The Blag.

Been a long time...

2010-02-09T21:32:00.003-05:00

Figured I should post, since I have some spare time with having work cancelled already tomorrow.
As far as work goes, I had my anniversary a few weeks ago and got a 40 cent raise, up to 9.50. Not much, but it's better than being out in the cold dealing with jerks canvassing. Nothing else is really new there.
For school I'm taking intermediate algebra and a fundamentals of biology class. Only two classes since I've already taken a lot of general credits/liberal-artsy classes and want to focus on sciences more, but I can't take more science until I've finished the basic classes, and some science classes require me to have passed math classes I can't take yet. This works anyway since I have to schedule myself for at least 25 hrs/wk at my job now. I don't know what I'll do in the fall since I'm trying to go full-time then again. Hopefully I'll be driving by then, which will make scheduling issues easier.
Oh yeah, I recently started practicing driving again with garrett. We went for 3 hours or so the other weekend, and weather prevented us last weekend and might this weekend too. He had me on smaller roads in the boondocks in his area mostly, then took me to bethlehem township (not inner city) to practice turning. I wish I could learn stick too, since apparently that's more fun and keeps you in fuller control of your car even though it's more difficult. I don't see how though, since I don't know who's going to let me wreck their transmission to learn.
Back to school though, algebra is not hard at all, it's mostly just a refresher since I haven't taken math in like 5 years before this. It's a lot easier now that I give a damn about math, and I'm remembering stuff as we go along. The biology I'm taking is actually the more thorough class at LCCC for people who want to go into science or health care fields (the one for people just getting their science credits for other majors doesn't have you do dissection in the labs and is a little easier). The lecture part of the class is ok, but I don't like how slow the professor is going. He knows we're behind and doesn't care, so I'm reading ahead but man I wish i didn't have to waste my time in class for stuff I already know. Then the lab part of the class is the totally opposite end. I have this lady who seemed nice enough at first, but she really gets snippy real fast. I kind of dread it every week, but I can't miss really any of them since it's almost impossible to make up a lab, plus we don't get even a little 5 minute break for the 3 hours we're there. It's going alright enough though, hard to tell since I've only been at it a few weeks.
All of that stuff is keeping me pretty busy, so if I'm holed up in my room a lot I'm doing homework usually. In other news, Garrett was in a small play in nazareth recently. One of his old friends from NACC's theater dept wrote the play and produced it and all, and someone dropped out so he asked Garrett to fill in about 3 weeks before the play ran last weekend. It wasn't a really great play, it was really heavy-handed and kept beating you over the head with the message ("be free-spirited/spontaneous, live life, etc") but it had some good moments anyway. The main benefit was I got to be at the cast party on sunday night which was a blast! Cast parties are always pretty crazy, but I won't get too into detail on that...
Other than that, I became vegetarian a couple weeks ago, stopped eating red meat as of the new year. Going without red meat was a lot easier than I thought it would be, since it was easy to just substitute chicken or fish dishes, so I only did that for a few weeks. Now that I don't eat any meat, I definitely crave all meat a lot more, but I'm just taking it a day at a time and so far I've been good. I do feel generally healthier, although that could just be in my head, and I do like that I'm eating a bigger variety of foods to make up for no meat. Before, it used to just be chicken for dinner, tuna sandwich for a snack, meat lunches, meat dinners, snacks with meat, etc etc. Now I have to force myself to eat fruits and veggies and be more creative with my substitutes. Eventually, probably in a few months, I'll go vegan. I'll probably draw out that process a little longer, go off cheese first for awhile, then get rid of butter, eggs, etc. And just so everyone knows, I'm not really doing this out of concern for the animals. I could care less about Bessy the cow, it's for health reasons mainly.
Other things I've been doing are practicing pool at the bars and pool halls, and reading some more layperson-oriented science books when I get the chance. One last link, and then that's pretty much my life right now though, so till next time...
http://www.pochoblog.com/2010/01/28/former-christian-apologizes-for-being-such-a-huge-shit-head-for-all-those-years/

How to be Lucky

2009-10-14T23:29:00.001-04:00

I was browsing the Internets when I ran across this article. It's not the most scientific study ever done, but it's certainly a step in the right direction on a subject as tricky and ill-defined as luck. I notice a lot of people in the family seem to have poor luck or at least think they do, and I don't think it has to be that way at all. Well, here's the article without further ado. Let me know what you guys think.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky---its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

finally a new post!

2009-10-01T15:21:00.003-04:00

I guess this is the 5-post anniversary, woohoo! Anyway, I have a rare afternoon where I'm mostly caught up with my schoolwork and don't have any other pressing concerns, and Steph told me I need to post more, so here it is.
School is keeping me a lot busier than I thought it would. I'm not taking very advanced classes or even honors classes at all, but the amount of work I have to do is a lot more than what I was used to with Philly community college. The longer I'm at LCCC, the worse an impression I have of philly's college. I had only one class that really demanded a constant schedule of assignments there. Two other classes mainly had short quizzes or for spanish, those little fill-in-the-blank packets to work on. Needless to say, those weren't very time-consuming. The last class I got together a methodical schedule of when to show up (every third class, only to get the handouts). The professor never even took attendance or assigned homework, you were just supposed to sit there and listen to the guy lecture about whatever the heck he felt like talking about that may or may not have been vaguely related to economics. He told us not to even bother getting the assigned book.
So I guess I should really have figured out that after that semester, it was only possible for the workload to go up. I have a speech to give every other week and lots of paperwork to go with it. There's tons of reading to keep up with for my english and psychology classes, plus the psych class has a major paper due on monday (fortunately that's already done.) Philosophy is really the only class where there's not a constant barrage of work; there's assigned reading but i haven't found it really necessary to the class discussions, and he's spaced out the papers and quizzes pretty well so it's never overwhelming.
There's not much time left over after that all, work, and garrett. At work, things are slowing down since we still haven't gotten a contract with the client doing the study most of us were hired for. There's talk about it maybe being signed in november, but until then work is getting scarce. They got a new study to do that they want to train a bunch of us on so they don't have to fire people, it's business-to-business calling, asking HR people to do a 20 minute survey about the healthcare benefits they offer. I am NOT looking forward to this at all, but it's pretty much necessary if I want to keep my job.
Monday of last week they fired 9 people and said they didn't anticipate firing any more, but that it was still dependent on whether we're willing to do some kind of phone work. We've all already had to be trained for another phone project where we get random numbers and have to determine if they're business or residential numbers, since some client wants to filter the businesses out of their call list. That's not bad at all, i mean a moron can do that job, plus we're allowed to read or do puzzles or whatever while we're on the phone since there's not a lot of mental engagement going on. So when I get assigned to that project, I get out my school books and get paid to do homework, which is pretty freakin nice. The other phone project, we can't read during, though.
So, that's about all that's new here.

Hi peoples!

2009-08-28T17:39:00.002-04:00

Well, just had my first week of classes and I gotta say, I heard a lot of bad things about LCCC from basically everyone I've spoken to in the past 6 months. BUT if this first week has been any indication, I really don't foresee any problems at all; I'm actually really pumped about most of my classes. In so many ways this is already way better than philly community college was. For one thing, none of my professors have neuropathy or scabs that they pick at in class...All of them seem really down to earth and happy to be teaching, and pretty funny too. I can't say I'm going to look forward to my speech class with great anticipation all the time, but the teacher does have a funny habit of railing against the right even though he tries not to. And I'm kinda freaked out about my English 2 class, because the professor seems to like to just throw a story at us and then expects us to come up with all sorts of metaphors in the story. Case in point: tonight he gave us a story about a guy who goes to the bathroom and finds a huge crap in the toilet that won't flush, and the guy panics and thinks about throwing the crap out of the window and freaks out, and finally just uses the end of a plunger to break up the poo and finally leaves the bathroom. It was not even 2 pages long. Then he asks us to write a paragraph about whether it meant anything or not. I mean what would you think? I wrote that it didn't mean anything, it was just a funny anecdote from the author's life or something. OOPS my bad, as it turns out every short story ever written must be rich with metaphors and hidden meaning. He starts talking about how the guy has problems with frustration and maybe potty training issues and can't find release in his life, etc. What the hell?! Don't get me wrong, the professor is funny as hell and we only have to write 2 Official Papers, but i'm gonna have a hard time making up stuff that stories are trying to say.
On the other hand, my psych and philosophy classes make me so excited! The philosophy professor is just teaching my class as he's still working on his graduate degree, and you can totally tell. He's 27, and when he talks he's always a little jumpy and scattered. But again he seems to really enjoy the subject and teaching, and he's getting us to talk to each other and make us do the thinking right from the start instead of doing lots of lecturing. Yesterday he asked us all to write a blurb about what we thought reality was, right on the spot. That was cool, but what was cooler was that he asked for people to share what they thought it was, and there was the usual collection of responses, "reality is what your senses tell you", "it's what you want it to be", etc. Then he had us go through the responses and call out problems with each of the definitions and it was AWESOME! There was all kinds of back and forth debate between people who gave the answers and the rest of us and stuff, i mean it was just fantastic!!! I'd take that class every day if I could.
School is about all that's new with me though, so I'll just end by posting this link concerning Andrew Weil, that homeopathy dude:
http://skepticalob.blogspot.com/2009/08/dr-andrew-weil-of-weil-supplements-weil.html

My computer!!!!!

2009-06-08T21:00:00.002-04:00

Is so great!!!!!!!!!!!1 AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH IT'S AWESOMEEEEEEEEEEEE

I cannot believe how easy it is to build a computer from scratch. It is literally legos. Even color-coded half the time too. I can't believe the prices companies get away with for labor charges. It took us saturday afternoon to get it up and running, and everything worked great the first time. No problems whatsoever. It's so sleek, it runs great, and the speaker system is just completely off the hook. Sorry to Steph in advance if it gets loud. Also, it helped that that morning, i got an email from the parts site that a whole bunch of my parts were nominated for customer choice awards. The monitor, the hard drive, the memory, and the cd/dvd drive. It is just literally impossible for me to be unhappy right now!

The people I work with

2009-05-21T22:12:00.003-04:00

Are a bunch of nutjobs. One of the new guys is incredibly creepy. The first day he showed up, he complimented me on having a sweater with a zipper neck, because it looked like one Buddy Holly had. I was creeped out, but decided not to judge too early. Then I got a few more random compliments over the next few days, and just the other day he mentioned that he goes to the record conventions at Merchant's Square Mall. I mentioned that I had gone to some too, and the next morning he asked me if Garrett and I would like to go with him and his wife (won't believe he has one until I see it) to the next one and "do lunch". (Hate that expression! You don't do lunch, you eat it!) I murmured some stuff about my cousin's wedding, birthdays etc...and today I found out a few other interesting stories about him from some of the other women at work.
-One woman knew the guy from before, because they used to frequent the same bar on karaoke nights. Every time, he would sing Greased Lightnin, but also slick his hair back, wear a leather jacket, and ocassionally grind the microphone stand with his back to the audience. This is a middle-aged guy we are talking about here, with glasses and a very drab appearance, keep in mind...
-The same guy also thinks he's a DJ. The first words he said to another woman were, "I see you're engaged. Here's my card." (does that even work?!)

Hey, this is just one guy. We've got a few crazy cat ladies, a woman whose blood pressure is like 9000 over 5000 all the time, and a woman who happens to have every medical ailment known to mankind in the history of medicine. They are stories for later.

Pictures from my old apartment

2009-05-11T20:43:00.004-04:00

New blog!

2009-05-05T21:43:00.003-04:00

Figured there needed to be some balance to all your guys' passive receptive type energies, not to mention a balance in opinions too. First order of business! Some people think that me getting a custom-built computer is a bad deal compared to getting a regular brand name one. Well, I thought, maybe I'm wrong and I should just get a regular computer since it's not too late to change my mind. Did some research on it tonight (google searched "brand name computer or custom built"), and as it turns out the universal answer (unless you ask a major retail store) is that custom built computers are all around a better idea. A few basic reasons why:
-There is generally no real difference between brand names: their parts are almost invariably the cheapest available, since the standard practice is to find the lowest bidder on a contract to supply parts. The computers are then generally assembled in a factory line.
-Parts are usually modified to make it difficult, expensive, or impossible (or all three) to upgrade. If you want more hard drive space for example, you basically need to get a whole new computer. With a custom built, you can just exchange parts and keep all the rest. Much cheaper in the long run, unless you never add information or programs to your computer ever and your parts never break down (yeah right).
-When a part does break on your brand name computer, the story I seem to hear from everyone is that taking it in to be repaired is a real pain. You've got a support guy trying to sell you the most expensive option, not the part that would actually make sense for you; if you've got a mac, you can't even open up the damn thing yourself and you've got to wait a month or so to get your entire computer back...
-Finally there's the fact that custom built computers are *custom*. You pick exactly what you want based on your needs and budget, and aren't forced to choose from a line of cookie cutter computers which invariably come with a bunch of useless software you don't even need. Depending on what you use a computer for and if you can salvage keyboards/mice/speakers etc from a previous computer which i can, your total cost is not necessarily going to be more expensive than a name brand, and if it is, you're almost certainly paying for better quality parts and a system designed for your needs.

As far as the guy building my computer for me, he's a computer science major who can write programs for goodness' sake, has already built a number of computers including his own, and because he's a good friend, he's building the computer for me and doesn't even want any money for labor. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm getting a better deal. Here's some articles on the subject (a lot of them are talking about small businesses that do custom building and not friends though hehe):
http://marsbox.com/blog/reviews/brand-name-vs-custom-built-computers/
http://reviews.ebay.com/Custom-Built-or-Name-Brand-Which-is-Better_W0QQugidZ10000000002148632
http://www.pcbargainhunter.com/computers/custom-computers.html
http://www.lockergnome.com/windows/2007/01/01/custom-built-vs-name-brand-pcs/
http://www.pc1news.com/news/0512/computer-security-advantages-of-custom-building-your-own-computer.html