ETS, among other things...

So as you may have guessed from the lack of updates, I've been a bit busy these past couple of weeks. What with the GRE not actually happening, trying to get two classes off the ground and getting profs to give me recommendations life has been busy.

Most of the reason that I haven't posted in a while is that me and my digital camera haven't been on the computer together and I really wanted to get some pics up about the Robots vs. Humans party that happened... jeez, 2 weekends ago now? Oy... But, my life has been very interesting in the meantime, I assure you. Some, errm, "highlights" of the past couple of weeks:

-Studying for the GRE. It's not fun, especially when they give you the wrong address causing you to miss the test and have to wait a month to take it again. Apparently they switched addresses at some point but forgot to tell us that the new location was in St Paul, not Minneapolis. Now Rachel and I are going to go down to Carleton to make sure that we don't miss the next one. I'm still bummed about not getting it done, but hopefully I'll be able to do better now, so it's not all downside.

- Gaming. The past two sessions have been very entertaining (well, at least for me, but that doesn't take too much). I was really tired of gaming before taking the two week hiatus but now I feel much more refreshed and on top of things. Last night's escapades involved roleplaying nerds being attacked by paper monstrosities, Russell's character losing his vocabulary and having to do a combination of charades and pictionary to have the other characters understand his instructions, and Ben's character convincing a geek that he was, in fact, a 12th level dwarf.

- The Wire. It is the cop drama that was finally done right. Every character is interesting even if they are all a$$holes. Very good (if confusing at times with all the nicknames), and a definite recommend.

- Admission Possible Party. I think this was the first one that I really enjoyed. Most of the time when I go to a party where I don't know anybody I feel really uncomfortable, but this party was different. Rach and I showed up midway through a game while there were still only a handful of people there. It was a good party game and segued into an even better one, at which point more people showed up and the party started getting better. The more communal feel at the beginning, plus the nostalgia-tastic music selection all came together to make me feel much more comfortable and have more fun. Yay!

- Classes. I have them, or at least theoretically I do. Friday morning I had 1 person signed up for basic computer, which started today. After sitting in the hallway for a sign up sheet for an hour I had 15 more people signed up and 5 more for my math class, a feat unparalleled in its scope. But, even though I sent out reminders on Saturday I still had 0/4 show up for my class this morning and only 1 out of the 6 people I had signed up for math class show up this afternoon. When I called they all claimed that today was no good. Oy... Wednesday will hopefully be a redo, but now I'm a day behind. Hope they like coming on Saturdays...

Well, that's enough griping for now. Hopefully I'll have the pics from the Robots Vs Humans party up pretty soon, but for now I must get back to work.

Until next time...

"The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself had done. There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life - life's "experiences" - are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. "
- "Taming the Bicycle" by Mark Twain

Nik!!

So there's the normal boring stuff about work, but that's not the point!

Nik is here!

Wooo!

I spent Tuesday picking him up from Carleton. We met for an early breakfast at the Tavern and ran into my old prof, Cindy Blaha, and had a nice chat with her. We were shortly joined by Ben, Kristine, Laura, Lisa, and an aikido guy named Marios(sp?). After that Nik and I just wandered around, talking about many different things from work to how evolution would occur in the Matrix. We had a bit of trouble finding Carls to hang out with, but we eventually tracked them down and spent a few lazy hours chatting on the Bald Spot. It felt really good to be back and not be there for some specific event, as it always felt weird before. Just coming back to chill out was a blast and felt perfectly normal. Ah Tuesdays... how I love thee...

The next couple of nights we did awesome things:
Wednesday: Gratuitous amounts of guacamole and salsa!

Thursday: Gratuitous amounts of RPG planning and watching Enemy at the Gates!

And on Friday, we went to the Science Museum! Unfortunately the Fear and Water exhibits were taken down, but we still had a lot of fun marveling at the exhibits.



And then we had gaming, including Des via video chat. It promises to be a very interesting game, and one where you have to pay attention to the mortal world at least a bit more. Russell learned this especially after being chased and tackled by police officers for resisting arrest and squatting in an abandoned house. Never mind that it was his house, just 10 years out of date.

So yeah, awesomes! Until next time...

"The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money."
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, by Mark Twain

Victory In Our Time

So, I return the blog triumphant! The foul GRE has been slain, my computer has been restored to me, and the geekiness has begun to flow once again as water. Life is good.

The GRE: The couple of nights before it I couldn't get sleep to save my life, so I thanked the Lord on High for allowing me 10 hours the night before the test. I showed up to the test bright and early along with all of the other test takers, only to find out that a) the place we were supposed to take the test was huge, and b) there were no indications as to where the test was to take place. We panicked for a little bit, but eventually the proctors showed up and we were able to find our rooms. I was a bit nervous at first, but as I got into the test everything became calm. Sure I didn't know how to answer some of the questions, and I had to guess on quite a few, but they were educated guesses and I knew how to do many others. So I left the test thinking that I at least did well enough to get into grad school, and really that's the point, now isn't it?

Life after the GRE has been beautiful. I got pleasantly smashed throughout Saturday afternoon and evening, and on Sunday Rach and I got to go do a reading of Teagle's new work, "Pain in the Neck." The play is about a bisexual and lesbian girl in a relationship, their problems, and the maybe-vampire that is preying on one of them. There were some pretty tripped out fairy-tale sequences, a Co-op employee who is probably a superhero in her time off, and plenty of that classically witty Teagle dialogue. It had some problems, but for a first attempt it was pretty damn brilliant. Good job Teagler.

I've also begun falling into the black hole of geekiness and money that is Warhammer 40k- damn you Pechous! I've assembled my first box of Imperial Guard (men with flak vests and flashlights vs untold horrors from beyond time and space- go Joe!) and am eagerly awaiting a Poorly Planned Purchase that I made on eBay the night before the test (I was REALLY exhausted that night and impulse purchases of several hundred dollars seemed to calm me down... thank God I didn't win more than one auction). I will probably be starting another blog detailing my adventures in painting and battling with my army, so you won't have to worry about too much of that stuff filling up the hallowed pages of this blog (I mean, there's not a lot of geeky stuff in here, right? Right.). Suffice to say that I am having far too much fun posing my little men and am very excited about fielding a fully painted and built force in a couple of weeks.

Also, my new RPG campaign is going to start up towards the end of this month. Once again, there is another site where you will be able to follow on that vein if you wish called Obsidian Portal. It's an awesome site that allows me to organize everything for an rpg and present as much as I want to to my players. I had a tremendous burst of productivity on it at work because...

Work:... all of the computers at my company are down! Noone can log in, so we are all using my lab computers/laptops to survive. Unfortunately most of my completed work is on my compy, so I used this as an excuse to avoid work until the system is back up again. It's kind of hilarious actually, because the only computers that work in our entire multi-state company are the computers in the residential computer labs. Apparently IT is trying to fix the problem right now, but seeing their past progress I'd say they have a while before it gets fixed. Oh well, plenty of time for me to catch up on all of the stuff that I've missed since the GRE started. And besides, for most of my stuff I don't need any prep- an internet connection is enough to get my students all in a row and signed up for their programs. I'll do a post a bit later on the cool new programs that I'm doing nowadays.

And one final note for now, as I'm getting a bit tired of typing: it's BEAUTIFUL outside! It's been 50s for a week now, and next week it's supposed to be 60s! Man Alive I am excited for Spring! Speaking of which, watch out for an extra-special Easter post: there's going to be a lot of fun happening on Sunday!

Until next time...

"The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people."
- "The Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant" by Mark Twain

Not much to report over the past couple of days. Work at Skyline has been kind of a roller coaster recently- on Wednesday one of my headphones was stolen by a particularly ballsy kid, which put me in a pretty bad mood, but on Saturday my students actually showed up, brought more students, and we had a really nice class where I taught them to surf the web in cool new ways. Now on Monday the internet in the lab is down on 6/9 computers. The other 3 do, but when we tried switching the router on and off 1 of the 3 working computers stopped working and one of the disfunctional 6 started functioning, leaving me with no choice but to wait for IT.

IT and I have a special relationship now. I send them requests, and they comply with about half the request right away, but then take forever on the second half. 3 months ago I asked IT to take in a computer and fix it, which they did promptly. I still don't have the computer back, and to my knowledge it hasn't been fixed yet, leaving me with 9/10 computers in the lab. Other times they'll fix my half of the internet but screw everybody else in the building. I'm just hoping that the guy will be here quickly and fix the problem quickly, or I could have a mutiny on my hands.

Now for your geek report. The war is going badly for the Eldar. Even with evenly matched forces I can't seem to pull even a close match out against the daemonic horde. The autarchs have decreed that scatter lasers will win the day against our foes, but my hope for the two battles tonight are few and far between. Where tactics fail, strategy will have to win the day. Unfettered expansion on my western and southern borders will have to be enough to carry us through this long night. Meanwhile in Granada my brother/ghoul Niccolo has fallen to the unclean hands of William, Nosferatu primogen and all around dirty, evil Englishman. Massimo has gone into mourning, but will now use his increased wealth to hire and ghoul/embrace an army to take down William and anyone else who was implicit in Nico's death. Other weapons will have to be sharpened as well, in the event of the eventual fallout. Elsewhere, in the far North of the United States, on the shores of one of the Greatest Lakes of the World, a musty, black and white tome with the picture of a raven on the cover has been opened, its words sowing the seeds for a Year of Frost, itself merely the harbinger to a Day of Iron... have I mentioned I like foreshadowing?

Until next time...

"In America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!"
- The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

The 3rd Day

My third day on the job was once again more orientation. I started off by dropping Oanh at the science museum, and then headed over to the Common Bond Community headquarters. I learned about the organization and even got to write a little elevator speech about what it does and what I do... as follows:

"I work for Common Bond Communities, which is the largest nonprofit provider of affordable homes in the Upper Midwest. It builds and maintains homes for low income families and individuals while at the same time offering them services that allow them to gain new skills and access to resources, like internet and job training programs. I run a computer lab at an apartment complex called Skyline Towers and in addition to running the computer lab there I teach basic and advanced computer skills to the residents."

There was then the usual discussion about harassment policies, a lot of paperwork, and I was off about an hour early. I decided to spend my time at a Borders near Skyline Towers, where I began reading the new WOD book Changeling: The Lost. It actually looks really cool, even though I haven't even gotten to the actual system yet. Basically you play a human who was captured by the True Fae and brought to the beautiful, mad, and dangerous world of Arcadia, where the laws of physics and magic are bound by Contracts that the Fae make with the world and each other. You somehow manage to escape from your capricious and cruel master and make it back to the real world, only to find that either a) you've aged 15 years and only 2 days have gone by, b) you've spent a week in Faerie while a century has gone by on Earth, c) you return to find out that you were not missed, as a magical construct called a Fetch has taken your place in your family and with your loved ones, or d) any or all of the above. Oh, and did I mention that you are now part fey and must live in constant fear that your master/mistress will come looking for you and drag you back into Arcadia, even if you swear you killed them last time? It just seems like a WOD game where there is finally actual constant fear that Those Things Out There are actually coming to get you, and the sad part is that your magical powers, as awesome as they may be, are probably not going to be enough to stop Them.

Wow, that was a long interlude.

Anyway, I then headed over to Skyline Tower and had more orientation. I met the other Americorps people there and toured the surrounding area with one of the Americorps leaders, Yvonne. Turns out that there are great cheap asian and Ethiopean restaurants in the area, so at least I won't starve. I got to at least see my demesne, but time ran out before I could check out my predecessor's hand off documents and get my house in order. I'm going to head in early tomorrow to work on that before the day starts. My fellow Americorps people there seem really nice and cool, but I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, and real work starts on Monday. Hopefully some of my fears will be allayed tomorrow, so here's hoping.

When I got home I was completely exhausted from not getting much sleep the night before and just scarfed down some left over lasagna and took a two hour nap. I got up to go over to Teagle's house to see Project Runway, which was a pretty sad episode in that over half of the designs were not only terrible, but that two people were kicked off as well. Oh well, whatevs- Heidi Klum can still do whatever she wants and get eternal love from me... (btw, Rachel is ok with that last statement)

Oh, and the world didn't end last night. I actually derailed orientation at Skyline by broaching the subject, and spent the next 10 minutes explaining what the LHC was, how it could destroy the world, and why Science has the Right to do such a thing. It was a pretty awesome conversation, let me tell you. The next big step will be on October 22nd I believe, when the particle mashing begins. Yay physics!

Until next time...

"Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them."
- "As Concerns Interpreting the Deity", by Mark Twain

p.s. You can now identify yourselves as followers of my blog! Join 13:72 my readers, and we shall usher in a new age the likes of which the world has never seen before! *cue patriotic music, salutes, big shouldered military jackets, etc.*

I Love Piracy...

Reeeaaally quick post today, as I, Liesel, Tim and my mom are headed down to Berlin, MD to go to Assateague Island for the weekend. In addition, as mentioned above, I have come to love piracy in limited doses. Take for example, all of the geek books that you can download with it! I have Song of Ice and Fire D20, the entire collection for the HERO system, and have debated downloading EVERY SINGLE OLD WORLD OF DARKNESS BOOK IN EXISTENCE, all for free.

Quick note about the HERO system: it's really, really cool. If you can think of a heroic power or character, you can easily build it using the system. Want to fly with wings? Sure! Want to use magnetic fields instead? Go for it! It has a ridiculous amount of depth, but fairly easy implementation. Might be cool for a campaign at some point...

But yeah, Pirate Bay = teh awesumxorz, and I'm headed to the beach.

See ya!