As 2008 draws to a close, there is the typical reflecting on what I have done over the past year and what I can do to make things better for next year. This year hasn't been that bad for me. I have doing a lot better at school since transferring to Illinois State University; hell, I am considered an honor student now for some odd reason. I made a commitment to getting into shape midway through the year and I have lost 45 pounds overall; my weight has gone down from 195 lbs. to 150 lbs. I have even built a little bit of muscle in the process and I am probably stronger now than I have ever been. As a part of my fitness endeavor, I completed one round of P90X. There isn't that much more that has happened in 2008 but I am glad that I did accomplish something for once.

I am hoping for a great 2009. My first order of business is to complete a second round of P90X. I will be doing doubles for the second round and I will make more of an effort to bulk up rather than worry about losing weight. While I am doing P90X, I want to stay committed to the few student groups that I am involved with. I did not participate in any of the student groups in the Fall 2008 semester that I was involved with in the Spring 2008 semester. As I have stated before but didn't really accomplish, I really want to put more of an effort towards studying Japanese. I would like to take the JLPT this year but I am not sure I will be ready.

Here hoping for an awesome new year.

Merry Christmas foos.

As you can see in the previous two blog posts, I have been messing around with various portions of this blog and changing things. There have been a few bug fixes; the biggest bug that was fixed was that raising 404s did not work. Most of the features changes won't be useful to visitors. A preview view has been made that I can use to preview an unpublished blog post that the general public cannot access. Pinging directories, such as Technorati, and pingbacks to other sites now work properly. Some extra settings have been made in my local_settings file. A WMD editor has been added to the admin. Also, I have made a Markdown extension that will allow easy embedding of YouTube videos using an XHTML-compliant object code; the embed codes from YouTube are not XHTML-compliant. I have not checked whether the code will work in Internet Explorer so I can't guarantee that the code will work for you if you are using IE; you should be using a different web browser anyway.

I wrote the extension myself but I took the idea for the syntax of the pattern from Samuel Cormier-Iijima. The example was mention in a comment on another blog. Here is what the Markdown code looks like and then the associated video rendered from the extension.

==youtube(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n3LobCY5HE)==

I will work on adding more over the next few days.

Testing directory pingback support.

Hello out there. This site is another attempt to get back into bloging on a regular basis. Unlike my last two blogs which have been hosted with WordPress, this blog was written by me using the Django web development framework. This is a very minimalistic blog but it fits my main requirements for a blog. I plan to build on this over time. There are some features that I have yet to fully develop, such as commenting. I have some code already implemented for commenting using the comments app in Django and comment-utils. Disqus is also an option that I am considering. Also, I have messed with django-threadedcomments in the past so that is another option.

As far as the content for this site, I imported my posts for the last year from my old WordPress blog; most of the other posts were not worth keeping. I will make an effort to post on a regular basis but I cannot guarantee that it will happen. There will also be more of an effort on toning down the subject matter of posts but this blog should still be considered NSFW.

If you want to take a look at my old blog, you can find it at http://ryochan7.wordpress.com/. I might delete my old blog later but I will keep it up for now. That is all I will mention for now. Later.