Aug 31
Classes are going well so far. I’ve had all of them at least once now, though we haven’t done anything interesting yet, of course. They all still seem interesting at least. I’m hoping for a good semester. Mayhaps I can make that happen. On an interesting note, I have a class on databases and the [...] [...more]
Posted: under General, School.
Classes are going well so far. I’ve had all of them at least once now, though we haven’t done anything interesting yet, of course. They all still seem interesting at least. I’m hoping for a good semester. Mayhaps I can make that happen. On an interesting note, I have a class on databases and the professor used an interesting explanation as to why he’s going to be so anal about our programs actually working right, all the time. He went into some spiel about how mistakes can realistically cause loss of money or death. That’s a fair enough reason I suppose. On the other hand, I’ve had him before and i know that he’s inclined to be that way anyways. 
Since I’m going to actually try to do well, I’ll have less time to blog, unfortunately. With any luck, I’ll really mean that too… At least I can grab feeds and just read on the weekends if need be.
On an unrelated note, I had fully planned about lodging a complaint about how gas had hit $3.00 for the first time ever. Today, I see it’s gone up again to $3.19, which means it’s gone up $0.50 in the last 2 days. I hope it goes down to the normal rip-off of < $2.70 or so soon. My cars have enough to last this week anyways.
Aug 29
When I weighed myself on Saturday I was down another 4.5 pounds. I was hoping to lose 3 or 4 pounds, so that is definitely good. From here on out I had kind of planned on going for at least 2 pounds per week, but I’m guessing I’ll lose closer to 3 this week at [...] [...more]
Posted: under Fitness.
When I weighed myself on Saturday I was down another 4.5 pounds. I was hoping to lose 3 or 4 pounds, so that is definitely good. From here on out I had kind of planned on going for at least 2 pounds per week, but I’m guessing I’ll lose closer to 3 this week at least. I’d love to set a long term goal, but it’s really hard to plan when you have no idea what’s going to happen…
My “diet” is going well. I’ve had a couple of times where I’ve eaten more than I should have for a meal, but even then my calorie total for the day has never been high enough to maintain my weight, according to FitDay anyways. I’ve went out walking a few times as well. My theory here being that if I were to walk about half an hour a day I’d probably be getting the same amount of exercise that I used to get with my old job. I’m not making an effort to actually walk every day, but I figure a little here and there helps. On top of that, I always mean to jog, which I should probably give a try again. Of course, when I do it, I can only jog for a couple of minutes, and then I have to walk for a couple of minutes, and then jog again….etc. I’m sure if I do it enough that won’t be an issue though.
Aug 27
Naturally, I’ve mentioned this before, but I hate college students. They’re like a swarm of locusts (I guess anyways…. never actually seen that come to think of it..). They’re like a pack of dogs. They’re like…..tourists. They clog up the stores and roadways and it impossible to get around.
Mind you, I don’t have nothing against [...] [...more]
Posted: under Rants, School.
Naturally, I’ve mentioned this before, but I hate college students. They’re like a swarm of locusts (I guess anyways…. never actually seen that come to think of it..). They’re like a pack of dogs. They’re like…..tourists. They clog up the stores and roadways and it impossible to get around.
Mind you, I don’t have nothing against any particular student, or 2, or 3, or 20 even. It’s the 20,000 that’s the problem. I don’t know how many exactly stay around all year, but I’m guessing at least 75% are of the mirgrational type. When they show up in town, the population roughly doubles. On the up side, they don’t all have cars, but then on the down side, on those certain roads that lead to hundreds of apartment units, traffic will be up closer to 500%. Unfortunately, I work down one of those roads. There’s a little bridge over some railroad tracks that they tore out in the spring and it’s taking them a full year to replace (this I don’t get…they had the old bridge gone in the first few days the road was closed….why does it take 12 months to build a 20 foot bridge?) that would be one of the main routes for what amounts to about 500 apartments to get into town. Now, they’re taking the shorter of the two remaining routes which just so happens to be where my work is located. When I got out last night at 11:30 you wouldn’t have known it. Traffic was as bad or worse than you’d expect it to be in the middle of the day.
And the stores…The students swarm through the stores, once again making them several times more busy than they would be otherwise. Seeing as though I don’t particularly like people that much, this is extra annoying. Of course, they buy everything as well, so shelves tend to run on the empty side. These items are primarily a problem of the last couple of days and will last through this next week. You see, they all show back up and start buying things for their dorms/apartments and clear everyone out. I remember last year we were out on the weekend before classes started and we saw about 50 cars waiting at a light to turn towards walmart and target. Normally there would be closer to 10 or 15.
Aug 26
The end is near. My classes start on Monday. This wouldn’t be terribly bad, but I feel that I’m not ready. I dropped all my classes last semester. I was having some problems, to say the least. The plan was to take my 5 months off and take care of those problems. I didn’t really [...] [...more]
Posted: under School.
The end is near. My classes start on Monday. This wouldn’t be terribly bad, but I feel that I’m not ready. I dropped all my classes last semester. I was having some problems, to say the least. The plan was to take my 5 months off and take care of those problems. I didn’t really though. Oops. Things in general have been better, I’m not sure what will happen when put under a load. That is, once I’m spending 12 hours of my day on work and school, before homework. I get this feeling it won’t really work quite properly. It never does exactly.
Then again, I’m just going to try to enjoy my classes. If I can make them into something that’s more like recreation than work then I should be fine. And I will actually enjoy the classes if I let myself. Particularly this semester. All my classes are 500 level courses that are CS electives for me that will undoubtedly have lots of grad students in them as well. My most interesting looking course is called introduction to biocomputation and evolutionary computing. Well, it looks interesting to me anways…
So I’m just going to start the semester with a positive outlook and try to have fun with it all. That’s the plan. We’ll see if it works.
Aug 25
Shocking. Just shocking. AOL has now adopted a policy that allows it’s customers to cancel their service. Their previous strategy was to not allow half of their customers to actually cancel their service when they called to do so. They offered employees up to ~$3100 a month in bonuses for “retaining” customers. Or if they [...] [...more]
Posted: under General, Internet, Technology.
Shocking. Just shocking. AOL has now adopted a policy that allows it’s customers to cancel their service. Their previous strategy was to not allow half of their customers to actually cancel their service when they called to do so. They offered employees up to ~$3100 a month in bonuses for “retaining” customers. Or if they didn’t they could always just be re-trained and passed up for promotions. Isn’t that nice? Why would anyone want to do business with a company like that?
I had my own similar experience when I signed up for AOL as one of those freeipod promos. I canceled after a few days. The guy I talked to literally wouldn’t let me cancel. He kept on telling me I should at least try the service. Although I had logged in online once just to see what there was, he apparently didn’t know or didn’t care about that. Lacking a landline phone, I certainly had no plans of actually logging in normally. On the other hand, a connection 40 times slower than I have right now is quite alluring….. Anyways, he just kept on going on and on about how I should try it, no matter what I said. When I asked to speak to a supervisor, he told me I couldn’t. When I asked for a way to contact a supervisor he said it wasn’t possible. I then accused him of not even being who he said he was and he happily read me off my info I’d signed up with. By the tone of his voice, he actually believe my accusation and was trying to assure me that everything was OK. Dumbass. In the end, I got him to admit that if I hung up the phone, my account would be canceled, and I hung up. I still had to call back and confirm with a different representative that it was actually canceled. For some reason I just didn’t trust the other guy…
It’s good to know that this happened to half of all people trying to cancel and it was AOL’s own policy behind it. Like I said, why would anyone want to do business with a company like that? All it took was a $1.25 million fine.
