Drawing A Blank

I started this little blog almost 2 years ago with hopes that I could put down my thoughts and feelings while discussing them with others. I've had a little success here and there, but as of late, things have gone way downhill. I doubt anyone reads this anymore, but I'll be moving to Myspace for the time being. It's up to you to find it on your own. I'll probably leave this account up up for archiving purposes.

Later.

Yeah, if you guys don't already know, I'll be 20 this Sunday. I don't feel twenty. Then again, I don't know what it's supposed to feel like.

It's been another fun year. I'm getting pretty close to that Associates transfer degree in Applied Science: I.T. I've had my job as a Lab Assistant for a year now, and I'm halfway looking for a better-pay yet still part-time job. My room is now clean for the first time in ages. I've got some more friends, and a good girlfriend. And yet, I seem to be busier than ever these days.

Doesn't look like I'll be up to much, though. Probably low-key. I might get a handful of friends together for a meal at some restaurant, that's about it. Of course, anyone with birthday wishes should definitely leave a comment below. My journal's been needing some.

Anyway, I got a full day tomorrow. College doesn't care what day your birthday is.

Here I am, at work. Another day in the Open Computer Labs. Except today I'm spending 5 straight hours at the college doing something. Four hours of work, one of Math. And at four this afternoon, I start in on my other two classes, going 'till nine or nine-thirty tonight. Yeah, it's a busy life, and I've begun to wonder if I've got too much on my plate. Thankfully my job is easy.

As some of you may already know, winter quarter's over, and my grades were A, B+, and B-. And as some of you may not already know, I spent Monday through Wednesday with Josh and John, cleaning up my room thoroughly. We cleaned, moved, vacuumed and steam cleaned the sucker. It's about as clean as it'll ever get. It's a great start to a new quarter, in my opinion. I absolutely love it.

Yeah, end of the quarter is just around the quarter. My problem is this: I barely learned anything at all in my CP 120 class and I'm now expected to come up with a website from scratch by Monday. On top of that, the rough draft for my final essay is due on Friday, the final draft Monday. The essay is the easy part. We only worked the tutorials for CP all quarter, all cookie-cutter, telling you what HTML code to write and where to write it. In essence, it was all but useless.

On the bright side, I'm through with Project Management as of today, and I'm certain I got a high grade in everything.

I'd say it's fairly accurate.

Personality Inventory
Emotional (49%)	[....................]	Logical (51%)
Concerned about self (27%)	[..........|||||.....]	Concerned about others (73%)
Atheist (49%)	[....................]	Religious (51%)
Loner (50%)	[....................]	Dependent (50%)
Laid-back (12%)	[..........||||||||..]	Driven (88%)
Traditional (77%)	[.....|||||..........]	Rebel (23%)
Impetuous (100%)	[||||||||||..........]	Organized (0%)
Engineering mind (73%)	[.....|||||..........]	Artistic mind (27%)
Cynical (44%)	[..........|.........]	Idealist (56%)
Follower (43%)	[..........|.........]	Leader (57%)
Introverted (31%)	[..........||||......]	Extroverted (69%)
Conservative (52%)	[....................]	Liberal (48%)
Logical (50%)	[....................]	Romantic (50%)
Uninterested (62%)	[........||..........]	Sexual (38%)
Insecure (17%)	[..........|||||||...]	Confident (83%)
Take the test! brought to you by thatsurveysite

I developed the flu on Friday. Man, that really sucked. I was nearly bedridden for most of Saturday and about half of Sunday. Thankfully there wasn't much homework to be done over that period of time, or I'd be knee-deep in crap right now. I'm still recovering; well enough to think clearly and type, obviously. I've got a headache because I forgot to take some Tylenol this morning, but doing okay other than that.

Yup. It snowed again today, about halfway through up until about an hour ago. While I admit it was snowing harder than anything I've seen in a long time, the snow has abated, and as far as I know most main roadways are clear. I really wish they would re-open the college for classes. They decided that the campus would close at 7 tonight, canceling my CIS 280 class. Mind you, I get that class only twice a week, and holidays and palooza have already cut into class time.

Yeah, I guess I'm just bitching. But I do have a valid complaint; we don't have make-up days, though it's easily feasible to have them. We can just insert them in that breaktime between quarters. We have more than enough days for that.

For those who need a refresher, read my last entry on the subject. Now, I haven't seen her since the end of spring quarter, as she has stopped going to college according to what I've heard. The other day, a mutual friend of ours said hey to me for her, and told me that she is still working the local Taco Bell nearby and she's become a manager or something.

Women are definitely not within my realm of knowledge, but this one I feel I should pursue. Two people have said to me on two separate occasions that they can see that she likes me after watching us interact. My only problem is that every time I've tried to have good conversation with her my mind seems to shut down and I have nothing to say, kicking myself for it later. I feel completely different.

So yeah, I'm thinking after I get my hair cut (getting poofy again), I should roll into her work and say something along the lines of "Hey! Haven't seen you in like forever. We should hang out sometime." and drop my number, leaving the ball in her court. If she is truly mutually interested, she'll follow up, right?

As always, comments/advice welcome. God knows I could use it.

Nearing the end of winter quarter at EvCC, things are going okay for me. Recently, my friend Kyle had brought over the old game, "Unreal". The different multiplayer modes were pretty fun, but left me yearning for UT2003. As you might expect, the game is a bit old and very hard to find. Thankfully there is BitTorrent for that. Yeah, I know it's not the most legal thing to do but if it were more available, I'd surely pick it up for 10-15 bucks instead.

However, there is a small problem: My wireless driver on the desktop has been pretty flaky; way too flaky for bittorrent. It takes forever to start up, and when the driver decides to stop for a sec, the whole thing will stop so I have to restart it. I've been downloading and restarting it since the day before yesterday, and I'm at 20%. So yeah, it's looking like I might have to call someone up for a favor.

After a small bit of twiddling with ndiswrapper, I got the loaner-top working just the way I want to with Fedora Core 6 Linux. It's friggin' awesome.

My previous experiments weren't the greatest. I started with Red Hat Linux version 7.2 way back in the day, ran into a roadblock, then quit because no one could help me with video. I tried Fedora Core 1 a couple years later, and still the same problem. A good 2, almost 3 years ago, I tried running SUSE 10.0 with everything working but the wireless, and no help on it. This time, I tried Fedora Core 6 on the Loaner-top and got everything going except for wireless, but found an easy tutorial on wrapping the windows driver with ndiswrapper so I could use it with Linux. No hiccups. I love it.

I've got 4 desktops running in a cube shape, and seriously personalized theme and login screen. The package manager pulls information off the net for extras that you can add in, dependencies automatically taken care of. Linux has grown a ton in ease of use and practicality. If I can do it, so can every other guy who spends just a little time learning about it. In all honesty, it took maybe 2 hours altogether, and the rest was personalizing it to suit me.

Today I pulled up an old burn of mine, Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory. It was scratched to hell when I examined it. I was in the mood to listen to it, and against the feeling that I wouldn't be able to read a damn thing on it, I ripped it to the hard drive taking painstaking measures. After about an hour or so of serious reading, my DVD/RW drive was done and I started to listen to it. I'm simply floored with the quality. So far I've only found 3 small parts of tracks (10 seconds) that are skippy. And I'm about half done listening. Okay, found another funny spot where a track seems to have half-imposed itself on another. But other than that, it's clean.

Anyone still got a good copy of that I could borrow?

Things have been going different as of late. Not much word from the high school buds, other than John. And as many of us in the area know, we've been seeing a lot more ice and snow than is the normal. Today it snowed for the third or fourth time this winter. Usually we get only one snow that sticks around a winter, and sometimes one that doesn't. I got to drive in it today, going to Smokey Point Alfy's and back. It was a bit disorienting, driving while the snow comes up at you. Thankfully the Rainier handles the ice and snow on the freeway pretty well.

Winter quarter classes have been good thus far. English is a lot more thought-provoking than I originally thought it would be. Project management under Al so far is good, I just need to come up with a project. Beginning Web Pages is also pretty cool and easy so far. It's basically HTML so far. See that? I learned it in class.

It's almost that time again. About 9 minutes from it, in fact. But to me, it all feels the same. Why is that? Probably because for the most part, things are the same. Yeah, I got me a Wii. The kids have a PS2. I'm a part-time (really part-part time) Lab Assistant. But other than that mostly things haven't changed all that much. Being single is still a personality trait of mine. I still would like a job with more hours. I still wish I had my driver's license. Naturally, everything didn't go as well as I'd hoped. But things are better than they were a year ago, I guess.

People have been lighting off fireworks since yesterday, and as you can imagine, the amount being lit every hour or so has grown exponentially since then. I'm literally hearing them go off every 2 seconds or so. No kidding. It's crazy, isn't it? But some people just like to light stuff off. And I guess here's an excuse to.

But that's how it goes, they say. And yet, it also makes me wonder: what is in store for the next year? I guess I'll have to wait another year to find out, eh? And now we're about 4 minutes away. I'll probably throw on my jacket and go outside to look around at the displays as they go off for the next few. Later, all.

Damn, it's been forever since my last bit, hasn't it? Yeah, almost a full month. Things have been going better than expected. First off, math 140 was hard and the final was sink-or-swim, but I think I did decently. I'm on quarter break as of yesterday, though I'm still on-call for work (hopefully more hours?).

After quite a bit of trial and error, I finally secured me a Wii in front of Target in the ungodly morning in this biting cold. I've only spent a few hours on it today, as I've spent most of the time going to the park and church, but so far, it's been a blast. Including the Wii sports game, odd enough. I also got me "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess." So far, the control scheme is pretty intuitive, though it's taken me some un-learning. You see, the Wii is all about simple gestures, while it didn't matter how you held the controller on previous systems. It was all about just pushing the buttons. I've only scratched the surface of this functionality, methinks.

Now, I wonder: Since it's been forever since I last posted, and even longer since anyone left a comment, will anyone have anything to say about this bit of news? I guess I'll find out soon enough.

I recently just got back from a testing session. Verizon was testing for Fiber Support analysts. Apparently, I did not pass that general test of theirs, which covered several subjects broadly. Also, they used scantron sheets. I absolutely hate scantron. It's a poor excuse for testing. I always get about halfway through a test then realize that I accidentally skipped a space or something. That's probably why I didn't pass in what they wanted.

Also, one of their tests was on one's convictions/personality. I thought that interesting. Naturally that was also part of the scantron. I talked to Joe (my bro) afterward, and he said that he'd never seen anyone hire using scantron sheets before, and felt that it was pretty crappy of them not to use their own facilities for testing. Personally, I felt that the scantron was a really bad way to go. I mean, if I had a straightforward test (as in, you can answer in the booklet), I probably could have aced that thing.

The other day, I was channel surfing and I came across the most moving infect-truth commercial I have seen so far. There was a campfire and 2 cowboy-ish guys in the middle of a road in a big city. One of them had a hole in his neck (probably from emphasyma) and had a device he held up to his chin to speak. The other (non holy) was strumming a guitar. Hole-neck cowboy began to sing.

"You don't always die from tobacco
Sometimes you just lose a lung
You don't always die from tobacco
Sometimes they just snip out your tongue
And you won't sing worth a heck
with a big hole in your neck
You don't always die from tobacco."

Nearby there was a sign saying like 48 million Americans live with tobacco-related diseases. That is the most effective method I have seen of getting their message across.

Several days ago, I went to the local GameCrazy and bought me 2 games for the Gamecube, because I hadn't bought myself a new game in at least 6 months (yes it took me up until then to realize that). I got Sonic Adventure DX, and Resident Evil 4 (on recommendation from a friend of mine). Both have been pretty fun.

Sonic Adventure DX is (so far) quite reminiscent of Sonic 3 (for any of you old-schoolers reading). It's so far using the same game-style, except it's in a full 3-dimensional environment, where you can pick things up here and there.

Resident Evil 4 was quite a surprise, contrary to what I thought it would be. It's more than just shooting up zombies. The zombies are actually smart in this game. Several have thrown their weapons at me, some have climbed ladders after me, and yes, they CAN open doors. Be afraid. The controls are a bit clunky at first, but once you're used to it, it gets pretty fun. Also: there is a money system in the game, which you can use to buy items as well as upgrade your weapons. All in all, it's tons more than I expected.

So again, other than college and work, that's what's been going on.

Today was the first day of fall quarter at the college. It was very, very busy. I worked 8-11 in the Baker Lab, then immediately went to my 11:00 Math 140 class. At noon, I got out and then proceeded to Shuksan for my CIS 224 class till 1. After that, I had a 1 hour break where I went to the MPR, talked to a few friends, then ate some lunch, until 2. I had to go back to Pilchuck for CIS 162, until 3:40. I was totally beat when I got home. It feels good to be busy, though. I missed that.

Yeah, it's hard to believe I've been using this for about a year now. Hell, it doesn't even feel like it. Time flies, regardless though. I'll leave with this one question for those who read this: If you could have any one superpower (yes, you can make it up), what would it be?

Personally, understanding women would be the one I chose. Haha.