Just moments ago my aparatment entered a new era of existence. I now have a brand new Air Conditioner up here, it�s a little sucker but it puts out a lot colder air than the last one, which could probably recount stories of the Nixon era if it could speak. Or if it cared about politics. Anyways, suffice it to say that my apartment is now starting to slowly cool off. Apartment life is fun, I�ve never had a land-lord before and I have never had to complain about something to a landlord before. Does ductape count as weather stripping?

I guess I didn�t really need to go to the gym today at work, I worked up more of a sweat sitting here and breathing before installing the AC. I really like the fact that I get 3 hours per week to use at the gym on base, I didn�t utilize that time for the first month I was here, and I�m kicking myself now for that. I know that my trend of twice weekly exercise won�t continue once I reach college this fall. Plus who else but the government pays you to not work so much!

I learned an interesting fact today, apperantly a single stalk of corn can transpirate a gallon of water each day during their peak pollination time (now). So the humidity is completely unbearable in this part of the midwest because there are many millions of gallons of water being pumped out of the ground and into the air right now. This combined with the usual temps of 95 make Iowa, Nebraska, Norther Missouri, a veritable inland sea, just at a much lower density.

pshawThis image may be disturbing to those of you who still held misconceptions about what the old He-Man cartoon was really about. I�m sorry, i just had to post this.

So, my apartment falls somewhere within the 8th circle of hell on the temperature scale. The window AC probably hasn�t worked well since the 70�s. Being on the third floor, while keeping me safe from flooding, does have a disadvantage where the laws of thermodynamics come into play. I�m not even really sure where my pants are, but I usually remember to put them on before I leave for work in the morning. Speaking of morning, I now know what it is. I was lucky enough to spend my first two years at college blissfully ignorant of the pain involved with having to be somewhere at 8:00 every morning. I have a regular full time job in an office building that requires me to be there around 8 every morning. This concept would have seemed so foreign to me only a few short months ago. What happened to me? When did I start wanting to go to bed by midnight? When did I start drinking coffee every morning? Why do I feel OLD!?!

My feeling of agedness might be related to the impeding birthday. That day in which we celebrate� um� still existing I guess. Not that I am actually old, it�s just that I will be turning 20, and will no longer be a teenager. They say that youth is wasted on the young, I say that expendable income is wasted on the old. Speaking of expendable income, apperantly apple is releasing the rev 4 iPod tomorrow. Those jerks, they dropped the prices of each level $100. But they didn�t keep the lowest level and drop that $100 too did they! No, they completely removed the 15gig iPod from the product lineup instead of offering it at the sweet price spot of $200.

All these dollar signs are confusing me. Why do you put the dollar sign in front of the numbers, but say the word �dollars� after the numbers. It makes no sense!

At work I have been putting a lot of effort into the Space Weather CBT. I now know more about space weather and it�s impact on DOD systems than I ever will need to know. All in all I have learned a ton about flash development this summer and hope that I can really leverage my new skills to benefit Level 1 Media.

One more point I wish to make. I saw I, Robot the movie this weekend. I was truly impressed. It was a completely likable movie. It didn�t follow any plot of Asimov�s too closely, and it certainly violated the spirit of what he originally intended in his robot stories. Yet, somehow I felt appeased by the number of elements from his Robot short stories that were included as ideas in this awesome mix of action/mystery/scifi. Sure, I had trouble visualizing Dr. Susan Calvin as young as the person cast for her part here, Bridget Moynahan. Will Smith is, as always, funny enough to keep audiences interested in the unrelentingly sci-fi themes that pervade this movie. The problem with sci-fi is that it can make people think, people don�t like to have to think about their movies. Sure, Issac Asimov told much more fundamentaly interesting stories, but none of them had the action or excitement that the movie I, Robot delivers so easily.

I have a fun idea, lets go over Timbly�s to-do list this week.

* Call UNK, register for Radio Workshop.

* Go to the bank, get new ATM card, open savings account.(what�s a savings account?)

* Do Laundry!

* Find some sort of tutorial or book or something on SQL queries

* Start writing my paper about my internship

There�s probably some stuff I have forgotten. But hey, it�s the unexpected things that make life interesting.

Recipe of the day/week/whatever: Toasteroni Deluxe!

Step 1 - Grab that 90 count bag of Pizza rolls that you left out too long and then decided to re-freeze thinking you might recussitate them. Pop a dozen or so pizza rolls in the microwave. Depending on the age of the microwave it may be necessary to nuke those puppies for anywhere from 1 minute to 2 and a half minutes.

Step 2 - Toast some pieces of bread. Remember that if your apartment is 80 years old then you should not toast the bread at the same time as nuking the pizza rolls, this will simply result in some breakers or fuses or something going out and your computer shutting down, losing your game of Commander Keen.

Step 3 - Place one slice of cheeze (yes I know that�s not the right way to spell cheese, but you don�t have any real cheese anyways, do you?! All you really have is those cheap little single slices that were mass produced last century) on a slice of toast, then place as many pizza rolls on that as you can fit (usually 4).

Step 4 - Apply Peanut Butter(creamy and chunky are both fine, though this human prefers chunky) to one side of the other piece of toast.

Step 5 - Place the peanut butter�d piece of toast on the pizza roll�d piece of toast. Consume immediately. If you wait any amount of time before eating this your mind might kick in and try to stop you. Don�t worry, food poisoning only kills one in 20.

The title is a challenge to Jonny T. I�m just sitting here at work doing what I�m not really supposed to do, hoping that the manpower reviewers don�t walk in and notice that, though I am typing industriously, I am not actually doing anything productive. I just supposed that it was time for me to update my largely ignored blog. The summer is in full swing, Aaron and Katie are finally married, my Crusade friends are in Vail on project, and I am in the �big city� living life to it�s fullest on my own. Not entirely on my own, I am actually spending quite a large amount of time with my honey, Becca. There is some very good news relating to the Becca angle of my life, she now knows for sure that she can go to Kearney as a grad student next year. She found out that she will get a Graduate Assistants position, and she has been in touch with a gal that she will be renting a house with this year. As great as the summer is I�m sure that it will be quite nice to actually have Becca in the same city while going to college.

I have finally gotten in touch with some of my fraternity bro�s here in town and am gonna go check out �The Chronicles of Riddick� tonight. I would normally give my own take on the movie as soon as I get back from seeing it, but I am, obviously, less inclined to update my blog regularly during the summer.

I suppose my official title now is �Flash Developer�. I�m not saying that I am really an expert or anything like that, but I have been working pretty much exclusively in flash for over a month now, and I have definately learned a lot about the program and it�s capabilities. I feel a little gipped that there is no class at UNK that actually teaches Flash development. Admittedly, UNK is not a technical college like the Peter Kewitt Institute here in Omaha, but as a multimedia major it seems almost necessary to learn new technologies like this before I get out into the job market. Though, I actually am not terribly upset because I learn new programs and technologies far more easily on my own than from a class. Another shortcoming of my education so far has been some basic multimedia design concepts that seem vital to being a successful multimedia professional, design documents and functional specifications are two things that I have never really heard of before. Design documents include your process work from the actual graphic design stage of a project, (although I never actually learned what process work was from my design classes at UNK, they just expect you to know how to do that, I am lucky I learned that on my own before I came to college) but design documents should actually include much more detailed material from the development of ideas for any project. Functional specifications (Functional Specs) are long and detailed documents describing each component and section of a multimedia project. I realized immediately after reading about these concepts in a new book that they are very important to an organized development process and seem like ideas that a multimedia student needs in order to be successful. I already have some basic concept of project organization and scheduling from the work I did with PHP Collab when working on a website for Level 1 Media�s first real client. These ideas about Gantt charts and Flow charts and Organization Charts are all important to keeping a consistent development process, but things that I am learning on my own as I go. I hate to sound like I�m complaining about the university, but well that�s what I do best. Complain about the university.

Alright, enough of this, I need to get back to work.

Summer is here and my internship has begun. For the past couple of weeks I have been living in Omaha and working at Offut Air Force Base. My internship has involved a great deal of Flash development. I think I should probably know flash inside and out by the end of the summer. I am really enjoying this job, I think that I can handle a fulltime cubicle job.

Another great thing about living in Omaha on my own is that now I have DSL in my apartment. Finally I have truely fat pipe that puts the University connection to shame. And what am I using this connection for? Well, playing games of course. I have completely missed the MMORPG scene because of the bandwidth restrictions on games at college. Now I know how much fun these online worlds really are. Currently I am delving into City of Heroes. This game is pretty interesting and I hope to waste a lot of time on it. Knowing my own limited attention span I guess that I will not end up paying for more than one month of play.

Am I going to want to go back to UNK and live the dorm life for another year after being on my own? This question and many more will be answered on the next episode of�. �AS THE TIMBLY TURNS!�

DSL rocks my face off. Seriously, I am online again.

This is the morning of my big move. Sure, I have been away by myself at college for 2 years already, yet, there is something portentious about moving into my first apartment. My first living space truly by myself, with no roomate. I will be moving into a nice 3rd floor dormer studio apartment. Sadly, I doubt I will have internet access in my apartment for the first couple of weeks. I will check into getting local phone service and dial-up once I get down there, but I will be sans connectivity for a while. I can stay in touch through e-mail while at work, but it will still be nice to have some sort of access to be able to do design work for Level 1. I really wish that I had a laptop right now, if I did, I could simply drive to one of the many nearby wifi hotspots near UNO and do any surfing I wished to for free!

Well, I�ll probably post an update on how my job goes later this week. I am also really excited about finally having a �real� fulltime job in my chosen career field. I�v had a number of great part-time jobs in the multimedia/broadcasting/IT area, but none of them have been as serious as this one probably will be. Eh, who knows? We�ll see on monday morning.

Here�s the big news, I finally heard about my job in Omaha for the summer. I have been eagerly anticipating word from Offut Air Force Base, and finally heard from them on Friday. Tomorrow (Monday) I will be traveling down there to do some paperwork for the job and to get things squared away with the apartment I will be renting.

This job is pretty exciting for me, I will be doing flash development for them all summer long, and it will count as internship credits back at UNK along with being a full time paid position.

So I have been keeping busy with my first week or so of summer by learning more flash, doing some IT consulting at a local business, and most importantly, spending copious amounts of time with my sweetheart Becca.

She is already in Lincoln ready to begin her summer internship tomorrow. We will both be on our own getting a taste of freedom in a large city, but happily close enough to each other to make regular visits a possibility.

This is just the launching point, a week from now I will be in Omaha starting my real summer. The excitiment is almost palpable.

I don�t know when I will next take the time to update this blog. The summer seems to make regular posting to my site a little more difficult. I don�t really know why.

Wooo Hoo! Those words sum up all my feelings right now. A few minutes ago I walked out of my last final of the semester and ended my second year at UNK. Next year I will be a senior. I kid you not, I can hardly believe the acceleration of my collegiate career myself. This second year was much less profound than the last one. Nothing huge changed about myself and my life this year.

I was just now reading through some of the blog rants in my archives from the end of last year. I thought it would be fun to go back and cover the topics that I talked about last year.

If I have everything planned out correctly I should be able to graduate from college in only 2 more years. I start to wonder why I would want to shorten my college career so much, but then I remember how much college costs, and the strong likelyhood I will have to be getting loans for next years tuition.

It�s true that I am still on course to graduate at the end of next year. And it is also true that it is exponentially more difficult and depressing to leave all that I am connected with here at UNK. My friends and even people I consider to almost be family are all here, I will really miss not having all these people around to hang out with every day. As far as the loans go, I certainly did have to get some loans, and they still arent enough to cover the rediculous prices of this education. Next year will bring on more loans and more money management hurdles.

To add one more big element of surprise I actually joined a fraternity this second semester. For the people that know me best this was a pretty big surprise, myself included. Everything that I have experienced as a pledge and member of Pi Kappa Alpha has firmly convinced my that I made the right decision.

Life in the fraternity is still totally awesome. I feel that I have grown much closer to people that I normally would not have associated with at all. Being forced to socialize and work with people of radically different backgrounds and personality types has changed me in some ways. I will never regret getting to spend time with these people, my brothers have made a huge impact on my personality. Friendships that I have developed here will be with my throughout my life. As an active member I have seen new pledges come in and then initiate. This perspective has really shown me the ways that joining a fraternity can alter a person, almost always for the better. Being around all these different guys really evens a persons personality out. I have seen many people, including myself, with personalities on the extreme ends become much more socially proficient.

Despite, the rigors of a long distance relationship, Becca and I are tegether and more in love than ever. This woman is amazing and truly makes me happy in a way that no-one else can.

This summer I will be in Omaha, working a job/internship at Offut Air Force Base doing some multimedia stuff. I hope to have more details on that soon. Living on my own in a larger city should be pretty exciting. I am really looking forward to getting a taste of this stage of life.

My job at the helpdesk has come to an end. I will really miss working with Aaron and Jason on a regular basis, but I know that I will still be working with them on projects for Level1Media.

Well, it is definately time to start packing up. I will hopefully post slightly more often than I did last summer. I think last summer�s total number of rants came to about� 3.

iowa_quarter

I dont know why I wanted to post this, but I was digging through my Pictures folder and found this screen capture that I believe came from an episode of Conan. Just giving a little shout out to my Iowa homies. Remember that this Thursday is the last epsiode of �Consistently Random� with DJ Timbly. Make sure you drop in the chat room if you are listening.

Some people, my roomate for instance, have accused me of being lazy and not posting often enough to my blog. To him I have a few sweet little words of advice that have really meant a lot to me in the past, these words are, �Stuff It!� If I wanted your opinion I�d give it to ya! Rodney, my roomate (for now), has just come upon a great revelation! If you turn the knob on our door it opens easier! What an age of wonders we live in.

My second class today was blissfully short, but not because the teacher intended it. Shahram (my Visual Basic prof) gave us the semester teacher evaluation sheets today. Before leaving the room to let us fill them out we asked if we could leave right after we finished the evaluations. Sometimes teachers let everyone go after evaluations, but this was at the beginning of class and since our final is Thursday we suspected he might want to talk at us some more. His answer was completely indefinate, he said both yes and no without clarifying. So we didnt press the issue any further. After we finished filling out the forms everyone just got up and left. All of his stuff was still sitting up there on the desk so it�s possible he actually wanted to continue class, but noone was there when he got back so I figure we just forfeited class and let him have an hour off too.

I watched Master and Commander last night. It was interesting in the way that a History Channel documentary is interesting. I�ll sit there and watch it for 2 hours once, but I doubt I could sit through it again. The movie is pretty interesting if you are even remotely interested in naval warfare, which I am. Yet, I can see how this was a case of �Wow, this book is great! Let�s make a movie from it and it will be great too!� Unfortunately it doesn�t always work out. Sometimes plots and characters that bring a great book to life just don�t transition well to film. Not all great books should be made into movies, despite the true awe inspiring success of the Lord of the Rings movies.