<![CDATA[jtolds.com - Selected Livejournal Archive entries]]> en-us Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License <![CDATA[Newsletter!]]> JT Olds 1133674740 Sun, 4 Dec 2005 05:39:00 +0000
Since I generally end up typing novellas, if not before, definitely today, I'm going to condense story segments into bullet points, and subsequently, those into links that focus on that bullet point. My word processor informs me that this entry is easily 10 pages. If you want simple access to the whole entry, click here.
  • Grab and Go
    My school has a pretty bad dining hall. I mean, everyone complains about college x's dining hall, but I'm serious. Here's a few articles:The only thing I've had the last 6 weeks I've been down there is gross Pizza or a burger. I mean, I eat some sticky spinach and carrots too, but ehhhh, yeah. Anyway, however bad they may be, they feed me, so there are a few, I guess you could say, arrangements I must make.
    One such arrangement is called Grab and Go. The bright idea here is to make sack lunches for kids who can't make it to the abominable food offerings for lunch in an actual dining hall. If you're considerate enough to inform them via a web interface the day before, there will be a white little bag waiting for you in a refrigerator downstairs the following morning. The sad bit is they aren't considerate enough to put actual food in the sacks. Generally when I order a simple Turkey and Cheese sandwich, say, I get like, a slice (one, one slice) of some processed meat, and some white stuff that I can only assume is supposed to be cheese on bread of my choice! Hooray for choices! I convince them using a drop down interface to put this crap on some sourdough bread. They also give me cookies (which I can't eat for worry of food allergies), an apple, and -unflinchingly- a bag of plain Lays potato chips. I'll get to that in a sec.
    So this is my lunch every day, generally my first meal of the day because I'm usually in bed during their offering of cold eggs from abused chickens (that's the latest thing. Apparently UDS abuses their chickens or something).
    The web interface intrigued me. It appeared very insecure. The full page loads, then on realizing that you're not actually logged in, it redirects you to some standard log in page. It's not too difficult to stop the page before it redirects. Anyway, I assumed that I could just refrain from logging in, make my own HTML form and replace all of their drop down menu boxes with my own options. Place orders for people, order a beer, or a car, or whatever, that sort of thing. I made some big stink about hacking or some silly notion like that. Well, it turns out their web interface is quite secure. It even does field validation to make sure you're not doing anything dumb like submitting your own HTML form. So, so much for being insecure and 'hackable.'
    However, there are two fields you can do whatever you want with, as long as each is 30 characters or less. The first name and last name fields. Well, I was pissed off about getting plain Lays every freaking day, so I started to complain, passive aggressively I guess, by saying my name was "I would really like" "something besides plain Lays" or something similar. Mr. something-besides-plain-Lays would constantly be frustrated by failure in their inability to give him anything other than plain Lays day after day. And I know they had some other stuff at one point because the first week of classes I got other chips. Like, good chips. I mean, plain Lays are great, but they wear on you day after day so much that I get sick thinking about them. The grease, ahh, man, I can't stand it.
    Here's where this all gets rather exciting. Each sack is labeled with what the student ordered, like this:


    By a stroke of luck, one day I said my name was "Please oh please," "anything but plain Lays" (notice the comma after Please oh please). Here's the result:

    The comma's gone! In it's place, everything is shifted around! Salad Dressing: Sprite? Beverage: Roast Beef and Cheddar? I got a glimpse of the little printed out sheet on which the card swiper person marked my order on after pickup, and everything was normal there. It was just this label that was messed up. Some poor confused sack filler even wrote question marks all over it, as I'm sure is apparent.

    Well, that's interesting, I thought. So I considered why this would happen. The comma was gone and everything was shifted. Well, I bet the data sent to the label printer is in comma delimited form. I could find out if I put in two commas and ordered another lunch. So that's what I did.

    Yep.
    Notice how my Beverage is no longer my Sandwich, and my salad dressing is no longer my drink. In the one comma picture, instead of my dorm building listed in bold on the bottom, None was there, that's the salad dressing usually. In this two comma picture, sprite shifted from Salad dressing to dorm building spot. Therefore, there was some order of drink, salad dressing, dorm building.

    I kept going. Three commas:

    This time my name was something like "John" "Olds,studentid,," which is why my student id is in there twice (well, I mean, before I smudged it out). Notice how those two fields got filled in right.
    After this three-comma go, I had enough information to deduce the order, which is this:
    firstname lastname,studentid,email,date,sandwich,beverage,saladdressing,hall,time,bread
    Yeah, I'm posting the order. Maybe that's a bad idea. Don't do anything I wouldn't. It is vital that you read on before deciding if I would or not.

    So I gave it another shot, filling in only what I needed.

    Notice the salad dressing field. Yesssss. It worked.

    Again again!

    I figured, maybe if they won't give me good chips, I might be able to get some extra food instead of the cookies I can't eat. I was starting to get hungry. Of course, no such luck.

    Of course, what followed this was rather unexpected.

    I got a cease and desist letter. Great.

    I responded.


    I got a reply.

    Way to go different chips!!!??? Right?? No. No new chips. I'm still eating plain Lays every freaking day. The self censoring word 'freaking' really doesn't put the right emotion into this. Every, well, so anyway.



    Passive-aggression is stupid and should be shamed. However, famous personalities such as Wile E. Coyote, Bob Sagat, and even 'Acura Integra' have been understood, as it were, to have recently picked up Grab and Go from the Middlebrook dining hall.

  • Thanksgiving
    For thanksgiving, I went to Utah! I think one of the funniest parts of the trip happened before I was even there. I slept through my flight and missed it. I had decided it was a good idea to not sleep the night before. There I was in the chair nearest the airport gate door, and I missed the plane. In fact, when I went to figure out what happened, the airline person behind the desk was like "Are you John Olds?" Apparently she had paged me numerous times. Numerous. Sleeping is dangerous. Moral? Never sleep at all.
    Yeah, it was a blast seeing family and friends. I really miss the people in Utah while I'm here, especially my family. For example, my siblings. I sort of gush about them from time to time, but they're just so cool. Oh man. So cool. I miss them a lot. I got three thanksgiving dinners (one with my dad and this girl he's dating and her family and friends, one with my mom, and one with my dad's family). I saw this girl my dad's dating a few times, and she's a very nice lady and I like her, but I really guess I just don't know how to act about it, because I mean, well, frankly, she's not my mom, you know? Her family seems pretty cool though.
    I liked hanging out with my mom a lot too. So much so that I think I've decided to spend a lot of next summer there just hanging out and helping around the house.
    My goal for that week was to learn to ride the unicycle. In that I failed. I still can't do it. Partially this is because of lofty goals, partially because I don't have the equipment I thought I had. I do have this unicycle, but while I had been telling people my uncle gave it to me a few years ago, I realized that when I was first learning (or trying to learn) how to ride it, my sister wasn't even born, so uh, it's at least, at least 9 years old. Great. So what that means is this is a kid's unicycle, which was also confirmed by my neighbor here (I brought it here). It's too small. Oh well.
    While I was there, apparently Jimmy Carter came to some Barnes and Noble's bookshop somewhere near downtown for a booksigning. My response was, and still is, an enthusiastic "isn't he famous??" Well, yes, he is. So I guess I just don't understand what he was doing in Salt Lake City, at a Barnes and Noble, signing books. This isn't very important to the scope of this entry, as I had church stuff to do instead, but I just would like to point out that Jimmy Carter is, indeed, a famous former US president, and for some reason I just feel like his actions are unfathomable, even though I have no reason to feel this way.
    It was great to see church people there, but I unfortunately saw a distinct lack of highschool friends. I attribute this to my inability to motivate myself to call anyone, and my departure early Saturday morning Thanksgiving weekend. Sorry guys, it would have been fun to see you all.
    On the way back through the airport I had some time to kill so I bought all of the Chronicles of Narnia in one book form at a gift shop for 20 dollars. I read through The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as the Magician's Nephew on the plane. I decided that the current canonical ordering for the books is silly and wrong, and I plan to read the rest in the order in which they were published (this is not chronological, but that's okay. Right things don't always make sense. I have a great argument for this, ask sometime.). As such, I have since had time to read Prince Caspian. I read some of the Chronicles of Narnia before, when I was younger, but decided that in anticipation of the super-exciting upcoming movie, I should brush up. I guess that's not super related to Thanksgiving.
    The other good part on the way back is I got off light rail one station too early, so instead of getting back on, I walked a few miles in the snow with a broken, overweight (I had to pay the overweight fee at the airport, and because of its weight, the handles got ripped) duffle bag. Of course, I couldn't make off that easy. I had to have unicycle parts digging into my back from the duffle bag the whole time.

  • Bike lock fun!
    It's been getting rather cold. In fact, a few days before I left for Utah for Thanksgiving, my bike was so cold I broke the key trying to unlock the frozen bike lock. The brakes were so cold that when I tried to apply them to not trash some kid, the brakes stuck and I was nearly thrown off my bike (again). Of course, after that I stopped using my brakes. What's a few kids?
    The tires were also sort of flat when I finally unlocked the bike, and as I rode they inflated. Talk about cold air.
    So anyway, I'm down to one bike lock key and don't plan on ruining it. The major problem I'm having is that my bike lock freezes and then I'm unable to unlock it. My first goal was to just use pliers. I went through at least one key like this. I decided that this wasn't working and since then out of fear of ruining more keys, I've been storing my bike in my dorm room and office until I can get a suitable plan together.
    I had a fairly reasonable plan of getting a lighter and melting the ice out. However, it turns out there isn't any oxygen in my lock, and the fire doesn't like to burn so much in there.
    On the other hand, plastic melts. This I knew. I didn't need a melting lock to remind me. Since I was holding the lighter close enough to actually have any effect, the lighter end melted off too. Now I'm down one lighter. I managed to keep my fingers.
    Today I went to Target to get a torch lighter, you know, the kind that are impervious to wind and things. Of course, I didn't remember until I left that this sort of lighter needs to be filled with butane, which I don't have. Drat.
    In explaining my precarious position to a few colleagues, I was informed that there exists some sort of deicing spray, and was subsequently laughed at for my ignorance in the matter. Which is actually pretty funny. Deicing spray? Like, there's apparently some sort of lock deicer, which is exactly what I need. Well, they didn't have that at Target either.
    So I'm still no better off.
    Update: I just bought some butane at a gas station on my way home from church today. I filled up my lighter and it rocks. I am leaving my bike outside for tomorrow morning, so hopefully it works and I'm not late to class. Again.

  • Racquetball smashing
    I smashed my racquetball racket. I mean, I usually do that. No change there. The change is that I smashed it against a wall and the strings shattered.

    So I had to decide if I wanted to restring it or not. I went to the store to see if that was even possible, and called a few people, but it turns out that since I had destroyed the plastic bit on top so much it wasn't even restringable without new factory ordered parts. It was rather frustrating how the employee at Gart Sports rather rudely informed me relatively often how horrible my racket was, and how it wasn't even worth it. I was quite offended. I like my racket. I paid good money for it. Really.
    Anyway, so I ended up buying a new racket that looks like this, if that isn't it exactly. It turns out it's the same one my roommate bought recently. Let me assure you there is no way I paid the 149.99$ listed on that website. I'm cheap. There was a sale.
    Needless to say, racquetball has resumed. In fact, I'm even taking a racquetball class instead of weight training next semester.

  • 5K run (walk)
    This morning, I ran a 5K around Lake Harriet. Update: It was called the Reindeer Run. I guess I don't really know the purpose for it, as far as charity or such goes. Today the high was a balmy 18 degrees. For some reason when people ask me the temperatures around here and I tell them, their response is "Celsius, right?" No. Fahrenheit. I live in the US. We use the Imperial System. Update: The temperature will continue to drop around here too. In fact, I'm pretty sure yesterday the Mississippi was flowing. It looks frozen solid today. The whole thing. Though I'm not surprised. Today the high is 9. It's probably best I continue to burn myself with butane. It was actually much warmer than I thought it would be with wind chill and all, so I ended up wearing 3 layers and was sweating and hot the whole race. It's sad to say I have no pictures.
    A 5K is a lot shorter than you'd think. I started off complaining quite a bit, with various side aches and other effects of not being in shape, but managed to run at least a mile before tapering off to a walk. I was with my neighbor Adam, who slowed down with me, which was nice of him. The best part though was about half way around the lake, we saw our friend Alex who we were with, who is quite in shape, and we suspected had already finished long ago, cheering us on. At first I was quite firmly of the opinion he had returned half way around the lake to mock our speed, but imagine my surprise when he said we had maybe a hundred yards left. Of course, since we were only half way around the lake I didn't believe him, stopped running, and started looking around to try to figure out where we were. Either there were two identical buildings on opposite sides of the lake, or we were all the way around the lake. Finding the latter more likely, while still quite unbelievable, we ran the last hundred yards quite excitedly. It was over much sooner than I thought it would be. It wasn't so fun during the race, but in retrospect it certainly wasn't so bad.

  • Miscellaneous

    • I switched majors. From Computer Engineering to Computer Science. Big change, happy day. I'm pretty stoked. I get to code next semester. That, and all I'm taking is a Math class and 3 CSci classes. Well, and 2 PE classes. My schedule for next semester is here (minus CSS goodness). Unfortunately with my switching up of my schedule, I don't get to take the Philosophy class I wanted. Boo. That's okay, my Tuesday mornings more than make up for it.

    • Recently there has been a big backlash at Sony-BMG for releasing CDs with a rootkit and spyware on them. It's a very big deal, and Sony clearly did the wrong thing. If you don't know anything about this, or need a news-thus-far account, I suggest you go here (make sure to look at parts 2 and up). Anyway, my most recent Switchfoot CD Nothing is Sound features this atrocity, and apparently Sony has issued a recall for all affected CDs. This whole thing doesn't effect me, since Linux is awesome, but it's the principle of the issue, so I'm going to do the exchange thing, after, of course, making a thorough rip of the XCP program, just in case I might need it or something, I dunno.

    • My car is for sale. It makes me sad, but alas, it's hard for me to drive when I'm MPLS and it's in SLC.

    • The Monk Christmas special is on this weekend. It's good, and I recommend you check it out. It's on the USA channel. You can use my schedule webapp for guidelines and more info, but I think the times are broken, so I'd take the data on there with a grain of salt. Check your local listings. New episodes start January 13. I also recently watched the Red Green movie, and thought it was surprisingly good. It was rather amazing how well the characters transferred from their very methodical TV style to the big screen. It really was the big screen too, as we watched it on the projector. Woo woo.

    • My neighbor was doing random Google searches and found one of my middleschool documents in an obscure folder on my webserver explaining mathematically how 2+2 does not equal 4. Of course, this is wrong. But anyway, this reminded me of other middle school documents I wrote, and I found a short story I wrote. I'm pretty sure it was middle school over elementary school at this point, but I don't have a good way to pin it to a date. It's hilarious. It's a great story, I think anyway, especially for a middle schooler, and I'm quite impressed with myself. While this only serves as proverbial self back patting, I thought it was decent enough to put a link to it here. It's in original Word document form, for shame, I know, so if you can't open it and want to, let me know. If you're wondering what the Visual Basic code is at the end after the "DO NOT PRINT" or whatever inscription, in one of the cut scenes, there's some computer thing talking to some rodent, and they switch some channel or something so that you can't listen in on their conversation and it goes to static. At least, that's what I was attempting. But the stuff that's supposed to be static is basically a ROT-encoded message (with my middle school modifications to the algorithm), and the VB code at the bottom will decrypt it. The error message is the decryption code number. This all makes sense if you read it first. The unintended consequence of this is focus is taken off the great, simply great plotline. I'm looking to make a movie if anyone's interested. Either of you Warner Brothers, especially.

    • I'm super excited about the Nintendo Revolution. Man, I almost can't contain myself.

    • I haven't shaved since mid-November, and I'm sort of liking it. I also haven't had a hair cut in a while, and while I probably look gross and terrible, since I really could care less of what anyone thinks of me right now, I'm enjoying the laziness. Woo woo.

    • My roommate bought a large aluminum steel (probably, it's magnetic) pole and planted it in a bucket in the middle of our room. Of course, this is preparations for Festivus, as explained in Seinfeld Episode 166, or this Wikipedia article.

    • My roommate and I were up until like, 3 the other night watching videos of what can only be described as Extreme Walking. It sounds silly, I know. When extreme sports sound silly to me, you have no idea how silly this sounds. Except, it's totally awesome. Here's a link to my roommate's blog discussing the best videos, and here's a link to the main guy's website. You can watch what I think to be the best video on Google Videos here. And then, unrelatedly, some other good Google Videos are this one, this one, and this one. It's unfortunately far too easy to waste a whole bunch of time on Google Videos.

    Another one of those tests
    It's funny because while largely I think the main result is true for one reason or another, I disagree with select points all of the summary.
    Your Inner Child Is Sad

    You're a very sensitive soul.
    You haven't grown that thick skin that most adults have.
    Easily hurt, you tend to retreat to your comfort zone.
    You don't let many people in - unless you've trusted them for a long time.


    Okay, now it's back to studying!]]> <![CDATA[Non-trivial update :)]]> JT Olds 1129875960 Fri, 21 Oct 2005 06:26:00 +0000 my last substantial update.
    Hooray for periodicity, even if it isn't predictable.

    Update: I completely forgot to mention that my siblings are my favorite people on the planet. They're so great. My brother is my hero and my sister is definitely the coolest girl ever. By far. So there.

    To begin, I'd like to point out that although I mentioned the Audio Adrenaline concert I went to, I must say that my all time favorite concert so far was the one I went to about a week after. Caedmon's Call is awesome. Their replacement for the recently departed (as in, he's solo now) Derek Webb, Andrew Osenga, is a pretty funny man. I shook his hand. I also have to say that singing God of Wonders and Step by Step (Rich Mullins tribute) with Cliff Young (Caedmon's Call lead) himself was definitely super amazing.

    I also mentioned I was getting Dr. Mario for Super Nintendo. I surmised this would lead to a decrease in productivity. This hasn't actually been the case, though it's been really fun. I would have to say that the real decrease in productivity came when I bought Dr. Mario for Gameboy. It's hard to pay attention in class. So luckily, I ran out of batteries. I ran those batteries down really fast.

    The racquetball club John and I are (still) going to found has not happened yet. We have all the paperwork filled out, but when it comes down to someone taking them into the Student Activities Office, it hasn't happened in weeks. We'll see how that goes. We haven't even been playing every other day any more, so I don't know what's up with that.

    John gave up on the projector project. His reasons for this are many and varied, none of which I can say I understand.
    I've nominated myself in his stead to finish this.
    Turns out the only real part left is to get an LCD (we've had a few, but they've all seemed to be predisposed to unfortunate accidents). So I've been looking around. I found a store that repairs them that I plan to check in with on a regular basis to see if they have any parts, but as of now, I'm 1 LCD short of an awesome projector.
    The pinnacle, of course, of this search for LCD monitors happened upon me quite unexpectedly.
    I recently received a Dell machine for the lab I run in the physics building, and I needed some simple brackets to mount an extra hard drive into the case. I went to OnTheGoPC (the local computer hardware and repair shop I plan to pester for LCDs) to ask them if they had anything like what I needed. They said I didn't, but if I were to go to General Nano, I might find what I was looking for.
    On the way to General Nano, on my recently mangled bicycle, I rode by another, smaller establishment called Trans Micro. I'll try to spare you these silly computer store names from this point forward. I went into this store and talked to (apparently) the only Caucasian guy there, as the rest were of some Oriental descent (I assumed Japanese, but my roommate assures me they are, in fact, from Vietnam Taiwan). He got me the brackets I needed, and as I was about to leave, I decided to ask if they had any broken LCDs I could purchase.
    He said he had one in the back, and they were going to throw it away, but that (and he had to check with his manager on this) he figured it would be cheaper for them to just give it to me instead of paying the monitor disposal fee.
    So he called for his manager, and this energetic little man excitedly comes over to see what he was needed for. On hearing about the monitor, he exclaims something along the lines of "Ah yes, LCD! No power!" and takes off for the back room. When he returned with a very, very nice, very large LCD, he proceeded to try to plug it in.
    This is a funny story in and of itself. Both he and I were baffled at the fact that we couldn't find the connection on the monitor to attach the power cable. We spent about 5 minutes looking all over the monitor trying to find where to connect the power. He couldn't find it, I couldn't find it. He was about to give up (he was telling me that if I took it home and took it apart I might find the connection) right when he saw where the connection was. The people who had designed this monitor decided it would be a good idea to have the power connection attached to the end of the monitor cable, so that only one cable ran out of the monitor. I would say that's idiotic myself, but I suppose the interference from the power line would be negligible. So he found it, and pointed excitedly extolling the virtues of how great it would be if the power adapter he had would work.
    He then spent the next 5 minutes running around his shop looking for a similar monitor to try and switch power adapters. None of the LCDs on display were what he wanted, so again he gave up and told me the monitor was mine.
    This nice monitor was mine. Free.
    So I was all rung up, and I had this awesome monitor in my hands, and I had a DC power adapter at home that was exactly what it needed.
    I could walk out the door and would have done nothing wrong.

    But I still felt wrong about it for two reasons. First, if it was true that the only thing wrong with the monitor was the power adapter, then I was taking about $300 worth of equipment off this guy (it was a really nice LCD monitor. Really nice) simply because he didn't have a dongle. Sure, it was his choice, but it seemed silly.
    And secondly, I had just noticed that the cash register computer LCD was the exact same brand and model. If I were to say absolutely anything about this new revelation, my chances with this LCD were forfeit.
    Ah well.
    So I pointed this out to him, and he hurried over and seemed quite thrilled with this new discovery. He quickly fiddled with connections, and found the power adapter for this working LCD and excitedly checked and rechecked connections to the supposedly broken LCD, and promptly had me turn it on. Which it did.

    So I said to him, "see, this is a working monitor. You can't give this to me for free." To which he said, "Yeah, you're right, Better take it back," which he did.

    As I was leaving the store the other guy said something along the lines of "you were so close to gold, you just had to ruin it."

    Oh well. To be honest, I felt a lot better leaving the store knowing that I didn't let that little man hose himself instead of leaving with a freaking sweet monitor. Stupid conscience. It's all a shame really. I was so close.

    So if any of you know where I can find a broken LCD (broken in the fact that the backlight is bad, as the plan is to replace it with an overhead projector), I'm in the market. I know, I know, Ebay. I distrust Ebay and their sneaky PayPal subsidiary, so I'm, well, hesitant.

    My sleeping schedule is rather lackluster. I mentioned I was up until 4:30 am rather frequently Monday nights in a shorter post, and this indeed has not changed. In fact, I didn't get to sleep last night until 7 am. I have a tendency to procrastinate on homework, and as my homework load has been changing from lots of little assignments to a few large assignments, I am finding that my ability to stay on top of them is less than I would like. People kept telling me this would hit me hard in middle school, and then high school, and now college, but I'm still staying afloat, if only barely.
    Obviously this has serious repercussions on my health. I woke up last Saturday incredibly sick; Sunday was horrible, and I still have a horrible cough. My family, specifically, my mom, has been very supportive in sending me things, but when it comes down to it I just need clean sheets and sleep. I plan to remedy both of these issues real soon now.

    The hurricane situation has, in the past, been quite heavy on my mind, so when I was offered the opportunity to go to Mississippi to do hurricane relief, I guess you wouldn't say I jumped at it, but I did sign up. I was pretty excited. If I had gone, I would be on a bus right now. Instead, after careful discussion and, apparently, some deliberation between very nice Campus Crusade members and, I take it, FEMA, it turns out that due to my possession of severe food allergies and Mississippi's currently lack of suitable, immediate health care, it seems too risky. I guess not everything can work out, right? I get the feeling this is working out for the best, but I can't place my finger on just how yet. Maybe I won't be there when Wilma hits and everyone going dies.
    </joke>
    That was a very poor joke. Uhhhh, yeah.

    Our University employs a system called "Grab 'n' Go" to distribute lunch to students who have class during one of the dining hall's lunch periods. Basically you sign up online the day before and tell them what you want and they have a sack lunch waiting for you the following morning. It's overpriced and gross, but I'm already paying for it. I've been growing increasingly fond of my sourdough and 1 slice of meat sandwiches. It's not so bad.
    However, the sign up process online is implemented very insecurely, and
    Update: That's actually just blatantly not true. I had a paragraph here about 'hacking' and some such, but I caution instead that one should always verify their claims in different conditions and situations before posting them on the internet. Bah. I was so excited, too.

    It also turns out that riding down stairs on a bike is not in the best interest of either you or the bike, regardless of how confident you feel you can accomplish doing so while standing and holding a racquetball racket. Needless to say, the bike landed on top of me, bent the handlebars somewhat awkwardly, and screwed up the gear shifter a little. I escaped with only a minor scrape on my arm and back. Wooo.

    I doubt Milon (highschool) reads this, but I just want to say that he's way awesome. I was talking to him at 2:30 in the morning (today? yesterday?) about topics I had no idea he was interested in and somehow missed during high school. I guess it's not a big deal, but it was just really cool, as he's a funny guy.

    I've developed a fascination for semicolons; semicolons are pretty dang awesome. I've been trying to use them properly in more situations, so if you find I've misused one or could have used one, let me know! I've just been really excited about them. Who knows why?

    Okay, so until next time I feel like updating, don't go changin'!]]>         <![CDATA[Long awaited update]]> JT Olds 1127458680 Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:58:00 +0000 While that is, largely, a valid reason for not having posted anything, the initial, and continued, intent of this newsletter is to let people know how things are going. And for my failure in that regard, I apologize.

    At this point, though it's more than a little pedantic to make a note of it half a month later and rather axiomatic, I did finally leave Utah for college. In fact, the elapsed time period is more correctly nailed down by two-thirds of a month, instead of a half. I got to Minneapolis on August 30th (Happy Birthday Dad!), after having had my flight cancelled and replaced by a much more suitable flight. I stayed in my office in the physics building yet again, but this time only for 2 days rather than 2 weeks. I did pretty much nothing, and then moved in to my dormitory that Thursday, 2 days later. To continue the pattern of 2s, this was 2 days before everyone else was allowed to move in.
    The reason for my early ability to move in was due to the fact that I was a member of a Middlebrook (my dorm) events planning council. My major duty was to run around and help freshman set up their computers (surprise). It was fun, and I got to meet a lot of people right off the bat.
    Because I had a key to my room, I let my roommate move in early, too. So we had a head start on our neighbors to get our room set up. In fact, I have friends in high places, or just awesome friends, and we got our bed bunked another two days early.

    I pretty much didn't do any homework for the next two weeks (there were exceptions).

    The following is a pretty segmented collection of stories.

    Instead, I've played racquetball every other freaking day or so. In fact, John and I have decided to found, apparently, the only University of Minnesota racquetball club. We have yet to write a constitution, but with our current rate of racquetball every other freaking day, and lots of expressed interest, we should be good to go. We are planning a ladder and maybe some tournaments. Woo woo.

    After two weeks, the homework caught up to me and I spent a few nights up until 4:30. No big deal though, a little nap, a little racquetball, and it was all better.

    I'm also pretty sure I'm going to join the Solar Car project. I've already attended the first meeting.

    We have a SNES and a Sega Genesis set up that have been on pretty consistently. Mario seems to be the favorite, though I've been a pretty big fan of Ecco the Dolphin. I'm super far in it.

    I initially had signed up for 20 credits this semester, 8 of which were 2 5000-level math classes, one of them an honors topics class. However, due to the fact that I don't plan to actually major in mathematics, and this topics course, since it is a topics course and follows whatever the instructor fancies, doesn't help me at all, I dropped it and picked up weight training instead. We'll see how that goes.
    But with the combination of that, my bike, racquetball, and random ultimate frisbee games, I should be in incredible shape by the end of the year. I've been biking everywhere, in fact, I followed traffic downtown after a party on frat row I attended (I'm being misleading. It was a Campus Crusade party), just on a whim. I stopped at an Irish pub I know (Kieran's) that features live, outdoor Irish music, and listened for a while. I then just biked around downtown Minneapolis, got yelled at by a cop for riding on the sidewalk a short distance, hung out in Barnes and Noble until I realized I didn't have a great way of getting anything I purchased back, etc. Fun times.

    Yesterday, Nick (not of the Halden variety, obviously) and I were trying to figure out where this huge university (second largest in the nation) dumps all of their partially and completely broken stuff, for example, computer components. They have to dump it somewhere. So I called the techmart that sells refurbished computers and asked them. They said there was a recycling plant on Como Avenue that sometimes lets the public in. We tried to find it by taking a secret ninja way through a grainery or something, and over a train track switch yard, and we did indeed find it, but it was closed. Shame. However, we also found a "Reuse" warehouse that was open today. Apparently starting at 8 am they were having a huge 25$/bike flat rate sale of confiscated bikes. They seem to claim they are open every Thursday to the public, and by the time we got there at 5 pm, it looked like every single bike was still there. Some of them were really nice. There had to be at least 200 or so. I plan to coax Will into driving us there next week. Not only did they have bikes, but they had like, 500+ chairs and sofas, desks, shelves, cabinets, projectors. computer components, microfilm readers, a copy of dBase, unopened, for DOS, microwaves, TVs, and tons of other crap. All for incredibly cheap. Like, 9 dollars for most chairs. It was amazing. I didn't get anything as I was again frustrated by having an inability to transport large objects on my bicycle. It was probably 5 miles or so away, so not too bad, but still.

    Luckily, I didn't die. This usually isn't even a concern, but I had just received a Meningitis shot, so adverse reaction was possible.

    Speaking of projectors, John has been trying to put together a projector of sorts. I'm currently looking at parts of an LCD screen he ordered from eBay, but alas, this hasn't panned out as smoothly as had been hoped. The grand scheme is to eventually build some basic surround sound system along with this projector, set up a multimedia box, and project DVDs and video games on our wall. It should be good times. If I understand right, John said he was considering ordering, I think, his third defective LCD to see if it worked right.

    Once this projector is finished, and Dr. Mario for SNES arrives in the mail, my productivity will probably drop more. Actually that's not true. That won't wait for the projector. Once Dr. Mario gets here, my productivity will drop more. Actually, I've been quite productive, frankly. I'm not concerned. With the frenetic (oh how I love that word) combination of my Electrical Engineering classes, Complex Analysis, Honors Physics 3, which is currently focusing on Special Relativity, and I'm relatively quite confused as my confusion approaches the speed of light, my job, Solar Car, Racquetball club, Campus Crusade (I think I'm going to start going to their Servant Team meetings, and go to the Fall Retreat), this concert I'm apparently going to tomorrow, random runs to the Rec and McDonalds with John at 1 am, Bible study (which we're reading a book now, which I think is good), church, Vespers (which is awesome. 2000+ student worship service at Bethel University every Sunday night), websites I'm (still) working on, and various other projects, I have my hands quite full.

    In case anyone's curious, I have my most recent weekly schedule I've typed up here: http://jtolds.xnet5.com/schedule/
    This is actually quite accurate, as since I can't even remember my own schedule, I have to check it (and update it) rather frequently.

    That was a very hand-wavy and sort of surfacy entry. I could delve into a lot of aspects of this post. If you want more info about any of it, please ask (really, like, really), but I had to catch up with a very substantial 2/3rds of a month of not updating.
    I need to decide if I'm going to go hear Kip Thorne speak in person by, oh, today now. Hmmm. I'm still so unsure about what I want to do. I would have to skip some substantial class time.

    I have to say that Switchfoot's new CDAwesome is really good, even if it is more Coldplay-style. Apparently that musical style sells well. Make sure you read this message from the lead singer before you try to pop it into your Windows based computer though. Click here for some extra information.

    Eat at Joe's.]]>         <![CDATA[Trip to bear lake]]> JT Olds 1124773920 Tue, 23 Aug 2005 05:12:00 +0000
    When I was like, 3 or 4, I had never seen a pacifier before, so when I saw the neighbor girl who was younger than me sucking on one, I was incredibly confused as to where the apple juice was coming from. Because all little things like that contained apple juice. My baby bottle had apple juice.
    So the question I had to figure out was where the apple juice was coming from. I immediately decided that it couldn't just be spontaneously appearing in the pacifier, as that was impossible. But then I started to think about where apple juice comes from usually, and it occurred to me that since apple juice came from apples in apple trees, perhaps if the entire world were to suddenly start just making apple juice 24/7, the world would have a net export of apple juice. It sounded plausable, and so I decided that maybe this pacifier had a little planet in it on which all the little people who lived there had the solitary goal of creating apple juice. But then I realized that was unfair to those little people, as they would probably want to do other things, and have fun. That and there would need to be people making them food, and there would also need to be a sun in there to give the little apple trees light, etc. At about that point I gave up and decided I didn't understand how the mysterious pacifier worked.

    I remember this chain of thought quite vividly.

    Last weekend I went with my family to Bear Lake. Pretty freaking awesome time, I have to say.
    Though, the trip up I got confused about my dad's directions, and ended up quite surprised when I found myself in Preston Idaho.
    It wasn't all for waste though. My indication that I was in fact, in Preston, where, incidentally, they filmed Napoleon Dynamite, was when I saw the gas station from one of the Napoleon Dynamite deleted scenes. There it was. La Tienda! Or whatever. So I turned around.

    I ended up driving back down with not only a bike in my car, but a windsurfer, extra tanness, extra sand, and less tiredness. I'm going to miss my awesome car. I guess technically it's a minivan, but it's so much more useful than most cars.

    With compliments to [info]laguna72, it would be funny if someone came up with some way of having quantum slacks. They could have 4 states. On, off, both, or neither.]]>         <![CDATA[At Least I Have Chicken]]> JT Olds 1124176680 Tue, 16 Aug 2005 07:18:00 +0000 I think this is a pretty good plan. We should be able to pull it off this time.
    Uh, what do you think, Abdul? Can you give me a number crunch real quick?
    Uh, yeah, give me a sec. I'm comin' up with 32.33, uh, repeating of course, percentage of survival.
    Uh, that's a lot better than we usually do, uh.
    Alright, time's up, let's do this. LEEEEROOOY JEEENNNNNKINS!!!
    Just, oh, man. Cracks me up.

    Incidentally, I like saying the word subtle. I think about the 'b' the whole time.
    However, this has nothing to do with the following post.

    This morning, I declared war on my morning self. Outright war. Initially I had been trying to work with him to get to work on time, but after having failed to make it, save once or twice, this entire summer, I gave up on my nice, cooperative plans, and bought 7 more alarm clocks, in addition to the ones I have. However, one was DOA, so this increased my net alarm clock number by 6. They seem pretty crappy, but my hope is I have enough now I can spread them throughout the house, forcing me out of bed.

    I do not think this is overkill, as the cashier at the store seemed to indicate by her inability to believe me that I was really buying all of them for me for this coming morning, since when I arrived at work today, my boss looked at the clock and said "I win." I requested to know if they had been placing bets, to which I received a chuckle and silence.

    That is bad. Very bad. Especially when my average lateness time is by 45 minutes. Exceedingly, embarrassingly, horribly bad. I completely understand all the implications, which makes it worse in that because I understand and have continued to be late, it makes it seem as though I don't care, which I do very much.
    So I'm going to give this a better shot. Wish me luck tomorrow morning.
    Update: Score! Only 2 minutes late! That's 43 less than usual! My poor dog was really confused though.

    In other news (requested story), I recently developed the idea that since I'm driving my minivan so much, I could probably save a lot on gas by taking out all the seats. This seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, even though my dad expressed great incredulity. Due to said incredulity, I developed an experiment to see if I was right in my gas saving silliness. I took the seats out, filled the tank, and zeroed a mileage meter. When I was out of gas I filled it up again, wrote down how much I put in, wrote down what the mileage meter said, and zeroed it again. I did this twice without the seats and twice with.
    Without the seats my gas mileage averaged at 20.1, with little to no deviation. With seats my gas mileage was consistently higher, so this indicates either seats increase gas mileage, which I doubt, or that the granularity of the experiment can not account for my seats. I suspect the latter, but do not plan to do more tests. Had it been an improvement I thought I was looking for, I would have seen it.

    I've recently been pulling out things that used to define me when I was much, much younger, and have reacquainted myself with them. Notably, Benny Goodman Swing music, Carman music (this makes me laugh), the Animaniacs, the Rescue Rangers, and as always, Dr. Mario.
    I bring up Dr. Mario specifically (though you already know I am thoroughly enthralled) only to mention that recently I beat level 20 on high speed, and can now do it relatively consistently. My Nintendo 64 version unlocked a level 21, which I beat first time I played, as well as level 22, and by level 23 I made one mistake and the pieces stacked up so fast I didn't have a chance. I love that game. I'm working on a network Dr. Mario system, and though I probably would never get around to it, if I can't get network support in an emulator working, I think I shall program Dr. Mario myself with a network layer.

    The job is awesome. We release 'the product' soon. Keep your eyes on http://www.mozy.com/ (mid-september).

    The band rocks. http://www.jeremiahsfire.com/

    Online biblestudy is continuing to go well. http://biblestudy.xnet5.com/

    I had a dream last night in which some faceless girl of, I suspect my future or something, took my hand and walked around for a day with me, just holding my hand. My heart was fluttering the whole time, in a middle-school-crush-that-is-working-out sort of way, even though I never would know what a middle-school-crush-working-out would feel like. Regardless, I woke up missing that feeling so much. I haven't had that feeling in a really long time.

    So hey, also, good news, guess who's not depressed at all? Yeah, not Strong Sad. I found his blog. Strong Sad has a blog. It's hilarious. It's here: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sadjournal/

    Todo list
    #include "todolist.h" //from last post, though ideally i should move up buying a plane ticket and selling my car on the priority list. The end of the summer is coming up soon. Oh, and the Apple 2 menu program I'm writing needs to be freaking close to the top, if not the very top.]]>         <![CDATA[Show-ahhhh]]> JT Olds 1116863640 Mon, 23 May 2005 15:54:00 +0000
    Because of this, I have had many fine people offer their showers nearby. Which rocks. However, today I decided I would probably not make it that far (to any nearby apartments with showers) but that I still needed one.

    As I've mentioned before, there is a shower in the basement of this here building. It's, uh, well, more of a chemical shower, see. I figured, if there was a way I could just... not... touch... anything and let the shower run for a while first I would probably live. But again, it's in the basement, and people work here during the week.

    I woke up at 6:30 to use said facilities. And it wasn't bad. The first thing that made me laugh was the fact that the shower head was wet, and there was a bottle of Head and Shoulders brand shampoo sitting on the wall of the shower. So, at least I wasn't the only one, right?
    There also was a hook on the wall to hang stuff even. Took me a while to find though.

    It must be said that the water smelled sorta funny, and the hot water was at the very most warm.
    I would have also liked to know that there was, in fact, no one sitting in the stall next to the shower flushing every five minutes, but that is something the toilets do automatically.

    The cleanest part of the bathroom happened to be the very middle, as it was farthest away from the walls. This is where I elected to get dressed.
    Which, I must say, made things rather awkward and difficult to explain when a noted professor wearing funny looking goggles wandered in. I decided that instead of explaining, I would let the, ahem, bathroom apparel (read: hastily drawn towel and wet flip flops which just happened to save my life), and the assorted toiletries which seemed quite strewn about speak for themselves. As far as any sort of spoken communication goes, he did nothing more than return my "hi."

    So, successfully clean. w00t. And I didn't have to walk to the Rec. It really wasn't all that bad. Now, if I can only go to bed at a reasonable time I could make this a morning habit.

    I saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie again. It's great. Go see it. Poor Laurel must think I'm nuts. I laughed through the whole thing. Again.
    I must say I'm slightly biased in my opinion of this, as I have been waiting for that movie since fourth grade, but even so, great movie.

    If you've seen it, all I have to say is the following thing:

    Oh man, makes me laugh every single time.]]>