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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

This is what the summer is for.  Clear my mind.  Focus on other things.  Work, friends, fun (Cedar Point with a bunch of ya?  Either IIT kids in the area (Toro, Phil, Kevin) or teh Michigan kids.  Most likely Michigan kids.  Kevin says the four of us are going to New York to do sock puppet shows from the window of a car, anyway, as that is illegal in New York :-P)), SLEEP.  MY GOD THE SLEEP.  AND THE VIDEO GAMES.  I would like to get back into Final Fantasy XI, but I need to finish Twilight Princess and.. and there is a LAN Party scheduled for the second of June!  Happy!  First real LAN Party since...  a year ago?  Wow.  This makes happy.  Ryan and Raúl (!) will be there.  Bob and Eric, Jesse.  Everyone.  Fragging makes happy.  Tony likes fragging.  Have not played a good twitch game in ages.  I will be home.  In Michigan.  There was a point when I did not want to go home.  When I dreaded the end of the school year and the temporary loss of my new home.  If everything works out as it should, I will be back here in three and a half months, and everything will be cool again.  But everything WILL be cool in less than a week.  There will be Sterling Heights and Shelby Township and possibly a visit to Ford to see all the highschoolers and..  happiness...  I can not wait.

I have a plan.  My exam schedule was previously posted.  I do not have to show up to the scheduled poetry exam because.... well, there is no exam.  I just have to make sure all of my papers are turned in by Wednesday at nine in the morning.  This is what I will do.  I will pack up my car Sunday and Monday with various things.  Books, clothes, speakers+subwoofer, video games, TV?.  I will empty out my desk.  Sort what I need/do not need.  Trash what I do not need.  Pack what I do.  Get dinner at 4:30PM and go to Psych exam (or go to Psych exam and get dinner shortly after 7PM).  Drive home.  Unpack.  Study for bio.  Spend the night.  Study for bio.  Eat some real food for once.  Study for bio.  Relax.  Drive back.  Study for bio.  Sleep.  Study for bio.  Go to Bio exam.  Get everything else in order.  Pack up car and go home Thursday.  Well, going home Thursday depends on what may or may not be happening this weekend.  Is there going to be a final-big-party-woohoo-destressing thing, or is it just going to be a "see y'all next semester?" kinda thing as we part ways for three and a half months?  Either way, actually, I may end up leaving shortly after my bio exam anyway.  Then I have the weekend before I really start have to working.  Use the weekend to relax.  See people. 

Then I will work my ass off all summer.  I will work and work and work.  There are a lot of awesome movies coming out this summer, so it should be a pretty good summer to make some money.

I watched some of the D&D game tonight.  I never did roll a character for this campaign, so I am unable to play.  Maybe next semester.  Alex came up with a really neat concept for this campaign.  Basically, all the player characters are villains and are placed in a big city.  There are factions and groups within the city the player can become part of and.. basically they are given free reign.  It is much more roleplaying based than previous campaigns have been, which actually makes me sad that I never managed to make a character (I think my dice bag fell behind my desk, am not sure). 

I...  I really need to start this eight page research paper on Nazi Eugenics.  Once I get started..  it really will not be that bad.  Then I can do the five page poetry paper on something Sylvia Plath.  Jason and I are studying Java either Saturday or Sunday.  I will read my Psych book at some point this weekend.  I will study Bio any other time AND while at home Monday night/Tuesday.  I really should have started earlier.  But.. what can ya do?  Next semester.  I WILL be on top of things.  I HAVE to be. 

Wait a minute.  My bio exam is Thursday.  I do not have to show up to my Poetry exam on Tuesday.  I have nothing on Wednesday.  I can stay through all of Tuesday AND most of Wednesday!  Huzzah!  That will be a VERY nice relaxing time.  A short little taste of what is to come.  I like.  Relax and read bio book.  Two days.  I can do that.

I am in a good mood.  I am really glad we talked.  I really do not know where things will go from here...  Less than a week left.  Try again next semester?  See where we are at next semester...  But I am glad we talked.  It is a good thing that we were able to explain ourselves to each other.  Comprehension may not be fully there yet, but realization is.  It is a start.  A good start.  And a start is better than nothing.  I think you asked how we let things get so bad?  Probably by not really paying attention and pretending everything was alright.  Live and learn, I guess?

I just... feel good about everything right now.  Especially about exams, for some reason.  I should be feeling hopeless despair because of them.  Especially Java and Bio.  I have not been doing so great in Java lately.  That is my major!  I need to do well.  And I should be worried about Bio because the final is seventy-five percent of my total grade.  I got a C- on the second exam, so I am hoping for a C+ or a B- on the final.  I may not actually get that... but as long as I pass I should be happy.  Bio is not critical to my major.  It is just a requirement.  I need to focus on the math and comp sci classes.  That is where it is at for me.

Wavemon (command line wireless network monitoring tool for Linux) is fun to watch. 

There are a lot of things on my mind, but for the first time in a while I think I am capable of dealing with everything. 

I am smiling.

Actually, I grinned the biggest grin just yesterday.  :-D Apparently David saw Spideman 3 Thursday night.  Before the midnight showings, but that is because he has an in.  The awesome thing, however, was that he went with Alyssa's sister.  I hear they have been talking a lot lately, too.  Much awesomes, dude.

I had a little Yoshi figuine that Jeff gave me last semester clasping the cord for my headphones.  I just now noticed that only a single arm was left on the cord.  His other arm was on my desk.  Yoshi is no where to be found, however.  Poor Yoshi is a lost amputee!  Oh, there he is.  Stupid messy desk.

What am I going to do with all these Bawls bottles?  Roughly twenty-five are sitting on my desk.  Do I take them home with me and return them at Farmer Jack's for ten cents each, or do I just trash them all?  I actually trashed two the other night in a fit of rage.  It took an impressive amount to actually break the bottle!  I threw one in the trash can in the trash room.  Went in.  Threw another and watched as it bounced off the rim, bounced off the cinderblock wall, and bounced twice on the tile floor before finally shattering.  Blue glass everywhere.  Very cool looking.  Should have taken a picture.

Nazi Eugenics.  Paper, go!

I called Linda around 11:15 or so at night (she lives in California, I figure eight on a Sunday isn't such a bad time to call).  Apparently it was =P Her friends were.. doing things..  I couldn't quite hear all that was going on, but it sounded fun.  They were trying to toss her into a pool, too.  I'm jealous, too cold here for swimming!

Apparently I had plans on Saturday night that involved Jason, but were foiled by my pulling a double shift.  Since I had no idea plans had been made, I had anticipated going to Alyssa's and surprising her after work.  And by surprise, I mean slap her three times for playing World of Warcraft (once from me, once from Brittney, once from Spoon).

A bunch of us totally need to hit up the Bangkok Pavilion sometime soon.  The Thai place by school doesn't have the best bangkok chicken, though I hear the rest of their stuff is pretty good.

I had David start transferring his custom Guitar Hero II iso to my computer via hamachi.  It failed about five and half, maybe six, hours into the operation.  So now I'm splitting the iso up into small, bitesized, one-hundred megabyte chunks.  And then I laughed, because there was an option for floppy sized chunks, one point four megabytes of delicious floppy sized archives.  I remembered when a game requiring seven floppies to install (SAM AND MAX!  Never have found that missing seventh floppy) was HUGE.  Now they come on DVDs.  Sometimes two.  With the smaller files, if the transfer fails again, at least I can start up again just about where it failed, instead of trying to retransfer the entire DVD image.

Anyway.  It's almost five.  And staying up late is a bad idea.  I had Sunday and Monday off of work.  I wasted Sunday.  I have lots of shit to do on Monday: read a poem, write a five-page paper, go to the Secretary of State and renew my license / get a vanity plate (SUGRDTH for the win), hang out with someone!, play some video games that I've been neglecting lately, and probably something else.  I was planning on going to Ford to visit all the not-yet-in-college kids, but if I'm going to sleep at five, there's no way I'll be able to get there by seven-twenty.  Maybe another day.

The robotics kids are leaving for another competition on Thursday.  They went to St. Louis a few weeks back, but I think this one is just in Detroit or something.  Then why is it the entire weekend?  I'm confused.

Good night!

I've been working a lot...  a lot...  My sleep schedule is so jacked up right now.  I went to bed one night at five in the morn.  I later woke up at three, one hour before work.  After work I went to bed at seven-thirty.  There was light in our room, from the outside.  Woke up that night at five, went to work at six.  Came home...  didn't sleep until ten, after dropping Brian and David off at MST and Bemis, respectively.  Mom woke me up at three fifty-five to pick them up from Dad's house.  I need to go to sleep very soon so that I can get up for my noon shift tomorrow.  At least it's only a five and a half hour shift.  I'll be able to do stuff that night. 

Speaking of doing things, I NEED to hang out with more people!  Work's been getting in the way, BIG TIME.  Speaking of work, the schedule for next week has finally been uploaded. 

Sat: 12-18:45
Sun: 17:30-01:00
Mon: 19:15-01:00
Tue: 17:30-01:00
Wed: 18:15-01:00

I'm closing four days in a row!

However, I have all day Friday and Saturday night off.  That is to say, let's do things.  I leave on the eleventh.  Next Thursday.  A week from today.

I still need to hang out with Alyssa and Shelby.  Sometime this weekend?  Do either of you read this?  Hm :neutral:

Paul came over tonight, Wednesday night.  We hung out, played Smash Brothers, Wii Sports, kind of watched 4chan and 7chan invade the Hal Turner Show.  Not much happened that I can remember.  We also hit up Borders Books and Best Buy.  Paul bought World War Z and The Alphabet of Manliness as well as Elebits from Best Buy.  I couldn't find any D&D books in Borders, but I did find all the Death Note mangas.  The first book went through maybe six of the episodes.  There were nine books.  Only twelve episodes have been released so far.  Probably thirteen either today or tomorrow.

Earlier in the day, after I picked up Brian and David, I got a new pair of headphones from Best Buy.  My old ones kind of crapped out on me.--My foot is asleep right now.  I do not like the feeling of pins and needles--They sounded as if someone had gone in and enabled the Sound Blaster Live! effects.  It was doing weird stuff.  Brian said that all he had to do was wiggle the cable a bit to get it sounding normal.  I used it as an excuse to get a new pair of totally sweet ass headphones.  I love 'em.

I can't hear anything with them on ^_^

I started playing Phantasy Star Online on the Gamecube again.  Phantasy Star Universe wasn't quite what I thought it'd be, and I just found out about user-run servers for PSOGC.  Totally awesome.  Apparently they also fixed the download quest problem that Sega and Sonic Team broke as well as enabling the Parasitic Gene: Flow drop that Sonic Team denied us.

It feels good to play that game again.  Too bad PSO doesn't recognize the Wii's wireless hardware.  I've heard that using a USB->LAN adapter on the Wii will allow the Gamecube LAN and online games to go online, but I need to look into it more.  For now, I'm stuck lugging my Gamecube and Broadband Adapter back to school with me.

You know what's funny?  Looking at the setup in our family room:
Two Wiis
Two Wiimotes
Two Gamecubes
Two or three corded Gamecube controllers
Two wireless Gamecube controllers
One Gamecube with the Gameboy Player
The other with an ethernet cable sticking out the side
Two Playstation 2s
Four Playstation 2 controllers
One Playstation 2 Guitar Hero Cherry SG controller (Limited edition; better than the crappy red one and the lame black and white one)
Various DVD cases for games belonging to any of the six afforementioned systems.
Cables all over the place.
A tennis ball
and a Kleenex box.

These headphones are great.

There are several songs that make me feel.... nostalgic, if you will.  They bring back memories of whatever I was doing at the time I first heard them or listened to them quite a bit.

Example:
Dragoste Din Tei, Pachelbel's Ganon (yes, Ganon), and Fluß der Liebe bring me back to a night... last February I believe.  Early February.  Ah!  The week of winter break!  My computer was in Dad's office because we had a LAN Party that week.  I was up kinda late that night, working on website things.  Trying to not think about Megan.  These three songs I kept playing, as I had just recently acquired them and liked them quite a bit.  That was also the night I installed WordPress 2.0 on my website and tweaked the included theme a bit.  I had been using WordPress for quite a bit since MovableType went pay-to-play, er -use.  WordPress 2.0, however, was a BIG step up from the previous version I had been using.  Everything just worked.  It was looked nice, and it was nice.

Songs like Through Glass, Perfect Situation, Make Damn Sure, Tell Me Baby, Dani California, The Adventure, Move Along, Lips of an Angel, Animal I Have Become, Steady as She Goes, Miss Murder, and a few others bring me back to this last summer.  At least one of these songs was guaranteed to be on the radio during my drive to work.  It was inevitable.  Those long summer days, driving down Van Dyke with my windows down (AC is broken).

But then there are songs like Cascada's Everytime We Touch.  It makes me feel... something.  It brings me back.. somewhere.  What I feel, and where I go, however, I cannot discern.  It's weird.  I wanna know what's with this song.  Why does it do this to me?

I bring this up because the latest Penny Arcade references it.  Reading the lyrics made me think of the song, which made me search through my playlist in Foobar 'til I found it.  And then I played it.

I'm confused.

Thanks to Jason from IIT, I've had something to do while closing at the theatre these past few nights: read Ender's Game.  It's really a great book.  Unfortunatly, no one around here has heard of it, save for maybe Dan.  I was at Guest Services when he asked me what I was reading.

Ender's Game
Nerd.
Says the guy playing Command & Conquer: Generals on his school laptop [given to him because he's in a Computer Networking class] and talks about World of Warcraft all day long.

He keeps calling it my "nerd book."

I find it funny.

I can't believe I'm closing four days in a row.  That sucks balls.

It's about two in the morning.  I should get up at ten in order to eat, shower, get dressed, and get to work by noon.

I really hope the money I get from all this is totally worth it.

Yea.  I'm back.  Need to plan a party or two.  I've got three weeks left, guys.

I should get some sleep.  I work in twelve and a half hours and I think Jason wants to do something in the morning.

Good night.

Did you know, it'd only be midnight-thirty right now in Arizona?

It's 10:36PM right now, but for all you losers back in Michigan it's 1:36AM.  That probably means you're all asleep.

Just thinking of what I need to do when I get back: Order books for school.  Work for money.  Start packing.  More work.  Hang out with friends (time permitting).  Other school related preparations.