Here are a couple of little stories from when I worked at my internship again over break.

A little background information for you, before we begin: I was responsible for the IBM RMA process. Basically, it was up to me to take the laptops that needed to be repaired and petition IBM for the replacement parts or for a box to send them the broken unit in. Usually, I would be able to just fill out a form on the website and they would send the part (after, of course, calling to let me know that they care–for every single request. All of them. Every time. Fuck that shit, none of us have time for that when I RMA 15 hard drives in a day). Sometimes, however, I have to deal with these people on the phone. It isn’t pretty.

One time, Karen, one of the laptop technicians, transferred an IBM representative from her phone to me because IBM had questions about an RMA request and I was the one to place the request. Here’s how that went.

Me: Hello?
IBM: Hello, I have a question about the computer you sent in for RMA.
Me: [Rolling eyes] Yeah, I sent in between twelve and fifteen laptops for repair in the last four days, so I’m going to need you to be a little more specific.
IBM: Oh, it’s case number… FUKIBM. [OK, you caught me, I made up that case number]
Me: Yeah let me just look that up in my records. What’s the concern?
IBM: Well it was sent in for a display repair, it’s out of warranty and that’s a billable repair, so I need a PO number before I can start repair.
Me: No, I’m not going to pay to have it fixed. Just send it back and I’ll throw it away. Thanks. [Click]

No matter how many laptops I send in at once (I think I averaged about four outgoing per day) they seem to think that if they call and ask me about “the laptop you sent in for repair” that I will know exactly which one they are talking about. You know, the one with the broken display and the little sticky note on it? It was black… it was a little scuffed up, you know! No, I don’t! You just described 83% of the laptops i sent in in the last 45 minutes! If you’ll excuse me, all across the United States employees of my company are scuffing their laptops, breaking their displays, and putting little sticky notes on them to tell us what’s wrong with it, and if I spend any more time on the phone with you instead of sending these things in, I’m going to get way behind on my work!

As you can see, the people at IBM are real geniuses. No, I really mean that. It’s just a shame that their only genius lies in their ability to run a business with such potential on the absolute edge. Their products are great, but their customer service, in particular the organization thereof, is quite lacking. Here’s another good example of what it’s like to call IBM for customer service:

IBM Customer Service menu lady: Thank you for calling IBM. Press or say one if you are calling to request a repair. Press or say two if you are calling about an existing repair. Press or–
Me: Two.
[Brring]
IBM: Tank ou for calling I B M repair, my name is Harold, how can I assist you today?
Me: Yes, I’m calling about an existing repair that I requested, and I’m wondering why it was cancelled?
IBM: Excuse me?
Me: I’m calling about a repair that I requested on the IBM ESC website. The request was cancelled, I want to know why. Do you want the case number?
IBM: The what?
Me: The case number of the repair.
IBM: Sorry, this is a non-technical department, let me transfer you.
[Brring]
IBM Menu lady again: Thank you for calling the repair queue. Press or say one for a new repair request. Press or say two for an existing service call. If you are an IBM Premiere Service customer, press or say three or stay on the line.
Me: Two.
[Silence]
Me: TWO.
[Silence]
Me: T–
[Brring]
Me: Shit.
IBM: Thank you for calling IBM, what is the nature of your concern?
Me: I’m calling about a service call that was cancelled, I’m just wondering why?
IBM: Sorry sir, you need a different department, let me transfer you.
[Brring]
IBM: Helo tank you for calling I B M customer service, my name is Frank. How may I help you?
Me: I had a service call get cancelled
IBM: May I have the call number, please?
Me: I-B-M-S-U-X [Yep, you guessed it, I made this one up, too]
IBM: … That doesn’t come up on my screen. Let me just confirm that it’s I-B-M-S-U-X?
Me: Yes. I know that it’s right, because I’m looking at it in the IBM ESC website where I submitted the claim.
IBM: Huh. Well, I can’t find the claim in my system. Let’s just open a new one.

For the next twenty minutes I tried to understand his accent and explain to him that I needed a replacement part. When he asked me for it, I gave him the model number of the part, then we argued for a few minutes about whether or not the part in question actually existed. As it turns out, it does. Imagine that. I still don’t think he’s fully convinced.

This is an appealing alternative to talking to IBM representatives on the phone:

Nice IBM phone menu lady: Thank you for calling IBM. Do not bother pressing or saying anything, because you will be randomly transferred between departments regardless of what you do. If you have any time-sensitive engagements, such as meetings, lunches, work tomorrrow, or dying of cancer sometime in the next ten to twenty years, it is advised that you wait until after you have a free schedule to call in. You’ll thank me for this later.
[Click]
Me: [Shoots self in head]

I wonder if IBM is actually a company, or is in reality a ten year old boy in a sandbox somewhere with a knack for voice-acting and a really twisted sense of humor.

You know what? As long as IBM keeps letting me pay them in peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, I don’t really give a fuck.

I lit my lunch on fire. It’s really sad, too, because we don’t have a lot of food right now, and I was really looking forward to my sandwich. At least the fire alarm didn’t go off (probably because I held a bowl over the detector whilst Ryan opened up the kitchen for some air flow). Damn you, toaster oven. That’s right, you did see me with the deep fryer the other day, and you know what? I’m not even ashamed! I love her, and I’m not afraid to say it. She makes me happy, and doesn’t cause fires, which is more than I could ever say about you!

In other news, I puked on Saturday night for the first time in over a year and 3 months. I guess that’s what happens when you have about a hundred fluid ounces of malt liquor in an evening. I’ll have to try again to validate that theory later. It’s a real shame that I’m in my third year of college and it’s only the third time that I’ve puked, but it’s an even bigger shame that in order to maintain a rather desirable once-per-year average, I’m going to have to make it through my twenty-first birthday without puking. That’s going to be a real challenge, because I hear that it’s basically everyone’s objective to make you puke on your twenty-first birthday. Oh well, I guess I’ll deal with that when I get there.

In the meantime, I think I’ll go light some dinner on fire.

Today, I dressed and cooked a duck. I probably didn’t do it entirely right, but I did it. I expected to fuck it up, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t turn out just alright. In fact, it was good. To boot, I was wearing a suit when I did it; that’s just legit and a half right there. Tomorrow: I sleep in to let my body fight the sickness. Wish me luck in my sleep endeavours. Or don’t. I’ll be awake by the time you read this, anyway.

Yet again, it takes the prodding of Matty to get me to post. I always think about it, but I just never do it. It seems like I’m always waiting for something cool to write about. And when I have something that I want to write about, I don’t want to freak anybody out. Oh well, we’ll just shoot from the hip. If people stop talking to me, I guess that’s just a little more time that I’ll have to do other things, like sleep.

I have a cold. As a result, my voice is pretty sexy right now, I think. That came in handy when I guest-starred on Aaron’s WAUG show on Wednesday for an hour. I thought it was a lot of fun being on the radio. There was basically no pressure since our transmitter is operating at such low wattage that you can’t really hear the station unless you’re sitting within 30 feet of the building, and most (if not all) of the Shoutcast listeners are friends of Aaron’s from his WoW guild. I had a lot of fun doing the broadcast for a bit, and I’m under the impression that people enjoyed my radio presence and that I will be invited back. I would like that. I think I’m going to grab the rip from Aaron, so if you’re interested in hearing my first radio show, I guess Aaron or myself could indulge you.

I’m in an acting class, and there’s a bunch of silly characters in there. You’d think that maybe I would have made a fool of myself by now, but I’ve been surprisingly reserved so far. I think it’s going to take some time before I come out of my shell, but that’s because I’m not entirely comfortable with a lot of the people. At least Eddie’s in there. That’s going to be some shit, lemme tell you what.

French is still cool. We’re doing some sweet shit right now with commands and past tense and stuff so I might actually be able to say things i want to say, like “kill yourself” and “I was so hungry that I could have eaten a raw baby.”

Macroeconomics is a godsend. Do you know what we did on the second day of class? We reviewed 7th grade Algebra. That’s right: slopes, lines, intersections… HELL YES I AM IN MFING HEAVEN.

Now we’re into the heavy shit:

I am friggin confused. I wish I could figure out what is up with the whole ‘human emotions’ thing, cuz then I wouldn’t need to be confused. The trouble is, I can’t quite tell what I’m feeling right now. I really wish there was a way to quantify human emotion. I suppose I could work on that. I bet I’d make a lot of money if I got something working. Tough shit, for now it’s all speculation.

I like someone. A girl, in fact. When I spend time with said girl, I have a good time. When I am not with said girl things do remind me of her, I do think of her, etc. The problem is that when I compare how I feel with how I have felt in the past, I’m not sure what the deal is. I compare what I feel with things that I have felt in the past, and I can’t even tell if I’m fooling myself into believing that I am romantically interested in her just because I like to spend time with her and she’s cute. It’s just that I’ve been attracted to someone before who I felt that I just connected with on levels that I couldn’t explain, and it felt so incredibly right that in comparison, nothing else feels the same.

Pessimistic Mark says:

Too bad you lost what could have been the best thing ever, you really fucked yourself there. It’s not coming back and nothing will replace it.

Optimistic Mark says:

The law of big numbers says that there’s got to be at least one more person out there that can make you feel like she did.

And finally, realistic/analytical Mark says:

Who are you to say that you know or don’t know who it is that could make you feel like she did. Just because you don’t feel it now doesn’t mean that it can’t happen with this new girl.

Thus ensues my dilemma. I don’t want to start something if I don’t know that I’ll be willing and able to see it through to completion. The risk of it scares me. I know, I know… “don’t be such a poon,” you’re saying, but it’s not the risk of hurting myself that really concerns me. It’s the risk of hurting her. I’ve broken hearts before and I don’t want to do it again if I don’t have to. It doesn’t feel good.

Of course, the biggest catch here: I don’t even know if she likes me.

Would I be being unfair to her to pursue my feelings even though I’m not entirely sure as to their nature?
Would I be settling if I pursued something perhaps within my grasp even though there’s a remote chance that something better could come along?
Am I being an idiot?

Silver lining to a dark cloud: I think I’ve figured out why nice guys finish last.

No, it’s not because they’re always waiting until I update my blog to do something.

Yesterday was pretty sucky. Today more than makes up for it. I woke up this morning 15 minutes before my alarm went off, took a shower, had breakfast, and had some time to work on my laptop before I went to class. Abstract Algebra wasn’t so fucking hard for a day. Computer Networking actually held some useful information for once. I was asked back to John Deere for a second-round interview for a summer internship.

Life is good, if only for today.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s birth. Today, we increment his status from “old” to “old+1.” I wish I could celebrate. I wish that I could give him a hug. I wish that I could hand him his birthday present, sit on the couch with him and talk, roughhouse with him like I used to do, but I am stuck at college. It’s sad for me because on this birthday, I think he particularly needs it. Instead, on this birthday, he sits on my grandparents’ hide-a-bed with a plate and several screws in his ankle, one less toe than he was born with, and nothing but a television to keep him company throughout the day. Thanks to the accident, this birthday is probably his most pitiful. It is probably the theme for my day: pitiful.

I woke up this morning to nothing. Absolutely nothing. No alarm clock, no smell of coffee brewing, no sounds of someone bustling around the kitchen making breakfast, no radio playing incessantly in Ryan’s room, not even the steady hum of computer fans. It was eerie. It was a bad start. The power was out for basically half of the campus’s residences.

When the power returned, I was looking forward to making a big Sunday breakfast like Ryan and I have a habit of doing every week. It would have fixed my day a little, but Ryan was too busy cleaning his room for his family and getting ready for and subsequently going to church to have breakfast with me. Instead, I made cinnamon rolls from a tube, burned them slightly, and sat at the kitchen table and ate mine, alone. I was invited to join Ryan at church, but not by him. Instead, it was Rachel who invited me to church, unaware that I did not know that she was going with Ryan. This felt weird to me. I’m probably making more of a deal of this than there is to make, but it seemed to me like he was passively withholding from me the fact that she was going. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it still felt odd. I think that he thinks that I don’t like church because I don’t believe in God, and because I crack jokes about not wanting to go to church, but I don’t mind church actually. I think that Christian values are actually quite good for the world, and that’s what church is primarily about: teaching people how to be better people. What I don’t appreciate is being asked to place my faith blindly (it would be blind for me, everyone has their own reasons to believe or not believe, but I don’t really have any reason to go either way) in one being or one idea. What I don’t appreciate is someone asserting their own belief as truth. I would have liked to have gone to church today, with friends (isn’t that one of the pillars of church: fellowship?) but I was not even close to being ready to go out into public. Too bad.

It rained. Usually, I like rain. Today, however, the rain sucked. It happened too softly, too shortly, and while I was inside. These three factors lead me to classify today’s rain as: pitiful.

I got some sewing done, but sewing that I should not have had to do. I needed to sew shut a beanbag that I borrowed from Laura, because the seams were coming undone because drunk people think they can juggle. I have come to the conclusion that, in general, they are quite mistaken. About all drunk people are good for are laughs and destruction.

I decided that my knife was beginning to dull again, and that the blade needed a little touch-up, so I got out my stone and began to sharpen it. I have sharpened my knife on many occasions before, with this stone, with this technique, and today is the first day that I have ever cut myself. It was a quite clean cut, fairly deep, and in a high-traffic area of my thumb. It will bother me for days to come. There is a good chance that it will become infected, as some of the powder from grinding the blade got into the cut. Oh well.

The highlights of my day: Pat and I made hamburgers with Frank’s Red Hot and ketchup in and on them. They were amazing. You should make them. Dan came home. I missed him, and I’m glad he’s alright. This week’s chapter in French is about colors, which I personally think we should have learned about 6 weeks ago. Jason and I finished the network lab in under two hours. It was supposedly taking other groups over three hours. Rachel somehow was able to make me smile every time she talked to me, and that really helped me get through my day. Tonights sleep will be a sweet release, and tomorrow when I wake, there better be an alarm buzzing in my ear, the soft hum of fans, and if I’m lucky, the patter of rain on my window pane. I’ll settle for two out of three. Oh, and I would also like my thumb to still be attatched.

Pitiful, yes. My day was not without fault. I felt faintly like crying all day. I survived. Tomorrow I will be stronger for it.

I wrote this for FTW!!!1 a while back, and decided that I wanted it to follow my blog too, because that lives on ‘ol Blue and I don’t know what’s going to become of the TS server after this schoolyear. The following is the complete reproduction of the original article.

I was at McDonald’s the other day, with Aaron, and he and I were talking. Of course, you should know at this point that nothing good can come of this. He and I were discussing McDonald’s newest ad campaign featuring people of many ethnic backgrounds eating McDonald’s food and stating that they are “lovin’ it.” We agreed that this is in itself quite amusing.

Webster defines love as:

1. to hold dear, cherish

Let me just start with a question. Do you hold your McDonald’s dear? Do you cherish it? Is it, to you, an extension of your being? I hope not. Don’t get me wrong, I like McDonald’s, but I don’t cherish it.

2. to fondle amorously

Have you ever fondled a burger amorously? I have, but I can assure you wholeheartedly that I was joking at the time, and my feelings for the burger were purely those of hunger.

3. to copulate with

Finally, how recently have you copulated with a food item? I can’t quite recall the last time that I did so, and the last food-related copulation that I recall seeing was Jason Biggs vs. an apple pie. Perhaps that should have been the tagline for the film: “American Pie: I’m lovin’ it.”

How incredibly ambiguous.

If you have not yet familiarized yourself with the theorized psychological stages of love, I reccommend it. I don’t intend to analyze them deeply in parallel with the McDonald’s ad campaign, but if you read them and you think about them, I’m sure you could be just as sarcastic as I could. What these bring to mind is a realization that love is a complex emotion, one that is hard to define, hard to pinpoint, and one that is (IMHO) impossible to fully understand. My ultimate question is: do we trust McDonald’s to assert that what each of the people in their ad campaign, or anyone who eats McDonald’s for that matter, feels for their food is “love?” I don’t think that the McDonald’s corporation understands love enough to be credible in that respect.

I propose that McDonald’s adopt a much more appropriate slogan:
“What I feel for this may be construed as ‘love.'”

Until then, I think I’m going to go get 2 apple pies for $1. I’m not hungry, I’m just lonely.

I wrote this for FTW!!!1 a while back, and decided that I wanted it to follow my blog too, because that lives on ‘ol Blue and I don’t know what’s going to become of the TS server after this schoolyear. The following is the complete reproduction of the original article.

In response to the recent articles making the general public aware of the reasons which it is beneficial for girls to date n3rds (I am aware of two such lists: the one that Sarah posted yesterday and this one ) I think that in order to help girls find n3rds to take home, I will offer some much needed insight into the world of the n3rd.

How to tell if he likes you.

1. Are you a girl? Then he likes you.
2. Does he not make eye contact with you? Then he likes you a lot.
3. Does being in the same room as you make him uncomfortable to the point where he occasionally can’t control his bladder? Then he probably thinks that he loves you.

How to get him to like you if he doesn’t already.

1. Introduce yourself…as a girl. Say “Hello, my name is [insert name here, or if you don’t want him to know your real name, make one up] and I am a girl.” At this point, he will probably turn a shade of crimson that you did not know existed (but for the record it’s [255, 0, 40]) and look at his feet. You don’t know it yet, but he now likes you. And he just vacated his bowels.
2. Wear a shirt with a number on it. Any number. Maybe when you’re in the same room as him, you could also loudly proclaim from time to time “I like numbers.” Don’t push the subject too hard, though, it shouldn’t take much to get him piqued.
3. Use words like n00b, pwn, 1337, and a whole lot of acronyms. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what 1337 means, or if the acronyms you use aren’t real, just throw anything in there. He will be so surprised when he hears you say “I totally pwned payless today. They were having this 1337 sale, right, and I pwned this one woman who thought she was going to get a sweet deal on some BAPs, but I hosed her with my level 26 purse with a rock mod, FTW!!1!.” He might even be surprised when you say “I was going to noob this one 1337 WTF right in the BBQ, but it’s that time of teh month.” The possibilities are endless.

What to do to get rid of a nerd that you don’t want.

1. Tell him that your favorite computer game is Photoshop.
2. Tell him that you are thinking of buying a Mac, and don’t budge when he tries to convince you otherwise.
3. Ask him if he can fit the internet on a floppy for you. Remind him that it has to be the whole internet, and tell him not to come back until he’s finished.
4. Punch him in the face. You should have about a week to move to a new city or something.

Ladies, please take full advantage of this information. FULL advantage.

I have an MN-700. It sucks. It offers me wireless 54G networking in a small and affordable package ($25 on w00t shipped) plus routing capabilities and a built-in 4 port 10T/100TX switch. I wish that it delivered. Don’t get me wrong, it works beautifully as a switch. That’s about it. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Microsoft probably didn’t design, build, or write the firmware for the switch that is integrated into my AP. You know why I think that? Because it’s the only part that works flawlessly.

Ryan and I were trying to play Scrabble 2 across the network the other day. Actually, we weren’t trying so much as were were actually playing it. Well, for a while, anyway. I had my laptop on the couch in Ryan’s room, connected to my wireless, so that he and I could talk to each other while we played our game without having to raise our voices from room to room. Sure, there was the in-game text feature, but I like to use my primitive vocal cords from time to time. You know, for the sake of novelty?

Let’s outline a few important details:

• My laptop and wireless router were separated by a grand total of ten feet
• In that ten feet between them, there was only two sheets of drywall (thank you, whoever constructed the Naeseth townhomes)
• I was using the Microsoft Wireless Zero configuration engine to establish and maintain my wireless connection

Ryan and I got about thirty minutes into a game, and it was pretty heated. The scores were close, the end was near, and the words were quite good. Suddenly, my computer told me that he had dropped out of the game. His computer told him that I had dropped out of the game. I minimized scrabble to find the “Wireless network connection is now connected” tooltip balloon protruding from my system tray. I had been disconnected from and subsequently reconnected to my router. As a result, some packets were lost that caused our game to be ruined. So, we tried to play again. About thirty miniutes later, it happened again. So, we ran a patch cable from my room to his room and played over a wired LAN. Problem solved.

I guess when my laptop says this:

What it really means is this:

I know that my wireless card works fine, because I have used it at length on other access points with no problems. Ruling that out, the only other things involved were Microsoft-based: my AP and the Wireless Zero Configuration Service.

Go figure.

That’s what my mind feels like right now as I sort through all of the 345 comments on my blog that are awaiting moderation. Each one is so desperately and at the same time patiently sitting in the queue, hoping that I will read it and decide that it has something meaningful to say about what I have written, and that I will validate its very existence with the mere click of a mouse button: “Approved.”

I wish that I could say that I was three-hundred-and-forty-five-comments-in-three-weeks popular and that my blog has a fanbase of loyal readers that read religiously and comment heartily. Would that it were so. Sadly, comments like

Thus he became possessed of both the sabemos for which he postscript displeased an army from his own spoilation, and invaded Socialist.

make me highly doubtful. So, confused, I continue to read, searching desperately for a single shred of humanity in any one of these babbling comments.

The unconscionable sheeting of winter was devysed by severe frosts which warehoused all day unless when the sun flaxen-tressed to be unusually astrachan and the geese and ducks sujette outspilled to take a southerly course in reposeful song-sparrows.

What the fuck? I tried to wrap my mind around this for a few minutes, and it sprang on me: what if this was some sort of code. I haven’t seen a few of my friends in a long time. What if one of them had been kidnapped, and only has access to the internet for ten minutes per day, and his access was monitored closely, and these screwy messages are some sort of a code? It makes sense. I am really smart, and if I were one of my friends and I was kidnapped, I would surely choose me to be the most likely to figure out the code. With this in mind, I set out to crack the code and rescue my friend.

In times like these, Google is your only friend. As such, I asked Google to help me with some of the vocabulary that escaped me.

• astrachan: “a major city in southern European Russia, capital of Astrakhan Oblast. The city lies on the Volga river, close to where it discharges into the Caspian Sea.”
• sujette: French for ‘subject’
• tressed: having long locks of hair

This can only mean one thing: My kidnapped friend is in a cold warehouse on the shore of the Volga river. Geese, ducks, and song-sparrows are resting there for a short period of time during their southerly migration. These birds may be pausing to bask in the glow of the sun, which has long locks of blonde hair at this present time.

I was about to set out to find him, but I decided that I should see if there was anything else I could determine from the other posts.

About his aliusque was a mereuse where hung a goodly ministrae, plump like himself and eke as well restricted.

• aliusque: Latin for ‘another’
• mereuse: ? but it appears to be French in origin
• eke: also (the definition that seems to fit the context the most)
• ministrae: plural form of ministra, which is Latin for ‘servant, attendant, or assistant’

So… about his other was a French something where hung a great deal of servants, fat like him and also restricted as much. What does it mean? Is my friend’s captor ritually murdering all of his fat subordinates by hanging them? I wish this was easier. It was clear that I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast, and my friend was in grave danger, so it was time to take action.

Suddenly, another comment caught my eye:

Great choice of shoes at our online store.

If you thought I was confused before, then surely the word for my new state was baffled. I like my shoes. I have never been anything but complimented about my shoes. Is it possible that I was wrong? Was one of my friends not in danger? What other explanation could there be? Whoever had left that particular comment for me apparently decided that since I had not yet gone to purchase shoes from his or her online store, it must have been because I did not have enough information, so they elaborated for me:

Incredible shoes abnormal sale. Adaptive postal and fetched exactly.

Holy shit! An abnormal sale?! I had no idea, whatthefuckamIdoingIneedtobuyshoesnow! I can’t believe that the shoes are even fetched exactly! Don’t you hate it when you order shoes on the internet and they aren’t fetched exactly? Look, they even have adaptive postal! What isn’t there to love about this abnormal sale?

Adaptive postal? …Adaptive postage? …Dynamic postage? …Postage may vary? Shit, I wonder if… This reminded me of a game that my friends and I used to play in high school, back when Babel Fish was all the rage. It was called ‘see how fucked up a translation gets when you cycle it through all of the languages.’ You start with a simple looking and innocent sentence like “I would like to buy some clothes from you” and translate it English->Spanish->French->German->English to get something like “He wants to buy little clothes of you.” One time, I don’t remember what we started with, but when it was done being sodomized by the translating engine, it came out “And go the elephants with cheese observing.” When I am old and gray and senile, and that is the only phrase that I mutter, they will think that I am crazy. I will simply be remembering “the good old days” when the Internet was one big game.

So, I guess none of my friends have been kidnapped. I guess it’s just some inconsiderate foreigner with a little bit of programming knowledge under his belt who designed a piece of software to poorly translate foreign phrases into english and post them on unsuspecting weblogs in hopes that the attatched links will generate him revenue. Of the 345 comments on my blog, 0 were put there by actual people. None.

All I have to say is: “I become I kill more whoever I have made this.”

This was quite a Sunday. I was quite productive. Even so, I feel like an utter sally. To help you to understand why, here’s a list of some of the things that I did today:

• Rearranged my room
• Vacuumed
• Cooked
• Did laundry

You will notice that among that list, the following items were not present:

• Killed a deer or other living animal
• Burped or farted loudly
• Drank a beer
• Lit something on fire

Looks like I have a lot of catching up to do…

That was a fun weekend. My fingers are crying. Were they to actually be vocal, they would say to me “Why would you do this to us? Why would you switch from an electric guitar with its soft and loose strings to an acoustic with its taut unforgiving strings?! What have you done? [Soft sobbing]” I would then tell them to shut up. It is time to get back in gear here. I have been babying my fingers on weak strings for far too long, and it is time to rock out painfully at first on the cumbersome acoustics. It’s okay, though, because they sound so purdy. At any rate, I played what could mistakenly be construed as too much guitar at Bradley this weekend whilst visiting Allison. I learned a new song, which was good, especially since it was a song that I happen to like a lot. We didn’t get to play DDR due to strangers (of course you can’t just play DDR in front of strangers, that’s wierd!) and Allison’s temporarily bum leg, but that’s ok. It just gives her more time to train for when she visits Augustana and we do get to play. Allison: I challenge you to beat me at any song on any difficulty. Do it, I dare you.

So I have been told that I am bad at the posting game. You know, the game where I tell you what’s going on in my life? Yeah. Well, I’m a busy busy guy. I have books to read (namely Elements of Style [grammar], A Guy’s Gotta Eat [nutrition], and Now You’re Talking [ham radio]), MP3s to tag (only about 9 gigs of them that need to be tagged at the moment), files to organize; if you’ve ever had a folder on your desktop called (get this!) “desktop” then you will know what I mean. I actually have a folder called “desktop” wherein resides a lot of files and a folder called “desktop” wherein resides even more files and a folder called “desktop” wherein resides YET MORE files and a folder called “desktop” (last one, I swear) wherein resides…a shit ton of files. And that’s just on my main end-user machine. I still have to organize the files on my laptop, also. In addition to that, I have a language to learn: French. Yes monsieurs and mademoiselles (forgive me if I spell incorrectly, we don’t write a whole lot yet) I have elected to abandon Spanish and begin anew with French for my foreign language. It’s a challenge, but it’s fun. Just think, I could have decided to learn an ugly language like German or something. I know, right? Who would want to learn that? I have no idea. In addition to French, I am also taking Abstract Algebra (the last stop in my mystical Math-major-journey) and Computer Networking (the last stop in my magical Computer-Science-major-journey). Yum. Plus I have a workout schedule wherein I lift with Pat 2-3 days per week and I am going to be running with Aaron 3 days per week. Also somewere in there (and I don’t quite know how or where yet) I have found time to keep up with friends and also sleep. I think I might have been doing both at the same time. My brain hurts. I’m hungry. There, I think you’re pretty much up to date.

What a delight. I just had an amazing one-month anniversary with Jessi:

1. Dinner out.
2. Cruisin’ with the top down.
3. Reclining the seats and staring at the stars to a whole lot of Death Cab for Cutie.
4. Almost falling asleep on the drive back to her house.

And now that I’m dead tired, it’s time to go to a LAN party and get friggin more tired.

Great weekend. Amazing weeked. I ran down to Ry’s farm and chilled there for a few days. There is nothing more relaxing than being in the middle of nowhere. Everybody is always saying “there is nothing to do, I’m sorry” and “it’s so boring” but I disagree.

• Ryan can always come up with something to do and get it set up in under 15 minutes, even in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know how he does it.
• Sometimes having nothing to do is a blessing. I have things to do all the time, and I like being able to walk around barefoot in a field and stare at the sky or some trees and just…not think. It’s so hard not to think in suburbia (although I do my best to try).

At any rate I had a great time, and I got a great sunburn (I glow in the dark now) out on the boat. Plus, I didn’t lose any fingers in the woodshop. That’s always a good thing.

So…
It worked. Sticky and I managed to get wires soldered on in place of the ribbon cable and the drive don’t know no differ’nt. Now I just need to transfer over my music (45 Gigs o’ it) and I will never need to leave my car again. Ever. Maybe I should have running water installed in there.