eviljim.com: the mac days

Brian stole and then devoured my delicious lunch I had been looking forward to eating all day. Without so much as even asking, or, say, MENTIONING to me.

What kind of person would just STEAL the lunch of one’s roommate? A bad person, that’s what. I’m hungry and I have nothing to eat, because my chicken has been stolen. And if you know anything about me, you’ll know one thing — I like chicken. Especially eating it, but also looking at it, too.

So far, I’m resisting a front from Allison to make me listen to — dear lord — country music. There are just far too many… syllables.

I cleaned my desk. It took 8 paper towels, all of which are now black from the disgusting dirt of said desk. It isn’t even extremely clean — it could stand another wipe down, but I ran out of paper towels.

I find it very, very frightening how well I have acclimated to waking up at 8:30 AM every day. This is completely and totally not in my character, and I should not be able to do it.

I realized it’s for two reasons: it’s not obscenely early, like 6:00 or whenever the heck I woke up for my internship, and it’s EVERY weekday.

Last semester I had to get up for a 9:00 class MWF and at, like, 2 or something for T and Th. It didn’t work. I never went to the 9 AM class. Well, to be completely honest I never went to the 2 PM class either, but that wasn’t because I was tired, I just didn’t want to go.

Yet almost three weeks into the semester, I haven’t missed a single class — not even the 9 AM classes, and those don’t count if you skip. I even convinced a particularly sleepy Jim this morning to get up and go to class.

School is already a lot of work, which has me worried because it’s only going to get worse. Fortunately one of my 6 classes is a writing class that is quite evidently a blowoff class. Attendance counts, so I have to go, but I doubt it will be a huge amount of work for a superstar like myself.

Completely unrelated except to an instant messenger conversation I’m having while typing this, I like using invalid arguments to see if I’ll get called on them. For example: “Well, you have to decide what we’ll do because I’m coming over to your neighborhood.” Not really a valid argument for someone that lives 9 blocks away, but it got me out of making a decision.

Finally and again unrelatedly, my brother Billy invited me to join orkurt, which is like Friendster but elite and Google-sponsored. I was giddy, I had been hoping to get invited, yay for me. I sent out invitations to everyone I talk to, if you didn’t get one I have a wrong email address for you, but sign up! Sign up and be my friend! I only have a circle of 27,265 people and need more!

Orkut makes me think of orcs.

While watching “Pirates of the Carribean” I noticed that in every pirate movie it ends up a sword master fighting what they assume is one who knows nothing about swordplay. They fight, the sword master narrating, and the guy who knows nothing ends up winning.

Yar, matey.

Anyway, back at school, weather is what you could describe as freezing. You would, unfortunately, be off by a factor of almost 40 degrees. -10 is not ideal walking conditions, and unfortunately I have a far-away class every day… nice.

Moving on, but still on the topic of classes, I start class bright and early at 9 AM every day. On Monday/Wednesday/Thursday I get done at noon. Around two I’ll be at home, looking around, thinking it’s far too early to have gone to class and also been home for two hours. I’m not sure if I like this or not, but it certainly is disconcerning.

And now a picture of a monkey, proudly stolen off our neighbor’s door.

(PS - It costs like a buck an ear)

Christmas delight started early this year; the plans have always been to spend Christmas in North Carolina with my sister, because she can’t fly due to pregnancy. So it wasn’t Christmasy at the house… but my mother managed to get into the spirt of things anyway.

She saw an infomercial on the following product:

Bible Songs 4 Kids. She decided she wanted it — for herself, if that isn’t obvious. So she calls the 800 number on the television and upon being connected is, apparently, asked what product she wants.

“The one on the TV right now.”

“What do you mean? I want the product on the TV right now, you should know what it is.”

My mother’s attitude raising, I tried to help out by saying “Bible Songs 4 Kids.” OK — that solved one problem. Although at this point I believe my mother pointed out to me the lady on the phone was stupid if she doesn’t even know what they’re selling.

So at some point — I’m not entirely sure why — my mother gets a guilty look on her face then, slowly, blurts out to the lady she wants the product as a gift (a lie). Not sure how that comes up, but then my mom starts asking the lady where she’s from (India, no surprise).

The deal is almost set, but on a whim my mother asks when her credit card will be charged.

Apparently this is information that the representative is not allowed to give out; she’d have to call up customer service for that top-secret information.

This — almost — destroies the deal. It was just about to fall apart when the saleslady just lies to my mom and says she’s billed right away. OK, good, the order is placed. Christmas cheer spreads here and in India thanks to both my mom and the saleslady’s wonderful, super moods.

Found a new program that lets me edit posts offline and also spell check. A very needed feature. Stupid name, but I’ll forgive them. All the more reason for you blogging kids to switch to Movable Type.

Not too much exciting new stuff — mostly just spending time with the family and trying to play Final Fantasy XI. I’m still unsure if I like it very much, especially since I can hardly handle killing a Forest Hare without getting my butt kicked. Hardcore.

One nice thing about this offline editor deal is that I can automatically insert the music I’m listening to while I post. A nice feature in theory, but with two problems:

1) It doesn’t have an iTunes plugin, which is now my primary music listener dealie.
2) I can’t listen to music and write.

Actually, I more or less can’t listen to music and do anything requiring thinking without getting oft distracted. Homework, writing, reading… nope. Well, I can’t listen to real music at least. Music without words doesn’t distract me too much… but what’s the point?

I have exactly 5 tasks left this semester (including all homework, projects, and finals). Only two weeks of classes left, then one week of finals.

Exciting times!

I was reading good-ole’ Christina’s web journal thing and got to thinking.

Christina is just about a teacher, or at least pretends to be — I’m not entirely sure and have no way of verifying her claims — and is student teaching. And I think she’s trying to substitiute? I don’t know, she can post a comment and clarify our knowledge. Or at least my knowledge. I think I’ve stuttered on this point long enough.

So one of her recent entries was about her breakup with her previous boyfriend including some poetry she wrote.

Imagine stumbling upon your highschool, junior high, or grade school teacher’s webjournal. You could learn far more than really any student should know about their teacher.

This may be the first time I’ve had an entry in mind before a title for the entry. It’ll be interesting to see how, exactly, it pans out.

Overheard around dinner time:

Shane: “She broke a dating etiquette law.” (If I spelled that right, I’m impressed).

Brian: Some boring crap that nobody paid attention to.

Shane: Starts to say something else, who cares.

I decide to ask what ettiquette law his date had broken. I think I was just hoping for another excuse to mock him for having opened a can of soda he dropped and then being amazed it exploded and he lost three quarters of his drink (how an engineer can be surprised at this, I’m not sure).

“She ordered a meal that was $4 more than mine when I was paying,” Shane told me.

I couldn’t think of a response to this but Brian did.

“Why were you even paying for her in the first place?”

Shane had agreed to pay for the date in exchange for companionship, not a bad deal for him, you’ll agree, especially if you know Shane. Personally I don’t see the big problem in paying if the girl doesn’t mind — especially at the beginning of a relationship, as it aids in the swooning process — but Brian seems to think it’s a sin of some kind.

Personally, I don’t see how a guy on a first date can look at a girl and go “okay, so you owe $10.50.” Although strangely enough I can see Brian doing it.

Anyway, my main point is if this “etiqutte” law exists, I sincerely doubt it applies to theme resturaunts. Buying some crappy food at Olive Garden that costs a few dollars more than whatever else is not going to break the bank. I think this rule might more be aimed at lobster to burger imbalances. Not, uh, pasta to pasta with extra sauce or whatever Olive Garden serves.

It’s such a small thing it’s not worth getting worked up about. Heck, maybe next time you go to eat she’ll just get french toast and about a gallon of water and even things out.

Do normal people really pay attention to these things? It just seems so trivial. Fortunately for me chicken fingers tend to be reasonably priced no matter the restaurant.

What would happen if you offered to pay and just got a free bread basket? That would be awesome.

Andy is awesome, seriously.

Pulling off the best Halloween costume ever, Andy is now my hero. Walking down Green Street at least 30 or so people yelled out at him (most of which actually knew who he was, some of whom just thought he was a walking toilet or something).

In an attempt to get the Halloween started off right, I attempted to find an entertaining event to attend. While studying with Scott in the Union I saw a flyer for none other than the 6th annual Halloween Date Auction.

I thought this would be funny. Surprisingly enough Brian thought so too. So Brian, Dan, Rob, Shane, Allison (so we didn’t look like complete losers), and I hopped into a compact car — Rob in the trunk of course — and headed over to FAR to see the types of things that go down at a date auction.

After much negative energy being thrown my way for not knowing where exactly in one of the largest buildings on campus the auction was at, we find it and…

We didn’t go. I apparently should check the sponsoring club when looking at these things; the United Asian Club was sponsoring this one and, well, we didn’t feel comfortable actually going in.

I was armed with my camera but I figured 6 whiteys walking in, taking a picture of a room full of asians, then leaving might just leave a different impression than I really wanted.

After that Andy, Christina, and Lauren arrived. Andy showed off his costume shown above and we walked to get pizza at Papa Johns (I believe we picked the furthest place intentionally, though I’m not sure).

A few people actually stopped and asked Andy to pose with them for a picture (Andy insists he could use the quote “Somebody’s a grabbin’ my buttttt” during one of the pictures) and several others took candids.

Of course the best had to be the fact that the pizza man called his girlfriend to come to the store while we waited for our pizza — simply to see Andy’s costume.

Saturday was exciting fun at Six Flags St. Louis — the best part was Brian telling me the weather would be great, and it ending up being freezing and rainy. Unable to use the polak fleece I brought, I walked around in what I can only assume to be roughly 50 degree weather in a long-sleeve shirt and jeans, soaked.

We popped over to Mr. Freeze first. We were on the ride, ready to launch when they noticed someone had thrown up. They had to boot us off and clean the vomit, which took about an hour, before they could run the ride again. Fun.

Homework time. Yay.

Ech.

I’m starting to suspect I might be old.

At least I’ll get in some last-minute roller coastering this weekend — a few of us plan on visiting Six Flags St. Louis. Yay. I hope it doesn’t suck although I am pessimisitic.

I suspect my iPod is broken. It doesn’t seem to want to shut itself off if nothing’s playing, and a while back the backlight timer didn’t time — it just never shut itself off.

I suspect this is all psychological because I want a new iPod. I should not buy a new iPod.

Too much I should post but can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, or don’t want to post.

Some Vegas stories and perhaps a story or two from this upcoming weekend if anything interesting happens… next time on here.

Well I’m back from Vegas kids, and on my first day back I get my very first City of Urbana parking ticket. Yay for me!

I’ve got roughly 1500 emails to filter through, just waiting to be deleted, so I’ll go ahead and make this one quick.

It was my birthday the 27th so if you haven’t wished me a happy birthday, it’s not too late!

Vegas was — as the kids say these days — spiffy. Aside from some rather large and very, very dumb last-minute wagers I would have left just about even. I left down about $100. Math will let you know almost exactly how dumb a certain last-minute wager was.

But, really, who wants to leave Vegas even?

Not me.

I won’t post any huge stories, at least yet, but a good time was had by most. I’ll have to post about the extreme location of my room and various other fun tidbits later. I’ve got birthday tidings to thank people for.

Of all things, I believe I’ve become addicted to downloading music legally. Swoon.

I’m not entirely sure how, but my phone menus are now pink. I suspect foul play on behalf of a certain person that will rename nameless — but lack the proof necessary to prove it. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to make my display NOT be pink.

I might have to get a new phone.

Pink.

Weekend.

It’s a paradox of life that the weekend must both start and end the week.

Deep, huh?

A while back I had planned on going home this weekend to visit the wonderful Six Flags Great America theme park, thereby using my season pass once again and thereby dilute the cost-per-visit value.

For the first time coming or going from Urbana, I was pulled over by an officer of the law.

Yup, the police pulled me over. It was down a road that links 57 and 55. I was going roughly 71 (or 68, depending on which cop you’ll take the story of) in a 55 MPH zone.

The first squad was actually driving the opposite way I was. Right after passing me he turned his lights on, did a rather illegal U-turn, and pulled me over.

He asked me for my name and registration, pointed out he clocked me at 68, and that I was exceeding the speed limit which was 55. He asked the typical speeding-ticket questions, where are you coming from, where are you going, and so on. He grabs my license and insurance and departs.

Then the other car pulls up. He had, apparently, been parked somewhere I drove by. He comes to the window, mentions that I was definately speeding and that he clocked me at 71. I repeat the same thing, more or less, I told the other officer — I understand I was speeding, I must have been paying less attention to my speed than I should have. I also say I understand it’s a wildlife conservation area and that it’s important to be careful in areas like this. I mention that I used to work for a park, and understand the dangers. He belittles my experience but agrees that generally it’s necessary to be very cautious where wildlife could be present.

Cop number one comes back and tells me he’ll just let me along my way once he runs my license number — as long as I haven’t had a ticket in the past year, I’ll be on my way.

Oopsie, I’ve had a ticket in the past year. I don’t have time to think about this though, oh no!

THUD.

My car violently shakes and I realize that something has struck the front driver’s side of my car.

Rather hard.

It was the second cop.

“Yeah, looks like your tire up there’s a little low. You might want to look at that and get some more air in there.”

I thank him, although I think it’s obvious at this point I’m clearly startled because he just kicked my car with no warning.

He kicks it again.

The first cop comes back, hands me my license and insurance and says I’m free to go along on my merry way. A small relief, but at this point I still think the other officer might be insane.

I thank them both, assure them I’ll check my air pressure, and I’m on my way without a ticket.

Yay! Yay for no tickets! Yay for ME!

I got home shortly after that (around 1:15 in the morning — late). I went more or less right to bed; I had to get up at 7 to get ready to go to Great America. To drive to Great America. Because 4 hours back and forth to Urbana is just not enough driving for me.

Great America was packed. Insanely so. Especially for a rather cold day, and also because fright fest sucks more than it did last time I went, and it was pretty crappy then.

At the park 8 hours, rode 4 rides (Superman, Eagle Backwards, Deja Vu, Superman again). Superman is super-fantastic in the absolute last car. Somehow it manages to be completely different than any other coaster.

Eagle Backwards (the car all the way in the back, which is the ‘front’ car because it’s on the track backwards) actually surprised me. Despite the massive number of times I have ridden it — I just didn’t know what to expect. Several of the hills caught me off-guard. Always a good thing.

Deja Vu is the most unsafe feeling roller coaster ever. There’s just far too much ‘dangle’. Despite being similar in that aspect to Vertical Velocity, V2 feels so much safer (same, actually, for Superman).

Speaking of Superman again — Superman has these leg restraints that actually hold your legs in place — you’re basically shackled in. Some idiot decided it’d be funny to make it look like he was shackled without actually being shackled.

They noticed this when the car was halfway up the hill.

They had to emergency stop the ride, raise up this little cart so they could get to him, release his foot holds, and re-engage them with feet. This took roughly a half our because he felt like riding on the edge.

Mostly everyone was cursing at this man, especially the people on the train with him, who were basically dangling face down over, well, a 150 foot drop to the ground. Kind of spooky and really uncomfortable.

To make it up to them, they let them ride twice — they just ran them straight through the station and up again. Of course, Idiot McI’mAJerk who left his feet to dangle got to ride a second time as well. A most profound injustice, if you ask me, because he wasted a half hour of my life.

Bah. Oh well. I asked the attendant when we were boarding if there were any rules I could break to ride twice, but he didn’t really like my question.

I’ve been DDRing a bit more since I got new pads. I picked up the generics (of course) of these pads — two generics being half the cost of one ‘authentic’ aftermarket part. I was worried the soft insert would cause problems but, as it turns out, they’re surprisingly awesome. No bunching or sliding, really, makes for a much better dance.

I finally got a copy of Drummania… which I’ve wanted since before the PS2 even came out in the US. Good times, good times.

Unfortunately not all my crazy purchases work out so well.

Case in point below:

The Lemonader. A mere $5 shipped from Amazon, I figured delcious lemonade was finally in my grasp.

Oh, a naive fool be I!

I feel foolhardy for not having pictures from the debacle that was brewing our first pitcher of lemonade. Words will just have to do.

First of all, it’s a strangely complicated procedure for making a drink that consists only of water, sugar, and lemon.

First the exact amount of water it tells you to add changes. I was told by fellow lemonade brewers that I just didn’t read well, but does this really seem a plausable reason for me screwing up? Doubtful.

The result of this was I poured in far too much water. “Oh no!” you might think “the pitcher is going to overflow and spill hot lemony water all over you! You’ll get burned!” No, kids, don’t worry. The fine people at LemonCorp knew of this danger and for that reason put a rather sizable hole where you pour the water in. So instead of having watered down lemonade you instead get water all over the place. The best part about the hole is it just comes straight out the back of the contraption. Not into any type of fail-safe mechanism which would catch the water pouring out at a rather rapid pace (seeing as they tell you to put in triple the water you actually need to).

Good design.

Well, whatever, we got that figured out so we turn it on and it starts to ‘brew’ the sugar water. I didn’t expect this but the Lemonader is much like a coffee machine, except instead of coffee grounds, it uses pure uncut sugar. Mmmm.

While this is going on you’re supposed to put some lemons onto that juicer at the top (this is where you could put, say, rats, if you were a vampire) so as to add essence to the Lemonade.

I start doing so. Everything’s fine until around the third lemon.

This is when the machine shoots hot steam at whomever is close enough to it to get painfully burned. Yep, if the water all over your kitchen doesn’t piss you off, they burn you too.

Nice.

So after tending to my third-degree burns and realizing I can no longer ream any more lemons (too dangerous!) we let the lemonade maker do its thing.

Aside from a pitcher of rather regular tasting lemonade, there was a nice pulpy mess that made me just want to jump up and make another pitcher.

MMMMM!

I need to drop my Computer Graphics class, but unfortunately I can only do that if I pick up another credit hour.

The only way to pick up another credit hour, as it were, is an independent study with a professor or lecturer of my choice.

I stopped by the office of two teachers — one I’ve had, one I have this semester.

The first one told me I could do an independent study with him if he never had to see me again until I handed in my project. This, actually, is exactly what I was hoping for, but I didn’t expect it put so bluntly.

The second guy, a teacher I have this semester, wanted nothing to do with me whatsoever. He more or less told me he didn’t have time to spare, etc, but took my name and email address anyway.

4 hours later he emails me saying that he would be interested in doing an independent study program with me.

I strongly suspect the only reason he emailed me was he looked up how I was doing in his class over the three machine problems, a midterm, and some homeworks, and noticed I had — by far — the highest grade in the class. Oh, also, the highest grade possible. I’m a superstar and haven’t lost a point yet.

It’s a good thing I’m smart or I wouldn’t be able to cover up that I’m stupid. Excellent.

Previous to hearing back from him, I had decided I should actually go to class that day — make it look good, because I really need a professor to sign off for this independent study crap. I sort of forgot the class doesn’t meet on Mondays though. Oops.

And now back to the pseudoadiabatic diagram!

The train I took every day over the summer derailed today… a bit spooky that if it had happened over the summer I very well might have been on that train.

The theater nearby in Champaign is playing classic movies this month — including Jaws next weekend and Army of Darkness on Halloween. Of course, the people I know all suck and refuse to go do something interesting for once. Jerks.

It’s midterms week for me — I have three exams this week — and all the studying I was supposed to do over the weekend more or less didn’t happen. Oops. I suspect this semester is going to not go as well as my previous two here.

Good thing I don’t care.

And now back to work; I just had to update so I could mock Shane for not updating.

Update time, I guess.

Not too much new and exciting. This weekend there were three swing dances in Urbana and I managed to go to not-a-one. I believe combined attendance at these three dances was roughly 10 people, including some very frightening people, so I didn’t miss out on much there.

In Vegas-related news (of course), Roy got attacked by a tiger. The only surprising thing here is apparently they have absolutely no animal control on staff — they had to get the tiger to stop mauling Roy with fire extinguishers.

Safety first, kids.

School has pounced upon me like an angry penguin.

I went to the Illinois vs. California game Saturday, my first foray into watching college football down here (and my only college football watchingness aside from my brother’s days at University of Chicago. Oh, was that horrible. It was always cold and he never played. I suspect he wasn’t even there for one of the games we went to). The Illini lost.

On the plus side of life, I’ll be in Vegas a month from tomorrow. My brother, the same one previously mentioned in a football capacity, is turning 30 years old and to celebrate we’ll spend a long weekend in Vegas for my birthday.

If that logic evades you, you are not a Reardon.

I was just sitting at my computer, minding my own business, when I suddenly remembered something from many years ago and almost started crying I was giggling so much.

Before beginning it is important to note my brother was not wearing shoes.

When I was young, way younger than my memory really extends (which is why the details on this are a bit sketchy), one of my brothers was going through his room and found an old combination lock he had forgot he even had. He didn’t know the combination or even where it was from. It was unlocked, just sitting in his closet.

For some unknown reason he decided to put this lock around his big toe and lock it.

Through some mysterious coincidence, the part of his big toe closest to his foot was just big enough to fit a lock around. The toe-knuckle, however, was too large to fit a lock over.

Therein lied a problem. The lock was stuck on his big toe.

That’s where my memory ends, but really, it’s got to be the best part of the story anyway. I have no idea how he got that lock off (I assume he did though).

So, uh, here’s some ramble for you.

My computer science classes have teamed up to assign one MP: “Using SPIM on the CSIL machines available in DCL, prove or disprove the existance of God. Be precise. No partial credit awarded.”

My weather class teachers have paired up against me, deciding to spout out random streams of letters — letters, man, not even whole words! — that are completely nonsensical. My Atmospheric Dynamics professor even used the letter “poo”.

I had no idea how to put that in my notes.

My math class is a joke. I think we can use a calculator on the exams, in which case I need to know precisely nothing. Excellent.

I am a handsome man.

Finished watching the first season of “24″. Fairly good. Maybe a bit overboard with all the kidnapping. Especially considering some of the director commentary near the end… “you just never know what to expect from us zany writers! We’re zany! We’re not afraid to do anything!”

I know what to expect. I expect a whole lot of kidnapping. Somewhere around when the show hits 1 PM (the show runs 12 AM - 12 AM, so a bit over halfway), they’ve ran out of ideas and decide to kidnap the same people a few more times. But it was still good, kidnapping aside.

Finally, according to census statistics, JAMES is the most popular first name. You all can go home now — I win.