Passed away this evening at the age of 81. Father of five, war veteran, and an all-around good guy.
Month: June 2007
Did I Say a Day or So?
I meant two weeks, I think. Of course, it’s just before 11pm right now and I have to get up for work in the morning, so I’m not going to be writing Atlas Shrugged here or anything.
I am back in school now, as best as I can be with a full time job that carries its own off-duty demands. Right now all I’m doing is taking a refresher in trigonometry so can move on to the calculus series. The idea is to take calculus 1-3 between this fall and next summer so I can transfer back down to Lincoln and finish my four-year degree. Somehow I managed to get enough credits between 1999-2002 to classify as four credits short of junior status, so I will be well into junior status after finishing calculus up. After that, there are really only a couple more classes in math that I need to take, and possibly foreign language, then it will just be computer courses the rest of the way.
I’m not sure how the foreign language situation is going to go. My understanding is I need four semesters of a language to clear the Arts & Sciences requirement. I took two semesters of Japanese at Metro in Omaha but I never used it once outside the classroom and have subsequently forgotten most of it. As for German… well, I lived there for five years, and I took through German III in school, but I haven’t used it at all since 1998. Either way, I have to start from ground zero again.
After that, who knows. I keep saying I want to check out the job scene somewhere on a coast; whether that’s in California or someplace east I don’t think I care too much right now. Just getting tired of the cornfields I think!
The State of the Site
Ok, so sometime last year I took this site down. I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it – it seemed it was mostly just getting used as a file repository, then that got out of hand and basically became impossible for me to manage. I guess I don’t really have any use for it aside from its original purpose (which was to provide me a spot to ramble about shit) so here’s a fresh installation of WordPress. The older posts you see prior to this one were random things I had written up.
The real answer to the question of why I brought things back into gear now as opposed to any other time is I see Steve and Dave started theirs back up, and now I must do my part to keep up with the Joneses. Or the Englers. Whatever. And the only reason I’m up doing this now (now being 3am) is because I just got through turning my apartment upside down rearranging things.
As much as I like this place, there is one major flaw with it: the bedroom is in the worst spot imaginable. Take a look at the floorplan here.
On the other side of the bedroom wall to the far right is the entrance to the apartment building, complete with stairs. Those stairs get loud, and they get traffic at all hours of the day. That means if you sleep in that bedroom, you’re subjecting yourself to being awakened at 2am, 3am, etc. My solution to this was simple: grab a blanket and go sleep on the couch. That stuck quite well, because now I sleep soundly and don’t get any outside noise.
But that presented another problem. Not really a terrible problem, but a problem nonetheless. Aside from my clothes, I was basically packing my entire apartment into my living room. If I wanted to live in a studio, I’d go get a studio. So tonight, after five months, I decided I was going to move the computer and the TV into the bedroom. That meant rerunning all the cabling I had strung out through the apartment and trying two different layouts before finding an arrangement I liked.
Behold, the new look
(Slightly Photoshopped to try to cover up how shitty the camera is on my cellphone.)
More tomorrow, I’m finally worn out enough to sleep, and this post is getting long enough as it is anyway.
The State of the Site, pt. II
I learned how to change a toilet seat today.
Now before everybody starts jumping to conclusions about why this took place, let me set the record straight: I did not race to the bathroom in a diarrhea-induced panic and blast humanity all over the old toilet seat. It wasn’t anywhere near that exciting – one of the bolts snapped for some reason, leaving me with a seat swinging around on one bolt. No big deal, replacement seats were $10 at Home Depot, problem solved.
I’ve been sleepwalking through the day, thanks to being awakened at about 830 this morning. That includes the escapade with the toilet seat, dinner with the folks, a few hours cleaning up the storage drive on my PC, etc. It wasn’t anything in particular that woke me up, but I suspect the sun being out and shining into the room had something to do with that. I’m going to have to hang some curtains I think; getting four hours of sleep on a Saturday is criminal (and having it happen several Saturdays in a row as it has to me is even worse).
I had some issues with the cable after moving everything in here last night – apparently the signal coming into the cable outlet in the bedroom is significantly weaker than the one going into the living room. Running the cable box and the modem through the bedroom outlet resulted in the cable box not being able to pull down the programming schedule from the provider, even though pulling down a list of channel names and displaying the correct time was no issue. So now the modem is hooked back up out in the living room and everything works fine. Cox wants $45 to send a technician out within the next week or two to ramp up the signal in the bedroom – screw that.
Actually, it’s kind of funny – at work all we charge for trouble tickets is the price of any parts used, and we try to adhere to a 24 hour response time. Here Cox is charging me $45 just to roll the truck sometime in the not-so-immediate future. No thanks, I’ll work this one out on my own.
I’ll post some tidbits about some other crap here in a day or so.
And on a side note… what’s the deal with MTV advertising hip-hop ringtones during Headbanger’s Ball? What am I ever going to want with a “Throw Some D’s” ringtone?