No, really. I just saw “Matrix Reloaded�?, if you’ve seen it you understand the feeling of detached excitement I am feeling right now. Across the nation premieres are letting crowds of excited fans out into the cold night parking lots wildly arguing about the meaning of so many fine points in this movie. It’s a movie that I almost want to take notes in the entire thing needs to be watched at least 5 more times before I can really understand it. Now I will simply pass judgment based on first impressions. I will attempt to me as ambiguous as possible and will avoid any spoilers. I assure you that nothing I can write here will fully convey the intensity of the experience that is “The Matrix Reloaded�?.

I feel that I should have been taking notes throughout the entire movie. Luckily I ran into a whole crowd of fellow geeks from a local high school that I attended. Each person gets different things out of a movie and notices different facts. Any big questions about the significance of certain characters and moments were probably explained are hinted at somewhere in that mass of movie. Again this movie covers a lot of ground and in certain places does feel rushed together for time constraints. I have to say that this movie is an entirely different beast from the first one. It’s been 4 years since The Matrix was released. Naturally the movie styles are bound to be a little different. This installment is a little cleaner and more modern, though I am not sure that is a good thing, the atmosphere is a little less permanent in this movie which is a shame because the atmosphere that was so finely detailed in the first movies was one of it’s biggest strengths.

I don’t know when I will get a chance to go see this movie again but I certainly will see it again. I have to admit that I feel a little uncomfortable at the unnecessarily suggestive scenes. The love making scene between Trinity and Neo is not really necessary but is forgivable as it does aid a lot in character development. The Zion danceing scene that takes place consecutively within that is really unnecessary. One particular sequence involving cake in a restaurant is completely superfluous in it�s attempt to legitimize its presence in the plot.

The biggest thing about this movie is that in the end you are left with far more questions that you expected there to be. It is so thoroughly confusing that it really expands your mind. I have to wonder if there have been forms of media in the past that have posed such profoundly useless philosophical consideration. I have read a large number of science fiction novels, many of them are quite good at cliff hangers and surprise twists and a decent amount of metaphysical theory. Yet, the incredibly complex structure of the story in The Matrix trilogy is more akin to Anime than anything else I am familiar with. Only in that odd imported medium of entertainment from Japan have I seen anything so blatantly psychotic, and chaotic. I mean, seriously it’s almost painful. And this is just the question, the answer is in the next movie. I doubt it will be any easier to digest.

Did past generations have to deal with these complex ideas in their very entertainment? Since when did the human universe become so boring that we need to throw the public through the ringer with concepts that have little effect on everyday life? Is this a sign of our cultures advanced state, and the levels at which consciousness has the ability to invent and manipulate the unreal? Oh crap, I guess I am doing the same thing this movie did, just ending with more questions than is really reasonable to demand of it’s audience. Perhaps these initial thoughts will be more amusing after I have had the opportunity to sleep on it and have maybe seen the movie a few more times.

Keanu is still kinda dorky in this move but doesn’t embarrass us by saying “whoa�? a lot. Oh and one more thing, there are too many new characters in this one. Some start to slip through the cracks.

The Summer of Timbly has begun. I am now home safe and sound from a long arduous trip back from college. It is good to be back with my parents and yes, even my little sister. The dial-up ISP torture that I will be subjected to for the rest of the summer is not so great. I am more than ready to sit back and bask is the slow pace and lack of hurry that comes with the summer months. The two semesters I spent at college seem like such a long time because of the huge number of things that happened. At the same time the past 8+ months have really flown by. I just held on for dear life as I was swept like a twig in white water rapids through my first year of college.

I already touched on a lot of the things that impacted me throughout the year, but it has come to my attention that I neglected a few major things. Besides the 17 credit hours I was enrolled for my first semester I also had a very nice job on campus. The university’s IT computer helpdesk seemed like the perfect fit for me. I can honestly say that I have endured the rigors of technical support both via phone and in person service. Actually, despite what most people in the IT industry say about tech support, I really enjoyed it. It was a great job for me, filling in my few spare hours in the week with something that I really enjoy and have at least a small modicum of knowledge in. I made some good friends working at the help-desk. One of which happened to be ‘kinda’ my boss.

Some of the things that I am planning for the summer include trying to get rid of the freshman ~15. So, no more pop, this means no more Mountain Dew. Yes, I know. I never thought that I would utter those words either. To avoid the calories and maintain my addiction to caffeine I have taken to drinking Iced tea. Mmmmm…. Tasty!

Another thing coming soon to me, is presence of some considerable back pain because my favorite orange office chair is staying at college in storage. My poor little civic couldn’t quite handle it. This office chair was ‘acquired’ from the news station where I will work for at least part of the summer.

I am totally looking forward to the rest of this summer, I plan on spending a little time with my parents, a little time making some money for next years tuition, and a whole lotta time with my girlfriend. That is another one of the developments this year that is hugely important to me. I have known her for quite a while and have been building up to a serious relationship since last summer. I am at a loss for words when I try to express how wonderful she is and what being with her means to me. This summer will be simply awesome.

Catch ya on the flip side yo! Watch out for the po-po.

I know that I just posted a rant earlier today�. er yesterday I guess. But I felt like I still needed to vent on what has been going on with me lately. Use the navigation buttons below to see the previous post that was only up for a short time.

It is now Wednesday of finals week for me. This is the end of my second semester at this University. All in all I have had a ton of new experiences and learned a lot about life, the universe, and everything. This whole year went by really quickly, I cannot even hardly belive it. 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. I like this college a lot, throughout the rest of my life in school I have only had a few friends, I knew people but didn�t nessecarily get along with them well enough to consider them to be friends. I graduated from highschool a semester early with no regrets and took a full semester of classes at a community college. This along with my working at a TV station in �real world� job definately expanded my horizons. I managed to hold on to my beliefs and moral convictions even while becoming close friends with older people from work that came from very different walks of life.

Here at the University I have actually made a good number of friends and become involved with a number of campus organizations. I sometimes think it is amazing that I can walk into the union and have to stop and talk with half a dozen people before getting some Taco Bell. The fact that I know so many people all over campus is a little crazy looking back on my middle school and high school days. 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. One of the things that I am most proud of this year is probably that I made it the entire year without drinking once. To some people this seems dumb, others respect my decision.

With the last 2 days of school before summer ahead of me, and my to-do list on the iPAQ dwindling down, I am more than ready to leave. I don�t know how long I will be home before I really start to miss all the people that I have come to know this year, but I will surely be happy to come back here again next fall. To all of you that live in Kearney or who I will not be seeing much this summer: I hope you have a good time, keep it real yo. To those who will be coming back home with me from other colleges: I can�t wait, summer will be awesome.

Soon my theme song will change from �The Final Countdown� to �Schools out for Summer�. How cliche.

Well, I felt all serious and profound when I wrote this. It�s not exactly poetry, but hey my stream of consciousness isn�t supposed to follow any set pattern that you can predict. So here is a little something different for my rants.

Where even light has fled hope still remains.

The darkness may close in around us, but a flicker of life will always combat despair.

Even when we cannot see the light of hope it is still fighting for us against the night.

We will not fade away in that cruel night, instead we will fight to fan that flame from a flicker to a blaze that can conquer any blackness.

Though many will stumble and fall, give up hope and give in to the crushing void; those who fight for light are never alone, even in the darkest abyss.

Our light is not extinguished by some evil external to ourselves; instead the shadow emerges from a pool of blackness in the hearts of all men.

The fire that burns eternal is fueled by the one in whom our only hope resides.

Lets make this quick. I havent been keeping this site up to date. For this I am mildly apologetic. I have been pretty busy with school as usual and I have a low tolerance for homework. The homework that I have actually accomplished is still a small fraction of what I still need to complete before� oh say, Monday. This is what our university calls dead week. The last week of regular classes before finals. That�s right ladies and gentleman, it is thursday, that makes tommorow friday. After friday usually comes saturday and this particular weekend saturday and sunday will be filled with a formal dance that I have been looking forward too sooooo much, and related activities. I need to finish a Java program (read: start on it), and of course fill out several forms and get some classes registered for the summer.

Everything after midterm tests in a semester is downhill. The funny thing about the phrase �It�s all downhill from here.� is that it can be used and interpreted in two seperate and completely opposite ways. It could either mean, that from here on out things will get worse, or it could mean that things will become easier, because you are not climbing uphill anymore. The novelties that lie hidden in the english language could be the source of a thousand little rants. You do not even want to get me started on the oddities that develop because of regional language shifts. That�s right ladies and gentleman, I complain about not having enough time or energy to get my work done, and then I take the time to contemplate idioms in their many permutations. And no, I did not buy a deck of Iraqi leadership target cards.

Remember back in the day when the biggest debate in computers that the general public was aware of was Mac versus PC. Except back in the day IBM was synonymous with what we now refer to as a PC, or a computer with hardware based around the x86 CPU architecture. Every once in a while I still run across a person who refers to IBM�s against Macs. The majority of the non-techie public assumes that Apple lost the OS war and has had little success. This is not entirely true because of the way they have diversified their products and been careful to maintain the allegiance their viciously loyal followers. I have personally never been a big fan of the Mac because of biases from my grade school days. I had already been used to using the Win3.1 machine at home and could maneuver through it with ease. When we came to school we had to deal with the brand new PowerPC’s which I had little or no experience with and seemed counter-intuitive in many ways. I was already used to a command line at that point, although I didn’t really understand what I was doing, I simply memorized which words to type in which order to make a few things happen.

The Mac was just as unstable as the PC in many ways back then, it was not uncommon to get a ‘bomb’ while trying to write a paper. This and the fact that I could never find any games to play on the Mac tainted my perceptions of the entire product line. Now I have changed my mind, I have matured and am able to make less biased decisions about which operating systems are best for me. I really like the new OS X, which is what is on the machine I am typing this from right now. OS X is a beautiful interface with lots of eye candy yet is still efficient and not at all sluggish. It is also built on top of a Unix variant. Therefore many of the linux commands that I am familiar with work on the terminal in OS X. This makes the Mac feel less like a dumb appliance for running Photoshop, and more like a real powerful workstation for almost any application. The biggest draw-back is the price of anything related to apple, the second drawback is the proprietary nature of apple’s hardware as well as software. This is very undesirable for a person who loves the concept of free software and everything that the open-source world has to offer.

I was quite angry at the Mac’s in a lab here on campus today but that was more the fault of Adobe premiere, which I detest almost as much as the spawn of Satan called coconut. Vegas Video has treated me very well, and it is only available for Windows. Let me tell you that Vegas Video will do everything that premiere will do but it will let you do it easier and faster with greater quality results. The interface of this program is really nice and clean, and the controls are mostly intuitive.

Whatever you choose for your multimedia/graphic design needs you should really shop around and try out a lot of less common software. Adobe isn’t going to have a monopoly on their market forever, I think it is really important to learn computer skills on your own, because classes on the subject never really give a good comprehensive look at what these highly complex software programs can do for you.

I am the KING of no pants! It is so incredibly hot here that I have decided to forsake much of my clothing for� well the absence of it. Okay, I�m not entirely nekkid, I�m wearing gym shorts and a watch, and I�m staying in my room. That seems reasonable doesn’t it? I wouldn�t want to cause mass panic.

The saddest thing as that this is still April and the hottest most humid days are still ahead of us. Or maybe another 6 inches of snow, you never can tell. I think that the heat and wind has eroded my brain. Excuse me while I slip into gibberish�

Just today I met a little gnome, he was nice enough fella. I was lounging around on my couch watching some �Screen Savers� on good �ol TechTV when I noticed something moving in the corner of the room. Thinking that a rodent had decided to inhabit the pile of socks and empty Mountain Dew cans that has been growing over there for a couple weeks now, I threw a shoe at it and was astonished to hear a loud squeak of indignation. Muttering some incomprehensible curses under it�s breath a 5 inch tall man ran across the room and jumped on my chest threatening me with his outstretched finger. To be sure I was surprised, I hadn�t had a gnome jump on me since� well, come to think of it this had never happened before. Standing up would have tumbled the lil� guy onto the floor so I decided to wait it out and see what he had to say. Besides I was comfortable on the couch and didn�t really feel like moving. I did, however, make a mental note to throw out the remainder of the cold breakfast burritos which I had just sampled, hallucinogenics were not listed in the nutrition facts.

�Why, sonny boy do ya feel like ya do be having to disturb an innocent old gnome just going about his business.�

With a thoroughly confused look on my face I attempted to focus on this little bearded menace that was acting so confident when confronted by the ginormous creature that I must have appeared to him. �Why are you in my room, and more importantly: are you even real.�

Rolling his eyes with disgust the gnome, that I came to know as Rupert, decided to elaborate on the reason for his presence in my humble abode.

�Do you not know that I am a pen gnome?�

�A pen gnome��

�Yes, I do be one of those noble breed of gnome that has been entrusted with the age old duty of gathering the annual pen harvest.�

Unsure of what to say to this miniature apparition, I decided to remain silent and let him continue his tirade.

�We pen gnomes do be the most honorable of all the small-object-gathering-gnomes. Our purpose in life is to collect as many pens as we can for the harvest.�

Reacting in the only way I knew how I just stared and dropped my jaw.

�I do think you be in need of a breath mint sonny. You would do well to treat a gnome of my stature with a mite more respect than you have displayed thus far.�

I managed to mumble some sort of apology, and asked �why do you collect pens?�

�Well we gather them and exchange them for precious toppings. Cheese, sunflower seeds, croutons, and the most precious material in all the world, bacon bits.�

�And who exactly would exchange bacon bits for these pens?�

Well Bic of course, and sharpie, and all the pen companies pay top crouton for the pens that we gather.�

The sick scheme slowly formed in my heat addled mind. Apperantly the gnomes were payed to abscond with pens from anyone and everyone in order to keep the market of pens from being saturated. Pen companies have long since filled pens with nearly inexhaustible ink supplies so the easiest way to continue to make a profits was to have gnomes steal the pens whenever possible. The pens were returned to Bic, or whoever was willing to pay the price could continually resell pens to the unsuspecting public.

Rupert the gnome was kind enough to enlighten me to this despotic scheme and filled in the holes in my theory about the sick cycle of the selling and stealing of writing utensils.

Now the only question that remains is what I will do with this knowledge. They say that knowledge is power, then again they also say �everyone wang chung tonight�. I feel as if there is a great decision before me, a veritable fork in the road of my life. Will I choose to take the road less traveled, for the freedom to choose that path is the only real freedom that a man can long after. Often destiny and fate conspire to force a man on a path that is not of his choosing. Destiny forges heroes from the least suspecting of individuals, those that feel least qualified are those who are most deserving of the burden of greatness. For power is the truest test of a mans character. With great power comes great responsibility. To me it seems as if my role as scribe in this medium of the web is to serve as a profound pundit. You are all now dumber for having listened to me.

Today I lost another blog entry that was quite excellent in my opinion. I feel so depressed after this happens that I really don’t feel up to the task of duplicating the stream of consciousness that was transcribed earlier in the day. Tonight though I will attempt to relate my earlier feelings to you in some semblance of the order in which they were originally conceived (and promptly lost due to a short admin login timeout). At the very least I can say that I have less pressure and fewer difficulties in delivering my semi-regular missives than Tycho.

First allow me to bring you all up to speed on myself and those that orbit around, and are orbited by, me. My roommate was involved in a vehicle accident, and another of my good friends was with him. They are both alive and fairly well, and now back at school with some relatively minor injuries. The cause of this accident was some bad weather we had this weekend where we had >6�? of snow just days after and days before unseasonably warm temperatures in the 70’s. Crazy Midwestern weather is always throwing new curve balls at us. Oh, and about that whole global warming and the rest of that environmentalist propaganda that children are brainwashed with. It looks like we have another case of overconfidance in our human interpretations of life, the universe, and everything.

Much of today was spent programming for my Java class. Every day I remind myself why I do not want to be a programmer. I have spent entirely too much time this semester working on assignments after the date they are due. The problem with time intensive projects such as expansive Java programs is that as soon as you get behind with one all the rest of them are pushed back as well. I will have to hope for the best and get this one turned in some time Friday. Doesn’t everybody look forward to Fridays because of the chance to do that much extra homework and work on various other projects?

One topic that I had hoped to mention here was the recent sentencing of a website operator who ran www.isonews.org and sold modchips for the X-Box. On one hand I feel appalled that the DMCA can be used to incarcerate people for experimenting with products that they purchase. On the other hand there are legitimate precedents to protect the greater good by limiting what people can do with the products they purchase. For instance you are prohibited from modifying cars and firearms in certain ways, but these are for safety purposes. I don’t feel certain on my opinions in this arena and will therefore leave the flame wars to the more ‘reputable’ sites. Of course you are supposed to believe everything you see on the internet. I have to wonder how often we see news stories on popular sites and never realize they are completely fake. Few people that are accustomed to the ease of access to information that the internet provides will make the effort to research something in a traditional method such as a library. The real world scares me sometimes�

The topic that has been tickling my synapses lately has been the concept of how we navigate the web. The structure of the web is based upon hyperlinks, and exists entirely separate from the physical structure of the network. The manner in which we as web-surfers discover new sites is usually by clicking through a link on some site. This site has links to other sites, and each site has links to still others. The number of websites out there is nearly infinite and ever expanding. The interesting thing about the web is the fact that spheres of interconnectedness start to develop. Your own personal interests largely dictate the sites that exist within your own sphere of knowledge. As we explore a few main sites that deal with topics that we are interested in we soon discover other sites that are connected to each other. One great example of how a particular network of sites can grow is the web-comic community. The growth of web based comic strips has been huge in the past few years. And I enjoy many of them because most are related to geeky things like computer games. All of this is really interesting if you can visualize the complicated connections between sites and how the click-thru traffic flows between sites to open up the horizons of people to new sites every time they sit down to browse the web. If you have trouble fully realizing this concept in a spatial manner you can take a look at this extremely cool site that uses the powerful google search engine.

One of the most powerful tools for quickly expanding a sphere of linked sites is the new blogging craze. The fact that blogs allow people to write down their ideas and provide extended information that is not their own creation. The consumption of information becomes a monumental task if you consider the amount of raw opinion and data that is available within only a few clicks off of any one web-log site. Some feel that blogs are the new thermometer for social feelings and crazes. This is likely true but I feel that blogs offer a truly diverse network of information that people can have access to and can discover through blogs that deal with related topics. The sphere of interconnected blogs that each person is aware of will depend greatly on which person’s journals they consider most worthy of their attention and repeat visits. The sites that people enjoy visiting the most will be the sites that offer the best links to related information that will be useful. The networking of information is a complicated concept to unravel. In the future this abstract idea of interaction of data on a human level may offer insights on the way that the human mind processes and remembers data.

My roommate informs me that this entry has stretched out to an excessive length. Therefore I will cut myself off and leave you all to digest the crazy rant that I have unloaded on you all this time.

Maybe I should stop watching so much Star Trek TNG on TNN. Hmm, well I will actually post a real update here in a few hours, in the meantime let me suffice it to say that my current excapades into the land of linux and the province of video cards requires that I place this link on my site for me to retrieve later. Enjoy this quick little confirmation of my survival of the week. I wasn�t sure if I was gonna pull through there for a while.

�Scroll down further for non geek rantage�

Well now, it�s later. And that link above is really useless to me. I think I�v decided that I�m just not going to get my current box to run Linux. Besides, I dont really need to use linux, but I do need to use WindowsXP for the video gaming and multimedia creation capabilities. Dual booting was all well and good when I had a geForce2 video card that would correctly install and run with openGL support every time I installed a linux distrobution. My distribution of choice is Mandrake an all around wholesome distrobution that purports to be userfriendly. Whatever, it�s kinda user-friendly, but still just as frustrating as any other. My problem now is that I have a nice ATI All In Wonder Radeon 8500DV video card. A really wonderful card with mediocre software provided by ATI, that does great things for video content creation. Unfortunately Mandrake 8.2, 9.0, and 9.1 have all been unable to start X after installaion. Somehow the installation program can always run in full GUI glory, but I am unable to get a flicker at even the lowest resolution settings. This is frustrating because I really enjoy using Linux. I have come to the conclusionthat it would simply be much easier to simply build another machine and just run Linux on that with a more generic and well supported video card.

To all of you out there that are not fluent in geekese. This is probably pointless to you. The above paragraph is tantamount to admission of treason against my geek brethren. I am making a dangerous declaration with this decision to just not have linux on my personal computer.

Okay, finally something not computer related to talk about. This previous week was a little hectic, I ended up working on a video project monday at the last minute. I stayed up until 5:00 editing and re shooting and it still ended up pretty crappy because of equipment failures. Then my alarm clock got unplugged somehow and I slept stright through the class where I was supposed to turn it in. The teacher was not pleased and this really hurt what I thought was going to be an easy A. I am learning that there is really no such thing as an easy A. I should probably learn to manage my time a little more wisely. Yet I have to ask myself what is going on, I don�t drink or party and yet I have trouble managing all the stuff going on in my life, yet somehow the people around me that screw around so much and tell me to �loosen up� they don�t seem to have much trouble keeping up with everything in school. Maybe the difference is just that they don�t really care about what happens in the classes. Honestly I am just a touch on the lazy side, I have been given a really easy life with few major problems, yet I manage to screw up a lot of the stuff like school that is just a matter of focusing my existing capabilities on a goal. Wow, I had intended to stop this crazy rant a few sentences ago, now I am on a roll. I think that I will try to make some goals for my life. I really don�t have many, other than a vuage notion that I want to graduate ~2 years from now. After that I assume I will find a job doing some multimedia work. Hmm� perhaps a statement of my aspirations would be a good thing.

It�s amazing how inspirational spending a few minutes in the party room down the hall was. Being around people that are caught up in the moment and not worried about anything beyond tonight is enlightening, yet introspective thougts only come to fruition through the medium of the written word. Translating your thoughts to a permanent and organized format seems important to understanding ones self. The inner processes of the human mind are unremarkable only as long as they remain the sole domain of our own minds. As soon as the complexities of the thought process are exposed to the harsh light of reality, we perceive the remarkable abilities of reasoning humanity possesses. Each person is a waste of the great potential that we were imbued with at creation. The power of the human mind is only limited by the boundaries of the human will.

These deep thoughts are brought to you by the relaxation that only Radiohead and Morcheeba can bring, exhaustion, and the letter �H�. (for hunger)

/me is away: body in motion, mind halted

yes. That is my answer.

By the way, props go out to my few faithful readers. They diligently plow through my inane ramblings to dig out the few interesting comments I accidentaly include with each rant I release.

What was the question? Well I can�t really remember, where this all started out is almost as muddled and confusing as the reasons for the U.S. being in Iraq. I understand that it�s because he has weapons of mass destruction and has supported terrorism, yet there seems to be something missing there. Other nations have weapons of mass destruction that pose a very real threat to their neighbors. North Korea is the much spoken of example that comes to mind. There are plenty of other middle eastern countries that pose a threat to peace. In fact almost all of them.

The problem I see is that the american people have this vague notion that we are taking down an oppressive regime and freeing the Iraqi people. Unfortunately these are people that we know little or nothing about. We arent familiar with their culture, their customs, or their religion. All in all the events in Iraq don�t seem real to most of us in America.

I mostly trust the current administration and our legislative bodies to make the decisions that are best for our country. Unfortunately this means we have to sit back and watch our forces roll across a country and fight a war live on television for a cause that isn�t terribly inspirational. I garuntee you that the media presence in this war will be a mistake. Military forces have to do ugly things in order to win wars. These are things that the american public as a whole will not want to see.

The most I can hope for is that the vast majority of Iraqi citizens will live easier lives after this war is over, and that the U.S. will have cheaper and easier access to Oil supplies and a more powerful presence in the middle east to defend our interests in the region.

This business of maintaining a nation and an empire is tricky. We can�t make everyone in the world happy, but then again, we don�t have to either. I know it sounds arrogant, but history is full of examples of nations rising to power and spreading their ideals around, with force if neccesary. In time every nation falls back into obscurity and the cycle keeps on going. Wars for resources and territory like this is simply the way things are.

My only comfort in this rather cynical view of current events is that our technology has made it possible to severely limit the number of civilian casualties that are inflicted through the course of this war. Remember that during World War 2 the allies effectively obliterated the many German cities such as Hamburg. The american people didn�t heard about it and didn�t care because we were commited to what we thought of as a noble cause. And the U.S. is responsible for one of the most horrific acts of terrorism perpetrated in recent memory: Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. War is war, wether it�s declared or not. Deal with it.

Maybe I was able to communicate my opinion on this matter. If you gained some understanding of my view point then I commend you for you astute attention to the random words and phrases that pour from my mind.

The term energetic may never be applied to me again. I have been really busy lately. Last night I spent like 6 hours on a video project and was unable to capture video from a DVD player with my video capture card(just so you know this was for completely non-profit, no piracy purposes). I wondered if there was some sort of weird copy protection scheme that prevented me from doing this. So I tried to record it to a VHS tape and then capture from the VHS tape into my PC. I couldn’t seem to get a decent record onto a tape from the DVD player either. I don�t understand this, I didn�t think it was really fair for the MPAA to prevent people from making VHS dubs of their own DVDs. Assuming that there was no way short of downloading and trying to get some DVD ripping software to work, I decided to have a friend run out and rent the VHS copy so we could capture this little 1 minute scene to work into this video project. Either my video drivers are really messed up on my box, or there is some sort of weird magnetic field surrounding my new room. Either way I will probably reformat and reinstall windows at some point just because it is easier than going in to fix things manually.

The point is that I spent several hours working on a video project, which I had fun doing despite the problems. And now I have a number of assignments piling up on me at the end of the week here. And there are still 11 items on my to-do list. What fun�

It�s kinda funny how you start to recognize the symptoms of addiction. I am speaking of my own addiction to Mountain Dew. I woke up this morning a little late and didn�t have time to grab a dew before I left for my first class. I didn’t have any Dew at lunch this� umm� morning I guess. So I sat down in my Lit class after lunch and promptly fell asleep leaning against the back wall. When class was dismissed I woke up and went to get a Dew at the union convenience store, after that first swig I immediately felt better. I really am just about useless without my caffeine in the morning.

Enough of this business, I need to get back to reformatting some annoying staff person�s computer. Work, work, work.

I moved physically on umm� friday I guess it was. I joined Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity on my campus and moved to the house. This is going to be pretty fun. I wonder if they realize I am a ginormous Geek. When I am feeling more energetic I may post some pictures of my new spacious room. It�s weird though, I never realized just how much junk I have. I have somehow acquired a great deal of crap within the last semester that I have been away from home. Well, the clock in the corner is telling me I should go to bed. I think I will obey it. Check out the cam to see who is the latest person to fall asleep in my recliner in an embarrasing position.