sugardeath

The only reason I would ever install Windows would be so I can play Final Fantasy XI.

…

Which explains why I installed Windows… After trying to get Windows to see my network devices, I finally got it all set up and reinstalled grub so I can boot back into Linux. I cannot get grub to boot me into the Windows partition now. Must be a sign.

Also, my FFXI dvd image is bad. So I cannot install from that.. Great. I have the original install CDs somewhere, but they are from the October 2003 launch… meaning I would be stuck in patch hell for quite some time.

And watch, after all this trouble I am going to find out that the Return Home to Vana’diel campaign is not running… I fear that Eikre will be lost to the gods of “null” forever. And the urge to pick up my scythe and slash little crabs has never been stronger.

And I cannot install on the PS2 because the install discs that came with the system did not include the Rise of the Zilart expansion disc, which has become so engrained into the main game that it refuses to install without. And even with all of these problems, I am willing to find a way to make it work.

Fear is when you realize that, after enough practice, you can pull an all-nighter without any sort of caffeine.

Five-hundred words; should be easy enough, right?

Things.

I’ve been reading a lot more, lately. I really wanna start that German book I ordered. Should be a jolly-romp through language land. I just can’t seem to set aside the time out of my ridiculously empty schedule to pick up the book, a pen, and a notebook (I’m going to encounter words and grammars I don’t understand, gotta be able to look them up). I see myself reading each section twice, once before and once after figuring most everything out.

I haven’t played a video game besides WarCraft III, Smash Brothers, or Mario Kart 64 since BEFORE Christmas Break. What’s wrong with me?

Articulation is something I’ve had a problem with ever since mid-way through the summer, if I recall. Not sure what’s up with it.. Memories of that last few days of school just came flooding back to me. Walking with Jason in the fresh, summer air to his car after school. Did we ever skip a psych class? Eighth hour, we had to have. I think we did, once, visited MST. Or was that in the early Fall, when we skipped one of those lame pep assemblies?

Needs more seizure bots.

I find myself tripping over words. It bothers me.

Andrew’s coming to visit on Thursday. Something about being a Camras kid. He’s not staying for the entire event, if it indeed lasts longer than Thursday. He’s got robotics that weekend. Since he’s not staying the entire time, he’s not shacking up with a currently enrolled Camras kid.

Things back home.

I should really get to work on this essay. I have the idea worked out in my head. I just can’t make myself type it out. Webcomics, livejournals (ebay, even!) are distracting me.

Wine does not want to install Oblivion. Some bullshit error (error -2147418113). (I’d rather not boot into Windows, never did run Oblivion all that well. Though Wine’s current track-record gives me hope: most games have been running better through wine than they did under normal windows)

I want to play FFXI again.

I need a good RPG. D&D is only so often, and I want an escape that’s more available.

I should try and play PSO some more. Get me that s-rank twin I’ve been wanting.

I’m almost tempted to start on the next Java lab (due Thursday at 12:45PM) than start on my paper (due in six hours). I would love to escape into a world of code.

Apparently I have a communication problem. Who saw that one coming?

I did, but did not.

I like how we always assume the worst. Oh, it couldn’t be me. I wish it were.

I’m really cold. I tend to get cold around seven to eight in the morning.

Currently my PS2 is out of commission. What, with four pins on one of the chips being soldered together. I’m really not too worried. Dropped sixty on a mod-chip; totally useless without a working ps2. And I don’t care.

Absolutely.

Commas, semicolons, periods.

Vicarious, Perfect Situation, Hate Me.

Was thinking of rolling a Blackguard, if I can’t play FFXI anytime soon. The Blackguard is the closest thing I’ve found to my Dark Knight.. Gotta create a whole backstory for him. He’s gotta have a good one, seeing as how he’s an EX-PALADIN. That’s an accomplishment, where I come from. He’s adept with poisons, good with martial weapons (SCYTH SCYTH SCYTH), and is evil. Sounds like a Dark Knight to me.

California rest in peace,
Simultaneous release

One of Jeremy’s friends recognized the AIM client I used. First person to do so. Everyone else is just like “oh, you’re using that one that doesn’t allow file-transfers [it totally does, by the way],” or “the DOS one [it’s linux, nub].” Robert (?) goes “What client is that? Naim?” I don’t know how, but I did a verbal double-take.

I haven’t booted Windows in a week or two. Or three? Uptime of 2 days, 17:56. Might just wipe it all. Unless I fail at getting PlayOnline/FFXI and/or Oblivion running through Wine.

Doubtful.

Like a lot of things.

Though I may be pleasently surprised.

Jeremy pointed out that there’s only two more weeks of school left before Spring Break. I’m still undecided as to whether I’m going home or not.

The kids back home just started their mid-winter break. They’ll probably have their spring break in about a month, or whenever Easter is.

I want a new monitor. A 19″ widescreen LCD. $150-$180. Maybe if I do well on midterms.

Thoughts keep popping in my head “What if I don’t do well? What if I lose my scholarships? I can’t come back.. don’t have the money..” And then I get really upset at the idea that I would have to go to Macomb for a year or two. I’m better than that. So is everyone I know who goes there. So are the people who will be going there in a couple years.

I just don’t work hard enough to deserve anything better.

Fuck this paper.

Great book. Thérèse Raquin. Translated from French. Typos galore (’them,’ instead of ‘then’).

Jeremy accidently bought regular Oreos. He never buys regular Oreos. He ate my Double Stufs because he bought regular Oreos. Fine by me. I’ve stolen so many pop-tarts from the kid. And cheez-wiz. Delicious, pressurized, canned cheese.

Damn I’m cold.

I made a snow angel today. Been meaning to do that for quite some time.

Should make a whole army of snow angels.

To assault the above freezing temperatures that are nigh.

Andrew’s coming to IIT on Thursday.

Heather left at seven (two hours ago… it’s eight now), for MSU. I think it was MSU. Wasn’t really the focus of the conversation.

I never visited any colleges. Well.. April 24th, 2006. The day after one of our LAN Parties, Mom and I made a trip to IIT for ‘Undergrade Preview Day.’ But that was because we had already decided where I was going. Without so much as an application to UofM, MSU, MTU.

Brian’s going to MTU. Upwards of twelve feet of snow sounds like much fun. They use snowshoes up there. And I’m sure the summers are damn nice too, right on Lake Superior.

I’m hungry. Cafeteria is open for breakfast.

I have the following typed for my paper:

Tony Lademan
HUM-104-102
Therese Raquin

asdf

Bland Sodexho eggs and pancakes are calling to me.

Will proofread later. If ever.

Am cold.

I figured I should post something while there’s nothing really going on at the LAN Party..

At around 2:45, Ryan, Tim, myself, and Andrew all went for a walk. We went to Jack Harvey elementary, which isn’t too far from Andrew’s house. We sat there and talked for a good amount of time. Ryan checked his phone at one point and it as 3:30. There were no creepy cars sitting in the parking lot this time. On the way back, we saw headlights coming down the street adjacent to Andrew’s. We ran like hell. It was awesome. Tim ran like no other. Then… nothing more…

I finally got to meet Danielle, Andrew’s not-yet-girlfriend girlfriend. She seems nice.

Random crap:

Um… The Sunday after we came back from Mackniac Island, I unlocked the Dark Knight advanced job in FFXI. Later that week, I achieved rank 3 with the help of a few members from my linkshell. The next Sunday (one week after I unlocked DRK), I unlocked the Beastmaster job. BST is a sweet job. Charming monsters and having them fight against other, tougher monsters (and thusly DIEING) is so much fun. Especially the part where I send them to their death. Did I metion that I like making my charmed monsters fight monsters several levels higher than them?

Not really much more after that…

School on Tuesday. Yay? Perhaps. As I said, I don’t really know whether I’m looking forward to it or not. I’m hoping to see a few people again. People I haven’t seen all summer. Keyword: hoping…

I was over Jason’s a few weeks ago when both his mom and Heather started bugging me about Homecoming. “Who are you gonna take?” Um… No one? Because I’m most likely not gonna go? “But you HAVE to go! It’s your senior year!” So..?

:ugh:

I dunno. Random crap. You should expect this kind of stuff from me when I’ve been up for almost 24 hours straight. I feel like heating up a few slices of pizza right now, so… I’m out..

It’s been a while.

Where to start..? Um.. I beat Mario & Luigi (GBA) two nights ago. I had been stuck on the final boss for a few months now. I’ve had the game for over a year. It’s a good game, ’twas quite rewarding to have finally beat the game after all this time.

I set myself two goals before this Saturday. 1) Ding level 90 in PSO so I can access Ultimate. 2) Ding level 30 in FFXI so I can do the Dark Knight and Beastmaster quests (those ones specifically, but really I can unlock most any advance job now). I hit level 90 in PSO with ease. However, I’ve had a harder time hitting 30 in FFXI. I am currently level 29 with less than half of the needed exp to go. SO CLOSE! I eventually gave up though, as there was no chance I was going to get an invite from any party in the area. And now I’ll have to wait a whole week just to get roughly two-thousand experience points! Agh!!

I bought a copy of The Good Earth at Border’s so I can do the second part of my summer assignment for Honors. This part’s due on the fifth. I won’t be back until the sixth or the seventh. Whatever. Ms. Szmiegil can’t honestly expect people to be doing these assignments and turn them all in on time. It’s the freaking summer. We’re going to procrastinate, we’re going to turn them in late. We’re not going to give a shit.

AndrAIa’s been acting up a bit as of late. I can’t run installshield installation programs anymore. At least, not on my user. I can do so just fine from the administrator account. o_O Things seem a bit slower overall, and blackbox hangs on shutdown. As far as I can tell, however, this only happens when I play FFXI on my computer. After I force-close blackbox, I have to force-close PlayOnline (after I already closed it before hand). This abnormal behavior of POL and FFXI can be attributed to the windower I use. FFXI doesn’t natively allow one to play in windowed mode, so I downloaded a program (recommended by Tim) that allows me to play with FFXI in a window so I can still chat on AIM or look stuff up. Funny thing is, the windower causes no problems on Brian’s machine. o_O

I think I may have to wipe AndrAIa clean… I’m not looking forward to that… All the backup… At least I have another partition to put things on AND my external harddrive (which still has >50% disk space free). I’ve been kinda worried about her lately, though. You know how during the summer, temperatures rise? Well, it’s not uncommon to see her running at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Infact, the only time I’ve seen her running lower is when I had the air conditioning on in our room piping cool air into the office when it was already somewhat cool out. Mom said to turn off the air conditioner, though, as it was apparently “too cold” outside for it to be running. I saw AndrAIa’s temperature readout shoot from 108 to 120. :cry::cry:

I’ve been getting about one shift a week at work. Last summer I was averaging two or three shifts a week. But now, all the shifts are g oing to the newbies (understandable, i guess) as well as the rehires. People are getting rehired at their old wage, in their old position, and getting MORE HOURS than I’m getting! WTF ::kicks a wall::

Oh. I’m going on vacation tomorrow. Mackinac Island. Going with Dad, Pia, Brian, David, and Ali (how DO you spell her name?). A week. Away from home. Usually I look forward to vacations… But right now… not so much… I dunno why. There’s nothing really.. going on around here. Heh, unlike last time we went up north. The whole Jason-Heather thing… Whoo, glad that’s over with.

…

Anyway..

I wanna get back on FFXI to see if there are any parties willing to accept a lvl 29WAR/MNK in lvl 17WAR gear for just one more level, but I feel as if my endeavor would just be in vain.

I’ve started playing Final Fantasy 2 on the GBA compilation Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls and it’s pretty cool. I wanna bring the PS2 up with us so I can play Final Fantasy 4, but I seem to have left ALL PS2 discs at Mom’s. (FFXI doesn’t require any discs, harddrive for the win). Oh well… Brian seems to recall them having a TV last time we were there… Maybe we could bring the PS2 to watch some DVDs or something. I dunno. I also wanna play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but there’s only two saves on the cartdridge and they’re both taken by Brian and David. David just started playing the game again after I kept bothering him about not playing it… I doubt we’ll have time to hit up an EBGames or something on the way Up North. (And I seriously doubt any of the local ones will be open at 9AM, when we leave)

I’m don’t have a Final Fantasy fetish, I swear.

Shelby’s birthday party was last Saturday. It was pretty cool. I didn’t go swimming, though I brought all the required gear. Near the end of the night, most everyone partook in a game of Apples to Apples. It was quite fun. Basically a card is pulled from the green card stack and layed down in a place where everyone can see it. Then, everyone else (everyone but the person who layed the green card) looks at their hand of red cards and tries to find a card that most fits the description on the green card. The person who layed the green card then flips over all the red cards and chooses the one they agree with most. They then give the green card to the person that layed the winning red card. Next person in line lays a green card. Rinse and repeat. To spice things up, there were cards that had people (people at the party) and descriptions or phrases that described them. Most were red, some were green. o_O

It seems I kept to myself most of the night until Catherine showed up. We mostly talked geek/nerd stuff <_<

Well, I’m out, gotta shower and pack for tomorrow…

I had this crazy religious discussion with Dad and Pia (Dad’s girlfriend) two nights ago. It was… interesting… to say the least. It was my full intent NOT to get into such a discussion, but it happened anyway. I found out that I have many of the same views on religion as Pia does. That was actually pretty cool.

Yesterday was the due date for the first two essays of the summer homework for Honors 12. I started the first essay the day before and finished it yesterday midday. I started the second and finished it at about 12:20AM this morning. I typed them up (for I do all my composing on paper) extremely quickly (I even amazed myself with my speed) and submitted them not even ten minutes later. I then made up some lame excuse saying that there was a solar flare that interfered with the time continuum (not to be confused with the sapce and time continuum) and that I had actually submitted the essay several hours earlier. I also said that the solar flare caused these essays to lack quality and that the next ones would be better. Lame, I know.

So I agreee 100% with Jason when he says that it feels good to actually write with a nice Pilot pen on actual paper. The pen glides so nicely and it feels so natural. I’m actually writing this entry out right now and will type it later after I wake up.

Overall, things have been pretty… plain, normal if you will. I’ve only got one shift this week, Thursday, so that opens up a lot of free time. Jason came over yesterday and brought Lacy with him. It was nice to see Lacy again and sorta catch up. They left around 3PM, for Lacy wanted to finish some Driver’s Ed. reading or something. Later today, I should be doing something with Heather, we’ll see if things work out though.

The 23rd is Shelby’s (16th?) birthday party from 2PM to 12AM. It also happens to be the “all night” LAN Party at CyberTech Plus from 11PM to 7AM the next day. Hopefully I’ll be able to leave Shelby’s party early and meet Jason over at CTP, or something (assuming I’m not on vacation this day). We were actually thinking he could give me a ride from Shelby’s to CTP. Oh how I wish I could drive. Sometimes. I’m supposed to be taking the road test sometime before school starts. Joy.

Well, I have a slight headache and should get some sleep anyway (’tis 1:49AM), so I’ll type this in the morning. Or noon. Or whenever I wake up. Or whenever.

Did I mention that I might be getting back into FFXI again? I hope I actually play the game for a respectable amount of time this time around…

Update: I wrote all this at around 1:30AM this morning. Since then, two things have happened: Heather came over today and we hung out and such. There was the usual tomfoolery. Also, we officially started playing FFXI again! I’m watching Brian play on the PS2 right now while trying to figure out why there’s an error while installing the PC version… Fun stuff!