Roofing, Yum

So, over the weekend, I helped my dad install roofing shingles on my Grandmother’s house (I’ll continue tomorrow afternoon after classes, too =/).

If that shit doesn’t make you want to ensure that you get a college education, I don’t what will.

Daytrip

Saturday (I would say yesterday, but because of a silly Philosophy paper, it’s Monday now =P), I took a little trip to Starkville, Mississippi with three of my friends. You may be wondering at this point, “Why?”, and I’ll tell you, friend: a Quiz Bowl tournament. Yes, my good fellows, due to the hard work of certain individuals, the University of Central Arkansas now has a team of people gathered together for the purpose of academic competition.

On this particular Saturday, Mississippi State University was hosting a tournament, and we were scheduled to compete. (Side note: the MSU campus is awesome. It’s big and seems like one of those places that’s just been there forever) Seven teams were in attendance, and a round-robin style bracket was had. In the end, we got fourth place, but we did really well. We averaged around 210 points a game. However, it was somewhat bittersweet, as we lost three (out of nine [not completely sure there]) games within 20 points (in the NAQT-style format that we were playing, each question is worth ten points, and if you answer correctly, you get “bonus” questions which are worth 30 points in total. You also get counted off five points if you buzz in before the question is finished with an incorrect answer). It was still really fun, though, and I think we did quite well considering that this is only our second tourney.

There’s one more thing I must mention. If you’re ever in Starkville, you have to eat at a restaurant called “Harvey’s” and hope that they have the Jamaican Jerk Tilapia Lunch Special going on that day. It is to die for. A mouthgasm, if you will.

Oh, one more thing. One of the people on the trip is a magician with music. He called up “Sweet Home Alabama” when someone said they wanted something classical rock, he found Rick Astley, Jewel, and Matisyahu on Sirius sattelite radio, among other things. ‘Twas epic.

Does This Mean I’m Bored?

Yes, very yes.

I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes or so importing all the old entries I made from various old blogs I kept (and by various, I mean my old WordPress.com blog and my Xanga). It was really rather easy once I got everything working, and now I have all my internet writings compacted into one place.

If you wanna go back and see some of the entries I made in my long-forgotten past (actually, about two years ago), you can go here for the WordPress stuff and here for the Xanga entries.

I’ll forewarn you, though, especially if you’re wanting to look at the Xanga stuff: that’s some of the longest content I’ve ever put finger to keyboard for. It also means that my XHTML compliancy on those pages are shitty (Xanga’s “editor” makes it look soooo bad).

Tasty Severe Weather

For the past hour or so, the weather here’s been pretty righteous. Lots (and I mean lots of rain), sicktacular lightning, and lovely tornadoes. It’s been pretty crazy. And somewhat scary.

One of my friends lives near an area where there was a lot more damage, and he’s going to try and get some pics. I’ll see if I can get those up tomorrow or sometime.

But yeah, it’s pretty insane here.

Thoughts

There have been some things lately that have made me think as to why I keep this thing around still. This thing being my blog.

First, I get no visitors. Really. I don’t. None. I can just take a look at my stats to see that I might get 5 visitors on a good day (that takes out of consideration articles that have been submitted to StumbleUpon and get a modest page-viewing). It shows up again when I look at my web host’s control panel and see that I barely use two gigabytes of transfer in a good month, and most of that is from one-shot things that I host on files.galador.org. I realize that not much of what I have to say is that interesting, but the stats are really disheartening.

I think that leads to point number two. I don’t make updates to this thing as much as I used to. Though it is up somewhat from Fall/Winter ’07-ish, it’s still barely half of what it used to be. I don’t know. I just don’t have as much drive as I used to to update this thing. And another thing is that I haven’t really done much interesting stuff lately to write about. I haven’t had a reason to make a huge WoT (a Wall of Text, for those of you out of the know) like I used to. To quote Andrew McMahon, “My life has become a boring pop song, and everyone is singing along.”

Thirdly, as a recent comment made me realize, people are assholes on the Internet. They don’t give a fuck about your life. They’d rather sit on their ass and make fun of you. To the commenter: if you read this, then know that I actually enjoyed your comment (for various reasons) I could have easily said, “What an asshole.” and deleted the commend from the moderation queue, but I didn’t. I’ll be honest, I did give it a thought, but I decided to give a fair representation of whoever happens to read this thing. I also took the time to respond honestly, and hope you take the time to read the response.

Fourth, it makes you feel really shitty when one of your friends finds out you have a blog, and they say something like, “What, you actually write stuff on there? What do you put, ‘today I used my computer?’ in a condescending tone. Really shitty.

So yeah. This article almost sounds like it belongs more on Xanga/MySpace/et al than a self-hosted blog as it’s all self-pitying and shit, but here it is. I’m not ashamed to speak my mind and bitch. I should really learn to do it more often. I think my life would improve a lot if I weren’t so passive. But that’s a story for another place.

I Can Has Break?

Yay! School is officially over… at least for a week or so. Yup, it’s Spring Break time around these parts.

Mine’s probably going to be relatively docile, consisting of sleep, and some fishing/boating down in Louisiana. That might not sound like much, but after the hell school’s been, lately, it’s going to be like Heaven.

In other news, I upgraded WordPress to 2.5 RC1, so if you notice some weirdness, drop me a line about it.

‘Snow Beautiful

Weather in Arkansas, it’s insane. Yesterday, it was roughly sixty degrees outside. This morning, it snowed. This afternoon / evening, it was back up to sixty again. The snow had mostly melted by the time I went to lunch. Oh, silly, silly Arkansas weather.

However, I was able to take quite a few pictures while it was still in full force. Check ’em out on the full page.

Continue reading ‘Snow Beautiful

Ghosts

Normally, I wouldn’t post about Nine Inch Nails (because, to be honest, I don’t really like them all that much), but this is just too awesome.

Trent has decided that all future releases from NIN are to be made available to the public for free (and that concerts are the real way to go forward), and the first album made available for free is Ghosts I-IV.

Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I – IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I – IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Trent Reznor explains, “I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.”

They (as in NIN themselves) also distributed it via many of the famous music trackers, which is pretty awesome.

I think more bands should take notice of what NIN (and others, Saul Williams and Radiohead among the few) have been doing with their art.