tbradshaw.net

So I’m come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be able to go back to a weekend and properly blog the events. I was so close twice now with last Thursday, but then I lost the huge blog posts twice now. I’m just going to call it a loss and move on. Instead, here’s a quick summary of last weekend. A summary, of course, doesn’t do that monster of a weekend justice, but whatever.

Thursday was an interesting night. We were planning on having White Trash Bash (one of our signature parties) last weekend, but postponed it because JD wasn’t going to be available. Of course we decided that we should probably still have some kind of festivities over the weekend, since a lot of people had made plans to come over. The problem, was that we had no idea how much beer was still in the keg. And the easiest way to figure out how much beer is in a keg? Yeah, that’s right… drink it.

Surprisingly enough, the keg on Thursday tapped at like 10:53pm and Pat and I took an amazing trip to get a new keg that was acquired in less than five minutes. We’re talking like mission impossible type amazing. The night was slow at first on Thursday, and then picked up with several teams of beer pong athletes going the long haul, with Pat and Jake going a stunning 6 games in a row.

Friday night was rescheduled from the get-go to be a beer pong night, and sure enough it was. Forrest and I went an unprecedented 10 consecutive games in a row. It was a stunning undefeated showing by Forrest and myself. Friday night also marked several firsts for The Bunker. It was the first night that we had an undefeated team go all night at beer pong and it was also the first night that we had body shots on the bar. Another one of those cool “oh we should do that in college stories” come to fruition as the idea of body shots on the bar becomes a reality. It was a pretty good night, one that lasted until almost 4:30am.

Saturday morning began bright and early at 8:00am, as I had again volunteered for ground crew with the Big Cats before the Nebraska game. It was another success for the Big Cats, and the first time that I had seen big Dave Plumb in action up on the stilts. He was a little hungover (understandably), and had a little trouble getting into it. But that happens to the best of them. Lauren was waaay on, making like 20 yards sucker tosses with ease and really working the crowd. I also heard good things from the big cats on the other side of the stadium, but I didn’t witness it to see it myself.

Saturday afternoon was a little awkward, but began a very cool Saturday night. I decided to head to Salina and then Hays with Lauren. We stopped in Salina to visit Mrs. Hatfield, where I was able to check out the Bunker Tub to-be. This hot tub we are purchasing this weekend is going to be large and in charge, and I was very pleased to find out that it was in such good shape. It’s going to be very nice. I also had a chance to play with George Henry a while, Lauren’s dog. That was fun too.

After a little unsuccessful stop for frozen pizza, we headed of to Hays. There were a couple cool things in Hays. First, Lauren’s brother Tom lives and attends in Hays, whose a very cool guy. Second, the TigerLAN was being held that weekend.

TigerLAN is a pretty cool mid-sized lan that is held at Fort Hays, and co-founded by Tom, Lauren’s brother. I hadn’t been to a LAN party in ages that I didn’t volunteer to work, and I was really looking forward to checking out the TigerLAN. It turned out to be well worth the time. After a nice dinner at Applebee’s (that I still owe Lauren like 10 bucks for), Lauren went off to party with Liz, an old friend from high school, while Tom, Steve, and I went back to TigerLAN to game it up.

I was unable to keep from volunteering my services, so I was happy to get a Quake 3: Arena server up and running so that we could play a Quake 3 tournament around 1:00am. Much to my huge surprise, I was really able to hold my own Quakin’ against all of the gamers there at TigerLAN (that wanted to play Quake). The tournament server was a FFA on q3dm17 (yeah, I know… crazy), and I came in second to another player. But, as soon as the tournament was over I asked him if he’d like to 1v1 for bragging rights. I came away the clear winner. (He really wasn’t a Quake player, so it was really unbalanced. I’m certain that if he knew the maps and could time the armor and mega like I was, he would have won by a long shot.) But “would have”’s aside, it was fun and I felt pretty good knowing I had “won” Quake 3 for the night.

After that tournament, I felt that I had accomplished what I wanted to at the LAN party, thanks in whole to a ton of generosity by Tom. He let me use his computer to play, didn’t charge me entry to the LAN, and even gave me a bottle of bawls. (I would have happily bought it myself, but I had no cash.) I was ready to hitch a quick ride home and go to sleep, when Lauren stumbled in to see what was going on and report on her night of festivities. She had been having a great time wandering around Hays with her friend Liz, and was ready to drag me along for a little longer. Which, of course, was fine by me. We meandered around a while, had a few beers, confirmed that the house parties had died down, had a few more beers, and chatted around with Alex (Tom’s roommate) before hitting the sack. Everyone I met in Hays was great fun and very nice.

As most people around me know, I’ve been having the worse series of bad coincidences one could imagine recently, and this vacation from Manhattan to have fun in Hays was the best day I had in a long time. At the end it got a little confusing, but… eh… whatcha gonna to do. Just wait around I guess.

Sunday was equally busy, with a travel home followed by a one hour “one man army” edition of Freedom to Choose on the the Wildcat 91.9. I was pretty worried about the show, but it turned out to be a pretty damn good show. It was certainly different not having the conversational dynamic, but it was good.

So, that’s the weekend in a super summary. I had to get this one out, because I’ve been blocked with tons of other stuff to blog about.

Wow.

I just don’t know what to think. I haven’t been blogging about my laptop scenario for quite some time now, mainly because it was just too frustrating to put down into words.

Over two months ago, my “new” PowerBook kicked the bucket. It appeared that I had dropped it a few too many times, and there just wasn’t any sign of life. The immediate tragedy was that I had math510 homework on the computer still that I needed off by the very next day.

I immediately give AppleCare a call to start the process of getting things fixed and another problem surfaces. It appears that somehow my AppleCare Extended Warrantee has disappeared. By disappeared, I mean that the tech support people get some bizarre “Obsolete” error message when they check my AppleCare warrantee information and not a single one of the tech support personel I talked to had every seen that message, or knew what it meant.

So rather than end up talking to a support personel qualified to get my homework for me, I end up chatting with someone from the administrative office about my warrantee actually existing. She’s helpful and nice, and after somem realization that I hadn’t actually gotten any support yet, writes me a one-time exemption to get AppleCare level support.

After talking with the support personel for quite some time and getting stumped, we hit a dead end. Not only does the tech support guy not know what to try next, he would normally bring it in for service. But without a “real” AppleCare warrantee, that wasn’t really an option. Then, in a stroke of “luck” (I guess), the computer decides to work for a second. I get my homework off of it, the tech support guy thinks he’s fixed it (I know he hasn’t), and I’m done for the moment. Though, the second I unplug the computer from AC power, it buzzes out and is down for the count.

“Eh, at least I got my homework off of it for now,” I think, “I’ll just hit them up later after they have the AppleCare warrantee stuff worked out.

Several weeks go by, and no resolution. So finally things get rolling after a couple calls and about three weeks or so, and they agree to send me a box to ship it back to them. Of course, with the warning that if there is accidental damage, they would be calling me for a ‘requote’. (Which, in laymen’s terms, means that instead of free services, you’re going to be paying for the service.) I was definitely nervous, because I knew that the laptop had accidental damage… I just didn’t know if it was my damage that was causing the problem.

After another several weeks, I send off the laptop via DHL back to Apple land, so that it can be worked on. A few days later, I get the ‘requote’ call. It seems that they had noticed that the little do-hickey that makes the ethernet cable ‘click’ was busted. They said that this would void the warrantee on the logic board, and that my total comes to $980.

$980!!! That was only four hundred dollars less than I paid for the damn thing new! I was stunned. Surely they could at least give me a better excuse for soaking every dollar I (didn’t) have. So I call them up, to explain that the little plastic clippy thingie was the only think broken on the network port, it had happened like the second week I had the laptop, and that the port worked just fine! Well, then they mention that the case was a little beat in on one side… and I couldn’t really say much to that, because it was.

So I give up, and I try to see if I can get some kind of cash together to pay for the repairs. But unfortunately, thanks to financial aid oversights, that wasn’t possible. They send back the laptop, completely unrepaired.

Or at least, that’s what they think! I’m actually sitting on the laptop right now, typing in this very blog entry. How? I don’t have a freaking clue! But I do have a hypothesis:

The problems that I was having with my laptop before it was sent in were most certainly hardware related. Almost like it was shorting out in certain circumstances. In fact, it was very very sensitive to physical movement and that would be the most immediate trigger for failure.

CD’s would go into the drive, and would end up spit back out. It was like there was something in the way.

It seems to me, that there might have been some “free radicals” in the laptop, busted a little loose from my constant usage and beatings of my laptop.

Could it be? When they disassembled my laptop to determine the problem, cleaned things up, and reassembled it, that they inadvertently fixed the problem?

Well, I don’t really know! But time will certainly tell. As of right now, I have my laptop back… and I caught myself actually smiling for many consecutive minutes. Something that hasn’t happened consistently since I was in Hays last Saturday (Yeah, I realize I haven’t blogged about any of that stuff yet… but this just couldn’t wait) or chatting and eating with Mo.

Everyone cross their fingers for me, I could use all the luck I can get.

Man, I am really tired of losing blogs to stupid crap. I just got bit by the session timed out crap again. I had a nice blog post for the Thursday night shinanigans in the prerequisite “good mood” type prose that’s been so hard to muster lately when I clicked “submit”.

I was rewarded with “Access Denied”. My session had timed out and therefore I was no longer authenticated to post content. “Well shit,” one thinks, “I better not lose that entry.” So I click “back” to retrieve my data and then firefox reloads the page and I am again greeted with “Access Denied”. All that effort, gone in one swoop. Which, all things considered, is exactly how I expect things to work lately. But that’s neither here nor there.

What I really want to do is write an application that will make blogging the experience that I think it should be. Like typing into a word processor and then self-publishing your work. The ability to save drafts, frequent preventative quick-saves, spell check, crap like that. Maybe even syntax highlighting for html!

I really think that this would be a kick ass application, and I really really want to write it (no doubt in python/gtk)… but I don’t know if I can really expect myself to find the time to do yet another project. Things already suck enough.

This weekend was amazingly long. With a total number of sleeping hours coming in at under 5 for the duration of the weekend, it really feels like it was an entire week that occured in just three days… well, four if you count Thursday festivities.

As such, I’ve actually started to blog the weekend several times now, but every time I’ve tried it’s ended up being like some kind of disjoint collection of stories posing as a novel. There was a lot to cover, a lot happened, but turns into more like a mini journal or blog of it’s own instead of being the normally digestible chunks that I like to put into my blog. It was especially bad, because after I was done with the weekend, I was so exhausted that it was difficult for me to get as energetic about the weekend as certain points of the weekend really desearved.

So once again, I find myself “back blogging” about the weekend, trying to make up for lost time and ideas that are probably getting less and less fresh in my head with every passing day. I expect that the next several posts will be about this previous weekend, broken up into little chunks.

The first draft of the Bunker Beer Pong Manual is now online! This is the source for our own beer pong rules, alternate rules, highlights/records, and more!

This is the first draft, so feel free to suggest improvements to the Bunker Beer Pong Manual, as it no doubt needs a lot of TLC. Especially with grammar and spelling.

This weekend we had one of the Signature Parties scheduled, the White Trash Bash. In fact, this weekend had been transformed into White Trash Weekend, due to scheduling conflicts with Bunker residents and important guests.

Well things have changed. Unfortunately, our roommate JD has had a death in the family and has left for several days to Illinois to be with his family during this time of loss. We just don’t have the heart to have White Trash Bash without the one and only JD Hillen sporting the infamous mullet.

As such, White Trash Weekend has been postponed, pending rescheduling and JD’s safe return.

However, if you’re still wanting to come to the Bunker this weekend, we’re going to turn this White Trash weekend into another crazy night(s) of Beer Pong! We’ve got a fresh keg of Bud Light that was amazingly aquired last night, and we should be good for a good long night of beer pong.

As always, you’ll need to be invited by someone, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you’re reading this.

Quite some time ago, when I first launched tbradshaw.net, I had made a decision. It was better to have something up, than nothing up. And it was better to start building content now, then waiting until all of the details were perfect before building content.

I have reconsidered those conclusions and I still think they are a good idea. So, here is The Bunker, raw and unprepared. Hopefully the content will start building, and soon we’ll start working out the details.

Until then, I think that this is better than nothing.

The vast majority of my time here in the office has been spent looking at the possibility of reimplemention of “roaming profiles” for our department. Though, originally, that wasn’t what I was looking for at all. This process began quite some time ago with a reevaluation of the working environment in the CIS main office.

Generally speaking, the computer systems here at CIS have been specifically designed around the needs of the research professional, followed by the needs of instructors. As such, previous systems administrators have done an admirable job bending the systems design to work for the office staff that provide the day to day logistical functions of the depertment. However, the stress marks were very apparent.

After careful consideration, (which I am becoming infamous for), I decided and then proposed that we begin to migrate the CIS office away from the traditional computer science systems and to a more homogeneous environment that would best cater to the needs of the office staff. Generally speaking, it was time to move to a completely Microsoft environment for the office personel. While I’m not a huge fan of end-to-end Microsoft solutions, it just doesn’t make sense to pretend like that’s not the solution that the office staff need. The already currently do 80% of all work in the Microsoft Office line of products, and the fast majority of their support needs are also tweaks necessary for traditional Microsoft file and print sharing, etc.

The proposal to move the office staff away from our Linux/Solaris/Windows environment was very well recepted by the rest of the systems staff, and we purchased a dedicated Windows file server, reagan.w2k.cis.ksu.edu, to host the files for the office personel.

One of the needs of the office staff is the ability to work on multiple computers with the exact same environment. While most of the office staff are professionals with their own dedicated workstations, a number of student office assistants are used that occupy between one and three computers in the front of the office. These students roam frequently in a first come, first served kind of way.

The office staff were also ready for new workstations. Most of the computers up there are pretty damned dated, and I’m certain that productivity increases from workstation responsiveness are going to be significant. (As long as the software changes don’t catch them up, that is.)

So in order to facilitate both the needs of the office assistants to be able to roam and make the transition from old workstations to new workstations as painless as possible, I decided that the best course of action would be to move all of the office staff to roaming profiles.

That research has led me to some rather exciting conclusions about the ability of roaming profiles to increase the useability and availability of our Windows systems. But alas, I’m out of time to complete that thought. So instead I’ll conclude in a different way, I think that roaming profiles are definitely going to be returning to our department and in a big way. I’ll follow up with how and why in a follow up post.

Okay, so maybe there’s one thing that I hadn’t considered when it came to using Gnome. More cool geek toys!

I’m making this very post with a blogging gnome-panel widget that was begotten from the gnome-blog package in gentoo’s portage tree. Very cool!

There’s just this really simple button on my panel that says, “Blog”. And when I click on it, I get this nice little pop up box from the panel with a Title box, a big box for the entry, nice little bold, italic, and hyperlink buttons, and a post entry button.

In fact, if this post works, you can color me seriously impressed. Both with the nice bloggerAPI support in drupal and with gnome’s apparent savviness. (Aside… I just minimized this window and brought it back and it kept my post… hot shit!)

I think I might have to play with the gnome bluetooth stuff next, it seems to be pretty far ahead of what I played with in KDE.

Update: It looks like it puts the title as the first line of the body… eh… easy to fix. It appears to be written in python, hells yes! However, it doesn’t let me pick topics… and that might actually suck. We’ll see.

Drupal has released version 4.5.0 of their content management system and I think I’m quite impressed.

The most immediate change to www.tbradshaw.net is the new theme, which is a snazzy bit of sugar that was added to the new version. However, some other really cool items have been added that I’ve been waiting for for quite some time. The big winners for me were:

• Document/Image Uploads - Uploading was kind of goofy before, it looks to be pretty slick now.
• Node level user permissions - OMG! HUGE! It boggled my mind that there was no way to make any specific permissions for areas of the website that I might not want to be completely public, or might want to give edit rights to someone without giving edit rights to everyone. Big deal, awesome result.
• Theme System Improvements - The theme system is okay, but needed some work. It’s good to see a little more work done on it. I’m certain that I’ll end up doing some custom theming sometime soon, so any bit of progress helps.
• Anonymous Comments - I don’t know exactly what changed with anonymous comments, but it was a pain before. I’m glad they worked on this one too.

I think this is a great sign. After Movable Type changed their model to remove the free version of their software, it appeared that there was a huge influx of users and developers to other blogging and content management software. I’m really pleased to see that this has affected drupal in a good way. The more progress made by great free (as in speech) software, the better.

Good work!

The math assignment that was due this week wasn’t too rough. It took much less time than usual, and even made sense. Still, it was a little time consuming. I probably put about eight or nine hours into the homework assignment, with straight time at around 6 hours or so.

(As an aside, I always quote my time like that and it may be confusing. What I mean is that I was working on math for about eight or nine hours of time that I would have done something else. But because it’s so painful, I do a little bit of goofing off in between, lowering the actual amount of time spent hard-ass working on math to some lower number from a decrease (albiet very necessary) in efficiency. I call this straight time. I probably worked on math and nothing else at all for 6 hours, while I lost 9 hours of my life).

I spent a significant amount of time this week in the library, working on a laptop with a study buddy (probably the only thing good that has ever came of doing my math homework). So when it came time to print my homework, I immediately opened up the laptop, grabbed all of the files for my math homework, and copied them over to my workstation. It made sense at the time.

But unfortunately it was the absolutely completely fucking wrong thing to do. See, the version of my math homework on the laptop wasn’t the most recent. My laptop didn’t have the tools necessary to do latex, and so through the magic of X-forwarding, I had been working on my workstation instead… from the library… over the network.

So I had just copied over a week old version of the homework, right on top of the copy that I should have been printing.

poof. Homework gone. Another cute F on a homework assignment to match all of the others.

I am completely inflamed with self-hatred. With brazen ignorance I destroyed hours of work and time, for a class that has taught me how to dislike school for the first time in my life.

Before I slither away, some quick replies to helpful comments thus far, as to save time for any readers:

Do you have a backup?

Yes, Cole makes regular (nightly) backups of home directories in the CIS department, and offered to immediately attempt to recover the file. It was in my opinion that there was not enough time.

Can you hand it in late?

No. Dr. Lin carefully outlined a policy that does not include acceptance of late homework.

Did you ask him?

No. Dr. Lin is a very talented professor that has a mastery of the material, a command of the relevency of the material to Computer Science, delivers excellent lectures, and has provided additional out of class assistance to me already above and beyond the typical expectations of a collegiate professor. I refuse to waste the time of such a professor to make petty exceptions for my own complete ineptitude. I would consider it disrespectful to waste his time for a student that appears to be a certain failure in this class anyway, especially for an occation as obviously faulted as this.

“I would really suggest CVS or Subversion for text files like that.”

That is a really good suggestion. I will begin to commit my homework to a CVS repository very soon. This would certainly provide a good layer of protection from future idiocy like this.

I’m done.

While browsing around the web, I ran across this blog post that has tempted me to try out gnome again. It seems that there may be a lot of configuration options that are available but completely unexposed in the configuration UI.

Of course, the fact that something so “important” to me as strict mouse focus not being in any obvious configuration windows may be in and of itself a sign of Gnome diverging from what I want in a desktop environment. I’ve also been looking around today for focus stealing prevention… and it appears that there may not be focus stealing prevention in the works from metacity for a little while now. The code freeze for gnome 2.8 appears to have stalled the development of the focus stealing feature set while they work out more of the details.

This may very well be a show stopper to me, but there’s still a big pull to Gnome… simply because I really prefer GTK applications to QT applications, and I miss the integration. Sure sure, I run all of my GTK apps in KDE just fine, but I can’t really click a link and expect anything to happen unless I’m using some KPart or KDE specific application. And while most of the KApps are adequate… that’s just about all I can say.

So anyway, yeah… Gnome 2.8… I’m running it at home and at the office. We’ll see.

So this morning was a monster of a “bad morning”, but because I have a funny story that happened before I even knew it was going to be a bad day.

This morning, while I’m taking a shower… it decides that it’s going to completely fall apart! I kid you not. I have a relatively large shower that is bordered by a three piece sliding glass door. So I’m groggily washing my hair, when out of the corner of my eye I notice that the first two panels of the glass door aren’t actually completely touching at the seam.

“That’s bizzarre,” I think. So I try and go ahead to pull the second panel over and close the gap so that the bathroom doesn’t get soaked. It gives a little bit of struggle… then it comes completely off the track and starts to fall into the bathroom.

Holy crap! So here I am, soap in my hair, trying to dive out and grab this giant mirror of a door before it crashes into the sink and blows up into a bazillion peices. I briefly have images of Die Hard, where Bruce Willis has to walk across the broken glass with bare feet, and I’m thinking “NO WAY am I doing that.”

Then comes the second complication. I have an attrocious bathroom cleaning record this semester, and it has been way too long since I’ve last cleaned anything but the toilet bowl and sink in my bathroom. So suddenly I’m doing the “naked don’t step into anything gross” dance in the shower, while simultaneously trying to crap this careening mirror door.

I lurch forward in the most awkward of positions and manage to reach through the first and third glass panels to grab the falling mirror panel, but not before I manage to bump the first panel with my elbow on the way through. By some marvel of physics, the glass first panel bounces around in the track and starts falling in to the shower. I don’t really have to worry about it falling far and breaking, however, because it immediately crashes frame first into my face.

So for a moment, I just stand there like some goofy statue. One leg in the air, one arm stretch out of the shower holding the middle-mirror pane, a second glass panel resting on my shoulder, while water rains down on my one supporting leg and shampoo runs down my face and into my eye, and my mouth, because couldn’t help but laugh at my own awkwardness.

I managed in the next several minutes to reassemble the shower, at least enough that I could continue rinsing off and get back to the lathering. When I was finished, it was a little bit of a challenge to get back out… but still funny nonetheless.

This bit of completely awkward comedy was really just a clever ruse by circumstance, to make sure that I was completely unprepared for the brutal morning that was to continue… but for the moment, I was laughing pretty hard.

This morning began bright and early… actually, not bright and early, because the sun wasn’t up yet. But sometime around 6:00am, the morning began as I prepped for several hours of “ground crew” for the Kansas State Big Cats. In my typical “pose the topic–then provide back story manner”, the Big Cats are a rowdy bunch of stilt walkers (a division of the cheer squad) that “work the crowd” at K-State events, most specifically the pre-football game tailgater-filled parking lots. I was first introduced to this group through my roommates here at the Bunker, of which Dave is (now) the captain, Llama is a semi-active, and JD is an inactive.

I’ve been secretly harboring curiousity about the workings of this group, as I have been semi-sort-of helping them in “inaction” for a while now. Since Dave has quite a bit of leadership responsibilities (even more since yesterday), I’ve been as active in the behind-the-scenes decision making as was helpful. There had been some intra-athletic-department drama this year and I had kind of became a consultant of one kind of another as the group (specifically Dave) worked their way through the issues. Throughout this process, I had rarely even seen the Big Cats in action, nothing really more than the occation peek at them in the tailgating lots before the football games as I walked myself to the game.

So while Dave decided to sit out this game and utilize this weekend for an employment opportunity, it came up that I was asked to be ground crew and fill-in as a warm body. The task seemed reasonable: be the misc bitch for the Big Cats while they were on stilts… pick up things they’ve dropped, take pictures, hold things, etc. I didn’t realize at first it would be so early in the morning, but that’s just details really. Importantly, I’ve been wanting to see this group in action for a while now. Lauren has hinted a couple times that I should try walking on stilts sometime, and she has been very clever at putting the seeds of curiousity… my one true vice… in my head.

So, now with the completion of the back story, I’ll start on the morning’s events. I awoke at 6:15am or so, keenly aware that the garage here at the Bunker contained all of the stilts and Big Cat gear, that I didn’t know where they were meeting at 7:00am, and that even if I did know where they were meeting I didn’t have Dave’s parking pass and might not be able to get there anyway. So I got showered and then gave Lauren an early morning call to see what I should do. She was very helpful, and I found out that they always met at the parking lot right next to Nichols by the Student Union. So I loaded up all of the stilts and started to get ready to leave.

Before I got all of the stilts completely loaded up, Ben, one of the Big Cats and a frosh at Farm House, stops by with his truck, probably to pick up the stilts. Since I’ve already got most of them loaded, he snags the big rubbermaid tupperware of pants and tosses it into the back and I head to the Union (he goes to pick up Tyler, another Farm House Big Cat).

Arriving at 7:00am at the Union was somewhat interesting. Primarily because it seems that the Big Cats are habitually late. Lauren had already warned me that she and Gwen were going to be late because they were going to pick up candy at Wal-Mart before meeting at the Union (of course, somehow that make them 37 minutes late… buuuut anyway). Besides that, the group started trickling in and everyone was assembled by 7:37am and ready to head to the stadium. Since we only had one parking permit, this made for some immediately interesting situational comedy. Now 9 Big Cats, plus me, crammed into the extended cab of a relatively new ford truck to make the trip to the stadium.

It’s worth mentioning here, as an aside, that I was feeling very much like a fifth wheel at this point. More like a 10th wheel… actually… but equally insignficant. I really had no idea what I would be doing, or how I could help. The extent of my knowledge about the ground crew job was “pick up dropped things… catch a Big Cat if they fall”. And so far, I wasn’t needed for any of those tasks.

So we arrive at the building that contains the indoor practice field (yeah, I should know the name of it… but it escapes me… Brandenberry maybe?), and the Big Cats start going about their business about “getting up”. At first I did more standing around, eventually helping Gwen a bit with picking up items after she was “up” and unable to reach the ground anymore. Finally as the group started to really getting up in mass, I started to be useful. I tightened shoe straps, adjusted pant lengths, duct taped pants on, duct taped shoes in, filled bags with candy, found tools to adjust some stilts, readjusted pants, and all around got things ready to go. I was starting to feel pretty useful, and I think that the Big Cats appreciated me being there. Of course they could have done it themselves, but I think I helped at making things easier… and that’s what I was going for.

The Big Cats then took to the walking and headed around threw the Cat Town region of the West Lot and to business. This is the part when I throw in another aside. As an unfortunate coincidence, this was the last game/event that Kendal, aka “Boss”, was involved with the Big Cats. She has been leading the Big Cats through thick and thin for something like four years now (maybe more, I don’t know for sure), and the drama of this year (added with other things I’m sure) made it clear to her that it was time to step down. It was a pleasure to see “Boss” in action–and while I’m sad it was her last game–I’m elated that I was able to see her in her element. From my experiences in management at events like QuakeCon, it was immediately apparent the quality of leadership that Boss was able to provide to the team. Her understanding of the purpose and direction of the group, constantly aware of PR/Marketing issues (”Big Cat appropriate speech only please!”), keen path planning skills, and group control was superb. I’m under the impression that Dave is the new leader of the group, and I hope that he can fill those very big shoes. I’m even thinking that I might send a letter to the editor to the collegian tonight, see if maybe a little shout out would be appropriate. Anyway, while I doubt Kendal will ever read my blog, she definitely has my highest and most public respect for a job well done. I’m sure this hasn’t been easy.

So the Big Cats started making their rounds, going far and wide to participate in classic “hand shaking and baby kissing” fashion. I can definitely see where the appeal of being a Big Cat is. It’s like being the center of attention, where your sole job is to deliver suckers and smiles to kids, high fives and smiles to the adults, attention and smiles to the alumni. As a PR instrument, I don’t think there is any way how the athletic department realizes their effect in the parking lots before the football games. From weathly donors to casual tailgaters, the Big Cats give personal attention to fans who are typically far outside the huge machinery that is the Kansas State Athletic Deparment. Like politicians kissing babies makes regular people feel like they are part of the huge process of democracy, the Big Cats bring fans inside the Kansas State Athletic department, even if just for three minutes and a sucker.

Anyway, Big Cats, you kick ass. Thanks for letting me tag along for a game. Hopefully you’ll give me a chance to do it again, I’d even wake up at 5:00am for the chance.

P.S. I think this prose is pretty good. I think I’m going to go ahead and write the Collegian.

Well this totally sucks. I had just picked up Mo to head to the Copus concert in Kansas City, when Pat calls. It seems that there was a little bit of a misunderstanding about stage time, and instead of 45 minutes for each set, it’s only 25 minutes for each set. Which didn’t actually sink in for a second, until Pat made it clear to me, “Yeah dude, don’t bother. You won’t see us tonight. It’s not worth it.”

%$%!#@@#$%@#$!@#$%

Yeah, so I went and dropped Mo back off, and now I’m just sitting in front of my computer on a Friday night that was really going to kick ass… and then fell to crap.

Even better of course, is that now everyone I was going to hang out with is in Kansas City, and everyone that’s still in Manhattan has other plans. Not that I know a lot of people in town right now that I usually party with, anyway. Llama’s workin’, Lauren’s at a Barn Party (yeehaw?), and Mo said something about getting plowed with her roommates and hasn’t returned my text message.

So what does that leave Travis with? Well not a whole hell of a lot. So I think that Me, Myself, and I are going to drive my illegal Jeep down to Fast Eddy’s and play some eight ball. It’s pretty cheap to rent a table for just one stick.

I’m thumbing my nose at the establishment again. After parking my Jeep for like a month now, pending the resolution of my recent run in with the law, I’ve went and pulled it out of it’s parking spot. Yup, in spite of the fines that I’ve already accrued (which really weren’t that much… $10 + court fees), I’m at it again.

But this time I’m a little better prepared to skirt the law. Previously I had done just fine without a proper license plate/with an unregistered vehicle, because they only really check if you do something wrong. Well heck, I can drive just fine. Just avoiding speeding and not making any stupid mistakes was more than enough to participate safely in the traffic community. Unfortunately I was nailed for the littlest of things… I didn’t have my tag attached properly. I only had one screw in the plate and I just didn’t get around to fixing it. So, the officer saw it hanging… and decided to run it just for shits.

So now, I’ve got a firmly attached plate, and I’m looking as legal as legal can get (on surface inspection). I’m thinking that I’m golden, and have nothing to worry about. We’ll see…

Here lately things have been really tight around the pocket book, almost entirely due to financial aid worries. For just a little bit of brief backstory, I fell extremely ill in the Spring of 2003. The illness forced me out of classes and back to El Dorado, KS for 24 hour nursing care (from the one and only Nurse Mom, R.N.) and treatment in Wichita.

Consequentially, I did not complete the necessary number of hours that I had received financial aid awards for and eventually found myself on financial aid exclusion, an account status that prevents any further financial aid awards of any kind.

This put me in quite the pinch, as I had always budgeted for this final year of full financial aid provisions. (After this year I’m going to happily turn down any further loans, opting to pay for everything myself.) The solution to this was to file a Satisfactory Academic Progress Appeal with the Student Financial Aid office. I’ve mentioned some of this before..

Well, I called the Fin Aid office today, and found out that my appeal has been granted! I’ll be receiving an award letter in the mail soon listing my options for financial aid for the 2004-2005 year. I can’t wait. I’ve got a lot of high interest, non-deferred debt instruments that I need to get the hell out of my holdings and get back to “normal” life.

Of course, one catch is that I have to pass 12 hours with a 2.0 GPA this semester. The 2.0 GPA is nothing… but passing math510 is going to be a bitch. Ah well, just more motivation to throw my life away to the land of math homework from hell.

Wow. It’s just now turning 6:50am and the Bunker has been running cable since 10:30pm today… er… yesterday.

Over the fall break, I’ve been putting in as much work as possible on the network infrastructure and services for the Bunker as I could. After putting quite a bit of work onto tom and jerry (two of the servers that provide services for the Bunker), I came to the point that I needed to find a more permanent home for both of them.

This is where the major dilemma occurred. Our physical network infrastructure has been “on hold” indefinitely as we waited for our landlord to return acceptance of a written proposal we had sent him. While we didn’t actually get around to asking about the network infrastructure, it was only because we were still waiting for word back on quite simpiler things… like JD getting to paint his room before it drives him insane.

If there’s anything to be said about our landlord, it’s that it’s only the bare minimum, when he has to. So we gave up on him, and today we decided to just do it. And just do it we did.

I have spent the last four hours in a miserable insulation filled Hell. The attic above the Bunker is a little too “quaint” for my 6′4″ stature, and it only got worse hour after hour, wading around in insulation. I’d bitch about it more, but I’m seriously tired… and still need to be at work tomorrow. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Oh, and the last thing is the lesson of the story. Never go into an attic without a mask. I did this once… and I’ve never coughed and wheezed and puked more. Even though this last time was over four hours, I was still in tons better shape thanks to a two dollar mask from Wal-Mart.

I’ve recently enrolled in a fitness swimming class offered by the UFM. It’s 6:00pm to 7:30pm on Tuesday and Thursday nights at the Natatorium, and quite the workout.

The instructor (Carol I believe), is fantastic. She really knows her stuff, is very encouraging, and very patient. And with me, she needs to be. I’m in such horrible shape it’s embarrassing. I’ve always been a little weak since I was “taken out of commission” by illness in the spring semester of ‘03, but I really didn’t know how bad I had gotten. It seems that while I’ve been able to recouperate an okay portion of my strength during regularly day to day activities, the attributes of stamina and endurance haven’t been reintroduced in any way. It took me almost 15 minutes to swim a 500 (I would guess roughly double the time of the “swimmers” in the class), and I would place my departure time at like… oh… 1:45? Yeah… scary sad.

But I’m working at it. I’m hoping that a full semester of swimming will really help me regain a lot of the stamina and endurance that I used to have before that fateful semester of “rest”. The instructor is even doing extra sessions during the week to help the weaker swimmers That would be me.

I didn’t even notice at first. I’ve been chugging along pretty well for the last several days without even noticing the pressure, but I think it’s finally getting to me. I’ve found myself easily irritable in the last couple days and I’ve been getting into that slightly downtrodden funk. It’s annoying.

Most of the stress causing agents that I have right now really just need time to work themselves out. Issues with finances, student financial aid, combinatorics, tickets/fines, transportation (0/2 vehicles available… woohoo!), finances, hunger, clarity, and other stuff I don’t blog about… they all are just “pending” on other things to happen. I think that’s what gets me… “pending”. I’ve let things pile up a bit with delays, and now that everything has reached a head, I’m stuck holding the hot iron and restless nights. To risk being repeatitive… it’s annoying.

Though, at least things are moving along. I’ve filed my Student Academic Progress Appeal with Student Financial Aid explaining the medical situation that caused my recent exclusion from financial aid. Cindy Forgie wrote me an amazingly complimentary advisor statement for the appeal process (thank you!), and the financial aid counselor I spoke with before turning in the appeal seemed to think that I “had nothing to worry about”. Now if I could just stop worrying.

After reading my blog regarding the ticket situation and my illegal tags, my mom immediately sprung into action to aquire me a new title for my Jeep. My mom is just amazing like that, and I guess has things rolling towards a new title already. But now we’re just waiting on a title to hit her P.O. Box. It’s far enough behind schedule, that I imagine there will be complications soon.

The majority of the rest of my financial problems are pending the financial aid appeal process… if that turns out okay, everything else money-wise will fall into place. (I was budgeting that money all along, so it’s very much like “the missing piece”.) I can’t wait to start eating two or three times a day again.

So, that just leaves me… waiting. I had some pretty cool weekend plans that ended up being scheduled for me… but they were cancelled today due to external circumstances. Too bad though, I’ve heard that Oktoberfest in Hays is a lot of fun.

In the meantime, today, I’ve cleaned a bit on my office at work. While I was cleaning, I found the little Zen Garden that was left here by a previous employee. Yeah, sure enough, I found myself “soothing the spirit with sand and stone”. I probably blew a good 25 minutes sculpting my garden… and surprisingly enough, I think it might have worked a little bit. I did a very minimalistic design, with a smooth sand bed and careful geometric placement of the rocks all to one side (except for one small stone). It makes it so the blank sand is really emphasized, and then there’s that one small stone, asymetrically over the right. It looks like that Art Appreciation class was really good for something after all.

Next up, I just finished actualizing my frustrations into this blog (mildly theraputic as well) and then it’s time for the last recourse of frustration… physical exhaustion. I’ll be hitting the natatorium at 6pm for a heavy dose of swimming guided by the amazingly knowledgable instructor of Fitness Swimming from the UFM. I think I’ll swim until I can’t feel anything. That would be super. And after that, if the mood hits (and there’s no calls from that crush), it’s $1 night as Rusty’s.

Anyway, I need to split to get to the pool.