SixFeetOver

Last Friday marked my second Gordon Globes victory in a row. My friend Chris and I made Mouse, MD – a parody of House MD, which is more or less the best show on TV.  The basic plot was that I (Mouse) was a genius computer repair diagnostician who saved the computer which controls all the student data at Gordon. We spent copious amounts of hours on the darn thing…many, many late nights (some till 4:00 in the morning for me; one night Chris never left the video editing lab). I spent 20 hours on the 21 second title sequence. In any case, we won Best Picture for the night, which was really rewarding. The best part was when the audience erupted in applause when they saw the giant M on the screen and instantly knew what our movie was.

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In other news, I bought egg nog yesterday. Nothing says “Holiday season” like a cup of ‘nog.

Today I walked by a display case in Jenks, and I looked down and noticed that written in the dust on the display case was this note: “Bush isn’t Christian!” I was rather annoyed by this. First, and ironically, writing a statement like that isn’t Christian. It is not our place to judge others’ relationship with God. Frankly, just because Bush’s politics don’t line up with yours doesn’t mean he isn’t a Christian. Second, he may not be the brightest president America has had, but at least he is one of the few politicians who try to make decisions within a moral framework. And have some sympathy – there isn’t a person on this campus (including me) who could even come close to understand the degree of difficulty he must have trying to be leader of the free world with all the pressures of that world telling him his moral framework is not legitimate and that instead he should just do what they want.

It’s true that I’m not much of a political person and I don’t follow the goings on of this country as much as I should. But I am of the opinion that most peoples’ politics suck – so many people want to base policy off of completely arbitary values (that is, absolutely nothing), and a great many people seem to have it all figured out, which annoys me too. My hat goes off to conservatives who are trying desperately to maintain some sense of real morals in this country and who recognize that not everyone can have their own personal arbitrary “values” which reduce to “I can do whatever I want, so get over it.”

I walked back past that display case and erased the n’t part of isn’t.  He says he is a Christian – it’s between him and God, not us.

Still unbelievably busy.  No time for anything, including this blog entry.  This year’s Gordon Globes movie due soon.  Big exam Friday.  Unreasonable amounts of reading to do, also for Friday.  Must always sacrifice study quality of one class to do better in another, or sacrifice study quality for all class in exchange for sleep.  It’s the opportunity cost of it all, as we discuss in economics.  Projects of my own exist only in my mind; sometime maybe I’ll see them come to fruition.  They could be quite interesting if done well; one programming project, one philosophy project.

Abstract: This paper will communicate it summary form the various activities which I have been involved in since the last post (non-inclusive). As a warning, it may contain generic college-student statements making references to fatigue, homework, etc. You have been warned.

1. School: Classes are going well, but keeping me incredibly busy. This year marks my first 300 level math course, the average difficulty per problem reflects that fact. I also have the pleasure of having two massive projects to do this semester, one large paper, and an unreasonable amount of reading for the remaining class. But I’m learning a lot and still managing to tread water, even if I’m swallowing a bit here and there.

2. Work: I’m working more this year than I have in past years, which translates to complete elimination of free time and a bigger paycheck. I work at CET more and I TA for the introductory computer science lab. Fortunately this year we get to play with programming lego robots, so that should be fun.

3. Personal: Apartment life has been great. It’s awesome to have a kitchen and the relative freedom of extended visitation. It’s difficult to find time to go shopping though, and there isn’t exactly much variety in my diet. But I’m working on it. Being in an apartment also also allows Alice and I much more time together than we would otherwise have, which is a huge plus. Also, Mike and Amy came to visit last weekend. It was a blast and the first time they’ve been to Gordon (I visited mike two or three times at Norwich, so it was definitely his turn!)

4. Conclusion: I keep hoping to catch up on work to have a few free hours to work on some personal projects. So far it hasn’t happened.

5. Footnote: I think my next computer will be a Mac. PC loyalties = broken.

It’s the End of Summer Post (EoSP)!

Let’s see. I wrapped up my final day of window washing today; now I just have to wait till next Tuesday and I’ll be heading back to Gordon, and picking up Alice along the way. Today was nice and relaxed, the boss had us clean his house (windows, walls, gutters, deck), so it was hours for the crew and a clean house for his family. We had a company barbeque tonight too, that was fun.

I guess I’ve done a few things since I wrote last. I went out to Minnesota to visit the lovely Alice for a few days in mid July. It wasn’t a super long visit but I was able to go for five days, which is more than we were really expecting for the weekend, so that was exciting. It was of course a great experience – I got to meet some of Alice’s friends, go to the Minnesota zoo, go swing dancing, and just have a generally really good time. I also went camping with Mike and two of his friends from school, which was quite good. We went out and did some “real” camping – no amenities were available. We also did a ridiculous hike, almost literally running up the mountain, hiking to the top in an hour and a half, a hike which no doubt should have taken 45 minutes more than that. Soulfest (music festival) was the following weekend, and that was also mostly good. It was better than I had thought it would be, and in fact before I went I had almost no motivation to go at all. But many of the bands performed swimmingly; Newsboys, Casting Crowns and Jars of Clay, to name a few.

The rest of my summer will consist of wrapping up all my loose ends here at home, cleaning up this disaster of a room and packing to head back to school and start work down there. I’m excited to live in an apartment down there, although it will be the first time in my life where I’ve had to provide my own food and go grocery shopping for myself regularly – that will be interesting. But I’m looking forward to going back.

So, let’s catch up.

Alice’s visit was fantastic. It was pretty amazing that timing worked out for her to stay here for a week. I felt bad because there isn’t that much stuff to do out here where I live, especially compared to where she lives, but we had fun, going to the North country in NH, visitng Jared, and some other things.

I ended up not going for the tech job for the hospital. The pay wasn’t what I thought it would be and the commute would have been ridiculous (up to 1.5 hours at 6AM – and I’m very much not a morning person.) Never mind the wear and tear on my car. Anyway, instead I’ve been washing windows. It’s been a very interesting job – much more involved than windex and paper towels, like I thought it would be. We wear tool belts and use special forumulas and squeegees and razor blades, etc etc. It’s quite a production. But I’ve seen tons of absolutely gorgeous houses since most people who hire professional window washers are pretty wealthy and have very nice homes. That’s been the biggest perk of the job.

I finally got a laptop. Dragging the enormous desktop that I have back and forth between school and home has been a huge pain, and I’m never able to go anywhere like Starbucks to do work when I’m at school because I usually need my PC. So my laptop came, and it was a bit of a DIY project, in that I installed the RAM and hard drive myself. Then I installed windows, fired it up…and the left speaker went crazy. It made a horrific staticy type noise for quite a while, despite reboots, and whether windows was running or not. The noise stopped and a few hours later I realized that no sound comes out of the left speaker at all. I’m pretty annoyed, because I’ll probably have to send it back almost right after getting it. Sigh.

On a better note, this Thursday I fly out to Minnesota to visit Alice. Let’s just say that these next 3.5 days of waiting cannot go by fast enough. I can’t wait to see her again.

It’s been awhile since the last post. I have no excuse.

Finals went well for the most part. My differential equations final was a bit of a beast – it was a take-home that required quite a few hours to complete. I did fine on it though. In fact, I may have finally gotten a 4.0 this semester, depending on how rigorously my French exam is graded.

Alice is touring in Italy with the rest of the Wind Ensemble and college choir from school. I’m jealous! She managed to call me today from Italy though, I was very happy about that but it made me realize exactly how much I missed her. She will be staying with us for a week after she gets back though – the highlight of my summer, no doubt!

I was talking with Mike the other day about summer plans and told him that I had the dull job of window washing lined up for me this summer. He came to the rescue and told me about a tech support summer job for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center that his mom had told him about. I got very excited at the idea of doing a resumé building, intellectually stimulating, hopefully high paying job. So, I began editing my resumé and cover letter with Alice’s mom’s help, and less than three business hours after submitting it got a phone call to set up an interview. Tomorrow I’ll be in Bedford at 10:00AM (it’s a 1.5 hour drive) for my interview. Hopefully it will all go well and I’ll be a techie for the summer!

P.S. – Suse 10 is a beautiful Linux distro. I just installed it on a clunker of a machine and it’s running pretty nicely.

Last Wednesday was my “golden” birthday, as they say – I turned 22 on the 22nd (of the 2nd month, no less). Having never had a girlfiend and a birthday at the same time before, I was quite curious to see what Alice would do. She made the day a ton of fun. When I got to my 8AM class that morning, my teacher handed me a birthday card. I thought “Wow, why is the math department giving me a birthday card?” I took the card out of its envelope and saw a picture of two little kids hugging each other – now I was creeped out that the math dept. would give me a card like this! Upon further inspection (that is, reading the inside), I realized it was from Alice, who had secretly slipped my prof the card to give to me the day before. Then in my next class a couple hours later (with the same prof), he hands me another card. I thought the original had just fallen out of my backpack, but no – it was a different card from Alice. Well, I thought that was really thoughtful, but I wasn’t expecting any more in the day because she personally knew this professor, but she didn’t know my other profs. I was wrong! My programming teacher had a card in hand when my 1:00 class started, as did my French teacher, who almost got the class to sing to me in French. So she managed to make going to classes on my birthday pretty special.
After all that, we went to the gym (to prepare for the food we’d be having later, of course). My mom mailed me a giant whoopie pie, my favorite dessert. After talking to both my parents and Alice’s parents on the phone, and going to the gym, Alice took me out to Chilie’s for dinner.  Going out to eat is an amazing thing when you are used to school food, and my cajun steak was especially amazing there.

My Mom’s birthday is the day after mine (somehow that keeps happening every year), so she and my sister came down on her birthday to go out for lunch and celebrate.  We had a good time, although the treatment at the restaurant we went to (Not your average Joe’s) was somewhat less than average.  Oh well.  In any case, it was an enjoyable couple of days.

Now, today is my last day of classes for the quad.  I have one midterm left and 14 pages of work to hand in for linear algebra.  After that, Alice and I are flying to her house in Minnesota for a week.  I’m excited!

It was about 20 degrees out yesterday, and Alice and I went out for ice cream. It’s the only time I’ve ever bought ice cream while I was able to see my breath. We’re an odd couple.

Today we’re getting well over a foot of snow.

I hope I’m not branded as being crazy as a result of this, but I’m actually trying one of these “win a free iPod” things. It seems legitimate so far. It’s one of those deals where you sign up for some trial service and then refer five people to the site, and then you get an iPod out of it. So, I joined to help a friend of mine, and signed up for a one week trial of some savings service which promised a wal-mart gift card. I quit before the week was up, so it only cost me a dollar, and now I just need to refer 5 people myself and in theory I’ll get an iPod. So if anyone is feeling brave, click here: http://ipods.freepay.com/?r=27006249, sign up, refer me, help me get an iPod! You MUST click on this link though for me to get a referal, you can’t just go to ipods.freepay.com.

Thanks to anyone who signs up.