man, winter vacation is just some sweet waste of in-between time.
being almost 22 now, i guess i've learned that i'm unable to function properly when i don't have anything proper to wake up for the next morning, i.e. school or work. like last night, i just wasn't tired so i stayed up long enough so that i ended up just not bothering to sleep at all (after i had slept till almost 4pm the previous day). so i took a 4-hour nap this afternoon and now i don't know what to do with myself. with all the goofy sleeping i'd rather be doing it back in college station without the rest of the family living normally, heheh. only scary thing is when i go back there it's gonna get SCARY worse cuz nobody else will be around so i'll have no reason to really go to bed at any point.
it's a really stupid thing to care about, but i'm pretty much convinced i am so content-overloaded. i kid you not man, i still have albums on my hard drive from 2000 yet to decide whether to burn. now that 2004's rolled around it's pretty much time stuff like that is completely phased out -- it's either thrown on a cd or trashed. i'm the worst when it comes to trying to collect something. i'll find a few episodes of some show or whatever and all of a sudden i'm on a mission to have every one of them. i'm not really sure why i do that, it's almost like i wanna just say i have a collection of something rather than actually use it. take my friends and seinfeld episode collections, for example. i'm pretty proud of having 2 of my favorite shows collected, but rarely do i ever actually watch any of what i've got. sorta makes me wonder why i bother to buy tv series on dvd.
i dunno, i'm kinda just eager to get back just to be in college station without academics to do for a while. 99% of the time i'm having a pretty good time when i'm there so it sorta makes me wonder how it'd be without having to be busting my ass all the time. all i'm gonna do until school starts is play music and movies at a ridiculous volume and sleep like 10-12 hours without an alarm clock, heheh.
this is just the time of the year where if you're 22 or younger you're free to be a lazy bitch.
i thought this was gonna be a deep and thought-provoking post. turns out i just sat and bitched about nothing.
i dunno,
justin
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Sunday, January 04, 2004
happy 2004. first post of the new year.
sheeeeat, it's been a while... my last post was just before finals started so i guess i'll sum that up. finals ended up being about the usual difficulty, which means some were easy and some were just impossible. somehow tho i ended up pulling off 5 A's and a B for a 3.8 this semester, heh. so basically i say that explains enough and i won't go into all the details. ;)
the colorado 2nd house christmas vacation project year 3 definitely felt like the busiest one we've had since our first xmas there in 2001. i'll try to sorta sum it all up. the first couple days were the most lax, and we mostly just sorta sat around the house for a couple days not doing anything, which was fine with me. it'd didn't take long for lauren and i to set up the gamecube, especially since we brought a bigger tv for our upstairs area. i started off trying to move a bit further in metroid prime, not being able to get anywhere, i moved onto crash nitro kart adventure mode, got about 80% done there now tho. but as soon as lauren put in mario kart it was obvious that was gonna be the game that stayed in for the rest of thet trip. we basically raced our sweet asses off, finishing all the goals in the game pretty quickly, so that we got to the point that we were just choosing random characters and racing all the tracks. usually by the end of the day we were sick of playing so we moved onto satellite surfing between VH1, MTV and fuse. apparently i had to completely catch up on some pop/mv culture that i hadn't absorbed this semester in my semi-boycott of mtv. vh1 had several of those borderline-annoying categorical countdowns going on, so somehow i ended up glued to "the 100 most shocking moments in rock & roll" and "the top 40 celebrity feuds of all time" and shit.
once we actually motivated ourselves to get off the damn couch we rode the 4 wheelers (although at that point there was a faulty spark plug in one so we only actually took *a* 4 wheeler) around the property, went skiing, and played foosball in the basement. the skiing was on the 23rd, and apparently nobody wants to ski 2 days before christmas so it was pretty badass having the slopes with so few people there. we stayed pretty safe tho and mostly stuck to greens, only 1 blue to relearn after the year hiatus. lauren and i went into town a little bit for some errands and shit, but mostly we just sorta hung around the house. i did finally decide to read lullaby, i bought the damn thing in like september. lemme insert a little plug/review for it here:
lullaby
by chuck palahniuk
he's written like 5 of these books, and i'd sort 'em like this:
5) choke
4) survivor
3) invisible monsters
2) lullaby
1) fight club
my rewiew is basically: they're all fookin great, really. in other words, you should save up yourself a good $13 or so and go buy at least one to get a taste. and if ya do that, ya might as well go for fight club, even if you've seen the movie. all of chucky p's books are great tho, but admittedly if you're a really conservative semi-religious "everything offends me" type, don't bother. he's really apocalyptic and whatnot, with the swift ability to knock you on your ass using only words and the like, haha. you can read them in like 2 days pretty easily, so i suggest you pick up one of chucky p's masterpieces and give yourself a nice break from harry, ron and hermione.
alright... wtf was i talking about again?
yeah, so then we had a pretty low key christmas. not that it was a bad christmas or anything like that, just a "low key" christmas. heh, honestly, at this point i really don't even know what the hell the holiday's even about. it's pretty apparent we're not actually celebrating jesus' birthday, so what exactly are we celebrating? in our family, i think it functions more as a "here i bought you some shit, did you buy me some shit?" type occasion, which apparently works out pretty good, ha. i racked up the usual array of clothing and gift cards, as well as a handy HP digital photo printer which compliments my digicam pretty nicely. i guess i just say it was low key cuz for some reason since we had to finish all our xmas shopping before the trip and things like that it just felt like xmas was already over already or something. i think from like the ages of like maybe 15 onward each year you sorta realize a little something more about how you really feel about the "holiday season." it's one thing when the whole santa claus gig exits your family, then another when you get into a stage where your parents understandably don't know what the hell to get you anymore, so you just get an envelope with a check and some clothes. now i'm just sorta moving onto another stage where i look forward more to celebrating xmas (in my eyes, purely seen as an excuse to exchange gifts and sing songs forbidden from the months of january to november) with my girlfriend/wife and eventually kids moreso that my immediate family. i guess after you've had 22 christmas's you start to wonder if there isn't something else you'd rather do instead of what you've grown so accustomed to. i better start another paragraph here to explain a bit more:
see, before '01 the tradition always involved christmas eve spent at my grandparents' house, then christmas morning with the immediate family. but since we built the 2nd house in westcliffe it's pretty much standard that we spend the xmas week or so there instead of in dallas where the grandparents are. part of the thrill of that wasn't "ooh i get more gifts and shit from people," but moreso that we actually got to see, y'know, other members of our family. my dad's brother and his family of 4 also live in dallas so we'd always see them, then another brother and his wife from soCal would come every other year. so especially when all 3 brothers + family were together, and even occasionally the 4th brother and others, it made for like 12-20 people and a pretty rousing good time. but nowadays my immediately family celebrates the holiday off on our own in secluded colorado. don't get me wrong, it's extremely cozy and wintery, but it just doesn't have the same feel simply because we don't even bother to see anybody else. i'm not a family guy really at all and i've never been very close to any extended family but to me to some extent that just seems all wrong. so i guess when it's just the 4 of us opening gifts and maybe having 3-5 minute calls with a few relatives on the phone wishing them well it just feels a little uninspired and not as worth celebrating.
although no one really said anything, this last christmas was actually the end of a certain era. that was the last christmas where i'm still in college, thus it was the last one in which i was actually still sharing a roof with my parents. by this time next year, i'll be in my own apartment living on my own working and living for myself. while obviously i'm still included in whatever the family does, in some ways it means i'm a completely different role player in the family regrading those kinds of events. it'll be up to me whether i want to go to colorado for 10 days or not. i mean who knows what can happen, maybe alayna and i celebrate xmas ourselves, maybe i'm staying in san antonio for a few days, maybe we're doing our own thing in dallas with friends, maybe we took a trip somewhere, there's no telling. so i'd imagine if i think this christmas felt different, i can't imagine how i'll feel for christmas '04.
moving on on the recap...
on the 26th zach flew in from dallas and alayna from SA an hour later. so most of that day involved just getting them to the house and getting everybody set up and reacquainted and whatnot, since my parents hadn't seen alayna since the summer. alayna and i exchanged our gifts, where i ended up with a shirt and a trendy denim jacket.
the 4 of us went to the royal gorge in canon city on the 27th and took plenty of pictures and video (still working on/deciding if i can try to post some of these pics somewhere or something) which was pretty cool since we were able to get some actual fast food and get away from the parents for a bit. just a sidenote: that was the first fast food place (arby's) i've ever seen that had a fireplace in it. we made it back in time to go to a favorite restaurant [in the middle of goddamn nowhere] and listen to some live music while eating what alayna claims to be the best chicken she's had anywhere.
on the 28th we had my dad's youngest brother and family over at the house for a few hours since they were driving through colorado. that was cool, but pretty much ate up all the daylight hours. at night the 4 "kids" went to one of the few places to hang out in westcliffe, the cliff lanes bowling alley. nobody actually felt like bowling so we just played foosball and pool instead, then had some late snack bar dinner.
the 29th was sort of the humbling roller-coaster day of the trip. the 4 of us went skiing at monarch, which was a good idea, and for the most part ended up maintaining that. only things that thwarted that were the huge post-christmas crowd and alayna's little freakout session in the middle of the slopes. lauren and zach stuck together at first, retraining zach on bunny slopes (he hadn't been skiing in 2 years) and hitting some greens while i coached alayna down the bunny slope. apparently i had sorta overestimated how quick alayna would pick it up again and it turned out we kinda had a lot of "rebuilding" to do. it's funny cuz alayna's a really adventurous type chick, not really scared of anything, but you get her on a sloped mountain with snow on it and she's not exactly herself. so after i retaught her some basics i convinced her she was ready for some greens. to avoid the 10 degree chill and huge crowds on the beginner lift, we went to the top and tried to go down the green "rookie" run. the idea was the 4 of us were gonna all go down it together, which was intended to be cake for me and lauren and somewhat of a task for zach. unfortunately things didn't really go that way. the fear of the mountain, not her lack of skills, completely froze alayna up and i had to do everything i could to keep from losing my temper and helping her as best i could. the poor thing had to cry it out a little bit first, then she seemed to gather some courage and she did much better after that. it's hard to tell whether it's sad or cute, but it's funny cuz alayna's not nearly as bad a skier as she thinks she is, but she's twice as afraid of the mountain as everybody else is, so she just has trouble willing her mind to do what her body wants her to. we ended up splitting up (i obviously thought she could benefit more from her own practice time on whatever run she wanted) so i hit several blues. i think i've been skiing 4 times now and i'd consider myself a decent intermediate skier. i've gotten to the point where the blues are more fun than the greens, just that any of you that have skiied a lot know the well-groomed almost-mogul blues are much different than the soft gentle greens, heh. hopefully i'll be back there soon, maybe to try out snowboarding.
somewhat unexpectedly, the nights of the 28th and 29th ended up involving a lot of 3-player (my sister had given me a GC controller) battle mode shine thief action in mario kart. we just sorta stumbled onto it, but it'd ended up being damn fun. we wouldn't go as far as saying battle mode is shit in the new mario kart, but we were definitely more into racing than battling with just 2 of us playing. but with 3 (and soon 4, since i just bought a wavebird controller the other day too) people it's fuckin great playing shine thief with several people battling to keep the shine. hopefully i can host several mario kart battle mode parties this semester, make it a drinking game or something.
pretty much all of the 30th was blown with the 12 hour drive back to dallas. once we got back everybody was pretty damn exhausted.
as part of her xmas present, i gave alayna tickets to the dec 31st stars game, so on the new years eve we headed downtown. we rode the dart rail down to the west end and ate at hoffbrau, then hit up the AAC. we ended up with a 1-1 tie (my rant about the stars this season is a whole other post) but she had a lot of fun, since she's trying her best to become a hockey/stars fan, so that sealed it for me. we caught the train back to plano and drove back to my house to celebrate the new year with some drinks.
on new years day we didn't do much, just did some shopping and met my parents at EZ's for dinner. yesterday i sorta continued touring alayna around dallas by taking her first to the galleria then over to northpark. we had a fun time just walking around, shopping, gettin starbucks and giggling at shit like we were better than everybody else, heh. hard to believe if i'm not mistaken it was almost 4 years to the day since i had last even been to the northpark mall. afterwards we blew a gift certificate at maggiano's little italy, which is attached to northpark. yeah, oddly enough, don't always assume a restaurant connected to a mall is really casual. turns out the inside of that place is pretty fuckin fancy and we were hella overdressed. we ended up mostly laughing it off and having a decent dinner anyways.
so today alayna flew back to SA and basically most of my winter "vacation" is done. i'm gonna be in dallas for the rest of this week, get some dental/eye appointments and errands done with before i head back to CS prolly early next week. until then it'll be a pretty slow week here at home, but hey, i've earned it.
hell of a long recap there, boy.
cheers,
justin
sheeeeat, it's been a while... my last post was just before finals started so i guess i'll sum that up. finals ended up being about the usual difficulty, which means some were easy and some were just impossible. somehow tho i ended up pulling off 5 A's and a B for a 3.8 this semester, heh. so basically i say that explains enough and i won't go into all the details. ;)
the colorado 2nd house christmas vacation project year 3 definitely felt like the busiest one we've had since our first xmas there in 2001. i'll try to sorta sum it all up. the first couple days were the most lax, and we mostly just sorta sat around the house for a couple days not doing anything, which was fine with me. it'd didn't take long for lauren and i to set up the gamecube, especially since we brought a bigger tv for our upstairs area. i started off trying to move a bit further in metroid prime, not being able to get anywhere, i moved onto crash nitro kart adventure mode, got about 80% done there now tho. but as soon as lauren put in mario kart it was obvious that was gonna be the game that stayed in for the rest of thet trip. we basically raced our sweet asses off, finishing all the goals in the game pretty quickly, so that we got to the point that we were just choosing random characters and racing all the tracks. usually by the end of the day we were sick of playing so we moved onto satellite surfing between VH1, MTV and fuse. apparently i had to completely catch up on some pop/mv culture that i hadn't absorbed this semester in my semi-boycott of mtv. vh1 had several of those borderline-annoying categorical countdowns going on, so somehow i ended up glued to "the 100 most shocking moments in rock & roll" and "the top 40 celebrity feuds of all time" and shit.
once we actually motivated ourselves to get off the damn couch we rode the 4 wheelers (although at that point there was a faulty spark plug in one so we only actually took *a* 4 wheeler) around the property, went skiing, and played foosball in the basement. the skiing was on the 23rd, and apparently nobody wants to ski 2 days before christmas so it was pretty badass having the slopes with so few people there. we stayed pretty safe tho and mostly stuck to greens, only 1 blue to relearn after the year hiatus. lauren and i went into town a little bit for some errands and shit, but mostly we just sorta hung around the house. i did finally decide to read lullaby, i bought the damn thing in like september. lemme insert a little plug/review for it here:
lullaby
by chuck palahniuk
he's written like 5 of these books, and i'd sort 'em like this:
5) choke
4) survivor
3) invisible monsters
2) lullaby
1) fight club
my rewiew is basically: they're all fookin great, really. in other words, you should save up yourself a good $13 or so and go buy at least one to get a taste. and if ya do that, ya might as well go for fight club, even if you've seen the movie. all of chucky p's books are great tho, but admittedly if you're a really conservative semi-religious "everything offends me" type, don't bother. he's really apocalyptic and whatnot, with the swift ability to knock you on your ass using only words and the like, haha. you can read them in like 2 days pretty easily, so i suggest you pick up one of chucky p's masterpieces and give yourself a nice break from harry, ron and hermione.
alright... wtf was i talking about again?
yeah, so then we had a pretty low key christmas. not that it was a bad christmas or anything like that, just a "low key" christmas. heh, honestly, at this point i really don't even know what the hell the holiday's even about. it's pretty apparent we're not actually celebrating jesus' birthday, so what exactly are we celebrating? in our family, i think it functions more as a "here i bought you some shit, did you buy me some shit?" type occasion, which apparently works out pretty good, ha. i racked up the usual array of clothing and gift cards, as well as a handy HP digital photo printer which compliments my digicam pretty nicely. i guess i just say it was low key cuz for some reason since we had to finish all our xmas shopping before the trip and things like that it just felt like xmas was already over already or something. i think from like the ages of like maybe 15 onward each year you sorta realize a little something more about how you really feel about the "holiday season." it's one thing when the whole santa claus gig exits your family, then another when you get into a stage where your parents understandably don't know what the hell to get you anymore, so you just get an envelope with a check and some clothes. now i'm just sorta moving onto another stage where i look forward more to celebrating xmas (in my eyes, purely seen as an excuse to exchange gifts and sing songs forbidden from the months of january to november) with my girlfriend/wife and eventually kids moreso that my immediate family. i guess after you've had 22 christmas's you start to wonder if there isn't something else you'd rather do instead of what you've grown so accustomed to. i better start another paragraph here to explain a bit more:
see, before '01 the tradition always involved christmas eve spent at my grandparents' house, then christmas morning with the immediate family. but since we built the 2nd house in westcliffe it's pretty much standard that we spend the xmas week or so there instead of in dallas where the grandparents are. part of the thrill of that wasn't "ooh i get more gifts and shit from people," but moreso that we actually got to see, y'know, other members of our family. my dad's brother and his family of 4 also live in dallas so we'd always see them, then another brother and his wife from soCal would come every other year. so especially when all 3 brothers + family were together, and even occasionally the 4th brother and others, it made for like 12-20 people and a pretty rousing good time. but nowadays my immediately family celebrates the holiday off on our own in secluded colorado. don't get me wrong, it's extremely cozy and wintery, but it just doesn't have the same feel simply because we don't even bother to see anybody else. i'm not a family guy really at all and i've never been very close to any extended family but to me to some extent that just seems all wrong. so i guess when it's just the 4 of us opening gifts and maybe having 3-5 minute calls with a few relatives on the phone wishing them well it just feels a little uninspired and not as worth celebrating.
although no one really said anything, this last christmas was actually the end of a certain era. that was the last christmas where i'm still in college, thus it was the last one in which i was actually still sharing a roof with my parents. by this time next year, i'll be in my own apartment living on my own working and living for myself. while obviously i'm still included in whatever the family does, in some ways it means i'm a completely different role player in the family regrading those kinds of events. it'll be up to me whether i want to go to colorado for 10 days or not. i mean who knows what can happen, maybe alayna and i celebrate xmas ourselves, maybe i'm staying in san antonio for a few days, maybe we're doing our own thing in dallas with friends, maybe we took a trip somewhere, there's no telling. so i'd imagine if i think this christmas felt different, i can't imagine how i'll feel for christmas '04.
moving on on the recap...
on the 26th zach flew in from dallas and alayna from SA an hour later. so most of that day involved just getting them to the house and getting everybody set up and reacquainted and whatnot, since my parents hadn't seen alayna since the summer. alayna and i exchanged our gifts, where i ended up with a shirt and a trendy denim jacket.
the 4 of us went to the royal gorge in canon city on the 27th and took plenty of pictures and video (still working on/deciding if i can try to post some of these pics somewhere or something) which was pretty cool since we were able to get some actual fast food and get away from the parents for a bit. just a sidenote: that was the first fast food place (arby's) i've ever seen that had a fireplace in it. we made it back in time to go to a favorite restaurant [in the middle of goddamn nowhere] and listen to some live music while eating what alayna claims to be the best chicken she's had anywhere.
on the 28th we had my dad's youngest brother and family over at the house for a few hours since they were driving through colorado. that was cool, but pretty much ate up all the daylight hours. at night the 4 "kids" went to one of the few places to hang out in westcliffe, the cliff lanes bowling alley. nobody actually felt like bowling so we just played foosball and pool instead, then had some late snack bar dinner.
the 29th was sort of the humbling roller-coaster day of the trip. the 4 of us went skiing at monarch, which was a good idea, and for the most part ended up maintaining that. only things that thwarted that were the huge post-christmas crowd and alayna's little freakout session in the middle of the slopes. lauren and zach stuck together at first, retraining zach on bunny slopes (he hadn't been skiing in 2 years) and hitting some greens while i coached alayna down the bunny slope. apparently i had sorta overestimated how quick alayna would pick it up again and it turned out we kinda had a lot of "rebuilding" to do. it's funny cuz alayna's a really adventurous type chick, not really scared of anything, but you get her on a sloped mountain with snow on it and she's not exactly herself. so after i retaught her some basics i convinced her she was ready for some greens. to avoid the 10 degree chill and huge crowds on the beginner lift, we went to the top and tried to go down the green "rookie" run. the idea was the 4 of us were gonna all go down it together, which was intended to be cake for me and lauren and somewhat of a task for zach. unfortunately things didn't really go that way. the fear of the mountain, not her lack of skills, completely froze alayna up and i had to do everything i could to keep from losing my temper and helping her as best i could. the poor thing had to cry it out a little bit first, then she seemed to gather some courage and she did much better after that. it's hard to tell whether it's sad or cute, but it's funny cuz alayna's not nearly as bad a skier as she thinks she is, but she's twice as afraid of the mountain as everybody else is, so she just has trouble willing her mind to do what her body wants her to. we ended up splitting up (i obviously thought she could benefit more from her own practice time on whatever run she wanted) so i hit several blues. i think i've been skiing 4 times now and i'd consider myself a decent intermediate skier. i've gotten to the point where the blues are more fun than the greens, just that any of you that have skiied a lot know the well-groomed almost-mogul blues are much different than the soft gentle greens, heh. hopefully i'll be back there soon, maybe to try out snowboarding.
somewhat unexpectedly, the nights of the 28th and 29th ended up involving a lot of 3-player (my sister had given me a GC controller) battle mode shine thief action in mario kart. we just sorta stumbled onto it, but it'd ended up being damn fun. we wouldn't go as far as saying battle mode is shit in the new mario kart, but we were definitely more into racing than battling with just 2 of us playing. but with 3 (and soon 4, since i just bought a wavebird controller the other day too) people it's fuckin great playing shine thief with several people battling to keep the shine. hopefully i can host several mario kart battle mode parties this semester, make it a drinking game or something.
pretty much all of the 30th was blown with the 12 hour drive back to dallas. once we got back everybody was pretty damn exhausted.
as part of her xmas present, i gave alayna tickets to the dec 31st stars game, so on the new years eve we headed downtown. we rode the dart rail down to the west end and ate at hoffbrau, then hit up the AAC. we ended up with a 1-1 tie (my rant about the stars this season is a whole other post) but she had a lot of fun, since she's trying her best to become a hockey/stars fan, so that sealed it for me. we caught the train back to plano and drove back to my house to celebrate the new year with some drinks.
on new years day we didn't do much, just did some shopping and met my parents at EZ's for dinner. yesterday i sorta continued touring alayna around dallas by taking her first to the galleria then over to northpark. we had a fun time just walking around, shopping, gettin starbucks and giggling at shit like we were better than everybody else, heh. hard to believe if i'm not mistaken it was almost 4 years to the day since i had last even been to the northpark mall. afterwards we blew a gift certificate at maggiano's little italy, which is attached to northpark. yeah, oddly enough, don't always assume a restaurant connected to a mall is really casual. turns out the inside of that place is pretty fuckin fancy and we were hella overdressed. we ended up mostly laughing it off and having a decent dinner anyways.
so today alayna flew back to SA and basically most of my winter "vacation" is done. i'm gonna be in dallas for the rest of this week, get some dental/eye appointments and errands done with before i head back to CS prolly early next week. until then it'll be a pretty slow week here at home, but hey, i've earned it.
hell of a long recap there, boy.
cheers,
justin
Thursday, December 11, 2003
it's been a week, time to post.
so thus begins justin's 7th finals session. jesus that makes me feel like i've been here a long time. i'll be blunt, readers -- finals are the time of year where everybody kicks their fucked-up-ness up just a notch or two. it never fails, every year you can just watch people going insane on campus. most people are just completely stressed out, and if you ever happen to have a relatively light finals period (it does happen now and then) go over to the 6th floor of evans and getcha a window seat and just kick back and enjoy the fuckin insanity.
i think now any time i hear the word "final" used in an academic sense i sorta always think back to the crazyass times me and dustin had when finals came around. double all-nighters and such, gets to the point where one of us would ask the other the time and then they have to sorta embarrassingly mumble... "uh... am or pm, dude?" it gets to be a weird feeling when you're like not seeing any daylight anymore.
that's kinda my MO for finals. i study best at night and sleep best during the day, so when i don't have any classes i've sorta come to just conform to when you do have a final, base your schedule on that. a lot of people don't seem to understand that. they see a 7:30am final as being horrible cuz they wake up early, but why didn't they do what i did? i slept the day before, and then studied all night and just went straight to the test in the morning like it was just a normal night class, heh. of course alayna never really likes when i "go nocturnal" but eh, it's only temporary and it's actually kinda fun to switch your schedule up a bit.
this time around i've got 2 finals on tuesday, 2 on wednesday. good in that they're at the end of the session, but bad in that they're all clustered together with two hardcore CS classes back to back. till then i've got some assignments/projects to sorta complete so between that and studying for the finals i'll be pretty goddamn busy.
at first i thought this semester was heading straight for the shitter but it's turned out pretty good. i have this longshot at a 4.0 this semester, although it prolly won't fall like that at all. i could even get a C or something, but prolly not worse than a 3.25 for the semester which would just sorta leave my GPA where it already is. it doesn't really matter that much anymore anyway since i've got my job lined up. they don't really seem to give a rat's ass whether i have a 3.30 or a 3.38, it still says 3.3 on my resume and then it's forgotten.
it's a goofy finals session this year though. between the biblical-like weather and having to build a new computer relatively quickly it's just felt kinda weird. what the fuck's with the weather anyway? i hate this bullshit where you gotta change clothes 3 times a day to be dressed properly. typical CS conditions in like october and maybe a bit of november are cold in the morning, hot in the afternoon and freezing when the sun goes down. but this year we're still wearing short sleeves and shorts off & on in december. that alone just makes me wanna get to colorado faster where it's just plain cold.
my old HP box was just starting to get too fucked to really handle anything anymore (it could run XP on a good day for like an hour straight) so i put together a nice package.
i built a box with an MSI Delta-LSR 400mhz MB, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1GB of Kingston DDR 3200 RAM, couple 80GB HD's, 48X burner, GeForce4 card all wrapped in a sleek silver Enermax case with blue LED's and case fans on the side, Samsung 17" flat panel for the display. pretty fuckin beautiful if you ask me. the plan right now is to convert my old box to an all-linux terminal, but i'll take other interesting suggestions, such as dragging it from a car for 10+ miles, dropping it from considerable heights, and setting it on fire. take it from me, don't buy an HP. build your own. :)
let's see, here's a new feature that hopefully won't piss people off... i'll put the latest news with several of my contacts here with a scrambled name so they won't be able to [immediately] tell i'm talking about them.
cRki - came up with some sweet voodoo logic where we only have to make like mid-B's and could even skip a hw to still get A's in our class.
asceJsi - at this point she doesn't even answer my IM's, not sure if there's more to it than that or she's just ignoring me. pretty fuckin sad that she can become friends with somebody and yet when her boyfriend's within 5 miles she drops everybody else like they don't matter. when somebody is pretty shady about returning emails, cell calls and IM's, ya kinda run out of options, huh?
yntKhar - things were going alright with her until she didn't send a pretty important email back and didn't return a cell call. i sent her a nice long pissy lecturing email she didn't really like at all, so we haven't even spoken since that. not sure what to do about it. need to patch things up in person over the break back home.
edCinac - things are prolly completely over. after 3 straight unreturned cell calls spread out over about a month, i resorted to a flame type email, which yielded nothing. i'm gonna come right out and say that chick was sweet but ended up being a complete bitch. congratulations on further proving to me why i never liked sorority chicks to begin with.
nLrio - had some potential there, but mostly fucked due to the fact that she's about to graduate. she made my 438 class fun all semester but i wish things had gone a little differently. don't really dig how she spent most of her time justifying what kind of person she is instead of just doing the right thing and proving it to me. i really enjoyed talking to her and all that during the semester though. just kinda wish she'd done a better job getting her shit wired so we coulda hung out or whatever, but she apologized appropriately every time it happened and she doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth really. all i can do is hope she remains some kinda penpal and that things go well for her in san antonio.
aaruL - provided some drunken fun saturday night, but unfortunately went a bit too far. think the lesson was learned tho and it prolly won't happen again. sorta proved to be a much cooler chick than i had thought before, just needs to let loose a bit more often. hopefully it doesn't always take 7 vodka shots to do so.
nthaCsira - prolly the only person i know right now (no offense to any readers) that's actually made the transition from my bad to my good side. proven that she's not the person i had painted her to be, and she's fun to talk to when she just drops the badass attitude and talks to you like she cares what you say. even turned out to be quite civil online.
Lnreua - tired of seeing her get fucked by people. going to my big brother mode where i just want everybody to stop hurting my baby sister. i'm here if she needs me.
next couple days will consist of possibly writing a paper, writing some code, hitting the books, tivo'd law & order/PTI/NHL2Night/etc and dvd's the two towers/serial experiments: lain discs 2-4/etc during any breaks. just glad to type this up on a fully functional computer and shit, heh.
get back to ya soon.
--justin
so thus begins justin's 7th finals session. jesus that makes me feel like i've been here a long time. i'll be blunt, readers -- finals are the time of year where everybody kicks their fucked-up-ness up just a notch or two. it never fails, every year you can just watch people going insane on campus. most people are just completely stressed out, and if you ever happen to have a relatively light finals period (it does happen now and then) go over to the 6th floor of evans and getcha a window seat and just kick back and enjoy the fuckin insanity.
i think now any time i hear the word "final" used in an academic sense i sorta always think back to the crazyass times me and dustin had when finals came around. double all-nighters and such, gets to the point where one of us would ask the other the time and then they have to sorta embarrassingly mumble... "uh... am or pm, dude?" it gets to be a weird feeling when you're like not seeing any daylight anymore.
that's kinda my MO for finals. i study best at night and sleep best during the day, so when i don't have any classes i've sorta come to just conform to when you do have a final, base your schedule on that. a lot of people don't seem to understand that. they see a 7:30am final as being horrible cuz they wake up early, but why didn't they do what i did? i slept the day before, and then studied all night and just went straight to the test in the morning like it was just a normal night class, heh. of course alayna never really likes when i "go nocturnal" but eh, it's only temporary and it's actually kinda fun to switch your schedule up a bit.
this time around i've got 2 finals on tuesday, 2 on wednesday. good in that they're at the end of the session, but bad in that they're all clustered together with two hardcore CS classes back to back. till then i've got some assignments/projects to sorta complete so between that and studying for the finals i'll be pretty goddamn busy.
at first i thought this semester was heading straight for the shitter but it's turned out pretty good. i have this longshot at a 4.0 this semester, although it prolly won't fall like that at all. i could even get a C or something, but prolly not worse than a 3.25 for the semester which would just sorta leave my GPA where it already is. it doesn't really matter that much anymore anyway since i've got my job lined up. they don't really seem to give a rat's ass whether i have a 3.30 or a 3.38, it still says 3.3 on my resume and then it's forgotten.
it's a goofy finals session this year though. between the biblical-like weather and having to build a new computer relatively quickly it's just felt kinda weird. what the fuck's with the weather anyway? i hate this bullshit where you gotta change clothes 3 times a day to be dressed properly. typical CS conditions in like october and maybe a bit of november are cold in the morning, hot in the afternoon and freezing when the sun goes down. but this year we're still wearing short sleeves and shorts off & on in december. that alone just makes me wanna get to colorado faster where it's just plain cold.
my old HP box was just starting to get too fucked to really handle anything anymore (it could run XP on a good day for like an hour straight) so i put together a nice package.
i built a box with an MSI Delta-LSR 400mhz MB, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1GB of Kingston DDR 3200 RAM, couple 80GB HD's, 48X burner, GeForce4 card all wrapped in a sleek silver Enermax case with blue LED's and case fans on the side, Samsung 17" flat panel for the display. pretty fuckin beautiful if you ask me. the plan right now is to convert my old box to an all-linux terminal, but i'll take other interesting suggestions, such as dragging it from a car for 10+ miles, dropping it from considerable heights, and setting it on fire. take it from me, don't buy an HP. build your own. :)
let's see, here's a new feature that hopefully won't piss people off... i'll put the latest news with several of my contacts here with a scrambled name so they won't be able to [immediately] tell i'm talking about them.
cRki - came up with some sweet voodoo logic where we only have to make like mid-B's and could even skip a hw to still get A's in our class.
asceJsi - at this point she doesn't even answer my IM's, not sure if there's more to it than that or she's just ignoring me. pretty fuckin sad that she can become friends with somebody and yet when her boyfriend's within 5 miles she drops everybody else like they don't matter. when somebody is pretty shady about returning emails, cell calls and IM's, ya kinda run out of options, huh?
yntKhar - things were going alright with her until she didn't send a pretty important email back and didn't return a cell call. i sent her a nice long pissy lecturing email she didn't really like at all, so we haven't even spoken since that. not sure what to do about it. need to patch things up in person over the break back home.
edCinac - things are prolly completely over. after 3 straight unreturned cell calls spread out over about a month, i resorted to a flame type email, which yielded nothing. i'm gonna come right out and say that chick was sweet but ended up being a complete bitch. congratulations on further proving to me why i never liked sorority chicks to begin with.
nLrio - had some potential there, but mostly fucked due to the fact that she's about to graduate. she made my 438 class fun all semester but i wish things had gone a little differently. don't really dig how she spent most of her time justifying what kind of person she is instead of just doing the right thing and proving it to me. i really enjoyed talking to her and all that during the semester though. just kinda wish she'd done a better job getting her shit wired so we coulda hung out or whatever, but she apologized appropriately every time it happened and she doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth really. all i can do is hope she remains some kinda penpal and that things go well for her in san antonio.
aaruL - provided some drunken fun saturday night, but unfortunately went a bit too far. think the lesson was learned tho and it prolly won't happen again. sorta proved to be a much cooler chick than i had thought before, just needs to let loose a bit more often. hopefully it doesn't always take 7 vodka shots to do so.
nthaCsira - prolly the only person i know right now (no offense to any readers) that's actually made the transition from my bad to my good side. proven that she's not the person i had painted her to be, and she's fun to talk to when she just drops the badass attitude and talks to you like she cares what you say. even turned out to be quite civil online.
Lnreua - tired of seeing her get fucked by people. going to my big brother mode where i just want everybody to stop hurting my baby sister. i'm here if she needs me.
next couple days will consist of possibly writing a paper, writing some code, hitting the books, tivo'd law & order/PTI/NHL2Night/etc and dvd's the two towers/serial experiments: lain discs 2-4/etc during any breaks. just glad to type this up on a fully functional computer and shit, heh.
get back to ya soon.
--justin
Thursday, December 04, 2003
hey loyal readers! today's a list of current goods and bads! hope you enjoy!
good:
mystery science theater 3000
racquetball
t-shirts with the word "fucked-up" on the back
E.L. Fudge cookies
pepsi
ex-girlfriends that still bother to email you back
mike & ike's
people that mention something they saw on my blog
mario kart with anybody else
alayna singing along to the scrubs theme
kickass computer components on the way
hurricanes
good hourlong conversations with someone that used to hate you
advice from an unlikely source
pardon the interruption on ESPN
the st. anger album
knowing my soundsystem beats the shit out of my roommate's when necessary
listening to alayna talk about roommate's physical characteristics
hoang's occasional amusing away messages
slashdot.org
the look on people's faces just before they catch themselves about to walk in front of a bus
bad:
people in general
margaritas
broken promises
not knowing where to put your hair
computers so fucked up they barely work anymore
finances
writing checks
forgetting how to properly go to bed and just passing out *on* the bed
really long emails from the president of your university
people that sing aloud in computer science labs
having to set up a completely new computer from scratch
the ABC network
people sitting active on IM but aren't actually there
polyphonic rings anywhere in public
guys that always have to label other guys either bro, man or buddy in any given sentence
the idea that any time you walk anywhere on campus you have to be on a cell phone
other than that, only some other daily musings for today. breaking news: peach la creme yogurt is "okay" but not nearly as good as raspberry. if you must buy la creme yogurt, stick with raspberry, but if you're at HEB and you see only one raspberry pack left, call 972.567.9948 and ask if it's okay to get the last pack.
in another piece of news, we had this chick in our emerging technologies class get up in front of the class today where we assumed she was gonna talk about her career and IT related things. instead out of nowhere, she's all "alright my real passion is to go around spreading the word about our lord jesus christ blah blah blah." i felt like i was the only one in the room shouting in my head in a big denis leary voice "www.WHATTHEFUCK.com?" i was actually kind of apalled nobody threw anything at her. she was all up there throwing around all those big fancy names for god and it was just quite a scene, man. props to her for following her passion but next time she needs to let us know before she drops that bomb again, hot damn. i think i almost said amen when she was done.
without further ado, let's whip out some badass kevin smith movie quotes:
Silent Bob: You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you.
that one's from clerks, and a good one if i might add. i think in some ways it says as soon as you find a girl that can devote everything she can to you, you keep her.
Dante Hicks: But you hate people.
Randal Graves: Yes, but I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?
another from clerks. if you know anybody about me right now you don't have to ask.
Brodie: You're gonna listen to me? To something I said? Hasn't it become abundantly clear during the tenure of our friendship that I don't know shit?
from mallrats. sometimes don't you ever just feel like saying that when somebody comes to you for advice and you have no idea what to tell them, yet you can't bring yourself to be blunt about it?
Jay: I feel like I'm Han Solo, and you're Chewie, and she's Ben Kenobi, and we're in that fucked-up bar.
from dogma. kinda sums up how i feel half of every day lately.
Serendipity: When are you people going to learn? It's not about who's right or wrong. No denomination's nailed it yet, and they never will because they're all too self-righteous to realize that it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith. Your hearts are in the right place, but your brains need to wake up.
pay close attention there, kids.
shit y'all, it's 4am! time to pass out!
till the next episode,
justin
good:
mystery science theater 3000
racquetball
t-shirts with the word "fucked-up" on the back
E.L. Fudge cookies
pepsi
ex-girlfriends that still bother to email you back
mike & ike's
people that mention something they saw on my blog
mario kart with anybody else
alayna singing along to the scrubs theme
kickass computer components on the way
hurricanes
good hourlong conversations with someone that used to hate you
advice from an unlikely source
pardon the interruption on ESPN
the st. anger album
knowing my soundsystem beats the shit out of my roommate's when necessary
listening to alayna talk about roommate's physical characteristics
hoang's occasional amusing away messages
slashdot.org
the look on people's faces just before they catch themselves about to walk in front of a bus
bad:
people in general
margaritas
broken promises
not knowing where to put your hair
computers so fucked up they barely work anymore
finances
writing checks
forgetting how to properly go to bed and just passing out *on* the bed
really long emails from the president of your university
people that sing aloud in computer science labs
having to set up a completely new computer from scratch
the ABC network
people sitting active on IM but aren't actually there
polyphonic rings anywhere in public
guys that always have to label other guys either bro, man or buddy in any given sentence
the idea that any time you walk anywhere on campus you have to be on a cell phone
other than that, only some other daily musings for today. breaking news: peach la creme yogurt is "okay" but not nearly as good as raspberry. if you must buy la creme yogurt, stick with raspberry, but if you're at HEB and you see only one raspberry pack left, call 972.567.9948 and ask if it's okay to get the last pack.
in another piece of news, we had this chick in our emerging technologies class get up in front of the class today where we assumed she was gonna talk about her career and IT related things. instead out of nowhere, she's all "alright my real passion is to go around spreading the word about our lord jesus christ blah blah blah." i felt like i was the only one in the room shouting in my head in a big denis leary voice "www.WHATTHEFUCK.com?" i was actually kind of apalled nobody threw anything at her. she was all up there throwing around all those big fancy names for god and it was just quite a scene, man. props to her for following her passion but next time she needs to let us know before she drops that bomb again, hot damn. i think i almost said amen when she was done.
without further ado, let's whip out some badass kevin smith movie quotes:
Silent Bob: You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you.
that one's from clerks, and a good one if i might add. i think in some ways it says as soon as you find a girl that can devote everything she can to you, you keep her.
Dante Hicks: But you hate people.
Randal Graves: Yes, but I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?
another from clerks. if you know anybody about me right now you don't have to ask.
Brodie: You're gonna listen to me? To something I said? Hasn't it become abundantly clear during the tenure of our friendship that I don't know shit?
from mallrats. sometimes don't you ever just feel like saying that when somebody comes to you for advice and you have no idea what to tell them, yet you can't bring yourself to be blunt about it?
Jay: I feel like I'm Han Solo, and you're Chewie, and she's Ben Kenobi, and we're in that fucked-up bar.
from dogma. kinda sums up how i feel half of every day lately.
Serendipity: When are you people going to learn? It's not about who's right or wrong. No denomination's nailed it yet, and they never will because they're all too self-righteous to realize that it doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith. Your hearts are in the right place, but your brains need to wake up.
pay close attention there, kids.
shit y'all, it's 4am! time to pass out!
till the next episode,
justin
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