Shouzer

Tonight, of course, was Halloween, and since I have a house now, I was really hoping to get some trick or treaters. I never got any back home since our house was, well, inconvenient to get to. But here in Terre Haute, I’m in the middle of a neighborhood, so I figured I would get at least a few. Unfortunately, I did not. So all the candy I bought will just be eaten by myself and my roommates. Seems like a waste really. Granted, I didn’t get home until about 7 tonight, but I figured there would be at least one or two. I guess I’ll have to wait until I move again to enjoy halloween tradition.

[Edit]: I was talking to one of my roommates about this a bit ago. Trick or Treating was cancelled in the county north of Terre Haute because of a triple homicide; the murderer is still on the loose. That may have put a damper on the trick or treating in Terre Haute as well. At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself. It’s not that no one likes us, it’s just that there’s some crazy dude on the loose. Yeah, that’s it…

I went up to Chicago this weekend for the Mazada Zoom Zoom driving experience. They set up what amounted to an autocross in this big parking lot, and they let you drive their cars for free. There were four events: an instructional course where a race car driver rode along with you in an RX-8, a precision driving event where you drove a MX5 miata around a tight course and tried to keep some golf balls in a bowl that was mounted on the hood, a match time event where you drove a 3 or a 6 and tried to match an exact time around a course, and a speed event where you tried to drive a MX5 as fast as you could around a course. The whole thing was a lot of fun, and I would say my driving improved over the weekend.

We also stayed at one of my roommate’s sister’s house, and she had a halloween party on saturday night. Through some unfortunate circumstances, there were only 4 guests there, myself, her brother, one of our other roommates, and one of her friends. So the party kinda sucked. Basically, I just sat there and watched people get drunk.

Unfortunately, there were no good meals to report on. I’m actually a little perturbed about that fact. Seems like to me, if your going to be in Chicago, you should be able to find a good place to eat. Actually, there is a back story though. We got done with the driving at about 12:30 and set out in search of lunch. We decided to go downtown and look for a restaraunt, but the guy who was driving decided he couldn’t find any parking places close enough to anywhere he wanted to eat. We probably passed about 500 restaraunts and several dozen parking garages. I really don’t know what the deal was. We ended up driving back out towards where we were staying and eating at this place called Benigans. We got there around 3:30. So we effectively drove 3 hours to eat at a chain restaraunt. Well, if we hadn’t gone through downtown, the drive would have only been 1 hour, so you can adjust for that.

After all that complaining though, I really did have a good time.

I’m taking a class this quarter called Technical Communication. About 90% of it is based around this big research project we had to do. All of the major assignments centered around it. Today was the culmination of the project because our trade article is due. The trade article is a 2000-2500 word essay that is supposed to be worth of publishing in a trade publication such as the IEEE Spectrum. That means that formatting counts because we are supposed to emulate the publication.

On Monday, we had to turn in a rough draft of the paper for peer review. One of the guys that reviewed mine suggested I switch to a Serif font to better match my publication, so I did so at about 10:00 last night. Turns out, MS Word does not like San Serif very much. It basically ate my paper. The formatting got all screwed up because the words just got cut off at the end of the line. It looked something like this:

consider this the ed
ge of the page.

Needless to say, it didn’t look good. When I tried to switch it to another font, the text turned into a like squares where the letters used to be. My roommates tried to open it on their computers, and the words looked like greek.

After about an hour of screwing with it, I got it to work by copying it into wordpad and then back into word. It sucked though because I wasted about an hour last night.

I didn’t get to bed until about 2, which is actually pretty late by my standards. Of course, I would have made it earlier if I had started my homework before 9:30. I just had to watch the new South Park though.

I really need to stop being such a slacker.

jared, when i was tellin’ you about where kbtoys was i was actually describing toysrus. my bad. got confused. dont know if there is a kb around us.

USC drops to #2. I mean, come on. That’s just ridiculous. I don’t even watch college football, and I know how stupid that is. If this isn’t proof enough for you that the BCS is just worthless, then you are an idiot.

USC should not drop in ranking until they lose, and even then it would be questionable. Didn’t they beat Texas, the new number 1?

The internet really is a great thing. Here I was, just searching google for one of my friends’ names to see how to spell it when I come across a picture she submitted to Jones Soda some 12 months. Well that got me to thinking, “Hm… Didn’t Kyle submit something of the sort a long time back, too?” As it turns out, he did in fact. Haha, and the internet saved it for us like a good little trooper.

As you might remember, I went to Detroit a few weeks ago for a ChallengeX conference. The sponsors took some pictures at the GM heritage center, which is like a car museum, and they finally put them up on their website.

Here’s one of the Rose-Hulman team posing in front of what I like to call the Hautian Special:

I have more pictures of the trip in my webspace as well as a higher quality version the one I posted.

Link to my webspace

If you didn’t catch the Rams-Saints game today, then you missed out. It was probably one of the most entertaining games that I’ve ever seen. The football itself was pitiful. Both of those teams suck, and are usually good at finding a way to lose. The Rams kep getting defensive penalties to offset their big plays, like 3rd down stops. The Saints, well, you should know how they do.

Anyway, the game was awesome because of all of the funny stuff that happened during it. First funny moment: D. Lewis punching some guy from the Saint in the balls. That was just funny. He got ejected and everything, but it was totally worth it. The send moment is the one you will see on Sportscenter: the Saints TE, Conwell I think, caught the ball and came down with it. Mike Furrey, FS for Rams, then proceeded to run over and grab the ball from his hands and run it back for a TD. The Ref didn’t blow this wistle because they are trained to go in favor of the fubble recovery because of challenges. Well, the saints were out of TOs, so they couldn’t challenge. The challenge couldn’t come for the booth either because it was the last play before the 2 minute warning. When they showed the replay, Conwell clearly had control of the ball. The ref probably couldn’t see because he was tied up with some other defender, but he definitely had control. So they credited Furry with an interception because they said Conwell didn’t have control, and the Rams won the game. Did I mention that the Saints were making a late comback drive that would have probably resulted in victory? Wow, I laughed for at least a minute about that one.

as im watching the illinois-penn state football game tonight, i come up with this theory. it goes like this. there are three types of football teams (and i suppose you could apply this to other sports and also players). i categorize them as follows.

1. The team that makes you think, “These guys are amazing. They are the some of the best at what they do, and I receive pleasure out of watching them play their game.”
2. The team that makes you say, “These guys are good. But if I devoted all of my time to football, I have no doubt I could be doing what they’re doing.”
3. The team that makes you say, “These guys look lost. I have no doubt in my mind that I could start for this team and make some better plays than what I’m watching right now.”

Examples:
1. 96-97 Chicago Bulls. Wasn’t this the team that won 70+ games? That’s insane. Jordan made everybody around him look like an All-Star. More importantly, the Bulls made everyone they played look like my high school’s JV team after Thanksgiving dinner. ESPN should start another network called ESPNMJ where we just get to watch him and his Bulls embarrass professional athletes 24 hours a day. I’d pay someone for that. And it would help ease the pain of the Washington Wizard days.
2. 2004 USA Men’s Basketball Team. I’m going to refrain from making any “Dream Team” jokes. Basketball had never been more boring than last summer’s Olympics (not to mention the preceeding World Championships in Indy). They premise: Get the best American roundball players (position doesn’t matter) together on one team, let them play some white guys from Slavic and SoAmer countries who aren’t good enough to play in the NBA themselves, and *hopefully* sleepwalk our way to the Gold. Sleepwalk was about all they did. Sure we got the highlight film facials and no-look passes, but this was no Sportscenter Top Ten Nominee. I’m pretty sure than my eighth grade team (22-3) could have beaten the teams USA was beating by single digits. And just like an average team, they won the Bronze.
3. The existence of the Houston Texans. Granted, they were an expansion team merely three years ago, but they had what I thought was a superb expansion draft. And they followed that up with an excellent college draft, where they got Dom Davis and Andre Johnson who have outplayed their draft position even this early in their careers. Along with this, they got placed into a division, where at the time, only one team was even playoff worthy (Colts). But three years into the Texans era, and has there ever been a team that you could bet against regardless of the spread or opponent.
“Texans are +145 this week”
“Oh yeah? Hm, I’m thinkin’ 150. Put me down for a half a hundred”
“They’re playing a Division III team”
“In that case, make it 200″

The 2005 Illinois Fighting Illini Football Team is a 3.

[Edit by Jared:] Updated categories.

got my displex and my martin-fields overlay today. if al lets me borrow his camera, pics coming later.

$3 billion?

The senate is talking about switching from analog to digital TV. I’m all for the advancement of technology since stuff like this will give me a job in a few years, but does the government really need to subsidize it?

The idea is to help people upgrade their old televisions so they can accept a digital signal, estimated cost of $50. I just don’t understand why the government needs to subsidize this. I can see that there will be lots of people who cannot afford to upgrade their TV, but should this really be a concern of the government? It is not like people actually need TV. I can think of lots of way $3 billion dollars could be used than making sure Americans are entertained.

So it turns out I look really uncomfortable when I’m the slightest bit nervous. My roommate was standing behind me when I was talking to a recruiter at the career fair. He said I looked really uncomfortable. I also had to do a peer tutorial the other day for technical communication. Both of the peers that reviewed me said that I seemed uncomfortable. I felt fairly relaxed during both of those two event, I mean, considering. I wasn’t as relaxed as I am now or anything, but it wasn’t like my palms were sweating or anything.

Hmm…I thought I was getting over that whole looking uncomfortable, getting red-faced, etc. That’s too bad for me.

So, I just recently bought the new Depeche Mode album, Playing the Angel…I have to say I’m pretty impressed with it. They’re definitely making a comeback and getting back to the sound from their last great album, Violator, in my opinion.

My favorite song of the album is definitely “Precious,” the album’s first single. Check it out.

“The Suffering” by Coheed and Cambria is a really good song. I haven’t listened to their entire album, but everything else on it sounded pretty bad to me. It was mostly emo, so it just depressed me. Still though, they have the one song that is good. You should check it out.

Jordy just posted that Maddox is going to be coming out with a book next year. That’s pretty damn amazing, as far as I’m concerned. He posts some funny shit, and I’d suggest to anybody to go check out his site. One of my all-time favorites by him is called I am better than your kids. Haha, good stuff.

[Edit:] It looks like it was actually Eddie who posted it. I didn’t realize anybody but Jordy posted on the site. My bizzle.