The Danger Chronicles

The answer is none. None more black.

2009-12-18T07:20:00.007-05:00

This is my amp. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I wanted to share my "new" Peavey amp today. I've had it for a while now It's a Vypyr model modeling amp, which means that it pretends to be a bunch of different amps. These amps include old standards like the Fender Deluxe, the old twin tube and several other clean models, Some Marshall goodness as well as some big crunchy amps like Peavey's own 6505, XXX and the Joe Satriani JSX plus others like Krankenstein and Diezel amps. Plus all of them have a clean and overdriven channel.

My model also has a dozen or so preamp effects like phaser, octaver, chorus, rotating speaker, tube screamer, pitch shifter, and others to choose from to get your setup sounding pretty much just how you want it for whichever song/style you want to play, be it Pink Floyd, Metallica, The Beatles or some clean classic country sound.

The higher end amps also have stompbox effects for even more sound customization, but mine does not. I got the 15W model, which probably sounds more like a 30W amplifier. My model also lacks the USB and MIDI hookups of the pricier models as well as the ability to hook up to the Sanpera pedal and the "power sponge" knob, none of which I think I miss at my playing level.

The amp also gives you good control over the sound with pre- and post-gain settings, reverb and feedback control, plus each effect has two parameters which vary by effect that you can control.

On top of all that, it also has a pretty good tuner built into it, which makes further use of the gazillion red and green LEDs all over this thing. By the way, the amp gets bored sometimes if there is no guitar hooked up to it, so don't be surprised if it starts putting on a light show for you.

And, if you thought amps that go up to 10 are for sissies and lust after one which goes up to 11 (you might as well just make 10 louder), this beast will rock your socks off. It goes up to 13!

My only beef with the amp is that it's magic musical elves seem to be defective. Judging by the kid in the music shop's performance, I was under the impression that when you hook a guitar up to it and bang on the strings, good music came out of it. I don't know if I've got it hooked up wrong or what, but when I plug in and bang on the strings, all that comes out is some awful noise :(

Minitaure Potato Gun

2009-12-04T23:45:00.004-05:00

Well, I thought it's about time that everyone have a tiny little potato gun, so here goes:

While I was working on my thesis and teaching during grad school, I spent a lot of time in my office "grading papers" and "coming up with class stuff" so, obviously, I had a lot of free time on my hands. Time which was usually fueled by a lot of caffeine and occasionally some Jim Beam. There's only so much fun you can have making lady-finger mufflers for covert fireworking, so the obvious next step is to build a wee little potato gun. Right?

You'll need the following material:
- A barrel: you can't get much better than a ballpoint pen tube. One of those cheap white ones that you can pull the ink-thing out of one end and the little plug out of the other end. That's what I use here.
- An expansion chamber: A small pill bottle or something similar. I used one of those gas station aleve bottles that has about 4 pills in it and will run you about $217 USD.
- Ignition source: Commonly referred to as "the clicky thing from the grill lighter." It's a little piezo thing that you push the button on and it makes a little spark. It's powered by gnomes.
- Ignition probes: I couldn't think of a better term for these, but I like saying "probe." You'll need two safety pins, push pins, or thumb tacks. I opted for one of each, safety pins would probably work best.
- Sealant: Epoxy would probably work best, I used duct tape.
- Fuel: Binaca breath spray, butane, hair spray...got the idea yet?
- Projectiles: Spit balls, potato (roughly 1,327,940 shots per medium potato...it doesn't take much. Pencil erasers are the absolute best projectile for this thing; they go FAR, they bounce and they're the perfect size.
- Ramrod: Something to push the projectile to the breech of the barrel. The ink thing you removed from the pen is perfect.

Do this stuff:
1. Make a hole in the center of the bottom of the expansion chamber bottle roughly the diameter of the barrel.

2. Stick the barrel into the freshly created hole. Seal around the barrel with epoxy, duct tape, used chewing gum or what-have-you. I think these materials are probably listed in order of best to less than ideal.

3. Poke your pins into the sides of the expansion chamber about mid-way along the length of it. You want them pointing toward each other at a slight angle with the tips about 1/8" apart or so; the spark from the piezo-thing will need to be able to arc across them. Make sure they're securely held in place with epoxy, duct tape, etc.

4. Hook your grill lighter piezo-thing up to the two pins with one lead going to each pin. If your piezo-thing doesn't already have some handy wires for this connection, pretend like they were in the materials list and go get them. You can attach this trigger mechanism to the launcher if you wish, but in my pictured example, it's just hanging off.

To use it:
1. Place your projectile in the muzzle end of the barrel. Poke it down most of the way toward the expansion chamber so it has plenty of time to build up some speed before setting sail.

2. Add your propellant to the expansion chamber. I find one to two squirts of binaca breath spray works best. You'll need to have the right fuel-air mixture in the chamber for it to fire properly; this will likely take a bit of practice to find the right mixture. If you find that it's not firing properly, try wafting some air into it or lightly waving the whole thing around a few times to let the air mix with the propellant.

3. Put the cap back on the chamber.

4. Point it in a SAFE direction. The projectile will come hauling out of there at a pretty good clip and we don't need anyone's eyes put out!

5. Click your piezo-thing and let 'er rip.

You've now got yourself a miniature potato gun that you can use to hurl spit-wads and pencil erasers at Trinity on The Matrix poster on your bedroom wall in your mom's basement.

tschüß

How Master Lock Combination Locks Work: A Pictoral Guide

2009-11-22T22:12:00.021-05:00

So I got bored and decided to figure out what's going on inside of those Master Lock combination locks. They're already pretty easy to open without any lock-picking skills, stethoscopes, drills or otherwise special equipment, so it was there isn't much useful knowledge to be gained...just curious about what's in them.

What's the best way to figure out how these things work? Well, Google it, obviously. It's not exactly a state secret. What's the most fun way though? To dismantle a Master Lock combination lock and figure it out for myself. So that's exactly what I did, and I took pictures of all the parts (something the existing sites seem to lack, despite their fancy-schmancy animations and CAD drawings).

The first thing I did was to pop off the dial on the front of the lock. This, unfortunately, didn't provide much entertainment, or clues to how the thing works.

You can see the notches around the circumference of the raised part on the back of the dial which mate up with the notches around the post that the dial used to be on. As you'll see in a bit, those notches around the red thing in the first picture are actually on what I'll be calling the third wheel later.

Nothing exciting here, so I popped off the back of the lock. This was a bit of a pain; lots of prying and bending and so forth. If you wish to take apart your own lock, I recommend using a grinder or something to zap off the rolled-over portion of the body that holds on the back plate (pried up around the edges in this next picture). The Sharpie markings are my own. Again, however, nothing interesting here.

This uninteresting thing with all the holes in it and my beautiful Sharpie drawing on it is actually what holds the three wheels which are the combination mechanism (the top [3rd, according to my nomenclature] of which is the thing with the notches in the first picture). If you pull that thing out, you're left with this:

Here, you can see the shackle (horseshoe shaped thing that you put through your locker door or what-have-you) and the locking dog mechanism (the shark fin shaped thing with a peg sticking out of it). The peg sticking out of the side of the latter is the locking dog, and fits in to the notch in the shackle. Since the combination mechanism wheels aren't in place to require a combination to be entered, we can go ahead and pull out the shackle. Notice how the locking dog mechanism rotates down as the shackle is pulled up. Also notice the ridge on the left side of this mechanism that comes down almost to the hole that the dial post goes through. Let's call this ridge the "fence" for lack of a better word (this is what it's called on other types of locks, I'm not sure what it's really called on these):

Once we pull the shackle, we have:

Now, for how the combination mechanism works. Each of the three wheels (1, 2 and 3, from back of lock to front) has little posts sticking up out of them (on the top of wheel 1, on both sides of wheel 2 and on the bottom of wheel 3). As you'll recall, wheel 3 is tied to the dial via the notches we saw earlier, so when you turn the dial, wheel 3 turns. When you turn the wheel far enough clockwise, the post sticking out of the bottom of wheel 3 catches the post on top of wheel two, which makes it turn. Once they both turn far enough clockwise, the post on the bottom of wheel 2 catches the post on top of wheel 1. Here, we see the wheels in such a configuration that the post on wheel 2 is against the post on wheel 1 so that it will pull it clockwise as the dial is turned clockwise:

With the wheels in this position, we can turn the dial counter-clockwise for some distance without moving wheel 1, since there is no post contacting the other side of the post to pull it in that direction. The post on the bottom of wheel 3, however, will come into contact with the post on the top of wheel 2, causing it to rotate counter-clockwise along with wheel 3/the dial. Rotate it far enough, and the notch in wheel 2 will line up with the notch in wheel 1:

Then, as in the last step, due to the configuration of the posts, the dial (wheel 3) can now be turned back clockwise without affecting the position of wheel 1 or wheel 2. Turn it the right amount and the notch in wheel 3 will line up with the already aligned notches in wheels 1 and 2:

When all of the notches are aligned as shown above, the shackle can be pulled upward, causing the locking dog mechanism to rotate back, allowing the fence to move far enough down (into the aligned notches), and the shackle can come free, opening the lock.

TA-DA!

Nintendo DS browser

2008-06-23T15:54:00.000-05:00

Well, my nintendo ds browser finally came today. In fact, I'm making this post from it right now. Typing in it utilizes the stylus to hit tiny keys on a keyboard that I,ve dubbed a "wee-board," so this post won't be too long. The ds browser (Opera) is pretty cool and functional thus far. Check back in the near future for a full review.

Don't talk to the police

2008-06-19T19:10:00.002-05:00

As if anyone needed to be told any more reasons not to talk to the 5-0, this video of James Duane, apparently a Regent law professor and big supporter of the 5th amendment, gives them to you. The video appears to be a taped lecture at the law school and, as such, is pretty long (on the order of 50 minute or so). The first 20 minutes is Dr Duane speaking as to why he, a defense lawyer, among many others, recommends NEVER speaking to the police under any circumstances unless you are legally obligated to or otherwise instructed to by a competent lawyer (NOTE: go find a competent lawyer and/or pick up a book to find out when/where/why you would be legally obligated to. The latter part of the video is from a police officer, presumably giving counterpoints.

Unfortunately, our landlady came by with a new copy of our lease at about 18 minutes into it and then it wouldn't play again, so if you watch it, feel free to leave some Cliff's Notes.

The video is streamed HERE, but allows a maximum of 20 viewers at a time.

It is also available (and linked from the page) on iTunes HERE. I have trouble downloading stuff from iTunes, so if you're successful at downloading the video file, please contact me to help figure out how I can get it from you.

Enjoy.

The US v Olofson travesty

2008-06-12T20:57:00.004-05:00

Well, in case you care but haven't been following this story, David R. Olofson's appeal was denied and he was ordered to report to prison by July 2. If you're not familiar with this case, it's one of an upstanding citizen, honorably discharged Army veteran and guardsman who lent his neighbor (and prospective AR15 owner) an AR15 rifle to check out before he spent the money on one for himself. While this guy had the rifle out at the range, it experienced a malfunction which caused the rifle to fire several rounds in a burst. The fuzz got called, the BATFE came and took this guy's guns, computer, life, etc. and sent him to court despite the fact that upon their initial examination they couldn't replicate the "automatic" fire so they modified the f-ing rifle so that it would burst fire when using soft primered .223 ammo (in a weapon presumably chambered for 5.56mm ammo).

For more on the story, try Googling it. Also see Mr. Olofson's ARFCOM thread regarding the issue (bad news in the form of copies of court documents on pg86). Also be sure to check out this Lou Dobbs snippet about the case.

EDIT: More video directly from CNN: Lou Dobbs Segment 1 (same as the one above) and Lou Dobbs segment 2.

Fire at will!

2008-06-11T20:01:00.006-05:00

Governet Ted Strickland (D-OH) signed SB184 (The Castle Doctrine) into law yesterday, thereby expanding the rights of law abiding Ohioans by allowing them to not be victimized. The law also includes some provisions improving CCW laws. See my earlier post for more information about the bill.

Here's the NRA-ILA press release, penned by Daniel White:

Fairfax, VA-Ohio Governor Ted Strickland today signed the National Rifle Association (NRA)-backed “Castle Doctrine” legislation into law to expand the self-defense rights of law-abiding citizens. SB 184, sponsored by State Senator Steve Buehrer (R-1), protects the rights of innocent victims to defend themselves from criminal attack while expanding the rights of concealed-carry permit holders.

“I want to thank all parties concerned for working together to make this victims’ rights bill the law in Ohio,” said Chris W. Cox, NRA's chief lobbyist. “When you're confronted by a criminal, you don't have the luxury of time. Under the ‘Castle Doctrine’ provision, if someone breaks into your occupied home or temporary habitation, or your occupied car, you now have an initial presumption that you may act in self defense and you will not be second-guessed by the State. The ability to protect yourself and your family from harm is important no matter where you are.”

Also included in SB 184 are several pro-gun provisions that make Ohio's concealed carry laws more “user friendly”. Among these revisions include important clarifications for persons without a Concealed Handgun License (CHL) to legally transport firearms in an automobile, and pick up/drop off abilities for license holders in school safety zones. The bill also designates mandatory legal fees for gun owners who require court orders to have firearms returned to them, decriminalizes concealed carry in privately owned parking garages, allows permit holders to carry a firearm in an unlocked glove compartment or center console and removes the written test requirement for renewal of a concealed handgun license.

“The Castle Doctrine bill is about putting the law back on the side of the victim, the way it's supposed to be,” concluded Cox.

Abandon hope, all ye who send me junk mail/spam

2008-06-08T22:04:00.006-05:00

I learned some new things and found some neat stuff tonight.

As I was going though all of my junk mail tonight(real mail, not spam. We'll get to that), separating the shred pile and the trash pile and the Business Reply Mail envelopes to send back to the vultures at the pre-approved credit card offer mail rooms, I wondered just how much postage I could milk out of these suckers.

I briefly considered stuffing the remaining portion of their junk offers back into the envelope (along with the original outer envelope for good measure, of course), but it didn't take long to abandon that idea as one that would require far too much of my time. Plus I'd have to remove all personally identifying information. Far too much time.

Well, it turns out that rule 917.243(b) in the Domestic Mail Manual says that the USPS can treat items with business reply mail card or envelope used as a label (like on a brick, blender, banana, or otherwise unwieldy and, ultimately expensive to ship) as "waste" and throw it away. So much for getting rid of all that crap that we didn't unload in the yard sale. Due to this unfortunate development, I now have a stack of business reply envelopes (a dozen or two to each of the major credit card companies) which will have to go home empty, costing the companies the meager 1oz First Class Mail postage of $0.42 (which goes to the hard working American men and women of the USPS) and the cost for the time it takes Joe Mailclerk to open the thing, pitch it, and complain about it to his fellow wage-slaves around the water cooler.

Homework: Since this operation isn't costing them very much, for the master plan to really take effect, the maximum number of possible BRM envelopes for junk mail need to be sent back. You'd better get busy pulling these things out of all those pre-approved credit card offers and shipping them back. And tell all of your friends to do the same.

As for spam/junk email, for the time being, emails are free to send and receive (not counting the negligent infrastructure related costs per email) so sending anything back to spammers would simply be an exercise in futility and likely only result in your email being added to more spam mailing lists (by the way, don't forget to use something like Temporary Inbox to protect your email address when signing up for stuff online). I did find something sort of neat though. THIS page helps to try and fight the battle against spam bots, email harvesters and web crawlers who scour web pages looking for email addresses to send spam to. Details of how they think it will work are on their page, but all you need to do is link to their page. The address is http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/spam/. They also offer some code to include on your website or blog:

Put this image in your blog!

 <a href="http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/spam/"> </a>

Or for "This link kills spam" text link, use
 <a href="http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/spam/"> This link kills spam</a>

So, for your next Homework assignment, if you have a blog or website, be sure to include this link in it.

Hooray for screwing with spammers and junk mailers!

Hey, HP...Eat it!

2008-06-06T12:01:00.004-05:00

NOTE I looked at this post after I was done and decided that THIS might help. Enjoy.

Well, if nothing else, I'm learning at work which products suck. Last time it was Windows Vista. Bill Gates even agrees with me on that one. Now it's HP. Their products are garbage and their customer support is a circus. Please note that only during one of my 15+ call to HP support could I understand more than 60% of what the tech was saying. As far as I could tell, that call somehow wound up in a Canadian call center rather than the Indian one, eh.

We got this HP OfficejetPro L7780 All-In-One printer back in February and it's been pretty much nothing but trouble. It would occasionally print and copy decently, but much of the time it would either barf out a document that was printed so lightly that it was unreadable or one that was barely readable but had big, black, nasty streaks down the left side of the page. Finally we got sick enough of it and had enough spare time for me to look into it.

First, I google the problem and search their support pages. No good. I look up this particular product on their site and learn that it has a 1-year warranty. Good. February 2008 to May 2008 < 1-year. Time to call and get everything squared away. I call up their 1-800 number and, after wading through those awful robot-menus that are supposed to be more user-friendly that just pushing a button, speak with this real nice girl who transfers me to someone else who finally routes me to the people who deal with these sorts of problems. After going in circles with these clowns, who are trying to get me to check crap like "is it plugged in," "is there paper in it," etc., they finally tell me to print a "Print Quality Diagnostics Page." Well, whatever that thing told them wasn't in any publicly available documentation but whatever it was they decided to send us another one for free under the warranty, but I called just in time since the warranty only has 13 days left on it.

WHAT? 13 days? By my calculations, one year from February 2008 would put the warranty end date somewhere around FEBRUARY 2009! Nope, they say, 13 days. F*ck you, customer! HA HA! Whatever, it's probably some sort of evil HP loophole. Send us the printhead and the printer will be fixed and the warranty be damned. I install it the thing and... Viola, it fires up and prints a beautiful, streak-free "Print Quality Diagnostics Page." Fast forward fifteen seconds and the printer is unresponsive and just keeps showing an error message of "The following printhead(s) has a problem: Black/Yellow (K/Y)."

Several failed HP "Live chat support" sessions, a phone call or two, several emails and one "successful" chat session later and we're making "real progress." These jokers are check asinine, common sense stuff like checking cables again. Unbelievable. I'm no printer genius, but common sense and the better part of a decade of computer science and electrical engineering classes tell me that lousy print quality isn't due to possible minuscule resistance from a surge suppressor/UPS. So I patronize this dingleberry for a while and finally they offer to send us a new printer, just in time since there are only a couple days left on our warranty. (P.S. The boss and the secretary finally got the warranty thing ironed out. Hopefully)

So the new (remanufactured) printer arrives from HP. Well, part of a printer arrived from HP. I had to literally disassemble the old printer and put the parts onto the new one. How much BS is that? What if this was going someone who isn't mechanically savvy enough to build a printer nearly from scratch? What if the parts coming from the old printer are causing the problem in the first place. What if the problem was with the cords, the print heads, the print cartridges, the print trays, the duplexer, or any of the myriad other parts that they didn't ship with this thing. In any case, I get the S.O.B together, all the parts swapped and the print cartridges and print heads installed (including the brand new, factory sealed black and yellow printhead that we just got). Fire it up and it give us the old familiar "The following printhead(s) has a problem: Black/Yellow (K/Y)." AHHHH!

I try the old printhead and it works, but still prints the streaks. OK, so in two different printers, each printhead causes the same problem. Does this sound like a printhead problem to you? Because this sounds like a printhead problem to me. I'm guessing that the original problem was caused by a bad black/yellow printhead, which they replaces with another bad one. So I call HP again to get this fixed, figuring they'll send me another head. Instead they offer to, once they receive the original printer back, they'll ship a third printer to us and we can return the second printer. Apparently this makes more sense than just sending us another printhead. I emailed them about this and they told me that this problem "requires one on one support" and that they'd call me. I can't call them, they have to call me. And they haven't called me yet.

So, as disappointing as this end to the story is, that's where we're at with this P.O.S printer. More updates to follow, if there are any.

Elementary, my dear Watson

2008-06-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner, they retire for the night, and go to sleep.
Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. "Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."

"I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes" replies Watson.

"And what do you deduce from that?"

Watson ponders for a minute.

"Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of the universe. What does it tell you, Holmes?"

Holmes is silent for a moment. "Watson, you idiot!" he says. "Someone has stolen our tent!"

My Castle

2008-06-02T20:15:00.003-05:00

Q. So John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are on a boat and the boat sinks. Who gets saved?

A. (highlight for the answer): America

Yeah, I know. It's a good one. I overheard it at a car swap meet with one of my buddies.

Anyway, the Ohio senate recently passed some legislation called The Castle Doctrine by a vote of 25 to 7. The legislation is now heading to Governor Ted Strickland(D), who has already voiced his support for SB 184 and is expected to sign it into law within the next couple of weeks.

SB 184, sponsored by State Senator Steve Buehrer (R-1), will restore the right of individuals to respond with force in defense of their lives and family, and immunize the victim from civil lawsuits by criminals or the criminal's family. SB 184 also contains several provisions which will make critical changes to Ohio's concealed carry statute (re: concealed carry on school property when picking up/dropping off a child, in vehicles, by tenants on their rental properties, et al.).

Hooray, Ohio!

Close the Dang Windows!

2008-05-28T21:32:00.004-05:00

Well, it's probably been well over a month since I've even booted any of my computers into any flavor of Micro$oft Windows. I've dual booted for the better part of a decade, but mostly just kept it on in XP. Lately, however, I've just kept it Linux. I got started on my renewed Linux kick a couple weeks ago when, after a year or two of procrastination, I decided to start checking out 64-bit operating system so that I could make better use of my Athlon 64 box. I picked this thing up a few years back thinking "soon, everyone will be using 64 bit processors and software running on the same." Fail! Apparently Intel and their big 32-bit dual-core deal is winning this processor race. But...I digress. Anyway, MS Windows sucks in general and I'd read plenty of horror stories about hardware and software incompatibility issues with the 64-bit Windows systems so I started looking around at the 64-bit builds of some Linux OS. What I found were more of the same incompatibility horror stories, but this time, it was mostly from the eggheads who wanted to and/or had the ability to tinker with it and make it work (I don't have the time, the inclination nor, likely, the knowledge to undertake such an endeavor).

So, since I was on a bunch of Linux distribution sites anyway, I grabbed a few new OS installations. The one that I've been enjoying the most lately is Ubuntu. This is probably one of the most user-friendly Linux systems I've used, which is likely why they call it "Linux for Human Beings." If you've ever thought about switching to Linux, wondered what the hell Linux even is, or simply been sick and tired of constant bugs, security flaws, failures and malfunctions, BSODs and all of the other fun things that come standard with Windows, this is probably a good starting point for you. Last week at work, I had to use a computer with Windows Vista on it and I think I can safely say that it was the most bloated, ill performing, ill designed, resource hogging, dumbed down, watered down shell in OS clothing that I've seen. Horrible. And I think that's probably where computing is going. Ever see Idiocracy where he goes to St. God's Hospital and they diagnose him by pushing the button with the stick figure pantomiming the affliction most closely resembling his? Yeah, it's like that. Moving on...

Ubuntu, like many other Linux OS these days, can be booted from a "Live CD," which means that you don't have to install anything on your computer to start using it. Nada. Zip. Jack Squat. Put the CD in your drive, restart the computer and...Viola...You're running Linux. When you're done, restart without the CD and...Viola...You're back in your usual OS. Ubuntu can also be run as an application within windows (I believe). Then, after you're finished seeing how superior Linux is to Windows, you just install it on your hard drive and start using it all the time (or dual-booting, I suppose). The good thing is, all of these methods of using Ubuntu are in the same .ISO file that you download and burn onto a CD-R.

Linux is also good for the cheapskate who doesn't want to buy or can't afford to buy the latest and (cough) greatest Windows OS since Linux is free. Free as in you don't have to pay for it. Free as in you can take it apart, play with it, change it, do whatever you want with it. Free as in once you have it, you can give it to your co-worker's nephew and your grandmother in Idaho. Free.

As I said earlier, I haven't used Windows (with the exception of doing so at work), in a couple months and I haven't missed it at all. The new system does pretty much everything that the old one did, only better and faster and without having to worry about compromising its security to spyware, viruses, code flaws and other computer nasties. For anything that I want to (I haven't needed to yet) run in Windows, I always have WINE and Bochs to do it, but those occasions are very few and very far between.

To Publish or Not To Publish

2008-05-28T21:18:00.002-05:00

I got the following email the other day. The deadline is coming up and I was thinking about maybe submitting my thesis abstract but it's not in their required form and I don't know if it's acceptable to change the abstract from it's original form. My thesis was about the use of artificial intelligence in diabetes management so I think it would be a good fit. It's a good paper, real bleeding edge type stuff and I think it has a good chance of getting accepted if I submit it. Perhaps if I get some spare time I might get ahold of my advisor and ask whether it'd be a good thing to do or not. It'd be pretty rad to get published. This, along with the prospect of getting hired for that teaching gig (which I don't think I wrote about yet. maybe next time?), things might be looking up in the Danger Brain realm. And in the spirit of stream-of-consciousness-posting, hopefully I'll get a good post going on here about our dickbag landlords real soon. It'll be a real gem.

Diabetes Technology Society is pleased to invite you to submit an abstract to
the Eighth Annual Diabetes Technology Meeting, which will be presented November
13-15, 2008 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. This
meeting is an excellent opportunity to showcase your work by submitting an
Abstract, networking with the world's top diabetes technology professionals, and
learning about the latest high-tech tools in the fight against diabetes.

The Meeting will include presentations on:
1) Technologies for Metabolic Monitoring
2) Noninvasive and Minimally Invasive Glucose Monitoring
3) Insulin Delivery Technology
4) Artificial Pancreas
5) Diabetes Information Management
6) Internet and Diabetes
7) Nanotechnology and MEMS for Sensors and Pumps
8) Tissue Engineering for Insulin Production
9) Assessing Diet and Exercise
10) Technologies for Improving Compliance With Diabetes Therapy

We invite your submission of an Abstract for a meeting topic or other area of
diabetes technology. Abstracts will be published both in the new peer-reviewed
bimonthly scientific e-journal of the Diabetes Technology Society, "Journal of
Diabetes Science and Technology" (DST), as well as the meeting syllabus. All
Abstracts will be considered for poster presentation and you have the option to
submit your Abstract to be considered for oral presentation.

The top three abstracts first-authored by students will receive the Peterson
Student Research Award. This Award includes travel, lodging, and registration
for the Diabetes Technology Meeting plus a cash prize (Gold: $1000, Silver:
$500, and Bronze: $300). The deadline to submit an Abstract is July 03, 2008.

[...snip...]

Over the past seven years we have received over 1000 abstracts for this meeting.
At last year's Meeting in San Francisco, over 600 clinicians and scientists
from 25 countries attended, and we hope you will take part in this year's
meeting.

It'd be preeeettty cool to get that cash and maybe take a little trip.

Online Game Trading

2008-05-28T20:42:00.003-05:00

So, I was trying to dump some of my old video games on Craig's List the other day and the only thing I was getting in response were CL scams of people sending me links to (presumably their own) auctions, similar to the old "here's-a-google-search-result-that-really-takes-you-to-my-penis-pill-website" scam. So then I (very briefly) considered taking my games to some joint like E B Games or GameStop, but then I remembered that the last time I tried that they offered me about $4 for a PS2 game that they had sitting on the shelf, used, for $17 and quickly removed that though from my head. That almost as bad as the college book stores, like the one that offered me $5 for a physics book that I bought the previous quarter for $120+. But it's OK, I'm not bitter.

Anyway...I poked around on the internet and found This Place, Goozex. First of all, they hook you up with a free game just for joining. Then, provided you use that link, they hook you up with another two free games after you complete your first positive trade (including your free game). By "free game," of course, I mean 100 points and 1 free trade credit. You spend your points on games and it costs 1 trade credit per game that you receive so, in total, you get 300 points and 3 trade credits just for signing up with that link. More popular games cost more, but there are plenty of 100 point games. Even if you just go to their main page you get 2 free games (but if you use that link I get a free one also! ;-) ). You can also get rid of your old games on there in exchange for the going rate of points for that game. The only downside is that you have to wait in line behind people that requested to send or receive a game before you. In sum, check it out; even if you don't have games to get rid of, you can get up to 3 games just for signing up.

GOOZEX

Gigantour 2008 Cleveland, OH

2008-05-22T20:31:00.003-05:00

Well, since I'm on a roll with putting crap into The Chronicles, I'll try to keep it up.

A couple weeks ago we went up to visit Blair's folks and see a show. It was sort of a combined birthday present to all of us since it was close to Devin and Blair's birthdays and Blair couldn't have made it up there without my car. Hooray dependence!

Anyway, Blair, her brother, his friend, her dad and I all went up to Cleveland to see this year's Gigantour. We had a nice lunch and some libations at Applebees, then made our way to the Hard Rock at Tower City, just up the hill from the venue, for some more beverages, and then rolled down the hill to see some bands and drink $8 beers. We didn't have a camera with us (besides, they were disallowing about half of the people with digital cameras from bringing them in anyway), so the only thing we had were our phones, which, obviously, aren't all that great.

The show was pretty gnarly. The opening bands were Job For a Cowboy, High on Fire, Children of Bodom, and In Flames. They were all actually pretty good and hardcore, which is a lot more than I can say for some opening bands I've seen before. The pit got pretty rowdy for all of the bands and everyone ended up bloody, bruised and broken just like one should when participating in such behavior. Not quite as rowdy as for some of the bands at Ozzfest (Hatebreed, Lamb of God for example...quarter mile wide circle-pit-of-violence), but still good stuff.

Of course, the headliners were Megadeth. I'm still kind of in awe that I actually got to see these guys live. They put on one hell of a show! I mean, they've been doing this for a couple decades now and they know what they're doing. I don't know if Mustaine was feeling a little under the weather or what, but he didn't have his trademark snarl quite down pat but they still rocked like mofos, doing all the old hits like Peace Sells and Symphony of Destruction as well as new joints off their recent albums.

I got a few more pictures, but they're all equally as crappy as these. Like I said, they were just on my cell phone and the best it can take is 640x480 resolution pictures. It also didn't help that pretty much EVERYTHING on stage reflected the stage lights to a point where it would wash out most of my pictures. I tried recording a little bit of the audio on my phone too, but we were so close to the stage and it was so loud that that didn't work out too well. Whenever I get a chance I'm going to try to stick them into a PhotoBucket slideshow, but I haven't booted Windows in a couple months and my *nix configuration apparently doesn't play nice with their flash slidehow maker. We got some better pictures of the last OzzFest, so if I keep it up with posting here, I'll try to get some of those up.

Your Own Personal Jesus

2008-05-21T20:59:00.006-05:00

Yep. My own personal Jesus. Sent to me directly by mail to give me fortune, fame and whatever else my heart desires for only a small monetary donation to St Matthew's Churches.

I got an envelope in the mail yesterday the front of which read

"This very old church loans this to you, to bless someone connected with this home. Then, it must go to another family that desires God's blessings. See letter inside...Your Home First"

and

"We want to give you this free piece of jewelry, a cross Blessed for you."

Needless to say I did a Google Search on it before opening it just in case it was some radical fundamentalist sect sending out anthrax or letter bombs to the unsuspecting general public. What, you don't do that too? This thing was creepy. Anyway, I read all about it online so I didn't need to open it just yet. I took it in to work for Show & Tell today. It was a big hit.

Inside the envelope was my very own Magic Purple Jesus Paper Prayer Rug; "soaked with the power of prayer for [me]." There were also instructions for using this miraculous 11x17" piece of paper. I'm not sh/tting you; this thing came in the mail to me. I'm in the process of trying to find the text of the letter online so I don't have to transcribe it, but the gist of it is as follows:

- Read the testimonials of others, like "Sister Y" who used the magic carpet and got $46,888.20!!11!!ONE!!!ELEVEN!!!11
- Get out your Magical Purple Paper Prayer Rug.
- Stare at Jesus' closed eyes until they automagically open up and stare back at you.
- Go into a room by yourself and kneel with both knees on it.
- (According to some internet accounts of their letter) Place the rug in a Bible at the page on which Philippians 4:19 is printed and leave it over night. If you have no bible, just stick it under your bed overnight.
- Put a check-mark next to your needs, which include: A Better Job, A new Car, A Home To Call My Own, Pray For for God to bless me with this amount of money: $________, et al.
- Check (or not) the box for whether you want the free Deuteronomy 8:18 Prosperity Cross, blessed by the curch.
- Enclose your "seed gift to God's work of $________"
- Send the whole shebang back to the church within 24 hours, or else your miracle won't come true. Plus they apparently need to send the rug on to others who need a Magic Jesus Rug.
- After you've mailed it back to them, the next day you can open your "Sealed Prophecy" but WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T OPEN THE SEALED PROPHECY BEFORE YOU SEND BACK THE RUG!!!!
- Profit.

Ah, btw, I found the full text. It's down there at the bottom. Anyway, this story has a tragic end. With all the fun we were having with it at work, and me practicing guitar and APPARENTLY NOT PLAYING SOFTBALL BECAUSE OF BAD WEATHER DESPITE IT BEING 60 DEGREES AND NICE OUTSIDE it turns out that I didn't get a chance to use the rug and send it back in within their 24 hour deadline. It's OK though, because I opened the envelope real careful-like (you know, in case it really was a letter bomb or anthrax after all) so now I can stuff most of their stuff back into the envelope, mark it REFUSED and send it back at their expense. I'll also be leaving the business reply mail (postage paid by them) out so that I can stuff it with Wal-Mart ads, newspaper clippings and other various things to make it bulky enough to cost plenty and sending that back to them at their expense.

It's just sick to think of how many sheeple will buy into this and send these turds their money. Below is most of the text from the enclosed letter, copied from a user over at Snopes.

READ WHAT GOD IS DOING HERE AT ST. MATTHEW'S CHURCHES.

Dear . . . Someone Connected with This Address,

People just like you are writing to this 55-year-old church, telling us of all types of blessings since this church started praying with them. They are receiving divine help in the form of answered prayer. Some are seing loved ones saved, and many of them are receiving spiritual, physical and financial blessings of all types - better jobs, raises in salaries, being able to buy and sell homes, buying new cars, and so on. Actually, these dear people are receiving so many blessings that it is impossible to mention them all in a letter. And, as you will read in the enclosed brochure a Sister Garcia used the same type of Bible faith prayer rug that we are sending to you, with this letter, and was blessed with almost $50,000! Now, we must talk to you about something we see, in the Holy Spirit, concerning you and your family's needs.

GOD's HOLY BLESSING POWER IS IN THE ENCLOSED ANOINTED PRAYER RUG WE ARE LOANING YOU TO USE!!!

WE MUST GIVE YOU THIS OPPORTUNITY FIRST . . . THEN IT MUST GO TO THE HOME OF ANOTHER DEAR FRIEND WHO NEEDS A BLESSING . . . You, or someone connected with this address, and another dear family are about to be blessed through this unusual Bible Faith, Curch, Prayer Rug, which we are placing in your care for these next 24 important hours. Because of any needs you are facing, we want you to use this Church Prayer Rug first, then we must pass it on to another dear friend of ours who also needs a blessing. As we pray for you and everyone connected with this address, WE FEEL THAT SOMETHING VERY WONDERFUL IS TRYING TO COME TO YOU.

When you use this Faith Church Prayer Rug, go into a room where you can be alone (just God and you). Turn off the television and radio and try to be by yourself when you kneel on this Holy Ghost, Bible Prayer Rug, or spread it over your knees. We want this Church Ministry, Prayer Rug to be touching both of your knees as you pray for the needs yo are facing right now. It is going to be like you are kneeling before God All Mighty at the alter inside a great church of blessings. If you need more joy, peace, health, money, a new car, a new house, healing in family communication, or whatever, we, as a very old (57 years) church, want to know about it. Check your prayer needs on page two of this letter. Talk to us. This power you and this church ministry are about to use works!

These next 24 important hours are crucial to you. Timing is important to God. After you kneel on this Church Prayer Rug, or place it over your knees, place it in a Bible, on Philippians 4:19. (If you don't have a Bible, it's okay - just slide it under your side of the bed, for tonight, if you can. If you can't do this, it is okay. Leave It There No Longer Than Tonight Only! God sees. Then, in the morning it is a must that you get this unusual blessing Church Prayer Rug out of this house and back to us, here at the church's chapel prayer room, in faith. We must also have this letter back, with whatever you need prayer for, printed on page two. You must get this Bible Prayer Rug back to us so we can rush it onto another family that's in need of a blessing. Do this without fail. Please, do not break this flow of power between us.

Notice the face of Jesus on this Church Prayer Rug. When you first look, you will notice that His eyes are closed. If you relax and continue looking straight into His eyes, you will see His eyes slowly opening, and He will begin looking back at you. Jesus sees your needs (Philippians 4:19). Use this unusuall, important Church Prayer Rug for tonight only.

Let us ask you: Would you like to have God's blessings upon your home, your family and your finances? Say, "Yes, Lord Jesus, I do need Your financial blessings upon me and my family's finances!" Deuteronomy 28.6. Just put a mark by your needs below, telling us that you want prayer. Also, check any other needs you are facing. Pray about sowing a seed gift to the Lord's work. Give God your best seed and beleive Him for His best blessing (St Luke 6:38). Now, go and use this Church, Faith, Prayer Rug. The Lord is watching and waiting. You are about to enter the Holy Spirit of God right here in your home, through this faith exercise. The, it is a must that you return it for another to use.

MAIL THIS PAGE BACK WITH THIS PRAYER RUG.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF PRAYER!

Dear Brothers and Sisters at St Matthew's 57-Year Old Church,

( ) I received this Church Prayer Rug you loaned me, and I used it as instructed in this letter of faith. Now, I am returning it to you for another to use.

( ) Yes, I do need the Lord's blessings upon my family and me!

Pray for my family and me for

( ) My Soul
( ) A Closer Walk With Jesus
( ) My Health
( ) A Family Member's Health
( ) Confusion In My Home
( ) My Children
( ) To Stop A Bad Habit
( ) A Better Job
( ) A Home To Call My Own
( ) A New Car
( ) A Money Blessing
( ) I Want To Be Saved
( ) Pray for God to bless me with this amount of money: $________
( ) Please, especially pray for this person:
( ) Enclosed is my seed gift to God's work of $________

ST. MATTHEWS CHURCH MUST HAVE THIS PRAYER RUG BACK. PLEASE DO NOT MISPLACE IT. IT MUST GO TO ANOTHER HOME AFTER YOU USE IT.

BE SURE TO RETURN THIS PRAYER PAGE WITH THE RUG. IT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU TO DO SO. - THE CHURCH WILL PAY THE POSTAGE FOR YOU. YOU WILL RECEIVE A WONDERFUL FREE, SPIRITUAL GIFT THAT WILL BE A BLESSING TO YOU FOR A LIFETIME, AS SOON AS WE RECEIVE THIS BACK FROM YOU.

"ACCORDING TO YOUR FAITH BE IT UNTO YOU" ST. MATTHEW 9:29

PLEASE PRINT YOUR NAME.

Josie's on a vacation far away Pt. 2

2008-05-21T20:17:00.005-05:00

Well, I noticed that pretty much the only traffic I get to this P.O.S blog is hits from Google searches for something to do with one of my old posts called "Josie's on a vacation far away" which is, of course, part of the lyrics to the song "Your Love" by The Police or Outfield or your choice of other countless covers. The post has absolutely nothing to do with the song, it was just a bit of lyrics that I had stuck in my head and I felt slightly guilty for tricking all those poor schmucks into coming here via Google.

So, since I'm now learning to play the guitar (again), I figure it can't hurt to put up the tabs and lyrics and maybe I'll learn it too. We'll learn together, now won't that be fun! By the way, I got a new guitar, so I'm not still trying to play that old sh*tty Gibson or Fender or whatever I got back when we lived over on first street.

Anyway, here goes:

Your Love (I Don't Wanna Lose Your Love Tonight) By
Sting and The Police / Outfield

Josie's on a vacation far away
Come around and talk it over
So many things that I wanna say
You know I like my girls a little bit older
I just wanna use your love tonight
I don't wanna lose your love tonight

I ain't got many friends left to talk to
No one's around when I'm in trouble
You know I'd do anything for you
Stay the night but keep it undercover
I just wanna use your love tonight
I don't wanna lose your love tonight

Trying to stop my hands from shakin'
Somethin' in my mind's not makin' sense
It's been a while since we were all alone
I can't hide the way I'm feelin'

As you leave me please would you close the door
and don't forget what I told you
Just 'cause you're right - that don't mean I'm wrong
Another shoulder to cry upon
I just wanna use your love tonight
I don't wanna lose your love tonight

Yeah

I just wanna use your love tonight
I don't wanna lose your love tonight
I just wanna use your love tonight
I don't wanna lose your love tonight

Tonight

And the Tabs/Chords:

Your Love
The Outfield

Intro:
~~~~~

      E   C#m   B    
e|-----------------                   
B|-----------------                   
G|----9----6----4--                   
D|----9----6----4--                   
A|----7----4----2--                   
E|-----------------                   
                                      
                                      


Verse 1:
~~~~~~~
E             C#m           B
 Josie's on a vacation far away, come around and talk it over

E        C#m                   B
 So many things that I want to say, you know I like my girls a little bit

 A                      C#m             B
 older.  I just want to use your love tonight;

C#m              A                B
 I don't want to lose your love tonight.


Verse 2:
~~~~~~~
E                 C#m                    B
 I ain't got many friends left to talk to, no one's around when I'm in trouble

E             C#m             B
 You know I'd do anything for you, stay the night but keep it under

 A                      C#m             B        <--(Strum these, once each)
 cover.  I just want to use your love tonight;

C#m              A                B              <--(same here)
 I don't want to lose your love tonight.


Bridge:
~~~~~~
The lead riff into this part is something like:


     G              A                 G             A
e|---------------|-----------------|-------------|--------------------| (2x)
B|---3-----5--7--|--5---5---5------|--3----5--7--|--8--7h8p7--5--7----|
G|---4-----------|--6---7---6---6--|--4----------|--6---------6-------|
D|---5-----------|--7-----------7--|--5----------|--7-----------------|
A|---------------|-----------------|-------------|--------------------|
E|---------------|-----------------|-------------|--------------------|


G                A
 Try to stop my  hands from shakin'
 Something in my mind's not makin' sense
 It's been awhile since we've been all alone
 I can't hide the way I'm feelin'

Verse 3:
~~~~~~~
E                  C#m                        B
 As you leave me please would you close the door, and don't forget what I
                                                        told you

E                C#m            B
 Just 'cause you're right - that don't mean I'm wrong, another shoulder
                                                        to cry up-
A                    C#m             B
 on.  I just want to use your love tonight;  <--+
                                                |- (Repeat 3 times)
C#m              A                B             |
 I don't want to lose your love tonight.     <--+


Outro:
~~~~~
C#m - A - B  (repeat and fade)  throw in an occasional Bsus

(Listen to the record to understand how the following lines
go with the music.)

   Voice 1      Voice 2

              Lose your love.
              Lose your love.
Your love.
              Lose your love.

I don't wanna lose your love tonight.
              Lose your love.
Your love.                               (repeat and fade)
              Lose your love.

Perfect. Now I can rest easy at night now knowing that visitors to The Danger Chronicles won't be disappointed. Well, at least with the Outfield tabs and lyrics. The rest of the blog still sucks.

Brain Sprinkling

2007-11-21T22:32:00.001-05:00

Get it? Like a brain storm, only less.

So, I'm constantly going about with all these grand ideas for a post to make on this damn blog thing so that it's not so f-ing lame. Don't get me wrong, it would still be lame, just not quite as bad. As I sit at work, visions of gun control posts, political posts, music posts, fence posts, random thought posts and posts with real, meaningful updates regarding my fascinating life and times dance through my head. And then I get home. If you've read any of my other posts you'll quickly realize that I'm a procrastinator. A procrastinator with poor priority management at that. I can't even figure out what to put off doing first.

Well, tonight I'm a procrastinator with a pint glass of Jim Beam with a splash of root beer and a slightly less hectic schedule.

I've been putting a lot of time into That One Song and it's still not even a wonderful as I had envisioned. It's getting better though. Membership (free, go now), is slowly growing and I even have some "celebrity" members.

I haven't updated my personal website in a long time, despite my constant discussion of it and urge to do something with it. In fact, I'm not even sure how much longer Ohio University will host my webpage. (see next paragraph)

Oh yeah...I guess I graduated. I have a Masters degree now. I guess we see how stoked I am about it; it made it in the top 5 paragraphs of this post. I was finished with it about a month ago. I defended my thesis (Similarity Determination and Case Retrieval in an Intelligent Decision Support System for Diabetes Management or something like that). And believe me, it's every bit as exciting as the title sounds. It's about using an artificial intelligence system that I built the guts for to replace endocrinologists for helping diabetes patients. Maybe I'll host it somewhere and post a link if I ever get around to it (not likely). It's available online in a couple places. I even have a copyright for it. Neat.

Well, along with graduating comes the disappearance of my teaching gig. Along with the disappearance of my teaching gig comes more hours at Mitchell Electronics (ugh, actually working for my money). I like working well enough, I guess...I just have better things to do. By the way, this is probably a good place to let you know that Jim Beam keeps screwing with my keyboard and making me transpose the letters 'N' and 'G' whenever I type a word ending in "-ign" as well as inadvertently inserting extra 'E's and 'K's where they don't belong at all, making the typing of this post quite long and arduous....

Oh...employment. I applied for a job in Washington. It's for the parent company of a the place that my buddy, Josh, works for. The job description sounds right up my alley and it definitely sounds like something I'd like to do and in a place I'd like to be. I half hope I get it because, as far as jobs go, it's as good or better than most others. On the other hand, I guess I don't really want to face the music that I'm "grown up" now and need to get a "career" rather than just a "job." If I don't get that job, I figure I'll just make my resume public on Dice.com and start looking for other jobs in my field. I told Larry that I'd be at Mitchell's until January and not later than June, so I guess I have a little window of time.

I also bought a truck. It's a Dodge Durango and it's awesome. And thirsty. It's up there in that picture.

Well, I'm out of here for now. Hopefully I get the motivation and creativity to do stuff like develop websites and make blog posts more in the future. Hopefully I get a good job. Hopefully I get my island, hockey team and cars that I want. Hopefully I get some deer next week (and F you to all the pheasant that we didn't shoot last weekend). Wish me luck.

Music Forum

2007-09-25T12:47:00.001-05:00

If you're interested in music at all, check out this new site we're trying to get going. That One Song is a free online music community. There's no music to download, but there's plenty of discussion to participate in. It was mainly created for the discussion of song lyrics, their meanings, histories, and references made in songs. There's also a place for discussing artists and bands, concerts, and figuring out what the name of that one song is that's been stuck in your head all day. There's also a place for musicians to get together and talk about musician stuff like writing music and lyrics, what equipment to use and to promote your own band. If you don't want to talk about music but want to talk with other people who are really into music, there's also a general discussion area for you.

That One Song is brand new, so membership is still pretty low. The more people that come in and talk, the better the discussion is, so go on over and check out http://thatonesong.20.forumer.com

Thesis Defense Date Set

2007-09-24T10:26:00.001-05:00

Well, it looks like I'll be needing to start really busting my hump hard-core. We set a date to defend my thesis and it's quickly approaching (24 OCT). All of my paperwork and a copy of my 100-some odd pages of paper must be turned in no later than 17 days prior to my defense and then there's still a bunch of other work to do. I've got around just over 60 pages of the paper done so far and hopefully more of it gets finished soon. I'll also need to prepare my powerpoint presentation that I'll give for the defense. It feels like I should be kind of nervous and I am a little bit, but not very much. I'll try to keep updating as I make progress.

Wish me luck.

Short attention span

2007-08-12T14:15:00.002-05:00

Well, I just started working on my thesis for the day. That lasted about 3 minutes before I got bored and started surfing the net and came here. Writing a 100+ page paper sure is fun.

I didn't get to work on the paper on Friday like I usually do because I went into work to make up for the hours I lost on Wednesday and Thursday at Ozzfest. It was pretty badass. Ozzy actually showed up this year and I have to say, seeing him perform was definitely one of the coolest thing's I've ever seen! We also got to see Hatebreed, Static X, Lamb of God and a bunch of other bands I've never heard of. One of the bands, Lordi (some crazy band from Finland) put on a good show that was kind of Kiss-esque; complete with 10" platform boots, costumes, tons of stuff on fire and all that. Even so, they didn't really fit with the rest of the lineup. I got a ton of pictures, but Blair insisted that we weren't allowed to take the camera in, so they're all from my phone and not very good quality. We're going to the Pittsburgh show on the 24th (day after my B-day) so we'll hopefully get some better quality pictures.

I got bored a few Fridays ago (don't worry, I've heard all the huge nerd jokes already, so save your breath) and wrote that Yahtzee program that I was considering in one of my previous posts. It's not complete and it's kind of buggy still. As of right now, the "You" character functionality mostly works, but sometimes it doesn't give you the right score for the category you choose. Only one of the computer players is mildly functional and not very intelligent. I need to work out the bugs and get the rest of the players going and intelligent and then it'll be something semi-worthwhile. What I have so far is here if you want to check it out. Like I said, it still needs a lot of work.

The page about all of our explorations hasn't had as much progress as the game, so hopefully it gets some attention soon.

But I have my priorities. I need to go work on my thesis right now. I started working on it 2.5 hours ago, stopped to write this, stopped writing this to take a nap, and then picked back up on writing this post. Very productive afternoon.

Ozzfest Pictures

2007-08-12T10:35:00.001-05:00

NEWSFLASH: Hippies Act Like Asses, Get Maced

2007-07-31T17:04:00.001-05:00

I leave for the weekend and look what I miss:

Melee breaks out uptown at end of anarchist confab
By Mike Ludwig
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
Monday, July 30th, 2007

An un-permitted parade of more than 150 costumed anarchists and their supporters filled North Court Street Saturday night. They barricaded the West State Street intersection and danced, chanted, climbed light poles, banged on objects and fire danced before police dispersed the crowd, using squad cars and pepper spray.

"Were just having fun," one marcher told a bystander who asked what they were protesting.

The parade participants were in Athens for the 2007 CrimethInc. Convergence. CrimethInc. is an international underground network made up of anarchists and other radicals.

After the crowd scattered, Athens Police made one arrest for disorderly conduct by intoxication, one for riot, and three for obstructing official business, according to a report released by Police Lt. Randy Gray. The identities of the individuals have not been released.

Gray reported that the Athens Police responded to a call made at 9:42 p.m. and arrived at the intersection to find a large group of people with flaming objects, stones, bricks and improvised drums blocking the street with road signs dragged from a construction site.

The flaming objects, known as "poi," are professionally made chunks of burning rubber on chains used by fire dancers and circus performers for entertainment purposes. To extinguish the flame, poi artists turn from the audience and spin the burning chunks less rapidly while lowering them to the ground, according to one performer who attended the event.

According to the police report, Lt. Gray told one of the performers to extinguish the "burning objects." The female said OK and turned away while continuing to twirl the poi. Gray tried to detain the person while another individual struck him in the back and grabbed his arm. Gray then used pepper spray to fend off other individuals who were converging on him, and further spray was used to disperse "what had become a violent and destructive crowd."

The marchers claimed that the "parade" was intended to be peaceful fun, and police were unnecessarily violent in their reaction. Several people were pepper sprayed in the face from behind as they dispersed eastward, and one anonymous marcher claimed the mace almost hit an infant riding on a woman's shoulder.

"I was standing by the BP talking to three people when Car 902 almost ran into us," said Benjamin Ayer of Michigan. Ayer was documenting the incident from the sidewalk with his camera.

"It swiftly turned into the driveway without warning. Two people fell on me, they were just passersby, they were just asking me what was going on and almost got hit. After that I breathed in pepper gas," said Ayer, who charged that police "gravely overreacted."

After dispersing, many of the marchers gathered at The Wire Community Resource Center on Kern Street, which was promptly put under police surveillance. A local spokesperson for The Wire told police that the center was not involved in the event but was open for a music event and does not turn down people at its doors. (CrimethInc., however, did use The Wire's "free space" as a redirect spot for out-of-towners looking for information on where the Convergence was being held.)

Police searched four cars outside The Wire with a K-9 unit after the event, but no arrests were made.

The parade was an impromptu activity organized by CrimethInc. The group's Convergence was a communal campout that took place northeast of Athens since last Wednesday. The event offered collective workshops on topics ranging from "Nude Theory and Practice" to do-it-yourself shoemaking. Participants traveled from all over North America to attend the event, which was organized with the help of local volunteers.

According to CrimethInc.'s Web site, the group is an "underground network through which we work to realize our daydreams, to take the reigns of our lives and make our history rather than using the same energy to insist we are being made of it."

The network is comprised of scattered collectives, travelers, music acts and publications that are invited to use the CrimethInc. label on their products and activities.

"There is no leader of CrimethInc.; it's a movement on its own," said a participant named Polly who traveled from North Carolina to attend the convergence. "It's a movement comprised of fun and energy."

Other participants said CrimethInc. is dedicated to creating alternative communities.

"I think it's important to foster communities outside of the 'real world,'" said Ben Croya of Illinois. Croya identifies has a "gender queer" and does not claim a specific gender or sexual orientation.

"Here individuals really have a say in there own lives," Croya said.

There is no central location or headquarters for CrimethInc., and no one is quite sure when and where the network originated, though some speculate it has been around since the late 1980s. According to some participants, the ambiguous and decentralized nature of the organization enhances the romantic appeal of its existence and propaganda, which is popular among youth in the punk, anarchist and dropout cultures.

"They live more than the rest have ever dreamt to live," said one participant who identified himself as Mad Fish the Norseman. "Follow those who only mumble, for they are already doing what doesn't need to be said."

CrimethInc. is responsible for several publications advocating an anti-capitalist lifestyle, including "Days of War Nights of Love," "Fighting for Our Lives," "Evasion" and a magazine titled Rolling Thunder, which chronicles the modern North American anarchist movement.

Hey, Peter. Whaaaatts happenin'?

2007-07-23T18:19:00.001-05:00

Well, it's been a while since my last post and since then the "Don goes to college and gets paid for it" train has pulled into the station, kicked my ass off and pulled away. I'm back to work full time at Mitchell's now, generally trying to get my 40 hours in within Monday through Thursday so I can "work on my thesis" on Fridays. This means that I'm at the exact same point on my thesis as I was two months ago. In fact, I'm "working on my thesis" as I type this. Now that's what I call progress; I should be in government.

Work is going well and we're doing plenty of other stuff to keep ourselves occupied. We just bottled our latest batch of homebrew: "Englishman's Nut Brown Ale" brewed with some honey (I meant to add lemon as well, but couldn't find what I needed), so that should be good. We went to Mid-Ohio yesterday to the first-ever Indy Car race in Ohio. It was pretty cool, if not just plain long. Our tickets were free (list price, $40 each) and they hooked us up when we got there with carry bags, hats, Bushnell binoculars, earplugs and other goodies). I sure would like to have one of those suckers to drive myself. 200+ mph. I'd be dead in a week.

We...er, my friends...some guys I heard of...finally got to visit the Mudhouse Mansion. From what "I hear" it was pretty cool and "they" got some pretty good pictures of the place. I would like to set some time aside and add a page to my site about the places we've explored like the tunnels, buildings and the like. Hopefully soon. I'll need the practice anyway I guess, since Larry wants me to do some more work on the MEI website.

I also have a plan to write a windows app for a yahtzee game in visual studio in my limited spare time. I started writing one for a console in java, but didn't have time to finish it. It should be fun and should help me brush up on my C++ skills as well as visual studio. This will also be good practice since I see plenty of software projects coming up soon at MEI. Our 'software consultant' (Stuart) is even planning to fly in from Chicago to talk about what projects I'll be working on. Exciting stuff.

Anyway, I need to go actually work on my thesis (AKA eat pizza and watch TV). I'll try to post updates about work, thesis and the new website section as details emerge.

The Ten Manliest Firearms

2007-05-17T21:13:00.001-05:00

Stolen from AR15.com, where someone posted it after stealing it from craigslist.
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The 10 SMLE was the other great weapon of the Modern British Empire (The Brown Bess musket being the first). Several MILLION Short Model Lee-Enfields in .303 caliber are still spread across the Earth, waiting to be used to evolve the species by killing the weak.

The Smelly, as it is called by those who love it, can be rebarreled in .308 (And was, by the Indians at the Ishapore Arsenal). There are still several billion rounds of .303 surplus out there, however, and it is still loaded by modern manufacturers. Karamojo Bell was such a testosterone laden bastard he used to hunt ELEPHANT with one. Forget .470 Nitro Express and .375 Holland & Holland Magnum. This was a warrior par excellence.

The Smelly is still the fastest bolt action out there, and a trained soldier (All Brits have Viking blood in their veins, either from the Norse, or those lesser Danes, but probably both) can fire just about a round a second in volley fire, and easily a round every five seconds aimed. It's an ugly stick with a barrel on it, and a bayonet lug that mounts either a spike big enough to crucify someone, or a blade the size of a small sword. The front end of a SMLE is the bad end of a SMLE. You want to be on the good end, behind it.

It was used in WWI by Brits, Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, some Americans and various allies. It slaughtered Turks and Germans. In WWII, it slaughtered more Germans and Italians. Okay, maybe bragging about dead Italians isn't so great, but it also killed Sicilians. And killing Germans definitely is a mark of manliness, because they also carry strong Viking genes. It was used in Burma, Malaysia and throughout the Pacific against the Imperial Japanese. It has won many wars.

Best of all, with so many still out there, the prices are quite reasonable, and spare parts are plentiful. Of course, the Smelly doesn’t break down much, so you shouldn't need spare parts, except the safety lever, and why would a real warrior worry about the safety? If you shoot someone, it's because you intended to and they deserved to die. If you can't find a Smelly near you, you may also carry a Lee-Enfield #4 Mk 1 and feel just as manly, it being the final offpsring of the line.

Mosin-Nagant M44
#9: Mosin-Nagant M44
Speaking of guns without safeties, here's the Mosin-Nagant M44 Carbine from Russia. The Mosin was used by the Russians against the Finns, the Finns against the Russians, the Estonians against the Russians, the Russians against the Russians, and the Russians against the Germans. It does, in fact, have a safety, but it's quite hard to engage. But this is not a complaint one would ever voice in the Red Army. Your officer would reply, "Safety? Safety? Is gun! Meant to kill! No warrior should know he has safety on gun, because he should be killing enemies of homeland! Safety make loud click to aid enemy in locating warriors! No safety!" while pounding his fist on the table.

And the Mosin can kill enemies of homeland. The muzzle blast will vaporize green growth within a few feet of the muzzle, and even if you miss, the enemy will be reduced to shouting "WHAT?" to communicate. You'll need a recoil pad or shooting jacket. Ordinarily, this might be considered unmanly, but this rifle has a short stock for using while wearing several layers of wool for a Russian winter. It is acceptable to wear padding to fire a Mosin.

Of course, there are also M38, 91/30 and other variations of Mosin-Nagant and all are cool. All, also (except the M38), come with a bayonet. Russian doctrine held that the bayonet was mounted except while traveling in a vehicle, because the Russians understood that an empty rifle could still be a pointy stick—a Viking spear. The Russians loved to spear Turks. So, coincidentally, did the Vikings. This rifle sounds better all the time, doesn't it? The Finns used the Mosin as a sniper rifle during the Winter War, and their greatest Sniper was Simo Häyhä, who had 500 confirmed kills in 100 days. This is a man the Finns describe as "modest" and "self-effacing." It's a good thing the Russians didn't run into a Finn who was proud and arrogant. They'd have been wiped out.

It fires a 7.62X54R (for "Rimmed") cartridge, about as powerful as .30-06, and holds the distinction of being in service from 1891 to the present, longer than any other military cartridge. It is still used in Dragunovs, PKMs and other Russian weapons. It's cheap in quantity. So are the rifles, because they were built for (all variations) over 70 years, by Russia, Finland, Poland, Romania, even the US. As I write this, arsenal-new M44s are $55 to $200. At that price, you should have several, so any guests you have during the Collapse can be outfitted as they receive Enlightenment. Then they can rape, kill, sack and loot with the rest of the men who secure a new Dark Ages to hasten the new renaissance. It will be a manly duty.

The GLOCK
#8: GLOCK
The GLOCK is feared by liberals. It's called "plastic" and "ceramic" and "capable of going through airport metal detectors." If this were true, it would be the coolest gun on Earth. But these things are total lies, and serve to point out that liberals are not men, and have no honor. The GLOCK has a plastic frame molded over a kilogram of metal (84% of the weight is metal), and will in fact, show up on any metal detector. So will the dense plastic.

Yes, the correct spelling is GLOCK. GLOCK insists so. As they are men and wish to loudly announce themselves, this should always be respected.

But the GLOCK is tough. How tough? This tough! To summarize: The GLOCK in question has not been cleaned in ten years, has been buried in dirt, saltwater, gravel, talc, dropped from a plane, dragged behind a car, tossed off a roof, driven over with a truck, and it still works. Gaston Glock didn't know anything about guns, and started from the ground up, thus not having any preconceived notions and incorporating the best technology available. It is an almost flawless killing machine.

GLOCKs came originally in 9mm, and have also been made in various numbers in 10mm, .40S&W, .380, 9X21mm, .357 Sig and .45 GAP. However, the only acceptable caliber for a man to carry is .45 ACP. 10mm is good but hard to find, .40S&W is a wussified 10mm that the FBI created when it found out its agents weren't manly enough for 10mm, .357 Sig is excellent but hard to find, .45 GAP is new and untested, .380 is only acceptable as a backup caliber, and no man would be found dead with a 9mm. Actually, a man knows he WOULD be found dead with a 9mm, because a 9mm is a .45 set on stun, and real men do not believe in stun.

GLOCKs are not cheap. They are much in demand by police and military around the world. Fascist European pussies refuse to sell them to Israel, because they secretly like the idea of dead Jews. The Israelis, being practical and almost as manly as Vikings, acquire GLOCKs anyway. If Viking king Harald Hardraada were alive today, his symbol of power would be a GLOCK 21.

K31 Carbine
#7: Swiss K31 Carbine
"While traveling around Switzerland on Sundays, everywhere one hears gunfire, but a peaceful gunfire: this is the Swiss practicing their favorite sport, their national sport. They are doing their obligatory shooting, or practicing for the regional, Cantonal or federal shooting festivals, as their ancestors did it with the musket, the arquebus or the crossbow. Everywhere, one meets urbanites and country people, rifle to the shoulder, causing foreigners to exclaim: 'You are having a revolution!"

- General Henri Guisan

Switzerland has not been invaded in 800 years, because every man and most of the women are issued guns which they keep at home. Imagine a government that not only allows but INSISTS its citizens keep military grade weapons. That's points right there. Even more, they hold quarterly Schuetzenfests, at which shooting, carousing and drinking are expected. And it's entirely possible you will have your ass handed to you by a 13 year old girl shooting a select-fire StG90 assault rifle that she carried to the range from school, slung across her back while pedaling her bicycle. Swiss GIRLS are better men than most allegedly-male American liberals.

There is a story, possibly apocryphal but awesome nonetheless, that a ranking German (possibly the Kaiser) was visiting and watching the Swiss military on their summer maneuvers. He asked the Swiss commander, "How big a force do you command?"

The Swiss general confidently replied, "I can mobilize one million men in twenty-four hours."

The German asked, "What would happen if I marched five million men in here tomorrow?"

The Swiss replied, "Each of my men will fire five shots and go home."

Note that Switzerland was not invaded during either World War, and still used an updated version of the same bolt action rifle from 1889 to 1959, and kept it in reserve service until 1980.

The Swiss K31 carbine is…well, the Swiss Watch of rifles. It is precise, sturdy, accurate, powerful and unusual in having a straight pull bolt action. It might as well be semi-auto, if a gas tube had just been added. But the Swiss are traditionalists and not afraid of it.

The K31 packs a kick. It fires a 7.5 mm Swiss round that is expensive, because it only comes from Switzerland and it's only available in match grade. There is no non-match grade Swiss Ammo. Swiss soldiers don't miss. This is why they've never had to demonstrate the fact. Invaders fear a mountain range full of snipers.

The K31 is available surplus for $100-$160, in conditions varying from "Arsenal new" to "Beaver chewed." The beaver chewed version is because the Swiss, when performing their summer drills, tend to use the rifle butts to pound TENT STAKES when they run short of mallets. It is an ugly but durable weapon, from a nation that respects the warrior spirit. As a bonus, when buying one surplus, one may find a card under the buttplate identifying the gentleman who was issued it. This is an awesome historical detail: a warrior's weapon with the warrior's mark on it. Some people have even managed to contact the soldier or his family from this information.

Automat Kalashnikov, AK47
#6: AK47
Another communist piece of trash, and I say that with the greatest respect. The Automat Kalashnikov in 7.62X39mm is simple enough for a third world peasant. It's quite robust. It is muzzle heavy and thus shoots well in full auto, though it is unlikely you can own a full auto one legally. Still, in semi, the weight helps a bit with rapid fire. The AK can be called anything except pretty and accurate, and it lacks a bolt stop to hold the action open when empty. On the other hand, you can bury it in the mud for a week and it will still fire after you urinate in it to sluice the mud out. You can also elect to get a variation of the newer AK74 and AK100, in 5.45X 39mm. Also look at Valmet, Finland, who makes AKs with their own name. These ARE accurate, but pricey.

The AK is one of the two most popular and common military rifles in the world today. It is a must for a warrior's armory.

Smith and Wesson Model 29, Dirty Harry
#5: Smith & Wesson Model 29
The .44 Magnum, as carried by Dirty Harry, is the quintessential man's gun. Harry took no crap from anyone. Any cop who clutches a thug in the elevator in front of his attorney and the prosecutor, compares him to dogshit and implies impending death is doing Odin's work.

Did you know that in "The Eiger Sanction" Clint decided the stunts were too dangerous for him to ask anyone to do them for him, so he learned mountain climbing and was the last climber up the Totem Pole in Monument Valley, before climbing the Eiger? That scene with the 1000 foot drop below and he has to cut his rope? Yup. Clint did that stunt. He writes his own music (he's an accomplished jazz pianist), performs it and directs most of his movies. He ran for mayor of Carmel, then left after one term. A modest, competent man and a role model for all. He should play heavy metal to be perfect, but he was also born in 1930 (meaning he was 43 when he climbed that mountain), so we can excuse the jazz bit. At least it's not rap, country or disco.

Even without that manly vote, the Model 29 was designer Elmer Keith's triumph: A hand cannon that packs as much wallop as many mid-range rifles. It can be used to hunt fairly large game, and it will put a thug down with extreme pain. Mercifully, the pain will fade concurrently with blood loss from the gaping hole it leaves.

It's a comfortable revolver, and if .44 Magnum is too much, you can load it with .44 Special instead. It is stronger than it needs to be, quite accurate, and instantly recognizeable. Carrying it in a well-made leather holster says that you are, in fact, a man and you take no crap.

Automat Kalashnikov, AK47
#4: AR15
Lots of people will dispute my choice of this rifle. Those people are whiners and pussies. Let's look at the facts: The Air Police grabbed it under direction from General Curtis leMay. Upon seeing it in Vietnam, the Green Berets, SEALs, and SAS jumped on it, to be followed by the Singaporean Special Forces and the Israelis. It soon became standard. Certainly, there were problems early on, in part because the limpwristed twits in Army Logistics made changes to the weapon and ammo without consulting with the designer, Eugene Stoner. The USMC (the manliest men of the manliest military on the planet, and true Vikings—shipboard warriors who strike fear into their enemies just by existing) were called in to remedy some of those flaws with the M16A2.

It works well in the desert, as long as it's not overlubed—the direct gas system blows dust out with every shot. All myths aside, the 5.56 mm round has killed a LOT of Asian losers who thought they could screw with Americans and come out ahead. If anyone doubts it, I have a standing offer to meet them at 500 yards and we'll swap fire. I get to shoot first. At 500 yards, a 5.56mm still packs more energy than a .45 ACP does at the muzzle. That's plenty of power. And it's not a sniper rifle. You should not be engaging at that range with an assault rifle. It's made to be light, deadly and face-to-face. It's the modern equivalent of the Viking's bow and broadsword.

What can you do with this rifle? What CAN'T you do with it? It can be converted to .22, 6mm, 6.8mm, .300 Fireball, 9mm, .50 Beowulf. All you have to do is press two pins and swap upper receivers. You can have anything from a 6" pistol to a 24" match rifle in a matter of minutes. It can be equipped with scopes, sights, lights, lasers, grips, slings, counterweights, pouches, compartments, underslung launchers and shotguns, bayonets and probably a kitchen sink. The USMC is impressed enough to have designed an M16A4 and plans to carry it for some time. At 45 years and counting, it holds the record for rifle service life in the US military, was and still is the rifle of choice of several elite units. Third world peasants carry AK47s. Elite experts carry AR15s.

I've used military versions of the M16, M16A1, M16A2, M16A3, M4, M4A1, XM177, GAU-5, manufactured by Colt, H&R, FN, civilian rifles from Bushmaster, Armalite, Eagle, Olympic Arms, Cavalry Arms, PWA and others. Conditions varied from Arctic, desert, swamp, woodland, field, urban. Problems? Few and far between. Clean out the crud, dry and lightly oil per the manual. Real men DO read manuals, regarding instruments of death.

I've attached the following pictures, to show the phallic excess one can achieve for a laugh, and to prove that my 9 year old daughter is more of a man and warrior than you. But you can get there if you work at it, and start by buying a good gun and learning how to use it. AR15s start at $550 and go up. Generally, the manlier the more expensive, but over $2000 indicates you are just showing off.

Remington 870
#3: Remington 870
Geek with a .45 says, "The pump action shotgun is sort of a Swiss Army gun." He's correct. You can hunt birds, squirrels, deer, criminals or terrorists.

The Remington 870 has been around for decades. It is easy to maintain, easy to find parts for, almost flawlessly reliable, can be outfitted with a broad variety of accessories that enhance its inherent and undisguisable lethality. I recommend a 20" barrel with an extended 7 round magazine, plus one in the chamber, alternating buckshot and slugs. Or you can go with all buckshot. This affords the opportunity to fire 8 rounds with 9 pellets each of 000 buck, measuring approximately 9mm, in about two and a half seconds with practice. That's twice the output of an Uzi with better hit probability and more power. In other words, as guns go, it is very well hung.

For hunting, I'd recommend a 24" barrel with changeable choke tubes. You can get longer, but don't really need it.

The only real disadvantage to a shotgun is range. 100 yards is about the limit, and less with shot. This is offset by the advantages of a reassuring "kaCLACK" as you cycle it (reassuring to you. Gut wrenching to your target), massive firepower that can leave a man standing dead, looking down at a hole in his torso big enough to toss a dog through, versatility of ammo, simplicity and low cost. You can often get one police surplus for under $150, used, and new for under $300.

Every house needs at least one pistol, rifle and shotgun. THIS is the shotgun if you can afford it. By all means buy a more modern Benelli as well, but the 870 is still the American standard. When the revolting scum start rioting like chimps and burning cars in the streets of America, it will quickly come to a stop because of Viking-sired rednecks with Remington 870 pump action shotguns.

Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP
#2: Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP
John Moses Browning is the patron saint of shooters and weapon designers. This was a man so manly that his sole purpose in life was to create weapons to kill tasty animals and the enemies of our nation in job lots. These weapons were so successful that both sides used the Hi Power in WWII, and the US Army is fixing its unmanly error of the 9mm by calling for bids on a new .45, while the Marine Recon units and certain other Special Operations units are STILL using the Model 1911A1 with a few improvements, 96 years after it was first fielded.

There are many versions of the 1911. The patent is expired, and dozens of companies produce a version. What can you expect? Real warriors know a good gun, and this gun is the most popular for that reason. This is a pistol so manly that during WWII, it was even made by Singer Sewing Machine, and collectors prize that version for its rarity. The 1911 is THE pistol people think of when the word is invoked. In fact, when I am World Dictator, the only pistols that will be allowed to be produced will be the 1911 and the GLOCK.

The 1911 is available in long slide, standard, short, bobbed, officer's models (slightly more compact), with dozens of accessories and custom shapes, in chrome, nickel, stainless, blued steel, Damascus, aluminum, titanium and plastics. All are good. The one caution is that some effete whimps have persuaded makers to produce some NON .45 versions, in .38 Super, 9mm and other inferior chamberings. A real man may carry a more powerful 10mm version, but he better have a .45 ACP slide and barrel at home as backup.

Barrett M82 .50 Caliber Rifle
#1: Barrett M82 .50 caliber rifle
Ronnie Barrett is a true modern Viking. He hunts big game. He plays with guns. One day in the late 70s, he thought to himself, "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a RIFLE that fired the same .50 BMG cartridge as Saint John Browning's Heavy Machine Gun?" So he built it. That's manly.

When the metrosexual Kalifornia wusses were wetting their pants over "assault rifles," he got dragged into the argument. You see, Ronnie sells many weapons to police departments, for use in stopping bad guys, so they claim. By "bad" guy they sometimes mean tattooed gangbanger. They also sometimes mean balding, pony-tailed, pot-smoking hippie, though. After all, this IS Cretinfornia.

But that wasn't enough for Commiefornia. They had a ban on "assault weapons" (An "assault weapon" is a semantically null political term that means "It can be used to hurt people." As the REAL commies in Russia, who were men descended from Vikings (at least the ones in charge) would note, "Of course hurts people. Is weapon." You may as well refer to your "house home." The wussy definition of "Assault weapon" bears no resemblance to the US military's definition. It comes down to, "It's black and makes us poopoo in our panties!"

So, even with a ban on "assault weapons" that included most self-loading rifles, including Barrett's M82 Light Fifty, the People's Republic of Kalifornija wanted more. They dragged one of his rifles from the LA SWAT armory and used it (Illegal for civilians to own, mind you), as a horrible example of weapons that Must Be Banned Lest They Pollute Our Precious, Bodily Fluids.

They got their ban, because their voters are the type of trilling limpwrists one sees portrayed in movies as stereotypes…only in Californica they're not stereotypes, they're typical. It must suck to be a real man on the Left Coast.

Now, Ronnie is not a metrosexual wuss. Ronnie is, in fact, a real testosterone-laden Viking MAN. He warned them then, then he told them, he would oppose them in their pursuit. And Ronnie does not make idle threats. He is a man of his word.

A few weeks later, LA SWAT sent one of these rifles that they use for shooting fleeing mopeds back to Barrett for maintenance…and Ronnie sent it right back to them, untouched, contract cancelled, with polite instructions to stick it somewhere dark and smelly and ride it straight to hell. Not only that, he publicly and proudly announces in all his advertising that he WILL NOT sell to or deal with ANY government entity in communist third world Kali.

And THAT, ladies and gentleman, is a MAN. While not everyone can afford or make use of his wonderful toys, it's certainly an honor and privilege to promote a real modern Viking who understands the application of bowel-emptying terror, and how to tell friend from foe.

And there's more! After securing military contracts for anti-materiel sniping (Generators, vehicles, radars, etc), and facing the wrath of Sarah Brady and her Gun-Grabbing Sideshow (which wrath he snickered at, it having all the intimidation of an angry kitten and Ronnie, as we noted, being a Viking), he gave the ultimate middle finger gesture and redesigned the weapon into 25 mm, or TWICE as big. This is a man so cool even his sperm smoke unfiltered Camels. And that makes this gun the manliest gun on Earth.

Jared the Subway Guy -- College Porno King?

2007-05-12T19:47:00.001-05:00

From TMZ:

Today, he's Jared Fogel the friendly Subway guy. To scores of Indiana U. students back when, he was their in-dorm porno-rental superstore. Eat fresh!

Before he became a poster child for weight loss, the affable Subway spokestool once ran a adult film emporium from his bedroom, reports Best Week Ever. His collection was said to be "vast and extensive," and rental rates were hard to beat -- a dollar a day per vid. "People would come from all over to take advantage of the deal," according to BWE's source.

The same source snitches that the real reason Jared started eating Subway wasn't motivated by health concerns, but sheer laziness. Turns out that Subway happened to open a franchise on the ground floor of his dorm, so it was the closest fast-food joint to Jared's XXX lair.

We called a Subway rep, who said that the company has no knowledge of the story and that Jared was "unavailable." The rep also pointed out that legends have sprung up from time to time about Jared, including one that he'd died.

Inconvenient truth?

2007-05-06T12:53:00.001-05:00

LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO HOUSES AND SEE IF YOU CAN TELL WHICH BELONGS TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST.

HOUSE # 1:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and
natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern "snow belt," either. It's in the South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.)

heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater
from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as "the Texas White House," it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

So whose house is gentler on the environment? Yet another story you WON'T hear on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC or read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it's truly "an inconvenient truth."

Someone posted the link to this on one of the gun boards I frequent and I thought it was interesting. Maybe it's all of Al Gore's carbon offsets that make it OK.

Wanna drive six Humvees and leave your lights and television on all day? Try freecarbonoffsets.com. Hippies give up showering and driving so you don't have to.

Fiesta

2007-05-04T07:24:00.002-05:00

Woo-hoo. It's quatro de Mayo! Blair's birthday. We were thinking about heading down south to the Kentucky Derby and camping with Josh and Kristen, but with all the stuff we've got going on here we decided against it. Gas being at $3.17/gal for the low-test stuff played no small part in that decision either. Hopefully we still get to go camping sometime soon.

I guess I haven't been posting on here for a while again, so I'll give a little bit of an update. After our cold-weather delay, we finally got to have our party here a few weeks ago. Unfortunately Josh was out of town, so he and Kristen didn't get to come, but Ryan and a few other friends that we haven't seen in a while came down to visit. I also got to see my neighbor swim across our yucky pond and get kicked in the junk, earning a solid $20 for each feat. We got in some hiking time too, going out to Moonville and Kings Hollow tunnels, and out on some of The Ridges trails. Got in some geocaching too.

My thesis work is coming along well. I got a pretty good deal of the code written for it. It actually does some A.I. stuff now; it can compare a new blood glucose management problem to all the problems that it's seen before and return the most similar ones, along with their score. I guess I probably don't have all that much more to do on that (well, I do, but I suppose the hardest part is out of the way). I got one of my chapters written for the paper also.

Like an idiot, I got myself wrangled into another meeting for it too. Not thinking, I sent the chapter to my adviser on Wednesday night so she could review it. Well, as luck would have it, I saw my adviser at the "Research Fair" at which I was presenting yesterday and she "invited" (read: demanded my presence) me to a meeting this morning to go over the chapter. I should have just waited until today to send it, then I would have been off the hook until next week. Probably could have even got away with sending it yesterday and pretending I don't check my email often. Regardless, the hardest part of that is out of the way to (not really), so hopefully I keep the ball rolling on that and get out of this place soon.

Joost invitations

2007-05-03T20:39:00.001-05:00

I just got a Joost account, so I should be getting invitations to share. If you want some, let me know and I'll try to get it out to you ASAP.

You gotta make sure you pay it forward though.

Vegas Pictures

2007-05-03T20:38:00.002-05:00

Looks like the photobucket thing doesn't work to embed the pictures from Las Vegas into the page.

Here's a link to the album.

Pictures

2007-03-25T15:26:00.002-05:00

[ACK, my slide show doesn't work!]

Put up some pictures on a picture site. They're on Photobucket, not the usual place, so we'll see how that works.

EDIT: Looks like I'm not so adept at the photobucket slide show thing. Link to the album is on my main page.

Set My Soul On Fire

2007-03-24T21:11:00.001-05:00

Well, all the rumors are true: Las Vegas is f*cking sweet. My original plan was to get on here occasionally and update with what we were doing but there's way too much stuff that I'd rather be doing than dicking around on a blog while in Vegas. We had so much fun there and did so much stuff but there's still so much more to do there. We're definitely going back, hopefully soon (maybe during the fall trip this year, hopefully).

Since the original plan didn't pan out I'll hopefully be able to get on here and make some more posts soon about all the individual stuff we did, along with pictures. Until then, here's a brief overview:

We stayed in the Imperial Palace while we were there. That, along with Harrah's and Casino Royal is where we did most of our gambling. While there we saw the Legends In Concert show at the IP, the Mac King show at Harrah's, The Phantom of the Opera at the venetian, the white tigers at the Mirage, the wax museum at the Venetian, The Auto Collection at the IP, the fountains at the Bellagio, the flower and Chihuly display also at the Bellagio, good live music by The Crashers on Freemont Street, bikini bull riding at Binion's, had The Star Trek Experience at L.V. Hilton, the Atlantis animatronic thing at Ccaesar's Palace, smokin' hot girls everywhere, titties at Glitter Gulch, some gorgeous views of the mountains and the desert, a volcano erupting at the Mirage a circus show at Circus Circus, and the Tournament of the Kings at the Excalibur. We also explored most of the casinos since they're all pretty rad and most have some sort of theme and are just fun to visit.

On top of all that, to make things even better, when we got home we had all of the stuff that we got from Cabella's on the way up to play with, we got our puppy back, and our beer will be ready to bottle tomorrow.

Theres's probably a ton more stuff that I didn't mention, but I'll try to get around to it and post a lot of pictures either on here or over on my pictures page. For now though, I guess I have to get back into the swing of things and start getting stuff done for when school starts back up.

Jenna and me:

DW+JJ 4EVR

Bright light city

2007-03-16T13:59:00.001-05:00

Well, another quarter in the books. Only two exams, one on Tuesday and one this morning at 8AM, both now finished. Went to ping after the AI exam, came home, drank a huge Sam Adams, played some video games and napped in the recliner with Rosco. Definitely enjoying the 30 degree, cold, windy, snowy, rainy weather. But not for long.

We're heading up to mom's to drop the dog off tonight. Then tomorrow, bright and early, we're heading to Wheeling to hit Cabella's. The plan is to get my adjustable choke and maybe a new spinner combo, but knowing our history with Cabella's visits, we'll probably spend too many hours and too many dollars there. After that it's up to the Falls for a bit, then to Akron, then to Cleveland from whence we're flying to VEGAS, BABY!

It should be a good time, we've got a bunch of stuff planned to do there. I've never been to Vegas before; not anywhere near that far west, actually. I'd like to visit the dam and canyon while we're nearby, but I don't know if that's going to happen. Plus, as an added bonus, the batch of beer that we've got fermenting should be ready to bottle when we get back (oh yeah, we brew beer now. More later). Then a few weeks and we'll have our first batch of High Country Canadian Draft and it'll be time to start working on the next batch.

I still have a ton of shit to do before we leave, so time to tend to that. Hopefully we'll have a bunch of pictures that can be put up when we get back, but we'll see.

I have a blog?

2007-02-28T18:30:00.001-05:00

Apparently, I have a blog. From what I gather it's not very good. It seldom contains any interesting reading and is updated far too infrequently. I suppose you'll have that though.

My quarter in school is pretty busy right now, as it has been for it's majority, but especially so now. I have second of three two hour exams for my manufacturing systems class. Mind you, this is a four hour class but for some jacked up reason it has two mid-terms, each two hours, and a two hour final exam. This is supposed to be my blow off class. My non-major class just to fulfill requirements. Anyway, right now in that class I have to study for this big test, read a journal article and write a lengthly review, work on an ill-defined project, and prepare a presentation about said project. Immediately following that, it's already time for the next two hour exam and we'll no doubt have at least one more quiz between now and then.

On the plus side, my Artificial Intelligence in Medicine class is going swimmingly despite the article reviews, presentations and small projects, all of which smack of busy-work.

Unfortunately, all is not well in the Artificial Intelligence realm. After having given my adviser multiple copies of my groups work (thousands and thousands of lines of code and other various files) and having her "look them over" we thought we had it nailed. We gave her some pretty good results and what we thought was a real good pass at it back in October of last year. About halfway through this quarter, she asks for a copy of the files that our whole thing is based on, which we gave her (for probably about the dozenth time).

Apparently she hasn't been looking at anything we've been giving her until now, and she isn't a big fan of said files. She went through and made up an entirely different file structure and has kept changing it for the past several weeks (though we think we have it nailed down again). What that means is that all those thousands of lines of code that were based on the old structure get shit-canned and we start over. What that means is that, if we want to graduate when we are supposed to and get our Masters degrees, we need to build this entire project as well as write a several hundred page paper about it over the span of one quarter. Isn't that grand?

Hopefully we finally get everything with the structure nailed down so we can put in a few weeks worth of work to get back to the point we were back in October of last year. There's only a few more weeks of this quarter left, then we get a little break; which I am using to go to Vegas with Blair and some of her fams. Also, Ryan is tentatively scheduled to come down to visit this weekend, which will be good. And there's a gun show, which is also a good thing. (Don't forget to write your representative and tell them to oppose H.R. 1022)

Anyway, time to stop dicking around and go study for tomorrow's midterm. Hopefully I will get some time coming up and start updating this thing a little bit more than I am now (since I won't have any "real" classes next quarter) and post some progress reports for our research.

Peace through superior firepower.

2006-11-28T08:34:00.001-05:00

Well, I guess it's been a while since I wrote anything here, and I'm not at work (and therefore bored out of my skull) so I guess it's about that time.

School finally wrapped up for me after a pretty easy quarter of independent study class and thesis research. That's going pretty well, still working on actually adding the Artificial Intelligence to the system, which is pretty neat. I plan on (hopefully) getting something done on that section of my site soon; put up some updates and whatnot so I can show people how cool I am. Work is still the same old stuff. With all the free time over break I have a feeling I'll have a lot of software work coming my way.

We took a little mini-vacation up north for the long thanksgiving weekend. First we went up to Blair's folk's place and hung out with her family for a bit, then to thanksgiving dinner at her grandparent's place in Akron. After that we hit the road over to Kenton to visit our buddy, Ryan. Thursday night was the status quo for going to Ryan's: Hanging out in the garage drinking and BS-ing (a bottle of wine each, followed by black and tans. yum). The next morning we piled in and headed up to the Cabela's store in Dundee, MI. We spent a ton of time there, got some cool stuff for us and the dog (who spent the weekend at my mom's). On the way back we stopped to check out a junkyard for parts for Ryan's new project; a '63 Chevy truck. No luck there, but the search continues. Saturday we hauled the '63 from Ryan's farm in Ada back to his buddy's shop in K-town

(but not before stomping through the field and trying, unsuccessfully, to kill stuff).

By that time Josh had made it into town so we headed over to Ryan's brother's farm to try to chase up some pheasant. We spooked up a few and Ryan popped off a few at a rabbit, but to no avail.

Saturday night we were doing the same-old-same-old out in Ryan's garage when we decided it was adventure time. The repo-ed house down the street was all locked up, so we did the only thing there was to do: buy southern comfort and fire up the mini-bike. Long story short, the gas station SoCo was weak and sugary and I got chased by the police riding a mini-bike through the streets of K-town. After putting the wee motorcycle away and a little more PDA from Ryan and his hot new lady friend, we went into the house to spend the remainder of the night helping Anheuser-Busch CEO's buy sports cars and watching movies rather than getting a good night's sleep.

Sunday we went down to my parent's place to eat another thanksgiving dinner and shoot clay pigeons off of the front porch before heading back down here. It was a pretty good weekend. I told my boss not to expect me in this week, so I've got a lot of free time. I've got some work I want to do on my car, so hopefully I get some of that done and, if I run out of other stuff to do, I may go in to work and earn a few dollars.

My cement truck

2006-11-07T13:11:00.001-05:00

I put Neon underneath it, i got 50 inch rims that I made myself in my basement out of aluminum foil and ornaments.

Well, it's been quite a while since I've put anything on here. Mostly because not all that much new stuff is going on. I've been programing alot at work and for my thesis work. School is going pretty well, right now I'm beginning to put in the first traces of artificial intelligence. I put in a part of the program to read in details from a file and populate some file structures that Eric and I built to hold details about a problem, solution and outcome of a case. The part that I'm doing now is the CBR part, that takes a new case as input and compares it to all of the other cases in the case base and finds the most similar ones. Eric is doing similar work on the patient database and eventually the two should form together to become some sort of super-genius device that takes the place of every doctor on the planet and I become a gazillionaire and get put in charge of everything . That or I at least get out of here with a reasonable thesis and a masters degree. Decent job fodder, I suppose.

In other news, hopefully soon we'll be going up north to nab some pheasants and other delicious, adorable animals. Blair's dad and, maybe, brother are coming down this weekend, so that should be fun. Other than that, not really much is going on.

T.G.I.T

2006-09-15T12:53:00.001-05:00

There are certain times in a persons life that can be considered defining moments of that person's existence. The day you get married. Graduation from college. Buying your first car. Watching your child be born. Things like that, moments of great importance.

Yesterday wasn't one of them, but it was still pretty motherf*cking cool. Our tale begins with a night of merryment wishing Gordon farewell as he heads to Talahassee for his new job. This merry-making involved widespread blackouts (wholly unrelated to the following; you know, the electrical kind), pitchers of Kamakazes, cups of Southern Comfort, a few brews, and friends who make out with smoking hot girls, steal basketballs, jump on moving vehicles in the middle of the street and shout utterly offensive propaganda at the masses. I know, you're asking yourself "Self, how could these folks' ady have gotten any better than this?" I assure you, it did.

Fast forward to the next day, when my boss is out of town and work is optional. I chose the "Don't go" option. So I had a rough Thursday morning of playing with the dog, playing video games, napping and walking the dog before I had to go teach what could quite possibly be the shortest lab ever. After getting out of lab Josh, Blair, Rosco and I went out to strouds to scratch my black-gun itch (and our "blow stuff up with boom-sticks" itch in general). While there we scratched the itch good and hard and got some good footage for the movie (that's another story). While we were there, there were a couple of guys that just got a Desert Eagle and were testing it out so we traded some shots with each others firearms. That was a pretty cool experience, even if it was just a .357 magnum Desert Eagle, we still got to shoot a Desert Eagle all Bullet-Tooth Tony style. I mean, this is a 5lb handgun we're talking about.

So when we're done there we decide to hit up CiCi's pizza for some grub and when we get there they're closing down due to lack of business so they told us to just grab whatever we wanted. And grab we did. We cleaned those suckers out and made off with about 8 or 9 pizzas, pasta, brownies, cinnamon rolls and drinks for a total cost of $0.00. Then we headed over to Gordon's to collect his old couch and table for our place and hung out and gorged ourselves. After getting the funiture over here, we had to dispose of the old one, so we took it out and dropped it off at the designated couch dropping off spot and did some more dumb shit before heading back in, all warm and fuzzy with the knowledge that it wasn't even friday yet.

Office Warming

2006-09-12T07:40:00.001-05:00

In my office, getting my stuff set back up and I'm bored as hell. I already fed the meter for 3 hours since I've got a meeting at 9 and I had to come in at 8 to get Blair to work. I start teaching tomorrow since we didn't have labs the first week of class. I got my computer in here (since the one they provided seems to be about 35 years old), my coffee pot and accessories (except for the lid), pictures and desk stuff all set up. Last winter they moved all our sh&t around during break and I didn't want to deal with that this time, so I took it all home over the summer. What do you know...same office.

Busy schedule today, meeting from 9 till who knows when, then working, then home to play with the pup and let him out. Then there's a student town hall meeting for Russ College of Engineering, so I'll probably go to that. After that, if it's not still pouring, Josh and I may go out to the range to blow up some stuff. I got a new toy while we were up at the Kenton Nationals. It's a Beretta 96D .40S&W type of toy. Retired from OHSP service when they switched to Sigs. It's a pretty effective hole puncher and I like it.

Then it's back home to cook up some limb chickens that I bagged this weekend.

Sounds rough, eh?

Back to the grind

2006-09-05T08:06:00.001-05:00

School is once again back in session. The buildings are cluttered with confused students not knowing where to go, the computers are buggy from summer updates, the streets are congested with ignorant f*cktards who don't know how to use crosswalks, much less avoid stepping in front of a giant chunk of sheet metal and rubber hurtling toward them. I suppose starting in a few days the streets will also be lined with with keg parties hosted by newly off-campus kids who don't know what they're in for and I'll, of course, be there like David Wooderson reliving my youth. "I get older and they stay the same age," right?

Anyway, this quarter should, once again, be a good one. I don't have any "real" classes, just an independant study class and thesis research/work. I'll be teaching that same Java class again and I should be able to get a decent number of hours at Mitchell's, effectively ensuring that I will have even less of a life than I already do.

My birthday came and went without too much excitement. I got some decent gifts as prizes for racking up such a ridiculously high score in the age category. Then Blair took me out to a nice mexican dinner, after which I was conned into, as a birthday "I-got-you-sucker", spending a shitload of money on a puppy. So we now have a cute little black lab puppy. It's a lab mix and we think it's mixed with collie because his legs are too long for him and his nose is a little pointy when viewed from above. He's cool as hell though and his name's Rosco. Obviously he likes me best, but he's pretty good around most people. Plus he doesn't crap in our house, which is a big plus.

What's new...

2006-08-04T14:11:00.001-05:00

Not me, that's for f-ing sure. My birthday is in a few weeks and I expect I'll be getting lots of canes, walkers, adult diapers and such; what, with me being over the hill and all. Soon I'll need to go nursing-home shopping. Enjoy your youth while it lasts, young-uns.

I don't remember if I wrote about it before (since I don't read this piece of crap, and sure as sh#t don't pay attention to what I'm typing as I write), but Larry's been having me write alot of programs at work. It kind of sucks, but it's also kind of cool. I hate writing code, and at leas one of his programming projects involved reading someone elses code and then making it better by overhauling it almost entirely. Two other programs are entirely of my own devising. Anyway, like I was saying, I'm not a big fan of coding, but It's kind of cool that it's apparently some sort of specialized skill that others can't do, so that's kind of neat.

Larry apparently appreciates the work; he gave me another $1.50/hour raise. Like the last one, I didn't find out until I got my check and saw my hourly rate had increased for the entire past month. That's pretty damn cool if you ask me. Especially since that's over $200 extra bucks just on that one check. Larry has also been asking me about my plans for after I finish grad school; he kind of wants to hire me as a full-time software type person. It was pretty cool when he asked me about that, it made me feel like I actually have some sort of useful skill (as opposed to feeling like a moron who hasn't learned jack sh*t in the past 6 years of college, which is the case most of the time). I told him I'd think about it. I'm still not sure what we're going to do once I'm done with school. I'd like to go somewhere with a good market for software type jobs and where I can make a pretty good amount of moolah at it; plus Blair wants to eventually go to grad school too, but not here at OU. From the sounds of it though, Larry's got a decent pay rate in mind. Great, more stuff to think about.

Speaking of Mitchell's, I burned my finger there the other day with one of the irons. Blair said it looked like a 3rd degree burn, based on what we learned when we were getting first aid and cpr certified, but I wasn't really paying attention. It sure didn't feel very good.

Anyway, I've got a ton of new XBox games that need trying out, so I'm going to go eat my chinese food and get started on that.

Today was a good day

2006-07-23T07:25:00.000-05:00

No barking from the dogs, no smog. Mama cooked the breakfast with no hog. I gotta say, today was a good day. I did, though, in fact, use my AK.

It's actually been a good weekend altogether. A good weekend filled with some heavy metal and rock music at Ozz Fest followed by some good old fashioned blowing shit up. I already had in my 40 hours by thursday so we went to columbus on thursday for the concert on friday so we could get there pretty early. Gates opened at 10 or 11 and we got there around noon. This was my first Ozz Fest and, I gotta say, it was pretty f*cking cool. There was stuff everywhere. Like, all sorts of stuff. Weird stuff, cool stuff, naked stuff, glass stuff, loud stuff, hot stuff. Tons of stuff there, I'm telling you. I ended up with a stack of CDs that only cost me $35 total (It felt weird since I haven't bought any music in a while. Lots of the bands were signing stuff around the venue, so I got a poster signed by Atreyu and then we got in line to get something signed by Hatebreed. I didn't have anything worty of being signed by such a sweet f*cking group so I headed over to pick up a CD. At the music tent they had a sign up (which I apparently misread) that I thought said that Black Lable Society was signing stuff at 4:20. Apparently it said they were playing at 4:20 and not signing stuff at all. Anyway, the long and short of it is that we got out of the Hatebreed line to get some shit signed by BLS and ended up not getting anything signed by EITHER of them!

That sucked, but at least I got to see both of them play, which was incredible. We got to watch Unearth, Atreyu, BLS, Dragon Force, Lacuna Coil, Disturbed, Hatebreed, Avenged Sevenfold, and System of a Down. We also got to see a side show and plenty of boobies. Like I said, it was a pretty good day.

After the show we went back to the hotel and by now it is Blair, her dad, Josh, his cousin Tyler, Ryan and myself. We hung out for a while before crashing. Drunk as hell but no throwing up, halfway home and my pager's still blowin up. After waking up bruised, wet and without a working throat we headed to Kenton. Then we got to dick around all morning trying to get guns and ammo gathered up before heading to Ryan's brother's farm. While there we shot the shit out of some clay pigeons with the 12ga and then shot the shit out of some various other items (gas bottles, cookware, etc) with the AK-47. Still, as before, a good day.

We got some pretty good pictures of shooting stuff but they didn't let you take cameras to Ozz Fest (and I wasn't about to shell out however much they wanted for the disposables they were selling at the mobile headshops set up all over the place). Once we get all the pictures put together they will be put up on the picture thing.

All this fun and it's only just now sunday. Still time to finish recovering. And, hopefully, if I can find a big enough screwdriver I can start work on refinishing my shotgun stock and barrel. I gotta say, it was a good day.

It's the end of the world as we know it...

2006-06-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

And I feel fine. At least it's the end of the school year. One year of grad school over and about one more left. Like I said before, all I have left is one more non-CS class and two independent study classes, so next year should be pretty easy as all I should really be needing to do is to work on stuff for the AI in Diabetes project.

Blair graduates tomorrow and then she's going to be working at DHI full time in the lab. I think she's pretty excited about that. We're having a big cookout for her tomorrow before her commencement and then we're going to watch her walk and then it's up to Roadhouse in Columbus where everyone is meeting up. That should be a good time. I believe Ryan is even bringing down his galaxy and one of his honies to get dinner with us.

Last weekend we went up to my house to take my parents to the airport for thier trip to florida. Josh came up and we ended up shooting about 1500-2000 rounds through our assault rifle and 9mm and Josh's old man's Ruger. I liked the Ruger alot and they had a pretty decent deal on them at Ohio Valley so I bought one of my own. They're very customizable, so I can see myself sinking alot of money into it. I've already bought a high capacity magazine for it and have probably put about 1000+ rounds through it in the week that I've had it.

Blair and I finally found a place to live for next year (next week, really). We signed the lease and everything already, so we can begin moving our stuff in whenever we want. The place is pretty cool. It is a one bedroom place with a good sized bathroom and living room, the kitchen is pretty nice except that the fridge and stove are kind of small. There's alot of counter and cupboard space though. It has a decent sized pond right outside our door, a fire pit, an inground pool and all that cool shit too. It's pretty inexpensive too and all utilities exept cable are included and it has it's own laundry room.

Anyway, I've got a ton of stuff to do so I am gettin off of here. I should have a good number of additional pictures to put up soon of Blair's graduation, some parties, and our shooting exploits which I will put up as soon as I get some free time.

Y.A.P.P

2006-05-24T15:54:00.000-05:00

That, friends, is Yet Another Pointless Post, in case you were wondering. My guess is that it will really live up to it's name.

So, since last time...I've received my graduate appointment for next school year, so I'm gainfully employed by Ohio University for another year. Hopefully they either keep me where I am, teaching Java to freshmen non-engineers, or find some free money for me (a research assistant spot would be nice).

I get to drive my parents to the airport next week, since they get to go to Florida with my brother and his family without me.

I got a bunch of new Xbox games including The Da Vinci Code, Fable: Lost Chapters, Panzer Elite, X-Men: The Next Dimension and a few others plus a couple new movies including Firewall. That should keep me busy for a while.

Also, the pictures section of my page should be growing more soon with the addition of Blair's birthday present (a 5MP digital camera) to the mix. There are some pictures up there from her b-day party, but those are really the only one's worthwhile that we've taken yet.

I think there's a bunch more shit that I was intending to put in here, but I'm beat from working out at ping, so I'm going to try out some of those new games.

Sayonara Ohio University (almost)

2006-05-10T12:19:00.000-05:00

Things are looking good school-wise. A chat with my advisor and a preliminary filling-out of my Plan of Study and it looks like next year should be pretty easy. I already knew that I only had 3 classes left to take (CS6xx level class, CS5xx or above class and a non-CS class, all of my choosing). But now it looks like, due to lack of classes that I'm interested in, I'll be taking two independant study classes and the non-CS class, one each quarter next year, all of which should be VERY easy. On top of that, my advisor is trying to find me some research money for over the summer so I can take a class about video games which, if I get into it, means that I'll take an independant study and non-CS class the first two quarters next year and no classes in the spring, which gives me lots of free time to work on my thesis. Either way it turns out well.

This past weekend was alot of fun (especially since it lasted about 5 days). Ryan came down and gave his talk with Erick at Stocker, then the rest of the weekend was one big blur of dumb shit. We had Blair's b-day party on Friday and that turned out pretty well. Over the course of the night we probably had a pretty good number of people coming and going and we burned through about 150 beers. Not to mention the colossal amount of my whiskey that Ryan did his part to rid me of. We ate well, got a little tipsy and engaged in much merry-making over the course of the weekend, plus I got all my work done, which was definitely a plus.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I saw something interesting on my way over to my office just now...Outside of Stocker Center there was a baby pigeon waddling around on the ground in the middle of the walkway and this huge crow came down and beat the ever-loving shit out of it. The crow flew up into the tree when I and some others walked by, but he was up there staring at the small bird waiting for us to get out of his way. Sucks for the pigeon.

Anyway, I've got a ton of grading to do before ping, so I ought to go do that.

One.

Happy Easter

2006-04-16T09:30:00.000-05:00

Happy Easter everyone (if you're into that sort of thing). We're not really doing anything special for easter, maybe we'll try to whip up some kind of semi-nice dinner or something. Mom kept trying to get us to come up for their dinner, but at $2.90 a gallon for gas I don't really want to make that drive again. Besides, everyone here's pretty tired and busy. Blair had to work and I've got a ton of work to do myself...I could really go for a 3 day nap too.

Yesterday was pretty eventful, I actually accomplished some stuff. I got up early (something I haven't done in years on a Saturday) and got some homework finished, cleaned up the house a bit, hung out on the roof in the sun for a while. Then Josh, Blair and I went fishing out at Dow Lake for a few hours. Blair mostly just studied but Josh and I caught a few fish. Josh caught mostly mid-sized sunfish and I caught a few small to mid-sized catfish and a few sunfish. We're going back out in a little bit today to try to increase our collection, I didn't buy 40lbs of charcoal for nothing.

After that we all headed out to Midway Speedway to watch some dirt-track racing. It was pretty cool, Blair and I haven't been to that before and Josh said he hadn't been in years. We're thinking about going out to Skyline in Stewart next friday to see another one. It was a good time; loud, fast cars, Busch Light and PBR, good friends, etc.

Josh and I went up to Ryans farm last weekend to put in some work but the weather was shitty so we just ended up spending the weekend drinking plenty, tearing out the second floor of his barn and getting his truck stuck in the mud. Also a good time, for pretty much the same reasons as I said above. Ryan's coming down soon to speak at one of the SME meetings and hang out and do some partying, so that should be pretty cool.

Anyway, I have stuff to do before heading out to the lake; I told the student's that I'd send out grades this weekend and I haven't even graded the stuff yet, so I should get on that soon.

Drowning in Arizona Bay

2006-04-04T14:24:00.000-05:00

Well, it turns out that whilst surfing and playing in the ocean with Tony on spring break I cracked a tooth. I'm pretty sure I know the exact moment that it happened, as I complained about it quite a bit, but then though nothing of it. My tooth felt funny on my tongue, so I had Blair look at it and upon closer inspection, pow, cracked molar. That's pretty lame, so I'm trying to get ahold of a dentist to fix this thing, but apparently it's difficult to find one in my network that can get me in or one that won't end up with me paying $450 out of my own pocket. Especially since I've got to get a new catalytic converter on my ghetto sled.

Josh and I are heading up to Ryan's farm this weekend to do some work and hang out. I figure we'll take some Busch Light and some whiskey and play on some heavy machinery. Ryan has a couple D9s I think, so we'll be doing some disking, plowing and all that fun stuff. He's planning on having beef this year, so maybe we'll be putting up some fence or something similar. It should be a good time, I haven't seen Ryan in a while and it'll be good to get out of athens for a while and do something.

Like I said before, I'm working with Marling on the AI in diabetes project, so I'm planning on making a page on my site about it soon, but I'm not sure how much information I'm allowed to divulge. Apparently we're not supposed to tell the patients really anything about it other than that we're trying to get "computers to help with diabetes management." Marling wants Eric and me to follow the doctor around for a bit a few times and, from what I gather, his schedule is rather erratic so I guess I'm sort of on call to follow this guy around. The doctor is apparently the father of one of my friends and they're supposed to be pretty similar, so that should be interesting. Anyway, if you're interested, check the website occasionally to see if I've added anything about it. It's much more likely to get finished than the skating and whatever other pages I was going to put up, since I actually have to do work on it. Oh yeah, I also need to update my resume on there. Busy quarter.

Back from Florida

2006-03-28T14:49:00.001-05:00

We're back from our spring break and I can't really say I'm glad to be back in ohio. We went from laying on the 90+ degree beach to driving through a damn blizzard throught he mountains on our way back. It was an awesome time down there. We didnt do a whole hell of alot other than hang out in or by the ocean and hold down furniture while boozing it up. We took a ton of pictures which I'll try to get up soon (along with the pictures from WV from about 5 months ago). I guess the only bad parts of it were having the temp drop on our last few days and seeing way too many nutsacks and/or asses hanging out.

I got my grades when I got back and did mediocre again. At least I've got my Grad GPA up to 3.5, so I should be able to make it the rest of the time without getting kicked out. I'm apparently wholly onboard the diabetes AI project. I'm going to the meetings and already have some stuff to read for it, so that should be exciting.

I also get to go back to work this week at both of my 'real' jobs. I start teaching java again tomorrow and go back to Mitchell probably on thursday. It'll be nice getting the moolah, but I could really get used to the time off.

My name is Arthur and I can count to potato!

2006-03-13T09:35:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been well over a month since I've put anything on here, so I guess there's some new stuff going on.

Firstly, I'm stoked for going to Florida with everyone on friday. I think it's going to be a pretty sweet time. I don't think we have much on the agenda other than holding down sand on the beach, guzzling booze and doing some gambling out on the ocean. Sounds perfect. All that stands between me and FL right now is presenting my AI project to my professor, colleagues and a large portion of the grad school advisors, taking my stats final (which hopefully will be as much of a joke as the midterm) and my networking final (which hopefully isn't as dificult as the midterm.)

Grad school is going great. I just found out that, with the grad classes I took as a 'senior' and taking what has apparently been "too many" classes per quarter, after this upcoming quarter I will only have 3 classes to take...And I get to entirely decide what they are. I have to take any 6xx level CS class, any 5xx level CS class and any non CS graduate level class. After that all I'll have left is doing research and writing my thesis. Speaking of which, I will now be (officially, I think) doing my research under Dr Marling on her Artificial Intelligence Diabetes project, so I can get started on compiling shit for my thesis soon. I was pretty excited to find out that I've been taking too many classes and Dr Marling told me to drop one of my classes from next quarter because "it would be too dificult and time consuming" and also because I would run out of classes to take.

Work is still pretty much the same old stuff I've been doing, but Larry has me working a little bit on updating the look of the website and Linda is having me work on one for her book club. Other than that I've pretty much still been making cables and circuit boards and miscelaneous stuff like that.

The other day we went up to visit my mom and we swung into EB Games to look at some stuff and I ended up buying True Crime LA, which didn't even work, so I gotta head back up there sometime soon to exchange. In other video game news, I'm buying an X-Box off of someone here at school. It's just an X-Box 1, but I'm still pretty stoked about it. It comes with 3 controllers, a bunch of games (some of which I like) and a slew of other stuff that I'm not real interested in but I figure I can sell to someone else or to EB. I'm thinking that maybe I'll even have Nate or myself mod it too. Woo Hoo.

Anyway, I'm out of here and hopefully I won't wait months at a time to update this thing and we can avoid having enormous posts.

Another day, another 0.83 euro

2006-02-05T11:48:00.001-05:00

Been a while since I put anything on here. Since last post a little bit of stuff has happened, but not much. We picked out a place to go for spring break. We're going to New Smyrna Beach, FL. We're going down with Tony, Katheryn, Brad, Kropat, and maybe Amanda and Christie. It should be a good time, we've been talking about going somewhere with Tony and Katheryn for a while. We've got a pretty sweet house rented that's about 4 houses from the ocean. Brad's getting his wisdom teeth forcibly removed from his skull the thursday prior to going though, so that kinda sucks. Well, maybe...they ARE giving him pain killers. Anyway, that should be a good time.

Other than that, school is going well. I aced my CBR midterm and I'm somewhat confident that I did better than a good portion of the class on my networking midterm. Now I just have my stats test on thursday to worry about. The other day I went into one of my prof's offices to get some clarification on an assignment and ended up getting asked to do my research under her and work on her AI project involving diabetes. I think there's some stuff online about the project so I'll post that if I find it. I'll probably end up working on this, at least for a while to see what it's like, since I was debating between AI and software development anyway.

Not too much new going on at work, still working on more and various things; getting into alot of stuff there.

Anyway, it's superbowl sunday, so I gotta go get working on making chili and getting ready to make wings. Go Steelers!

I kind of felt sorry for the horse...

2006-01-16T23:32:00.001-05:00

More excitement in my world: I've begun doing what could probably be called "software verification" at ME. I'm basically just going through the software looking for bugs and stuff that doesn't belong or stuff that does belong but isn't there. Larry also has me looking at some stuff to spruce up their website a little bit to look more like the site of one of their salesmen. I'm doing that on top of still doing all the same old stuff too.

In other news, I think I'm going to start work again on my own website. Perhaps put up a page about sports, maybe updates on the teams I follow, maybe some sort of betting medium. I'm also considering a couple more sections, but I'm not real sure where I want to go with them. Chances are, they'll never come to fruition anyway.

more later

SSDD

2006-01-04T19:05:00.001-05:00

Holidays are over and it's back to school time. I always hate this time. Everyone is all stupid from not being around this many people for a month and forgets how to act, traffic laws, manners, etc. And it's way too crowded. I tried going to Ping tonight, but it was completely fucking full, so we just left. I can adjust my schedule easily to be able to go when it's not so busy though.

Speaking of my schedule, it looks like it's going to be another long quarter. On top of teaching Java again (for a different prof), I have a lot of classes that require a lot of work. I have another artificial intelligence class called Case Based Reasoning (CBR) which, from what I gather, shouldn't be ALL that tough for me. I'm also taking an internet engineering class that is, from the word on the street, a ton of time consuming work. Plus it's hot as hell in the lab from all the machines running. Lastly I'm taking some engineering stats class taught by some guy that is under the microscope; so instead of the easy, blowoff class that we all expected he's going to actually teach the class. Plus, I'm still working at Mitchell as much as possible (which still isn't much). I'll probably drop down to even fewer hours there soon depending on how my schedule is going. On the plus side, ITL doesn't use a book, I got my CBR book from OhioLink and my stats book from the OU library. $0 for books rules.

The holidays went well. We got a bunch of good loot. Other than my RAM and Civ IV I got some money, clothes (useful ones, too), stuff for the house and all sorts of other good stuff. The computer's pretty much in use full time between me with Civ and blair with the Sims 2. New Years was pretty good to, we went up and hung out with Blair's dad at the Eagles club then swung by my mom's place for a little afterward. But, sadly, all that has come to an end and it's back to the grind. I'm off to the basketball game (maybe) now, though, and then swimming, so I'm out.

Josie's on a vacation far away

2005-12-19T17:22:00.002-05:00

UPDATE: If you're looking for tabs or lyrics to "Your Love," you're at the wrong post. Try HERE.

Well, it's been a little while since I've put anything on here, so here we go. A few new things going on. I've become an ordained minister. I also bought a guitar. (NOTE: these things have nothing to do with each other) I got a decent strat style axe by Gibson so I can start trying to play again. It's been ages since I've had a guitar so I doubt I remember much. I know I remember most of the chords, so hopefully some of ther other stuff comes back with minimal difficulty. Plus, now I can now (legally) perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, blessings, file taxes as a minister, begin my own church and all of these other perks that come along with being ordained. Woo-Hoo!

We went up to Blair's for Xmas. That was alot of fun, except for the drive. We gave her aunt a ride up from C-bus. It turns out that she lives about 3 houses down the street from where my brother used to live. We mostly just hung out up there. We ate well at her grandparent's place and scored some good food. Devin also took us out to eat at applebees, which was f$cking sweet! We were supposed to take him and Halle out to a movie but it didn't fit into the schedule, so we'll get to it whenever we see them next.

I got a bunch of cash and some restaurant gift certificates (I can eat FOOD on my lunchbreaks now). We also got a wok and some candles, a blanket and some assorted other stuff. Plus I got another gig of RAM for the new computer (an early xmas present from mom) and I'm pretty sure she's going to get us Civ IV too.

Hey, Aqualung

2005-12-09T23:42:00.001-05:00

My first week at the new job at Mitchell is over and it looks to be a pretty good gig. I basically put together cables that plug into their boards and make the circuit boards themselves that go into their testers and encoders, make the cases, etc. I don't make the entire thing at once, but I think I'm making pretty much the whole things peice by peice. It's pretty cool taking about less than 20 bucks worth of sh%t and turning it into something that sells for a few grand. I enjoy it quite a bit and am not really looking forward to it if Larry decides to put me on some of the software projects that he was talking about having me do. That would look pretty bad ass on a resume.

I still have that copy of City of Heroes brand new and in it's box unopened if anyone wants it. I replaced it with FarCry. That game is hard as hell, it's taking forever for me to progress through it but it's pretty good. I need to get some more RAM for my computer so I can really crank up the graphics and whatnot. I also got my new deck in the mail, it's pretty nice; it just needs gripped. Hopefully I'll get to go out tomorrow if some of the parking lots are cleared off, but I doubt it.

Tonight was DHI's Xmas party so we went to that and got some free food, a lousy Elvis impersonator and some expensive drinks. That was a good time.

I also got an email from the Engineering graudate chair about my TA assignment next quarter. I'll be teaching CS230 again. It's kind of a lousy class to TA for because it's pretty remedial for me and not at all interesting, but it should be a bit easier this quarter since I've already done it and have all the code already made and all that business; so that should make my quarter a bit easier. I still need to register for classes, since I was supposed to do that about a month and a half ago or more.

Oh yeah, and if anyone has ideas for Xmas gifts for me or for me to get for other people, let me know, because I haven't started yet and don't so much have any ideas yet.

High Maintenance

2005-11-29T10:15:00.000-05:00

Yet another buying spree, apparently. We went out to walmart the other day to get a video game to alleviate my boredom and picked up a pretty cool looking game called City of Heroes. Upon getting it home we found out that on top of the $20 + tax that the game costs and the 2+ Gb of patches it needs to install, you have to pay between 12-15 bucks a month to keep playing it. So we tried to take it back but they wouldn't give us cash, just another copy of the same thing, so if anyone want's a copy of the game, brand new, unopened, still in the box, etc let me know and i'll hook you up for cheap. I also ended up going back the next day and picking up some game that Blair's been wanting to play caled NiBiRu. It looks kind of interesting, but it's pretty dull. I guess she's into that sort of thing.

I also bought a new deck from Powell-Peralta. It's another MiniLogo like the one i have now, only a little bigger. It'll be heavier too, so not as good for doing tricks and whatnot (not that that's really an issue) but it'll be good for cruising and the like. I basically just got it as a back up for the one I have now since they were having a sale and I got it for 35% off. Too bad they wouldn't let me use the other code too though, then I'd have gotten a free dvd, lanyard and belt too.

So, during football last night Blair decides she want's beer so Josh, her and myself head up to BP and pick some up. Then she ends up drinking the better part of a 12 pack and crashing on the couch during the game with our guests still there. Tsk tsk, not very polite. Also, this has got nothing to do with anything, but Josh and I finally fixed that peice of shit brown char in the living room. He brought over a torch, big hammer, metal rod and with the help of our porch handrail, some of Mary's homework, a Combos bag and one of the original peices of the chair and now it actually sit's up straight like it's supposed to with minimum wobble. Anyway, then later Blair ends up still wasted in the middle of the night sobbing incoherently. That and apparently she slept on her phone and hit the call button that called her dad. So Monday night football turned into quite the interesting / productive night.

Home Sweet Home

2005-11-27T12:11:00.001-05:00

We're finally back in A-town after a week away visiting our respective families. That went about how one would expect. There was lots of good food and visiting and whatnot, but dammit that's one long boring drive up and back. Plus with this weather, I used a whole tank of gas on the way up and another on the way back. It was fun though, hanging out with everyone, with the exception of my nagging mother. Oh yeah, and Halle still smells awful. We got a few more pictures while we were out but, once again, they're on that p.o.s disposable camera we bought for last weekend since someone lost their digital one, so we won't have pics until we finish off the rest of the pictures and get them developed.

Other than that, not much is new. OU lost yet another football game, knocking us down to 4th in the MAC East. I've been going up to Cats Eye with Gordon on sundays to score free chili dogs and cheap beer during the browns games. I may be getting a couple jobs over winter break; one at Diagnostic Hybrids where Blair works, looking through a microscope and one at Mitchell Electronics, where Josh also applied. I kind of hope I get the jobs but kind of hope I don't. I hate working, but I like the scrilla and I get bored when I don't have anything to do.

Also, looking over my past entries on this thing, it seems I've neglected to tell the tails of the IEEE end of the quarter/world party a couple weeks ago, so I'll provide a brief overview: Two kegs of Coors, one of Honey Brown, one of Killians Irish Red, several hundred jello shots and 13 gallons of cheap 110 proof vodka, a few gallons of apple juice, a bunch of cans of whipped cream and some cinnamon; professors pouring said vodka, apple juice, whipped cream and cinnamon into the mouths of unsuspecting victims repeatedly; stashing said jello shots in hoodie pockets; "someone" puking into the sink because "someone" couldn't handle the professor beside him puking into the sink; someone else puking all over the fridge after drinking the flamable apple juice I concocted; and JD being drunk again(scary thought). That, is a brief recap of the IEEE party. The longer version is much more interesting and apparently involves running around smashing kegs into each other, soda can tossing, punching, and much more liquor.

Finals week

2005-11-17T10:35:00.000-05:00

Last weekend was pretty awesome. There wasn't a whole lot to do around town, but the hotel was so nice that there wasn't really any point in leaving the room except to get dinner. Dinner consisted of a couple fillets for me, salmon for blair, along with all the other usual dinner stuff, some creme brulee and some other desert thing and alot of ass kissing from their staff. After that, it was back to the room where there were some chocolates (made in-house) and a nice Reisling. The room was awesome, we took some pictures of it inside and out, so I'll put those up as soon as I get them. The bed was so comfortable, too; that was the best night's sleep I've had in a very long while. I definitely missed it our first night back.

All good things must come to an end though, as now we're back in Athens and it's finals week. Nose back to the grindstone and all that BS. I can't believe it's Thursday already. Both of my finals are tomorrow and I'm not so sure I'm ready for them. I'm sure I'll do well enough on the 506 test, especially since I'm already doing pretty well in the class; but the more I think about the 645 class the more nervous I get. I'm meeting up with Wes today to study for both of them, and perhaps Tony for 645. I also have to finish the take home portion of the 645 test (thankfully worth around 50% of the grade) and our last homework/quiz/sample test thing for 506.

Anyway, I've already procrastinated way too much, so I gotta go get some shit accomplished.

Another step toward taking over the earth

2005-11-09T08:38:00.001-05:00

So, the other day after attending the student town hall for the college of engineering (mainly to score the free pizza and pop, which ended up being our entire dinner and lunch the next day) I remembered that we needed to run out to Walmart to pick up some contact lens solution and some feul additives for my awesome ride. The idea was to not spend more than $20. We get there, pick up some contact solution, the car stuff, some shaving cream, and as always, we head back to the electronics section to look at games and gadgets and whatnot. So, we get over to the computers and get to looking around and, long story short, I went way over $20.

I got a pretty sweet computer with a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 3200+ processor with 512k of L2 cache and 1600MHz FSB, 512 megs of ram, ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics set, a 100 gig hard drive, DVD burner, fire wire card (thank goodness I just blew $30 on one of those last week), 10-billion-in-one memory card reader (for some reason), a ton of USB ports and a LCD monitor. It was almost exactly what I've been looking at online, and for a bit cheaper too. I only have a couple complaints about it though: one is that it came with XP Home rather than Pro (which is easy to remedy. I'll probably end up putting that on here shortly) and that I didn't get all that much of a jump in performance on all of my games. Stuff like Civ III only uses the processor up for a very short time while it's thinking (as opposed to constant 100% usage on the old machine) but when playing Halo, in scenes with alot of AI characters on it where everyone is shooting the hell out of everything it occasionally slows down to the point where you can pick out the individual machine gun shots and the load screens pause for slightly longer than I'd expect. It seems to work better for online play though, so that's a plus. I'd like to get ahold of some software that's intended for 64 bit processing so I can get more of a feel for whether or not it was worth racking up such a huge CC bill.

On the plus side, however, when we got to the cash register, the cashier looked at my contact lens solution and told us that they had it for free over at the vision center, so we ended up not having to pay for that. Score!

Football Friday Night

2005-11-05T09:57:00.000-05:00

And none of that lame high school football either. A real home-town college ball team getting their asses handed to them. Way to go OU. We went to the ball game last night rather than the hockey game, and ended up thoroughly disappointed and chilled to the bone. It was a pretty good game, but we eventually ended up loosing 30-21 or somewhere around there. Then yours-truly had the awesome idea of heading up to Baker Center to watch Laughter After Dark (which we'd been planning on going to for the past year or so and are just now making it to our first one). The comedian this week was one of those hypnotist comedians and it was pretty damn funny watching people make fools of themselves.

My parents are supposed to be coming down today, but I can't decide on when to invite them down; either for lunch and maybe a movie or for dinner and maybe hockey/volleyball games. I don't particularly want to spend all that much time with them, but they're giving me some dough for my allergy medicine and a new eye exam and the related stuff for that.

I don't know if it was from yelling at the game, laughing alot last night or sleeping with the window open, but when I woke up this morning it felt like I smoked a pack of cigs. I imagine it's probably a combination of the three, but feels like I spent all night at the bar.

Anyway, as mentioned before, classes are going better than I figured they were. Jundong passed out a grade sheet for Computation Theory the other day and it turns out that I, by far, have the highest grades on every one of the homeworks, the second highest grade on our second midterm, and dead in the middle on the first midterm, which I'd been disappointed with from the time I got it back. Also, I talked to the prof for my Crypto and Computer Security class and it turns out that I'm doing the topic for my presentation more like he wanted than the other people have been so far. I'm still convinced that my presentation (which isn't so much finished) is going to suck terribly and I can't really find the motivation to work on the corresponding 10-page paper (which isn't so much started). Oh well, as long as they don't kick me out or take my teaching gig. That's me, Mr. Aim-High. I'd like to do really well though so it brings my overall GPA up to where it's supposed to be.

Yet another worthless post

2005-11-04T16:20:00.000-05:00

(this is the second time I get to post this. I'm trying out the Opera web browser and apparently it doesn't like blogger)

Not a whole lot of new important stuff going on, so here's a bunch of new not-so-important stuff.

I finally shipped the iPod back to apple, so I should be getting it back soon with a battery that doesn't suck, so that's a good thing. Hopefully it doesn't take too long, since in the short time that we've been together I've become quite attached.

I've also been fooling around alot with my linux boxes. I recovered my Mandrake 10.1 system that Windows tried to eat by devouring my MBR. That wasn't all that hard. Also on the Mandrake pile I've got the http server up and running with my entire [lousy] web site loaded on it, so whenever that beast is fired up you can get to it via that server rather than through the OAK server. Unfortunately, I'm paranoid and despite being behind a slew of firewalls, I'm still not going to tell anyone about it for security's sake. Next up on that front is making some symlinks to my stuff on other partitions and hosting all of my music and video files and perhaps some linux distros for easy access from other places. TW will love me.

I downloaded the fedora core ISOs too, so I may soon put that on here too to see what it's all about since my dad lent my RH9 ISOs to someone and never got them back. Oh well, not supported anymore anyway. Now just to find some blank CDs to burn them onto or get someone to burn the DVD version for me (Josh).

Going to the Football game tonight, another one that's going to be on ESPN2. Hopefully we'll stay undefeated at home. As of now we're tied for first in the MAC East. Then hockey tomorrow night.

Next weekend Blair and I are heading out of state for a little anniversary getaway. We're celebrating 3 years by getting a pretty amazing room at some huge old hotel. The thing was built in 1893 or some crap like that and it's all marble and whatnot. We got a package with one of the nicer suites with a jacuzzi in the room, Italian marble bathrooms, passes to the next door YMCA for workout facilities, bottle of wine, box of chocolates, dinner at their nice restaurant, breakfast the next morning, and all kinds of other nice crap like that. Then we're going to spend the day hanging around there, go to the mall, maybe a movie, lunch at Olive Garden. Should be a decent time.

I was also going to talk about the fun I'm having with the firewall trying to keep people out of our network (thank you girls downstairs) and how I'm doing better in classes than I would have guessed, but this thing's already pretty long and I've got better shit to do, so I'm out.

happy halloweiner

2005-10-30T14:18:00.000-05:00

More babysitting this weekend. Some unnamed guy that we know once again got into the liquor and started misbehaving, as usual. This wasn't all that bad of a situation, seeing as how it just gives us more fodder to make fun of Bra...uh, unnamed guy and the ensuing good times that are had when we remind person x of all the things they did. We didn't dress up as anything this year other than warm people. The costumes this year were pretty disappointing, not much creativity anywhere with the exception of a handful of people. That and all the super-hot girls wearing next to nothing. That was pretty rad too. So a mostly uneventful, mostly sober night plus the time change and I actually got a decent night's sleep for once (despite the squeaking bedspring sounds and "person x falling out of bed" sounds).

Then, to top it all off, we got up and went to Ponderosa for lunch. Let me just tell you, it was awesome. Especially since this is the first time that I've actually eaten before 5:30PM on a sunday, since I usually just wait for Blair to get home from work with left over pizza.

Plus, apple sent me my box to return my iPod (oh yeah, I bought an iPod. Now i'm sending it back). The battery doesn't charge right or hold a charge if it somehow, miracously, manages to get charged. So I'm sending that back to get it serviced and then I'll be back in the listening-to-music-rather-than-reality business shortly.

Ah, sweet conformity

2005-10-26T12:07:00.000-05:00

Homecoming one weekend, haloween the next; plenty of excitement in Athens. Homecoming was...interesting. I didn't do a whole lot, but watching others was pretty entertaining. The end result of the weekend was a pair of very muddy shoes and jeans, another win for the football team, a couple smashed cabinet doors, a broken cup, sore testicles, pumpkin devistation (due to collisoins with said testicles, vehicles and nearly some guy), a half empty keg, several empty cases, a huge empty vodka bottle, a random punched guy, mass exodous of things from the upstairs, a porch covered in broken glass and a very, very smelly living room with beer/vodka/red bull/other various fluid stained carpet littered with bottles, cans, peices of candle holders, cups, fans, blackberrys, cards, and various other things. Hopefully haloween is slightly less 'interesting,' or at least interesting in a different way.

I finally got my replacement rocket delivered to replace the one I lost out at E State St park. I also got my iPod delivered. That's right: me + iPod. First a blog and now a fucking iPod. Baahh Bah! Baaahhhh! It's pretty sweet being just like everyone else. I just got it yesterday, so today was my first day with my new toy and it seems pretty rad, as sad as that is. Apparently everyone else is right. Conformity is where it's at!

Ryan may be coming down to visit either this weekend or next. He wanted to come down for homecoming, but he had his daughter that weekend. He doesn't really want to come down for h'ween since he had a bad experience there a while back.

In any case, before any of the fun this weekend can start, I have to polish my 506 homework, study for the 506 test on friday, work on my 645 presentation some more (and study that crap) and work on stuff for next week's lab. I can't wait.

...Burning out his fuse up there alone...

2005-10-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

That's right, I'm a rocket man. Saturday, bored after watching Tony bust out of the poker tourney, Blair and I went to consumerism-depot to pick up some sandwitch supplies and look at stuff. The idea was to look at games and puzzles, but I got side tracked and, long story short, ended up at home with a rocket.

Apparently, model rockets are AWESOME. However, on Sunday, after Maj. Tom's third ever launch, in front of an awed crowd of my parents, Blair and myself, my first ever rocket's parachute failed to deploy, causing the Major to be stuck forever in that big, ugly, stupid tree beside the soccer field at West State St park. And trust me; the irony of me dooming the rocket from the beginning by dubbing it Major Tom is not lost on me.

In any case, we went out and bought another rocket kit and were going to launch it until we found out that it requires quite a bit of assembly and dressing up before launching, so that was postponed until later and we went and saw The Fog in Nelsonville. Terrible movie by the way, don't even think of seeing it. Just horrible. Later, taking Blair's advice, I emailed the rocket company and blamed them and their "faulty parachute" for "failing to deploy" and causing the rocket to "decend in an irretrievable location." Today, after getting back from Hudson, I had an email waiting for me from Estes telling me that they were shipping me a whole new kit. Thank you Estes! So it all turned out for the best. Plus, when I saw Brad this morning, he said that he used to be all into model rockets and has a bunch of stuff at home for them and may get back into them with me.

By Special Request

2005-10-17T09:43:00.000-05:00

An abbrieviated list of reasons why I don't like O'Blenness Memorial Hospital in Athens

Just about everyone I know who goes to school or lives in Athens who has been to O'Blenness has had bad experiences there. These are a few of my favorite personal ones:

I've gone in to the ER believing that I had broken bones, been X-rayed and told that I was fine, probably just a little sore and to go home. So I go home and walk around on my just-fine bones for about a day only to be called back later and told that I really do have broken bones (which, it turns out, aren't good to walk around on). This has happened twice.

Another time, Blair drove me in pretty late in the evening because my eye was enormously swollen, bright red and looked like it had something in it and I was having trouble seeing. After signing in and whanot, they left me sit in the mostly empty waiting room for about 3.5-4 hours before seeing me for about 2 minutes, giving me saline eye drops, and telling me to go home. I understand if they're understaffed, but it seems like with something as important as someone's vision and possible permanant damage to it, they could find time to at least look at it and make sure that it's not something terrible.

Most times that I, or most people I know, have gone here, they've been severely understaffed, and the staff that they do have consists mainly of one, maybe two, doctors and a handful of med students without much of a clue as to what they're doing.

This, in short, is why I'm not a big fan of this hospital. Perhaps I've just gone at inopportune times, but it seems odd that everytime anyone I know goes there is an inopportune time. Maybe it's better at other times, or maybe the medical gods just hate me.

That's it, rant over.

Grad School 101

2005-10-14T09:58:00.000-05:00

So I got my missed lab all taken care of with minimal collateral damage. Almost everyone got their stuff turned in and the Prof only made me feel a little bit bad, rather than completely ripping me. It's not really like it's a hard lab to teach or anything seeing as how they are mostly cutting and pasting code.

I also got my tests back that I took in both of my classes. I did right around average on one, and a bit above average in the other, but I was still pretty dissapointed. Livid may be a more accurate description of how I felt upon seeing my grades, since I was under the impression that I did well on both of them. Oh well, I guess this just means I'll have to start studying earlier, harder, and more for the rest of the quarter. Other than this stuff, though, I'm enjoying grad school quite a bit. Especally the scrilla.

oh mang, i so sleeeeepy

2005-10-12T13:21:00.000-05:00

Last night I couldn't get to sleep because I kept tossing and turning and whatnot and I kept coughing. So, around 3AM I polished off what was left of our bottle of NyQuil. Fast forward to 10:50 AM, when I roll over and realize that I didn't quite make it to my 10AM lab. That I am supposed to be teaching. Luckily a couple stuck around and handed in their stuff, but now I'm having to go in for a make up lab and actually have to go to my office hour and will probably have to stay later for tomorrow's lab section if people show up. If they don't, I'll have to figure out times to make appointments to meet with them. Way to go, Don.

like a villain

2005-10-06T09:14:00.000-05:00

I finally went over and picked up the new wheels from flipside. I haven't really got a chance to ride on them much, but they seem kind of awkward because you're up about 1/2-1" higher from the ground. Moss said that's good though because it helps give you more pop. I should have just let him sit on the wheels for a bit longer since I couldn't really afford them, but I was getting a little anxious. Plus the threw in a free set of riser pads. It's no free bearings, but it'll do, so I'll be trying that stuff out more soon.

The big question on my mind now is whether or not to turn off my computer. It's now been on for about 2 months straight without any major flaws or performance degredation. That's pretty good for a windows computer and it just seems kind of wrong to interrupt it. I'll probably shut it off for a few days soon.

Now that I have taken two pretty big tests in the only two classes that I'm taking, I don't really have all that much to do. Once again Austad has given the 230 classes a mind numbingly easy lab assignment that takes pretty much no effort whatsoever. All of this amounts to me not having to think real hard for a while. Which works out well since Brad just bought X-Men Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse, which I have all but comandeered and played relentlessly for the past several days.

For the love of everything holy....

2005-10-03T08:07:00.001-05:00

Keeping in mind that I just started this thing a little while ago and I'm still relatively new to the whole blog thing, I've been slightly taken aback over the past few weeks. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, there is such a thing as spam blog comments. Spam blog comments. This strikes me as particularly lame, and it also strikes me as particularly ironic that, as unimpressed as I am with the whole blog idea (I still hate them), this bothers me to the point of furthering this disgusting blog habit with a rant devoted specifically to the blog spammers. From what I gather, this is a fairly common thing since google has included the functionality for what amounts to a spam filter for blog comments.

Or, perhaps I'm just bitter about not getting any real comments rather than advertisements for air mattresses and diabetic testing equipment. In either case, I need to finish my homework.

Boo-ya

2005-10-02T10:54:00.000-05:00

I finally got my CS645 test taken and out of the way. I'm feeling pretty confident about it, especially since Bruggeman gave us plenty of extra credit opportunities on it (despite the fact that I didn't really have time to take advantage of them). Now I have to bust my ass to get this big homework finished for 506 for monday and I have a fairly sizeable midterm in there on teusday.

So, after all of that bitching and moaning about wanting Moss to get in those new wheels for my skateboard, he finally gets them in and I can't so much afford them, so I've been avoiding going out there. He got me some spitfire wheels instead of the cheap mini-logos he was supposed to, so I can't really afford them, let alone new bearings to go with them and I don't really feel like changing bearings back and forth between them every time I want to go from hard to soft wheels or vice versa, so he can sit on them for a while whilst I accumulate some scrilla.

Also, I've all but stopped drinking for a while. I figured I need more money in my pockets and losing some weight wouldn't be a terrible idea and this will kill two birds with one stone. The plan was to not drink at all for about 3 weeks to see how it goes, but this weekend my buddy had a little get together so I drank some liquor (no beer though) in moderation. Now that that's over with, and the week of not drinking that I did accomplish didn't go so bad, I think the other plan's back in effect.

Oh what a night!

2005-09-26T15:50:00.000-05:00

Well, we started off having a normal sunday evening, watching football and then the animation on Fox. Then Family Guy came on and Brad suggested we play the Family Guy Drinking Game. Between Mary, Brad, Blair and myself we nearly killed a 30 pack of keystones before the episode was over, so we did the only logical thing to do: go get more beer. Barefoot. So we came back and hooked up my laptop to the TV and watched a bunch more episodes that way and thus, for some odd reason, killed almost 60 beers between the four of us on a Sunday night.

More to come...

Another post

2005-09-20T18:12:00.000-05:00

I skipped all (both) of my classes today to head back home and bury my grandpa. He died last friday at the age of 80. Blair went with me too, skipping all of her classes as well. It was a pretty nice service with alot of people showing up. There was even the whole ordeal with the flag draped casket, color guard and rifle salute over the grave site. I don't know if anyone got pictures of it or not, but it was a good service. If not, I got one of the arrangments, the little folder thing and one of the brass casings from the rifle volleys. One downside though was that I've got some kind of sinus thing going on and it's kind of hard to breath, so after carrying the casket I about needed one of my own.

Afterwords we headed out to my cousins' place for a little get together before heading up to lancaster to exchange the bum copy of San Andreas that we got on Sunday and then back down here to get stuff ready for tomorrow and thursday's labs which I haven't even started. I had forgotten that I took all of my CD's out of the car except for the Flogging Molly mix I made, so we got to listen to that for hours on end on the drive up and back. That makes for one long, irish car ride. That, plus being sick and having a few beers at the get together and I about fell asleep around a dozen times on the drive back.

Ugh...My Brains!

2005-09-19T09:06:00.000-05:00

Had a pretty decent weekend. On friday we were all over the place. After drinking some disgusting punch made of wild irish rose, thunderbird, mad dog and 151 we headed over to blair's coworker's house for the white elephant party. We ended up getting a candle holder, a ski lodge sign and the puzzle that we took in the first place. That was a pretty good time and there was a ton of good food there. There we had some tequila sunrises that I decided to kick up a notch after everyone left the kitchen. Brad and I then abandoned the party to go next door and leech from the keg of labatt we found. After leaving there we headed over to Alan's party for some cheap beer out of their kegerator. That place got old kinda fast and everyone there wanted to go to the bars so we gave tony a call to come get us. We'll see all those people next week anyway at that party where their band is playing. After Tony finally showed up to pick the three of us up (with three people already in the car) it was time to head out to our professor's (who will remain namless) house since our buddy was house-sitting it. There we played some cards and helped ourselves to other various libations, marveled at the size of the animals wandering around the house and, for some reason, ordered a pizza at around 2:30am. Even the ride home from there was an adventure with Brad nearly sliding out of the back of the truck on the highway. And all of this is just on friday. Hell of a way to start the weekend.

Saturday was pretty rad too. We went up to Ryan's farm for his big ol' shindig. He had a few kegs of our favorite beverage, an enormous fire that smelled like burning cow piss (imagine that), and a golf cart that was the source of much entertainment throughout the course of the evening. We got some pretty good pictures from here that I'll put up once we get them off of Mary's camera.

TGIF

2005-09-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

Well, it's finally Friday and it only took a mere two and a half weeks to get here. Didn't do a whole hell of alot this week. Picked my topic for my research paper in CS645, avoided doing the homework in CS506 (which I told myself I'd get up early to do today and I just rolled out of bed), and taught my first labs. That was kind of a trip (see last post for a description of what they had to do). The second lab was better though, since through some kind of poor planning there are only two people in it. This was a good thing since it only took them about 7 minutes to finish the lab as opposed to the 1 hour+ that it took the wednesday lab to finish.

In an unprecedented turn of events that is sure to shock everyone I didn't quite stick with my plan to not drink during the week whilst in grad school. Wednesday Brad and I went up to The Union to see the rock show benefiting hurricane katrina relief efforts. The first band that played was utterly unbearable, so we headed down to the Redbrick for some 75¢ molson drafts. After that we went back to the Union to see if Brad's buddy's band was up yet, which they weren't. By some unimaginable stroke of sheer, unabashed total lack of musical talent, the band that was up was about 463x worse than the previous band. They had a pirate flag, 4 guitarists, a drummer with only two toms, a keyboard, a guy with an accordian, a projector set up showing video of some kind of marches, and a guy with a pan of colored water on a overhead moving it around. Somehow, avoiding killing myself during their set, we made it to Brad's buddy's band, Break of Day. They were pretty kick ass. Apparently they play in athens pretty often and I can't wait to see them again. We're partying with them tonight, and again next weekend at a party at which they will be performing. Also on the agenda for tonight is a white elephant party at one of Blair's coworkers house. I'll finally be able to unload that extra copy of GTAIII. Score. Also this weekend is Ryan's party which is rumored to have between 5 and 10 kegs, an enormous bonfire, drunken hay rides and much more. Does life get any better?

Clever Title Here.

2005-09-14T13:14:00.000-05:00

I started TA-ing the labs today. It's much less exciting that I had figured it would be, so it probably won't be getting it's own spot on the webpage. The first lab consisted of helping the students log on to their computer, change their password (which didn't work, thank you Mr Tysko), and print something. Despite this, it still took some of them almost an hour. At least it didn't take the whole two hours that they get.

Other than that, my quarter is starting to get somewhat busy. I picked the topic for my research paper in my Cryptography and Computer Security class and have an assignment due in the complexity theory class next week. It's better than being too bored I guess. Hopefully I'll get this stuff done before this weekend, which is Ryan's party. That should be a good time: a bunch of food and kegs and a big fire out on Ryan's farm in Ada.

Anyway, I'm going to go see if I can skate for a bit without keeling over from the heat.

1337 |310663r

2005-09-12T09:40:00.001-05:00

Well, I think I decided which of my graduate classes I'm going to drop. Not going to my two hour long 8AM class this morning helped settle that. I plan on picking it up on the software class again in the fall, for now I wan't to take it easy so I can put up some good grades on the board. After dropping that class should make the quarter alot easier.

We got the quarter off to a good start this weekend, quickly reverting to the drunken circus that is Ohio University. We played Pittsburgh's football team on friday in front of a record nearly 26,000 person crowd. And then, in a shocking, unimaginable moment of sheer non-bobcat-football-ish pigskin playing overtime glory, kicked a mudhole in their a$$es and stomped it dry. It was a good time and only 15 people got arrested for setting shit on fire after the game. I don't think anyone got arrested for rushing the field after the game, but then again, they were all too big of pussies to tear down the goal posts. What is the world of college ball coming to? For shame. It was fun though, but I prefer Peden being a little less crowded.

Then we had a big bonfire and keg up at Jim's place and a few more parties at which to make appearances. On saturday night when we finally came home (sometime well after 4:30AM) we saw Kropat's friend on the floor. He had apparently pissed himself and and didn't even move when Josh stepped on him. He had disappeared a few hours later, so he may have simply been a leprachaun stopping over for a quick nap on our living room floor.

Grand Theft Brain

2005-09-07T12:38:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm still trying to get my grad school schedule worked out, but I'm facing a bit of a dillema. I have to take these two classes (which I took in undergrad but didn't get quite good enough grades to use the credit for grad school) and do well in them to avoid getting tossed out of the grad program, and these classes are only offered in the fall and spring. There is another class that I really want to take in cryptography and computer security, but it's only offered once every two years...this quarter. I'm already signed up for all of them plus 6 hours of fake credit. From what everyone tells me this is going to be a really heavy course load and I don't want it to be so heavy that it affects my grade adversely in the classes that I need to stay in the program, so it would make sense to drop the 600 level class, but I really want to take it. If I drop one of the other classes I would only have 8 hours of real class and need to pick up even more fake hours to keep the 15 credit hours needed to keep my teaching gig, plus I would feel like a slacker. I just can't decide what to do with my schedule and pretty much noone is very helpful with deciding.

Our trip

2005-09-06T08:44:00.001-05:00

We're finally back from our trip and it was pretty damn awesome. We stayed in the Falls for a day then went up to the hotel. That place was awesome, it had a bunch of waterslides, a huge fort to play on and all that fun stuff and the room was cool as hell. It was right beside Cedar Point too so it only took about 3 minutes to get there and there were basically no lines at all so we rode everything at least once. The longest we waited for anything was about 20 minutes for the Dragster. It also didn't hurt that this entire time we were getting fed on steak and lobster dinners and at Margaritavile. Delicious. After that we headed up to the island for a few days where we played alot of games, ate stuff out of Blair's aunt's garden and went to this bar and had the entertainment sing a song regarding Blair's dad's parenting. I even did the "Toast to Honor" over the mic for the whole bar. That was a pretty good time, but we didn't get to go out on the boat because David was repainting it or doing some sort of work on it.

After all of that business we parted ways with Blair's folks and headed down to Ryan's. That was fun since we hadn't hung out with Ryan and his people for a while. Josh was up there too and we partied a bit just like old times back here in A-town, staying up till 5AM and everything. On sunday we went up to Ryan's farm and harvested a whole bunch of shit all day (got a little bit of sun too). We canned a whole bunch of salsa and peppers and various and sundry other items from Ryan's farm, staying up till 6AM this time. We even got to listen to a friend's story about what happened after he left the bar with this hot chick old enough to be our mom. Twice. Well done, un-named friend, well done indeed.

The week went by in kind of a blur and staying up until the wee hours of the morning for the three days before we start back to school was probably a bad idea, but it was all alot of fun. Ryan's coming down to party for his B-day next week (old S.O.B) and we're going up there later this month for a huge party out at his farm with a hog roast and a bunch of kegs and food, which should also be alot of fun. But, for now, I have to go get things in order for school. I still need to register for classes yet and get my office and TA job straightened around, do some errands and whatnot. I'm kinda excited for this quarter, can't wait to go to some hockey and football games and see how grad school goes and all that fun shit. Should be interesting.

Over the hill

2005-08-25T13:45:00.000-05:00

Ah, another year older. The big 2-3, I practically have one foot in the grave by now. My birthday came and went, for the most part, uneventfully. Blair and I went up to Brad's place (which was a pretty damn nice place) for a while. Kropat was there along with Brad's folks and his neighbor. We played cornhole for a while over a few brews and headed to Easton. We never made it to the comedy club; instead we went to game works. After a few more brews, a couple shots and a few 7-and-7's Blair and I had the enjoyment of watching Brad and Kropat play some games, since neither of us had the money or the motivation to play any games. Kropat had to leave to go meet his cousin while he was in town and do a little partying. The rest of us went up to Bar Louie and ogled super-hot waitresses and ate $1 burgers. I scored us some free desert since it was me and Brad's b-day, but after the burgers and yet more beer we were too full to mess around with it.

Then it was time for the quintesential birthday passtime: the titty-bar! Brad didn't know exactly where any were but he "kind of knew where some might or might not be, in a general area." We departed for Worthington and drove around looking where he thought a place called Dockside Dolls was, but we didn't see it so we kept driving and I spoted a place called Danny's Gold Fox Show Bar. I highly reccomend not going there. The girls there were entirely unattractive for the most part and only one at a time was dancing, if you can call it that, on their tiny stage in between the pool table and the restroom. The one bartender (some relatively hot girl) was smashed and the other (I assume it was Danny) was missing both index fingers at the first knuckle, presumably from owing someone money (it looks like that sort of place). There was one other bartender who was super-hot but was apparently only there for looks as she wouldn't make our drinks or even talk to us all that much. Bitch. In any case, we had a few beers (0nly one round of which we actually paid for) and quite a few 7-and-7's which we kept getting comped to us because drunk girl kept spilling all the booze on the bar instead of in the cup. That, and she knocked over a few of them while trying to get up on and down from the bar for her drunken stumble-dance. This daffy bitch also kept stealing Brad's hat and losing it. Brad kept having to beg her to get it back and in most cases the "cocktail waitress" had to bring it back to him after searching around behind the bar for it. So, like I said, I reccomend not going here. We plan on making a trip to a decent establishment pretty soon to purge this one from our memories. We kept having to assure Blair, who said she'd check out another one with us, that they weren't all like this.

And since, in good form, birthday celebrations are a week long thing, we're heading up to my folks' house for a while tonight to hang out for a little bit and have a little mini-party, going to a decent sized party tomorrow in The Plains with Gordon, and having my big birthday bash here on saturday, with plenty of keg beer, liquor and other goodies. Much fun should be had.

Right now, though, I have to go back to Stocker Center to get some of my information about grad school and my teaching spot.

I ain't evil, I'm just good lookin'

2005-08-18T09:22:00.001-05:00

Turns out we did in fact go out looking for adventure again last night. We were bored and looking for some fun stuff to do online exploration wise and we stumbled upon a great find. After finding alot of misses, like a haunted, abandoned, nazi-spy-used, dead-body-and-baby-skeletons-found-in castle (now restored and turned into a club), a kick-ass abandoned hotel (now also restored), a few sweet abandoned schools (mostly demolished), a sweet abandoned mansion, mill and house (too far to travel last night), abandoned hospitals, and myriad other places to far to go at 10PM on a weeknight. We settled on Haydenville Tunnel, obviously a tunnel in the podunk little town of Haydenville. You can see it, along with all of the other tunnels that I've mentioned(moonville, king's hollow) here, just click on structures and go to Tunnels/Bridges. We finally got there after I took a wrong turn and we ended up all the way up in Logan, my old stomping grounds. I'm pretty sure that this one wasn't an actual train tunnel so much as it was a track for mine carts, since it was very narrow and short and there was coal all over the place in the walls and whatnot. It was collapsed in quite a few places and very dangerous looking and there were a TON of bats, all sizes from a couple inches in wingspan to about 9+ inches in wingspan.

I also learned a few new things on my board yesterday. I can get in and out of primo (board balanced on it's side vertically), almost do a 360 pivot without grinding down to the tail, and a shove-it that I miss just ever so slightly. I also pulled a bunch of grass out out of the sidewalk out front to try to grind, but I need to get some curbwax so as not to come to a dead stop as soon as metal hits concrete.

Over 180,000 served

2005-08-15T10:45:00.000-05:00

Well, this weekend was a fun one. We left thursday for the Falls and on the drive up there we kicked over 180k on my car. The transmission could use a little tuning, but a buck-eighty ain't bad for a chevy, and it still runs pretty well; I'd say she'll make it to 200k, and by that time we'll be ready to buy our first brand-spanking-new car. Friday we watched some movies before heading up to Cleveland to watch the tribe game. Blair's dad always takes us out someplace nice before the game, so this time we went to Cooperstown, this kick-ass, baseball themed restaurant dreamed up by none other than our good friend Mr Alice Cooper. After stuffing my face with ribs, chicken and beer we headed over to the game.

Ah, the game. The tribe performed at about par with how they usually do. It would have been better if we had won, obviously, but their baserunning was somewhat less than stellar. They got off to a good start but then, as usual, blew it, giving up eight runs that they never came back from. They held up a few times when they could have reached the plate, which probably would have given them the 'W,' but se la vie.

On saturday we slept in a bit and then went to a civil war reenactment. It was good; loud and smokey and violent and all of that business, but I already knew how it ended so that kind of spoiled it. Plus they never got up close and personal and beat the shit out of each other with their rifles or anything like that, just blew each other up with cannons and rifles and whatnot. After that we headed out to watch Halle play soccer, but the game got called because it was starting to storm and there was lightning. So, we drove Halle home and went down to the Eagles with her dad and watched a band and had a few drinks.

Sunday we hung out with Blair's mom and went up to the Great Lakes Science Center. They have this travelling exhibit called Body Worlds 2 going on now and her mom wanted to check it out. What it is, is this doctor who stripped a whole bunch of bodies (human, horse, etc. but mostly human) of their skin and puts them in different poses and whatnot so that you can see how their muscle tissue works in different activities and where their guts are and the difference between healthy bodies and unhealthy ones. It was pretty neat, not nearly as creepy as seeing a bunch of dead, mutilated human remains sounds. Also, not nearly as weird as Gordon calling me at the museum and telling me about nailing a chick in a pool, another in a group of trees outside of a bar and his ex-girlfriend twice. Very strange, indeed.

In any case, that was pretty much the end of this adventureous weekend, I'm sure there'll be plenty more in the near future. Brad is coming down wednesday to pay some rent and move stuff in, so we'll probably hit the bars for a bit, then we're probably going down to Cinci or Newport with my folks next weekend, then the comedy club and bars for me and Brad's birthday, kegs for the same occasion the following weekend, and then all the Cedar point / island / canning food business the next week. On top of all that, I think we're probably going to end up going out for another middle of the night, middle of the woods adventure like we had last week very soon. Good times will undoubtedly ensue.

In the dark

2005-08-11T09:48:00.000-05:00

First off, this is a long entry, but it's worth it (kind of) since it has a few of our adventures from yesterday including a few haunted tunnels and cemeteries and a run in with a people trying to screw in the woods and a bear. We decided to have a bit of an adventure yesterday. We started off the evening by whipping up some pepper butter concoction of Ryan's (this isn't the adventure part). It turned out pretty well, but the one variety was kinda runny, more like pepper sauce than a thick spread. Anyway, we canned a few jars of that stuff and finally it was time for the adventure to commence.

We (Mary, Blair, Ryan, Josh and myself, all in my car) headed down to Frank's (which I believe, oddly enough, isn't called Frank's at all, since Frank apparently hasn't owned that place in a decade and Lou runs it now but we still call both him and the store Frank for some reason, but that's not important). In any case, we went to this store to stock up on some beer. As usual he was out of pretty much everything so we ended up getting a 30 pack of keystones and a few sparks. After loading up the cooler, we headed out to check out the Moonville tunnel and cemetery. For those of you not in the know, Moonville was a small mining town that was ravaged by some disease a very long time ago and it's supposedly haunted, so we decided to go out there in the middle of the night with a bunch of booze.

Moonville Link 1
Moonville Link 2
Moonville Link 3
Moonville Link 4

Getting there was a bit of an adventure in and of itself, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 lbs of people and booze (and a ouija board, sadly unused that night) with all the up and down windy, hilly, loosly graveled back roads. I haven't been out to survey any damage to my car today, but we scraped the hell out of the the bottom of the car and at one point went over this little hill by the cemetery and hit the chassis on a root and after our first stop of the night I already had about 1/4 inch of dust on the car. In any case, after getting to the first spot, Ryan decides that we stopped one bridge too soon, so we had just wasted 20 minutes of traipsing through pitch black, middle-of-nowhere woods for nothing. We hopped back in the car and headed down to the right spot (Once I get my photo album up I'll add some pictures, but for now there are plenty on the moonville pages above). When we got to the right spot there was already another car there, so we just figured it was other Moonville-tunnellers. However, it turned out that it was some couple trying to get a little alone time out in the middle of the woods and the girl was swimming in the 15' deep swimming hole in the creek. You wouldn't catch me dead in that shit (although if you did catch me in it, I'd most likely be dead). In any case, after crossing the creek and stomping about a quarter mile out into the middle of the woods, we got to the tunnel and hung out for a while, took some pictures (see above note about pictures) and killed a few cold ones. There was a ton of weird/cool grafiti all over the inside of the tunnel and we kind of kicked ourselves for not bringing any of our paint from our other adventures a few weeks ago. Perhaps we'll head out there again and add some of our own tags to the tunnel/tressels. This could only hold our interest for so long, so we decided to go hit the Moonville cemetery (more on this in those links up there) and a short drive and minor car damage we were there. Despite this possibly being the most boring place, we spent the most time there, just turning off the headlights, cranking up the car stereo drinking a few brews and chatting for a while. The night was clear as hell and you could see so many stars without all the light pollution, since we were miles from any sort of civilization. After about half an hour or 45 minutes, Ryan says he know's of another tunnel, so off we went in search of that one (we had to get directions from the love-birds we interupted).

This tunnel was leaps and bounds cooler than the moonville tunnel and I'm really glad that Ryan took us to this one. I couldn't find much online about it on google, only two pages and only one of them was semi-worthwhile [King's Hollow Tunnel]. This one was about four or five times longer than the Moonville tunnel and made from wood rather than bricks. All along the tunnel there were peices of the walls missing, as you can see in the pictures on that page. At one particular spot there was a larger-than-the-rest hole with a big pile of dirt in front of it that just looke like washout. Then we heard something inside the hole snoring. This wasn't a small something snoring. This was a very, very big somethign snoring. Think big as in mid-size car big. Upon further investigation of the hole we saw some footprints about 10" in diameter in the dirt and a ledge about four feet high, so it we figured it was a bear. Then we noticed that it wasn't snoring anymore so we figured that it was probably time to move along our merry way and get our delicous selves out of there. So we went even further out into the middle of pitch-black nowhere and saw the pond where Ryan apparently fell through the ice into a deep beaver-induced pond, got hypothermia and had to knock coal out of the tunnel walls to build a fire in order to avoid dying. Neat stuff. It was getting pretty late and Blair was getting sleepy and afraid, so we decided to make the trek back to the car and head home. After quite a few miles of hiking and many many more miles in the car, our adventures had come to a close for the night. I'll try to get an online photoalbum going and put up some pictures soon, but for now I need to go check out the car and make sure it's in good enough shape to make it up north for the Indians game since we've decided to head up today to spend some extra time up there.

G-Seven, Street Fighting Man!

2005-08-09T14:26:00.000-05:00

Well, I found out which class I'll be teaching in the fall, and I'm real thrilled with it. I'm teaching the lab for CS230, java programming for non CS majors. With W.K.A, my good buddy that fucked my CS300 grade the first time I took it and brutalized me in my independant study Java class last quarter. This should be fun. Plus we'll be using his new book, which is hot off the press down at the publishers, which should also be interesting.

I got some kind of letter in the mail yesterday from OU telling me that I'm a retard or something like that, I need to go up to the financial aid office to see what it's all about. I have a feeling that it may just be because I haven't registered for any classes yet so I'm beneath the minimum credit hour limit and it threw some kind of flag, so I'll have to head up to Chubb to get it straightened around tomorrow, as I've already wasted today out skating with Gordon. We went down to the skatepark for a little while and, as usual, I was too much of a pussy to do anything other than skate around the lip a little bit and play around in the 13' bowl. Gordon jus rolled in on one of the little inclines and carved up some of the smaller bowls. Then we went to the Commons and skated that parking lot for a pretty good while and caught some rays. I tried to get him to sneak into the fair with me since the back side of it is adjacent to the commons but he wasn't having any of that. Being the sensible person that he is, he wanted to go home and fix up the huge gash in his ankle from the skatepark and get a few beers in him to keep the Old Crow that he had for breakfast company. After he went and got his supplies, I headed up to the school lot where I skated even more. I got my manuals down pretty well and I can carve back and forth and tic-tac pretty well at a good speed and practiced my ollies and pop-shoveit's some more.

We went down to the Athens County fair last night and it sucks major ass. It basically consists of four rides, six animal barns, and a few tents with bible-toters trying to preach to the rednecks. I'm looking forward to going to our fair next month, it's about eight times as big as this p.o.s.

It turns out that in another bout of bad planning we somehow overlapped our time up on the island on Erie and going up to Ryans, so the week before school starts is going to be even busier than I had anticipated. The plan now is for us to still spend the two days at cedar point and four days on the island, but we're going to have to drive our car up to sandusky also so we can drive straight down to Ryans and help him harvest and can a bunch of stuff out of his garden. I think that's going to be the weekend right before school starts, which kind of sucks, but we'll be getting a shitload of food out of it.

Entries of confusion

2005-08-04T18:23:00.000-05:00

The summer is heating up, and I'm not just talking about the extended periods of weather in the mid- to upper-90s. There's shit going on!

This upcoming weekend we're going up to my folks' house to do some laundry and get some more stuff. Pretty uneventful. But then, the following weekend we're going up to Blair's place to hand with her family for a bit and see an Indians game and maybe a civil war reenactment with her dad. Blair's mom even took some time off work to hang out with us. How sweet.

Then my birthday (and Brad's, who still hasn't moved in yet) is on the 23rd. We're thinking about heading up to Easton or somewhere and going to The Funny Bone and maybe some bars or a movie or something. Then that weekend Kropat got off from work from friday through sunday and wants to get a keg here at our place and have a big ol' shindig.

And, as if that weren't enough excitement crammed into the end of the month, we're exceeding our monthly fun quota even further the following week. Blair's dad and aunt are going to cedar point and taking us (and maybe Devin and his woman) with them. They got a kick ass room at this hotel that has an indoor waterpark, a few big beds, a balcony, a wetbar, and all kinds of cedar point/water park stuff included. We're doing that for two days then heading up to the island for about four days. I think everyone is going, so we'll probably hop on Dave's boat and head over to the other island to hit some bars and find some parties and maybe go a few miles out on the lake and do some fishing. Since we have more advanced notice this time, we may even end up shooting up to Canada for some french fries and gravy. Mmm, poutine. And you almost made it, too.

The hippies are coming

2005-08-04T12:17:00.000-05:00

Our street has been infiltrated by filthy, loud, stinky, non-showering hippies. This is a rather annoying turn events since they've decided to mainly sleep and hang out in the grass out front, their big giant van/bus hippy-mobile and the abandoned/condemed house across the street a little ways down. Apparently they're only staying for a couple days though, then moving on to go hiking or backpacking or tree hugging or whatever the hell it is that those things do when they're not smoking weed and listening to The Dead. Although, the one girl was kind of hot for someone who smells like a butthole and has Chia Pets growing under her arms.

Screaming at the window

2005-08-02T13:10:00.000-05:00

Ah, it's finally cooled down a little in Athens. The high is a mere 92°F and only 30% humidity. Perfect summer weather and it's about time.

Last night I went over to Gordon's for some beers and skating, expecting to skate for an hour or so, as it was kind of late. I figured we'd skate the school parking lot for a bit then head down to the commons lot. After about half an hour to 45 minutes of him cleaning the bearings and wheels on those old trucks I gave him and a few beers, we went out to the playground. We had couldn't have been skating for any more than two minutes before Gordy broke the damn truck in half. Then this big group of dirty little kids came over and kept asking us to do stuff on the skateboards and trying to do it themselves too. After a little bit of that the kids started getting into it and being incredibly mean to each other for only being around 8-11ish, so we split out of there and went to tag up Gordy's board with a stencil I made for him. He decided to head up to the pub so I was going to go home and crash since it was around 10 or 11PM. On the way back Josh and Ryan spotted me trying to get across the Central Ave river caused by flushing the hydrants. Since I had all my stuff with me, we decided to go out on the town and inspect some stop signs and walls. We ended up close to uptown so we stopped into the Pub, then we went to the Skull for a few tastey, cold beverages and then headed back out on the town some more. Then all of the sudden it was about 1:30AM and I was in my living room with a couple barbeque chicken legs, mac and cheese and biscuits, so I took a shower and went to bed.

What an interesting night.

Two bits, my ass.

2005-07-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

Another jobless, classless day yesterday saw me actually be productive. Imagine that. Me. Productive. Who would have ever guessed it.

I got a new credit card the other day. This one I actually earn points on so I can get all kinds of neat stuff. Perhaps I'll finally get an IPod so I can be just like everyone else on the planet. If I'd been earning "thank you" points on my other card I'd be cruising Athens in a brand new DB9 with mahogany interiors and seats made from cows fenced in by bushes to make sure that their hides are flawless. I suppose I'd settle for an I-Pod or croquet mallet or some simmilar thing.

In any case, this new-found spending power prompted my motivation. I loaded up my board and some music in the car and set off for my adventures in the mundane. I finally got a haircut, which is a good thing, as I no longer look like a caveman junkie. The stylist was hot too. I talked to my buds about it later and we decided that haircuts from hot stylists are like going to the stripclub; only cheaper, plus you get a haircut out of the deal. They're moving all around you and leaning over you and stuff, but you don't even have to shove ones down their pants. It was a good time.

After that I went out to the skate park but it was pretty crowded. They're adding on to one end of it so the other parts were extra densely packed so I left my board in the car as to not smear my brains all over the concrete in front of everyone. I talked to some dudes that were touring the skateparks out of Chi-town and gave them the dirt on Skatopia, local spots and where the shop is. All that skating made me want to skate so I headed down to Flipside and bough a skate tool to loosen my kingpins. Moss just sold his last unit tool so I had to buy one that was twice as much (hey, twice the points, eh?). Then I skated for a few hours, got sunburned and dehydrated and went home and passed out. Good times. Just like Chico and The Man.

Oddly enough, I actually spent a thursday night sans booze. Ryan and Josh came over with leftovers from our previous night's big dinner. Blair crashed early and the rest of us spent a few hours calling up people to fuck with on sprintrelayonline. Those people will say anything you tell them to. Anything. Awesome.

Summer in the City

2005-07-26T13:16:00.000-05:00

Another hot-as-hell day in A-town. It poured yesterday, with Tstorm and tornado warnings and all that crap. The weather was kinda neat though. It literally dropped 15+ degrees in under 5 minutes and the sky got really dark and there was lots of good lightning. A good storm to watch, if you're into that sort of thing. The only drawback is that it's pushing 100 degrees again today and with all that rain water everywhere the humidity is a killer. It's way to hot to go skating again today. It's pretty much too hot to do anything; even to walk over to G-dogg's place to leech the free AC. I should probably head over there tomorrow if it's hot like this again to do some more laundry and sit in the cool apartment.

It's boring as hell with only a few people in town and the majority of them in classes. I've mostly been, when not attempting to skate, sitting in front of the tv or the computer playing games and checking email/stocks and whatnot. My stocks are doing so-so. They kinda took a dump the past few days, except for that under-achieving AT&T p.o.s. I'm almost out of the red on that thing; hopefully the SBC merger goes through so it boosts the stock and I get the $1.3/share dividend.

I resumed work on the website, but it's still pretty lame. Every once in a while I'll get into it and try to make it semi-nice but then I quickly lose interest in it. Not really that much happens in my life to provide enough content to run a site with any real meaningful content on it. Perhaps that will change once I start grad school and begin teaching and working on my research projects. I'm still torn between putting my focus on artificial intelligence and software development, but at least I've actually decided to give it a go (even though it is, for now, just to kill time for a year and get some $$). I wish that I had taken up Dr Marling on that research opportunity over the summer. Then I would at least have something to alleviate some of this boredom plus gain some AI research experience. That and the $3k over the summer would have been nice. I guess having some time off isn't so bad though, seeing as how this may be my last summer before I have to actually be an adult and get a career and all that BS. Se la vie.

The Life and Times of a Rockstar in Athens

2005-07-25T07:32:00.000-05:00

A new day dawns on the horizon. Seccond session summer classes are beginning today. New faces, both in the student body and the teaching faculty, eager to teach and to learn new things. New topics covered, new stones turned, new material stuffed into brains, new buildings to find.

But enough about those suckers, I'm still not taking summer classes.

I actually managed to get up before the crack of afternoon today so I'm going to attempt to accomplish something today. After I watch TV for a bit, that is. My feet seem sufficiently healed to the point where I can get back to shredding up the streets on my board and I think I'm going to take advantage of that. That is assuming that I don't first die of heat stroke, as it's supposed to be around 37ºC today, which I just can't wait for.

If I can avoid death whilst skating I think we'll manage. Gordon is going up to maryland to get his mama and then going to the beach for a week or so and has bequeathed his keys to me so we can hang out in his AC apartment. I'm meeting Blair there for lunch later, so I hope to get some skating in before that and before it gets to hot. He's always got a ton of bottled water there, plus AC and television, so I see myself spending quite a good bit of time passed out on his couch this week.

Ryan went back to his farm in Kenton this weekend and brought back a bunch of goodies and he's going to make a big Thanksgiving-esque dinner tonight so we're all heading over there. He's doing his farm all organic so it should be pretty yummy.

Dear Diary....Jackpot!

2005-07-21T23:50:00.000-05:00

Ugh, I finished re-doing my computer today. I had to reformat one of the hard drives and reinstall Windows, which means that I have to reinstall everything that was previously on it. That was a great time, but I'm all finished with it now.

G-Dogg and Kathleen came over for dinner tonight and we had fired up the grill and made a ton of stuff. Brad and Kropat also showed up for a while and moved some of Brad's stuff in and promptly took off for some hot man-on-man love back in Cbus. We're still looking for suggestions for what to do on our birthday's since our b-days are on the same day next month. I kinda want to go to Atlantic City or Windsor or something but in reality we'll probably end up just having a party here in town.

Kathryn brought down her little brother to take some placement tests for school since he's going here next year. We went uptown with them, Doug and Christie, who are now married, Doug's bro and Gordon and spent the night draining aquariums and then doing a mini-shuffle. Good times. It's nice to see some familiar faces since the town's so dead during the summer.

Laundry day

2005-07-20T17:13:00.000-05:00

Another fun filled day. When I woke up my entire toe was black and blue, so I'm thinking more so that I may have broken it the other day skating. Bummer. It's laundry day today, so in between going back and forth to gordon's house to do that, I'm working on my computer, which took a huge sloppy dump last night and I had to reinstall windows. That pretty much messed up the whole works so I'm in the process of moving important stuff to other hard drives so I can reformat it and put everything back together again, kinda like humpty dumpty.

Kathryn's little bro is coming down to take some tests for his pre-college crap, so we're going out with them tonight and going to try to get him into some bars and whatnot. I'm not sure if Tony and the rest of the gang is coming down or not, so we'll see when that time comes.

Hopefully it cools off a bit soon so I can go out and skate before it's time to go out. I'll probably end up skating with gordon since I'm going to be in and out of there for laundry anyway. There's a pretty sweet playground to skate by his place plus it's not too far from the University Commons, which has pretty nice pavement and whatnot. The trucks I gave him for his board are all old and kinda crappy, so Moss is trying to hook him up with a set of used, newer ones. G-Dogg still skates pretty damn good for a 46 year old that hasn't been on a board in ten years.

Phone Tag

2005-07-19T19:23:00.000-05:00

First off, a bit of a rant. So, we got our new cell phones a couple days ago and they're sweet. But......they don't have games on them like they said they would. Upon calling customer support they told me that they should have games, same for the email support people. They said that we should send them back to get ones with games. Then they told me they shouldn't have games and to get phones that do what they promised these would do, we would have to ship these back (2@$15 each for shipping) and buy new phones (2@$50 each and $15 for shipping). I wanted to cancel the service, but they said that they'd charge us $200 per line for early cancelation even though we're within our trial period. So now it looks as if we're stuck with phones with no games. How mundane.

Anyway, about a week or so ago I got my paperwork for grad school and it looks like all of my teaching assistantship stuff went through, so I'll be getting free graduate tuition plus a pretty good deal of money for teaching. Good stuff. Thus begins my life as a professional student.

Haven't been out skateboarding yet today as I injured myself yesterday. I wore some crappy socks that gave me a big callus and a blood-blister thing on the bottom of one of my feet, which kinda sucks. That and I think I broke one of my toes, which also sucks. It hurts to move it and it's all bruised around the joint. Hopefully they're feeling better soon so I can go out and skate a little tonight or at least tomorrow.

Ok, time to go scavenge the house since it's pretty much supper time and I haven't had a bite to eat all day.

Prolog

2005-07-19T04:16:00.000-05:00

As disgusted as I am with this turn of events, I've created a blog. Now seems like as good a time as any for this as I'm beginning to learn how to skateboard again, I just moved into our new house in a somewhat crummier neighborhood than last year, and I'm starting grad school in the fall.

I bought my new skateboard almost a month ago after a long hiatus from skating. When I was a kid my brother gave me a skateboard, but the fat chick from down the road came to visit and wanted to try it out. That didn't turn out so well, as she snapped it into several peices. The horror....the horror.
Anyway, I'm getting a little better at it but I can't really do anything on it. I can cruise around on it without killing myself, which is a start I suppose. I'm mostly trying to practice manuals, ollies, and [pop]shove-its.

It's late and I'm already disgusted with the fact that I've even made one of these things in the first place, so I'm outta here. More later...maybe.