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after a small discussion my Sunday March 31
after a small discussion my brother and i had, it's time for you, the internet user, to determine the fate of socks and sandals. click here to register your vote; it'll only hurt a little, i promise.
i admitted to myself long
i admitted to myself long ago that i don't have what it takes to be a rock star. it's just a style thing i lack. however, i still like musicians, and i like working in musically-oriented industries. today, i mixed the audio for lucky boys confusion's live performance at the planet. after they left, i did some cabling clean-up and noticed that kastubh, the frontman of lbc, had left his sunglasses on the news studio desk. now, they could have been anyone's sunglasses i suppose, but you see, they were rock star sunglasses. they couldn't have belonged to anyone else, and you know what i mean.
naturally, i act politely before thinking deviantly, so i returned them to the canopy club where they were playing tonight, and some dude in a wifebeater took them from me and promised that they'd get returned. riiight. it really doesn't matter to me, though -- i just only hit myself over the head now, though, when i realized i should have kept them and sold them as authentic on ebay for a starting bid of $100. i'm a retard. who doesn't want their own pair of sunglasses that scream: i am a rock star? maybe i should have kept them...
jon sent me his recent Thursday March 28
jon sent me his recent power point presentation on volcanoes that he authored for a class. i'm not quite sure which class it was for, but take a look at it. it has the latest and greatest volcanic information. thanks jon, and i hope you don't mind me making it public domain; i'm just concerned for the general safety of anyone who reads this site. on another note, for those of you who lived in allen hall in the fall of 2000 and watched the election in damien's room, you'll laugh at the following. for the rest of you, well, i can't make promises. steve kline is just that damn funny. anyway, without further ado, i present my first foray into the world of video editing.
i've been a little slow Wednesday March 27
i've been a little slow to post to the blog since my return to champaign; i think that could be directly related to one or more of the following factors: (a) a big ece project due yesterday (b) a japanese midterm tomorrow (c) being moderately ill and/or (d) selling ben folds bootleg copies.
new york: day three. one, Tuesday March 19
new york: day three. one, i really dislike these japanese laptop keyboards; things like " and * are not where they usually are, and i really dig those characters. nonetheless. it`s evident that i will journey out here in may to study for three weeks prior to my departure for japan. i`m looking forward to both very much; michael has been teaching me lots of useful things.
somewhere along the packing stages of friday morning i decided that it was spring already; a coat was unnecessary for the trip. while i`ve escaped with a sweater for the past two days, i think i am lucky in today that it is sunny and 45 degrees: hopefully the wind is at a minimum. i`m glad we got out here right away, even though nathan just returned this morning, because we`ll leave tomorrow and there will still be four or five days of vacationing bliss before i return to champaign. i hope todd`s keeping it real there; getting his ride fixed...even though, deep down, i know that my mother would never want it in working order: todd`s too close to me, i may feel compelled to drive it.
anyway, page news: you can expect the mark or todd quiz in a week or so, followed by the sandals quiz which i will be drawing up upon my return to champaign. you see, clearly the nation is not clairvoyant on its description of "fashion". we're going to empirically discover that nathan is wrong, i.e., socks can go with sandals.
php and c++ are consuming Wednesday March 13
php and c++ are consuming my life. it's no joke. it's been years since i've actually spent any amount of time programming anything, and i forgot how crazy it can make you -- striving for perfection, skipping meals, leaving a mess. hell, i did my laundry sunday -- i folded it yesterday -- and i'm intending on finally returning it to my closet this afternoon after class. class and programming. it's all i've been doing. thank god it works now (with realtime playback information). i can be home without wanting to work on it. i'll probably clean up the code lateron, though -- it's a little messy.
ok, one day later i Monday March 11
ok, one day later i read that last post and realized i have delved into complete dork-talk that no one could really understand. anyway, i made a fun php script, and if you're into that kind of stuff, you can download the php source for the sidebar content at the left here.
bam! i installed a web Friday March 8
bam! i installed a web server the other day on my personal machine to serve up mp3s in terms of my playlist (given the students account quota), and then i realized that it was going to be annoying to consistently update "current playlist" with what i had been listening to recently. instead, i made it surprisingly more dynamic. by issuing a windows message via a small c++ program i wrote (with builder, the program really wrote itself), winamp outputs my current playlist to a file which php on my local machine then parses every time you refresh this page. moreover, it makes the song titles links to the files on my local machine. therefore, if you refresh this page from now on, you'll be wowed with dynamic content and downloadable mp3s on the left bar. theoretically, if i put all my mp3s into a playlist, ran the playlist tool, and you pressed F5 forever, you could snag my entire collection. but you're not the dork. i'm the one who put all this coding in c++ and php just to have a little dynamic html fun. i guess that just about sums up just how much time i have on my hands nowadays for random junk, because i have nothing except for japanese to do this week.
Letter to the Editor (Daily Thursday March 7
Letter to the Editor (Daily Illini) regarding the ISG elections:
Something stinks pretty badly at U of I, and for once it's not the pig manure. This time, the stench is so strong that I can smell it all the way here in Arizona. Apparently your SEC operates without ethics or principle, as does your student government elections. As I understand it, there was initial protest to Mr. Meron and Mr. DePriest's candidacy, but the SEC 砺oted almost unanimously・to allow them to be on the ballot. Now, after the elections, those two candidates are disqualified for election guideline violations by the SEC?
Why would two independent, cartoon-fronted candidates be axed through some technicality? I壇 be willing to go out on a limb and say it痴 because they won the plurality. At every major university, there are some people that spend their entire college careers aspiring to take over the student government, and when they don稚 get their way ・watch out! It is a shame that the SEC needs to legitimatize their position by sabotaging and rigging the election results via technicalities. Spending too much on a campaign and splitting funds? I was unaware that either Mr. Meron or Mr. DePriest paid the Daily Illini for any campaigning materials or advertisement, and I would go a step further and say that the Daily Illini paid Mr. Meron a wage for his column. That may even constitute negative campaign dollars when tallied up in the end (keep in mind the use of fuzzy math in these sorts of situations, it痴 a skill that you need to take a number Political Science courses to learn). Frankly, it痴 not much different then the kid running for office whose dad owns the T-shirt shop, it痴 a perk of being at the right place at the right time.
With that being said, it all boils down to the fraud that student government elections are ・there are some groups of people that will be allowed to achieve an 兎lected・position (the anointed ones), and then there are the independents who will not ・under any circumstances ・be allowed in office. Unfortunately for us normal folk, it痴 like this everywhere, at every level of political office, period. In the end, all you can really do is laugh at them and avoid compromising your own integrity. Vive la revoluci.
Jonathan Hutcheson
Sophomore in Journalism
Arizona State University
with last night's shenanigans, isg
with last night's shenanigans, isg has sunk to an even lower level. the gnome and the snail won, and now they cheated them out of a victory because they're not a slate. more to come on that...anyway, it's thursday afternoon...been fixin' computers for my hourly wage, la creperie at 5, and i just received this as a forward. generally, i hate them. however, in this hilarious case, i'll make an exception [Ed note: Dead link removed].
quick site notation before i Wednesday March 6
quick site notation before i begin: i made all of the fonts one size bigger (yay stylesheets), i found that xx-small was a little hard to read. let me know if this is better or worse. anyway, today's highlight o' the day: i went to wpgu to pick up my paycheck (on the order of one fourth of its previous size, mind you), and i was eating one of the free bagels in the back that we get every morning from bagelman's. chris calef walks into the back and says, "hey, it's like you think you still work here or something..." i enjoy the joke, but not as much as dana, who i can hear laughing from behind the partition. clearly, she thinks that i needed to go. you can hear it in her laugh. it's good, i need some enemies; i was running short. regardless, calef tells me that at andy's (the former general manager of the station) going-away party, he approached carly (my former boss), travis (the new general manager), and andy with four shots of liquor, and proposed a toast to "mark-fucking-[last name removed]". he was greeted by silence, then a nervous laugh, and then the shots. heh. i couldn't have asked him to do anything better. openly, albeit drunkly, bring up the looming point that everyone already knew: there really was no good reason. to mark-fucking-[last name removed].
everything's really cleared my mind now, and i've learned that wpgu will teach you radio, but it won't teach you shit about management...and that's what we need to change if we want to succeed in book, as a station, and as a working environment. i don't believe i'm somehow more qualified than anyone else there, but i do know that piece of information, and i intend to use it to help our failing work ethic.
on that note, the rest of my life has picked itself up well. it's been a month since i've been off the air, and i've: applied for a scholarship for japan this summer, done all my japanese stuff, hung out with friends more, gained some perspective, sent out the ben folds master, focused a little more on my relationship with heather, and have been consistently updating this site. it's not too bad, i'll say. i needed the time off. played some frisbee tonight in the great weather -- spring is 'round the corner.
alright, so yesterday was an Tuesday March 5
alright, so yesterday was an uber-productive day. i, with the help of a few individuals, did the following: made the $2.5k summer scholarship people happy by getting everything turned in that they had demanded last friday, made ipeng happy by submitting my passport photocopied as well as some mugshots and my japanese placement exam, i took the physics 113 conflict final exam and it seemed rather straightforward, i did alright on my music 145 (electronic music synthesis) first major project, went swimming, and then laughed a lot with de bono at the union at nine. if you've never seen these guys, go to the union on monday nights at 9pm. i don't know how they do it, but improv is quite an art.
however, today, hasn't been so much in the same direction. however, it is for this same reason that i am allotting time to update the blog page. therefore, i suppose it's productive in its own right. anyway: last night, jon called me, and we chatted about a number of topics, one of which being his omnipresent suggestion that i should transfer to arizona state university. i openly admit that the weather is really nice there, and i would have a great time, but that would also somehow suggest that there's something that is not pleasing about the good ol' u of i. sure, it was twenty-eight degrees this morning when i walked to class ... but you really can't desire to be in a better engineering school that ours, which is ranked in the top five in the nation. as a fan of high fidelity, i can't help but be interested in a program that makes a top five listing. anyway, point is, as much as jon says it doesn't matter (college, in terms of where/what/major/et al), i don't believe him. i remain unconvinced that in this slightly slower economy than of the nineties will just hand me a job when i leave this campus...so i feel the need to qualify myself with an engineering degree peppered with an international minor in japanese. high school was a joke, and for once, i feel the need to actually intellectually accomplish something. it's like proving to yourself that you actually can run five miles non-stop, even if you don't want to.
the latest in random musings: Sunday March 3
the latest in random musings: check out my new tutorial on how to become a creep with photoshop and random pictures [Ed note: Dead link removed].
quite possibly the most studious
quite possibly the most studious weekend i've had in quite some time. awake at 9am to go to japan study abroad orientation (more details to follow lateron), homework all night long. bed, finally, at 2:30am. sheesh. japanese, ece, and physics, along with that scholarship, will eat me alive this weekend.
hrmm. i just made a Saturday March 2
hrmm. i just made a significantly longer post than this one and it got lost by blogger. ah well, such is the way of technology. a quick summation: i'm not so busy anymore (10-15 --> 3-5 hours at wpgu per week), so i've had more time to reflect on everything...and i'm still kind of unhappy. not with anything in particular, but just with life in general. a lot of things will make me happy from time to time, but this is not like last year where i can look around and think, "hey, i'm in college!" and be able to smile about it. those days, and this is a surprise to me, have already passed. i'm on the eve of the second half of my collegiate education, and i most certainly don't know how i feel about that. i've already started meeting less people. hrmm.
take it away, louis armstrong. man, if you can't feel good listening to him, you're not human.
