yes, I’m still alive… yes, I’m back at school… yes, I’m horribly and incredibly busy. Taking a week off right before finals has caused some problems. I have a crap load of catching up to do. I’m still in catch up mode… then I have to work on stuff that is due in the future… First on the list is a group project that is due in 4 days give or take a day. It’s a huge project and I don’t know how far we’re gonna get. I got bumped as project manager… that’s what happens when you miss 3 group meetings in a row… but oh well… now if we crash and burn, it’s not my fault! the only sad thing is now I’m the only one in the group without a title. there’s project manager, systems engineer, and 4 technology leads… but there’s 7 people… and I don’t have a title… I am the piss boy… I am only worth 1 point. (it’s a card game for those who didn’t get to play this past week)

on to important things! I am engaged!! I asked Deedee to marry me Thanksgiving… and suprise, suprise… she said yes Everyone back home seemed happy, but everyone here has just been like, “why’d you ask her now? that’s too long to be engaged” and “well, make sure you live together first and have sex a few times to make sure you really want to marry her”… what’s wrong with these people? the correct response is, “Congratulations and best wishes.”.. just shows you how different views are in the bible belt vs the people’s republic of boulder.

I had hoped that visiting State would help me make a final decision on what I’m going to be doing next fall… no such luck. I’m still confused. Complete strangers don’t see why I just don’t go back to state… maybe that’s saying something.

In other news, you should be able to feel the awesome power of the Beast from where you are, now I upgraded The Beast and he now has two MP 2000+ processors crunching numbers for me I actually have a bit of a problem. I can’t get both processors to crunch the same process up to 100%. It will only crunch such that it is 100% of only one processor. Like, 50% of one and 50% of the other or 25% of one and 75% of the other… why won’t it do 100% and 100%??? anyone know how to remove this limitation? I did find one process that pegs both of my processors. I can decode avi’s to vcd’s with incredible speed now Of course, as with any parallel process, doubling the processors does not half the time. but it did cut about 1/3 of the time off of the decoding… that’s a nice boost. I also can’t seem to run multiple instances of a program… I really wanted to be able to run like two copies of a number crunching program and assign each one a different processor… if anyone knows how to do that, let me know….

I gotta run… got to read about 100 pgs of stuff before bed tonight…. later…

I almost forgot the quote of the week… first, I have to say, airports are a wonderful place. You get to see and listen to lots of people that’d you never see or hear otherwise… now, on a completely unrelated note, I give you the quote of the week:

“If we got into a fight, and you tried to strangle me… we’d probably end up having sex”

well, it’s that time again… I’ve been busy this week… I’ve been sleeping lots to help get better… it’s helped a lot… for anyone who’s still sick out there, I prescribe sleep… at least 10 hours at a time… 2-3 days and you’ll be fine

as for what’s been going on in the world of me? well… that’s mostly why I haven’t posted… I’ve been too busy thinking. I’m at a crossroads of my life. There’s signs up everywhere that tell me exactly where each path leads, but unfortunately, I can’t seem to get this blindfold out of my eyes… I created a third option and then all but eliminated one of my original two… for those just tuning in, I’m trying to decide where to go to school in the fall, what to major in, and therefore what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life. I did get one major decision out of the way. I got an offical offer to continue my TA with astrophysics next spring, and that pretty much solidifies my decision to drop my research project. This means cutting my income by almost half, but it’s better than trying to do research I’m not interested in. I haven’t told the prof yet, but I will tomorrow or next week.

so what are my options about next fall? well… it goes something like this… stay here and do aerospace or go back to State and do aerospace and an MBA. Well, those were my two options… I thought of a third. That is to stay here and do astrophysics, or specifically planetary sciences, looking at Mars. It’s a long story how I came up with that third option, but it kinda scares me and excites me at the same time.. It would mean completely leaving the realm of aerospace and rocket science, but it would mean a return to science instead of engineering, and it would mean studying mars… something none of the aerospace people here or at state are doing… I don’t have a clue what kind of jobs there would be out there for an engineer/astrophysicist, and that bothers me. I’m sure NASA needs mars experts, but they don’t need that many of them, I’m sure…

going back to my first two options… I’ve all but eliminated staying here in aerospace. I just can’t justify it. Most of the stuff I can do here, I can do at state, and about half of them I can do better at state… There’s soooo much for me at State that’s it’s hard not to just run there without thinking. Academically, there’s a good aerospace program, paid research at the ERC, and a speciallized MBA program. There’s also friends, family, and especially Deedee. There’s the idea that in a few years, my siblings might be going there, and it would be cool if I were there for that… There’s the band… I miss band… SEC football… only being 2 hrs away from home… only being 2 min away from Deedee. So why not just go there? because I’m a blasted Aquarius and I can’t do anything without thinking it through and logically justifying it, first.

Well, I’m up an hour later than I should be… and I’m sure you’re tired of reading about my inner turmoil… and if you’re not (and even if you are), you’ll be hearing more of it later…

p.s.. 45 – Krys… 46 – ???

ok, I planned on posting yesterday, when I had time, but as it turns out, I literally could not crawl from my bed to the computer (less than a foot and a half). Yes, I was that sick. I hate being that sick… then again, I guess who doesn’t? it was on my free night, too… so it’s not like I got to skip out on anything important.

Thank you JP for the 44th comment. Also, it looks like JP knows me best or at least he got more of those questions right. I’m wondering how many of them you just guessed on and got right? As it turns out, y’all know me better than I know myself… Everyone said that my dream car was the BMW 850. When I made that quiz, I was thinking about the Mustang, but afterwards, I thought to myself, ya know… given the choice between the cobra and the 850, I’d have to go with the BMW. I’m not very suprised that most people did not know the name of my company. For the most part, that’s something you only see if you are working on my computer, as everything that is actually registered is registered under that company. Most people answered Wolff Engineering Solutions, which, I have to admit, is a pretty cool sounding name, but was made up on the spot. Yup, I’ve always been the CEO of Wolff Management Systems Here, have a business card…

So let’s see… what else has been going on… role playing game is going good… I now have my PC’s on 6 simultaneous side quests in addition to their main quest. Some of them were things they took upon themselves, and others were meant to be minor distractors, but the PCs just couldn’t help themselves… turned it into a full blown quest…

oh, I got into a “discussion” with the lead ITS guy here on campus… as a complete and separate coincidence, my computer crashed friday night and it took me until sunday to get it back running again. Thank you Kris for being a Guru in times of need…

ok, it’s late, I got to get some sleep… more to come… hopefully more often than once every 10 days or so… we’ll see… I gots a lot going on….ok, so I will take another second and mention this life-altering struggle I’m having.. Trying to decide what to do now… I’m finishing up my masters in december, but what then? I’ve always figured I’d go on to a PhD, and I need a PhD if I ever want to teach, but now part of me is thinking about doing an MBA either instead of or in addition to a PhD… A Masters/MBA is a powerful combo, but would a PhD/MBA be more powerful? Plus, State has a unique program called MBA-Project Manager. It’s an MBA program that is especially for Engineer managers. I’m almost positive that if I did an MBA, State would be the place to go… but not necessarily for the PhD… argh! it’s so confusing… why can’t someone just tell me “this is what you are supposed to do…”??? that’d be so much easier… dad gum it… anyway… more on that later, but sleep now…

ok ok ok… I’m not dead… I’ve been busy… some quick notes and then I have to run to wal-mart (which is no small thing considering wal-mart is 20-30 minutes away)

first, 43… I think that’s a record. I’m kinda disappointed that once I pointed out that we passed 40 everyone quite writing, but oh well… 43 works…

amendment 31 was defeated because of the fact that stupid people are allowed to vote. republicans mostly won CO, but just to give you an idea of how liberal boulder is… every single local post was won by a democrat… and not just that, but there was only a single post that received more than half a percent (0.5%) republican votes… liberterians scored big in several posts, but not republicans… oh well… as I’ve heard more and more frequently lately, “welcome to the People’s Republic of Boulder”

I got into it with one of my only friends from here… she’s way far liberal, and after our argument, I had to stop and think… you know… not very many of my close friends are liberals. I guess I don’t mesh well with liberals… I relayed this revelation to Richard who replied, (heh… alliteration), “Duh… you’re too opinionated and outspoken to get along with liberals”… well… ok… sure… so, how many of my friends out there think that they are liberal vs. conservative? I won’t ask how many of you think I’m opinionated and outspoken… I’d be afraid to hear the results…although, honestly, I know I’m both… got a problem with that?

I’m starting a war with ITS here… I put in a phone call directly to the top… oh yeah, I’m going down in a giant ball of flames… consequently, if anyone out there knows how to “eavesdrop” or “listen in” on a connection (i.e. from your computer know what I’m typing into telnet), let me know. I’d like to be really informed for this arguement.

quote time…

Quote of the Week:

“There is no place for ethics in politics” — a liberal friend

Quote of the Month:

“If the government has no knowledge of aliens, then why does Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, implemented on July 16th, 1969, make it illegal for U.S. citizens to have contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles?”

first, I’d like to remind people there is still a debate raging on the comments on the blog below this one, but I felt like writing…

I have been in such an odd mood today. I think I have told off at least one person in every major thing I’ve done today. Went to class… prof didn’t show up, so I got to rant about that. Then wrote my “if you have to get a supervisor to translate “no pickles, no onions” then … get out of my way” comment… The went to my TA class and told off several people for talking during class… yelled at some people for looking like they were cheating… graded papers, yelled at the scantron machine and then emailed the comments to random person in charge… went to group meeting… yelled at the guy who didn’t show up (he was up all last night… so I called him at home, woke him up, and yelled at him… didn’t really mean to, but oh well)… got home… went to observing session.. yelled to lead TA about other TA not showing up… went to store… took 30 minutes to buy a loaf of bread and a bag of candy.. got into a fight with the manager of said candy… told him he should look into the newly invented concept of common sense… came home.. had an email from one of the people in the group meeting telling me that I should read her emails so I’d be better prepared. (I intentially ditched her email telling me how to do my homework her way), so this is what I replied to her:

“I actually think your premade list was a bad idea. Sure, it may not always be the case, but if you have a complete, ready-made list in front of you, why bother thinking? Just scratching off what doesn’t apply doesn’t mean you will get everything that does apply. Sure, it takes a little longer to compile the final list, but it forces creative and original thought. Plus, like I said in the meeting, Dr. —– is looking for creativity in the trade variables… If we have word for word what was in another paper, then we really didn’t do anything. That’s why I kept trying to steer away from that paper in the meeting.”

then, I got an email reminding me that I’m invited to a formal lunch with a committee to discuss the graduate school… and I replied by saying:

“excuse me for being direct, but this lunch isn’t just a butt-kissing luncheon is it? I find that my opinions tend to express views other than we live in a peachy-keen department and for the most part, I always get told to shut up before someone important hears me… anyway, it’s just important to know so that if someone expects me to sing the praises of the department they can just buy me a sammich and send me packing.”

and finally, I got an email yelling at me because I’m one of three people in the department who have not switched to secure shell logins to telnet and ftp… so, with my momentum going, I wrote a long retort back to them… this is the conclusion to a masterpiece of an email:

“in short… You are not “protecting” me… you’re harrassing me and inconveniencing me. you are forcing your insecurities and paranoia on me… I find it to be offensive…

but, as I knew before I started writing this email, I am but one informed engineer in a sea of uninformed ITS drones. I’m sure this email will be deleted before the reader even gets to this point… which means I’m talking to myself… hmm… at least I’m not paranoid.”

so I’m expecting to come under attack from ITS tomorrow… should be fun… bring it….

maybe I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow… shame, though… being eVil is fun.. .

oh, and as an after thought, one of my roomies just asked the other how our landlords got enough money to go on vacation for 6 months out of the year… without thinking I screamed out “by raping poor college kids of their hard earned money”… I am in such a mood…. I need to find more people to go off on…

ok, first, I was wrong about the sniper… he was too stupid to fit my profile… anyways…

I’ve been slacking in my quotes lately, although I’ve had some nice ones… unfortunately, I can only remember two of them right now… first, from Dan of our role playing group, on horiscopes:

“Saggitarius: advantages: you’re good with a bow… disadvantages: you poop while you walk”

second… well, this is just odd… I’d say 5 points to whoever can tell me where this is from… I’ll even give you a hint ahead of time… it’s supposedly a love poem:

“The sky is blue. The world is a blind man/

squatting on the road.”

how random is that? and that’s the entire stanza, too… some people have bad definitions for poetry…

::sigh:: if only I could remember the others… oh well…

so, me and a friend here got into an argument today about an issue about to be voted on soon in Colorado. It’s called admendment 31 or something 31, anyway. The admendment proposes that any non-english speaking student wanting to be educated in CO would be put into one year of English immersion classes and taught fluent English before they are placed into a normal classroom/curriculum. Currently in CO, it is up to certain teachers to maintain a bilingual classroom (yes, mostly spanish), and it is the option of parents to have their children be taught in their native language. i.e. you don’t have to speak any english to graduate from schools here.

now… I have tons of opinions about this, but before I dive into that, I’m wondering what you think of this idea. If you need more clarification, ask, and I’ll try to find the answer.

and I think that about concludes this edition of my life. I’m tired, so I’m goin’ to bed. Goodnight.

p.s. Never ask your sensei, “is that supposed to hurt?” (cause the answer is, “no, but this is…” followed by, “AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”)

as a side note, if this is right, and he’s trying to contact police, then my whole theory is blown to crap… a smart sniper would not try to call police…

Also, what does everyone think of this?

today on My Blog: sniper rifles, deer, sniper rifles and dice (yes, those go together), and tests…

first, tests… tests suck. I took three and got one back so far. 42… I made a 42… the class average was a 56… you’d think that would send off warning whistles to the prof, but no… to him it’s just a test. lowest grade since the days of Miss White (maybe I should have added ugly bats to my topics list) I won’t rant about the test itself because I would cause myself to have a stroke… I’m following Andy’s theory, “if you ignore it long enough, it’ll go away”.. since this isn’t a door, that should apply, right?

deer… I had a deer in my backyard. (there should be 4 pictures there). He apparently hurt his back leg when he jumped into our yard. Richard opened the gate and let him out for a while, but he came back. I didn’t know all of that, so when I got up, I walked out back and enjoyed the sunlight and read my taco box for about 3 minutes before richard came out and calmly informed me that there was an 8-point buck against the fence… and sure enough there was! He was huge. He was watching me pace around the yard, and I never noticed him. I called the humane soc. who told me to call the police, but the police said he had just as much right to be there as I did, and if they had to come out, they were required to shoot the deer, so we just let him wonder around our backyard. He just munched on grass and our neighbor’s trees until he decided to leave that night. Kinda interesting having a buck in your backyard.

now, I have two sniper rifles on there… one with dice and one without… so let’s cover the one without first… The Washington Sniper. I think a lot of people misunderstand this guy. So here’s my personal opinion. Mike Read once told me that for every bit of good in a person, they were capable of doing something equally as evil. Thus, the really good guys like me and him were capable of the worst evils, but we chose to keep that evil in check. Now, don’t get me wrong, but if I decided to snap and be evil for a while, there’s two directions I would go. One would be the mastermind of some great plot, like the one I thought the terrorists should have done using 4 people and C4 to take out 50,000 people at a football game… the other would be if it was just me.. and that would probably be something like this sniper. Except this guy made two fatal mistakes, which I’ll discuss in a second. But I see this guy as a very smart guy who just knowingly decided to go evil. I initially believed he had military training, and I still do, but I wonder why he hasn’t killed each of his marks… he’s either incredibly far away, or his aim is off… so he’s not sniper trained. anyone in memphis who wants to see what a military sniper can do, just take a rifle down to shelby farms and ask the range master to sight it in for you… He’s a vietnam sniper (I think) and can put 3 bullets through the same hole at 100 yards, no problem. anyways, back to the sniper. like I was saying, this is the way I would go… random victims, one shot, no evidence… Now we see the two errors he made… one, he left evidence… a tarot card… stupid move… this is where I think that when evil takes over, you don’t think as clearly… you want to leave your mark, and you want people to know you… it’s a power thing… so he screwed up and left a calling card. I don’t think he thinks he’s Jesus (a theory put forth by someone here… “I am God” with Virginia and Maryland (Virgin Mary)), no I don’t think so. The second screw up, and a bit more than the first, is that he killed an FBI agent working his case. takes away the random victim aspect, and it lets them know that at some point he was close enough to the FBI to know who was working his case, and lots of stuff… That narrows the search… stupid move… anyways, to make a long story short, he’s a smart guy who consciously decided to go bad… he’s playing a game, and if he plays smart, he could play until he gets tired of playing…

now, for anyone who’s made it this far, sniper rifles and dice… in other words, d20 modern. 3rd edition has come to the 21st century. It comes out next month and I’m fairly excited about it. talk about flexible.. you can do pretty much anything with this system. It’s modern times… no magic or psionics unless you want them. anything you can think of you can get… do you want to be Neo? How about Jackie Chan? or my next character, The Professional. Of course, you can be a politician, a doctor, lawyer, and all that other boring stuff engineers are an option, too. The new wealth system will be really cool… no more counting gp (or dollars as the case may be). You want to buy something? Roll yer d20 Every item is a DC. If you make the DC, you get the item. What changes is your wealth bonus. If you try to buy something beyond your normal means (your wealth bonus), you lose a point from your wealth bonus. If you try to buy something way beyond your wealth bonus, you lose a d6 of wealth. you can buy things below your wealth bonus all day long. It’s pretty cool if you read about it… you can buy a sports car, but then it makes it much harder for you to buy anything but food for a while anyway, I’m definately excited about this system… comes out next month… everyone buy a copy and start thinking about what you want to play next summer

ok, I think that’s about it for now, isn’t it? ok, well… goodnight…

odd… hmm… yes, I can do odd… first, let me say that anyone who hasn’t read a copy of Stephen King’s The Stand should go get a copy and read it… so you’ll know what to do after the Apocalypse No, I’m not predicted an apocalypse, but it would be handy to know what to do. My dreams have been rather odd lately. they started off being all post-apocalyptic, but now they’re shifting to the apocalypse itself. The dreams themselves have been incredible. I normally don’t dream in such vivid color, but when the firestorm crashed into the wave of water, I was dreaming in just incredible color. reds, blues, browns… fairly amazing. even the used cars and fried chicken were in color (but that was post-apocalyptic, so don’t worry that a giant fried chicken is going to come and destroy us).

anyway, last night was different from the others… my dreams have generally been going in reverse chronological order, and last night was when God decided to destroy the earth by fire… However, I don’t think this one is completely related to the others for several reasons. Mainly it wasn’t as realistic. The others have been believeable, but this dream featured a cameo from the Voice of God, so it doesn’t quite fit in.. also, the whole scene was different… hard to explain. The end of the dream was especially out of character for both the series and me, personally… It ended with me turning away from God and blaming him for failing to save certain loved ones. Definately not the norm for me.

anyway, I think I’ve spewed enough personal stuff today… I doubt anyone is that interested in my dreams.

I have two tests this week.. one tomorrow, one the day after, so I’m going to be brain-fried this weekend. oh well…

I have a new toy!!!! my home theater receiver died. Since I have a nifty Best Buy service plan, and this was the receiver’s 4th death, I got to get a new one. I was severely disappointed with the amount of money they gave me for it, but oh well… Since the one they offered me in return was a POS, I decided to dish out the extra money for a spiffy receiver… and spiffy it is… I got a new top of the line Kenwood receiver. And why is it so spiffy you ask? Three letters… T… H… X… I gots me a THX certified receiver. And dad gum it, it’s powerful… I normally like to test a receiver by putting in Twister and listening to the THX logo and the opening scene… Now, on my other receiver, I’d turn it up all the way and be all like “yeah, bring it!” but when this one started I was yelling “run away!” I actually had to turn the thing down quite low just to make it bearable… the opening scene of twister actually gave me goose bumps… it was nice… anyone up for a movie?

‘night… wish me luck on those tests…

first, tmpgenc does/can utilize two processors to convert avi to mpg and it does it a lot faster than 4-6 hours on a single processor. Just thought someone out there should know that

second… fall break was great. Got to go home. Didn’t really get to spend enough time at home home, but I did get to spend some quality time with Deedee in Po’Dunk. Yes, we went square dancing. it was actually pretty fun. It was the largest collection of hicks I’ve been around in a long time, but then again I’ve been in CO for a long time, too. I almost got into a fight. Of course, those three guys had no idea I was about to kick their… rear end, but, yeah… It’s amazing how a couple of guys can ruin a good wholesome square dance.

also, does anyone else find it slightly ironic that a bunch of babtists sponsored a dance? does the whole babtist no-dancing thing make exceptions for different kinds of dances? hmmm…

Chelsea turns 15 today… Happy birthday Chels. (not that she reads this, but yeah…)

welp, it’s late, so i’m gonna run… oh, somone got lucky… I couldn’t get the scanner to work, so those pictures of a certain someone and a mop will have to wait… but dad gum it, sooner or later, I will show the world that picture