Bobbis.net

Oy, school has started. Summer on campus is so peaceful, not having to worry about people running around being in my way, etc. Speaking of busy times, last Sunday around 10:00 PM, Chris and I tried something out that we wanted to do for a while... drop bouncy balls down the rotunda in Curtiss. We did this while the MUG server was backing up. Chris finds himself at the office on off hours a lot since he is stuck with 56k at home (Nevada).

Today started with me sleeping in until 9:00. The school year starts, and I get to sleep in on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. I stopped by Staples for my notebook and headed to class.

Hist 280
History of Science I

Sounds like I will be interested. A lot of writing, but they won't actually check for good writing. Sounds like a BS class, and I'm okay with it. Got out early, but not early enough to grab something to eat. I have sections tomorrow morning at 8:00.

Econ 101
Microeconomics

I got a C the last time I took this course. Last time I took it I really didn't try much. I'm retaking this because it's part of my foundation, and I just managed to squeak under the cutoff foundation GPA required for MIS. Though, for the time being I'm in the Business Undeclared, so I can take the other general business courses needed for my planned major. I might think about changing sections to get with the teacher I had last time, he was much cooler that this teacher.

Phych 280
Social Psychology

This class sounds like it will be really interesting. The instructor, imo, seems to understand the subject well. He made it clear that he is not going to sugar coat anything to avoid offending people. He told us "This isn't high school anymore" and that if we are offended by his language he "doesn't give a sh?t" His lecture and powerpoint were very interactive and well-planned. I'm going to like this class.

TrLog 360
Business Logistics

This is at 5:00 PM. The subject is extremely complicated and boring. They have an engineer teaching it, and it has been regarded as a difficult course. It is required as part of my business major. I think Lagomarcino Hall is going to get imprinted in my mind as the place all my worst classes meet. I had COBOL in that same room. I think I'm going to grit my teeth and work though this class.

Work today was full of work. I set up a computer, took a few phone calls, resolved some IP conflicts, and managed to eat lunch somewhere in there. I was doing something just about the entire time, totally different from what it has been there the past week or two.

As I mentioned before, I have class at 8:00 tomorrow, then work most of the day. I plan on getting a few of my my textbooks after my 8:00 class. Tonight begins the MUG meetings. This one is the officer's meeting, and I'm hoping to have a general meeting next Tuesday. Wednesday will be fun with a similar schedule as today, but tack on to the end of it, a quick dinner, FUG, and church.

Good night.

What a weekend. Friday was fun hanging with Adrienne, Jen, and Ben. We had dinner at Great Plains, said hi to Tyler at his frat house party thing, then watched Eurotrip. It was ok, I'd give a B-.

Saturday, felt like it was supposed to be Sunday since yesterday felt like a Saturday (though I remember that Thursday felt like Friday). I mowed the lawn, got some Hickory Park and found out that there was a problem with the MUG server, so I went to work to take care of that. The UPS failed and I found the RAID on the MUG server needed some fixing. Got things back online for the time being. That night I finished up the end of season 4 of the West Wing. I have to say, the last two episodes were very good.

Sunday, I slept through church. I was planning on going, but the power knocked out my alarm clock. I watched Kill Bill Vol 2. Had dinner at church then went to work to work on the RAID. That was a lot of fun. It took forever to back it up, but that allowed me some time to get some work done on the burning station.

I learned that Adrienne bought an iPod, but she doesn't have the correct hookups for her computer, so I ordered a FireWire card for her so that she can play with her new toy (I'm so jealous). I'll end up installing that later this week.

School starts tomorrow. I still need to get a notebook. I plan on stopping by Staples on my way in. My tentative schedule is below:

I'm going to get to bed now.

Wow, where has this week gone? It seems to have gone by so fast. Thursday, nothing at all happened at work, I went home grilled some brats and watched some West Wing.

Today, was a bit more interesting. The G4 that has been out for about a month and has been having warranty issues has finally been fixed and is back here in the office. Tonight I'm going over to Adrienne's to hang out.

Meri got her teaching job. I'm excited for her. I haven't heard much of the details, but it sounds like she is excited. Colin is in Oklahoma for a wedding, and school starts for me on Monday. Tom has offered a new person a job, but that doesn't mean Colin is out of luck yet for a job here.

I found out that because my brother is now out of school, and that we make money from somewhere, I'm not eligible for subsidized loans. I thought that it was because I got my FAFSA in really late this year, but for some reason they think we have too much money. At least I'm frugal and didn't spend much money this summer. I've got some school bills to pay. Though, I should also look at other loan opportunities if I decide to move out.

I'm heading off to Adrienne's now. Good luck everyone!

Today at work was really boring, but I'm not going to complain about that. To kill the boredom, I started a tutorial on Java. It doesn't seem very hard, and it's a very nice tutorial that I can take at a comforable pase.

Went to church today. Helped move some tables around before service. Because of the moving, service started a little later than usual. It was nice to see some more regulars around.

After church, Colin and I met up with Walter to see Harold and Kumar go to White Castle at the dollar theater. I wasn't expecting much, but my boss said that it was a good movie. He was right. I agree with his statement that it is almost like another Office Space. It has been a while since I've seen a good comedy. I knew it was a bit of an offensive movie. They actually asked for my ID before giving me my ticket. That is the first time that has ever happned to me. Giving my rating, it gets an A. I will probably buy it when it comes out on DVD.

Interesting read about the history of our calender.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/year-2000/leap.html

I found it while starting to learn Java from Princeton.

I had a nice weekend.

Friday, at work was mostly unpacking. Chris had taken the day off and Tom and I unpacked. I moved two more servers onto the KVM and put together a storage rack. Cleaned up the middle of the room a little bit. I was doing something most of the day. I left as soon as 4:30 came around. It's strange being the first one the leave. I'm usually the last one to leave, so I make sure all the lights are out and everything is put away.

I had to race home, and quickly load the van with the stuff I had packed the night before and then go pick-up Colin and some firewood. Then my mom decided that she was going to stay with my aunt and uncle in the neighboring campsite, so I had to help her load up her stuff (almost all of it ended up not being needed). This caused us to leave much later than we expected. The whole idea of the trip was to get away from parental supervision. Mom said that she respected that, but she was still there.

After unloading at the campsite, which was already set up the night before by my parents (yes, parents come in handy sometimes :-D), we went to Applebee's in Ankeny then to HyVee for groceries. During dinner Meri arrived at the campground and took a nap. We had a short campfire and ended up in bed before midnight. At about 1:00 AM or so, there was some interesting noises from animals fighting in the nearby bushes that entertained us.

Somehow, we all ended up getting up around 8:00 AM. I don't know what is up with us and getting up early when we are all away. I could have used a lot more sleep. Nick cooked us a nice breakfast over the campfire and we got out on the lake before noon, before it was anywhere close to busy. Meri ended up going home to write some thank you letters and ended up taking most of the day doing stuff in Ames. We picked up Walter at the lake around noonish. After getting off the lake we took showers and I started dinner on the grill. We somehow managed to get just the right amount of food, and with me bringing condiments, the only things left over was a little bit of cereal and some cooking oil. After dinner we got a nice fire going and had s'mores. Gaila about burned her lip off by accidentally sticking a burning marshmallow in her face and Meri managed to make a marshmallow explode off her stick. After the fire ran out Colin, Walter, Meri, Gaila and I went for a walk on the bike path down to the marina and back. We were back by midnight and went to bed.

The next morning we had cereal and packed up camp. Again, we ended up getting up before 9:00. We were out of the campground by 11:00 or so. We got people home. I washed the boat, took a nap until 5:00 or so and got dinner, ate dinner, then immediately went back to sleep before 11:00 after doing the Sunday chores.

This is the last week before school starts, so I want to make the best of it. I'm thinking about taking a day off sometime this week to spend a day at the state fair so that I don't have to deal with the weekend crowds. If anyone is interested give me a day and perhaps we can pull something off.

I am still really tired, so I am going to get to bed early again. I'm starting to get a little flaky with my sunburn, but it is not really irritating me that much. I hope everyone had a good weekend!

What a week. Monday I tried to get people ready for the camping trip this weekend, but not many people showed up. We tried again on Tuesday, and a few more people participated. Also, because of the State Fair, there are a lot of people camping. This was something that none of us were really expecting, but it caused a huge headache. Thankfully my parents are cool enough to help me out and get us a spot today.

My parents, though, are kind of overreacting about how this trip is going to go. They had me really clean the camper, grilled me on supplies as if I have never used our camper before. Last night I took my mom with me to wal-mart to get a few things for the trip. I had a list of what was needed, but it ended up taking 2 hours. I had 5 things on my list! This is why I don't like shopping with her. I managed to sneak Kill Bill II in the order for the troubles :-). With everything that happened yesterday, it felt like two days.

Tuesday, I had a dental checkup. They found two cavities (I eat too many sweets). I haven't had any for a long time. They grilled me again asking about my wisdom teeth, but they are not bothering me at all. I was able to get an appointment Wednesday to take care of the cavities. We decided to try out a new system for this appointment that would require no anesthetic. After a while I really felt it (not uncommon with that procedure), so we decided to do it the conventional way. They applied the anesthetic and waited a few minutes for it to take affect. They started again, and I felt it again. They then decided to give me another dose and worked on the other cavity, which wasn't as sensitive and was already treated. After that they decided to make sure that I was numb and waited for my lip and half my face to go completely numb. With the extra anesthetic my one side of my face was numb for over 4 hours. It finally came back about 40 minutes before church, so I was able to get a quick dinner out of the way before I went.

Church was nice, but it went quick. It did allow me to relax a bit so that is a good thing. I didn't hang around after church because I still had a lot of work to do on the camper.

I finally got the warranty issue figured out (I hope) with our G4 that has been going on for 2 weeks. It felt so good to get that out of the way. Though I have a new problem where one of these computers that I'm working on does not want to boot off the firewire drives. I'm determined to get this working before I leave work. When I get home I'm going to put things together and ready to load and I'm going to crash.

Also, my guestbook got SPAM bombed. I got 40 messages within 2 minutes of time. Thankfully, I have moderation on and I know my mySQL enough to DELTE FROM entries WHERE date > 200408120000; and deleted 40 things at once. I assume of bots figoured out my guestbook it won't be long until they find my blog and I will have to moderate anonymous posts. That would be a pain to get working, but I would turn anon posting off and have everyone register an account. I'm not going to do anyting about it now, but it's something to think about.

Speaking of anonymous posting, Colin's discussion in the previous entry made me think of some ideas to insult anonymous posters instead of having "Anonymous Coward $name". I could have in insult rotator to dish out a different insult at random. HAHHA. Okay, I'm too lazy right now to do it.

I'm so tired. I hope for a good weekend.

I'm Back!

For those of you who didn't notice, or didn't talk to me in the past few days, my server has been down since Thursday afternoon. We have been moving our office and it took us all day Thursday, Friday and from noon to 7 on Saturday to get everything up here. I am here now, on my own will, to turn on my server and get my space set up. I have taken some pics as you see below, and yes, that is a window. We will be here for a few months until they decided to start and finish working on where we are supposed to go on the 3rd floor, but at least we have same level access to an elevator now so the second move later this year shouldn't be as hard.






Click images for larger.

On Thursday I went to Adrienne's place to hang out with her, Katie, and Colin. We watched Scary Movie 3, ordered some pizza and pop and BSed around some as well. It was fun, but I didn't move around too much.

Friday, after work, I just went straight to sleep until dinner. I'm so exhausted from all the work at work. I'm so glad it's done now.

Saturday, Colin helped us move the servers up. With all the extra space, putting it back together was much easier than it was the first time we set it up downstairs. Before moving stuff, Tom took us to Battle's for lunch and afterwards he took us to Moe's Bar and Grill in the Northern Lights strip mall. We had a really good time BSing about movies, the move, and other things. It was lots of fun, and Tom paid for all the meals for all of us for helping. Thanks for the help Colin.

I still have to get things ready for next weekend. I can't take Friday off since my co-worker has already beat me to it. I will send out an email about next weekend later tonight so that we can get organized. I'm really looking forward to a relaxing weekend after all this moving and after all my summer classes are over.

Later.

Yesterday, about an hour or so before it started storming (I assume it was windy at that time) the big tree outside the door where I work fell down. It has been diseased for years and we have been waiting for people to cut it down or for it to fall on the building during a storm. Luckily nobody was hurt and it didn't fall on the building. It did make a huge noise when it fell, but I didn't care to investigate it until after work. It's all cleaned up today, and now it is sunny on the side of the building which is really strange.

Today, at work, it has been all moving and organizing ten years of computer junk. Most of it is trash, some goes to the warehouse and there are two rooms where stuff we are keeping has to go. It sucks that we have to move twice within 6 months.

Church was cool. Fritz said no more dinner before service anymore. Though it is nice to have him back for the service. I like how he makes us think and reflect. Colin and I got to catch up with what's going on in Meri's life after church.

For those in the know about the camping trip, I will work on the details this weekend, perhaps Sunday, and then perhaps have a chat Sunday or sometime next week.

Right now I'm at the UDCC with Colin studying for my MIS final that is tomorrow and playing around with the computer. Most of the time here there were boy scouts making a lot of noise and being fairly annoying.

Adrienne is going to have a housewarming party (apartment) sometime later this week. Thursday and Friday will be spent moving more stuff and Saturday will be all afternoon moving the servers. I know that will be a lot of fun.

It's about time for me to go. I'm really tired and I have more work to do tomorrow and a final.

Good Night.

Ack, something is messing up any switch I put on my desk. As we are busy moving stuff around here I don't have time to figure out exactly what is the problem. So I have this server plugged directly into the room's switch. With all the moving and stuff going on, it might be possible that I will be off-line for a day or so or on and off a lot.