Haven't updated for a while... been busy. Same old stuff. I had an okay Valentine's Day. Nothing too exciting... because Valentine's Day isn't a particularly exciting holiday to begin with. My brother bought me and my mom both a dozen of roses, which was really really nice of him. What a good brother! Remember the Family Guy where Peter found a Genie in a lamp, and got to make 3 wishes? And one of his wishes was for theme music? So when he'd be walking down the street a jovial little tune would play in step with him, and then if something bad happened the music would change to suspenseful? That was great. And remember how it was 69 degrees here yesterday? That was great too.

I didn't get any sleep last night, probably because I had a test in C++ today. I was coughing like crazy, which is stupid. I didn't want to take any of the medicine I had, because at some point during the night you have to start worrying about what kind of shape you're going to be in when you wake up. So I was worried about being all drugged up to go take my test. But then I woke up after getting no sleep and had a huge headache and felt like total crap. So I took 2 Dayquil, 2 tylenol, and a sudafed sinus something-er-other. I have a feeling that was a bad idea. My test was hard to begin with, then of course I'm stupid, then of course I'm all drugged up. I can't imagine I did too spectacular on that test. We'll see I guess. I once took a test in one of my solaris admin classes... and I was terrified I'd done horrible. It was the midterm I think, and I think I was pretty sure I must've got a C. But then I got my test back, and had gotten 100%. Completely aced it. So obviously I'm a retard when it comes to gauging these things... so I guess I'm not going to worry too much about the C++ test. I'm sure going to wonder about it though.

I'm reading Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz. I don't think I've read it before, but it was on my bookshelf, so I'm not really sure. I suspect that my memory is bad enough that I might not actually know I was reading it for a second time. Who knows. Seems okay for now, although I've read so much Dean Koontz lately I'm really starting to pick up on the same themes repeatedly. I don't know if it's generally true for all authors, but Dean Koontz seems to fall back on a lot of the same themes pretty often. Here's a happy family with optional kids, and here's a psycho killer that's going to ruin everything for them and expose some great secret from the past. Here's a happy couple, and here's a psycho killer/psychiatrist that's going to ruin everything for them and expose some other great secret. Here's a happy family that wants to adopt a child, and here's some psycho child that's going to try to kill everyone and expose some other great secret from the past. I guess if you had to categorize Dean Koontz books, you'd probably say they mainly involve psychotic killers, happy families, and great secrets. Of course all the books of his I've read of late have all been around the same time, so I suppose he could have expanded his horizons by now. I guess I don't really mind. They're all perfectly good elements, and he does do really different things with them. So.

Current events, school, and books... yeah I guess that's all I have to offer today. Yawn. I wish it was summer.

Todays invention: Driveway Tarps (actually from a few days ago but I forgot about it)

Driveway tarps are for people like me that have bad snow cars and don't want to shovel their steep driveways in order to park in the garage on a snowy day. By some magical mechanism, they will roll out as your garage door rolls up when you push the button on your remote, and then they roll back up automatically when the garage door closes and are stored on the inside of the garage door. I might make a prototype (I think that's the right word) from some carpet and a bunch of yarn... but I haven't figured out yet how the mechanism will work that will roll and unroll them. They'll need to be securely fastened to the top of the driveway somehow so they don't come loose when you drive on them. They'll also need to not break and stuff. If you have an idea of how the whole operation might work, send it my way via email and I'll give you 50% of the profits I make if I ever sell the idea.

So I think people have a problem with new formats for things. I know I do. Remember when Go-gurt first came out? Yogurt in a tube you suck out? How nasty did that sound? It was still yogurt though just the same. It was even probably a more practical format for kids, rather than sending them off to school with a spoon and a cup. Next came pudding in a tube. I was slightly less shocked, but still unsettled by the whole idea. I guess they've done okay though, because both things are still around. Someone out there must not have a problem with the idea. Perhaps the younger you are, the easier it is to accept things like that. At some point more recently, Kraft came out with string cheese that was in their singles form. So you'd have a stick of cheese, but instead of peeling off layers the standard string-cheese way, they pre-cut the layers so it looked like you got a core sample of a block of their singles without the wrappers. I tried one, and it wasn't bad. Cheese is pretty much cheese as it turns out, but still the format bothers me. The IDEA of it bothers me. I'm not sure what it is about me that makes me afraid of seeing new formats for things. I'm not afraid to try new flavors, or recipes, or whatever. But put something that used to be in a jar in a tube, and suddenly you've frightened me. I don't know, it baffles me.

You often hear that old people have a hard time accepting "new fangled" things. Maybe we go our whole lives being used to the way things are, and the way we've seen things. The older you are, the more used to things you are. Then when something comes along that's different from what we're used to, we worry about what's happening to the world. We remember with fondness the days before the world got more and more crazy, but now we're uncertain of the direction it's taking. Gooey food in a tube, pre-cut string cheese, these things are not impractical. But they are signs of the times, signs that the future is closer than we'd imagined. How far off are we from eating entire meals from a tube? What if you could eat goo from a tube that tasted just like a Big Mac? It'd make eating on the run easier, but wouldn't you prefer the actual sandwich in sandwich form? Maybe that's what really bothers us. Things change, and that's not such a big deal. But when things change and we think it might be for the worse, maybe our minds want to block out the change in order to cling to what we knew in our past to be a good time. I think food and food formats are a good indication of this. I can't figure out why else I'd be afraid of that stuff. Except for peanut butter and jelly in the same jar, that's just gross.

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Ahh Thursday, or as I like to call it, my Friday. Life is looking up for me, I may have found myself some gainful employment. Can't say much now (don't want to get my hopes up too much), but I should know around Monday what's up. My mom's out of town for a few days... which is fun. That means I get to leave my crap all over the house, park in the middle of the garage, and forget to take my vitamins. What a party! I can't wait till I live alone, my house will always be trashed and I'll be sick all the time from not taking my vitamins. So exciting.

I watched Tru Calling tonight. That show looked pretty terrible to me. I was thinking alright, so they took a chick from Buffy, stole the plot from Early Edition, the show about the guy that gets tomorrows newspaper today and has to save the world. Lame with a capital L, right? Hehe, I used a pretty lame expression to describe it as well, just to show you I know lame when I see it.

Anyways, I didn't want to write it off before I saw it, because I like that actress alright and I also didn't have anything else to do. So I watched it. I'll give you a rundown of what happened. The girl Tru wakes up and goes about her day. She works at a morgue, and as happens every show I guess, some dead guy talks to her and asks her to save him (which manages to scare her every time, you'd think she'd get used to it or something). So he took a gunshot wound to the chest, and all she knows is that he was at a certain ATM that day, which she found out from a bank statement he had in his pocket. Then they do a time-shifty looking effect and show Tru going backwards through the day sort of, and she wakes up from a nap on the couch and it's the beginning of that day all over again.

Her boyfriend is fixing her garbage disposal, and she has to lie to him so she can go out and figure out how to save the dude that gets shot. She goes to the ATM he goes to and watches him check his balance which is -$400+, then he slams his fist into the ATM. She follows him, he goes to some clinic to try to get medicine for his daughter but he can't, so he goes to hold up a convenience store. Shit happens, Tru doesn't help, and the clerk ends up getting shot instead of the robber guy. Tru screws up and the dead clerk asks for her help, so she jumps back again to the beginning of the day. She tries again, screws up, a kid that was shoplifting dies. She tries again, screws up, someone else dies. She goes through this day like 6 times or something. At some point she figures she has to help the dad get the money for his daughters medicine, instead she gets him the medicine. The daughter dies anyway though, and asks Tru for help of course, starting the loop again. So she figures out that she has to talk to the dad and get his daughter to the hospital. The dad gets stabbed though while they're talking (high crime area apparently, sheesh) so she gets him to send his daughter to the hospital, then she goes with him too. The guy dies, but Tru realizes he has the same blood type as his daughter who is also dying in the room coincidentally right next to him, so they give his heart to his daughter. Touching, indeed.

That's a brief rundown of the kind of antics you can expect from that show. If you remember Quantum Leap or Early Edition, this show will remind you a lot of both of those. The girl has to face the same kind of superhero issues that all superheros face, she can't tell new people she meets, she doesn't know her boyfriend well enough to tell him and have him not freak out, etc. I guess the whole idea is pretty tired, but I really liked Quantum Leap, and I really liked Early Edition as well. So what can I say, I guess Tru Calling was alright. It's amusing and entertaining, and it beats the shit out of Dark Angel, so there you go. I probably won't mark my calendar and go out of my way every Thursday to watch it, but I would probably watch if I happened to not have anything else to do. I was going to fetch a picture to put next to this story, but that chick has a terrible site. All kinds of broken links, obnoxious ads, who knows what else. My power just flickered, so I'm going to take that as a good indication that I wasn't meant to find a picture, because someone is coming to kill me. I miss my mommy.

Groundhog Day came and went, shame I didn't notice. Not that I would've done anything if I had noticed, but I like to acknowledge the possibility.

Well I finished that book I was reading, False Memory. Then last night I watched Love Actually. Since I've already talked about False Memory, it's Shitty Review Time for Love Actually.

This is what I get for looking myself up on the internet, someone making quite the name for us. Male to Female | Transgender | 46 | Capricorn | Bristol@@ Engineer UK Bristol 5ft 8ins. A colorful character at least.

Boy, I sure hate Astronomy. Stupid universe. What I do like though, is the thought of putting all my homework and assignments up on the web for other people to search for in the hopes that I can help someone else in the future with their shitty Astronomy homework. I haven't really had a class yet that that was really worth it for, but I think Astronomy is a serious candidate. Gotta put that Misc section to good use anyways. I wish everyone everywhere put all the homework they ever did on the web. Then teachers would be forced to do different stuff all the time so students wouldn't just snag stuff off the web. They wouldn't though, so then my homework would all be done before I even started it. Then I'd somehow pass Astronomy without knowing a damn thing about astronomy, and I would see that as a fine accomplishment. The accomplishment of the avoidance of information acquisition contrary to personal prerogative. Way to go, me. The real benefit of doing that though would be mainly from a vengeance perspective. If I have a teacher that thinks it's cool to assign an absurd amount of homework for a core class I couldn't care less about, I can't help but get a little laugh from the idea of undermining those attempts if even in the smallest way. If I was a science student, I'd have a different attitude I'm sure. But I'm not.

Don't you love it how Kazaa files are never what they say they are? So you download one thing and get something entirely different because someone renamed the file for giggles? Yeah I love that too. I wish stores would start packaging everything wrong, so you could buy a tub of butter and it'd have jello in it. Life should really be more like Kazaa, what a great presence bad programming has in this world.

Oh... it's February. That's pretty exciting. I guess President's Day is some day coming up... so three day weekend, or if you're me and you don't go to school on Fridays or have a job, a four day weekend. I know, I do have it pretty rough. I am looking for a job, which is a misleading statement. I've FOUND lots of jobs, pretty much every job I've found has been a job I've found. So I would say I've found lots of jobs. However that's not what finding a job means I guess, finding a job actually means getting a job. That's the unfortunate part of the thing, the reality of it. I've noticed for most jobs I am either really underqualified or really overqualified. I'm underqualified for a system administration job, but I'm overqualified for a data entry job. I guess that's what I'm in school for. I want to be overqualified for better jobs mainly... that'd be pretty cool. My jobhunting did produce one silly fun little result. The president of my college resigned not really long ago after some budget bullshit (I don't blame him one bit), and they've been looking for a new one for awhile. Anyway, the job is actually on Monster.com now, and somehow it turned up in my search. The amusing part is that they list the salary as $150-165K/year. I guess that's probably readily available information anyways, but I like knowing something like that. Then when they do find a president and he bitches about something or has a problem, I'm going to say "Goddamn, you make like $150,000 a year and you think you're allowed to complain about anything? You jackass." I hope they hire a new guy soon.

I learned something valuable today. Watching home improvement shows is really motivating. I watched some show where they redecorate someone's room for a tight budget, like they only have $1000 or $500. So they made all this wacky homemade stuff and bought used furniture and whatnot and they come up with these decent looking rooms. Anyways, watching that stuff actually motivated me to clean my own room in an effort to make it look nicer. So I think whenever I need to trick myself into cleaning my room, I'm just going to watch one of those shows. I wonder when I'll figure it out and that trick will stop working? I'm pretty stupid, it'll probably take a while. Don't tell me if you see me.

I'm thinking of making a name for myself with my school newspaper... that'd be pretty cool. I was thinking I should write letters to the editor every day about how much the paper sucks. Every day I will come up with clever new insults regarding articles printed in the most recent issue. I'll have suggestions that will revolve mainly on fun ways of firing their staff and replacing them with various objects from the kitchen or barnyard animals. My hope is that they will get so annoyed that they will actually print something nasty about me, which of course is all I'd really want. I'm sure I'm not going to make the paper for doing anything good. That'd be boring as hell anyways. Something to consider and never do I'm sure, I'm good at those things. I should really get a job in considering but never doing. Or talking a lot but accomplishing nothing. That sounds like hardcore management to me. Bedtime for me I suppose.