Christmas Dreamin'

I guess Jackie's upcoming birthday has me getting greedy for material stuff, so I've been ogling all the things I want on the internet stores. Scary prospect, I know. I'm trying to get everything together one location, so I'm putting together Wish Lists on Amazon. Too easy.

General Wish List
DVD Wish List

Now, don't buy this stuff from Amazon if you can get it cheaper elsewhere. Amazon has some good deals, but not always the best. And I still enjoy surprises, these are just suggestions! Good hunting!

Can't Find It!

I'm trying my darndest to find some podcasts in Arabic so I can listen to them on the bus and get used to the sounds. But so far I've only found one that's still in operation, Imtidad Cultural Show (feed). Does anyone out there on the wide interwebs know of any other good ones?

School Badges

As promised.

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 

Also original work published under GPL. Go nuts! I would like to know if you're planning on using these, just as a curiosity.

Tired

Getting sleepy, but I had to inform everyone that I start at Transportation Services on Monday. Cool, huh? Oh yeah, and my car died at school, so now I have to get up early and acutally take the bus.

And I had a brilliant idea, and now I have to find/make web badges for CU, if not a couple of other schools. Woo! Go me and my little fads. G'night everyone, gotta get up early and run in the morning.

Showing off my badges

Well as you can tell by my sidebar, I've succumbed to the web badge craze. They're pretty cool, I think. Most of mine are from this nifty page, but I made a few of my own for military people that wish to use them.

• 
  
• [Edit: New]
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• I thought this one was a nice touch.

These images were made by myself and I'm publishing them under GPL for free use. I could make more and/or different versions; if you're interested, just shoot me an e-mail at xylo04 @ gmail . com. I'm no good with colors, so let me know.

May need a new hat soon

In the past week or so, I've been putting in applications everywhere, because frankly, my financial situation is worse than bad. And it may be paying off, just maybe. I had another interview yesterday with Best Buy, this time for Computer Sales. The interview was pleasant and went well enough, but I'm not hopeful. I subtley pried into my chances of getting the job, and it sounds like the manager is looking for something else. For one thing, I don't have much sales experience and computers are inherently difficult to sell. But the biggest thing is my schedule. It's the Best Buy closest to the CU campus, so naturally, all the college students apply there. That means the employers are flooded with people who can work nights and weekends, precisely when I'd be able to work. He said he'd pass my application around to the other departments, but frankly there's better jobs out there, at companies that haven't turned me down twice.

However, a beacon of light showed up this morning. I recieved an e-mail back from Transportation Services of CU. They wanted to set up an interview, so I put on some dress clothes and set one up for this afternoon. We talked about the responsibilities, and it sounds almost tailor-made for me. Entry level IT support and maintenance, so helping people with problems. Data entry in their vehicle database, and in the operations manual they're developing. Random office work. Maybe a little bit of washing vehicles, or vehicle logistics, or picking up stranded drivers. Fifteen to twenty hours a week, at somewhere between $8-$10 an hour. And my prospects were much better at the end. They were looking at several applicants, but she said a few were just too overqualified, grad students with PhD's. Not only that, but both of her children were in or formerly in the military. I can only hope that counts toward my chances. I should know tomorrow, and if I get the job, you know I'll be calling my entire phone book!

Busy Weekend

So this weekend turned out to be very entertaining, and busy. Saturday we all collected at 6 AM so that the girls could go down to Broomfield Days early and set up some booths. I joined them at about 9. The parade was nice as always. Broomfield High School has a marching band again, so we were happy. They're fairly large, and sounded good. Legacy's band was enormous and sounded great. How do they do it? We had a little rain throughout the day, and usually took shelter under the Thompson's Fine Art booth, where Kristen was working. We went to see the dog show, and Jackie became an impromptu judge! Around 4, the wind started to get pretty strong, so we helped dismantle the Thompson's booth with the brother of the artist, Bill Thompson. The wind ended up very strong, and I'm sure we had gusts over 100 MPH at times. Bill paid Kristen in a little cash, and everyone in art. So now I have a colored, matted Dan Thompson sketch of a dragon/Humvee creature, running over Islamic extremists. Very cool.

Sunday Ashley, Jackie and myself decided to take a field trip. Ashley has never seen Red Rocks before today, so it seemed like a nice little trip. We went and wondered around, and the girls were only lagging behind by a little bit. :D Afterward we drove across the street to Dinosaur Ridge and walked along the exhibits and took photos for a while. We stopped in at the gift shop, and Jackie and Ashley each got a plastic stegosaurus and t-rex. (Quotes from Firefly ensue.) A weekend to remember!

Rear-ended from the front!

I'm just going to mention that this morning has been, by all accounts, pretty crappy. I decided to drive to the Park-n-Ride instead of taking my bike on the local route, but that's not one of the crappy things. I was an intersection away from the PnR when I hit a red light, with a pickup truck in front of me. We all stopped, but then the pickup rolled backward and hit me! We got out real quick, and the lady seemed pretty worried about what had happened, like I was going to be really angry. We both drove into the PnR, since she was also taking the bus, and we examined the damage. Her truck was fine, but my car has a nice new dent on the front of the hood. Now for those of you who have seen my car, a small dent on the hood is a drop in the bucket. I told her I wasn't worried about it, that my car needed a lot of work anyway and I wasn't upset about a small dent. If I had a nice new car, that might've been different, but with my old Civic in the condition that it is, it really doesn't make a difference. She looked on the verge of tears, poor thing. She sounded like she was born elsewhere, maybe Scandinavian. Her name was Inna.

On top of that, I forgot my bus pass, so I'll have to pay for parking later. And despite all this crappiness, I'm really still very chipper this morning. Can't explain it. The world could be ending around me and I'd still be cheerful, and I don't even know why I'm happy. I just figure it's a good outlook on life. Could be.

I'll try and backdate a few things later, like drill.

One more week of school down, even though it was ...

One more week of school down, even though it was a 3-day week after Labor Day and drill. Nothing too interesting happening there. Drill was actually a bit more interesting at points. I actually got to use some of my MOS job skills.

Friday my task was to set up for a miniature SRP, a paperwork field day meant to make sure every soldier is up to date on their personnel, finance, insurance, and medical documents. Between SGT Lant and myself, we learned a lot of things we're not able to do without admin priviledges, and so we had to settle for a few less-than-perfect things. For instance, the printers. Important for a paperwork event, right? Well instead of just hooking one up to the network and mapping all the computers to it (very simple and elegant), we were forced to tell all the users to save their documents to USB keys, walk it over to a single computer hooked up to a printer, and open it up from there. Much less elegant, but workable. Saturday my mission was just to babysit the event and make sure none of the computers spontaneously combusted. None of them did, so I studied a little Arabic.

Sunday was slightly more interesting. The SRP was finished, so instead I was able to join the rest of the section in attempting to fix some of the computer problems around our building, fixing our defunct laptops, and the like. At the end of the day, SGT Lant took all of us to the Network Control Center where they keep the network patches and a couple of the servers, and taught us a little bit about it. That stuff really gets my juices flowing; there's a lot of power in that room. I haven't seen that type of equipment since my Cisco class, and I've never dealt with a VoIP phone system. We were supposed to fix the phones while we were there, but it's been a while since SGT Lant has worked with the PBX machine, so rather than mess up the entire phone system, we just let it alone.

Back to Cool

So it's that time again. After a fun-filled weekend, it's strait back to the grind. The transition back into classes wasn't too bad this time, not like last Spring, just getting back from AIT. I'm prepared for college life again. Although after this first week, I kinda have to ask: are my teachers?

First thing in the morning is Arabic, five days a week. Perfect way to start out the day. (Taste the sarcasm dripping from my lips.) Actually, it's not really that bad. I guess if we learn languages with an infantile part of the mind, then first thing in the morning actually sort of works. The only downside is that homework absolutely has to be done the night before. I get sick reading or writing on the bus, and there's about 10 minutes in between the bus and class in which to do stuff. Maybe enough time, if I forgot to write my name on something. That said, I've got about half of the alphabet down after this week, and starting to recognize the greetings that Oustad (Professor) Aissa throws at us. This may end up being my focus for the semester: Oustad says that if we're not putting at least 3 hours a day into Arabic, if we aren't sick of Arabic by the end of the day, then we're not doing enough. Arabic cannot be learned by intelligence, only by work. That could be good news or bad news, and only time will tell which it is.

Physics 2 shouldn't be anything too out of the ordinary. So far Professor Pollock seems to phrase things very formally, maybe too well for our good. He's good for a lecture, but for actual learning it looks like I'll be relying on the text and the Help Room.

Algorithms was supposed to be the fun class, but oh, no. They couldn't do that, could they? Give me an enjoyable compsci class? It's compsci alright, but so far it looks like it belongs in applied math. I'm learning math induction and proofs by the seat of my pants. It almost feels like I'm missing a prerequisite, but no, I checked. Maybe I just shouldn't have promptly forgotten all that calculus I absorbed over the summer.

To sum it up, so far so good.