blog.rengawm

(I'm alive!) Still talking about politics... and a bit of life, if necessary.

2008-01-04T00:16:00.000-05:00

The primary motivation for this post is my excitement about the Iowa caucuses tonight. But, as long as I'm here anyway, I figure I'll talk about my life since late October.

Huckabee wins in Iowa! I sort of expected it... polls were going that way anyway, though he was on a bit of a downslide there since his 22-point advantage a few weeks ago. In my opinion, here's what will happen...
Huckabee goes up a bit. People can see him as possibly viable (as in, they're not the only ones supporting him anymore, and he can actually win.) A lot of people who liked his message but were scared of his popularity will start noticing him, I think. If nothing else, he gets TONS of free media coverage, at least for 5 days until New Hampshire. I doubt he'll win there, but it's not impossible.
Romney does a bunch of damage control. He's denying it, but I doubt he had much room for an Iowa loss. If this helps McCain beat him in New Hampshire, I don't see him recovering.
McCain and Giuliani have parties. Their biggest problem, as of yesterday, was Romney. Now, not so much. Unless Huckabee jumps up a lot, they come out of this minus one formidable opponent. This, as McCain is rising nationally and Giuliani keeps slipping.
Ron Paul will, of course, send out his legions of cyber-spammers to add 5986743958734 comments to every news story they can find a "Comment" button on.

Democrats... Barack Obama! I'm actually quite a bit excited about this. I REALLY don't want Hillary to win. Edwards is nothing special, I don't even really think about him. But tonight was my first significant exposure to Obama. I loved his little victory speech. And, as his was after Huckabee's, I realized that a lot of things that attracted me to Huckabee are shared by Obama. He emphasizes the need to work as one nation and see past party lines, and they're both for big change. I'm still undecided on whether I approve of the Iraq war or not, but the pro-life issue remains, which is one of my biggest. But, following a Giuliani/Obama nomination, I might end up siding with Obama. Unless Huckabee was Giuliani's VP, which I could easily see.

In other news, for everyone who cares enough about my personal life (you stalkers...), I'm now a sophomore and a half, which means 2.5 years to go. (Please pass quickly.) School starts again on Monday. Blech. But my earliest class is at 9:10 on M/W/F, and 9:45 on Tu/Th. Much better than 8:00. Taking sociology at a Juvenile Detention Center should be ... interesting. I think I'm looking forward to it, but we'll see. Sociology doesn't excite me.

Got oil for my car, baked potato chips, a gift certificate, and maple candy for Christmas. I'll enjoy/use it all, and considering that I generally just buy something when I want it, I can't think of anything I wanted that I didn't get.

Back to World of Warcraft, for a few months anyway. I've got one character of each class now, all at least level 16. Woooo.

Christmas/New Year were both wonderful and fun. I was mostly sick on Christmas and the day after, but recovered enough to hang out with nifty relatives for the remaining week of Holiday goodness. Going back to work is a pain.

The Colbert Report is coming back on Monday. Hopefully it won't be too drab without the writers. I'm pretty much excited. It'll make starting school the same day not quite as horrible.

And, that's about all I have to say.

Political Ramblings

2007-10-22T21:32:00.000-04:00

Just 2 more weeks until the library's new network/website/catalog goes live... it's getting busier, but I still love it. Maybe addiction to change will get the better of me after all the excitement is over... but then, I'll be tweaking and adding things on the website for months after this.

Even more of "Go Mike Huckabee!" than the last post: He's won the last two events (FOX debate last night, American Family Council conference on Saturday) without anyone else even coming close. (Ok, so Mitt Romney paid people to vote for him, and Ron Paul once again assembled his army of cyber-spammers, but Huckabee wins in a fair debate. If only there ever were such a thing...) But, there have been more donations on his site today than there were in the last week. I can't wait for next week's poll numbers after all the attention has time to go produce effects there. Oh, and perhaps even more importantly: Chuck Norris supports Huckabee! Clearly, nobody should even consider any other candidate anymore.

I'm still reading "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming". This is an incredible book.

If we claim our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-sixtieth the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid eighty-five million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better antimalaria policies. Which should be our first mission?

And, shockingly enough, Al Gore's logic is not flawless. He loves to say "If Greenland and a certain ice shelf in Antarctica slide off and melt in the ocean, water levels will rise by 40 feet." This is generally followed by horrible, awful, emotional pictures of the water levels in Florida and California. What he fails to recognize is that the Antarctic ice cap is at its highest volume of ice in recorded history. He also doesn't really support his theory either. Anyone can say "If all of Antarctica slides into the ocean, water levels will go up 400 feet." That doesn't make it a reality.

And, whaddya know, yet another political remark: We played with some numbers in my American Government class this morning and figured out that the average taxpayer would have to pay $20,000 every year for the government to break even, and that government spending has about doubled every decade for the last fifty years. Spooky.

Fall

2007-10-10T13:39:00.000-04:00

Fall break was this weekend. I worked for 30 hours. That is all. Oh, and I went to the Career Center for an "Advisory Committee Meeting". There were only five people there (including Mr. Wright and Brian) but it was great to go back and say hello to assorted random people.

My single Thursday class was canceled, and I have no lab on Friday. This means that I may actually have some free time this weekend, since I didn't during the two days of break. Mmmm, free time. Oh wait, maybe I forgot what that is.

In other news, only 3 weeks and 2 days left until I need to have the new library website complete. It's been a great project so far, and I've had the chance to change a lot of things (mostly behind the scenes code stuff) and add things that I've wanted to see there for a long time. (I've now created a blogging system, a wiki system, RSS feeds generated from the blogging system, and other goodies.) This is probably the first big deadlined project I've ever worked on, and it's fun. So, no complaints there. Coding for 11.5 hours on Monday was a bit brain-frying, though.

I watched the Republic presidential candidate last night. Most of it was either vague, confusing, or both. I got a couple laughs out of it, though... like Mitt Romney's lawyers who he'll consult if he ever wants to declare war on Iran. The debate didn't change my thoughts (Go Huckabee!) though it was annoying that the four major candidates got probably 75% of the debate time, and the other four less major candidates weren't left with much time to say what I think are some very valuable opinions. Huckabee is now on Rasmussen Reports' list of major Republican candidates, though. So, getting closer. It is useful to point out that he's the only one who has been steadily increasing.

And, I think today is officially the beginning of Fall. It's 60 degrees, and wonderful outside. I could live in this weather all year. (Minus the ragweed allergies.)

Apple

2007-10-01T11:22:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I don't claim to know a lot about how the stock market works...

But, I would tend to think that Apple's stock price doubling in the last year is a good thing.

Also, their market cap is $133 billion right now. Microsoft is $277 billion. This means that financially, Apple is now half as big as Microsoft.

Getting closer...

A Long Overdue Ramble

2007-09-26T23:20:00.001-04:00

Though it's been a while, I guess not much important has happened since my last post.

My American Government class is reasonably interesting. It's got me paying slightly more attention to politics lately. That, combined with a weird list of Republican candidates, and a random interview on the Colbert Report, has me as an active supporter of Mike Huckabee. Mostly, I like his Conservative-yet-bipartisan attitude - he says he's not one of those people who would just vote no on anything a Democrat wants and vote yes on anything a Republican wants. And for that, he wins a bundle of points with me. I hate how divided politics are right now. Huckabee talks about "Vertical Politics", where the focus is on things that will help America, as opposed to "Horizontal Politics" where it's just Republican vs. Democrat. And yet, he has all the values I'm looking for. So, that's my quick plug for him. Go, vote, or something, I don't know.

My life for the last month has consisted of:
27% Sleep
25% Work
11% Classes
10% Random Recreational Computer Activities
6% Eating
5% Homework
4% Driving
4% Assorted Religious Activities
3% Socializing
3% Other
2% Assorted Errands

This is a schedule which I do not mind entirely. It becomes difficult to really do much of anything else when I'm working 38 hours/week and have to write about 9 pages of English homework every week. Fortunately, that's my only really intensive class.

I had to decide to not teach PSR this year due to this schedule. I'm not terribly sure I was ready to deal with a bunch of 2nd graders all by myself anyway, so maybe this is a good thing.

My gaming life of late has consisted primarily of Star Wars online text games. I tossed in a bit of Sim City 4 and Civilization 4 for a couple weeks, but as I expected, once I spent a week on each throughly smashing the objectives to pieces, I got bored. I also tried Star Wars: Galaxies (the World of Warcraft of Star Wars) briefly. There is never anyone on, so that only lasted for about a day. However, they have a very interactive environment... much of the game is built by the players themselves. But as a MMORPG, it's just not much fun without the "MM" part. I might get back into WoW sometime soon, if I get bored enough. I don't know what else to play, at this point.

So, what else. Work has been steadily busy, but productive. I'm pretty much redesigning the entire Library website before the end of October. I've been working on it for about a month and a half, and I'm definitely getting close to being 75% done with all the hard coding.

And so, life goes on.

And, it just works.

2007-07-23T12:40:00.000-04:00

It is shocking how well life works sometimes. Example: I get my new job at the library (which started today) and quit working at Walsh, just in time for Vacation Bible School to start at our church, which I get to help at from approximately 5:00 - 9:30 every night. And, just in time for the LAN party this weekend. Working 54 hours per week like I was, there'd be no way to handle that much stuff going on. But now that I'm down to 38 hours, it's all fine. Ok, so I would have had to take some vacation days - no huge problem. But it's things like this (and getting the job I wanted last year right after I decided to go to a local college, and randomly deciding at the last minute to go to the Career Center, and randomly deciding that I wanted to work at a library in the first place) that remind me to be thankful for either bizarre circumstantial luck, or divine intervention.

Staying Up

2007-07-10T02:28:00.000-04:00

Well, I was about to go to bed, but then iTunes picked a piece of music that I very much like. So, now I have to stay up until it's finished. Might as well write a blog post, I suppose.

Last week (the week of the 4th) was probably the best week of my year so far. I only worked one day (Monday) and took the rest of the week off at both jobs, mostly to spend time with relatives, but also to just have plenty of down time and not have to worry about going anywhere or doing anything all week. I didn't know how much I needed the break until I was right in the middle of it. I got to play plenty of nifty board games, and hang out with cousins who I only see twice a year, and entertain (and be entertained by) my baby cousins, and etc.

I was planning to go to Cedar Point tomorrow, but Brian and I are hiding from the extreme heat and picking a later date when Mike and Ben can come as well. Too bad "a later date" is July 30th or 31st. But, oh well. I can't wait to ride the Maverick...

Also: I got a new full time job at the library: "Coordinator, Virtual Services". It's yet another step toward where I want to end up in 5-ish years, even though it'll be crazy going to school and working for 38 hours/week.

Ok, that's all for now.

Toyota and Pearl Harbor?

2007-06-28T18:44:00.000-04:00

Today I saw a bumper sticker which caught my attention. It went something like this:

TOYOTA
brought to you by the same
nice people who gave you
PEARL HARBOR

Naturally, as a proud Toyota-owner, my initial reaction was negative. But then I considered this point more.

Japan bombed a very important military target, which had strategic importance and wasn't in a location where too many civilians would be caught in the crossfire. And what'd we do? Nuked two of their largest, most heavily populated cities. Wake up, people. Just because the US Government did something doesn't mean it's perfect.

This is not to, in any way, trivialize the horror of Pearl Harbor. As with any time lots of people die, it's tragic and it'd be best if it didn't happen at all. But I don't think Pearl Harbor is the thing we should complain about. If the bumper sticker mentioned the inhumane treatment of US P.O.W.s, I'd go with that. Torture and etc. makes me sick. But anyhow.

I'm taking pretty much all of next week off so I can spend time with relatives who I see twice a year, and just relax in general. I can't wait - it'll be the first time I haven't had 40+ hours of commitments in a week since this time last year. However, I'm having difficulties with reminding myself that it's OK to take vacation time - I have 2 weeks and 4 days to use up this year, and I haven't used more than one day prior to next week. So, remind me that I'll survive.

iPhone will come out on Friday (which is tomorrow as of now...). While I'm not getting one, it looks like an excellent product, and I can't wait to see how well it does. I hate AT&T, though, for making it so absurdly expensive. (The minimum plan is $60/month) As a radio story just reminded me, AT&T will be making significantly more money from the iPhone than Apple will. Maybe when the iPhone is available through other providers, it'll become more affordable. Some day.

Growing Up

2007-06-21T13:18:00.000-04:00

I was eating breakfast this morning, and Michelle and some Bullocks and Lofresos were leaving to go to a concert type thing... and it hit me. Not only do my friends and I have jobs, but now all of our younger siblings have jobs, and are driving all over the place. Somehow, though, it doesn't seem nearly as weird as it was when the first group of kids (myself included) were driving and working all of a sudden. Maybe it's an oldest-kid thing... but somehow, I think I'm still kind of in denial regarding the whole thing. Maybe I'm 19, but Michelle should still be 14, as far as my internal clock is concerned. And my parents still seem 40.

Time flies. Next time I look up, Michelle will be in college and Sarah will be driving.

Jobs + Gates = ?

2007-06-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

So, at a digital/electronics conference recently, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were asked to talk a bit about their own contributions to computing, the other's contributions, and where they think things will be in a few years. Interesting stuff, if you happen to follow this kind of thing.
Click here to read the whole thing. (You can also just search for it on iTunes - it's on as a podcast or vodcast)

I do have to admit that I can identify with Bill Gates much better than I can with Jobs. Although I love macs, possibly to a fault, (POSSIBLY), Gates is so much more the "geek" of the industry. In the afforementioned discussion, he talks about how he looks at things and thinks about the mechanics behind them, while Jobs just knows how humans think and what they want. I still don't particularly agree with Microsoft's business ethic, though. So.

Sociology

2007-06-10T23:37:00.000-04:00

I need to stop thinking about people. When I do, this is what happens:

One of the things that most bugs me about society is the fact that we are so much a society; that is to say, I think people have an unnecessarily strong need to associate with other people. By this I don't mean that people shouldn't want to be around other people. That's a necessary part of life. It is instead the way people act around other people that gets on my nerves. The "crowd mentality"... the "Oh look, everyone else is clapping, I think I will too"... the "You do things like this because that's how people do it." Grrrr.

This manifests itself all over the place. Expressions... manners... customs... traditions. Are these all stupid? Nah. But, here's one that simply drives me up the wall: applause.

We clap at any performance, whether we like it or not. And then we clap for every sentence that comes out of the president's mouth, and I know that plenty of people don't like any of that. Why do we clap? Think about it. I couldn't figure it out. It's not because we appreciate what we've just seen. It's not to make people feel "nice". Is it because everyone else does it? Well, so why does everyone else do it? Because they assume the performers/speakers expect it? Why do the performers/speakers expect it? I'm guessing it's because "everyone else does it". GAAAH! It's circular logic! There IS no good reason. And why clapping, anyway? Oh look! I am beating my own hands, therefore I must appreciate you! Grrrr.

Expressions: Things such as "beating around the bush" or "touch base" or "hit two birds with one stone". Some of them actually make sense, most of them don't. But, everyone is expected to know what they mean. In many cases, saying what you actually mean is easier, shorter, or simpler than substituting it with some expression. Why do people use expressions? Do they have some kind of emotional significance? Does it imply superiority somehow?

And then there are traditions... things we do every year just because we think it appropriate. Why do we have Mother's day, for example? Many people would probably come up with something like "because we like to appreciate all the work that mothers do". No, Mother's Day is the creation of a card company that saw an opportunity for revenue and jumped on it. But all you have to do is attach nice, fluffy emotionalism, and people will jump on board out of perceived obligation. Oh, how sheeplike we are. No, I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate mothers. For all they do, they deserve something. But limiting it to a single day per year doesn't do them justice. But, why bother doing anything about it during the rest of the year? We might as well just wait for mother's day! No, traditions have taken the spontaneity out of life, I think. Surprises are far too surprising these days.

So, essentially, what am I saying... I suppose I'm just thinking that people ought to think for themselves a little more than they do... in as many words.

Stuff of the Week

2007-05-21T08:58:00.000-04:00

Ooh, that last post was #50. Whaddya know. That puts me at about one post per week, since I've had this thing for about one year.

I love having 3 monitors... there's just a whole wall of glowy computerness on my desk... and I'm not building another one after all, either because I'm too lazy or because my old desk works - I'm not quite sure which it really is. So, one could argue that I should work on the basement with dad for a bit instead... and I probably will, I guess.

Supreme Commander is a very interesting game. It's very advanced, with native support for dual monitors (Woohoo!) and multi-core processors. It's a very large-scale game, too... as many reviewers have said, it's more about strategy than most other RTS games, because there is so much space.

Cedar Point on Saturday was crowded... but otherwise good. We went on the front seats of Millenium Force. That was DEFINITELY worth waiting 1:45.

And... that's all I can think of writing right now.

Blah, blah, blah

2007-05-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

So, let's see... Oh, that's right, I was supposed to write about Spiderman 3. It's hard for me to describe this movie. It is one of the first movies which I could not remember well. I'm not really sure if that makes it good or bad or neither - it moved around a lot between various stories, and I didn't think there was a tremendous amount of continuity between these stories. Well ok, I guess that makes it a bad thing. The special effects were good, though. And I'm not saying the story was bad, either. It was a great plot and whatever... plenty of drama, action, and occasional comedy. But for those who have not yet seen it, I'll not say more.

In other news... I've spent way too much money this week. I bought a 22-inch (widescreen) LCD monitor. It's supposed to come today. I also bought my season pass for Cedar Point - I'm going this Saturday, next Wednesday, and a few other yet-unscheduled times this summer. Now I need to build a desk that can hold 3 monitors and a laptop with room to spare (Can't have too many computers... right?) I'm convinced that there is no furniture company that makes exactly what I want, and I think it'd be fun to try doing something like this by myself anyway. But we'll see where I get with that. I also got something else, but certain temporal circumstances prohibit me from discussing that subject.

Still alive...

2007-05-04T17:51:00.000-04:00

So it's been a while, I suppose. This is probably due to my World of Warcraft ... "hobby". But yesterday I decided I'm not addicted anymore, and now I'm bored with it. So now I'm trying to come up with things to fill the big gaping hole of time it left open... so this leads to making a new MP3 CD for my car. (MP3, of course, plays compressed audio files, letting one fit around 130 songs on a single CD)

The iTunes end of this was fine, if not a little annoying. I had to burn standard audio CDs of three sets of songs to strip them of their copy protection. (Grr, it's not like I'm trying to pirate these or anything...) However, instead of renaming all the songs this time after I copied them from the newly burned CDs, I found out that if you never eject the CD in the first place, iTunes remembers all the names. So that saved me quite a bit of time. Then it was time to burn my first CD directly through Vista...

I had a folder containing the 100-some files I wanted to put on the CD. So, I assume the process hasn't changed much since XP, right? Not quite... as soon as I dropped the files on the CD icon, Vista asks me to name the CD. Ok, fair enough, I do. But then it formats it. I'm like... huh? And it proceeds to begin burning the files to the CD. I'm still OK with this... surprised, but it'll work - I had all the files I wanted on the CD. But while actually burning the files, Vista writes each one individually. That is to say, it has the CD drive spin up, it writes one file, and the CD drive slows down. And this happens about 100 times. Very annoying - took around an hour and a half too.

But what else... ok, so it's summer. Even though it won't be for another month and a half, but hey, don't tell Walsh that. I finished last week. Now I'm working in Information Systems at Walsh. Making minimum wage again, but it's fun, so who cares. I still have the library job anyway, so it's not like I'll go broke or something. But it'll keep me "out of trouble", I'm told. Is that a good thing? Oh well.

Tree pollen... allergies... argh.

Edit: And, the CD that I burned with Vista did not work in my car, nor did it work in my mac. Windows? Compatible? Hah! So my solution? Copy the MP3 files to my mac, and burn the CD from there. Worked perfectly, and about 15x faster too, on a computer that's now 5 years old.

God Bless America .... Pretty Please?

2007-03-27T23:36:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I get home from work and (somehow) end up in front of the TV. Except this time I'm not watching some pointless sitcom or something. I watched C-SPAN for two hours. They're talking about the national budget. At the moment I turned it on, there were a few Republican representatives griping about how the Democrats were going to raise taxes. We are to believe that this would be bad, because the money the nation gets from taxes actually goes up when you lower taxes, because people have more money to invest, and to start new companies with, and as a result everyone is better off and can pay more taxes anyway. They proposed instead that taxes should be lowered further, toward the end of prompting more of this same effect.

So the Republicans are done. Now it's the Democrats' turn. It took all of about 5 seconds after the representative set up his little easel and big cardboard diagrams for him to start whining about how President Bush has increased the national debt by a few trillion dollars. He argues, then, that the President has borrowed money from other nations in order to help fund a tax cut for Americans making more than $400,000 every year. That is a nearly exact quotation. So now I'm to believe that, if this representative is speaking accurately, America borrowed $3 trillion and handed it to a bunch of rich Americans. But the fun doesn't stop there! We're not planning to raise taxes, but we are going to lower taxes, says the Democrat. And while we're lowering taxes, we will increase spending on education, veterans, and healthcare. Gee, doesn't this sound familiar? Oh yeah, that's the same promise that President Bush campaigned on in 2004. So it sounds to me like the Democrats are saying that President Bush's budget plan has put the country in a ridiculous and insurmountable amount of debt, and yet they are proposing the very thing he did.

Where can our country go? This is not politics, this is some sad kind of schoolchild playground war. The Elephant gang and the Donkey gang are so blinded by their own superiority that they refuse to see past the shortsightedness of their own team and accept that the other side might have anything valuable to contribute. Ok, so there were several Republicans who got involved in scandals of some sort. Therefore, all Republicans are bad. So there are some Democrats who think taxes and spending should both be increased. Therefore, all Democrats think taxes and spending should be increased. HELLO! It's not rocket sceince! It's BASIC LOGIC! What if our congresspeople would, for once, forget what "side of the aisle" they're on and just look at an issue as no more than it is. A Republican proposition to lower taxes should be treated no differently than a Democrat proposition to lower taxes. And yet, if the Democrats have the majority, the Republican bill will lose simply because it was a Republican who created it. Does no one else see it? Surely, you'd think that if enough regular citizens would speak up on an issue, politicians would have to actually read the Constitution for once and realize that they are supposed to be representing their districts, not representing their party. What I'm seeing is top-down government, not the bottom-up government that was intended. Authority is supposed to come from the people, through the congress, into the laws. But instead it comes from the majority in Congress, into the laws, down to the people. Never mind who started the war, never mind what party that last scandal involved - why can't politicians vote based on the merits of the propositions rather than their affiliations?

Vote for Nader!

Journey to Vista: Part II

2007-03-10T23:09:00.000-05:00

So, Vista did actually install that time. (Finally...)

I spent most of the first 2 days after that working, and/or installing WoW and various other games. Throughout all of that, aside from several dozen (Yes, I mean at least 25) messages asking me if I was REALLY sure about installing that game, or if I thought it might rip out Vista's internal organs, I couldn't tell that I wasn't using XP with prettier windows. I wasted no time at all getting rid of the "Windows Sidebar" (a.k.a. Mac Widgets for Windows) and shutting off various other resource-draining things that Windows assumed I'd need. I was relieved, however, to see that there was no Windows Messenger bugging me every time I started up.

If you asked me what I thought of Internet Explorer 7, I could only tell you as much as I saw when I was downloading Mozilla Firefox.

And then I tried to reorganize the Start Menu. EVERY TIME I tried to rename something or move something, it asked me if I really wanted to do that. After all, if I renamed it, that would just be bringing out a welcome mat for all sorts of terrible viruses. (?) At that point, I got sick of closing those windows and shut the User Access Control off. Who cares if some little piece of spyware figures out what websites I go to - it's a lot less trouble than closing 50 pop-up windows every day.

And so from there, I moved on to hardware issues. All my CDs that came with my hardware had drivers for XP, but not for Vista. Vista already installed drivers for my graphics card, so that was fairly convenient. However, finding and downloading the drivers for both of my audio devices proved to be a little bit more irritating. Not just because Windows goes crazy whenever you have more than one hardware option for sound stuff, but because the websites of the companies I had to get the drivers from were complete junk. Just, eww. But I eventually found and installed those, and got everything (even my microphone) working again.

So, overall, what do I think of Vista? Well, I'll sum it up in one sentence:
Vista is XP + (Pretty Graphics) + (Mild Foolproofing) + (Copied Features from OS X)
And, this is pretty much what I figured it would be.

Moving on... my spring break was way busier than I wanted it to be. Somehow, I ended up working a bunch for the first 3 days of the week. Oh, except on Tuesday I went to dinner with Sarah and the Tatums at Chipotle. I now know that it is NOT smart to get the sauce they call "hot". And we were going to see Amazing Grace, but Andy was in a random mood so we say Night at the Museum instead. Then I had to work more on the same old volunteer project on Thursday, but had a little lazy time later on in the day. On Friday I had the morning to do nothing, but then I went to help my mom do a big mass mailing thing. After that I had a LAN party, but it didn't last all that long... everyone had left or fallen asleep by 5:00 AM. Today I slept until 11:00, and then spent most of the day being lazy and/or doing nothing of significance.

Woo hoo. One more day of break until school. Gee, I can't wait to get up at 7:00 AM on Monday. *groans*

Journey to Vista: Part I of ?

2007-03-06T00:50:00.000-05:00

Aside from working for 9.5 hours, all I did on my birthday was... hmm. Install Windows Vista!

My 120-day trial of XP was running out... days counting down to 0 more quickly than I could keep track of. And so, last week, I ordered Vista (Home Premium version, but who's counting). Well, it came today. I was going to give a little presentation at work about building computers (remind me to think about who my audience is next time I do that) and so I had my mom run by and drop off the package, but it was too late for me to install it first to show it to the people. Unfortuate. Or so I thought at the time.

Then I left work. The family (minus dad, who is in Europe this week on some kind of fancy business trip) was going to go to Steak and Shake or something, but it was already closed. Go figure... at 8:45 PM on a Monday. Oh well. So after that little detour, I returned home to try to get Vista to work.

I backed up my files to one of my other hard drives. Or, well, technically, to a small piece of all three of my hard drives in this computer. But anyway... that's roughly $250 of game CD keys, music from iTunes, and things of that nature. But the money aside, I did not really want to have to mess with setting everything up again. I copy all my game install CDs to the hard drive - much faster to install them that way. At any rate, I ran the Vista installer from within my current version of Windows. It got kinda far along, and then it asked to restart. So I comply.

BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(restart again...)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(mess around with the motherboard settings for a bit)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!

Ahh... a glimmer of hope? Vista didn't die when my computer restarted at this moment. Yeah, I'm writing this as it tries to install Vista again. But anyway, back to my story.

At this point, I had given up on that installation. So I tried to somehow get back at the old files to make sure they were still intact. That wasn't working. Ohh, back to realtime: here loads Vista. Ok, I'd better cut to the chase...

So after much tinkering with components, I "borrowed" the hard drive from my previous computer and booted Windows off of there. I was able to salvage all of my data. Then I tried many more things to get Vista to work, with little success. On a hunch, I eventually got back on and set up the hard drives more simply (converted them to basic partitions, did away with the software RAID) and isolated all my important stuff onto one hard drive, leaving the other 2 completely blank. So then I installed Vista again, and it seems to be working this time. And that's where this story ends for now.

And here's my desk, after all of this:

To be continued...

Car Show

2007-02-28T22:05:00.000-05:00

Last night, Brian, Brian's dad, and I went to the Cleveland Auto show. That was quite fun. Let's go over what I got to do:
Sit in a bunch of cars, including...
$130,000 Mercedes
Porche Somethingorother
2008 Nissan Altima (the car I want when I'm done with my tC)
A bunch of Hondas because Brian is obsessed, heh
Mazda RX-8 and Miata... both really fun, Miata felt incredibly small though (maybe it is...)
Chrysler 300 (most leg room in the back I've ever seen... period.)
Huge annoying pickup truck
Corvette...
Subaru Impreza
And much, much more!

Of course, being able to drive them would have been better, but I guess they can't allow that, for obvious reasons. They did get close, though... there's a Jeep test track type thing where they drive you over logs, up 35 degree hills, through water, up, down, and all around. It was really bouncy, but there's no question that Jeeps can handle off-road stuff after that. And we got to ride in a Dodge Charger, too. They went 0-30-0 pretty quickly. They were showing off the brakes, but the acceleration was pretty fun too.

So, if you're thinking of going, it's pretty nifty. (and not too expensive, either... $12) The only thing I wish they had more of was concept cars. There were only 4 or 5 of them... impressive though they were, it would have been fun to see what Scion and Honda and them were up to, not just a couple Ford and Chevy things.

More of the Same

2007-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

Yikes, it's been a while since I remembered to update this.

School:
I STILL don't have much homework at all. Most people would be happy. I happen to agree with most people. I'm doing almost all core requirements this semester, so while I wouldn't mind learning a bit, I won't be incredibly stressed out if my courses don't really teach me much. Spring break is in a week... and we're already halfway done with the semester. Whoo!

Work:
Busy, busy, busy. I've been working on a bunch of website projects - stuff like adding an RSS feed, revising the book ordering system I made a few months ago, running around like crazy fixing web filters... We had our annual Staff Day on Monday (Presidents' Day), which was pretty fun. Our team made the tallest tinker toys tower, and I later got to do a few informative sessions about the Wiki format, especially on wikipedia.

Life:
A particular volunteer project that I said I'd do in early January continues to haunt me. Will I ever learn to say "no" to people when they ask me to do things? Sigh. I guess I could have worse problems. I don't know... not really a whole lot of new stuff to talk about here. My Macbook was having battery issues (the only problem I've had with it since I bought it) so Brian and I took it to the Apple Store at Legacy Village, and they gave me a new battery - for free. I love the Apple Store. I think I want to live there. Legacy village was a HUGE pain to get to, though. And it was equally difficult to park. But it looks like a nice place to hang out on some nice warm day, when we're not running around trying to save ourselves from frostbite.

And ahh, it's Lent again. How'd that happen? Gosh, is it February already? Shows how much time I have to pay attention to ... uh, time. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out what I'm going to "do" for Lent. Moving away from the whole "giving stuff up" theme that I've followed since I knew what Lent was all about, I think this year I'll try to do good things that I would normally not do... rather than not do bad things that I would normally do. (There's no way I'm giving up World of Warcraft, or sugar.) After Mass at Walsh on Ash Wednesday, I went to math class with ashes still on my forehead... the Chinese teacher said something to the effect of "how you get hurt on forehead?", and then I had to explain what it was all about... heh.

So, I turn 19 in 9 days or something, I guess. I don't know why, but 19 seems like a very boring year to celebrate. Maybe it's because for the last few years, I've had more significant milestones like driving or being a legal adult (whatever that means). I'm not really looking forward to turning 21 anyway, because I have absolutely no desire to consume alcohol... I'm fine with the 0.1 tablespoons of wine I have every day at Mass... so I guess as far as I'm concerned, I'm now just getting older, rather than closer to some important privilege.

Ugh.

2007-02-04T23:31:00.000-05:00

Before I start with something, I guess I'll talk about what I did in the last 2 weeks... naturally, the majority of the first week was spent at school or at work. Work is still pretty busy, for reasons that most people reading this blog probably know about. I've become re-addicted to WoW. I've gained 10 levels in the last week and a half, which I guess I'm pretty happy about, in a hopeless no-life way. Getting more involved in the guild and stuff. But anyway... I was supposed to go to an open house at the career center that week too, but the building had issues and I couldn't go. I'll go later this week, though. Ben came back from RIT just to go to the open house, so him and Brian and myself went to a movie and ate dinner and stuff instead.

This last week I went to a Handel concert by Apollo's Fire with Sarah C. and Mom. That was the first time I had been to a concert since way back when I couldn't even appreciate the beauty of live classical music. Gosh. And I'll have to go to another one, too, for my music class. So I'm looking forward to that more now.

On Friday I helped at the "Library Lock-in". Basically, 20 kids between the ages of 11 and 16 spent the night at the library. Most of them didn't sleep, at least not until later in the morning. I didn't sleep at all... until I got home, of course. But yeah, it was crazy for the first 8 hours, then they calmed down and got tired and cranky. I was up for 29 straight hours, I think. That's a new personal record, by far.

Ok, now I'm going to complain. Facebook has many groups related to so-called "Manlaws." Said rules are supposed to dictate how "real" men should behave. So, let's have a look...
This particular group has 112 things listed. To avoid making this too long, I guess I'll divide them up into general categories, because most of them are fairly repetitive.
"Real men" must drink lots of beer: 25
"Real men" should use girls as, erm, sex devices: 20
"Real men" must think of nothing but sex: 11
"Real men" must pay close attention to their appearance: 16
"Real men" must be rude and/or selfish: 17
Random other things not relating to morality: 23

So, come again? In general, "real men" have to behave like morally lost animals? Why is this? Has modern, secular society so distorted everthing? Ugh. Oh well, in that case, I'm perfectly alright with not being a real man. And I think I'm probably a lot better off for it.

Random Stuff of the Week

2007-01-20T01:30:00.000-05:00

I'm 2 weeks into the semester, at this point. And how much homework do I have? I have to make a list of 10 spanish words I don't already know, read about 10 pages for theology, and 15 pages for philosophy, and then do 6 short logic problems for math. Yeah, I'm liking this homework load so far. I'm sure it'll pick up, though.

In music class this morning we watched a DVD of a string ensemble performing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It was insane! The primary violinist had to move so fast that it looked pretty much impossible. Now I definitely need to start working on my cello. One requirement for completing the music course is that I have to attend at least two live classical music performances. For the longest time I figured concerts would be boring... after all, I can listen to music any time I want. But after seeing the DVD thing today, I'm pretty much completely excited about it. Now I just have to find some concerts to go to.

Hmm. I want to have a LAN party now. I don't even know why.

Procrastinating

2007-01-15T00:42:00.000-05:00

Well, school started again. I didn't get a bunch of homework yet. The teachers are waiting for next week to try to kill us all with that. I have to read 30 pages of Philosophy, and do a dozen logic puzzle things for math. Math class shouldn't be too bad. Apparently, it's not going to pass algebra level math, but it's more about looking at math in different ways. And the other classes seem like they won't be too difficult. Not a lot of writing involved, so far. Programming will be just as easy as it was last semester, just in a different language. I'll just be glad to get a lot of the required core classes out of the way after this semester. Not to mention that we're done with finals in the last week of April.

And work has been busy, lately. The library's website has kinda decided to see how much programming I can do at once. I blame Microsoft, once again. And then I had to get backups running after I discovered that they hadn't been running for a few weeks. (oops) It's a good thing my old boss bought a new backup system before he left, because the old one seems to be pretty much dead.

And let's see... what else did I do... I went shopping with Brian on Friday, though I didn't buy anything that time. Then we decided to drive to Medina to shop more, but nothing really caught our attention. So I just kept driving north, then we went east a bit, and got halfway-lost. We went to the northeast corner of Medina County, then north a bit, then back south. Kinda nifty. Makes me want to go on a road trip.

Then on Saturday, Michelle and I went to the Bullocks' house to watch "The Sting", which was about some con artists who are really good at gambling and stuff. It was so confusing, but so interesting. Lots of plot twists, and you're never sure (even at the end, really) just who is on whose side. And people keep dying, but not really dying. Or something.

Tomorrow I don't have my day classes, seeing as it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But instead, I'll go into work because I have to go to a meeting and then I'll stick around to observe all the craziness of the library's Halo tournament. Then I get to go to an evil 3-hour Philosophy lecture. Blaaaaaaagh.

On Being Bored

2007-01-06T11:36:00.000-05:00

Today, there has been absolutely nothing to do at work. So I'm going to post on my blog.

The last week and a half has been pretty busy. Last week, I spent the majority of my time with relatives. And I worked 18 hours that week, even though I only needed to work 12... so I lost one day of vacation that didn't carry over to 2007. But oh well. So then this week, I've been catching up on various projects that I've decided to do for people. At first I was a little mad at myself for getting into said projects, seeing as it is my last week of break before the Spring semester, but I realize that if I hadn't been doing projects, I'd just be on World of Warcraft or something useless like that, so I guess it's all good anyway.

Speaking of the spring semester... I'm not really sure whether I'm excited about or dreading it. I don't have to take Calculus this time, and that was what made the last semester so tough. But I have the same instructor for a computer algorithm class. Or, I guess he'll probably pronounce it "Ararims" or something. I'm definitely not looking forward to having homework again... but I like going to daily Mass at Walsh... and I'm definitely glad I don't have to go to school at all on Tuesday or Thursday.

And that's pretty much all I've got to say.

2006

2006-12-31T11:36:00.000-05:00

So, let's see here. It's 9.7 hours from being 2007. Seeing as my intention in blogging is to record what I'm doing and thinking so I can look back at it a few years from now, it seems appropriate to go over the stuff I did this year.

January and February were boring in that I don't recall anything that happened during then. That is, of course, not to say that nothing happened. But oh well.

March: I turned 18, and went to Columbus for my second year of BPA state competitions. I got 4th in "Fundamentals of HTML" (and the top 5 go to nationals, so that made me decently happy)

April: I changed my mind overnight and decided to go to Walsh instead of Steubenville. (Mostly because it's so much cheaper to go to Walsh and commute)

May: Brian, Ben, and myself went to BPA national leadership conferences in Disney World. Probably the funnest week of my life that I can remember. And I didn't get 1st place again this year, but I'll take 3rd.

June: Did graduation stuff. Officially finished at the Career Center (which made me all sad and whiny, and still does)

July: We had my graduation party, which was followed by an overnight LAN party with about 12 people or so.

August: The busy month... went on vacation with the Bullocks, came back, got sad because I had to leave my page job at the library, got happy because I was then promoted to "Technology Assistant", bought a white Macbook, and started college.

September: Too busy getting used to school to remember.

October: Bought my Scion tC on eBay and flew to Florida with dad to pick it up. Got into debt, bleh.

November: Grandma and Grandpa Wagner were moved into a slightly assisted living apartment building due to Grandma's memory problems. Everyone was sad and missing their house, where they had been for like 40 years.

December: Whee, finals! I got a 3.85 GPA for the semester (3 A, 2 A-). I'd be happier if they made no distinction between A and A-, but oh well.

And just so I don't have to remember in my head, last year I was about 5'10" and 130 lbs. Now, I'm 6'0" and 140 lbs. Next year, I'm planning on being 6'1" and closer to 160 lbs.

And that's been my year.

Dreaming of a White Christmas...

2006-12-23T23:52:00.000-05:00

So, it's 8 minutes away from being Christmas Eve, and there's still no snow. As much as I try to prevent myself from attaching some sort of weather requirement to Christ's birth, it just doesn't feel very Christmasy. I suppose this is what it's like in Florida and stuff every year. One more reason to not move to Florida, I guess. But it's getting colder and colder... maybe it'll still snow. (Not that we need Michelle slipping off the road any time soon, but hey)

Ok, an hour and a half later, I'm done being distracted by World of Warcraft for now.
So anyway, this is the first Christmas that I can remember when I haven't had a list of things that I want. I guess this makes things difficult for my parents because they have to try to figure out what I want. But every time I want something, I usually just go out and buy it, which hadn't been the case in previous years. It'll be nice to be surprised for a change, though.

Relatives will be around for the majority of the next week and a half, as well. Which should be fun, since we only see most of them twice a year, unfortunately. It'll be a lot easier to figure out when we can go up to Cleveland (where the grandparents live) and stuff since I only have to work for 18 hours, and I don't have to meet a set schedule. (I have to use up extra vacation time. Oh darn.) But Tony (my previous boss) is officially gone, and the new boss doesn't start until January 2nd. I'll miss Tony... we had a lot in common. But oh well, he gets a lot more for his work at his new job.

Thoughts of the Week

2006-12-14T00:36:00.000-05:00

Hmm, so let's see here.
Dad and I have been finishing the basement. I've put up about 60 feet of wall frame in the last few days. So, that's probably about 200 nails. My wrist is now sore. However, I suppose I'll keep hammering away anyway, because I'd like to have at least two of the rooms done before a big recital thing we're having in a week.

And all the Christmas stuff is up now, with the exception of the tree. And we actually have our lights on now... prior to this year, mom and dad never let us turn them on until a week before Christmas or something. But the lights look pitiful, as we don't have enough to sufficiently decorate the house and stuff. Oh well.

I need to buy a cello. But I think I'll have to wait until the beginning of summer break for that. And speaking of break, it's now happening. I love college - mom can't make me do school over Christmas break anymore!

And finally, a server died a couple weeks ago at work, so I've been busy running around and fixing people's profiles and stuff. Fun, fun, fun. But I'm glad I have something to do now, since I don't have any homework to do. And the library hired my new boss yesterday, I haven't met him yet though.

And good night.

Finals Week

2006-12-06T00:13:00.000-05:00

I have a Calculus test tomorrow. I'm not anticipating doing extremely well. I guess I shouldn't complain incredibly if I get a B in the course (right now I have about 94%, I think) but I could have easily studied everything a bunch to do really well on the final. It's like "senioritis" all over again, except that I know it'll happen 7 more times before I graduate, with increasing severity. But at least after this Calculus class is over, I won't be made to do any more math for the rest of college. So I guess it's all good.
And on Thursday I have an English test, which will be easier but still obnoxious. But after that, I'll be done until early January! I can't wait! I have tons of huge plans - let's see if I actually do any of them, though. I'm going to try to not burn up all my free time on World of Warcraft. Mom is already making lists of chores that I will be made to do since I'll have "so much time". And I'm going to do my usual crazy Christmas lights thing, and go to some parties at work, and maybe even make some of the same old cookies that I always used to make for bake sales at the career center.

Gosh, one month will not be nearly enough time. I've got myself anticipating summer break now.

Life as of 11/27

2006-11-27T03:19:00.000-05:00

Considering that I don't even remember when the last time I posted on here was, I guess I'll just start typing.

Right now, it's 3:00 AM and I'm playing World of Warcraft. What a surprise. But I did all the homework I needed to do, and I'm not tired... and I just need to go get another tailoring skill set! And then another level, then maybe a quest... then I'll be done. Assuming, of course, that there are no more quests to do. Yeah right. So after this, I think I should probably go to bed.

Life has been good. Thanksgiving was nice - we got together with all the other Wagner cousins this year, in Troy, MI. My grandparents had recently moved to a half-assisted living apartment, but their house hasn't been sold yet, so we stayed there. It was really weird without my grandparents and half the furniture. We went to visit the new apartment, and Grandma was there almost crying about wanting to go back and missing the house (if I had lived somewhere for like 40 years, I guess I would miss it too.) Apparently, she had some weird thing go on the day before, with her diabetes, so she had another nostalgic episode then, but she forget that she did, so she had to have another one. Or something like that. But anyway, yeah.

And then we drove back (and it took us an hour longer than it was supposed to because we kept looking for a dairy queen, but never found one) and then I went to a LAN party at Ben's house with 10 other people. Great fun, especially in Call of Duty 2... though Mike wins too much. (or maybe it's just that I lose too much...) And that lasted until Saturday night, with several trips to restaurants and stores and whatever else.

And then tomorrow is school again, after the 5 day break. *grumbles* But only 5 more days of classes - I could get used to this college schedule. Then finals, but they should be easy. Hopefully.

Oh yeah, one more item of business...
My boss at the library has resigned to go to some other job or something. Since I don't have the required degree (yet) and I don't have time to work for 38 hours/week, I can't take his place... but, I'm really excited (and worried, anxious, nervous, etc) to see who my new boss will be. And then there will be a couple weeks when I'm the only technology employee there, so I'll be in charge... not that I'll actually have to do very much important stuff, but it'll still be kinda fun, as long as nothing important breaks.

Stupid Windows; Social Life

2006-11-12T00:07:00.000-05:00

Windows makes fast computers so dull and slow and stupid. I've been spending the majority of the last week replacing defective parts, trying to get windows to recognize everything correctly, and now I'm just reinstalling completely. And I'm doing all of this with my 120-day trial version of XP. But, now that I think about it, I'm going to probably (as much as I hate to say this...) upgrade to Vista when it comes out, so 120 days will be plenty for that.

And I've actually had something of a social life mixed in there, too. Last night, I went to a play put on by some Walsh students with Sarah and Mrs. Chiavaroli. (That is, not my sister Sarah, the other one. Or something.) It was a comedy, "Someone Save my Baby Ruth"... and it was all about a candy shop! (my kind of play...) They threw candy at the audience, but not nearly enough by my standards. Of course, if I had been in charge, they would be throwing five-pound bags at everyone, abundantly. But oh well.

And then tonight, Michelle and Brian and I went to see "Stranger than Fiction." Good funny movie, though at parts it seems like it's switching back and forth between comedy, drama, and, I don't know, horror or something. Or maybe that was just because there were so many preview for horror movies. I'll say this much... after seeing this movie, I'm once again reminded of how much can be different if your watch is a couple minutes off. (This was one of the themes of the movie). It's like, you leave to go somewhere 30 seconds later than you normally would, and as a result you aren't in the way of the car with no brakes, or something random like that. Gack, so mind-boggling. If I did everything 30 seconds earlier or later than I would otherwise, it's just crazy to think about what big things could potentially happen as a result of that difference. Or something. Oh well, I guess at times like this, I'll just trust that God knows what's going on.

Whee, XP install is done. Time to go to www.getfirefox.com - you know, can't have the new computer being contaminated with spyware and all that.

New computer... again?

2006-11-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

So, I got around to ordering my next gaming PC. Yeah, I know I just bought a car a month ago, and a laptop 2 months ago, but... yeah. I'm done buying big stuff now. (Or at least that's what I claim at the moment)

For anyone who cares, here are the numbers:
Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) at 2.4 GHz
4x512 MB of DDR2 800 Corsair RAM
eVGA 512 MB nVidia GeForce 7950GT Graphics Card
3x160 GB SATA HD (for a RAID configuration)
Case is a "Cooler Master Ammo 533" (it looks like something you'd carry a weapon in, pretty much)
And, 500 watt Antec power supply

And, Newegg.com is the best thing ever.

WoW; that game is addicting.

2006-10-30T19:35:00.000-05:00

So yeah, as you might guess from the ultimately failed attempt at humor in the title of this post, I've become addicted to the World of Warcraft. And it's all my old boss's fault. She plays, and she wanted someone to go on to quest with her. Naturally, it didn't take a whole lot of convincing.

So I've been staying up as late as possible to play this game, though I think maybe now my addiction is calming down a bit, and it's looking like WoW will be more of a hobby, not my life. At least, that's the plan. But we'll see. At least it's making me less addicted to facebook.

So, other than that, life is pretty much normal. School is fine, work is fine, albeit a little slow still. I always like the challenge of trying to finish a seemingly insurmountable pile of work. When I was a page, that happened all the time, whenever I came in and there were 6 full carts of books. Technology department, not so. I get maybe two or three problems every day, and they're never all that significant. Why can't some crazy thing happen that keeps me running around all day? Like, when all the patron computers go down, then the internet dies later that day? Bah.

And I got a 98 on this big giant paper we had to write for English class (big giant = 7 pages, in my vocabulary), so I can sleep peacefully now. And I have pretty much 2 days off of homework, since I had tests and/or meetings with my teachers for the last few days of school. It's funny how that turns out. And there are only 4 weeks and 4 days left until the semester is over. And it seems like I started a few weeks ago... crazy.

Life as of 10/16/06

2006-10-16T13:18:00.000-04:00

Well hmm. To start where I left off...

Last Sunday morning, my dad and I flew down to Florida to get the car. It was fun, and we didn't run into any strange problems. We pretty much signed the papers, paid the guy, and started driving. We got to Columbia, SC by Sunday night, then we had to go find a hotel. So, we checked in, went to sleep, got up, ate breakfast, and left (that is an inclusive list). Then I drove all day on Monday (didn't really want anyone else driving my new car, heh) and we got back at around 7:00 at night. The Appalacian mountains were fun to drive through... and now I'm thinking "road trip!" for next summer. But we'll see.

And then I had "Fall Break" on Tuesday, so I worked a bunch and then went to the Career Center for some advisory dinner thing. That was decent... after some snacks, me, the teacher from the program I was in, and a few other people sat down to talk about stuff to teach in his new class.

And then back to school on Wednesday... blech. Crazy Chinese calculus teacher only had 2 days to assign homework though, so it wasn't too bad. And now I'm in the library waiting for my Spanish class (we get a test today, whee). We're also eating some odd kind of spanish food after the test... corn, mayonaise, lime, and something else... but I forget what it was. I'm bringing white grape juice, just so I don't have to walk out with this really weird aftertaste still stuck in my mouth.

Dear Blog: College Weeks #5, #6; New Car?!

2006-10-04T19:36:00.000-04:00

Hmm, so where were we...

College stuff... classes are going pretty well. I'm not flunking anything (yet). We have a Calculus test tomorrow, but it's open-book, and I'm not too worried about it. (though maybe I should be)

Last Sunday was my dad's birthday, and we went to "Wally Waffle", a brunch-type place where he always used to take Michelle and me when we were really little. Then I stayed up until 2:00 doing Calculus again. (I'll really have to work on that whole "not procrastinating" thing.) Next week, and the week after that, should be a lot easier in Calculus, as we have less than half of the amount of homework we usually have to do, for various reasons.

And yeah, I bought a semi-new car, a 2005 Scion tC (my dream car, pretty much) on eBay last Saturday. It's a bit earlier than I had originally planned, but the price was decent. So, on Sunday morning, Dad and I are going to fly down to Florida and meet the guy with the car, then drive it back up on Sunday and Monday for all 22 hours it'll take. "Mildly exciting" is an understatement.

Ok, back to the irritating 7-page English paper.

Dear Blog: Personality Types

2006-09-26T13:10:00.000-04:00

So I was chatting with some other people on the text game the other day, and we were talking about our personality types. And then we all went to this online test thing that told us what kind of people we were. As it turns out, I'm an "INTJ", or "Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging" Want to know how my head works? Go to [ http://typelogic.com/intj.html ]. And then go to [ http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp ] and see what you are.

I was actually pretty surprised how much the first page correctly describes me. Especially the parts like "Typical INTJ career choices are in the sciences and engineering" and "they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation". Heh, that's me right there.

Dear Blog: College Week #3, #4

2006-09-22T19:56:00.000-04:00

Yikes, I'm busy. Really, really, really busy. So I forgot about this for a while. But anyway.

The new job has been going really well. I've been fixing a few things here and there, and the rest of the time I get to do homework. So it's not all that horrible on my schedule. And I got my first paycheck from the new job today... much better than shelving books, I can say that much. Do I miss the old job at all? Not a bit.

I've been obsessing over some programming for the last couple days... the forums from the text game crashed for some reason, and I've been trying to piece together bits and pieces of the database to recover as many posts as possible. It's fun... I just like it too much and ignore homework because of it, heh.

So yeah, about that educational stuff... I had a few tests this week, which were all pretty easy. I'm definitely not looking forward to writing a 7-page paper for english, though. And the math test won't be too great either. Ick.

I've been going to daily Mass on campus, too. It's really nice, especially because I wanted to go to Steubenville in the first place because of all the Catholic stuff there. There's not a big group of students who are active in campus ministry activities and stuff, but there are enough to get noticed. And to top it all off, the head of the computer science department goes to daily Mass a bunch too. So, I'm happy about that. And I get to eat lunch with the "Mass crowd", too. Instead of by myself in a corner. Which was getting a bit old, I guess.

Oh, one more thing. I've moved the date for getting my new car back to Christmas break. 8 more months is too long to wait when I'm this obsessed, heh. And I decided that a car loan won't be so bad after all... I'll pay what I can, which will be at least half, and then I'll just have to pay an extra $800 or so in interest by the time I pay it off. Insurance will be a big pain, though. Stupid "18-year-old-males-are-guaranteed-to-get-drunk-and-wreck-their-cars" stereotypes. Doesn't a completely clean record for 2.5 years mean anything?

Dear Blog: College Week #2

2006-09-10T00:06:00.000-04:00

Hmm. Well, the new job has been going pretty slowly. I don't know enough yet to start working on any of the projects we have to get done, and stuff isn't broken enough to keep me busy. (Not because it's running Windows. That's just an anomaly.) So I've mostly been sitting around more in our little basement office-cave thing doing nothing of much significance. Next week should be a bit more interesting, as my boss says he's going to start training me in some of the other stuff we do.

Homework this week actually ended up being surprisingly easy. I still have a bunch of calculus problems to do for Monday, but most of the other stuff I was able to get done during the week. It might get a little interesting when I have a bunch of exams in the same week or something. But oh well, I suppose I can always take a day off for that.

Oh, one more thing... my dad's old car thing pretty much started to die recently. The muffler doesn't really muffle anymore, so it sounds like a car straight out of a demo derby or something. Kinda funny, but not very practical. So anyway, today he went and bought a 2002 Honda Civic. Now I'm temporarily jealous, heh. I'll just have to wait until May when I buy a Scion tC. Heheheheh.

So yeah, that's that. Only 12 more weeks of classes to go for this semester!

Dear Blog: New Job!

2006-09-05T22:00:00.000-04:00

After a decently stressful English class (we were told to write a summary in class of something we hadn't explicitly been assigned to read, heh) I got to run back to the library to start my new job. It's nice to be somewhere familiar for a change, heh. So, for the first 2 hours, my boss went over a bunch of the administration tools and passwords and stuff like that, then he went home and I sat around staring at the phone for a while waiting for people to have problems. That didn't work too well, so I wandered around for a while saying hello to other staff people and stuff, asking if they had any computer problems. Sigh, no luck. So I went back down to the basement and poked around and organized my desk (I get a desk! Whee!) for a bit. Then I got a phone call! Happy joy excitement! Even though it was only a patron trying to figure out how to put files on her flash drive, it was still something. But oh well. I get to start on some projects that will keep me busy tomorrow, or something.

But I think it'll be a great job. I liked shelving books enough, and computer stuff can't be nearly as tedious.

Oh, and I was talking to someone in my class who said that his dorm floor has LAN parties all day and stuff. Sigh. Not fair. But I guess I have to figure that the experience (and money, for that matter) that I'll gain from the tech job isn't worth the money it would cost to stay on campus and play LAN parties and not study and flunk out of college or something.

Dear Blog: College Week #1

2006-08-31T23:32:00.000-04:00

While my first week of college doesn't end until tomorrow, I only have two short classes then, so it doesn't really count. So anyway, I'm not quite sure where to start. It's all so different from what I've always done before that I'm sort of numbed by all the new things. Sure, classes at the career center were a bit of an adjustment toward regular school life, but all of a sudden I have 17 hours of lectures every week, not 12.5 hours of lab time.

I've been decently busy the whole week, finding errands to do and stuff. I'm a bit concerned that I won't have time to do anything but school and work once my job starts on Tuesday (things like, for example, getting a haircut or something). However, it'll only be ridiculously busy for 5 weeks, then I'll have 3 hours to spare whenever I need them during the week.

So, academic stuff... well, with all the classes, I'm being forced to quickly adjust to taking notes, which is something I'm not experienced with. But I think I've figured out how to put down what I figure I need to know. I guess we'll find out when I take exams, eh? Programming is really easy. Too easy. But since I don't have time for more than I'm doing now anyway, I won't complain too much. Calculus is, well, calculus. The professor in that class has a really strong Asian accent, so I hope I don't get completely lost once we get a bit deeper into the material. Spanish will probably be my toughest subject. Memorization = bad. History should actually be a lot easier than I figured it would be. The teacher has some nice (and simplifying) methods of telling us how to get ready for exams. And there's english... I don't want to write 7 pages! *whines*

Waking up at 6:30 is really messing up my internal clock, too. I keep waking up at about 3:00 AM, jumping out of bed, and getting all set to eat and go to school before I figure out that I still have 3 more hours to sleep.

And, still haven't really "met" anyone yet. I went in assuming that I'd be put in classes with the same people for a bunch of time, like I was at the career center, but I guess I didn't realize that when the whole class is pretty much lecturing, there's not a lot of time for talking to classmates. I'm kinda assuming that once I figure out who the other computer science major people are, I might find some people with common interest to hang out with on campus. But I don't really mind stuff like eating lunch by myself... I'd do it at home anyway, the fact that there are a hundred other people in the room doesn't bug me that much.

And, that's all I can remember to talk about at the moment.

Dear Blog: Classes and textbooks and jobs! Oh my!

2006-08-27T00:28:00.000-04:00

Well, today I packed my 50-pound bag of textbooks and tried to get a decent solution to my laptop carrying case problem (wonderful macbook is too small to fit in my old Toshiba bag) before "opening day." Opening day was, ehh, acceptible. Nothing tremendously special. My day consisted of sign-in, lunch, fancy little "college starts, parents go away" ceremony, dinner, and some introductory class type things. I kinda feel a bit "left out", I guess, as a commuter, even though about half of the students at Walsh commute. It would be fun to share a room with someone for a change (assuming they didn't play rock music all the time...) but I guess I'm probably a lot better off financially and morally as a commuter. No stupid drunk people parties every weekend.

Oh, another thing that happened recently, though everyone who reads this probably already knows anyway, is that I got the "technology assistant" position at the library. It's a nice career-related job with great pay, but it'll be 30 hours a week. So I'll like the job, I just won't have any free time at all. At least for this semester. But it'll be worth it in the long run, hopefully.

Classes start on Monday, and I have more orientation stuff tomorrow. None of it is really making me nervous or excited or anything... maybe just because everything is flying by too quickly to pay attention to.

Ok, time for sleep.

Dear Blog: Life as of 8/15

2006-08-15T00:47:00.000-04:00

Hmm. My weekend was decent. I actually did something fun, other than poke around on my computer all day (instead, I poked around on my computer while Brian also poked around on his computer in the same room). Windows is stupid. Then we watched a Mythbusters about diet coke and mentos. (Fun!) I'll have to try making a bubble tower with helium sometime.

Then I stayed up until about 2:30, so I didn't wake up until 11:30, which was too late to go to the latest mass at our church, so I went to a 5:15 mass in Barberton. It was interesting... it was full, but there were a lot of people who didn't really seem to care, and a lot of teenagers too... or maybe I'm just contrasting it with St. Andrews, where the average is age is probably 60 or so. 5:15 must be the usual time for people who sleep until 1:00 PM or so.

Tomorrow (Or today, I guess) is my first day off work (excluding sunday) for a while. 38 hours doesn't last nearly as long as I thought it would. But it's my last week being an official page at the library... kinda sad, but I just keep hoping I'll get one of the other jobs. The director is on vacation in Canada (where he can't be reached) until next monday, though, so I won't even find out if I get an interview or anything until after he gets back. Gah! Anticipation!

And then I got "Fun with Dick and Jane" from the library and watched it tonight. It was hilarious, despite a couple unnecessary stupid scenes. And at the beginning of the credits, they say "special thanks to:" and then list a bunch of the infamous CEOs and other executives from companies that had big money scandals (which was a recurring theme in the movie). Adelphia got in there a few times... maybe stuff like that is why Time Warner bought them out.

So, enough mindless rambling. Time for sleep. (in 80 degree humidity! Whee!)

Dear Blog: Almost forgot...

2006-08-11T02:17:00.000-04:00

Whoops. That's right... new macbook! Ok, so I need a laptop for college. I didn't really want to use the stupid slow useless Celeron laptop. So, I went for a wonderfully white, shiny new MacBook. Apple had a couple great deals too, so I got a free $180 iPod, and only paid $60 for a $160 printer/scanner/copier. And to top it all off, I ordered the stuff on Friday night, and on Saturday it said they shipped it. It then came on Tuesday morning. Pretty nice for 5 day shipping!

Do yourself a favor. Get a Mac! ;-)

Dear Blog: Ohh, I have a blog to update...

2006-08-11T02:13:00.000-04:00

Whee! I'm posting from a Blogger widget on my new MacBook. New MacBook? Well, I guess a lot has happened since I last posted.

Vacation was really fun. It was nice to have a break from craziness for once. Though my mom would have liked me to be outside the whole time, my idea of vacation also inclues a sufficient supply of Super Smash Bros. Melee on our GameCube, sleeping in, and avoiding bugs as much as possible.

Then I came back, and helped for a few of the five days that our church has vacation bible school. That's always fun, especially since I don't have to worry about leading bunches of little kids around all over the place anymore... I help with skit setup and stuff, and then just stand around and eat while all the kids are at various activities. But I couldn't be there the last few days because of work and a LAN party. This LAN party was also great fun, though we played a bit much Halo for my liking. (And I kept losing... imagine that!)

I finally got my schedule for Walsh, too. And then I told my boss at the library what the schedule was like. So, we concluded that I'd have to resign from my position there because the times that I couldn't be there needed to be filled, or something. So that was unfortunate, and I was pretty depressed about it until three days later, when I came in and saw that another position was open. The Technology Assistant is leaving. I applied for the same job in February, but didn't get it because the director didn't want to hire someone who might go away to college in 6 months anyway. How ironic.

So, I applied for the technology assistant job. It would be 30 hours/week, but they're fairly flexible, so it could vary from week to week. It would be absolutely nuts for the first few months of college because I could barely even be there for the 30 hours. But, it's about 13 dollars/hour, so I can hardly afford to pass it up. I also applied for a job at the front desk, which is 20 hours a week, but $10/hour and not as flexible. It would be a lot more fun, though, since the people I'd be working with are all fun. So, we'll see which one I get.

And, that's been my life for the last few weeks.

Dear Blog: And those darned peasants keep revolting...

2006-07-16T23:05:00.000-04:00

So yeah, still addicted to Rome: Total War. It's really fun... even though I'm still on the same scenario I was on about 5 days ago. So many settlements to conquer! But the ones far away from my capital don't like being so far away, so they keep getting mad and rioting. Then they get madder and take over the city, so I have to go re-conquer it. And at the same time, I'm trying to conquer the entire civilized world. But, all in a day's work.

So, the last most-of-a-week has been nice. I've had my first few days of not having to worry about any school at all. (what a good time to get addicted to a new game, eh?) I worked for 11 hours on Friday, but it went by much more quickly than I thought it would have. Maybe it'll help make up for the time I'll lose on vacation. Oh wait, the 38 hours I'm working for 2 weeks after that should do the trick.

And then there's this week... I'm going to go over some math before I take placement tests this weekend for Walsh. And I'm going to work either 5 or 6 hours (all until 9) on each of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then I have to go to orientation at Walsh all day on Friday. Then go on vacation the next morning. So who knows, this may be my last entry until after then.

Ok, time to crush these stupid Carthaginian dummies...

Dear Blog: Life as of 7/11

2006-07-11T22:34:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to finishing up all my school stuff. Whee! Now I get to have 5 weeks of free time before ... college. But yeah, done with high school.

Today is my mom's birthday, so I took her to see the Prairie Home Companion movie, because we have a mutual interest in the radio show it is about. Well, it was strange and boring, but oh well. It's the thought that counts, right?

So, in the computer world, I have thoroughly exhausted my interest in Sim City 4. This was aided, perhaps, by the recent acquisition (legal, that is) of Rome: Total War. So, now I'm all addicted to that.

At work on Monday, there was this lady who came in with two kids. One was probably 4 months old, and the other was about 2. She went to use the computer for 2 hours, with the 4-month-old sitting next to her on the floor in a baby carrier thing. It was bad enough that this baby was screaming and crying for 2 hours straight. But then she completely ignored her 2-year-old, who was climbing and jumping on the desks and chairs, and trying to color on the LCD monitors with little pencils, and running all over the library. So then, when the 2-year-old got stuck in the elevator, the mom ran over to get her out, leaving the sobbing baby unattended, which prompted even noisier sobbing. Of course, once she grabbed the 2-year-old and held her on her lap, the 2-year-old started screaming and whining too. So, 2 hours of this. It was not fun.

So yeah, random story of the week.

Dear Blog: Movie Night!

2006-07-07T23:17:00.000-04:00

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest today. It was absolutely spectacular (in my own opinion, anyway). The funny parts were funnier, and the dramatic parts were way more interesting and complicated. And should you go to see it, stay after the credits for one of those little 20-second clip things.

So, other than that, life has been pretty much the same as usual for the last couple of days. I have obtained a copy of Sim City 4, which is quite possibly the most addicting game I've ever come across. (and right now, it's playing on the other computer as I type this.)

Still have a couple physics tests to do, but that's because I have to wait for mom to grade a few other things before I can do them.

And, that's all. Woo hoo.

Dear Blog: Graduation Party, Etc.

2006-07-04T00:53:00.000-04:00

So, let's see... last week was nuts. I finally got around to finishing my big 1750 word paper, and I was going to try to finish up my physics tests too, but that got interrupted. I spent most of Friday and Saturday helping my dad build our nifty new deck. It'll be handy to have around, when it's finished. Still have to put up some railing, though. But that was absolutely exhausting.

So, then was my graduation party, which was fun, though after the first few minutes of introducing people to other people I kinda just gave up. So, LAN party followed, which ended up being everything I had hoped it would. There somehow ended up being almost enough fast computers for everyone to use... and the 8 player red faction was hilarious. (not to mention the 9 player call of duty games.) It kinda fizzled out on Monday morning (I got 3 hours of sleep, by the way) and most of the people were gone by about 1:00. But Mike, Ben, and Seth stuck around until 5:30-ish, when I had to start getting ready for work.

And at work, I was a complete zombie. Ugh. I nearly fell over a few times, and every time I sat down my eyes just slammed shut and wouldn't open. But 9:00 eventually came, at which point I stopped being really tired. Then I stopped at Wal-mart to see if they had SimCity 4 (all Brian's fault!), but they didn't, so oh well... next time. Then we shot off a bunch of great fireworks that my uncle bought at some place like an hour away. They were exceptional. While the ones we got didn't go up a hundred feet and blow up and get huge, they were nice tree-height things that had plenty of flair. (The neighbors probably had a fit, though... we were doing this at 11:00 PM)

So, then I took turns playing Call of Duty 2 with my cousin, and we decided that we're both really tired, so now I'm going to bed. But whee, tomorrow morning I am obligated to get up and watch a bunch of 8-year-olds walk up the street chasing a fire truck, complete with headache-causing noises. Maybe I can get some sleep NEXT week.

News: Oh, the hilarity...

2006-06-26T13:06:00.000-04:00

So, I just glance over at my Google Sidebar (a wonderful device, by the way), and see "Saudi men who got on school bus excused" in the news section. Of course, it seemed really odd, so I go to the link...

"Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, were charged with misdemeanor trespassing after boarding the bus bound for Wharton High School on May 19. They told investigators they got on the bus because they wanted to visit the school and didn't know it was just for students.

"At the time, the men gave conflicting reasons why they boarded the bus and were kept in jail for the weekend, police said. They were released after detectives determined they meant no harm, and immigration agents found that they were here legally."

And then, this morning on the way back from biking, I was listening to the news and heard that some really rich guy (whose name escapes me at the moment) is giving $55 million to Bill Gates for his charity foundation thing. So, the second richest man in the world is giving a bunch of his money to the richest man in the world. Ironic, isn't it?

They were also talking about all these clothing factory workers who live in Jordan. Apparently, since they're so desparate for jobs, they go pay some agent person to find them a job in a factory somewhere. Then they go work at the factory, where they work terrible hours in terrible conditions, getting very little pay, if any at all. So then they have to pay the job-finding person back, but they can't because they're trying to support their family with about $1/week. So, some agency went in to investigate and found out about it, and they're going to prosecute. But the factory managers were complaining about it, saying that it's not really their fault, it's because of all the American importers who insist on the lowest possible prices so they can make more of a profit. It's like, how can people really go to clothing stores and pay ridiculously low prices for stuff when they know how it's made? I thought it was pretty disturbing.

Visit This: What OS are you?

2006-06-24T00:11:00.000-04:00

Which OS are You?
If I had any idea what it was, I might be happier. Maybe I should investigate.

Which File Extension are You?

Dear Blog: Cars, cars, cars.

2006-06-23T10:30:00.000-04:00

So, in my continuing obsession with pretending I'm shopping for a car, I went to investigate the Scion tC. All I can say is: Wow. The thing has two sunroofs, the rear seat reclines, it has 160 hp, and all the other features one would want. But it's only like $16,000. That's still way out of my price range, but next year maybe I can find one for closer to $10,000.

So, this means I'm no longer dreaming about a Subaru Impreza. And then there's Honda Civic, but if I can find a car like the tC for the same price... yeah.

So, this week I've just been doing ... hmm ... school! (Or things that distract me so I procrastinate, or something.) I hope to be done on Saturday, though. So with that, I guess I should probably get to work.

Dear Blog: Random Stuff

2006-06-17T23:59:00.000-04:00

So, this week wasn't too bad. I receieved a preview of Vista when Brian came over with his computer last night... and then we played Mario Kart while Windows was destroying his computer. (And I did beat Michelle.) :P

And today I had my last meeting as a youth group president. I won't miss it too much, heh. It was fun enough, I just wasn't able to devote enough time to it. Then I went to a game/swimming thing and got all exhausted.

I've decided to take up bike riding. There's a nice trail in Clinton, and as long as you go before it's 80 degrees, it's nice. And not too crowded, either. Maybe I'll actually get some exercise this summer. But I'll have to do it strategically, as our water heater broke today and taking a shower after biking would be a tad chilly until the new one is running.

So, that's what's going on, just in case you wanted to know. I know, it's so terribly dramatic, and your life will be forever changed due to this knowledge.

News: Google's Greatness

2006-06-14T11:32:00.000-04:00

Google is making three buildings, each as large as a football field, in Oregon with the sole purpose of housing servers. Granted, Microsoft and Yahoo are both doing the same thing, though perhaps on a slightly smaller scale.

Just for background, in March, 2001, Google had 8,000 servers running. In 2003, it was around 100,000.

"Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years."

"Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google."

Google = Borg. I love it! You will be assimilated!

Read complete article here

Dear Blog: Car talk!

2006-06-12T22:12:00.000-04:00

I'm listening to Car Talk. Which is, unfortunately, a special rare treat now that I work on Saturday mornings, when it is usually on. But in between laughing fits, I guess I can go update this again.

So, let's see... I'm too distracted to remember what happened on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And then on Sunday/yesterday, I played badminton (why do they spell it that way, anyway?) for like 6 hours at Brian's graduation party. And we blew up diet Coke/Pepsi and mint Mentos. Very fun. But then today I had to work from 8 AM to 6:30 PM. And my legs were completely dead after running all over the place at the party. Every time I sit down, it takes me about 30 minutes to collect the willpower to stand up. Sigh. But I can sit around and do absolutely nothing (except school) tomorrow.

Back to laughing my head off...

Dear Blog: Cedar Point #2

2006-06-07T23:15:00.000-04:00

Once again, Cedar Point was nicely uncrowded. Even more so than last week, I think. Maybe because the Millenium Force was open and everyone went to that... but anyway.

We got back at 1:00 AM... much better than the 7:00 of last week. And my first and last ride there was the Top Thrill Dragster... as it should be.

But, my internet access was removed for a period of time, so I've got some catching up to do, I suppose.
Went to see X-Men 3 on Saturday with Mike, Brian, and Ben... Excellent movie. Don't mind all the stupid critics. And I've been told (though I didn't know this when we saw the movie) that there is some nifty little clip after the credits. Just FYI.

Then on Sunday was a fun little picnic event at church, after which we went bowling and saw Over the Hedge, which is also a good movie, but a bit slow after X-Men. But that's just because I prefer action/sci-fi to comedy.

And the "Summer Sub Time" started this week, with me working pretty much all day on Monday. I also had to run to the doctor, where I narrowly avoided getting part of my toenail cut out. Stupid infected ingrown toenail.

And I also found out at work today that one of the other pages has to leave because the director won't let him take a month off. Which means that he can't sub for me when I go on vacation, and since four other people will already be gone that week, I may not get a vacation at all. Which will be terribly frustrating, especially considering that I'm working for another person for two weeks so she can go on a vacation. But oh well, I'll just have to wait and see.

Dear Blog: New Target of my Affection

2006-05-31T21:44:00.000-04:00

Yay! My new mac keyboard is here! It's so white, and beautiful, and soft, and shiny, and quiet. It's by far the most comfortable keyboard I've ever typed on. Did I mention that it doubles as a USB hub? Also, the keys are not surrounded by a big plastic barrier, so junk won't get stuck inside and mess it up. And, I can use all four arrow keys, not just one... and it won't be having a heart attack every time it gets humid. For those who don't know, my old keyboard was the unfortunate victim of about two tablespoons of falling white grape juice. Sometimes the whole thing would just go berserk.

But, in other news... returning to a 6 hour work day after the 4-day vacation was a bit tedious. Especially because it was a normal day. Nobody came in with really stupid questions, and nobody came in trying to destroy the library. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Dear Blog: Cedar Point #1

2006-05-30T19:53:00.000-04:00

Well, Cedar Point was fun. 30 minute wait, or less, on all but the Top Thrill Dragster. Which I did ride, finally. In the first seat, too. It didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. But, this was probably because my brain was just completely numbed by everything that was zipping by all at once.

Then, it rained right before we were supposed to go on the Raptor again, so we left at 5:30. But oh well. Fun anyway. Next time, it had better not be 90 degrees.

Ford is also terrible at designing rear seats in their cars. Trying to sleep in a Taurus requires leaning your head back far enough that it messes up your neck, or leaning in absurd positions and getting a sore back.

Dear Blog: Random Thought

2006-05-28T10:41:00.000-04:00

So, as I sit here doing physics... on a Sunday morning... (my own fault for not doing it when I was supposed to, I guess)

I'm reading about how the protons and electrons keep each other stabilized with electric charges and stuff. So, I start thinking... about how I'm made of atoms, so I'm really mostly empty space. (since electrons are so far apart from the nucleus and all) And I'm typing on a keyboard, which is also mostly empty space. And there are lots of tiny little electrons zipping around all over the place in me. Ack.

Maybe it's best if I just accept reality and leave it alone.

Dear Blog: Yay, weekend!

2006-05-27T12:25:00.000-04:00

For the first time in, oh, probably 9 months, I will have the rest of the weekend to sit around at home and relax. (Or do school, but anyway...) My first summer in 3 or 4 years without summer school is approaching. I'm not sure if I'll love it, or just get bored. I've got plenty of stuff I could do, but I'm not accustomed to having lots of unorganized time. It'd be easy enough to get addicted to some game like Everquest, but I want to actually DO something with my time.

But, going to Cedar Point twice in the next 10 days will be fun...

Now I'm drooling (ok, not really) over the $1250 computer I've put together on newegg.com. It's like, do I want that computer now, or a car that's 2 years newer next year? Decisions, decisions.

News: Laughing at Vista

2006-05-25T00:12:00.000-04:00

Time for a good, healthy stab at Microsoft.

Vista in 6 months? In my own opinion, they'll miss that deadline by far. Even one of the Microsoft executives in charge of the Vista release is saying it's going to take a while, in this interview.

(Should you read the whole article, I must caution you to ignore everything that Steve Ballmer says. I wouldn't trust a man who does this, or this, any more than I would trust a 1990 Ford to get me across the country without breaking down.)

An article I like much more (yeah, I know I'm biased) is this one by C-NET. I'll believe an independant research firm more than Microsoft's executives any day.

Dear Blog: Changes

2006-05-23T12:08:00.000-04:00

Sigh.

Suddenly, I'm starting to realize the enormity of everything that happens at the end of one's senior year. No more Career Center - something I'll miss quite a bit. As I look back on the last two years, I see how much my "sociality" has grown. Being around other people for a significant part of every day would tend to do that, I suppose. But it was a big deal, at least at first. I'm no longer 95% shy... only 60%. Heck, I never would have dreamed of having a blog until recently, even. But oh well.

College in the fall? I suppose that just like all the other big changes I've gone through, it'll happen when it happens. But it's still weird to think about. At least I can look forward to the intramural dodgeball. ;)

On another note, Michelle gets to start half-stealing my car in 6 months. Just don't destroy it until I get a new one, eh?

Dear Blog: Oh Wonderful Microsoft

2006-05-17T21:53:00.000-04:00

There are times when I think I might have some sort of mental inability to concentrate. Times like, for example, whenever I take an important test. Having failed Microsoft exam 70-291 (networking with Windows) today for the second time by a small margin, I can officially balk about how many ridiculous details Microsoft expects you to keep track of. They also have a knack for trying to ask 3 different questions, and then asking you to provide an answer related to none of the questions.

"You're the network administrator for 50 computers running Windows XP, 35 computers running Windows Millenium Edition, and ten servers running Windows Server 2003.

Bob cannot log on to the domain. Yesterday, you installed a new router.

It is raining outside, and Bob had tacos for lunch.

There are four servers connected to the new router, and the domain controller is connected to a router connected to the new router, but DNS is no longer functional on the domain.

What do you do to allow Jane to remotely dial-in to one of the servers?"

But oh well. It's May, which means I get to try again for free. Next time...

News: Apple does it again!

2006-05-16T18:52:00.000-04:00

So, hmm. What to add, I wonder.

Then I randomly clicked one of my selected links, and discovered it. It is absolutely beautiful. But at the same time, it is now very affordable.

Of course, I'm talking about the new Macbook. Apple has somehow managed to make a laptop that is close in speed to their $2000-$2700 Macbook Pro, but with a smaller screen, and for $1100-$1500. Shopping spree, anyone?

Greetings, Earthlings.

2006-05-16T10:42:00.000-04:00

So, I was studying for a test. That got boring, so I got to thinking. And then I suddenly, perhaps subconsciously, created this.

If my previous online activities are any guide, this will completely consume my attention for a month, and then it will disappear into the vast number of unattended blogs.