It took me a while, and I usually hate sites like Tumblr, but I made one, dammit. And I’m going to use it mostly as a place to send my phone pictures, which I take a lot of.

I’m going to be going to MoogFest. I’m so full of anticipation that my genitals have sucked up into my body cavity. Tickets weren’t too expensive and the lineup isn’t even complete yet! Since my last update, I did receive my iMac and it’s still sitting in its box. I’m a freak about dust and hair, and I don’t want my mother’s corgis to get their hair all over it. I go back to school Saturday so I’ll be able to set it up then.

I’m going to attempt to stretch my lobes again in the future. I never did explain what happened when I tried to before, but let’s say it didn’t exactly work out the way I wanted. As of right now, I have little balls of annoying hard scar tissue in each lobe, which are slowly going away. Emu oil works wonders. I’m going to have them re-pierced in early October and hope that scar tissue stretches without hassle.

I sold a bunch of textbooks on eBay for about $500. Some of them were in horrible condition. YES I MADE SURE TO EXPLAIN THAT IN THE LISTINGS. >:|

I have so much packing to do tomorrow.

The hardest part about writing down what I’m thinking is coming up with a title. I’m pretty sure WordPress requires a post title before publishing. This brings me back to the days of designing crazy layouts on pitas. I always just used the date for my post titles then. But anyway – avast ye, make way for a boring post.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m in a good patch in my life, or not. I’ve probably thought more about myself and the world in general in the past 4 months than I have in my entire life. I’ve been slowly trying to teach myself how to deal with situations that I have little to no control over, and it is pretty difficult. I remember back when I was younger, I cared so much what people thought about me and I really wanted to be recognized for something – anything. Now, I don’t even care, but my life at this point does feel like a waiting room. I have, hopefully, about a year and a half left of school. The idea of not finding a job right after school terrifies me because I want to be stable. I don’t want to end up living with one of my parents and working a dead end job like everyone else I know. I want to be able to live the life I’ve always wanted to since I was young. Not finding a job is a very real possibility, but I’m trying my best so that this doesn’t happen. One of the qualities that I like about myself is that I’m extremely independent; it’s done more good than harm, for the most part, so I don’t see it as a bad thing anymore. I’ve recognized that I’ve lived about a quarter of my life (or so I hope) and I really want to do as much as I can with the amount of time I have. I think this idea is due in part on why I’ve wanted to take so many risks over the past few months. I don’t think I’ve made enough mistakes in my life and the ones that I have, I’ve learned from greatly.

I am pretty excited about Moogfest, though. The lineup hasn’t been fully announced yet, but I really hope a lot of good artists will be there – ones I actually listen to. I also hope that tickets aren’t expensive; I’m sure a lot of free shit will be given out and I love free shit. I’m going to see the Crystal Method live next weekend and I’ve not listened to them since I was in middle school. Their past couple of albums have just not been that good, but from what I hear, their shows these days are amazing so I’m really looking forward to going.

I’m also going to buy myself an iMac.

Chillax. I’ll still use my ThinkPad, but things have gotten to a point where using Linux has not grown past anything but a great OS for a server, and if I dare say, a novelty on the desktop (or laptop in this case). Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux to death. I’ve been using it since 2001. I started out with RedHat and moved from it to Mandrake, to Fedora, to Slackware, to Debian in 2006. I can build a custom kernel, patches or not, like something fierce. Frankly, I’m tired of how capricious it is. I’ve used a myriad of distros, and while some are better than others, they all essentially work the same. I’m tired of using VirtualBox to perform tasks in Windows that can easily be done in OS X that cannot be done in Linux. OpenOffice sucks and I have to use Microsoft Office. Gimp feels like a bucket of rusty nuts and bolts. There are no seriously good audio players – they’re all either too slow, terrible at managing playlists, ugly, or defective in some other way. I’m tired of using drivers that just cut the mustard. More is needed than just the minimum in functionality. There are other reasons as to why I no longer feel like dealing with Linux on a daily basis anymore, although they are trivial, but they’ve piled up over the years. I’ll still try to work with it on my server, but for now, I’m going to have to switch over to OS X come mid-August. Yeah, I know I’m a heretic. My 18 year old self would carve it into my arm.

I do start school again in 3 weeks. I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve been meaning to redesign the layout for this site, but I just haven’t had the time (or desire). I’ve been working quite a bit lately, so I’ve really not had much time to do anything. It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve had time to spend just checking SomethingAwful and my other slew of sites. I did go to Asheville yesterday and picked up some grape shisha from HookaH-HookaH, and I had a chance to try it out. It was better than I expected, although it looked pretty disgusting. I’ve never actually tried any that used honey instead of molasses, so it was pretty different. It certainly was easier to separate and there weren’t as many twigs as I usually find in Starbuzz flavors.

I finally bought a new server. Yes, Alice has been laid to rest and has been superseded by my new server, mogwai. Mogwai is an Acer Revo R1600 running Debian stable 64bit. I bit the bullet and built a kernel for it without CIFS support and I’m not even going to transfer files to it using SSH (I know, right?). Instead, I’ve found that NFS4 provides throughput speeds way faster than either of those two (why I even used CIFS before, I don’t know?), not to mention it no longer takes an hour to build a kernel.

This afternoon, I ordered a Bodum Santos.

I’m pretty excited because I’ve heard the coffee it makes is really good – not bitter at all, and there are no grounds left behind. Unfortunately, I’m just not manly enough to use it with a butane burner, BUT I’m going to be daring and bring a hot plate to school with me in the fall. If you look up a demo of one in action, you’ll be jealous. And you’ll want one. Amazon sells them for $50 and they retail at $120.

Also: of Montreal sounds like Phoenix. And I don’t have to work tomorrow. Sa-weet.

I was able to go out today. :S I got every bit of my school work done last night so that I wouldn’t have to worry about any of it today, or for the rest of the week.

I’ve been looking forever for these:

and finally found them. :D I also found these little candy tins shaped and designed like an NES controller. They looked pretty dorky, but I liked them anyway. I went looking for new shirts today in the mall and found some flannels that I really like, but stores never seem to carry shirts I like in a size small. I’ll have to go back some time this week and see if there are any in stock. I also ordered a new battery for my ThinkPad last night. It’s not had a battery in over 2 years and I’m wishing more and more that I had one so I just bit the bullet (well, my wallet) and plunked down $50 for one from a seller on Amazon. That’s pretty good considering Lenovo directly sells them for $200. Hm. I found some flip-flops at Wal-Mart for $2 a pair (is that even a bargain?); I’ve needed some badly and I’m hoping that for that price, they don’t contain some sort of chemical that makes my feet rot off.

So, I have no more plans for the day. :( But. I think I will just sit on my ass and watch D. Gray-Man episodes and read more out of River of Gods. I should be reading Jude the Obscure for class, though. Oh well. I might look for a new theme for this site. Actually, I was recommended that I listen to Passion Pit, so I’ll get around to doing that. My goal for this week is to look for a cigar shop. I dream pretty big. It’s too bad Charlotte doesn’t have any hookah bars. :/

I’ve felt so indifferent about a lot of things lately. I used to have so much care for the smallest things, but I just don’t anymore. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but almost everything seems trivial now. School has even gotten to the point where it’s trivial, although I’m doing better than ever and I’m not even trying. I’ve felt strange for the past couple of weeks and I can’t quite describe it. I’ve thought about all of this a lot lately and I’ve wondered if it’s because I’m depressed and I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve finally been able to sleep decently these past few days and my appetite hasn’t changed; I was able to eat three platefuls of raw spinach last night.

I used to be so sure of what I was going to do when I was finished with school and I don’t feel that way anymore – for certain reasons. I don’t feel that things are hopeless, but I feel like I’m walking down a corridor heading toward thousands of doors – some locked, some not. For the past two years I’ve not had to think much about what I’m going to do with myself when I no longer have school, because everything seemed to make sense then.

I once heard that a system administrator is the 21st century version of a ditch digger; it was something I scoffed at. Recently, I was told by someone in the industry that it’s not something you want to do your whole life; you’re supposed to have something else lined up. I don’t exactly have that, but the more I think about it, there seems to be some truth to all of this. That’s not to say that I’ve changed my mind about what I want to do when I’m finished (I sure as hell don’t want to program), but there’s always the question of “what if?” I think a lot of this worry stems from my fear of incompleteness. I came across this while talking to someone and it’s kind of strange. I realized that numbers ending in 9 really make me uncomfortable, so much that if I am able to control it, I will increment whatever it is just to make it complete. Maybe this will come in handy at some point. The way things work out is pretty funny.

This week is my spring break and I don’t have much planned other than to swap out my piercings – the bar in my conch for a hoop, and the bar in my tragus for a super-duper titanium one. Oh, I’ve been listening to Mujuice lately. He’s pretty good.

Chris: Where’s the money symbol in Excel? Surely it has it somewhere.
Me: Uh…as in a dollar sign?
Chris: Yeah
Me: Shift + 4?
Chris: looks
Me: Pretty standard.
Chris: :O
Me: Oh wow.
Chris: Shut up.

I think it’s time for spring break to start.

I’ve gotten all my tests back except for statistics – an A, a B, and a C. Watch statistics be a D. I ate a bunch of figs last night. I regretted that this morning. I received my research topic this morning for one of my classes: What does the term “down to brass tacks” mean and where did it originally come from? I might work on that this weekend. This probably shouldn’t be true, but as someone majoring in information systems, I really hate programming – of any type. It’s not even that I can’t do it; I can, but it’s so dull and tedious. I hated Java in high school and while C++ isn’t so great in college either, it’s not as bad. Why we’re even being taught using C++ is a different matter. I don’t really have much to do today except fix a logic error in last night’s program and talk to my “ethics” teacher about why I made a C on my reaction paper with the only comment being “largely unclear and incoherent.” Figure that one out. Hint: English isn’t his first language. I had to wear a jacket this morning because it was actually cold. This is good.

Update: Made an A on my statistics test :D

I do not look forward to writing this paper for my ethics class. The length requirement isn’t long, but it’s going to take a lot of rambling to fill it up. I’m finished being sick, finally. Luckily, it wasn’t anything serious. The only real odious task for this week was cleaning out Mossby and Trigby’s tank, which I did this morning. It was disgusting, to say the least. Their water was cloudy and smelled awful. Mossby has been proudly sitting on top of the rock this afternoon. I don’t know why. Watching Trigby eat three whole grasshoppers this past week was hilarious. Mossby was supposed to get two of them, but that didn’t work out…unsurprisingly. I watched The Girl Who Leapt Through Time yesterday.

It was pretty good and there weren’t any boring moments. The next one up on my list to watch is Perfect Blue. I have no idea what it’s about, but I hope it’s good. Also, it’s been a long time and the Debian installer is still broken. The root password and users set at installation are not actually saved and network manager is broken. The last time I used it (couple weeks ago), it didn’t detect any of my network hardware even though it was recognized by the kernel. Both of these problems have been reported, but nothing much is really being done about them. I’d like to switch back to Squeeze, but I can’t until this is fixed.

Fall ’09 Schedule

It’s not too bad…so far.