Happy New Year! Welcome back to the 2006 edition of the URI! Zone. In August of this year, this site will have been around for ten long years (although it will have only acted as a blog-like enema of the tortured soul for five of those years). What this means, for people who are not so hot with numbers, is that my site is older than Napster, older than Slashdot, and older than MacOS 8. It's just one year younger than Amazon, eBay, and the Java programming language, and HoTMaiL is its elder sibling by a mere month. Honestly though, this site is far cooler than HoTMaiL ever was. I am all the hot male you could ever want and I have the added bonus of not resulting in spam.

I enjoy writing my daily column for all you thankless Internet hobos, and while I know I'm not a great writer, I hope that I'm at least entertaining enough for your daily fix. Booty-willing, I hope to still be writing when I'm 104 and carpal tunnel has gnawed my fingers away to nubbins (since by then, the Internet will be run on brain waves, and you will hit the Back button by quickly jerking your head to the left). If I don't last as long as I expect (since Oriental people are younger than they appear and I could already be 104 and about to keel over), then I at least hope to be writing this ten years from today, when I am 36 with 18 kids and the future wifey is ordering me to come help with poopy diapers instead of wasting my time writing updates about how funny poopy diapers are and how they will not be so funny when she puts my keyboard in a Caps Lock and dashes it against the rocks below. (You see by then, I will have acquired Internet notoriety and will be living off my PayPal earnings in a villa on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with a cliffside pool like the one in Road Rules). My site is older than PayPal too.

For today's update, I dug deep into my archives (which are ever so wonderfully organized now) and looked at my journals to see what I've been doing on previous New Year's Eves. Some people might argue that this type of update is too easy, but I counter by recognizing that I can't do this again for at least ten years without repeating content. So, here's what I've done since 1994:

1994: In tenth grade, I was on a band trip to the Peach Bowl where we played Sweet Georgia Brown on the field during halftime with eight million seventy-two other unique snowflake high school bands and then drove back home immediately following the game to save on hotel fees (fewer nights means fewer cheese and sausage sales required). At midnight, I was somewhere in South Carolina reading A Separate Peace for English homework, and the next morning we ate breakfast at a truck stop.

1995: Stayed home with my parents and most likely played computer games until midnight, then went outside, shouted "Happy New Year!", and went to bed. I wasn't just a party animal, I was a party mineral and vegetable as well.

1996: Ate dinner at the Atlantis Pizzeria with Aaron Ulm, Jack Wilmer, and Jack's Maryland friend, Bruce, then came back to my house, where we watched the movie Stakeout and played Doom.

1997: This New Year's was spent at the Orange Bowl where VT lost against Nebraska. In another "what a cheap band" episode, we drove straight home after the game and spent New Years Eve on an Abbott bus.

1998: We were on a Gator Bowl trip this year, at the Sea Turtle Inn. On New Year's Eve, all three hundred and thirty members of the band (besides a few weenies that went to bed early, probably to study their CS textbooks) were on the beach. The next night was when the trumpets played Tech Triumph on the beach until the cops came. If "CS" offends you, pretend I said "EE".

1999: '98 was the year we went to the MUSIC CITY BOWL, which earned enough money to send us to Nashville for about forty-seven minutes, if I recall correctly. We were back home in northern Virginia well before New Year's so a bunch of trumpets got a couple rooms at a motel in Springfield for the night. This was back before I drank at all, but it was still a fun night. This was also the night Jason and Rosie started smooching late at night when they thought everyone was asleep. Don't worry, Internet moralists, they were just smooching, and now they're riding the matrimonial monorail for life.

2000: The day before we took off for the Sugar Bowl and the National Championship, the trumpets decided to reenact 1999 at the same Springfield motel, with fewer freshmen and less smooching. Kevin Moorhouse introduced a game called Mr. Bud with over thirty-five written down rules.

2001: Spent New Year's Eve with Nikki in Montclair where we watched an unmemorable movie (which may have been Road Trip. This was back when I had an affinity for Killian's, and may have had six of them that night. Don't worry, Internet moralists, I was already twenty-one. Now, I have an affinity for any beer you can buy thirty of for fourteen dollars at Costco. That's called economics, kids. Nikki did not drain a bottle of Arbor Mist this year -- I guess the previous year was enough.

2002: This was the year I was living in Tallahassee and had agreed to host my VT friends for the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville. After an ill-advised make-out session with a homeless guy in downtown 'hassee, I got the flu. All I remember about the night they arrived was that X-Files was on TV, I was too hot to be cold and too cold to be hot, and shivering on the floor of my bedroom because being up high on the bed made me nauseous. I spent New Years Eve sick in some Jacksonville bar on the one night that Jacksonville decided to go below freezing, and when that got old, I trudged back to the rent-a-van and waited for the others while homeless men outside eyed the van with its motor running with great interest. F U Jacksonville.

2003: When I started writing my daily updates, I stopped writing my little archived journals, because there's only so much writing you can do in a day before you go crazy and start attacking random power walkers on the sidewalk. As such, I have no idea what I did for this year -- can anyone else remember?

2004: Went to a wild party at Ben's house in Chantilly. Because I lived mere minutes away, I didn't drink, and just went home to sleep with Kitty and Booty after the ball dropped. What did I tell you about being a party noun?

2005: This year, Anna and I decided to have a party at my house in Sterling, since I had a basement and a pool table. What else could you possibly need for a party? Only about ten people showed up, most likely because we didn't decide to host it until six hours before midnight. (We redeemed ourselves as party hosts this past Halloween).

2006: We decided to stay in at my house with some tasty treats from Subway, my patented New Year's Chocolate Chip Cookies on a patented New Year's themed plate, and the first few episodes of the British version of that show, The Office. After those, we channel-surfed through a panoply of shows, including the Road Rules with the cool pool, MTV's ball coverage with way too many bands I had never heard of (and what the heck is up with Laguna Beach?), a show about baby penguins, and a couple episodes of World Poker Tour. We actually got so enthralled by either penguins or poker (who wouldn't?) that we missed the ball dropping by one minute, and it was 2006 before we knew it. Oh, and some guy from some band that sucks tried to crowd-surf into the audience and everyone backed away so he landed on the floor. That he's in a band called "Fall Out Boy" is just delightfully fitting.

My site is older than Fall Out Boy.