2/9/2006
February 8, 2006
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— GarthK @ 6:45 am Edit This
Wednesday:
Snow was falling early this morning and continued till about noon, leaving about an inch, mostly on grassy surfaces. It was that wet kind of snow that sticks to all the tree branches for a couple hours before it melts.
I went to the Faner computer lab before class because my Internet connection is still not working, for the second day in row. Classes lasted from noon till 4:30 today. My marketing teacher mentioned a story that I have told several people over the last year; about a government agency, DARPA, wanting to create a futures market for terrorist activity. DARPA was hoping that people associated with terrorists would bet on terrorists acts that they had knowledge of, but Congress shut the program down before it ever got started, mainly because they didn’t want someone placing a bet then committing the terrorist act in the hopes of profiting from it. If you think that’s weird, it’s just the tip of the iceberg with DARPA, which has dozens of equally crazy project ideas, all of which you can read all about on the Internet. I’d put a link here if my damn Internet access would start working again at home.
Back at home, I made myself a tuna dinner box kit for dinner, then realized that I couldn’t do my homework without my damn Internet access, so I went to Morris library. There, I spent a couple hours doing a business communications assignment. A couple sitting across from me was in the process of breaking up I think. The girl looked Middle Eastern and the guy looked like a regular white guy. I heard him say something to the girl about how unfair equal opportunity policies were, then she just went off on him, saying that he was just a typical white male after all. The argument lasted over an hour and got really annoying after a while. You can hear a lot of unusual(and often ridiculous) political arguments on college campuses.
Back at home, I spent another hour studying Chinese, then had some more of that tuna stuff to eat while watching Mind Freak on A&E. The star of the show was just walking up to random people and making their belongings float around somehow.
Hopefully my Internet access will be back tomorrow. There was a note from Tammy in my kitchen when I returned from school at 4. She had reset a server somewhere, then actually gone into my apartment to see if my computer had access. It didn’t, so the note said a technician would come by tomorrow. Not bad service.
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February, 7, 2006
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— GarthK @ 6:44 am Edit This
Tuesday:
This is boring, but at least I don’t have cancer or a brain tumor, or I hope not at least. I got up early this morning, at 8, to study Chinese a while and eat 4 waffles. I kept dozing off during the last 30 minutes of finance class, which is an hour and fifteen minutes long. I spent my one-hour break doing more Chinese studying in the Faner computer lab.
On the way to work after Chinese class, I stopped and picked up a burger and fries from Wendy’s, then ate it sitting on a coach in the back office of the bookstore.
I had to quite entering books into the database at five fifteen because someone remotely shut the server down for some kind of maintenance.
Back at home, I had macaroni and cheese and canned beef fajita soup for dinner. While I was opening the can, there was a commercial for the exact same product on TV, which made me feel like Truman from the ‘Truman Show’ for a minute.
I planned on studying right after eating, but unfortunately sat on my bed instead of a desk chair, which resulted in an hour of sleep that I hadn’t planned on..
Dawn stopped by at 8 o’clock and told me that the girl who lives underneath her had just stopped by to complain about the noise her stools make on the ceiling when moved across the kitchen floor. The girl had brought some of those pads with her that can be stuck to the feet of chairs. Sounds like some kind of freak to me. We joked that it would be really funny to stick the pads on her apartment door; one per day for like the next two weeks.
Dawn and I agreed to get back together for a drink at 10 o’clock, then I studied till then. When she did come back, we spent about 45 minutes watching ‘Crocodile Dundee’ on TV and talking about school and random things. I told her about the air purifier I picked up by the dumpster on Sunday, and it turns out that it was hers. She apparently thought it was broken, but I don’t think it is. I told her she’s not getting it back.
My Internet access has been about ¼ the speed of dial-up for the last 24 hours and it is getting really annoying.
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2/6/2006
Febuary 6, 2006
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— GarthK @ 7:53 pm Edit This
Monday:
Johanna and I talked this morning, which was the first time in a week and maybe the longest we’ve ever gone without talking. Nic’s mom gave me leftover food last night from the Super Bowl party, so that’s what I ate for lunch.
Went to school at one o’clock, and it was another cold, sunny day. My business communication teacher asked the class what Super Bowl commercials they liked the most. I told him I had too many whiskey and Coke’s to remember because you can really say anything you want in this class. He gave me an ‘A’ on the paper I typed about the fictitious organization called “Society of Corporate American Money Managers(SCAMM)”. I can’t wait to give my oral report in a couple weeks, in which I plan on projecting a huge picture of Mr. T. behind me while I speak.
I spent my one-hour break in the Ag Building computer lab. In marketing class, we continued discussions on cultural differences. The teacher showed a slide ranking different countries in a ‘directness of speech’ comparison. People in countries at the bottom of the list were supposedly much more blunt than people at the top of the list. I noticed that Scandinavian countries were at the bottom, so I told the class how Johanna thinks it’s weird that people passing by her on the Campus Lake trail will say ‘Hello’. There’s just not as much total stranger small talk in Finland.
Back at home, I went to the office building to pick up a package, which was my computer’s new memory. Inside, Johanna and I talked on Skype for a while longer, then I had leftover beef stroganoff for dinner. Next, I installed the new memory into my computer. It didn’t seem to be operating any differently at all, so I checked to make sure it even knew about its new gift. It does, so maybe buying more memory is just some kind of huge scam. Well, maybe I notice something……
At 6:45, I went back over to Mark’s apartment to finish showing him how to burn CD’s on his computer, which I promised last week to do and is taking a lot longer than expected, partially because I couldn’t figure out his software and partly because he’s brain-injured. We did eventually get one CD burned, but he doesn’t seem to understand the process yet. I’ll eventually try once more because I think he could really get into it if he learns. I like to try and get severely-injured people interested in computers and the Internet because they often have little or no social life. Learning to do that really changed the last couple years of Billy’s life before he died two weeks ago. His mom told me that he wouldn’t touch the computer for the first couple months after she bought it for him, then couldn’t be pried off it after someone showed him a couple RC car racing websites. Mark is absolutely obsessive about some habits, so I was thinking that he might produce some interesting results if shown how to edit music and video. If I was to produce a documentary about Mark’s everyday life, it would leave you all scratching your heads for the next couple days. Maybe that’s a good idea actually…….a really good one. I could enter it into the Big Muddy Film Festival maybe……and Mark would just love every minute of it too.
Going back in time a couple hours, the first thing Mark told me tonight was that Andre committed suicide sometime in the past day or two. Andre had lived in Indiana after moving away from the building he used to share with Billy in Carbondale. He had been over to my apartment by the police station dozens of times and I had taken him to the big party at my family’s home on May 8th 2004. As surprised as I was to hear about his suicide, it was something that I used to expect to happen any day, as he was injured in the first place by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head about 5 years ago, when he was 18 years old, I believe.
I rode in Mark’s truck with him to Schnuck’s at 8 o’clock, where we met up with Jake and followed him back to his place to hang out for a few minutes.
Back at my apartment, nothing else to exciting happened. I’m trying to figure out the air purifier I found by the dumpster yesterday. It has some switches and lights on top of it, but the labels are all worn off, and it seems there is no product manual online for it. Whatever, I’ll just turn some knobs for a while and see what happens.
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Febuary 5, 2006
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— GarthK @ 7:52 pm Edit This
Sunday:
My computer is suspiciously different every time I use it. By that, I mean that all software will not usually open in the form that it was last used in. I use Microsoft word to type this every night, and each time the page layout will be different. I think this supports the Big Bang theory.
OK, in all seriousness, I didn’t really eat any breakfast this morning. I took my laundry to the office building around 10 o’clock and saw Don sitting up tables, which meant the free Sunday breakfast was on. The Sunday breakfast is like church around here, just not quite as early and without the direct worship.
I was the first person to arrive for breakfast, then an Indian woman came just a few moments later. She asked some question about Groundhogs day, then that led into a conversation that lasted about 30 minutes. About 10 minutes into it, another Indian person joined in it, whom I had met at another breakfast a couple months ago. I asked these two people where in India they were raised in, which resulted in a debate similar to what an orbanite and a hillbilly would have in this country. It’s always interesting how these stereotypes exist everywhere in the world.
Walking from the breakfast back to my building, I passed an air purifier sitting by the dumpster, which I carried along and found that it seemed to work. I’d been thinking about buying one for a few weeks because this apartment seems to be extremely dusty, so a free one is perfect.
I went over to Mark B’s place at 11, whom I told I would show how to burn audio CD’s on his computer. After spending almost two hours describing a program to him, I realized that it wasn’t actually working, so I really didn’t teach him anything. It took so long because he had to listen to all the songs on each CD to decide what he wanted on a compilation CD. Another reason I went to Mark’s place was to record some footage for the DVD I’m making for Billy’s mom. I had Mark talk for just a couple minutes about Billy on tape, which I also plan on having a couple other of Billy’s friends do.
I was back home around 3 o’clock. I’ve been listening to this band called Nightwish for the last couple days, which I recently downloaded almost 2GB of songs of. I really loved the sound, so I investigated online and found that they are a Finnish band that originated in a town called Kitee, which is near the Russian border just about 50 miles from where I passed through this summer. It seemed like such a coincidence because I have been in love with this band for the past few days, thinking the whole time they were most likely Americans. Small world…..I just happen to find a Finnish band that I love and Conan Obrien just happens to look like Tarja H.(Finnish President)
Nic came to pick me up just after 4 o’clock, and his dog sat on my lap the whole way to his place. We dropped the dog off, then went to his parents home, who were having a Super Bowl party. I was interested in attending this party to see what kind of friends his family would have. I figured they would be interesting since Carl used to be the editor of the local newspaper. The only one I really spoke to much was an Indian guy, which was coincidentally the third Indian person I had spoken with today.
Nic, his sister and her friends spent the first hour or so of the evening playing poker in the front room. The youngest player was a third grade boy, and I think he might have been beating Nic. Even Nic’s sister beat him most of the night, and he sucks even worse at racquetball, seriously, but not as bad as Mike.
There were at least 15 different people that came in the house through the night. Carl gave Nic and I a book about racquetball rules, which I intent to rub in Nic’s face considering he has pretty much banned me from doing anything fun in the game at all.
I spent the last few minutes of the evening with Nic, his sister and her friend playing a game upstairs, in which you had to make up definitions for ideas.
I left with Nic when Sara got off work from Schnucks. We picked her up, then went back to their place. I took a bunch of exploitative pictures of her pet turtles when she went out to pick up some Labamba’s for dinner.
Nic and I then went to the Hangar and played a couple games of pool and talked to Cheech. A lot of other people from Schnuck’s had been there earlier for an invite-only party.
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2/5/2006
Febuary 4, 2006
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— GarthK @ 7:44 am Edit This
Saturday:
I somehow ended up awaking at 8:30 this morning, even though bedtime had been after 4AM. I’d told Dawn last night that I might go with her to WalMart at 9 o’clock this morning, but didn’t really think that would really happen after making the decision to go out at midnight.
I walked to the office building after getting dressed, to see if there was any chance that someone would be there to hand over a parcel that had arrived yesterday. A ‘parcel notice’ had been in my mailbox last night, and I expected it to be my new 200MB hard drive. Tammy and Tiffany were both in the office, and Tiffany handed over two parcels. One box contained a very unwelcome new Hewlett Packard 10B financial calculator, and the other one contained the very welcome new hard drive.
Dawn knocked on my door before I got both of the packages open, then we headed towards Wal-Mart in her car, stopping along the way so she could run errands at Union Planter’s bank and the post office. Small flurries were falling and it was the coldest day in nearly two months.
At Wal-Mart, I shopped on the $40 gift certificate that I found in my mailbox from Tammy the other day. I didn’t have any particular purchase ideas in mind, but just planned on browsing around to see what might be needed. Those items turned out to be some bath products and food, which totaled $26, leaving $14 still available on the gift card.
Back at the apartment, the rest of the day was spent computer wrestling, so to speak. After installing the new hard drive, the machine didn’t recognize its existence. I solved that problem by remembering that new drives have to be formatted, but was then faced with a new obstacle. My version of Windows, XP, cannot use more than 137MB on a drive unless a ‘service pack’ is downloaded and installed from Microsoft’s website. So, I downloaded and ran the service pack. After making me stare at the screen for 15 minutes while it displayed a message reading, ‘inspecting your system’, a box came popped up saying something like, “Service pack cannot install. The product key is invalid”. Investigating this error message online, I found that versions of Windows which are known by Microsoft to be illegally distributed on the Internet have been banned from downloading service packs.
But like any other computer security feature, there is always a way around it if you do a bit of searching. After just about a five minutes search, I found instructions on how to insert three lines of code into the registry and make the software recognize all 200MB of my hard drive. It appears to have worked, but the drive seems to have only 189MB of free space on it for some reason. But, good enough.
Now that the drive was in place, it was time to start using to for one of its main intended purposes; video editing. I went through all the 10 or 12 videos with ‘Billy’ footage on them, copying any segments with him or his friends to my computer. Going through these tapes, I also came upon many long forgotten things that I recorded during the winter and summer of 2004. I’ve decided to start trying to edit and publish one of those tapes to my website every month, at least. After finishing these 10 or 12, there will be plenty more to keep me going for another year, at least.
Nic and I went to play racquatball sometime in the mid-afternoon. I beat him 15 to 5 in the first game, then he beat me 15 to 6 in the second. The third game was mine, too. I nailed Nic in the glasses with a fastball during the middle of the second game. It was the second worst hit I’ve ever given anybody. The worst was when I almost broke Mike’s hand about a year ago.
Taking a water-break, I saw a guy from last semester’s statistics class sitting on a bench. All last semester I had thought he looked familiar, so I finally asked him today if we knew each other from somewhere. We didn’t, but he seemed pretty cool.
Nic and I went to the weight room after the games. Neither of us did much weight lifting, and Nic spent most of the time talking to a couple friends, one of which had red and blue dyed dreadlocks and was wearing a shirt that said, “I fu**ed you butt” on the back of it. The other guy was a short foreign black guy who is a black belt in karate and can supposedly do crazy things like climb around while walking on his hands. Nic kept asking him to punch people, but he never did.
Back at the apartment, it was back to the computer. I finished pulling footage off the tapes, then started editing it. I recently started using a new version of my editing software, Adobe Premiere, and I almost gave up and went back to using the old version tonight. I couldn’t at first figure out how to do tasks that were amazingly simple on the old version, and on top of that, the software kept crashing the computer. It wasn’t the kind of crash that you can just alt-cntrl-delete either, but was the kind where you have to restart the whole system. After like the third crash I decided something would have to be done. I suspected the problem could be due to the fact that I only have 256MB of memory, but was also thinking that it could be something else, like the fact that the editing software is installed on a separate hard drive partition or the fact that my boot partition was almost full. So, I uninstalled the software and moved 13GB of music from the boot partition to the new hard drive, then reinstalled the software onto the boot partition. Another success, or at least I think so far.
I made myself beef stroganoff for dinner at 9 o’clock, then watched the news and spent a few more minutes on the computer before getting some much needed sleep.
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2/4/2006
Febuary 3, 3006
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— GarthK @ 2:00 am Edit This
Friday:
Did something a little different for breakfast, made two egg sandwiches with mayonnaise on hamburger buns. It changed my life. I went into Chinese class at noon totally prepared by knowing all the new vocabulary. The assistant had the class translate sentences onto overhead projection paper, then get up and read them as they were projected. Certain people in the class always giggle when I speak and I’m not sure who it is.
Went to work after Chinese because I forgot about my other class, business communication. The day was beautiful and I realized the forgotten class only after getting all the way to work. Once there, I decided not to go back because I wouldn’t be missing that much anyway.
The store got really busy around 4 o’clock and Carl asked me to stand at the counter by myself, even though I don’t know how to work any of the equipment there. A fairly strong storm went through just before dark, dropping heavy rain and a few bolts of lighting. I spent the last part of my shift shelving books because Carl had to use the computers for something.
Back at the apartment, I ran into Jesse while checking my mail, whom I hadn’t seen since before the break started. I next tried to do my laundry, but realized that the change machine wouldn’t take a $20 bills.
Made leftover chicken breast sandwiches for dinner while watching a documentary about the 911 congressional report, then went to Dawn’s apartment down the hallway to see if she wanted to have a beer. She did, then we had another at my place.
Josh called around 11, then he and Marina came to pick me up an hour later. We picked up Matt and Jared at the Cellar, then went to the Hangar. The Hangar was way too crowded for comfort, and even getting a drink took 10 minutes. A guy was drug out fighting towards closing time. Walking around the bar, I saw Lucas, Aaron(Biggie), Dan and Autumn and a girl from one of my classes last semester. I can’t remember the girls name but I tried to buy her giant Lincoln head in December.
Damn, time flies, seems like it was just the 21st century……
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2/2/2006
Febuary 2, 2006(thanks Tim)
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— GarthK @ 9:58 pm Edit This
Thursday:
Today will be remembered by wetness. I was wet from 9:30 this morning to 6 o’clock this evening. The day started out dry, eating 4 Eggo waffles for breakfast, then I got soaked in the five minutes that it took to get to finance class.
There was a quiz today in that class, which was extremely easy because it basically just asked to find information in a balance sheet and income statement. The lecture was just as simple, as the class was taught how to use the Hewlett Packard 10B calculator to do ‘time value of money’ equations, in which you just figure out how much an investment would grow over a certain period of time. I hear this class gets really hard, so I guess I’ll try and enjoy the easiness while it lasts.
I got wet the second time going from finance class to the Faner computer lab, where I studied new Chinese vocabulary till a few minutes before that class started. In the classroom, I was talking to a fellow student before the teacher arrived. She said that she is also planning on spending the summer in China, so we made tentative plans to talk more about this when we figure out exactly what we’re doing. Her Chinese name is Li Pei, but I can’t remember her real name.
My third, final and most serious soaking happened on the bike ride to work, and it was truly miserable. I actually had to shake off like a dog before entering the bookstore. I worked until 6:40 tonight and entered a couple hundred more books into the database, including some sex position guides with large color photographs.
The store closes at 6 o’clock, but I stuck around because Carl and Kelly were still working and I had a few books left to do. They told me I could leave any time I wanted after the close, but I figured I didn’t have a lot else to do at home.
Back at the apartment, I ate a plate of leftover food from last night while watching true crime forensic shows on Court TV. There was a knock on the door around 7:30, and a guy was standing at the other side with a small card in his hand promoting some kind of new entertainment venue in Carbondale next to Mary Lou’s cafe. The guy’s appearance made me think that the venue is some kind of Christian organization. Devoted college-aged Christians just always seem to dress and do their hair a certain way. After he left, I heard people talking in the hallway and was wondering if I was about to get another knock on the door. Sure enough I did, and this time it was a college-age Christian-looking female with a similar but different card advertising the same event. I didn’t tell her that somebody else had just knocked.
I next spent some time trying to figure out what to do for Chinese class tomorrow. Most of the syllabus is in Chinese, so figuring out what I’m supposed to do sometimes takes as long than doing what I’m supposed to do.
Josh T. called around 10 o’clock to see if I wanted to go out. I told him yes, but then he didn’t call back till after 11, so I changed my mind and went to bed because I knew it would have ended up being a very late night.
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2/1/2006
Febuary 1, 2006
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— GarthK @ 9:06 pm Edit This
Wednesday:
If anyone finds a pot pie, it might be mine. I know I had one in the freezer, but couldn’t fine it when I went to cook it for breakfast this morning. My brother called around 10:30 to invite me to tonight’s basketball game, but I declined because of work and study plans later.
I studied for today’s Chinese test till 11 o’clock, then went to school early to eat at Mcdonalds because my pot pie was missing. I stopped at the apartment office on the way there to pick up a package, which turned out to be the international marketing book I ordered on Ebay.
Eating my McDonald’s by a window, I noticed weird girl sitting by herself at a table outside. She was black, dressed in a tie-dyed skirt and was eating fruit. The first thing to catch my attention was the fact that a black girl was wearing a tie-dyed skirt, then I noticed weirder things, like her licking the cap to a milk container. She got up to throw the trash away when she had finished, then danced all the way back to her table. It’s just not everyday that you see a true black hippie. There used to be one in town, this very horny girl named Ika, but I haven’t seen her around in a while.
Walking towards class, I saw a fellow Chinese student sitting at a table by Starbucks. I can’t remember his name, but he brought a finance book for me to buy today. It was last year’s edition, which sells for $20 online, so that’s the price I paid him. I didn’t have any cash on me so I went to an ATM machine upstairs. Back at the table, we talked about the test for a few minutes, then went to take it. The assistant administered it and let us start 5 minutes early. It seemed to be going slowly at first, but I ended up finishing first.
Today was the weekly two-hour session of business communication class, and it nearly put me in a coma. In marketing class, we had a short quiz about a case we read, about a company called Blair that makes water purifiers, then had a discussion about it. At the end of class, we were assigned to the groups we will working on our main project with, which will not be due till the end of the semester. There are five people in my group, including me, but one of them was not present. The ones present were two girls, both named Kelly(i), and a guy named Matt. To exchange contact information, I gave out the business cards I made yesterday. One of the Kelly’s saw I was from Murphysboro and said she also was, but I didn’t know her because she graduated in 2002. She did know my sister, though, and also said she knew Nate W. The few minutes I spent with these three people today led me to believe that working with them will be a very good experience. They were all very open, happy and friendly. The guy, Matt, looked like he could be in his late 30’s and said he worked as a mechanic for a while before deciding to go back to school. Talking to him for a minute made me think he’s a serious partier, so he might look older than he actually is. Fortunately, my first impression was that he’s a functioning partier who will do his part in the assignment, like myself, haha.
Next, was off to work, where I stayed until 6:20 and was able to finish entering all the books into the database that were left over from yesterday. Carl said he could barely bend over and stand up because of last night’s racquetball games.
On the way home, was a stop at Save-a-Lot. Back at the apartment, was an attack by Tiffany’s little wiener dog. Tiffany is a blond girl that works in the office and her dog hates me sometimes then lets me pet it others. She also had a second dog with her tonight, which looked to be about 2 weeks old, but she said it was a miniature pug that was actually three months old.
I cooked a chicken breast, pasta and green beans for dinner and watched an episode of ‘Bones’ while I ate it. A little boy was taken hostage and had his finger cut off to try and blackmail the dad.
After the show, I did this week’s business communication assignment, in which the class had to write fictitious letters to fictitious business people, inquiring about fictitious professional organizations. The names and organizations didn’t have to be fictitious, but I thought it would be more fun. I sent a letter to a person at the Bank of America called Bigol Crook, and the name of the organization I wanted info about was called the Society of Corporate American Money Managers, or SCAMM. We will see how far the teacher’s sense of humor goes.