just so happened that the Auburn/Alabama game was going on the same day only yards away from us.

While I was down there, I invited some old friends from high school to the party, who in turn invited several of their own friends… it got pretty crowded… (sorry Joy)
We had over 200 drinks, but the poor guy next door was kind enough to offer us free access to his keg… with a big crowd outside, we started volunteering people to do keg-stands… Donald did it for the first time and was able to hold on for about 30 seconds… we were proud.

Needless to say we floated the keg in less than 20 minutes… Sucks for Joy’s next door neighbor. We felt kinda bad, but he was too drunk to care… oh well.

So… after a keg stand, and god-knows-how-many more beers, Joseph and I started taunting eachother, like we’ve been doing every time we get drunk for the last year or so… I always tell him that I’m gonna beat his ass (which is funny if you know us well — I’m out of shape and he’s a built almost-pro boxer), and he always says something to the same effect, but he never has a pair of gloves handy… Well, this time he did, and we boxed for almost half an hour. It was crazy. I had a blast… Joy took pics:

See the look on the people’s faces? That’s the oh-my-god-Brunner-is-crazy look.

Ouch. He obviously got some good punches in.

…but so did I =]

It was all in fun… Today I can barely type with my right hand because it hurts from repeatedly punching him as hard as I could for half an hour and my entire mid-section aches… but it was worth it because I had a blast. =]

Justin’s birthday is next weekend… I’m looking forward to it.

I haven’t posted in a while… a lot has been going on… I’m not really sure where to start.

I switched from Blogger to b2evolution, which is why everything looks different and things got kind of weird for those of you using an RSS aggrogrator. It shouldn’t make a difference to readers from here on out, except that it should be a lot easier to comment. The only major differences are on my side.

Anyway, I mentioned before that I might “start a section of my site that’s dedicated to what’s going on in Iraq [that] will feature news written by Iraqis instead of news from Western media networks.” Well, that’s exactly what I did, and it turned out so well that I ended up giving it its own domain name… check out wordsfromiraq.com. It’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

I spent the weekend in Auburn. It was *alot* of fun. I also got a call that confirmed that I’ll be working down in less then a month, and Donald and Joseph insisted that I should live with them while I’m down there. I’m definitely looking forward to it. I can’t wait to get out of the house, I can’t wait to get started at the new job, and I can’t wait to live in Auburn.

I’ll blog more later… Peace.

I bet you won’t see these videos on CNN…

This is a video of US forces neutralizing (blowing up) an ammo dump in iraq, taken by a soldier. Cool, ehh? And you thought you’ve seen fireworks…

Ever wonder what’s it’s like to be shot at? This one is of US troops moving through the streets of Iraq as they’re fired upon by insurgents.
Click the images to start the download. Obviously, BitTorrent is required. Enjoy.