Sold the Lumina. Somehow we got $1500 for it instead of like $200. That’s how I’m gonna survive the rest of the summer, and then excess money from student loans plus work study should help me out quite well each semester.

Why things are getting better, I think:

• I’m able to monetarily survive the summer.
• I’ve got my own apartment, where I can do my own things, and cook my own food, and lounge around petting cats and watching Conan on hulu.
• Nicole’s cats are freaking awesome.
• My new computer (by need, remember?) is performing great and is allowing me to catch up on some much needed gaming.
• I’m getting back into Animal Crossing (on the Wii now).
• Hanging out with good friends (Casey, Jeremy, Amber) quite a bit these days thanks to the Tai kids.
• Helping out again with the Taiwanese Cultural and Academic Exchange program.
• Got my first above 3.0 semester GPA this past Spring.
• Because of that, I am still allowed to attend IIT!
• My beautiful girlfriend comes back to Chicago in less than a month!
• In six days we’ll have been together for four months (this still surprises me immensely, to be perfectly honest).
• She’s bringing her ferrets back with her and they’re going to stay at my place! (this has me extremely excited for some reason )
• She is learning German and this is the perfect reason to brush up on my skills with the language!
• I bought a game for the first time since… forever. I honestly forget the last game I bought prior. Last weekend Frictional Games was having a sale on the Penumbra trilogy (a survival-horror/puzzle/adventurer series). It was $5 for all three games and they were on Linux. This is not something I could pass up. I love survival-horrors (as much as they get to me), I love puzzle games that make you think (as much as they frustrate me), and I love supporting developers who release their games natively on Linux.
• I’ve been following the Hundred Push-Up Program and, while I’ve had to repeat two weeks already, I already notice a HUGE improvement in my strength and muscle mass (then again, any muscle mass is a huge improvement over none ).
• Because of this I have a greater confidence in.. me and my presentation. It’s kind of surprising, really. I wasn’t at all embarassed when I took my shirt off at the beach the other day, for example (I’ve always been kind of self-conscious about my extremely skinny and muscle lacking body, but I’m actually doing something about it now, which itself is also a huge improvement).
• Summer is flying by, despite every day being pretty much me sitting in front of my computers doing nothing productive.

I apologize that this summer isn’t nearly as post-heavy as last summer. I believe there are reasons for that, though (mostly lack of generally interesting stuff to talk about that hasn’t been outlined above and lack of boredom at work. Boredom at home leads to me dicking around on the web. Boredom at work led to me writing because I couldn’t dick around on the web. Well, led to. Since I don’t have work this summer.). I think it’s also due to a lack of.. doing things. If I’m in a doing things mood I tend to think about updating the site more often.

Things with Sarah are going pretty damn well, I’d say. We had a couple of misunderstandings or little fight-type things near the beginning of the summer, but definitely nothing too serious. I’m more excited for her to come back than I am for the ferrets to come with her, than I am for everyone else to get back in the city, than I am for James to move out, than I am for.. a lot of things. I try not to let my mind think about.. much beyond the next couple of days, but sometimes it’s hard (nothing more than like.. a season or two… I’m having thoughts of us just cuddling up on the couch under a blanket drinking hot drinks and just hanging out in the winter, for example.. perhaps after ice skating or something (I can’t ice skate, by the way, Sarah.. It could make for hilarious times)). It’s a mental defense I’ve set up thanks to previous relationship failures. And, really, why think too much about the future? Obviously one has to have goals and stuff for school, work, general life things; but one does not live in the future, one lives in the present, they’re living NOW. I try to focus on what’s going on now and make the most of it. No point in worrying about the future or lamenting the past (as much as things tend to pop up and try to distract you, it’s just something one has to deal with).

It’s been really nice to get out of my apartment for hours at a time last week and this. I am going to be kind of sad when the kids leave and I really won’t have a need to leave my apartment…

Anyway, four fourty-eight is kind of a late time to finish up a post and go to bed.. My sleep schedule was good for like.. a total of two weeks this summer.. not even consecutive weeks at that…

I dunno, ever since the car sold I’ve just felt really good about things. That lifted a huge burdon from my mind and now I’m looking around realizing that I have quite a few good things going on. I am immensely happy I asked her out. It almost didn’t happen, but I forced myself to NOT think about it and just see what would happen. It was a twofold decision, really… On the one hand, it was kind of like an experiment.. in that whole “can I actually get a date with someone that I barely know? (as opposed to having been a friend for some time)” way, and on the other it was a necessary step forward, to move on. It seems like kind of a weird way to look at it, but that’s how I’ve rationalized it out in the time since. And I’ve had a lot of time to think about it (four months worth, to be almost exact ).

Gah, five oh-six. I really need to get to bed.

…I mean it.

That last post wasn’t actually me, guys. Paul complained…

I feel like shit right now. I don’t know why. I think it’s school related. I did nothing productive this weekend. I don’t want to fail at this, I really don’t. This is really bothering me, hence the interjection.

Paul (who, by the way, got accepted into Wayne State’s pharmaceutical program, so please refer to him as Dr. Paul S. Douchebag from now on), complained that I hadn’t updated in some time (nearly a month by now), and, as a joke, I suggested he write something under the guise of me. Far too many of you bought it. I read it over and thought that the writing style was completely different from mine, and thus found it pretty funny that nobody caught on. Most of it’s out of date, but the skittles vodka thing that Ryan did is actually recent (I had talked about it with Paul) and on my list of things to try.

School has been.. actually pretty decent, relatively (I slacked this weekend, yeah… but overall… I’m not too bad off?). My semester consists of a web design class, Project Management, advanced Java, and the holy-crap-you-guys-suck-too-much-to-be-in-school-but-we’ll-give-you-another-chance-because-we’re-nice-like-that,-don’t-fuck-it-up class. Web design so far has mostly been stuff I know, and what I don’t know I can damn well pick up easily enough. Project Management shouldn’t be too bad, it’s mostly simple math and common sense. We’ve had a little bit of group work and the first assignment was due… today.. :/ The you-suck class is so easy and pointless it’s stupid. Java has actually turned out to be REALLY easy. The book and the professor are mostly useless, but a little time with Google and I can finish these coding assignments up in no time (and not in the CTRL+C CTRL+V way). I am really ashamed of myself for not doing this class right the first time. I could have easily managed this class, the other class I took, work, and the other side job no problem during the summer with plenty of time to spare for Mass Effect. But no, I was dumb. It was a learning experience. A learning experience that I will take to heart this summer when I don’t take any classes. I really, really should take some classes to catch/keep up, but…

I’m going to be living in an apartment with Nicole over the summer. That’s going to cost money. If I work a normal job (preferably the same one I had last summer? I’m gonna shoot an email to Jon sometime near the end of the semester and see if a position would be open for me again.), as well as an on-campus job that Nicole could get me, I should be able to save up enough money for rent to last a while. Law Bulletin paid me $10/hr, and school would pay me $7.75/hr; together it would be amazing. Hell, even if I only got the on-campus job I could still cover normal two person rent (assuming I were able to keep the job during the school year and get a similar amount of hours, we’ll see how well that works… this is why I plan on working double during the summer and saving saving saving). During the summer, Nicole’s boyfriend James will be staying with us and thus rent will be split three ways, which allows for even more money saving.

The apartment is at 34th and Loews in the Bridgeport area. It’s about $995/month and the place looks and feels a hell of a lot better than what we originally thought it would be. I’d say that the bedroom alone is about.. three-fourths the size of my MSV room? The room I share with Tim. There’s two bedrooms in the apartment. There’s a kitchen. A really nice main room. A back porch, and a small backyard. The place comes with a fridge AND a stove/oven. I like that, food is good. I’m more excited about the whole washer and dryer being included, though! Holy hell, I don’t have to pay for laundry beyond detergent anymore!! It’s pretty safe to say that Nicole and I are pretty much in love with the place. It was recently redone, with the windows still needing replacement (they will be replaced when the weather is nicer, though). The lady we’re getting the apartment from is one of the higher ups in the IPRO program here at school. She was apparently talking to Linda one day (Linda knows everyone) and happened to mention that she was looking to get rid of her apartment (she’s moving in with her boyfriend), and Linda knew Nicole and I were looking, and so we were pointed in each other’s directions. We had planned on looking at this place… maybe looking at a few other places… but this place was just.. amazing. I’ll definitely take pictures when we move in (Nicole had a few requests to take pictures when we visited the first time, but that’d've been a weird invasion of privacy for Ms. Kleppinger).

I really think this will work out well. Hell, I want it to work out and will work to making it work out. Monetarily comes to mind first, but I also mean more of the… social? aspect of it. In the past two and a half years I’ve found something… weird: Freshmen year, I roomed with a random roommate, Jeremy (not current-Jeremy), and it was really great. We got along well, never really stepped on each other, things were great. Sophomore year, I roomed with Corey, who I had been good friends with for some time and… after a while we started grating on each other. Hell, near the beginning of the year there was almost violence regarding a stupid as hell discussion we were having. We’re great friends again, now, though. This year I’m rooming with another random roommate and it’s pretty nice. We don’t talk… like ever. At least with Jeremy we had some over lapping tastes and talked a bit, but with Tim it’s mostly silence. Which is fine. He leaves nearly every weekend, I get the room to myself and thus usually host loud and obnoxious gaming nights with Corey and Phil and Richard or Jeremy or a couple of the girls. It’s really a lot of fun. I will miss that, the “hey, let’s go walk down the hall and see who’s up to what” nature of the dorms. At least in the apartment, the bedrooms are seperate, and if Nicole and I start grating on each other we can at least hide for a bit. That’s not a bad deal. But I hope that won’t happen. She was one of my closest friends last year before we dated. It.. was kind of weird afterwards, but I’m pretty sure we’ve both talked it out and that there is nothing weird anymore.

She’s definitetly one of my best friends again. She really helped a lot with the Jacki thing. She and Jeremy (current-Jeremy). This is why I think living with her will either be really bad or really good. I was (and still am, mind you) good friends with Corey and then we roomed and it sucked (I don’t think it helped that I a) was far too sick to take care of myself at one point and stunk to high hell, and b) tried to throw humor into him coming out to me… I still feel REALLY bad for that… That can NOT have helped the situation at ALL. I mean, things are cool now.. we all joke about it, he does most of all… but… damn. That was insensitive of me.). The current order of close friends goes something like this: Nicole at the top. Jeremy very, very slightly below her. Phil and Corey together below them. These are the most important friends in my life right now. These are the people I go to in order to talk about things or take my mind off things. If living with Nicole makes things sour between us (because we’ll see so much of each other), I don’t know what I’ll do. I am very worried about this.

Best part, the apartment is cheaper than staying in MSV for the summer and Fall/Spring. They raised the normal prices, so it’s safe to say that they raised the summer prices. Currently, for next school year, MSV is about.. $5,200? Last summer it cost about $2,X00 to stay in the dorms. It’s about $6,000 (rounding up to $1000, not including utilities.. :/), for me, for a full year in the apartment. Assuming James stays for three months, that comes down to $5,500 for the whole year. This should be manageable. I plan to take out as much money as I have been for these past three years of schooling (including room and board) and just receive a massive refund check that I can then apply to living in the apartment. Right now, the money that I owe later in life is not an issue. The issue is staying in school and doing well and living semi-comfortably. If that means I owe a ton of money later on, so be it. Student loans are common, people often pay them off for a long time after they get out of school. I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about doing well enough in school to get a job that will let me pay them off. I’m worried about living right now and learning how to live on my own so that it’s not a shock when I enter the real world later on. College is not a time to learn just academics, it’s a time to learn life. Making this apartment work is just another course in living. I really want this to work. I should go finish the previous paragraph before I forget what I was going to say.

I originally told Mom that I would be taking at least one class this summer. I really don’t think I should. I really think that I need to just work my butt off this summer and save up some money. I will soon have a place to pay for. It will no longer be one lump sum of money that I never see paying for housing and food. I will now actually have to earn the money and see it leave my bank/pocket. I will now have to be fiscally responsible. It’s time to grow up a little.

I am really excited for this. This was the next big thing on my to-do list. The last was “get a real job.” Granted, I couldn’t hold it due to school, but working at Law Bulletin last summer was really nice and allowed me to prove to myself that I WAS capable of landing a real job in a real work place doing real work. I know I can do that again; the tech sector hasn’t been hit as hard as other industries with this recession thing.

I had “The or” typed here when my music went all wonky and by the time I got back to it I have no idea what word I was going to type that beings with “or.”

Oh.

The original post that got eaten mentioned that I had nothing to write about, really… Well, you know how that goes. Current word count is 1900.

I am learning to mouse left handed because of pain in my right hand/arm/shoulder from these desks and the height of my chair in regards (they’re far too low to the ground, I prefer to tower above the desk and rest my arm on the table instead of propping it up on the table). My mouse is not made for left-handed/universal mousing

Pulled another all-nighter. My weekend sleep schedule got so screwed up. I was getting like three or four hours of sleep each night last week due to talking to Jacki every night. I’m.. I got four hours of sleep Thursday night, got up around seven or so on Friday to go to work, and then stayed up until… seven or eight or so on Saturday talking to Jacki. Fell asleep around.. nine? Slept until.. nine. Stayed up with Jacki until about six or seven again. This time I slept from noon until eight, which is a decidedly more normal duration, just not quite during the right time of the day. So to fix that, because there was no way I could’ve fallen asleep again until it was too late, I am pulling an all nighter. Probably the.. third time thanks to this girl? Fourth? I’d do it every night if sleep deprivation didn’t cause hallucinations and death and stuff.

One of the early episodes in season two of the X-Files deals with this squad from… the Vietnam War? whose members were surgically and medically altered so that they never required sleep. It was really neat. I’ve been on an X-Files binge lately. Started season one Thursday night, watched a bunch Friday night and Saturday morning, then again Sunday morning and more Sunday night. The reason I had stayed up until noon Sunday morning was that I had reached the end of season one and wanted to start season two right away. I believe I am on.. episode.. eight or nine of season two? I don’t know. At the rate I am going, I figure I could get to the first movie (between seasons five and six, I believe?) in a week or two, and then finish up season nine maybe a few weeks after that, and then finally be able to watch the new movie that just came out. I don’t know what started me on this.. Back in the winter and early spring I would go to Sci-Fi every night and watch, in order, an hour of Twilight zone and then two hours of the X-Files. It was good stuff. Most of the episodes stand alone quite well, so I never really felt lost or anything while watching it on Sci-Fi. Paul said that quite a few episodes in the early seasons sucked balls, but I’m not of the same belief. While there have been some episodes that don’t quite stand out as well as other ones, I still think they’ve all been pretty good.

I got some really nasty bites on my feet sometime last week. Thursday or so? Probably.. Got them after wearing a pair of white socks that I must not have washed in forever.. Bet there was something living in them.. kinda disgusting.. The bites are terrible because when I’m bare foot my pants rub on the top of my foot (where they are), and, since I work everyday, I have to wear my tight-fitting dress shoes. Can you say painful? I actually haven’t worn my regular tennis shoes in quite some time… It’s.. going to be.. comfortable, you could say, to wear my looser fitting tennis shoes again. It’ll be great.

I’ve five more days of work, including today (since it’s just started).

There’s less than five days until Jacki’s plane touches down at Midway. It’ll be four days come 5PM.

9:41

My breakfast this morning consisted of.. chips and salsa, at like six-thirty or so in the morning. I meant to not eat my muffin last night and save it for the morning, but that didn’t happen.

I recall Theresa, one of the awesome Center Court ladies, stating that this past Saturday was the last day Center Court was open. I went to put money on my card for laundry and saw that I have a brand new eight-some bonus points on my account. If I’ve got these bonus points but no Center Court to spend them on.. I am going to be very unhappy.

I moved into my new room last Wednesday and Thursday afternoon/nights. It was.. fun… I hate moving so much, and I just went from one hall to another. Going from one place of residence to another place of residence with a completely different address will suck even more, I imagine. Hopefully I find an apartment or something near IIT. Assuming I can find an apartment. I think I said this way back, but that’s my next major goal in life, get an apartment. Shouldn’t it be something like.. oh.. I dunno, do well in school? Get a good job? etc. Yeah, I guess, but that’s not what it is, so.. yeah.

I believe about half my clothes were clean, but I threw them all in the laundry at once anyway, bed sheets/blankets and all. All together it was four washers and four dryers worth of stuff. I don’t know of washer nine was being stupid, but I put my two blankets in there and they were still soaking after an hour and a half cycle. Granted, they WERE abnormally wet coming out of the washer, but.. hm.. I don’t know what could have caused either situation. The crayon blanket seemed the wettest, so I stuck that one in washer eight which had proved itself earlier with my dress cltohes, and put an hour on it. About four hours later (I forgot about it while talking to Jacki), it was perfect. Because I didn’t have enough money on my card to put the binary blanket in a separate dryer (I was afraid washing them together would turn out not well again), and because the TechCash site didn’t seem to have the “Make a Deposit” button at the moment (I don’t understand?), I ended up draping that blanket over Tim’s clothes rack and putting a pot under the corner of the blanket that was dripping the most. Hoepfully it’s done drying by the time I get home…

I do not look forward to folding all of my clothes or making my bed. I should really be writing this documentation for my scripts as well as trying to figure out why the script aborted when I ran the thing Friday night..

9:53

I finally shaved my mustache… I think it’s been like two months? It was getting pretty bad… and itchy..

Itchy itchy tasty.. I wanna play Resident Evil again..

I ordered a new mousepad from Newegg Thursday night. I forgot to order the video cables for my laptop at the same time. The laptop uses standard vga (dvi, maybe?), but doesn’t have S-Video out or anything else common, instead it’s got a nice little mini-RCA jack that does video and stereo sound together. It would be great if I had this cable, because then I could stream movies off of AndrAIa and play them on any TV on campus.

10:01

How palindromic!

10:12

I will receive a paycheck for $745 a week from Wednesday, on the twentieth. The day that Jacki leaves Chicago. The day before classes. The day before Phil’s twenty-first birthday. That’s a fair amount of money that will be nice because I’m sure I’m going to spend a lot of money while Jacki is here. It’ll be worth it.

10:27

[...]
10:34

[...]

12:32

1976: Lakeside Mall opens with four anchor stores: Hudson’s, Lord & Taylor, Sears, and J.C. Penney. The mall also features a movie theater and ice rink, the latter of which was eventually replaced with a water slide.

..water slide?

Re: Sterling Heights

As of the census of 2000, there were 124,471 people, 46,319 households, and 33,395 families residing in the city. The population density was 3,397.0 per square mile (1,311.6/km²). There were 47,547 housing units at an average density of 1,297.6/sq mi (501.0/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 90.70% White, 1.30% African American, 0.21% Native American, 4.92% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.34% from other races, and 2.50% from two or more races. 1.34% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

Ancestries: Polish (19.0%), German (14.4%), Italian (12.5%), Irish (5.7%), English (5.0%), Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac (4.8%), and American/US (4.0%).

Jacki and I were bemoaning the.. prevalance and nature of Chaldeans this morning (’cause we’re racists fucks like that). Granted, it’s been eight years since the census, so a lot could have changed since then.

WHAT! Didn’t Mr. Suggs get promoted to Principal of.. crap, what elementary did Paul get transferred to (it started with a ‘C’?)? Wiki says that UCS operates twenty-nine elementary schools, but only lists eight… Browning isn’t on there.. but apparently Mr. Suggs is currently the principal of Bruce Collins Elementary.

I’m pretty sure Beacon Tree is that stupid huge one.. Bigger than Ford, if I recall correctly?

12:44

Why does MALOW get its own wiki page when none of the other junior highs do? At least all of the highschools have wiki pages.

The summer of 2008, demolition took place in the school to fix the walls and outdated classrooms to better the learning experience.

Many of these same modifications have taken place at the school’s sister school, Dwight D. Eisenhower high school, which was dedicated in 1972 and has the same floor plan. The buildings are so alike, in fact, that in the early 70s, the same lockers in both buildings had interchangeable combinations.

Interchangeable coms!? Hahaha, Wikipedia, I love you.

Hah, Stevenson calls Ford’s pool home. Take that.

In 2004, the school’s locally-famous circle drive was modified to make way for construction on the new Performing arts center on the Clinton River Road front of the school. The performing arts center dramatically modifies the aesthetic front of the school. It officially opened in the Fall of the 2007-2008 school year and holds 800 patrons featuring modern touches and state of the art lighting and sound systems. The new center debuted officially with the musical, Into the Woods, in the December 2007.

Locally famous, eh? Perhaps for the end-of-the-year senior circle that would back up traffic on Clinton River.. =P

Nicknames

---

Henry Ford II High School was known locally as “Suicide High”. Although the name is fading, October 22nd 2007 marked the 10th anniversary of a series of 5 suicides that took place between June and October of 1997. on October 22nd 1997, A 15 year old freshman was the last to take her life.

Henry Ford II High School also has many novelty nicknames, such as “H.F. Two” and “H.F. Deuce”, which are variations of namesake Henry Ford II

HAHA WHAT I remember when that.. Brian? kid took his life in October of 2002, my freshman year. That was a pretty weird day.

OH MAN! The school’s website has barely changed from when I used to work on it! And… the opening flash has a picture of.. !! Is that Poop-Pants?! Her name was.. Rachel something or other, I’d have to break out a yearbook but they’re all at home. Anyway, story has it that she pooped her pants at a party or something and thus transferred schools for a year or two… RACHEL SPICA HAHAHA I just remembered. =P And then Brittney from S.O. is in another picture. Weird… I think the girl sitting next to Poop-Pants is.. Erin Glaros? Looks kinda like her. Haha, I remember when she first transferred to Browning Elementary and David Shirley had the biggest crush on “Elmo Girl” as he called her, due to her Elmo backpack, I think? Oh, the good ol’ days, eh?

Oof.. not feeling too well after eating this turkey pita sandwich thing.. The hunger I felt did feel kind of off… but.. still.. I’d rather have food in me than not.. I just hope it stays in me.. I really need to get to bed early tonight.. If only to feel well..

Going to the bike shop today after work with Casey to get a new chain for my bike. Old chain was rusted fairly nicely, so.. off it goes. Next I need to borrow Joy’s bike pump and inflate my tires. Then perhaps I could ride to the lake and such!

14:06

Linux-ts is really slow today for some reason. Makes my tests take a lto longer than they should.. I’ve even had to stick afew more delays in the one.. I am so tired right now it’s not even funny.. I’ve done this before and it’s never been this bad… Right after the bikeshop I need to fold laundry, make my bed, and go to sleep right away. If Jacki’s on I should apologize to her.. maybe giber her one of the things I wrote? Probably. Definitely. She deserves something for me skirting (?) out like this…

It iwll be nice to have a new chain for my bike, but will I ever actually use my bike? Hopefully someone organizes like bike rides or something, that would be pretty awesome.

14:26

I just gotta keep myself doing something for the next two hours and twenty minuntes. I hope these last days of work go by quickly. Half the reason I’m falling asleep here is because there’s nothing to do.

I’m actually writing this out by hand at the moment. I’ve got AutoTester running through both scripts and that should take some time. I’m writing on the back of the Race Judicata information packet.

Besides, when linux-ts is slow, these scripts work flawlessly. I whipped up some quick documentation earlier today and that is just about done too…

14:36

[...]

14:46

[...]

14:56

Oh god, did I just get all poetic? I haven’t done that since… oh.. the eighth grade.

This is keeping me up pretty well, physical pen on paper action. It’s good stuff it is.

So this whole eight hours a day thing definitely ain’t that bad once ya get used to it. I could easily see this week flying (and it damn well better).

But the day may come when you got something to lose
And just when you think you’re done payin’ dues
You say to yourself “dear god what have I done”
And hope it’s not too late ’cause tomorrow may never come
Reach for the Sky
’cause tomorrow may never come

15:09

Ah it’s been too long since I’ve written.. like old-fashioned pen and paper. It’s a good feeling. I feel much more expressive (albeit slower..) this way. Too bad it’s all going to get typed up anyway.

For some reason half these ‘search’ buttons are being hit… They get focused, but not hit or activated I guess the word would be. This is temporarily remedied by my hitting enter, but since this script is supposed to be automated while no one’s here, this is going to be a problem.

15:47

One more hour.

16:40

I think… I think I spent the last hour eighty-percent asleep..

Emailed in sick yesterday. Received a bitchy response about how shirking responsibilities is a disruption. I get to work today and I have seven new emails: three are PNN, one is about me calling in sick. No new Work Requests. Huh, kinda hard to disrupt things due to being unable to fulfill my responsibilities when I HAVE NOTHING TO WORK ON. Thanks, guy.

[...]So because I got no sleep I am sitting here practically dead, falling asleep to music.. I did download like nine new episodes of This Week in Tech and Paranormal Cafe, and TWiT kept me awake quite well. I started falling asleep when I put the music on.. ..am I conditioned to fall asleep to music? I should take a nap after work today. [...] but I can’t keep going to bed so late. I have to come to work seven more days. I have to pretend to do things for seven more days..

Speaking of pretending to do things.. I was actually motivated to work on my script this morning. It was cool. Mostly got some organizational stuff done.

12:16

Four hours, forty-five minutes. I got breakfast this morning, bacon and eggs. Kind of a small portion.. ok, a really small portion, but it was still nice to eat something in the morning. Got to work at eight..

Got my paystub today.. ~$390 deposited in the bank yesterday. My next paycheck should be a fair amount more, even with the sick day yesterday. Doesn’t quite look like I’ll be able to afford Ophiuchus any time soon… I just hope Andy holds out for what could possibly be another year..

[...]

Did they… just get pizza for the office?

[...]

This font makes that smiley look so goofy…


By Tony Lademan (2008)
for Law bulletin Pub...
Software Qualtiy Ass...


12:31

12:39

I like how I can sit here, type a bit in notepad, scroll around AutoTester, hit F5, sit back for ten to fifteen minutes, refresh the log file, rinse and repeat, and make it look like I’m working. It’s pretty nice. Actually, no, it’s terrible. I wish I had something real to do. Something other than this stupid script that I’ve been working on for almost two weeks now? Ugh. It’s so boring. Give me real work.. Though I know I’m not going to get any.. what with seven days of employment left…

13:18

I love when I make stupid little mistakes such as not assiging a value to the correct variable… Ugh..

So I’ve realized that the more I wrte about [...], the less I write about anything else, and therefore the less content you guys get. Which I assume you guys care about or something. Correct me if I’m wrong. I could uncensor all that… but where would the fun be?

Ugh.. here I go again.. falling asleep with two and a half hours left… My goal was to get into work early so that I could leave early and therefore a) not be as tired when I leave and b) be able to get to sleep sooner..

Stirb nicht vor mir..

Or I could run the test and go to the bathroom, which I’ve been doing for the past week or so… :/

13:59

Awesome, my first nosebleed in ages. Actually, also my first nosebleed in any sort of work environment. Good thing I was already in the bathroom at the time…

14:01

Two hours… I am so falling asleep it’s not cool… totally worth staying up all night.. Can’t make me think otherwise. I wish I could subsist on less sleep.. That would be great.. or that I had enough time in the day to take a nice long sleep AND still do what I do every day (which is, admittedly, not much..). Oh well. Just gotta live with what I’ve got, eh?

14:16

Ugh.. I keep falling asleep.. This script is like.. just about perfect now.. What else can I do.. Test it and fall asleep to it? :/

I bet you that I will have no real email until like Monday of next week… I bet that’s how it will work! Because it is crazy slow time just before Tony leaves. God this sucks. GIVE ME SOMETHING TO DO!

14:30

14:51

Ugh.. getting there.. an hour.. I can do this…

15:01

Why did I have to drink so much water? Now I have to pee..

15:31

I should really bring something to do tomorrow.. and next week… something inconspicuous though… Too bad I sit so close to the freaking walk way. If I were… even where Conor is, things would be perfect…

15:50

[...]

Sample Resignation Letters

11:57

[...] It’s very exciting. I’ll be out of here. While it is a GREAT place to work for, I wish I had more responsibility and less down time. It’s fucking boring. I’d rather be bored at home doing nothing than bored at work and feeling awkward because I’m getting paid to pretend to look busy. That’s not… work, that’s cheating.

Namon at least got most of Office 2000 back on here. No access for me, but that’ll just be even more reason for Jon to upgrade me. Though all signs point to him not doing so. Namon started saying.. some things about Jon. I don’t know true any of them are, but I could see them.. maybe.. Namon also told me about how he went to Alabama State for an education but came out of it with a kid. Actually.. he mentioned that most of his kids were mistakes. I never found out if he has one or more baby mamas.

He seems like a cool guy. Dad is from Southfield? Loves hockey. Loves the Wings. His sixteen year old kid lives with mother in Mobile, Alabama but visits every summer. The went to see some Blackhawks games a while back. I’ve been meaning to go to a Blackhawks game, preferably when their facing the Wings.

This is my first 7-11 run in ages, and only because I was starving and didn’t have time to hit Center Court for lunch this morning. It literally took like three minutes. I wonder if when whoever looks at my fob record they’ll wonder why I fobbed out at 12:10ish and why I fobbed right back in like three minutes later. Should I really have even bothered? I get paid a hefty sum on Friday. I get paid a heftier sum two weeks after that, which is also the second day of school. I figured I’d take the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before school off to get things in order. [...]

I grabbed two string cheeses at 7-11. I am excited to eat those.

[...]

I am so cold right now, I don’t know why. I’m moving my leg a ridiculous amount.

12:28

[...]

Why am I so cold?

I really need to lift.. something. Anything. Helping the kids move in two weeks ago proved to me a) how much I need to do it and b) how easy it can be. They’re like.. a million (twelve) years young, right? Well, their suitcases or whatever were like five (one and a half, maybe) times their size, so Casey and I took them up to the third floor of South hall for the kids. Well, my arms were damn sore, but it only took like, what, ten to fifteen minutes to move all that? I need to find some sort of physical labor that would tax my upper body without me really thinking expressly about working out.

1:03

Hm.. actually got some work done on my AutoTester script.. It’s gettin’ there.. I really hope I’m not doing this for the next two and a half weeks.

Everyday around 10AM, 1PM, and 4PM I get an email. Everytime I think it’s something real, someone trying to contact me, and I feel a little less lonely and bored here at work. But then I see a new emailed in the PNN/SII folder and realize it’s just the automated PNN to SII Submission Batch Process…

Guilty pleasure admission: I like Beyonce’s Irreplaceable. Also t.A.T.u (I need more of their songs).

I hope this Bawls (in a can, ew) helps me stay awake today.

Namon was bitching about how I was on an NT machine as my main work machine, that it wouldn’t help me with my schooling (what? I’m thinking he meant like work experience for school or something? I’m not sure). He asked me how I could use this machine and not get frustrated. “It’s only a summer job.” Then we shared a terrorist fist-jab.

All of my name searches in AccessPlus are for “Rademacher” because it is not only fairly rare in the database (there’s still results, though, which is fun), but because I can type it completely with my left hand (with a swift slide to the right for the ‘m’).

Man, I really hope whoever looks at this script after I’m done and gone appreciates my comments and stuff. I should spent a whole day one of these next weeks commenting the shit out of this and put it in my DSR as “commented script to make it more understandable to others.”

1:23

1:43

Yum yum string cheese.

Ooh… you touch my tralala…
Mmmm… my ding ding dong..
(mmm..!)

I just stuck a little header on my script

#By Tony Lademan (2008)
#For Law Bulletin Publishing Company
#Quality Assurance department

It’s within my rights, yeah? I mean, not that I’d have any use for this script outside of LBPC, but still.. it’s not a bad idea to have my name attached to things I’ve written.

Speaking of things I’ve written, I need to get on integrating MSN and ICQ support into that plugin I’m modifying. I’ve already had two requests (one for each) over the weekend, so I should probably get on that tonight. It’s not too hard, just gotta figure out how to recompile the Python egg.. <_<

2:06

Ehhh… my stomach feels funny. Maybe I shouldn’t have let that cheese sit at room temperature for almost an hour and a half..

2:18

I put in this LOGGEDIN variable and check so that JUST THIS wouldn’t happen:

Sorry , Invalid Username/Password or Inactive Account!

It seems that logging in too fast/often results in the account being locked for a short period of time.

Oh look, there’s a Work Request in my name for Office Pro to be reinstalled. Namon, you’re a cool guy, really. He’s talking with Jon right now.. They’re… going to wipe the disk? Time to back up my stuff to the SQA server…

2:38

Whoo.. Running Win2000 on a Pentium 2 with 256mb of RAM… Why is the p2 mounted veritcally? Why is the heatsink so stupid looking? Namon’s gonna drop XP on my old machine (a p3). Shouldn’t take too long. Worst case I’ll have it back sometime tomorrow.

I can’t install AutoTester on this machine because the cdrom isn’t hooked up and the IDE cable in there doesn’t have a second connection on it.

FUN STUFF

2:51

Oops I didn’t have to move the machines, he’s going to do it right here, oh well. WinXP here I come.

3:00

My old machine has a 10GB harddrive. That’s special.

Namon commented on how fast I type earlier today.

Is it really already three? This day is flying.

Been listening to a a lot of.. hard? music lately at work. Time to give the Final Fantasy Piano Collections another go. IV’s is the best. I need to play it on the DS.. Got somewhat far on the PlayStation, but I refuse to play it again on the SNES (on my Wii) due to the shitty translation job. Though the SNES version has dialogue during the flashack in the intro, neither the PlayStation or the DS versions have that.. Kind of odd, I thought.

Casey suggested we go see Dark Knight at the IMAX again with Phil this weekend. I am excited. I wonder if we will be playing D&D? Alex is gonna be at home for the weekend I’m pretty sure and I don’t know what Jeremy is doing.

3:13

Seventeen minutes until my boss leaves for the day.

Typing this script up in Notepad with no way to test it is really lame. I don’t have the drive to work on it at the moment..

I just got really tired, too… Ugh.. stupid guarana crashes… asldkfsl;fj

Manjot has taken to emailing a friend or a family member or something during work hours. I can’t tell who the recipient is, it’s all in Indian.

I am thinking of buying Mario Kart Wii sometime soon. I miss racing online and just racing in general. Plus the time trials, that’s where it’s really at in that game.

3:42

AND HE’S OUTTA HERE

The name you chose for this PC earlier in the setup
TESTPC7
is already in use by a machine on this network.

Please choose another:
TESTPC007

I’m sure Namon won’t mind.

Jon told me to ask Namon for another IDE cable to hook up the cdrom in the 2000 machine I’m using at the moment. I don’t think I’ll do that..

4:02

Both Manjot and Mustafa are out of here. Another hour fifteen for me. I’m falling asleep. This can’t end well… Time IS flying, though, so maybe I can just make the most of it somehow.

Goddamnit! Got another PNN/SII email.. I was hoping someone finally moved the CourtBriefs fixes to production so I could do one last final test and send out the last approval email… BUT NO

Hm, I wonder how traffic jammed people would take to me blasting classical or piano music? That’s be pretty awesome. I used to go to/from work last summer blasting the local classical station, got some weird looks. I was a cool guy. Not that my car speakers can really blast, per se.

Speaking of my car, I really need to see why I have a ticket on it. I was told that, despite my being in the wrong lot, I would be fine because my car is currently disabled. I should also reenable it. Sometime this week or next week, for sure.. Ugh.. So much to do…

Tatyana’s out. It’s just me and Namon whenever he gets back and decides to finish the XP install. I can install XP for personal use and all, but I imagine there’s some network settings he has to give it so that it behaves properly on the LBPC network. Perhaps.

Conor didn’t come in today and we didn’t get an email from Jon saying “Conor will be out today.” Hm.. Namon said that Conor doesn’t know what he wants to do. He’s been here two years, he’s been a chef, and he is/has researching/ed theology. Hm.

I wonder how old both Mustafa and Conor are. They have little bits of gray hair and Conor has some thinning going on at the top of his head. Conor’s wife (maybe? he has a ring) had a baby two months ago. I.. really don’t want to be like either of them.. They’re both fairly.. nondescript and just.. here to work. The devs seem to be pretty cool, though. Joking around with each other, always talking to each other, ALWAYS HAVING STUFF TO DO. INTERESTING STUFF, TOO. Shortly after I got hired there was an opening for a Java dev. I’m pretty sure the employee handbook stated that I have to be in my current position some arbitrary amount (longer than I would be employed for anyway) of time before I can move around. And besides, the Java they’re doing here is probably far advanced compared to what I know (though I imagine I’d have a much better chance of understanding it if I had actually done any work for CS441 this summer…).

Nevermind, I think Namon’s outta here too. He just came over, did some stuff with the install then turned off the monitor and left. His shirt was untucked where previously I think it had been tucked in? Perhaps.

IT’S JUST ME GUYS. ME AND KELLY, BUT I DON’T TALK TO HIM ‘CAUSE HE’S ACROSS THE ROOM. SILLY DEVELOPERS.

4:15

4:26

The Final Fantasy IV Celtic Moon disc is actually pretty good too, a neat take on the game’s music.

I really need to reboot into Windows and get some more podcasts for these next two weeks.. I’m sure there’s at least two more shows of This Week in Tech to pick up as well as a few Paranormal Cafes. Should keep me entertained for all of… three days, maybe?

I hope you guys like long posts. Really, how many of you read ALL of the last one, and are reading ALL of this one? That’s a lot of time that you could be doing something more productive with your life. You should feel bad.

4:46

Some of these Chrono Trigger remixes sound slightly different on my Zune.. I wonder if it’s just because I haven’t listened to them in some time?

4:52

I need to grab more remixes from ocremix.org. I’m going through my Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger ones right now and I forgot how GOOD some of them are. Damn. Not to mention the compilation projects.

I am really tempted to take one of these AutoTester One discs home and make a copy of it. The program is damn neat and I really wanna play with it more.

Things on my “to order” list:

• A Wii VGA Cable (~$50)
• A new keyboard (~$50)
• A mini RCA audio/video cable for my laptop (~$??)

5:09

Time to put this up and get out of here! Or email it to myself so that I can proof read it when I get home. Why are journal entries the only thing I proofread? Well, journal entries and messages to people, but I don’t proofread school papers or anything of that sort. Oh well, time to get movin’.

Because this whole fiasco took about three hours or so, I wasn’t able to get lunch… So here I am starving with forty minutes left on the clock… I am going straight to Chipotle after work and getting another big-as-my-head burrito. It will be delicious and filling.

I definitely have a lot more money in my bank account than I thought, so I can totally justify buying this burrito. I might also be able to justify a new keyboard.. After using the laptop for the weekend, I realized how shit my five year old keyboard is. The space bar only works in the middle, a lot of keys either don’t hit or hit multiple times.. It’s annoying. I found a neat keyboard on newegg that’s about $50, same exact key layout as my current one (which is great, I love this layout), glows just the same, but looks to be of higher quality than mine. Thing is, a wired Apple keyboard is also $50, and that thing is sexy. I have heard of some issues with the Apple keyboard and Linux, but I’d have to do more research.

Half an hour..

I’ve been spending my free time doing a lot of… nothing. Well, nothing social or interesting, just playing around with my computers.. I got Skype working on the laptop, full webcam and front mic support too! Tested it with David last night, works pretty well. Someone Skype me at sugar_death sometime ((

A while back Nicole linked me to a Youtube of some dude who took a picture of himself once per day for like.. a couple of years? I’m thinking about doing something like that. It’d be pretty neat. I look like shit in one of the test pictures I took Sunday morning after I installed Cheese.

I can totally camwhore now that I’ve got the mic working too.. <_<

I really hope my boss gets me a new machine… an XP machine. How many of our clients are really using NT still, anyway? How many of our apps are web based? The majority of them, right? That’s OS independent there. Give me an XP machine already!

I feel so disconnected without email. It’s pretty awesome. I can’t see if I’m supposed to test these three work requests in production that I’ve been working on. I can’t… see anything. I can’t send my boss a Daily Status Report.. Haha, that’ll be fun to explain tomorrow. “Yeah, he said he was coming back, but he didn’t.”

I should have quite a bit more money come this Friday, too. And then two weeks after that… and two weeks from that… I won’t be broke-ass for some time! It’ll be.. exciting. What will I do with that money? Buy food.

Ah! I forgot to grab my Costco card while at home… :/

I wonder if I should be saving these to my desktop as I type them? I haven’t deleted any yet, I’ve got two for yesterday and one for today. I can really delete them after I post them.. Laziness will fuck me over, watch.

Twenty minutes.. Go me for getting into work fifteen minutes late, thus leaving fifteen minutes late.

My timesheet has three hours unallocated to any Work Request. That’s a fair amount of time that I was watching Mr. Dude play around on my computer.

The AutoTester script that I was working on screws up massively when I make it start searching… It’s a pain in the ass. Actually, no, what it is is that the developers set the address for a ‘Terms of Use’ link on this ONE page to $CURRENT_ADDRESS + “#” instead of linux-ts/test/apweb/terms.cfm. Ugh. I should email Melanie about it so she could fix it quickly..

OH WAIT

Gay.

Fifteen minutes.

When leaning forward, my bangs (can they really be called bangs at this length? I part my hair and they’re mostly off to the side) fall forward and hit me on the mustache area. I can almost get them in my mouth if I try (well that sounded dirty).

Twelve.

I like how I can write and write while bored at work but I can’t arse myself to even open WordPress to begin writing while bored at home.

I really should have left Dude Man at my computer and gone to get lunch anyway. The hunger pains were pretty bad for a while there… but they’re gone now for some reason. I don’t understand it.

Man I love the YTMND soundtracks. Number eight has The Lonely Man Theme, which some of you may recognize as the end credits music for the old Incredible Hulk TV show.

ALSO AXEL F. I think I may have mentioned this before?

Four.

Lights off in the server room.

Lots of TV themes.. Cheers, Flintstones, Bill Nye, MacGuyver, The Price is Right, and a few others?

Out of here. Big ass burrito time!

I missed work Tuesday morning, but went in Tuesday afternoon. Erika had Victor and I putting up table tents (the little foldy guys you see on the tables in the cafeteria) advertising that if you register early you could win one of two iPod Touches. I arrived at work thirty minutes past three, but I’m going to give myself an extra thirty minutes because SSV is warm as hell on a clear day. Stupid people building buildings with glass all over the place. It’s like a greenhouse, only for melting people instead. Especially the fifth floor. Psych is cancelled tomorrow, so that’s even more time I can work. I should hopefully be able to get up early enough to work from 9-11:15, go to Software Engineering, get lunch, then work anywhere from one to two until five. That’ll make up Tuesday quite nicely.

Odd: IIT hasn’t cashed the check I gave them for the second part of the housing deposit.

I need to check out the Dreamhost Panel more often! Apparently I can install four different Google apps onto sugardeath.net as well as use Gmail for all hosted email accounts. Like, actually have a gmail interface, but at mail.sugardeath.net instead of gmail.com. I dunno if I’d do the gmail thing, at least not for the main sugardeath domain, but it’s still pretty cool. I’m gonna play around with the calendar now. Hm. I did the calendar thing and it looks like it’s gonna install all of it. But it looks like I can easily disable a bunch of them if need be. I even get Google Docs! WTF Awesome!

Anyway, I feel better now that I’ve discovered how little the monthly payments will ream me (even if I don’t get a discount like I do with the one year and two year payments). This means that I can also take out money to payback Health Services and hopefully not overdraw / cause the housing check to bounce.

The psych make-up is gonna be emailed to me at 1:30 on Friday. I’m taking an extra hour of lunch from work to take this exam. I should really get to studying tomorrow (today). I slept a lot today, kinda missed most (all) of my classes. It was such a nice day, too! 70 degrees fahrenheit!

I have $119 in bonus points remaining on my account. This is because I rarely visited Global Grounds or went got extra food above the meal plan from Center Court (or even just visited Center Court beyond the two transferrable (lunch?) meals per week). I think I will get a salad or something in addition to two hamburgers and a pop from Center Court tomorrow. Stick the salad in the fridge, eat it when I get hungry again around eleven or twelve at night.

I have two more breakfasts this week. Because I slept through both lunch and dinner on Sunday and lunch today, I get a total of three extra meals during the week. I used one breakfast Monday morning, and will try to use the remaining on Thursday and Friday.

Update faster DNS! I wanna play with my calendar and other things!

I really need to start looking up sources for my com paper and figure out what the hell is expected of me for my precalc paper. Seriously, wtf? Papers in math class? The topic I chose for my com paper is basically “email and its effects on other forms of communication in the workplace.” “Other forms of communcation” being memos, bulletins, gossip at the watercooler / at lunch. Also the (in)formality of email and whether the in(formality) of other forms of communication have changed as a result of the introduction of email. Seven pages. I think we need eight sources or so, half of them have to be hard sources (i.e. non-internet sources). That’ll be fun. This will be an insanely dry topic that I will have to somehow stretch out into seven pages. Are there even that many sources that discuss this? I should really start working on this.

Also, what the hell is up with my CS487 group project? I emailed the defacto leader of the group about when we can get together to work on the next deliverable and he never replied to me. OK, cool. Shouldn’t we be coding by now? I am still confused as to how/why we’re going to interface PHP with Java. Also, why Java for a game? Let’s just go C++. Cross-platform hoo haa, that’s what. I appreciate it, but… Java? For a game? The prof sent out our current grades on the group stuff. He also mentioned that a member or two has indicated that another member is not pulling his weight. Excuse me for being sick. At least I emailed the group to let them know about it. Perhaps I should do those self-evals o_O They just seem dumb, though. Do a self-eval on your contribution to this plan of the design of your game. What. “I contributed these sections. I wrote words. Perhaps I could have chosen better words in certain parts of the text, perhaps I could have phrased things differently.” Sure, OK. No? I also need to do a self-eval for the last group presentation in com. I understand those kind of self-evals: “I talked to fast, I didn’t look at the audience enough, I tripped over this phrase.”

Speaking of com. Supposedly we’re going to start presenting on our papers next Wednesday, despite the fact that he extended the deadline for the proposal of the paper topic to last Friday. Meaning, most people haven’t even started their papers (perhaps even their research?) because the majority of the class turned in their proposal’s ON FRIDAY. We are kinda behind in the class, though, so maybe he’ll give us some extra time. Gehrs is usually pretty cool. He basically gave me a free A for ITM460 last semester. I approved of that.

Bauer called at 1:37PM on Tuesday, despite our agreement that 1PM was the time for the conference. He did most of the talking and I did a lot of “mmhmm, ok, yeah.” He’s recommending the CIS degree because then, if I choose to do so later on, I can go into a Master’s program for the full CS program. With an ITM major I would only be able to go into a Master’s for ITM. CIS requires a minor, which will be ITM. He says that I should have enough electives to take a second minor, but I think I’d rather not take two minors. He gave me a recommended schedule for Fall semester, but said nothing about Summer. He did email me a list of the ITM minors (which are slightly different than the ITM Major specializations), so I guess I’ll be choosing my summer classes from those, seeing as how I only need to take one more specified CS class for CIS. There are about two CS electives and three or so CS Technical electives. He suggested I talk to the Career Management Center and give them my resume because I said that I was interested in a summer job. I should do that soon.

Why do I feel like I’ve already this? I haven’t. The last mention I made was on Sunday.

Anyway, with CIS I have to take Physics 1 and Chem 1, but they shouldn’t be too terrible. I can take Physics 1 with Corey next semester if our schedules line up.

Maybe I talked to someone about this? Incredibly in depth? Not like me…

The ‘wake’ light on my alarm clock is flickering.

Figuring out how I am going to pay for my website has actually relieved me a lot more than it should have. I should be relieved by doing the important things, like studying for my Psych exam, working on my papers, not sleeping through classes, clearing my holds so I can register for Summer semester and soon Fall, getting out more, working more so that I have money to spend on the important things: like the soap and shampoo that I am running out of; balls, I am going to be incredibly tight on money until my next paycheck comes in… Looks like I won’t be paying Health Services their $10 until I get paid. They can wait. It’s only $10. Now, if they accepted credit card, I would have paid when they handed me the freaking pills. But alas.

The Google Apps site says that Google Email is being “updated” and that it’ll take up to an hour. I click on ‘Email’ and there is a button labeled “Disable Email on this domain.” That does not sit well with me because of the Dreamhost warning:

IMPORTANT: You need to register at Google Apps for your Domain, then re-create all your email accounts with them first, or your current email will break.

Seeing as how I did not choose to install Google Email, though, I should be fine, correct? We’ll find out come the morning.

Practically all of swads is going to the Spring Formal this Saturday. Money and lack of interest have prevented me from buying a ticket. I went last year. Dances really aren’t my thing. Also, I’ve got no one to go with. I’m sure that if there were someone that wanted to go with me and I were slightly interested in them, I would jump up and buy a ticket. But as it is, I shouldn’t be spending the money anyway. I’ll just play video games or research while everyone else is out… having fun…

Nah, it’ll be cool. I play grindan gaems on PSO with Paul S. Douchebag. It’ll be fun. Like old times on when we played online on the Gamecube. Fuck, I love PSO. Especially when it’s free

Besides, I’d need to borrow another fancy pants jacket thinger. I borrowed one from Noah for the formal last year, but I’m nearly 100% sure that Noah is going with his girl this year (hey, if I were dating her and she wanted to go, I wouldn’t say no; also, rhyming).

Enjoy yet another huge ass post (what’s an ass post?).