S’Been A While
I think things are getting a lot better, all around. I'm somehow managing to keep my apartment AND put food in my belly! Granted, my main diet has consisted of peanut butter and sometimes jelly sandwiches, tuna salad sandwiches, and ramen (with ingredients, like peas and carrots and potatos and cheap sausages/hot dogs; so I'm still getting important stuffs and not wasting away on terrible food), but I figure a budget of $40-$50 a month for food for a poor college kid is NOT a bad deal.
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! :D
- 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 :razz: )
- 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 :razz: ).
- 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 :razz: ).
Gah, five oh-six. I really need to get to bed.
...I mean it.
What?
Apparently I installed this app called the "Honesty Box" on Facebook a while back and totally forgot about it. I don't see the point of it really, but I got this just today (it says twenty-three hours ago, but the notification popped up today):
I'd date you, if you asked. :P But you never will.
I let the person know that I feel like a jerk because of that.
This is going to bother me.. who is it?
Update 3/21/09 @ 7:40PM CDT: That message was apparently sent on Christmas Eve. That makes it less likely that it's who I thought it was. What confuses me is.. who would send that on Christmas Eve? Who would send that? What bothers me is, why did the app take so long to send me the notification?
In other news, spring break has been great. I beat Resident Evil 4 for the second time on Saturday, I think. Started playing "The Mercenaries" minigame again just yesterday, first time in over two years I think (last time I remember playing it was freshman year). It's a pretty fun distraction from... lots of things. But then I found out I had a java assignment that was given to us on the day of the exam (who does that?) and is due by midnight on the last day of spring break (who does that?!). So, that's what Friday and Saturday's time will be spent doing... yay..
Well, time to get to that. I need to get some work done before dinner, hang out a bit with people after dinner (Mario Kart), and then get some more work done.
Freaking A
I finally got mysql-server and mythtv to play together (and with me, and not sexually)! I wiped the old Debian install on Din and tried to install Knoppmyth, but it wouldn't install LILO properly. I never did like LILO, Grub has always handled booting better in my opinion. Easier to use, too. I was then gonna try MythDora, but a Fedora / Red Hat system has never appealed to me... I like Debian-based distros too much, which explains why I just reinstalled Debian and gave it another shot. Worked fine this time. I got the thing running mythfrontend on bootup and everything. Now I just need a TV card to test things with.
I have a slight problem where Debian dumps me to an "oh shit" shell (what's the real name for that thing?) because it can't find /dev/hda. Everything is on /dev/hde, and it knows this, yet one step during bootup is looking for /dev/hda. I can make symbolic links for it and it works fine and everything, but they never stay.. so I have to do this on every bootup. There must be some permanent solution.
The differences between Debian and Ubuntu are amazing. I find that even if I chose to install all the extra Debian things I still had to do some work to get the system useable. Ubuntu, despite being based on Debian, just works. Then again, so did SUSE for the most part.
I uploaded photos of the Delta II rocket launch to Facebook. They'll find their way here eventually, and when they do they'll be in their full 2592x1944 resolution, not the crap by crap res that Facebook scales them too. Not that it matters much, though.. The shots didn't really come out too well.
In other news, I added about eight hours of play time to my KOTOR save. I have become so dark sided that on my character sheet I don't have just have a red glow behind me, I have a red glow that sort of explodes into a fiery.. thing. Black smoke all over the bottom and these hot ember like particles floating up. It's neat. I wonder what it looks like when you become just as light sided.
My car died on me when I was on my way to pick up Dad from the Chevy dealership. Wouldn't start until after Brian came to get me and we had picked up Dad. Thankfully a nice couple helped me push it into the Speedway at Riverland and Van Dyke. It died in the left turn lane JUST before the Riverland driveway. Started up just fine for Dad on his first try and gave us no more problems. He's borrowing my car for the day tomorrow because apparently the van has this big electrical problem and will be at the dealership all day. I hope my car doesn't give us anymore shit.
I just had to make a change to the pipe link plugin.. The regular expression was using \w to catch alphanumeric characters. "/" is not alphanumeric. A quick search on Google revealed that \W will catch nonalphanumerics. Just copy and paste what I had.. change one set of \w's to \W's and all is good.
Vacationing
Just my notes from my notebook, maybe I'll expand at a later date.
Saturday - Sterling Heights, Michigan -> Dayton, Ohio
-Nice freeways/on ramps/exits (white)
-696 into Detroit is always fun
-Japanese steak house
-cook not as engaging as others
-walmart crowd is horrible; got new cargo pants
-Holiday Inn was decent
Sunday - Dayton, Ohio -> Mammoth Caves, Kentucky
-Wright Patterson Air Force Base
-Fighter pilot and Mars IMAX movies
-Dayton Steak 'n' Shake had same layout as Sterling Heights'
-Red Lobster for dinner
-Mammoth Caves hotel (thankfully we didn't get the 'rustic' cabins)
Monday - Mammoth Caves, Kentucky -> Huntsville (?), Alabama
-Lunch at the hotel
-Really cute waitress. Had an emo haircut, hair dyed reddish, cute voice combined with a hot southern accent... braces too (she smiled a lot)
-Caves were cold, dark, wet, dry air (quite humid outside, though)
-Cave crickets (looked like spiders)
-some girl saw brian's robotics shirt: "Thunderchickens? They're from Michigan, right?"
-Southern accent is hilarious (except for the waitress, that was just hot)
-guy in restaurant was louder on his phone than he was to person across the table from him
-Brian drove the first bit to Huntsville, needs to work on driving a bit more...
-Haven't seen any Michigan license plates, a few Illinois and Illinois Temp plates though
-Holiday Inn again. This time with wifi.
-Ate at Chick-Fil-A for dinner, cashier's name was "Destiny."
-I drove by two Piggly-Wiggly's, the name amused David very much.
Done.
Not too sure about that Bio exam... but everything else should be pretty good. I hope. Ergh. Stupid school. At least IIT approved my scholarships for next semester. I have at least one more semester at IIT! -_-
Today is the first day of summer vacation, really. Though I will probably be on campus for another three days. It is currently seventy-two out, at ten in the morning. Forecast calls for "lower 80s." Nice.
So much rain yesterday. It actually started pretty hard again after I got out onto Van Dyke and did not let up until Pontiac, basically. It was sweet.