NOTE: Yesterday was my birthday. This is the post that I started writing on that day and finished today.

Today is my birthday. Need I say any more? I baked my birthday cake (a pound cake) with my sister and my mom yesterday, and my mother thoughtfully made some vanilla icing/glaze for it as well. I had most of the cake for breakfast today. As for presents, from my parents I got a TI-84 graphing calculator. I have an inordinate fondness for graphing calculators, especially (I think) because of their programmable capabilities. I love my PSP and all, but I'm more interested in making the programs than using them. Besides games, of course. I love those whether I'm writing them or playing them. At a summer camp at Northwestern last year, I created a program that basically rendered my friends' calculators useless by getting itself stuck in an infinite loop, but someday I want to make a self-replicating program that will automatically copy itself to other calculators when its host is linked up. In other words, a virus. A TI calculator virus. It might be impossible, but that doesn't stop me from trying. It's mostly for high school, though. I know it doesn't seem like much of a present, but my father tells me that there's a different present on the way from the site where they purchased it. It should be here in two or three days. From my sister I got a $25 Best Buy gift card, and although the workers at Best Buy are stupid and frustrating (except for the Geek Squad), Best Buy is one of my favorite stores, bested only by EB Games and Gamestop (not to mention Borders and Barnes and Noble). Okay, so it's my fifth favorite store . . . but whatever. At school, I got impromptu birthday cards from some of my friends. Thanks Umair, Stephanie, and Teddy for the hilarious quasi-birthday-cards! By the way Teddy I am not from the region of India known as "the Cow Belt", but I love cows nonetheless, so your card is still politically correct. My good friend Sophie was very thoughtful and got me a hacky-sack and a friendship bracelet, so thank you very much Sophie if you happen to be reading this. I need to pay you guys back sometime; I feel like a jerk not giving presents to my friends for major events.

I also got my hands on a book I've been after for a while. I picked up Mind Hacks at the library just before it closed. The idea I'm working with here is: if I can hack the structure of my own thought processes, then I can hack anything, seeing as the human brain far surpasses any computer in its complexity and subtlety. Oooohh. Feel the power. Speaking of computers, I managed to get myself transferred out of my Web Authoring course to the Programming course I've wanted all year. Hallelujah. It's pretty cool, despite the fact that I'm two weeks behind. I'm catching up pretty quickly, though. C++ is a great language. My previous experience with OOP languages was a neat little keylogger I wrote in Visual BASIC .NET. VB is a sloppy, messy language, like HTML with programming capabilities. I didn't like it very much. But it was helpful because of the coding habits I picked up from it, like actually declaring my variables before starting the program and being more specific about data types to conserve space. I also learned how OOP actually worked, which was great. Previously, I played around with weakly typed, lenient languages like Liberty BASIC. The rigid structure of C++ and object orientedness eliminates the guilt I felt at writing programs held together with spit and prayers in non-OOP languages.

YouTube has just held its first annual YouTube Awards (yay!), so I'll finish off this post with the category winners:

Most Creative goes to "Here It Goes Again" by OKGo:

Best Comedy goes to "Smosh Short 2: Stranded" by Smosh:

Best Commentary goes to my personal favorite, "Hotness Prevails/Worst Video Ever" by thewinekone:

Best Series goes to "Ask A Ninja" by digitalfilmmaker (gotta love those ninjas):

Best Music Video goes to "Say It's Possible" by TerraNaomi:

Most Inspirational goes to "Free Hugs Campaign" by PeaceOnEarth123:

Most Adorable goes to "Kiwi!" by Madyeti47: