Shouzer

So, I’m posting this on my parent’s computer. I guess my computer is just screwed way up. For some reason, it doesn’t let met access the shouzer addpost page. That’s not the only website it has problems with either. When I go to hotmail, it tells me that it is under construction or some crap like that, but I can get in if I login through passport. My computer is a piece of junk. If any of you actually buy a compaq out of your own free will, you are a moron.

Speaking of computer problems, it’s making “the sound” again. That means my hard drive will go out within the week. This is my second hard drive to break, for the record; I think I listed all the crap that has broken on it a few weeks ago. It is a little sad that this problem is so common that we have a name for it. If you say that your computer is making “the sound”, pretty much any sophmore at Rose will know what you are talking about. We are the only ones that have this exact model of laptop.

Maybe I can talk them into putting a different type of hard drive in when they fix it next week…

Wow, it really hasn’t seemed like it’s been that long since I’ve posted. But Shouzer doesn’t lie.

I haven’t done a whole lot since I’ve gotten home. I started working last week, and while I don’t like work, I certainly appreciate the money it makes me. Plus, I like what I do, which will always make work more enjoyable.

I just got done watching the Indy 500 a little while ago. For those that didn’t know, it was a big deal this year, because there was a rookie woman this year named Danica Patrick who qualified 4th. She ended up doing pretty well. She was the first woman in Indy history to lead a lap, and she had a legitimate shot at winning. She ended up 4th, but she proved that she’s a legitimate racer.

I had been thinking about going to the race this year, and now I wish I would have. In addition to all the stuff with her, it was actually a really good race. And the guy that won is on a hot streak. He’s won four of the first five races this year. That’s impressive.

Wow, so yeah, it’s letting me in now. I don’t know what was wrong. It started working after I cleared the cookies, but I had tried that before. Technology is weird. I’ve had a lot go down recently, so I’ll try to fill you guys in.

As I mentioned in the shouts, I got a job. Booyah. I’m doing a big project called ChallengeX where we are hybridizing a SUV. Rose-Hulman Ventures, the business incubator here, decided to sponsor it by paying the 2 faculty advisors and 6 students to work on it over the summer. I’ll be doing that. My job is going to be implementing the control strategy for the car into some program called Labview, which I guess is used for programming the actual controller in the car.

Because of the job, I’ve decided to drop my summer class. It just didn’t seem like a great idea to try to work and take a really hard class at the same time. Plus it saves me money because I don’t have to pay for the summer class now.

We had a great senior prank this week. There’s a statue on campus that is like a naked girl riding a fish. Yeah, it’s like the weirdest thing on campus. Anyway, somebody decided to dress it and put a dildo in the girls hand. It was awesome because I saw some of secretaries walking past it, and they were like, “that’s not a bottle of sunscreen!”

Finally, I ran a triathlon last weekend. It was 800m swim, 40k(25 miles) bike, and 8k (5miles) run. It took me 2:45 which is pretty slow, but I finish so I was pretty stoked. I didn’t have a real bike to train on, so the bike I was riding the bike for the first time ever. That really didn’t help very much. It was the school’s bike, the bike club has 5 bikes or so, and they let me use one. Anyway, it was a good time, hopefully I’ll get to do another sometime in the future.

Guess that’s it for now. I’ve got 1/3 finals done. I finish on Thursday. I can’t wait to come home this Friday or Saturday, but I guess I’ll be coming back to Terre Haute next week.

Picture it: SLU ER — Today for 12 hours, a young college student working part-time in an urban trauma center (for both Missouri and Illinois, no less) slaves away in 7, count ‘em, SEVEN TRAUMAS!

Four of them being stab wounds. WTF? What the hell were all these people thinking, going and getting stabbed on such a nice day out. Clearly, they weren’t! One got stabbed in the back, literally, one on the left side, one on the right side, and one on the right side of the neck! Ouch!

Trauma #5, thankfully not a stabbing, was just a plain ‘ol found unresponsive at a scene. Turns out, the guy has a massive head bleed. It was pretty bad. If I knew how to post pictures (and if I had the CT scans) I’d show ya guys how huge this thing was.

Trauma #6 was a mechanic workin’ under a car. The car wasn’t properly supported…it fell on him…more precisely, it fell on his head and face. He got some nasty, nasty avulsions (skin tearing away from the body). You could see the guys gums b/c his upper lip and nose were torn off…yuck.

Trauma #7 was a car crash. This lady got T-boned and then flipped over about twice. Luckily, she was stable when I left, an hour late, and the night crew finally took her case over.

Needless to say, I’m tired, and goin’ to bed and it’s only 9:30. I haven’t gotten to bed this early since….hell, I can’t remember when.

Gotta do it all again tomorrow. Hopefully, it’ll be better. But I gotta admit, I love the trauma cases. It’s where you learn/see the most stuff.

So when I went to my circuits lab today, it was a nice sunny day. In the middle of it, it started storming hardcore. I finished the lab in an hour, and by that time it was sunny again.

We had power outages in the middle of it, but they had some sort of backup power system. It didn’t seem like a good idea to run all of those instruments on backup power, but what do I know.

I just thought it was weird that the weather changed twice that quickly, but Indiana is weird like that.

The Senate just passed an $82 billion Iraq Supplemental Spending Bill. While I think that’s laughable (how many times are we going to spend $80+ billion over there? I thought the phrase Bush was spreading was ‘Mission Accomplished’..), that’s not really the point. Attached to the bill as a rider, Real ID was just passed as well.

Real ID is a bill mandating the use of National IDs within three years from now. Basically, that means a few things. First, driver’s licenses will no longer be given by the state. They’ll be handled federally. Second, these new IDs will be linked to a government database that contains every detail about you. Third, if you want to do *anything* that involves the government, you’ll need to show this ID card.

Now while this may not seem like a bad idea at first, I have a few problems with it. My main problem is that it provides a false sense of security. The supposed reasoning behind it is that it will “hamper the ability of terrorist and criminal aliens to move freely throughout our society by requiring that all states require proof of lawful presence in the U.S. for their drivers’ licenses to be accepted as identification for federal purposes such as boarding a commercial airplane, entering a federal building, or a nuclear power plant.” Here’s a quick refutation of that. The fact of the matter is that this wouldn’t have stopped 9/11. Every hijacker had legitimate ID. So the difference with this is what? No we, the citizens, get watched ever more closely by the government.

The second thing that bothers me is that this got passed as a rider. Why? It wasn’t strong enough to get passed on its own? What does this have to do with extra money for Iraq? Basically, from the debate in Congress, there were people who disliked this, but were unwilling to vote against it, because that would mean they ‘voted against the war’. Look what that got Kerry.. He was unpatriotic, didn’t deserve his Vietnam honors, and lost an election. What Congressman wants that on his record? It’s ridiculous that our government has been reduced to this.

Third I have an issue with this part of the bill (from here:

Amends the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) to authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security (the Secretary), in the Secretary’s sole discretion, to waive all laws as necessary to ensure expeditious construction of certain barriers and roads at the U.S. border. Prohibits courts, administrative agencies, and other entities from reviewing the Secretary’s decision or from ordering relief for damages alleged to have resulted from such decision.

Huh? Prohibits the courts from reviewing the secretary’s decision? Yeah, don’t we all wish we had absolute power. That seems sort of against the Constitution. Or something. What would I know?

Lastly, I have an issue with the fact that this is another thing being handed off to the federal government to handle. Smaller government? Nope. Once again, though, nobody cares.. Had any of you even heard of this issue? I doubt it.

So here’s a video of my awesome laptop. To fix that crap, they had to replace the motherboard. For the record, here’s a list of stuff that’s been replaced in the order that it happened.

Motherboard
Wireless LAN card
Processor
Heatsink/fan
hard drive
motherboard again

That leaves:
case
CD/DVD drive
RAM
screen (but that goes w/ the case)
and that’s all I can think of.

fyi, this thing that I took the video of happened a month or two back. I’ve just been too lazy to post it.

I just did the worst on a final that I’ve done so far in college. Yay. I used to like math. I really did. Now I’m fairly certain it’s my least favorite subject out of anything I’ve taken. Thank you, school.

Thinking about it, finals are dumb. That’s all their is to it. Sure, it sounds like a decent idea. One big exam to cover everything we’ve done and see how much you’ve actually learned.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy until you’ve only got 8 problems on the exam and it turns out one of them is worth 6% of your semester grade. Huh? 6%? What makes that problem so damn special? On top of that, this type of problem wasn’t on any previous homework, quizzes, or exams.

So looking at the big picture, 6% of my semester grade was from a problem I’d never dealt with before. Had I been taught it? Yes, she covered it in lecture. La-di-fucking-da. Technically, you also learn how to write in lecture right? (Stuff like Comp I and Comp II). Does that mean suddenly you’re Shakespeare? No it fucking doesn’t.

Oh well. I had a 94% going into the final. Even if I got about a D, which is highly likely, that drops me to about an 84%, which is still a B/B-.

Finally got some FTP action goin’. Here’s what my ankle looked like a few days ago.



It looks a lot better now, but I still can’t jump or run.

A few weeks ago, I went out to play basketball, and I saw a black guy wearing a Steve Nash jersey. It made my day.

Oh yeah, oh yeah!

Finals are done!!!

My finals schedule overall wasn’t too horrible. I had two on monday and one on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Thank God this year is finally over. It’s been a pretty tough year–Organic chem–but I’m glad its finally over. There were many times I was pretty stressed, but thankfully I get a week off from that stress, then the first of my summer classes start. Hopefully physics won’t be too bad over the summer.

In some other good news, my job at the hospital is really starting to pay off. They decided to give me a promotion of sorts. They changed my work status and now, I’m eligible for some tuition reimbursement, which is totally sweet! It becomes effective next fall.

Well, I need to get goin’. I got called in to cover someone’s shift.

Hope everyone’s finals are going ok!

So this weekend I am going down to Kentucky because Elizabeth is graduating. It should be a good time because I haven’t seen her since Christmas. Plus, all of my family is supposed to be there, and it’s always nice to see them.

I’m planning to stay in Terre Haute over the summer. I’m going to be taking a summer class at Rose, and I’m hoping to find a job somewhere locally. I didn’t have any luck finding an internship, so that seems to be my best bet. If I don’t find anything, I’ll probably come home after the class is over. I’ll just have to play it by ear.

Several of you were curious about the layout of my room since we have a deck. I took a pictures last night to put on a flyer, so I figured I post it here too. If you know anyone you wants to buy it, it’s for sale.

So, I had my first two finals today in bio and stats. I think it’s pretty safe to say that these will be the two hardest finals I have this semester simply because of all the information I had to memorize for both of them.

Tomorrow is my forensics final which actually only covers material learned after spring break. I’ll be studying for that all day tomorrow before the actual exam.

Wednesday I have my “so-called” ethics final. It’ll be pretty easy, at least it better be as it’s only over 1 philosopher and the book we’ve been reading.

Then I’m done! Can’t wait. Is anyone else taking finals yet? Or is this your last week of classes?

Regardless, good luck guys!

I just found out that I aced my last math exam. That’s money. I walked out of it thinking I did, but there’s always the chance I did something stupid. Anyhow, that brings my average up from an 89 to a 92.6. So As long as I don’t do something stupid on the final, I should manage an A in that class. Booyah.