Didn't I warn...

you? and myself? But seeing as I've got a massive exam coming up tomorrow, I couldn't help myself.



Speaking of which, I have this gigundo exam tomorrow at 11:30. I would REALLY appreciate prayer. Also, a set of walkie-talkies. Batteries included.

You can mail them to eterpay aultneygay, arborhay allhay, oomray ourfay ixtysay-ixsay eeBay, unway ousandthay illtophay irclesay, altimorebay arylandmay, ootay unway ootay ivefay erozay.

Life is like....juggling eggs?

I don't know how many times I've been tempted to post a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, but always declined because I knew that once I started, my blog would become this unofficial "Calvin and Hobbes cartoon of the day" blog, which would be...mostly pointless, even if pretty darn funny. But this one totally nails how I'm feeling right now, so... =D

the end of the world as I know it

ok, I really shouldn't be that dramatic. Let's face it, even if I do bomb my exam on Tuesday, don't finish my very important homework assignment by Monday, and seriously screw up my group by not finishing my OTHER work for Tuesday - the world won't end. I will probably have four fellow group members trying to assassinate me. But really, life could be worse.

On a totally unrelated note, Virginia Tech gave Clemson a wake-up call last night - I wish I had predicted this one publicly, because as much as I have enjoyed watching Clemson be a really good team, I didn't think they were going into this game with much respect for the Hokies. Heh. Too late now. Tech pasted Clemson 24-7.

On a note related to my unrelated note, it's the '06 Fulmer-Spurrier bowl tomorrow night at 7:45 on ESPN. Yay, we finally get to beat Steve Spurrier. Tennessee 31, South Carolina 14.

don't look down...

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I agree with everything in this article about the upcoming elections. This probably isn't true - I'm sure there's something in it with which I disagree; I just haven't found it. So, I'm interested to hear what anyone else may have to say about the article. Times like this, I wish more than two people read this blog, so that the comments were slightly more....interesting. I guess the content of the blog should be more interesting, huh?

On an unrelated note: Firefox 2.0 is officially out today! 2.0 is a real step up from 1.5, and having been using release candidate versions of it for about a month, I can say that it is worth getting immediately. Installation will NOT (I repeat, NOT) affect your profiles, so you can safely install over your current installation. Just download and run the executable (.exe) installer. To make this as easy as possible, you can click on multiple places on this page to go to the download page. For instance, you can click on "Firefox 2.0" above, or you can click here, here, or here. You could also click on the period at the end of this sentence. Lastly, I will even allow you to click anywhere in this entire sentence to Download Firefox 2.0.

blah

That word concisely describes how I feel right now. Reasons:

• 88% on my Statistics test. If I hadn't made stupid mistakes, it could possibly have been a 97%.
• I need to study, but I desperately don't want to. I cannot get remotely excited about anything resembling studying right now.
• I didn't understand a word of what the teacher said today during Statistics. Not his fault; I just didn't get it. I doubt it was incredibly difficult material, but my brain was turned off. Still is.

On the other hand:
I have a new job. I guess this belongs in this list. I think it should be mostly fun, though that remains to be seen. I don't start until next week, because of these midterms. Amid all of the mediocre/bad grades that I get in some of my classes, I am somewhat encouraged that I think I might turn out to be a pretty reasonable programmer/software designer. This is important to me especially because a lot of the students here have huge head starts on me - they started programming in high school, middle school, or even earlier. Ack. I didn't write a single line of my own code until my first year of college. =P

help me please...

I don't have a whole lot to say. Worship was a little better than usual today, which isn't to say that it was great, unfortunately. For those who don't/couldn't know, this has no bearing on the worship service itself, or the sermon, or anything like that. It's the state of my heart, and to be blunt, it ain't lookin' so good. Anyway. Minor encouragement.

What else? Ah yes. I had the neatest (if that word applies) conversation with my mom this evening, about lovely, important things like evangelism, and the folly of postmodernism. Lovely.

But the main event of the day was having the Lorts (all five of them, from Gretchen on down to Richie - ask if you must, but if you don't get it, you probably just won't ever understand) over to my house. This was the - um - defining part of the day, in that it drove home to me how completely incompetent I am. I cannot even keep myself happy, much less another 5 visitors happy. Every time a group of Lorts is coming over, I get really excited because I can't wait to see them, and I really enjoy their company. However, every time they get here, I can't handle it. What I really want is to spend the entire time with each one of them, separately, and really enjoy the PERSON's company, but instead, I end up having to try (and incidentally, MISERABLY failing) to entertain and be entertained by everyone. In the end, the whole thing is terribly awkward, and I manage to ignore and/or offend all of them in some way before they leave. Mercifully, they are all gracious people, and even people who have no reason to be there whatsoever (does Gretchen get anything out of coming to my house for two hours: I think not) are perfectly considerate and polite.

So, the point of posting this is to ask the entire Internet (except those of the Lort family who will be inclined to say wonderfully kind, polite, encouraging things in response to this): How does one keep a family of friends happy at one's house for two hours? What is the magical formula for including everyone, finding a topic of conversation that is universally appealing (let me just say that guns and football don't seem to work), and generally having a good time in these sorts of situations? Help!!!

What a day....

Wow.

I installed flooring from about 11:30 until 3:30.

Then, I watched the Tennessee - Alabama game, which lived up to the reputation of every single Tennessee - Alabama game that I can remember: it was a nail-biter. Tennessee came back from being down 13-6 in the fourth quarter, and won 16-13. We stopped them inside the twenty on two drives; we even made them kick a field goal from our 1-yard line. Our defense did great. We held them to 211 yards. Even Erik Ainge, who threw three interceptions, made his best play on defense - a head-down dash for the sideline to knock out-of-bounds at the 8-yard line the guy who had just intercepted his pass. When our defense held them to a field goal, that saved us 4 points - more than the margin of victory. Our offense wasn't so hot: even though we managed 359 yards, we just couldn't seem to put it in the end zone. A missed field goal didn't help either.

After the game, and after supper, I worked on the flooring again until 10 o'clock, when I started working on an assignment to prove that I can be of some help to these people from school working on the wiki project. It was lots of fun - I learned a lot while doing it, but it was all very doable. You can check out what I may be working on for the rest of the semester here. I finished at midnight.

Well, I added this blog to my "Notes" section on Facebook, so hopefully that will inspire people to actually come here. I'm disappointed that no one from the Tennessee crowd has shown up yet.

Oh, by the way, I was wrong about the Clemson - Georgia Tech game. Clemson destroyed GT, 31 to 7. It wasn't really quite that bad - Clemson put up 14 extra points near the end of the fourth quarter - but on the other hand, Clemson was clearly the better team. Actually, my prediction was wishful thinking, I guess. I'm not sure why I wanted GT to win, but I do know that having seen their uniforms, I was confirmed in my pregame choice of Georgia Tech. I don't think I could ever root for a team that looked like this.

I need to get some sleep. Worship is the most important thing I do all week, but I don't take it seriously enough.
Though I must say, I am NOT a big fan of 9:30 worship services. How am I supposed to pay attention in worship when I can't even pay attention in my Software Design class which is from 10 to 11:15?

RSS and power outages

Turns out I was wrong - I can't set up RSS. Because it's already set up.
So, if you have Firefox 2.0, you'll notice an orange icon on the right side of the address bar. Click on it, and follow instructions. This will enable your browser to list my recent posts, so that you can tell if there's anything to see here.
If you have Internet Explorer 7, There's an orange icon in the toolbar where your tabs are. Click the miniature arrow next to it and select RSS (not Atom). If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. If you don't have Firefox 2.0, you can download release candidate 3 (very stable, much nicer than 1.5, etc.) right here. If you don't have Internet Explorer 7............well, I'm not going to provide a link because I don't condone the actual use of Microsoft browsers.
Speaking of which, I'll probably be posting in the near future regarding the upcoming final release of Firefox 2.

I'm back in my dorm now because I'm not at work, and I'm not at work because we had a series of power outages today, culminating (for me) in an hour-long span without any power. Of course, my laptop was fine, but everyone else was leaving, and it was pretty hard to concentrate. And it was a lovely excuse.

The wind outside is unbelievable. I love wind. I wish I were a largish bird. The current weather conditions would be like going to a roller coaster park.

Remember: Tennessee 46, Alabama 17, and Georgia Tech 30, Clemson 27. I can hardly wait.

Thursday was an OK day

For a Thursday, anyway. The Mets lost, which was sad because I think my dad would have liked for them to win. Ahh well, the Tigers are going to kill the Cardinals anyway. I predict a 4-1 series.

Midterms next week are looming large(ly?). That's a really weird expression.

I am scared of midterms next week. There. That's easier to understand, and more truthful anyway.

Hey, I realize I haven't been the most consistent of bloggers, but I'm mulling over a revolutionary new way of blogging that I think might create some interest. Some details still have to be hammered out, but maybe in the coming weeks, I'll be able to unveil my master plan. If things go well, I'd like to consider an even MORE revolutionary idea - or at least, my original revolutionary idea on a grander scale.
We shall see.

I think I can set up RSS for this blog, which would allow those of you with Firefox to semi-automatically get notified of updates to this blog. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a brilliant method of subscribing to Blogger blogs, besides getting one's own Blogger account. This is frustrating, but I keep hoping that if I post regularly enough, some people might actually make a habit of coming here. ;-)

A record...

I have posted three days in a row now.

So, I think I set a record today....for the longest time waited between trash can emptyings. In the medium-small cylindrical brushed metal trash can category. Unfortunately, of all the times I've carried my trash can down the hall to the mother trash can in the trash closet, this would be the one when there would be people standing in the hallway. So I walked past them carrying a trash can overflowing with the most colorfully disgusting assortment of trash they had ever seen. I was embarrassed, and they were too. When I came back through the hallway, needless to say, they had disappeared into their rooms.

My quiz today was fair-to-middling. I like that expression. It's good to have a calculator for these quizzes. In the future, someone should remind me to remember that I briefly remembered that I ought to remember to take a calculator with me to my quiz.

The meeting went well, I suppose. It still remains to be seen whether this will be a good fit, but it looks like a combination of PHP, Javascript, and MySQL, of which PHP and Javascript are fairly similar to C/C++, and MySQL is not very difficult to do simple things with. I should be able to pick it all up relatively easily, which is encouraging. I don't have any idea what they want to pay me, which is fine with me. I'm not really in this for the money.
Oh, and it looks like I'll be assisting another guy who has been working for them for a while, which is nice. It means it's not all on my shoulders, and they have experience working with CS majors.

Tennessee has Alabama at home this week. We kept them to 6 points last year, and still managed to lose, because we only scored 3. And as much as I love the SEC, that wasn't because of the famed SEC defenses. Actually, it was, partly. Tennessee's defense was amazing. And Tennessee's offense was out-of-this-world, stupendously, surpassingly, and overwhelmingly AWFUL. This year, our defense is good, and our offense is #8 in the country. And we've had two weeks to prepare for them. I fully realize the Murphy's Law nature of predicting such things, but if we don't win this game.....we will learn someday that someone was playing with the thermostat in Hell on October 21, 2006. Final score: Tennessee 46, Alabama 17.

Other prediction: I think Georgia Tech will edge Clemson, 30-27. (May I say that this is mostly for the benefit of those who love to see me get things wrong....)

I'm so excited!

No, really, I am. New things always get me excited. Except for new pimples, new rust, and new oil drippings underneath my car. But basically, new things get me excited.

So I really might start posting here daily. I think that would mainly be because I can't make myself do the work that I need to be doing. But it's also because this blog is shiny and new, and I really like it a lot more than I like(d) Xanga.

So here's my life in the shell of a nut:
Technology is back to working for me. My computer only randomly dies at reasonably spaced intervals (now that I've replaced the motherboard). My PDA is back to acknowledging touchscreen input - apparently, some screws were loose (actually, a screw was too tight. I removed it, and Voila!). My Bluetooth headset with a battery life of 373,404 (milliseconds) has been replaced, and my new one (a Scala 700) works wonderfully (except that Lorts can never understand a word I'm saying when I use it. This has always been the case, and I suspect it always will. They're genetically defective, or so I hear.).
On the other hand, my iPod is about due for an untimely death, explosion, or maddening dysfunctionality. So is my cell phone.

Classes are plodding along at the speed of the Millennium Falcon on steroids (and not the cheap-o, rub-on stuff that Barry Bonds uses either). I have a total of seven thousand, two-hundred and sixty-nine midterm exams (*I may have massaged the numbers a tad) coming up not this Thursday, but next. I can hardly wait. To buy my History book.

I am going to meet with the English Department tomorrow to see if there's anything I can do to "help" them with a project they have. I have no idea what this means, or what they want. I even doubt that they know, but we'll see. I'm not remotely ready for this kind of stress (telling a bunch of adults that I can't help them because I don't know PHP well enough), but I told them I would meet with them primarily as a character-building exercise (putting to death my man-o-phobia).
I have a hard time imagining what the blog page will look like after a post this long. I'm not sure my beloved new page design will stand the test, but I'll see in a moment.

A dash of seriousness: I would appreciate whatever prayer time anyone can spare. I'm don't think I really get the whole lovingChrist thing, and I think it shows. Ditto for readingScripture and prayer.

Hey Arathon, way to kill the mood. Or at least drastically change it.

Whiz

Cheese Whiz, that is.

Figured the first sentence should rhyme.

Other than that, I'm really out of things to say. Maybe later.

I ran out of gas today. The recovery was about as simple as it could possibly have been. Praise God.