September 2004 Archives
I think it wasn't too long ago that people found this out: a great way to promote an event or to bring people together is to make a t-shirt out of it and sell it for cheap. If you do too much of that, I guess we'd get into what I'd like to call the "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" phenomenon. However, while you're still in college (like me), the prospect of getting some new and clever t-shirts for cheap is very encouraging. I mean, if you get enough of these cheap shirts, that could delay laundry by at least another week, right? I think so.
With that in mind, I've positioned myself to make today and Friday an official T-shirt gathering period. Gina and I picked up our free Nonsmoking Hokie shirts from the Health Center this afternoon, and I'm poised to grab one of the last, coveted "ISE: Imagine Me As Your Boss" tees. I already bought the Orange Effect 2004 shirt for $5, and I got a free "IR Hires Hokies" from the Ingersoll-Rand booth at Engineering Expo. One other that I know about is the College of Engineering's annual shirt design. This would be my first t-shirt buying experience with the college, but since the shirts are usually just goofy enough so that only engineers would get the jokes, I think I'll hop on board with them this year. To tell the truth, the only shirts I've passed up on are the ones where you have to sign your soul away with a credit card application before you can get it. No thanks.
Cheap t-shirts with no strings attached are a great thing. So grab a drink of your choice and raise it to the cheap logo shirt, for without them, our washers and dryers and other assorted laundry equipment would be working overtime.
PROJECT BS STATUS UPDATE: As of this post, I think most visitors have regained access to the site. I believe the problem has been resolved, and the good people at Infinityhost and Apollo Hosting have finally got me straightened out. Let's give a huge "whoo-hoo!"
CORRECTION: In yesterday's post, I mentioned something about rending my garments and running off into the jungle when I get angry. I'd just like to clarify that the comment is merely an exaggeration for comedic effect. I wouldn't want to give you the wrong impression, because as my own girlfriend Gina said in response to that comment, "how gross!" You gotta feel the love there.
NEW BUSINESS:
...I mopped up the residual smelliness from yesterday's flood tonight, in a cleaning fit. I think the only lasting casualty from the whole episode may be the small carpet Mom got for me to put in my bathroom years ago. The duck mat, I'm proud to say, is being cleaned as I type this.
...Beginning Friday, I'll be one of the five guest bloggers for the venerable D103.com. I'm honored and humbled to be able to land a guest spot on Daryl's blog, so check out my posts there over the next couple of weeks, too. And heck, just check out his blog daily anyway.
...Tomorrow morning, I'm off to Roanoke for my first intensive job application process with UPS. Apparently, it's going to take two hours just to do the application, with no interview involved at all. This I gotta see! In related news, my current interview count is sitting at 5, I think. Not too shabby.
Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow!
Perhaps I spoke too soon about Project BS being completely back online. As of this post, I'm still getting sporadic reports of inaccessability, which is making me angry. And when I get angry, I tend to rend my garments and take to the jungle...
... Actually, as it turns out, this was one of those days where I should have just stayed in bed:
A tap on my door stirred me from my blissful meditation. I glanced at the clock. 9 AM. A good two hours before I wanted to wake up.
If it hadn't been for that aggravating PPIC assignment, I thought, I could've made some kind of new sleeping record tonight..
The knock grew more persistent, so I fumbled around with the nearest pair of pants in the dark and answered the door, bleary-eyed and hair all asunder. It was my roommate, Bobby.
"Bret, where's the drain outside the door here? 'Cause it's about to flood the basement."
Ah, perfect. One of the perils of living at a place like Wesley is that our basement - which just happens to hold all the bedrooms - is below ground. It's below ground and above an underground river, I'm told. Anytime it rains for more than a day or two, we're always in for a spin of the Flood Roulette Wheel to see what kind of problem we'll get next.
Bobby and I narrowly avoided drain spillage from outside by unclogging all the leaves that were covering up the drainpipe. I felt pretty successful, and I vowed to reward myself by washing my hands and going back to bed. I strolled on into my bathroom, flipped on the light, and was startled to see that the laws of physics had apparently stopped working, causing water to flow up out of my shower drain. A nice shower-load of water was standing in my bathroom, on the cusp of pouring out into the floor.
"The laws of gravity don't work here anymore!" I said to Bobby.
"We must have been sucked into an alternate dimension where everything's turned upside down," he replied. How could either of us argue with that logic?
My first instinct was to grab the ShopVac, but since we only have the diminuitive 0.25 gallon version, I was causing more splashes than dryness as I ran back and forth trying to empty the container before the shower filled up again.
Then, I remembered the Emergency Sump Pumps (TM). Those beautiful blue cylinders of pumping power. The ones that saved Steve's room from flooding a couple of years ago! After a little bit of a search for a proper hose, I had Mr. Sump (as I thought about affectionately calling him) sitting in my shower, draining all the murky water of questionable content out into my window drain. Problem solved, for the most part, until Bobby and I had to mop up the other sewer line covers that were bubbling up elsewhere on the basement floor. Brilliant!
Hello, boys and girls. After a weeklong hiatus that was entirely and completely unplanned, it looks like Project BS (and thus this blog) is back on its way to being propagated throughout Internet-land. I was pretty worried for a few days there, and I was certainly none too happy with the miscommunication that resulted in my domain name hanging in purgatory somewhere, renewed but not attached to my site anymore.
It's my pleasure to be back posting knowing that eventually you all will be able to see it again. And by eventually, I mean within a day or two, hopefully.
All is mostly well on my end of town. I tackled my first Statistical Quality Control test last Thursday and received my grade today. I scored well above the average, which left me feeling rather energized through the rest of today. The weekend was also nice and productive, though the outcome of the N.C. State game only served to make me mad.
I've got a few new and interesting things planned for this site, once I'm confident that all the domain name issues are straightened out. And before too long, it'll be the one year anniversary of this humble blog!
'Tis the season!
My posting has been sparse this week, indirectly due to the DNS troubles. Knowing that not many people are going to be able to see the posts until who-knows-when (hopefully soon) is a real bummer.
But at any rate, I'll keep on keepin'-on, as they say.
Yesterday marked the beginning of autumn for those of us on planet Earth, and I can already feel the scents and feelings of the season creeping in. All it takes is one deep breath as you walk outside here in Blacksburg, and you'll be able to tell. The leaves are beginning to turn. The days, while roughly equal in daytime and nighttime, have a temperature difference of 40 degrees. Football's in town. I think I enjoy the start of every season for different reasons, and those are some I'd list for autumn. As the nights gradually grow longer and the days grow colder, I'll gradually start wishing for spring again, but for now ... pull up a chair, autumn. I'll brew you some tea.
I tackled my first Statistical Quality Control test tonight, armed with no less than 4 textbooks, a pile of notes, and some practice tests dating back 6 or 7 years. Oh, and my brain, too. I think I'll be at least around the average for the class, which is about as good as you can hope for in situations like these. Hey, that's another sign of autumn, too: it's usually right around the first test week of school. Blimey.
Until I ramble again, keep yourself out of trouble, unlike Cat Stevens.
Today's Upcoming Job Interview Count = 4!
Some of you have had trouble accessing Project BS for the past few days, and I believe the trouble is stemming from my domain name renewal process. The timing was a little off between me and my webhost, so I think my domain name might have been set free for maybe half a day. Long enough for the domain name servers to show that there was no site pointing to it, I suppose.
The bottom line, though, is that Project BS is still up and running just fine and has been throughout the last week or so. You'll be able to view it as the name servers start realizing that there's something here again.
So, if you're finally seeing this screen instead of a 404 message, welcome! Have a peanut or two.
I'll be peddling myself tomorrow at the Engineering Expo career fair on campus. I don't much like career fairs, but it's time to be looking for a job, so bring it on! Wish me luck for the remainder of the week, as well, because two tests are looking me square in the eye right now.
Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! This chair be high, says I.
Will my friends and I attempt to do anything in excess of talking like a pirate? Only this afternoon and evening will tell! Most of this afternoon, however, I'll spend catching up on homework and perhaps a nap.
Aye.
My earliest memory of seeing the poetry in action was back in my days in Pritchard, when a guy down the hall had some little number about "beer in fridge good" or something like that. I had some great ones at Jen's old place, as well as the legendary Knollwood 1304 place, but alas - those are gone. Last weekend, however, a bunch of us hung out at Sarah's new apartment after the game. We had a little too much fun with the magnetic poetry, I believe - because after all, part of the fun is seeing how you can turn ordinary words into inappropriate phrases. A full-fledged picture gallery may be forthcoming, but today I graced you with one of my PG poems. It sums up my feelings this Friday quite succinctly. It's more of a phrase, really, but I guess Magnetic Phrases doesn't quite have the same effect.
(The other one I really liked, "jocks love your drawers," came out blurry. I'll have to snap another picture the next time I'm at Sarah's.)
First up, I want to wish Tom a happy birthday. Gina and Amy orchestrated a massive surprise dinner for him at the Boston Beanery, where about 12 of us waited on them to walk in. Gina made a Superman cake, which you can also see on Tom's site. It was quite delicious. All in all, it was a fun evening on the town tonight.
Don't you like the days when you seem to be hitting everything on all cylinders? Especially when those same days involve you being lazy up till the last possible minute and still getting everywhere on time. Let's do a play-by-play. Today, I had a preliminary interview with UPS at 11:15. I decided to drive to campus, a risky but time-saving maneuver, but only if I could find an empty metered spot. You see, I don't have an on-campus parking pass, so that severely limits the spaces where I can park.
At any rate, I narrowly found a parking space before I had to go to plan B and park in a lot that was too far away. I put enough change in the meter to last for an hour and a half, and arrived at my interview spot with five minutes to spare. It turns out my interview started pretty late, so I didn't even have to worry that much. I was starting to sweat that I was going to run out of time on my meter, however, so that added an element of conflict and tension to the whole plot. My interview went well, though, and I ultimately returned to my car just as the meter ticked down to zero. Brilliant! I grabbed a quick lunch, made it back to Wesley and changed, and walked to class to get there right on time. It was definitely one of those days where just a tiny bit of unfortunate timing or bad luck could make the whole day awful, but since none of that happened, it was okay.
This weekend looks like it'll be fun. We've got another I-name hurricane remnant blowing through town soon, almost a year to the day after Isabel hit us during the Texas A&M football game. We'll be in a similar situation for Duke in a couple of days. Go Hokies! We already know how to play in a hurricane.
(In all seriousness, though, my heart does go out to everyone who's been in the path of this year's storms. I can't imagine what it'd be like to have to come back to the damage and destruction.)
Well, I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, but I was hoping much later. There's already a problem with the new football ticket distribution system.
Those of you who went to school here might recall the Miami game last year, where many students who wanted tickets, including most of our Wesley group, simply did not get them. This year, the athletic department moved to an online lottery for determining who gets student tickets and who doesn't. It worked like a charm for the first two games, but now, due to the wonders of randomness, about 10 out of 30 of our Wesley folks did not receive a ticket - myself included.
Tom speaks out about this at TSPN, and his thoughts echo mine for the most part. I think that, quite simply, every student who wants a ticket to a football game should get one. We're the whole reason the football team exists, and we're often the biggest driving force behind making the stadium loud and imposing for our opponents. We buy concessions like giant turkey legs. We buy lots of drinks in those plastic cups so we can stock up our cupboards. We help make Lane Stadium what it is during the home games.
I know that there's essentially a set number of student tickets for each game, and that number stays pretty much fixed, but I also know that it's far fewer than the number of students we have here. Not every student is going to want to go to the game, but there's got to be a way of determining and satisfying student demand on a game-by-game basis.
Is there a "perfect" system for ticket distribution on this large a scale? Probably not. Maybe a season ticket/pay system like what Tom suggests in his article is the way to go. Maybe I could have avoided this by getting season tickets for this year, but I love the excitement about not knowing exactly where I'm going to sit for the next game. It's part of the fun. When I find out that I, a student who paid my athletic fee, am simply not going to be able to go to the game at all, the excitement can quickly turn to cynicism. I hope the athletic department can keep tweaking this system so that future generations of Hokies won't have to watch all their school's home games on TV.
This was a really good weekend. I needed a really good weekend to offset the potential this week has for being way too busy. I don't have a whole lot of time to write a long, descriptive entry, but here's some good chunks of notes about what went on.
... First up, welcome Amy Mac to the wonderful world of blogging! TSPN has kindly donated her some space to do her ramblings. I'm looking forward to reading what she has to say.
... Second, Hokie football came back to Lane Stadium on Saturday, in a blowout versus Western Michigan that resulted in a 63-0 pummeling. All the old traditions came back into play for us as fans, including the "key play" schtick and our end-of-game streamers. I also got to help hoist the Hokie Bird to the top of the stadium for the first time in my four years here, so that was a lot of fun. He wasn't too heavy. Gina and I almost got pictures taken with him, but all these screaming high school girls got in there first, before the Bird's associate pulled him away and back down the stadium steps. At least Katie and the new Otey, Brian, got to rub elbows and snap photos with the Bird himself.
... Speaking of Otey, he came in this weekend to hang out, as did Amy. It was great getting to see some old friends again, just like the good old days ... and by "good old days", I mean just this past summer. But still, it's always going to be nice having everyone come back to visit. Otey and I also made our required trip to Souvlaki, a tasty Blacksburg staple, today.
... On Friday, I embarked on the first leg of my journey to become the next Fred Astaire. (Ha!) Gina and I went to a free swing dancing lesson, and I learned a few new moves. Considering my previous repetoire of moves consisted of absolutely nothing, it was quite a large improvement on my part. You'd think after playing musical instruments all these years, I could keep my feetwork going while remembering to do things with my arms. I'm still doubtful that I can pull any further dancing moves off.
... After the game on Saturday, various groups of Wesley members went out to eat. We all ended up at Applebee's at some time or another, but it seemed to revive another tradition of eating well after being out in the stadium sun all day. The only change was that a few of the faces were different. There were some other alums thrown into the mix, making it a diverse and fun group. A good time was had by all.
... There's a heckuva lot of potential conflict and stress coming up now, though. This week and the next are the two when all the impending assignments and tests bunch up together. It's when we separate the mice from the men. The winners from the losers. The ... you get the picture. I also will hopefully be doing a ton of job interviews over the next couple of weeks, also. What's up with this real world stuff getting in the way?
Cheers for now, folks!
I have my first test of the semester today, and as you can see, I'm studiously studying for it by making a blog entry. Really. I'm using an advanced form of osmosis combined with subliminal messages to get the job done. Forget all this "reading notes" stuff. (Actually, I am going through my notes after all, but when it comes to the first test of the year, I have a very short atten... oooh, what's that?)
In a revolution of blogging technology and thought, I'll give you an update on how it goes later.
Test time: T- 2 hours, 20 minutes.
UPDATE 4:53 PM: All in all, it wasn't that bad. The hardest question revolved around "domains of responsibility" for the different departments and people involved with suspending this guy. So, all in all, I'm pretty sure I aced it, or at least came close.
We now bring you back to your regularly scheduled weekend.
Gina and I celebrated a year-and-a-half of being together tonight, and it was a lot of fun. Being in school again, particularly with a restarted job search and potentially huge projects on the horizon, it's easy to lose sight of the things that can really put your life in perspective. I basically just needed another quiet night like this one. We enjoyed a delicious dinner at Outback, then goofed around Christiansburg a bit.
When I took her home and we were saying goodnight, my CD changer put on James Taylor's "You've Got A Friend," just like a charm. The funny thing is, I put that CD in about a week ago, as the sixth CD in the six slots I get to fill. Isn't it funny how, purely by coincidence, the perfect song can appear at the perfect time? Maybe it's that James Taylor is good for many occasions, or maybe it's the Man Upstairs pulling a few strings, but either way, it makes life that much cooler. All I could do was think "thanks, James" as I drove off.
Here's an image for my writing journal if I ever saw one. (I have to keep a separate journal of ideas and inspirations for possible short stories for my Creative Writing class. It's a bit too skinny for comfort right now, so I've been looking for stuff to put in it just about everywhere.)
Picture this: the remnants of a hurricane are blowing into town, soaking the streets and everyone on them. The traffic lights glow into the night, becoming beacons to the cars and the people trying to squint their way through the mist and haze. One lone college student braves the sidewalk by himself, his backpack tightly secured. The hood of his sweatshirt hugs his head as drops of water keep a steady rhythm in front of his eyes. And suddenly, for no earthly reason, he decides to hunch over and powerwalk, his fists pumping straight into the air, a goofy grin all over his face.
This kid was happy about something, or maybe he was just trying to be goofy. Either way, Gina noticed another guy walking very goofy earlier today, as well. Is there some kind of new sport or a special holiday week I don't know about? This person seems to know something, at least. It's nice to know we're not the only ones who notice these things.
I'd write more, but I have the hiccups, and those are annoying. Excuse me while I find a glass of water.
This was definitely one of those Mondays that left me feeling woozy. Now, the exact biological cause of the woozy feeling may turn out to be something bigger, just because I wasn't feeling so well earlier on, but that remains to be seen. After an apple and a slight rest on the bed, I'm feeling better. I'll keep you all informed, of course.
A couple of interesting things happened to me over the weekend. The first was another Computer Disaster whereby Windows unexpectedly and completely crashed. I guess I was lucky, though, because it wasn't the hard drive's fault this time. No data was lost, just a few hours of my time that I could have otherwise spent working or goofing off.
Gina and I also went to see Garden State on Saturday. I was hoping it would live up to the hype, and in my opinion, it sure did. Zach Braff has crafted a fine little movie here, and having Natalie Portman play his love interest was the best choice he could have made. She perfectly portrays the kind of girl you want to just settle down with, and according to Ben (who'd seen it a week earlier), he had to keep from drooling too much. There are some uncomfortable scenes with drug use and the like, and it is a slightly offbeat movie, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. There may even be a new grouping of films for me: slightly weird, off-kilter, modern little tales that try to explain life, love, and how to get through it all. One of these is definitely Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Garden State is another.
And on a final note, it was cool getting to hang out with the aforementioned Ben, as well as getting to chat with Sarah H. while they were both in town. I can handle that.
I was sitting in Production Planning & Inventory Control today, because I'm a good student and it's every Tuesday and Thursday at 2:00 PM in Robeson 210. 210 is a room with a great history, to be sure. Actually, it's just where I had both of my college-level Physics lectures. The desks are scratched up and marked with various Physics-related messages of varying vulgarity. My first semester of Physics was actually pretty pleasant compared to some of the other professors my friends had, because I had Amy.
In a curious twist of fate, I now have a class in 210 that's totally unrelated to Physics, the aforementioned PPIC. Today, right in the middle of class, some sort of moaning noise kept growing and growing. At first, I thought I might have been the only one to hear it, but more and more people began chuckling as it progressed. Just imagine a cross between a leaf blower and some sort of sick, twisted laugh lasting for four or five seconds at a time. Dr. Ellis tried her best to keep us focused and to keep talking through it, but it certainly became a distraction. And suddenly, just as it came into our lives, the moaning stopped.
This obviously begs the question of who or what was the source of the moaning. Some on one side of the classroom claimed that a few on the other side were just snoring really loud and obnoxiously. "That's a hell of a snore, though," I overheard one guy say. Could it have been a floor buffer? Possibly. Someone trapped in the supply closet nearby? Maybe. The haunted remnant of some poor physics student? Probably the most logical answer.