Long Crazy Day

Today has been one of those days that's just been long. Got up at 6AM so that we could meet for CIS480 for weekly presentations. Survived that even though Goulet interupted me again in the middle of the presentation. How unprofessional is that and why does he always do it to me? Anyhow did the work out thing afterwards listening entirely to Flipsyde's "Someday" which for whatever reason rather motivated me. Then plugged home and did a little homework and wrestled with my e-mail which for whatever reason was making Word docs unrecognizable. That's MSFT for ya.

Met Sean for lunch at Country Kitchen where we think that the waitress mighta (keyword there) been interested in me. She was kinda cute so maybe see about stopping by Country Kitchen again sometime for a lunch. Not like I've got much to lose eh?

Then Sean and I moved two vehicle loads worth of stuff from the old church office to the new church office. This took the entire afternoon and was a ton of work. I earned my lunch today!

Kicked back now and am studying some Exalted stuff as I ponder how the various players in history view the Usurpation and the curious thought of how powerful First Age Exalts were. Plus I am finding interesting places to send my PCs this fall.

Word of the day: Trondheim

Procrastination towards Self Improvement?

So as little personality tests go we have the postive but then there's also the negative. I'm almost more curious to see what people think my negative attributes are (hey, I can find a lot more on that list to describe myself then on the postive one, go figure).

Back to practicing on that bloody powerpoint. Although actually I think it flowed pretty well just too short by half...

LOL

I'm gonna shamelessly post this article from the Onion that mentions this glorious city of Stevens Point. Katy found it first as I cannot claim to regularily peruse the Onion these days.

Today Feels Like Thursday

It does. I keep thinking the week is almost over when it is only halfway done. Weird thing is that this week has been pretty structured so it really should make more sense then that.

Random good note: volleyball went well! I got enough people out to do 3 v 4! Really humorously if Al, Steph, and Evie had been in town we could have done 5 v 5. Makes me feel slightly less alone when I think about it. Sometimes Stevens Point can feel very empty in summer.

Anyhow, I am currently procrastinating on my powerpoint presentation for CIS480. Actually I managed to put more stuff in there then I thought I would. Hope noone is terribly bored by this though. Granting since we are meeting at 7:30 AM I am not sure half the class will even be really awake.

Found out Seth is going to China the end of summer. Knew it was a possibility he'd be going that soon but somehow didn't really realize it. He'll be gone two years and I suppose it's pretty unlikely he will be able to get home much during that time. Two years is a long time. I haven't a clue where I'll be in that time.

Not much else to talk about. Life is pretty quiet really.

Memoirs noone will read

Saw Memoirs of a Geisha with Amber on Saturday night. It was quite good despite being a slower movie. Rather confusing a lot of the time, probably make more sense to watch it through again. I'd highly recommend it but be aware it is a slower movie! It's a strange thing to look at in perspective because Japan's whole culture shifts radically as the movie goes.

Funny, I felt like I had more to say at the moment but I don't. It's Lars' birthday today so happy birthday to him (think it's his 727th or something, he's old).

Volleyball tonight at 6:15pm. The more the merrier!

Carl's D & D Rnd 3

Here is the link. It was pretty fun. We're finally 2nd level!

On a side note, if you're bored go look at the personality test link below and rate what you think about me. Com'n, please :D

Something to do

So I was reading Katie's blog and found an interesting page she had discovered called a Johari Window. So if you're bored check this out and participate.

Make it Three

Here's something I bet you didn't know. (If it's no longer 6-24-06 you'll have to find that page in the APOD archives I'm afraid.) Pluto has three moons. Charon, Nix, and Hydra. The last two just got names. Pretty interesting stuff.

In a slightly more random topic, I ran my first X11 app today.

Slightly More Useful Content

Well seeing as Allison needed to go to bed early I actually have some time that isn't very late at night. This week has been a lot of late nights as I've been hanging out with Jamie as she's been house sitting (the place has 3 dogs and 3 cats all who are relatively friendly so it's a lot of fun playing with them and chatting with Jamie), and of course there was Dani's D & D game in there. Plus CIS480 has begun so that has consumed some time and will certainly begin to eat up more and more as time goes on.

I finally got and set up my wireless router so this post is coming via my wifi network. I'm pretty proud even tho I did have trouble setting up (modem needed to be reset). I got it up and running now tho so finally I have flexibility.

I've been re-watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (1st Gig). It's one of those shows that hide a fair amount of subtly in it and rewatching dredges up a lot of things that might otherwise be missed. I am also seriously enjoying the music by Yoko Kanno. She by far is one of the best artists I've listened too.

Speaking of music after watching Hero monday I downloaded the soundtrack. It's kind of sad one so I had held off on getting it til now but there was one track that really reached out to me. It's called "Gone With Leaves" and it reminded me greatly of "Metamorphis Pt 1" by Phillip Glass. Turns out the composer of the Hero soundtrack, Tan Dun, is a student of the Phillip Glass' style of music. Feel pretty proud I caught that.

Well that's all for now. This week was really pretty enjoyable and I hope the rest of my summer is as good.

Keeping Busy

Sorry there hasn't been much content of late. I've been swinging between keeping busy and sitting around and I really can't motivate myself to stay focused of late when I am sitting around.

Dani's D & D Rnd 3

Here is recap of last night's game.

I've finally finished reading the geography section of the FR corebook so I've moved onto the Underdark which is somewhat shorter and much less thorough sadly. Maybe they will eventually do more on the Underdark.

Live from B240

Just finished creating our first presentation for CIS480. I'll be giving it tomorrow morning so wish me luck. I hate presenting but I'll only have to do it 2 1/3 times this summer so it's really not so bad. Plus I'll get the two of those done tomorrow and a week from tomorrow. That'll be nice at least. I don't mind being quasi-in charge as it's probably more practical for me to be that since I am around and have more free time but I still hate speaking in front of a group even one that's only 10 people including myself!

In the meantime Congress continues to be distasteful: they voted themselves a $3300 raise and then shortly thereafter voted down raising the minimum wage above $5.15 an hour. Gee I'm glad that they have their priorities straight there and are looking out for their constituents especially since we know most Congressman barely make ends meet. Think it's about time we ammended the Constitution to not let Congress set their own wages and promptly hack them down to enough to cover living expenses and that's about it.

It's been a pretty busy week but highly enjoyable thus far. Here's hoping the rest of summer is as good!

CIS 480 Begins

Well this next 8 weeks may very well be quite crazy. The task we've been given is quite doable but I have no doubt I'll be learning a lot as I go through it and I'd hazard a guess that my partners are in the same boat. It's a little strange basically working with people rather then getting a coding project but reality is that working with people is probably key to any job out there.

So here we go!

Sunday

Well Carl's D & D game was cancelled due to it being Father's Day. Didn't find out til today but everything worked out well. Kicked back a little bit and beat C & C Red Alert 2 and then sort of moved onto to the expansion. Had a friend over and watched Hero. The more I watch it the better I realize Hero is. The "yellow" scene with the leaves and the "green" scene in the throne room and by far my favorite scenes. It's such a vibrant sad movie. Discussing it we wondered if a lot of Chinese films end with most/all the protagonists dying. Haven't seen enough movies to know. *shrug*

Class tomorrow then movie at 8:30 everyone is welcome to come over. I'll turn on the A/C if there is a lot of us so it isn't so hot! Anyhow going to get ready for bed I think. Try and sack out by midnight so I will get 7 or so hours of sleep!

Upcoming Books

Well poking thru RPG.net's forums led me on a long daisy chain through DriveThruRPG and eventually at D & D's home Wizards of the Coast. The basic run down is that WotC finally opted to put a larger portion of their line into legal, albeit DRMed, pdfs. However they come at full price so it's debatable whether they will sell nearly as well as other pdfs on the site which are usually cheaper then their physical equivalents.

Anyhow I was more interested in the news coming out of Wizards on the Monster Manual IV and the Forgotten Realms supplement Dragons of Faerun. MM4 serves the base purpose of making my shifter even more useful/adaptable/overpowered and beyond that honestly doesn't serve a lot of purpose unless I run a D & D game someday and then folks aren't going to be happy because I will be able to throw something like 7.2 billion random monsters at them (albeit most easily defeated prolly by a level 15 party of 5). Dragons peaked my interest initially because it was described as Faerun's version of the Draconicom and thus I hoped it'd stat out some of the more interesting FR dragons. Alas it looks like it will be more setting information then anything else although I'll still prolly pick it up.

Alright. There you go. Random D & D news. Do with it as you wish.

FIFA

So I'm a little envious of my friends who are in Germany right now because they have the chance (at least in theory) of being able to go to a World Cup Match. I haven't seen many of the matches for this cup on tv mostly because they air on the morning and they also air (I think) on ESPN which I know longer get. The previous world cup had the benefit of being in South Korea so I would be able to watch at night. Maybe now I will get lucky since next week with classes I'll be up. Perhaps its on ESPN 2 or it might even replace the daily soaps on ABC (god forbid). I'll have to look into it. Anyhow go teams USA and England (not Britain because the Welsh and Scots get their own teams I do believe). Joga bonito!

In the meantime I am hoping it might actually rain here. Or thunderstorm. It seems that the storms are missing us sadly. Boo!

Tomorrow is Carl's D & D game. We're busy gaurding this old lady. I totally forgot to write that into the summary, oops. Something of course is afoot!

Oh Really

So I was reading Exodus 16 where God supplies Quail and manna to the people of Israel in their 40 year journey to the promised land. I was surpised to find out that manna literally means: "what is it?" It was a very surprising meaning. I always figured it meant bread or something along those lines. Obviously nowadays its connotation is that of food for the most part but it is kind of funny to think about sentences with manna replaced with "What is it?" It's also amusing that a lot of fantasy games use manna as the power for magic or what not. I guess it fits pretty well that some designer needed a mystical power source and used manna for it. Guess they didn't know what powered the magic either!

Carl's D & D 1 & 2

Read about it here.

:|

It occurs to me that this blog doesn't serve much more purpose then my ramblings about my life. I wonder if I should attempt to give it some direction...

Ouch

So just read on the Google Blog that they have released Google News in Arabic. Curious even tho I knew I wouldn't be able to read a thing. When the page loaded I had a rather painful realization. Arabic is read right to left. This I knew. HTML in its most basic form however renders top-left (ie if you do not format anything in any way it will heavily favor top left for spacing and layout). You know how much of a pain it must have been to develop that page? Guess that's why Google people get paid well!

IT

IT, originally uploaded by mirv120.

More motivational poster fun. Made this one myself with the help of Twism (being the photographer) a ways back.

Progress in a glacial sort of way

So I sorted everything out of my lower drawer where I dumped about a million papers prior to moving. Then I put my bike together. Doesn't sound like a lot but that drawer was a mess. I am pretty proud of myself. In cleaning tho I realized I need some magnets. I have a Marvin's menu and a Papa Murpht's menu and nothing to attach them to the fridge with.

I am rather excited about getting my bike together. Now I can wander around a bit more and get exercise at the same time. I'm curious to see how well I can maneuver with a backpack on my back. Throw in the factor I've hardly ridden in the past couple years to make it more interesting.

Not much else to say at the moment. Looks like this weekend it will be getting rather warm again. It really seems to be swinging back and forth on the chart. Odd.

Wednesday

Had a fairly productive day today (or yesterday). But first off I should remember to say Happy Birthday to Amber who celebrated Tuesday.

Went on a major shopping trip out to Wally World picking up about a million things that I needed around the apartment. Swear I spent more time looking for stuff in Wal-mart then anything else. I ran into Mary which was nice I haven't seen her in awhile. I also swung by campus and paid tutition, called what seems half a dozen people but prolly was only 1 or 2 to straighten out billing and other stuff from moving. Happily my credit bill arrived here so now I know everything is going to correct address bill wise. Wish I didn't have to pay the bills tho.

Called Lars and chatted with him about the trip at the end of summer. Trying to make sure everyone is on the same page well in advance. Now I gotta remember to send out for maps of various states in between here and there. Also called Jenny and talked very briefly with her. If only I had the spare change to make a jaunt out to Maui and visit her! Maybe in theory if I didn't do any side spending I might.

I ended up getting C & C Decade at Walmart. Hoping that'll entertain me most of the summer. A huge variety of different missions. There is a first person shooter even. The practice multiplayer is kinda strange but hoping maybe the real thing is cooler. If we get enough people to buy in might make a good LAN package. On a useful note since I already had C & C Generals we've already got an extra copy to borrow out.

Still lots to accomplish this week. Had a very long list!

"And you know what that makes us?"
"Big damn heroes, sir."

So perhaps I should give a real update

Why? I dunno.

Let's see. Class starts in a week. Well less then a week now. The apartment is more or less unpacked and has been for awhile. I am doin' the last couple loads of dishes that needed to be done so they'd be clean post move. Since ya know anything transported in a box using old newspapers as padding prolly should be washed prior to use.

Right now I am plugging away at Secret Soldiers. It discusses terrorism and the global response to it focusing on the special forces groups that are created to counter terrorist groups. The first three chapters are rather dry as the go over the huge numbers of active groups in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. There were a lot more groups out there then I thought and a lot of them were active. In Europe alone it seems terrorist bombings were fairly common place. Hoping once I get out of the overview chapters that things will be more interesting as individual chapters cover major operations and the like.

The new apartment is very nice. Small but I honestly don't really need much more space. It'll be nice when I get wi-fi set up so I can compute out in the living room tho. I have a full size couch! Yay for that. I can sprawl out and watch tv! Or read or write or whatever else. Have to get Twism over to see if it causes nap induced nightmares however. On a side note one of my random strident goals is to clean the place partially/fully every weekend so that it stays pretty nice.

That's all for now. Need to try and finish up dishes.

Dani's D & D Rnd 2

Decided I'd post these on the other blog I use very occasionaly for RPG related rambling (lot of quasi-theory stuff) rather then make everyone else scroll past. Here.

Brief

Happy Birthday Evie. Been kinda disorganized of late hence why haven't posted much. Will try and get things together this week and write some more. Is all for now I'm afraid.

Finally the Interweb

Yea so I've finally got cable in the new place. No wireless yet, need to find a cheap wi-fi router. Not in a huge hurry tho. The iMac seems to run a bit slower then the Wintel box. Maybe it's just the specific browser (Safari) but I dunno. Fool around with it some as time passes. Blogger managed to go down right after I got everything running denying me a wonderful time killing event.

Somehow this summer is lonelier then last. This probably is partially cause I was at work 40 hours a week and commuting another 10 greatly reducing the amount of time I had in the apartment. More people were around and most of them were directly in Point. Hmm.

Day in GB

So got up early (for me at least, 8:30) and visited Kara-Rae in Green Bay. It was an interesting drive. I tried to short cut by taking a county road that Hwy 10 simply passed over so had to back track and then got the same treatment by Hwy 172 in GB so ended up running a bit late.

Got there and we went to eat right next to Lambeau Field. Now I've been to County Stadium and the 95% completed Miller Park next to it but never near a major football stadium before. It's huge. Not sure I've ever seen that massive of a structure in my life (not that I can think of and I would think I'd remember). Pretty amazing. Then we pretty much toured around the city to the point where I kinda sort of have an idea where things are. Chatted, etc, etc. Hope Kara had fun sheparding me around :o

Got back in time for Dani's D & D game and that was good I made it on time because it was just me and Isaac. That report will be forthcoming. Real internet comes tomorrow as well so I am excited about that!

Summer Reading

Well since I was back home I picked up an armload of books I want to/should read this summer. Since my backlog is passing 20 books (assorted mix of novels and historical non-fiction) I figured i'd better attempt to make some headway. I grabbed all three Janisaries. I've read Janisaries in high school but it's been so long that to read the sequals I will need to re-read the original. By the end of high school I understood what Dad meant when he said he couldn't remember much about books he'd read even a couple years back. I grabbed Secret Soldiers because I've read enough bits and pieces of it that I figured I should just plow through and finish it. The first couple hundred pages thus are pretty dry but once actual operations are detailed should be more interesting. On a whim I also snagged The Dig by Alan Dean Foster. It's been awhile since I've read it but it's one of the most interesting worlds I've ever explored. That is essentially the short list. Armed Struggle is on tap if I get done. I've prolly 60-70 percent complete with it anyways. Beyond that I am unsure of what to tackle. I have 3-4 books on the Russian Front in the World War II but am unsure of which to tackle first plus I'll need to space them out.

Of course there's always side trips for RPGs. I'm still attempting to finish up the Forgotten Realms geography (all 100+ pages of it). I'm past halfway but that'll move in spurts.

Well time to read and then sleep. Have a good night all.

Sorry

Yea, computer at home was in the shop so no internet there hence the lack of posts. I get internet later this week so then I'll write some more. Maybe a little in between then but I am trying to keep busy. I brought several books from home to read so I am trying to actually work my mind muscles rather then just surf the interweb all summer.