eh, i'm kinda in a semi-pissy mood. prolly just cuz i gotta do some homework tonight or something. other than that i don't really have any reason to be in a less than stellar mood.

here's a good odd news story for ya. pretty damn amazing somebody could do that, although in some weird way i sort of understand it.

for most of my time on campus today, it was semi-raining. for some reason in some ways i prefer going to classes on a day like that rather than a sunny nice day. i like my fellow students that either forgot an umbrella or just don't give enough of a fuck to bring one. there's just something noble about being pelted by the rain. not necessarily today, but there have been times in the past where i'm biking or walking to a class and just getting completely throttled by hard rain. no effort is made to speed up at all. i get to class and i'm completely drenched. everybody with their huge over-sized texas a&m umbrellas, what's the point? especially when you've already got a jacket on anyway and it's barely even drizzling. what exactly is the worst that's going to happen if you don't bring your stupid way-too-huge umbrella to class? you get a little wet? as if you're gonna get to class and all at once the entire class is gonna turn, point, and laugh at you? especially those supposed tough guys we've got on campus with a thick goatee and a hunting jacket on, they've got a huge umbrella like they're made of fucking sugar. i'd imagine those are mostly just the agricultural majors here on the 6 year plan anyway, huh?

that's another thing worth bitching about. what's with this new trend involving thinking it's apparently really cool to just fuck around for a few years, change majors 7 times, and graduate in 6 years, taking 12 hours every semester and using all 3 Q-drops? it's too often where maybe we do one of those first-day-of-class intro things and you hear some asshole laughingly say "yeah, heheh i'm actually class of '02, gonna graduate this may tho... well i dunno, maybe... not sure" and then we all laugh along. why is that even funny? i think instead of laughing the professor should immediately pass out blunt objects for everyone to heave at the idiot that just admitted he's a fuckin moron that doesn't belong here.

i overheard this guy in racquetball today say "yeah i'm gonna graduate in may probably but i'm applying for grad school, y'know i'm just not ready to move on..." what the fuck is this? i know i'm the guy that grew up too fast and has already worked real jobs for like half a decade, but am i the only one that sees something wrong with this? it's one thing to want to go to grad school for further education, then another thing to go cuz you can't find a job, but quite another to just go cuz you wanna keep going to college. such a fuckin drain on the system, man. that's what i think about every time somebody mentions being here for more than 4 years getting an undergrad. i wonder how much of your parents' and the state's money you're completely wasting just cuz you can't get your shit wired and at least graduate with a 2.0 or something. in the 2 years you pissed your career away by "chilling" in grad school i'll be sitting in my upscale apartment with a respectable bank account having a nice cold budweiser thinking how much i preferred by decision to yours.

i kinda rehash this all the time, but i made a point to alayna the other day asking her if she noticed a difference between how dominant cell phone usage is now compared to when we started at a&m in 2000. at this point it really is insane.

the high-tech pro-gadget side of me says great, we all have portable means of communication and this is yet another great evolution of a semi-necessary product, the telephone. but then the evil anti-social side of me screams in protest. the concept of everyone having their own portable telephone is great, but the way it's actually played out in our little fucked up mini-society on campus isn't exactly utopian. my biggest beef with cell usage all over the damn place 24/7 is best summed up with: hey, who the fuck are you talking to all the time? seriously, that's like the whole reason this entire phenomenon confuses the hell outta me. i just can't help but think, who cares about you this much? i know that sounds bad, but i just... don't think that's what the advent of portable telephony was intended for, y'know? that's why you pay $50/month for your coverage instead of a more limited $15ish. y'know they actually pay that in europe? no joke. this is why you have to get that insane 1000 daytime minutes blah blah blah instead of a more sensible 200 minutes. have you seen people right when they get out of a class? i swear, at least at this university, if a big lecture of 300 students lets out, about 100 of 'em are on their cell within 30 seconds.

do you know how pissed off i'd be if i were one of those people you called in that situation? hey, i love hearing from people, i wish i did more often, believe me. but do you really think i wanna stop what i'm doing for you to complain over a shitty cell connection how boring your lecture was and oh-my-god-this-chick-in-front-of-me-was-so-and-so? that's all people talk about! it's useless shit! sure, if you make a call to someone to come pick you up or something, that makes sense. that's what cell phones are good for. but it seems like 90% of the time people aren't doing that kind of thing at all. all they're doing is blabbing about their stupid unimportant shit. more and more, people don't meet anymore. you can't meet someone when they talk on their cell 12 of the 15 minutes you were next to them.

i know i'm in the extreme minority here, but i just somehow see cell phones as such a turn-off now. i think when i remember back to how my college days were, i'm gonna remember "yeah that's when cell phones started to get really useful and high-tech... and then we shit all over it." the best analogy i can think of right now is in the movie seven where john doe is admitting that when a guy just spoke to him in public he was so incredibly banal that he just threw up all over the guy's shoes and couldn't stop laughing. there's no way you're not banal if you spend that much fuckin time on your phone. you're not nearly that important, dude.

i don't exactly have a much greater point for all my bitching, just that these are the kinds of things that bother me these days. there are *some* good things going on!

me and the goza actually got my older box working a little better with some HOT debian action, boy. after some time under mandrake and some experimentation with slackware, it looks like the debian distro works well on this setup. it still needs plenty of tweaking, but she's already ripping winamp tv and radio streams (can we still call 'em shoutcast?) and running bittorrent. plus i was shocked when she was able to churn out KDE so quick. so at least as of now i've got veritas and aequitas running side by side. [sidenote: yes, that's veritas and aequitas, as in latin for truth and justice. selected only cuz the twins from boondock saints each have one tattooed on their hands. just seemed like a badass concept to me. i figured it was better than luke and leia or some shit.] the plan is if maybe over the new few weeks i can write some good scripts or get some kind of automation going so that i can just leave veritas to do nothing but sit and rip streams and gather bittorrents all day so aequitas doesn't have to. i know you don't care, but it's been a long difficult project and it's exciting for me to get it running properly. just be happy i'm excited about something, asshead.

i think i'm trying to wear too many hats, man. it's kinda hard trying to be computer science student justin, boyfriend justin and entertainment justin all at the same time. more and more i'm starting to notice that has something to do with my weird sleeping habits sometimes. that's why i don't like to get much sleep. i can get along fine with just 5 hours, but even when i can get like 7 or 8 i realize a lot of times i don't cuz i think i have too many things to do. with tivo, bittorrents, newsgroups, p2p, etc, there's just too many places to get good shit. so i end up gathering alllll this shit that friends recommend i see/do or i'm interested in or whatever and i try to schedule everything out and it just hardly works at all. like right now i've got one anime series to watch that's 13 episodes, of which i've watched 1, another of 26 eps of which i've seen like 5, prolly a dozen eps of family guy still to watch, the entire series of the maxx from the mid 90's to watch completely, eps of ER to relive, etc etc etc. i think in my final semester here i put forth like 10x more effort just managing my own entertainment than i do actually working for my degree.

it's just hard for me to relax with that kinda lifestyle, y'know? at any given time if i'm not tied up with academics i'm just thinking about how i should be watching/playing/doing something. that gets all tied up with trying to be social and missing alayna and all that. i realize everybody's lives are like that, just that for me i think i really try to spread myself too thin. working out like 4-5 times a week with racquetball, being social and enjoying the things that i find entertaining, goddamn man that's almost enough justification for never sleeping more than 7 hours at a time, heh.

i guess i better get to doing some of that shit i mentioned, huh?

see you on the other side,
justin