Let the drum roll begin!  The next entry into Random Thoughts will mark my 100th entry and needs to be celebrated.  I haven’t figured out how exactly to do this but rest assured it should be interesting if not extremely dorky!  Well to wrap up this entry I will leave you with one final thought:

Wow, didn’t see that one coming.

John

 Why is it that on the only day of this entire week that I need to be up early, I can’t sleep?  I need to be up in 4 hours and 45 minutes and for some reason I can’t sleep.  I just keep tossing and turning thinking about EVERYTHING.  I guess the good thing is that 90% or so of everything on my mind is positive in one way or another but I still just need to get some sleep.

Now for some babble!

I think this past week had given me some time to look back and think about everything thats happened so far this semester and what’s to come next semester.  Although the near future is still somewhat fuzzy I can still see how it molds together to accomplish my goals.  The last 3 semesters or so of my life at ISU will be very exciting and I am really anxious to see what happens. 

For now though present is exciting as well and always full of suprises.  I think the past few days have made me realize that I’m on the right track and happy where I am at the moment.  As I said the future is still a tad bit fuzzy, as it should be, but things today are making it easier to see by the day!

Night night to all!

John

It’s really kind of weird having almost the entire building to myself.  There are a few RA’s and Prostaff here but for the most part its just me hanging out in Smith Hall.  Closing went pretty well.  Except having to wake up at 10 am to get a submaster.   Oh the power I had!  Behold the key that opens up 120 rooms and costs $2000 to replace.  I guess that’s why there’s a little coily thing to put your hand through.

Anyway, it should be nice to just take a break from school for a week.  The crappy part about taking a break from school though is that it usually always means taking a break from the people I see everyday. 

I’ll continue this later…..I’m OUUUUUUTTTT!

John

Today was Wednesday and we all know what that means.  Yes that means it’s soccer day!  Usually I’m excited after the game win or lose but this game just sucked ass.  OK, let’s get the good stuff out of the way first before I ramble on!

The Good

 Newbies to the game this week were: Mega, Bill, Curtis, and Hannah!  It’s always fun when there are new fans in the stands.  Thanks for coming guys!  Thanks also go out to the returners as well: Anthony, Charity, Amy, Megan, Nicole, Karen, Stef, Bre, Tom (If I forgot someone comment yourself in and I’ll edit this post ASAP!)  Yay for Kathleen scoring our only goal!  And that’s where the shit hits the fan!

The Bad

We only scored 1 goal!  That would be just fine and dandy if only the other team didn’t score any.  Sadly they had 6 under their belt after 48 minutes.  Props to Mark and his team on that one!  Overall though the game really sucked.  We had a ref that we had never had before, a yellow card for cussing, plenty of pushing and shoving, and a lot of horrible calls, or lack of calls,  thrown in their as well.  Anyway, that’s enough bitching for now! 

The Ugly

OK, so there really isn’t any ugly in this whole equation but it was the next logical heading so I figured I’d go with it.  The ugliest it gets is a little bit of confusion amongst people.  I haven’t really figured out how to deal with this confusion yet but I really need to figure that out fast.  I’ve done my best to explain the situation to some people and those people are really understanding and excited (Charity!) but others haven’t gotten the full story yet and may have unknowingly said something they didn’t mean to say.  It’s just hard trying to get this to work out with so many people.  I really don’t want anyone to be upset with me or angry about the situation but apparently it’s too late for that.  I guess I’ll just have to come out and explain myself to these people at some point.  It won’t be easy.  As much as I’d just like to spill the beans and get the entire story our here start to finish,  it has long been my policy to be personal but at the same time keep certain people out of this whole mess that I call my LiveJournal.  People will be mentioned but I have drawn a pretty strict line and I don’t like stepping over it.  I guess that’s it for now.  If you’ve read through this entire thing and have no idea what just happened I’m sorry.  Anyway, that’s the end of that tangent.

In Other News

Today was absolutely GORGEOUS (hehe)!  On the way to my first class I thought to myself, what a waste staying inside all day.  Luckily my first class got out 30 minutes early because all we did was a short review, my second class got out 10 minutes early (even though We <3 the Ratio Test!), and my third and final class was cancelled!  I even mentioned to the Neil and the Jake that we should just skip soccer and play soccis.  It was a GORGEOUS day for soccis!  Later I headed over to the apartment and Neil made Jake and I pancakes.  We all ate together discussing whatever it is 3 college kids discuss while eating pancakes and then we went Wardriving!  For all of those who don’t know what this is and for those of you who haven’t guessing it’s already something REALLY dorky, I will explain.  Wardriving is the practive of driving around looking for insecure wireless networks.  We managed to connect to a few access points during our little trip and found well over 150 wireless access points.  If anyone wants free wireless just head over to Willow with your lapop and leach away!  The three of us also decided that we could incorporate dumpster diving with wardriving by hooking up a webserver and webcam to the laptop and broadcasting a live feed of us driving around picking up garbage!  Ahhh, fun times with the boys!  That just about brings me back to the game so I guess this is the end for now!  Later!

John

…here we go again…

So when the pizza got here Lily was just getting back so we invited her up for some pizza as well.  Little did we know how amusing the next 2 hours were going to be.  We were all just chilling when one of my friends decided to make an off comment to me on AIM resulting in Lily getting online and talking to him.  Quickly my sister got pissed off at what was being joked about and was calling me up.  I had nothing to say and thought she was blowing everything out of proportion so I got off the phone.  Then the 3 of us (Bill, Mike, and I) decided that Lily should call up the sister and talk to her one on one.  An hour and way too much information shared later we we’re all scratching our heads wondering what just happened.  Interesting to say the least!

Now, I could go on and on about Saturday night but I think I can sum it up rather quickly by ripping off a Master Card commercial.  So here goes:

(The scene opens and it’s 7pm)

Leave for Culvers.  Get there and eat as much ice cream as possible.     45 minutes

Leave for Shoe Carnival to visit the cousin.     25 minutes

Leave for Best Buy to kill time and get John the new Stroke 9 CD.     15 minutes

Leave for Walmart to get Lily air freshener.     15 minutes

Take the long way to the movie theatre in order to waste time.     20 minutes

Getting tickets and seats.     15 minutes

Having the most different, crazy, weird, what are we doing, why did we leave so early night on the town?     Priceless!

Yeah, that just about sums it up!  And now it’s Sunday and I really don’t want to do anything!  Time to get some food though.  Later for now!

John

PS - I’ll never look at palm trees the same way again!

The Weekend Thus Far!

Friday…

At about 9 or so people started to gather at the residence of the Bill.  Karen and Bill were already there and I followed.  Then I invited the Clubb over and there were four.  A little while later Stef and Ryan stopped by on their way to see the Grudge.  After a while it was determined that we were all going to see the movie so we bundled up and headed across the quad to University.  The Grudge isn’t quite what I would call horrible but it wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen either.  Maybe it’s just that it’s really hard for a movie to scare me.  Afterwards Bill, Ryan, and I headed back to Watterson freezing our asses of every step of the way.  Upon getting back Bill and I ordered some pizza. 

OK…I really need to go to bed right now.  I promise the rest will be updated tomorrow.  Rest assured it’s all good so far! 

John

So I’m still awake.  I was studying for our 325 test tomorrow which is going to bend the Tres Amigos over BIG TIME.  Right now I’m at a point where I think I need to get some sleep before I go insane.  Just for those of you who aren’t familiar with the 325 class here is a little tidbit of useless information….

IADD:          MAR = SP = SP - 1; rd
                H = TOS;
                MDR = TOS = MDR + H; wr; goto Main1

Basically that’s the microcode that tells the computer how to add two integer numbers.  And you thought it was easy!  Don’t get me wrong it’s kind of interesting to find see exactly how the computer gets this stuff done but it really makes me wonder what kind of crack these people were smoking when they figured all this out.  I mean really, I wouldn’t believe you in a million years if you told me the people that designed the Mic-1 were not on SOME drug!  Seriously.  Anyway, that’s enough about that test.  I’ll post some more tomorrow about how exactly it went. 

Moving on…

The rest of today wasn’t too bad.  Got up at about 9:30 in order to get some of the 325 study guide done.  I think I get up earlier on days that I don’t necessarily have to than the ones where I do have to be in class by 9:35.  Went to some classes, discussed some stuff, learned some stuff, the usual.  Ended up back here around 3 and had to tinker with my PHP assignment.  That leads to an interesting story.  Funny thing actually.  Ace-Host, the hosting service Neil, Jake, and I use, apparently doesn’t like when you run a PHP file on their servers that contains an infinite loop.  Long story short my account was suspended for a good 12 hours while they made me beg and plead with them to give it back.  At 3am www.rayray.org was back up and running.  Finally got all that shit 99% done and then submitted it.  One minor error but I didn’t have time to spend sitting there trying to figure it out so I said screw it.  I’ll probably end up fixing it later because it’s actually a failry decent piece of work if I do say so myself. 

After studying for my Calc 2 test a little bit and filling out my little notecard it was off to that.  It could have been better, much like every other calc test I’ve taken, but overall it wasn’t too bad.  I was able to check some of my answers and was baffled when they were right the first time.  Neat.  Running out of Stevenson it was time for game 4 of the #include <team.h> season.  I got to wear my bright orange shorts, gold socks, and awesome purple jersey.  I find that as I get older I’m more comfortable with being weird.  I’ve just about stopped caring what others think!  Back to the game.  We ended up kicking this teams ass 8-3 which was exciting because it was one of the more fun games that we’ve had.  It also helps that only one goal was scored on my watch and that I **almost** scored one on my own.  One day I’ll score, I just know it!

After the game I headed back to the floor for some rest, showering, studying, and socializing.   Although I was slightly frustrated, crabby, and not very optomistic about the test tomorrow someone managed to cheer me up for a while! Thanks!

After 3:00 tomorrow the week will be over and I can finally relax and do what college kids do best.  Sleep!  Although I’m not really sure about that at the moment either.  I’ll just have to wait and see I guess. 

Although things are different they feel so right!  Night All!

John

“And that’s beautiful to me!”

This weekend was great for many reasons!

It was my last full duty weekend of the semester.  That wouldnt be awesome, unless of course it was also the same weekend of our staff retreat.  This cut roughly 16 hours from my weekend of duty and 3 sets of rounds.  The retreat wasn’t bad.  We all had a good time, eating, playing games, team building.  Typical retreat stuff.  The cabin was a lot better than I had envisioned and the weather wasnt too bad at all.  All in all not too bad.  Although it was nice to get out of there and back to this thing we call Watterson. 

Instead of coming home and going to bed I spent some time on my PHP.  I worked on that until about 3 and then all productivity for the rest of the weekend pretty much came to a stand still.  At this point the weekend beame worthy of the adjective “Great.” 

I’m really tired and needing sleep so all I will say is that there is a good chance I’m sleeping on cloud 9 this evening!  Night All!

John