mr.vash

05:48 pm: Giving Blood
I gave blood today for the first time. That was definitely a good experience to have. There were almost no complications in my case so it wasn't really very interesting. The person who took my history (I don't remember her first name) had the last name sondahl, which seemed rather related to mine.

Also, they made me lay down as a first timer, which was a little disappointing, because I wanted to watch. Then they elevated me gradually, after the whole process was over, and kept asking me if I felt at all dizzy. It was actually a little hard for me to judge if the elevating change had to do with giving blood or due to that I usually feel that way after having been lying down from my clonodine.

I would be hard pressed to say I enjoyed it, but the whole process took over an hour and a half and I didn't have a concept that that much time had passed. So, I must have enjoyed it to some extent.

01:34 pm: The EE goes to EE
A few weekends ago, Hannah and me went to "Engaged Encounter". It's basically a cheap (cost wise, not quality wise) substitute for premarital counseling that's highly subsidized by the church and takes place over the course of a one weekend getaway. It's somewhat religiously oriented, but I did not feel it was outrageously so, such that it would not be as useful for me and hannah. Really, you'd have to ask hannah about that though; she'd be a much less biased judge (or maybe as\more biased but in the other direction). So, it was a whole weekend focused on working on avoiding large marital conflicts, and understanding things about the way your partner operates, to the same end.

Before I go into the weekend structure and events that affected me. There are a couple observations about random things I'd like to make. The sleeping arrangements were a pretty funny societal commentary in my opinion. A Christian event with engaged couples, obviously the sexes were split for the engaged couples. What I didn't expect was that they put all the guys in a single basement room, with bad bathroom access, and cheap looking (although surprisingly comfortable) beds. The women were put in the rooms in the same hall as the bathroom 1 or 2 to a room (I think there was only one woman who had her own room, other than that it was 2), in comfy small bedrooms, with much nicer beds (although hannah's was a little [really] creaky). Now is when I acknowledge that they really don't have enough rooms for every two people to have a room, still, it felt to me like a social expectations comment needed to be made.

The other thing that struck me is that it seemed like an awful lot of the couples in attendance were already living together, which I did not expect. There were also whole sections of the questions, (which I will talk about later) geared towards people who had been married before or had kids coming into this marriage, and about if you were having sex or living together already. That showed to me that in some ways, at least, the church is having a shift in expectations to accommodate a more modern\reality of marriage. Given those things didn't necessarily apply to me, but interesting to note, none the less.

The weekend structure was that there were 3 lead couples who had been married for some time. There were a number of different topics that they were to talk us through. They normally would just explore their own experiences and their reflections on them that had to do with a given topic. After they had shared with us, we went off individually to write about our thoughts on related topics, normally in the form of questions that were provided. After some time of writing, you would get together with your partner and read each other's writings. After both people were done reading, then you would talk about the topic.

I really liked this format. I found myself feeling less restricted from saying things or worrying about how I was saying it. The one complaint I had was that I never had enough time to write. I often was only able to answer maybe 40% of the questions in the allotted time. I understand that the time limit was the weekend though, and there were a lot of topics to cover.

One thing that I did that weekend as we were talking, that I feel is a big benchmark for me in my relationship with my future wife is, while she has certainly see me drop tears before, she had never seen me weep. That happened, during our talk about forgiveness. I didn't nearly get to finish writing that time, and it was all supposed to be our thoughts about a single thing. While I was trying to relay the rest of my thoughts, (as I'd really just written the background about what I wanted to say) I got all teary and out of control. I'm glad that's happened.

Other than these sessions, meals, and free time, there were a few other things that happened. The one that was of particular interest to me, such that I will now talk about it, was an anonymous questions box. A little box that we could write questions on, that would be answered by other engaged couples. During this time, there was to be no input from the married couples, just from the other engaged couples.

One thing I noticed about this question box time was that it seemed that a lot of people didn't like how their questions were interpreted. I noticed this several times in other couples and at least a couple of me and Hannah's questions were also like this.

There was one question in particular that I thought was very interesting because of the controversy that it aroused. The question was something to the sort of what should we do if our kids do not want to go to church of put up resistance in going to church or something of that sort. I also thought it was interesting because of the motivation for a couple without kids to ask this question fascinated me. I think there are two things that were commonly agreed upon; it depends on the age and their reason for not wanting to go. While everyone seemed to agree that these two factors would change their answer, what their answer would be, given any set of circumstances, as we discussed a few of them, was radically different. Fun stuff.

Maybe it's just been a really long time since I've been among a bunch of non-intellectual (and non-married) type males but I really had problems relating to a lot of the rest of the men at engaged encounter. Oh, how they do love to talk about sports and cars and manly things. I really mostly just had to ignore it while sleeping. The rest of the time was spent with my Hannah. She's mine! It worries me slightly how little I cared about almost every topic of conversation between them.

11:06 am: A nice little godsend
I showed up at UP today for my first round of summer classes. When I got there, the room that BIO was supposed to be happening in was in use for an exam. I went to check that the room hadn't been changed last minute (which happens a surprising amount). When I did I noticed that my classes were not going to start until the 18th. I had always had one week off before, but apparently due to us finishing early this spring, instead of starting sooner, I get another week off.

I should have checked the date instead of assuming it was the same but I can live with that mistake.

BWAHAHAHA

03:23 pm: Drive test
I took my drive test for my license last Friday. I guess I misread the things that were supposed to be brought as I did not have my social security card, which is a necessity for them to actually print you your card. I was allowed to take the test anyways though, with the idea that I'd have to bring all my paperwork back and get the actual card later. I don't really plan to drive much under circumstances that are different than my permits conditions, but my permit will expire this June, which would make it more of a pain to eventually get my license if I don't do it soon. Also, car licenses are required for motorcycle equivalents, which at some point I plan to look into, maybe this summer, maybe not.

I failed due to one of the grounds for automatic failure. I didn't actually notice that I had turned onto a one way street evidently. I don't remember it being well marked, but of course, I wouldn't. I actually didn't know until after my test that one way streets weren't labeled at all lights. As a result, I made one turn into the wrong lane (going into the one way street) and one turn out of the wrong lane (out of the one way street). Either of which are individually grounds for immediate failure.

I also got marked off for a couple things I can't understand. One looks like it says downshifting (I did take the test in a manual transmission), I still have yet to understand why that would be a bad thing. I also got marked off for "stopping on a crosswalk" with the qualifier "waited too long". I can only assume that this means that I stopped properly, then moved onto the crosswalk for visibility and she did not like how long I was there before I felt there was a sufficient opening.

That was an interesting experience though. I guess I'll get to do it again.

12:25 pm: bikes and stuff
So, I have a few updates in terms of biking I guess. Let’s make a story out of it, shall we?
I had this goal of biking out to forest grove all the way. Since Hannah is planning now, to not be living at school next year, I thought that I should get it done now, or I’d not get motivation to go somewhere in long biking distance for a while to come. I tried twice. The first time I got a flat tire at about the 25 mile mark (out of 30) which was pretty lame. My bike continued to get flat tires a number of times this semester, this time, I may have found out why.
I usually used the UP bike shop to get tires repaired because it only costs a couple bucks to get a new tube there and the labor is free. This time, when I went there, they were too backed up to accept new bikes so they told me they could sell me the tube, and I could do it myself. I’d been a bit suspicious of the number of flats that I’d been getting and I was willing to do the repair myself. I took down the tube size I needed off my wheels and went to get the tube. It turned out, they don’t actually carry the size of tube that the wheels said I should use…..epic win
So, I decided I should probably go see if the right size of tube might do me any better. Thus, I needed an online expedition to get myself the right size of tube. Of course I got lazy and didn’t get around to it for a bit. Then one day my bike (as well as hannah’s) disappeared out of our side yard. Apparently stolen. While I wouldn’t say I’m happy about it, I think it’s pretty funny that someone stole my flat tired bike. So, at least I didn’t have to deal with the flat tire.
From then on I’ve been using bikes that the UP bike shop loans out for free. With one of those bikes, I did make the bike out to forest grove all the way. The bikes happen to be a bit too small for me though so the long ride turned out to be a little painful… Worth it!

12:21 pm: Some "fun" with a robot
So, this semester was very likely the hardest semester I have had thus far in my college career. Due to that, I haven’t written an entry for something like 3 months. That means, now, we get to hear tim talk about a bunch of stuff he’s all but forgotten along side a bunch of stuff that’s fresh in his memory. So, over some span of time now, I will be doing a blog-athon about the past 12-13 weeks highlights that are still memorable enough to talk about.

School has been pretty intense since the middle of the semester the upper division EE class entitled “microprocessor interfacing” (should have been called embedded systems/ controller design) was a real trial in a number of ways. It started out as nice discussions about hardware design considerations with a little assembly programming. About half way through the semester, when we were assigned our first of four labs. At this point, I took a look at our syllabus and realized just how back loaded this class was.

We had completed about 10% of our grades work at that half way point. That worried me a little bit, to say the least. We were also getting enough experience in assembly programming that we were to start our main end project for the term. An autonomous robot. (robot that avoids running into things)

Supposedly, the physical part of the robot was built for us, just without the electronics setup done (the motors were mounted on a frame). So, the project was split into three parts for the three people in the class, the physical part (given to me), the avoidance algorithm (given to MJ), and the sensor interfacing (given to Zubin).
In case anyone has forgotten(you’re crazy if you haven’t), MJ is a graduate EE student, and Zubin is a 7 year senior EE. As the term progressed, it came out that there were some… creative differences between my two group members. They both had very different ideas about how the project should be run.

Eventually I became involved too, despite my best efforts to remain neutral and point out what I felt were the strengths in both of their methods. This made for a very frustrating project. As far as playing to our strengths, I think it turns out that we failed to do that. I actually turned out to be the most gifted coder in our group, doing the physical stuff which heavily involved circuit debugging, which either of our other group members had much more experience with than me. The good thing about that is I now am much more experienced in such debugging which will make all the classes that should have taught me that, a whole lot easier, when I do take them.

At any rate, through much disagreement and pain and hard work, due to what I still think is faulty hardware, the robot never ran. We put plenty of work into that project for an A but according to the grading rubric, we should have something more like an F due the terribly limited functionality. I really don’t know how we will get graded but I learned a huge amount from that project, so that’s good.

I think the most frustrating part for me was that it felt, with the exception of Zubin (meaning Dr. Lu and MJ) people didn’t really trust that my opinion meant anything. I was much less educated, but ultimately I feel as I was assigned to the physical part of the project, they should trust my judgment about that sort of the project. I was unable the entire term to convince them that there were some pretty severe hardware problems that I was unable to fix.
After finals week, I left and told MJ what the state of the robot was (as Lu continued to extend the deadline for that project again and again in hopes that we could get it to work). MJ was never able to fix the physical problems either as it turns out. That, at least was a bit satisfying to me.

I really wonder (more than care) what my grade will be in that class. That’s a hard decision to make for Dr. Lu. This is the last time the course happened before the accreditation visit and according to the grading system on the syllabus, we should all get D’s or worse in the project.

Despite how painful it was, I got a lot out of it, so, as long as I pass, I won’t complain too much.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
Just in, my overall grade is apparently a B in this course. That is acceptable.

02:02 am: You can skip the first two paragraphs if you don't care about the intelectual rants
I can’t really tell at this point how long this phase will last but like the typical male, I seem to have become infatuated with motor vehicles as of late. More in a theoretical, efficiency sense, than in a lusting after a nice car sense. I guess what started it was something a conversation, me and Hannah had. She became upset with me for presuming that the poor in rural areas could do without a car. Being once in rural poverty once herself, I can understand the ignorance bothering her. I didn’t say anything at the time, as I deemed it not a time for confrontation; However, I, once again started thinking about more affordable ways to get around. The foremost of which was a smaller motor vehicle. When I started to research motorcycles, I found that as far as what is sold in the US, there was not one motorcycle that would get above 80 mpg max, as an advertised mileage. (as a point of reference, the best non-hybrid cars get in the 40-45 range tops) However, almost every motorcycle was advertised as getting from 0 to 60 in under 5 or 6 seconds (depending on class). This strikes me as a very odd feature to find so desirable; Even if you were on the highway at rest with no cars in sight, I’d find this an odd thing to want. Anyways, looking into scooters in this country and others, we don’t even sell things in this country that get near countries like India, which is just stupid. Their best is about 50 KPL ( about 117.5 mpg) Also stupid, is how much our motorcycles cost, you might as well have a car here. I think I’ll be sticking to my petal powered bike for a while longer. It seems such a beautiful balance of everything. I suppose one could make the argument that my bike costs a great deal of maintenance costs though. I’m rather prone to bike braking…

On another note of motor vehicles, something that I’ve enjoyed (and not enjoyed sometimes) doing myself, while driving, is observing things that are sociological laws of the road, while not being legal and often in no way I can understand being good ideas. There are more obvious things like that everyone wants to move faster than is fuel efficient on the highway. There are also things that I’ve been more surprised with such as rules about how long to accelerate and when to break when you are coming to some kind of stop. One of the largest reasons that I prefer driving manual transmission to driving auto is that neutral is so much more accessible, thus, when there is a red light a fair distance ahead or, even more, a stop sign/more guaranteed stop I like to try to coast to it. Sometimes, even if this causes no delay (which it very rarely does more than a couple seconds, and because of when I’m doing it, it doesn’t cause lights to be missed) I pay attention to how close I get followed etc and notice this makes other drivers uncomfortable. Even more interesting to me, is that when I do this with no other cars behind me, as having only a permit I am always with people in a car, this stopping pattern can make me feel that passengers in the car are uncomfortable. This could be me being self conscious; I don’t think that’s what it is though.

Chemistry is a great source of aggravation right now. Mostly chemistry lab, though it’s largely due to a lack of having covered the material in lecture that we’re expected to have down by the time we get to lab. We still haven’t covered the material in lecture that we should’ve known going into last week’s lab. This week’s lab was just terrible, awful, no-good, very bad. The other thing that doesn’t seem to help me though, is my lab partner. I became acquainted with him in engineering statistics this last summer. He seemed fine, so I thought I’d be his partner. He is a complete ass. I don’t know if this is a legitimate stereotype but he spent some time in the navy. Having already passed the lecture (but dropped the lab), he’s great at making me feel like I should know things. It’s not even his fault that I don’t have the right knowledge for the lab. He also spends a whole lot of time, not only flirting with the lab aid, but trying to instigate sexual comments about me and the lab aid. All this really isn’t even as bad as vector calc though, so, I guess that means it can get worse. Still, one can hope it gets better.

Oddly enough, my favorite class by far is my highly programming oriented class. I still am convinced that I won’t enjoy the coding but starting over with a completely new assembly language that I’m expected to know nothing about, but knowing where my knowledge tends to fall short in programming, having had plenty of classes to see my pitfalls, is making this course really ok!

It also really makes me feel at home intellectually, which is odd because I’m in with a graduate level EE and a 7th year EE senior. This was actually the first time I realized how well versed in hardware computing I was in anything comparable to a formal education. Also, since it’s a 3 person class, everything seems more out in the open. For example, our second homework was joked about as a class because two of us (the grad student and me) seemed to miss listing the CPU as a component of a microcontroller. That’s really truly sad!

The wedding date and location have been changed, but are once again fairly settled on. Everyone seems happy; Wootz! I also think it’s really interesting the groups of people me and Hannah invite. I feel more like inviting those who I feel are really close to me. She pretty much invites a lot of people for reasons I would not, including some people who apparently invited themselves. As it is here’s the guest breakdown:

Tim’s family invites: 16

Hannah’s family invites: 43

Tim’s friends: 7

Hannah’s friends: 27

Mutual friends: 6

I think it’s a rather interesting comparison. I’m also completely fine with Hannah inviting who she wants to, so this is in no way a criticism. I just think it’s interesting how different the view of this event is. That is of course very common for men and women to see a much different purpose in the wedding itself.

I guess that’s about it…

01:02 pm: Misc
Due to my apparent lack of need for sleep lately, I have found time to write this post. I’ve also found time to play games of warcraft. So far I’ve played two today and they were my two favorite types of games, which are the following:
1)A great, exciting game with a worthy and well mannered opponent.
2)A game where my opponent was a bad mannered, jerk, who failed to adapt to me not playing the cookie cutter strategy, and was thus dominated. At the end of the game he decided to share that his loss was entirely due to “fucking lag”, not his lack of units that could attack my air units; thus of course I was a “lucker newb”.
Sometimes the bad mannered internet gamers can make me so happy :)

In actual news, wedding plans recently came back to scratch, so, that was actually a great relief to me. I like the open discussion part much better. If only that part could last forever, while we sneak away and get married…


Uh...here’s a joke about women:


I don’t know that I have all that much to say really, back to school… Oh, so there was California that was acceptable, except for the part where Hannah’s family is pretty vicious about poking fun at vegetarianism. I don’t seem to mind that nearly as much as her. As a matter of fact, they all seemed very pleased with the compromises I make to vegetarianism. Still, they probably shouldn’t be so harsh. But, families all suck somehow. It could be worse.

On another not very important note, as I've never really liked fake meat too much, due to it mainly tasting like slightly drier regular meat, which I was never a big fan of to begin with, I forgot that bacon was always too greasy for me. Fakeon (Fake bacon) is actually really good. If any of you, like me, enjoy the general taste of bacon but find it too salty and/or greasy I highly suggest it.

In case it's of any use to anyone, here's my schedule this term.

I mention it mostly so people will hopefully never (ever ever ever) bother me on mondays, EVER!

Guess that's about it unless people care that my bike was broken again. It's fine now, apparently.
(ever ever ever!!)

08:11 pm: I hate the people using the word Indian to describe native americants for this reason...


There is no Indians (the kind from India) listed so I have a hard time distinguishing what is meant by "Indian Americans" because there is also an "american" category. I did figure it out (it meant native American) but these sorts of things should be clearly labeled on the graphs.




On another slightly related note (in that Hannah is native American), the advantages Hannah thinks avocados have health wise are as follows "It's a healthy fat!" and "It's good for non ingestion uses, like in hair!"

07:06 pm: Something lost. Something cleaned.
I seem to have lost my ring and as of a few days later, have yet to find it. How will people know what a pimp I am if they can't see my ring!?

Also, for the first time as far as I can recall I made the dishwasher sud out, due to my choice of liquid soap after not finding any of the solid kind. So, in addition to getting the dishes washed I got the kitchen floor here washed!

Good times.

06:28 pm: A couple quick notes that apparently deserve a post of their own.
So, despite the fact that my final grades still have yet to be posted as my final grades, they are posted in my transcript already. There goes my irrational grade anxiety. I will never have to do vector calculus again, big fun!

Also, I may have mentioned this before but every time I notice it again I have to comment on it to someone; I think that the whole logging IP's feature is hilarious. I have no idea what anyone would do with someone else's IP address except possibly ping flood them. That said from someone who has some idea of the meaning of an IP address, I'm sure a lot of people using the feature would have less idea of the implications. That's it! It's a scare tactic for people who are also ignorant in this way!

On another note I hate comcast a lot. They are pure evil.

05:00 am: Catch up time
Oh boy, my first typing experience on a laptop with the Dvorak keyboard. It's so small! Also on that note, on my home computer, every so often I go back to the typing program I used to learn the new keyboard. Mostly to check how fast my typing is currently. The most recent time I checked it was at about 29-30 words per minute, which according to a completely arbitrary scale the program has, it claims that that is a sufficient typing speed for those who are not trying to market their typing professionally. (who would want to aim at 40-50, if anyone cares) So, it took me about 5 months to achieve that after making the switch. So, at this point very glad I did that.

When I first arrived here,(in Seattle) my first experiences were that of following Nathan around and him offering to help people out (financially for the most part.) We experienced many shifty characters. Nathan, much like me and many others I know, make a point of not just giving people money but making sure that they get the thing they claim to be asking for, as it tends to deter the people who are lying to you to get your money. There was even one guy, who me and Nathan are convinced, did con Nathan out of some money by getting on the bus he claimed he needed it for and flashing a pass he evidently already had. We, overall, encountered a great number of people that were quite shifty, including the one that seemed to succeed and none that I'm entirely convinced wanted our help for what they claimed. This was a very disappointing experience as my experience with the homeless in Portland, at least, is that a great number of them are just as happy with me buying them a meal or giving them a bus ticket instead of money for the said item. It's not new to me seeing scammers but never that many in a row; I don't know if I should attribute that to Seattle or bad luck.

As I have recently gotten off school for the winter break, I'm still really nervous about my grades which have yet to be posted. How I did on my finals was pretty iffy. Given my grades throughout the rest of the term, I have a very slim chance of actually failing anything but I still have anxiety, like I hadn't made that calculation.

It's also beginning to be the case that there is, at the least, tension about the specifics of the wedding of me and Hannah. I hate being in the caught in the middle of things in this situation (or ever really). I'm so apathetic myself about how the wedding is conducted. It's going to be a short, nervous, blur however it turns out and won't affect my marriage itself much, if at all, long term. So, my priorities are making it cheap, getting public recognition of our relationship, especially from our families, and making her happy with it. Not in that order. That proves to be a difficult task already and it's surely going to get much worse before it gets better. Solely for that reason it kind of becomes my preference to just go get a marriage on paper and forgo the ceremonial part but my family is not so hot on that plan either, thus failing one of my 3 main goals. It's little wonder why there is so much anxiety surrounding weddings. People with strong opinions are lame.

!Oh my gosh potentially offensive content coming up ,off and on, for the rest of the entry, for various family of mine (and possibly others) you have been warned!

This thanksgiving I spent with Hannah's family. An aunt and uncle to be more specific. They live in a pretty isolated environment with a fair bit of land. There were definitely some things that differed in their family dynamics that struck me, on this particular trip. Obviously, good and bad is rather subjective but here's how I would break it down:

Good:
*My family has the assumption that couples won't sleep together until they are married. Theirs had the assumption that me and Hannah would be sleeping together. Honestly, I think my families inability to disconnect beds and sleeping from sex is pretty ridiculous, and I think sleeping together is a very natural and healthy thing to do. For that matter I think that sex should be on a couple by couple basis, and more up to what the couple wants than what the couples family thinks. That's not everyones take though.

*Though, I feel like my family (at least my immediate family) is fairly open about talking about sexual things, by the utterly appalling standards of this country, one area that is pretty taboo is pornography. I can't tell that it's particularly harmful as long as you understand it's fake (in that it's staged the same way other media is, and thus is not to be an educational experience). At any rate, one of the things we watched a bit of was a pornographic story. It was actually really refreshing to me to see one of my favorite categories of movie, in that the storyline and acting was just so awful that it was a pleasure to make fun of together.

*Our dinner was vegetarian lasagna and salad. Much simpler than what I am used to for thanksgiving dinner. I really appreciate simplicity and normality for thanksgiving dinner. It's a much better setting for me to feel thankful in, than making the women slave away in the kitchen all day on more expensive and consumptive foods in more gluttonously, large amounts than anyone even wants to eat. I know I'm not the only one with this problem of our cultures "thanksgiving day" but I thought I'd voice that I appreciate that simplicity, especially on that day.


Bad:
*It seemed at some times more than others but more so than my family that the subject of conversation was often about traveling and/or food; neither of those topics am I particularly fond. This doesn't mean that I'm always thrilled with my own families conversation but I get sick of those topics pretty quickly.

*They seem to spend most of their free time in front of the TV. I don't have anything against watching TV shows but I can't stand the extent to which they are interrupted with commercials. I don't mind embedded ads but adds that interrupt the flow of the show, I totally do. Embedded ads only seem to happen as the primary advertising mechanism in the online Korean and Chinese media that I watch, I think that is a fine system. I also just seem to have different taste in some television than the rest of the people there, which doesn't help TV be interesting. Including a show that is largely about travel and food, it was having a marathon. It helped me get homework done though; so, there is that.

Ok, that's my list. I feel like I'm missing something from it but.... oh well.

There are another couple things I feel like mentioning about the place. The shampoo in their shower must be the same kind that my ex- girlfriend used, or at least it smells very similar. I realized it before applying it and convinced myself I'd adjust to the smell in a short time and it wouldn't be a big deal. That was a mistake, I kept smelling it all night; it made me feel really awkward. Also, on a brighter note, I really like medium-large, affectionate dogs. I keep forgetting just how much I like to have them around. They have such a dog, obviously, that's why I mentioned it.

I think that's about it.

04:25 pm: Vegetarian Label… Religious associations

 

Just thought I should let everyone know about an uber-excellent mistake I made before I start with the main topic-ness. When I was down in Corvallis over fall break, I was staying at my grandparent’s apartment. The reason I was there was to get their email (which because of a mix up was not had not worked for some time) all happy again for them. At any rate, my grandpa has recently gotten this power wheel chair. While I was on the phone with tech support getting the whole thing straightened out, I got put on hold a lot, as normally happens on such calls for those of you who haven’t experienced the joy. At any rate, while being on hold I jumped in the chair and did what I suppose would be equivalent to pacing for a handicapped person. Then of course in my infinite brilliance I continued in this manner once I was back on the phone. Then naturally I needed to be at the computer, which I had left back in the next room. On my way through the door, and I mean through like a baseball through a window, I decided having hit the door in such a manner was a sub-optimal plan. I resumed my email job, after having put the chair back. After I finished up, I looked at the dent in the door and panicked at the damage I had caused to the door. It was by no means a hole but it was somewhat of a Chuck Norris sized dent.

So, there’s that; epic fail.

 

I broke my bike again, also. Yippee. I must suck at riding bikes.

 

I somehow started thinking recently about the correlation between people’s strengths and weaknesses in correlation with their religious beliefs. More specifically I came to realize that I think a lot of people have “problems with Christianity.” But really it’s not Christian concepts they have problems with, it’s how people who are Christian behave and use their word of God. Often, when really, the bible has nothing very specific at all to say on a matter.  Such matters always have Christians on both sides of them as well. None the less, religions get blamed for such things. !~cough~! Islam !~cough~! Anyways, I realized that a long time ago, actually, obviously, with that example.

 What I became interested in now, is what good qualities do people associate with various religious groups? So, since “good qualities” are subjective, it’s more about what people perceive. Anyways, if people have specific thoughts, admirations etc. of any specific groups of this kind I’d like to hear them. Especially if it’s about the Mormons, I’d love to hear. Everyone who isn’t Mormon and who has feelings about Mormons, it’s always bad, seriously. They don’t regularly do anything bad (that could reasonably be perceived with ill intent) to anyone I know. I don’t think they deserve all the crap people around me give them.

Another thing that I became interested in one afternoon was about vegetarianism and gender. I read a 13 year old article on it just for the reason that it popped up in a Google search. It was a very interesting read about theories as to why so much more of the vegetarian population is female than male.  That also got me thinking about ways that males are sociologically constrained it this culture, which I feel is rarely addressed but since I’m not feeling too constrained currently, I don’t really want to go into that. At any rate, as I was thinking about it, and reading both, I realized that I envy the vegetarian label. It is something that I don’t have, because of the way I choose to execute my morality. I also really need to be more conscious about supporting the industry that produces my food in inhuman ways. Specifically for me this means, I may have to give up milk until I find a source that I am satisfied is humane. There may already be, I just haven’t had time to look into it. I should suffer for my negligence though, presumably. (As opposed to something else doing it for me.)

Another thing that confuses me is that in industries that involve animal testing has standards (or is supposed to; legally they do) in terms of how they can treat those animals. Ethicists agree that animals can feel pain and it is wrong to cause them pain in terms of testing. Given, it’s poorly enforced at best in the testing that goes on. Why is it that food animals are not required to have the same treatment. If their life has value or not, their pain should, but as far as I know there are no such standards in the food industry. A lot of cancer testing and such, expects to kill the animals, but they are euthanized under some circumstances of pain (supposedly). Is there some rational for there not being similar laws in this case? I guess it wouldn’t help but I want to know!

10:00 pm: mistrust!

A couple of things are also going to be tacked on to this post in relation to the whole engagement thing.  I didn’t want to plague the previous post with them. Apparently, some people think that the legitimacy of an engagement is based on something that a woman wears on her finger. Firstly, yes I did get her a ring.

Secondly, I really think very lowly on people gauging something that way. It really feels to me like (if it has any general meaning, as opposed to between just the two individuals) a symbol of an age in which a man is promising to financially support a women in exchange for her servitude as a wife. Or perhaps conditional gifts are just a concept I’m not sociologically accustomed to enough. Additionally, if it’s supposed to be symbolic of anything in terms of the union in general, I would think that not just the woman who would wear one.

Also, for whatever it’s worth the term Fiancé bothers me; make a note of it.
New topic!

School seems to be acceptable. It’s a hard semester but I seem to be doing fine as of yet. Well aside from my CS lab which… I’m just not cut out to program, at all. Starting with an unnecessary CS lab was a good way to appreciate that math does make some sense to me.  So ya… dropping the CS. Then just one more semester of math and misc. “need to take classes”. I can’t wait to have classes that I enjoy as the majority of my load for once. (Fine… It’s a lie, I can and will.)

On a humorous note, a… whatever the thing you put toilet paper on is called, got installed in our ADA bathroom today and it has a funny (to me) feature. Not only can you put one roll of toilet paper on it but it can hold one usable and one non-usable (Due to that it’s not actually suspended in the center) roll. I’m sure it’s part of having it work for those who are disabled but it seems funny from a me using the bathroom type standpoint. I’ll get to, instead of just replace the toilet paper, replace it from the replacement only to realize then I must fill the replacement to be satisfied.

Now, onto mistrust!

I’d really have liked this to be the main body of my text, but there’s not so much for me to say on this issue as there is to feel. Bottom line is that a lot of people are really more mistrusting than is really statistically viable of other people. I guess if anything I’d blame the media and such for polluting our relatively safe Portland area with all sorts of horrible images and such.

At any rate, I have been blessed with a gift of trust. This gift as far as I can tell generally makes me a more happy person that I would be without it. Trust, not just for my loved ones etc, but for the crowd. This gift however comes with a burden; being reminded of other peoples mistrust can have depressing effects on me. Especially when they are sacrificing something sizable in order to make themselves feel safer.  More than anything else though, what makes me feel terribly horrible, is other people inflicting (or trying to) those mistrusting habits on me.

My parents seem to get a brunt of my complaints. Oh well; here goes another example involving them. So, we had a space for my bike in the front of the garage which wasn’t very useful until it was pointed out to me that there was a spare garage door opener. I attached it to my bike under the light and quite enjoyed rolling into the garage on my bike with the press of a button. Eventually I was told I couldn’t keep the thing attached to my bike because someone might take it. I’m not even sure it’s obvious what it is much less that someone would take a garage door opener that they don’t know what house corresponds. Since then I’ve ditched the garage door opener and just been parking my bike in our open side yard. No one walks down the alley anyways. These sorts of things just tend to infuriate me.

Can’t wait to live Canada, where people have that trust thing! (Again with the subtle lying)

(Hannah is a palindrome, I love her<3) I wonder if anyone will read something in such small font…

05:18 pm: My Hannah

At some point, it had apparently been spread, due to a previous post, that me and Hannah were engaged to be married. I’d like everyone to know that that post was not supposed to be saying that. It was about a conversation I had with my parents.

We are engaged now, though.

I love my Hannah (and I love that her name is all on the home row of the Dvorak keyboard; palindromes are cool too)

12:33 pm: Thinking\ observations about things and stuff

 

I’ve made the switch to Dvorak now.  I’m certainly a pretty terrible typist currently, but unless I have to now, I’ll be off of QWERTY. This is my first post written in Dvorak!

Here are some obvious and, hopefully some not as obvious, observations about the process thus far:

 

-          Some people seem to feel the need to give me a surprising (to me at least) amount of crap for doing this.

-          A lot of people don’t know of the Dvorak keyboard’s existence, or qwerty’s original purpose.  

-          A lot of functions (especially hot keys) are very linked to certain places on my keyboard, as opposed to the symbol that I cognitively associate with that hotkey.

-          It’s interesting that since typing once again requires a great cognitive effort (it’s a chore I keep having to force myself to go back to) , the other things my brain normally has to do during (spelling, which has always been a weakness AND thinking about what I want to say) can together become impossible to do fluidly.

-          My typing speed is really dependent on how much sleep I’ve had. It’s 3-4 times faster when I’m very well rested than when I’m lacking sleep.

-          Letter combinations that are short (for example   th(e), ch) are clearly getting more practice and are starting to come out abnormally quick. That pretty much keeps me going.

-          On a qwerty labeled keyboard, looking at it triggers me to revert as such.

 

That only took me most of an hour…

06:29 am: My Hannah

So, I rather like this girl, you see? So much so in fact, that me and her have tentative plans to enter into a marriage, if doable, next (not this coming) winter. So, about 1.5 years from now. That’s a very important piece of information as a premise to the main topic of this post. Actually these first 2 paragraphs will be premises.

 

As hopefully you are aware, my parents and I will soon be moving over to north Portland, next to the university.  I will be living in the hopefully dim, quiet, and cool basement. This basement is easily large enough for two people to comfortably live in.

 

 This brings me to talking about when I was first telling my parents about this.  Specifically, why I was telling them was because I would like to marry her, while not spending extra time in school. (via working part time schooling part time) So, I was asking, with plenty of warning for them to think about whether they would be ok with picking up her as a 4^th housemate. That was the only way I could think to make those wants come together. So after some time and fretting about how they’d react, I brought this topic up. Also, for the record, I have considered how it seems abnormal and thus, silly to marry someone and continue to live with your parents. I think it makes sense though and plus I’m going to be in my 20’s living in my parents basement (just need the basement); I might as well do it with my wife J!!!

 

For the most part the conversation was better than expected… given a lot of the “expected” was just my morbid unrealistic fears. On the note of fears, I said something to my parents during that conversation I had been scared to for quite some time, and am rather proud of having said; I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to so directly. I know I’ve mentioned Hannah is not Christian. I also remember how hard it was for Nathan to eventually tell my parents he was not a Christian. My parents certainly seemed to want to address the issue of her not being Christian a couple times in the conversation. One was in terms of how kids would be raised. First thing about that is, I don’t feel marriage is indicative of having kids. Secondly, this is what I was scared to tell my parents by the way: I don’t know how I feel about “raising kids as Christians.” By this I mean taking them to (forcing them to go to) church on a weekly or greater basis and dedicate some of their life to learn about the faith before they have cause to be interested about life’s greater questions.  Additionally, I’ve always felt that there was a correlation between what I think I’ve best heard described as lukewarm Christians and people who were raised as Christians from birth. I guess I just feel like those things should be more open to my offspring (if there are any) as they see fit. I would certainly be eager to share of my faith when they did become interested. I hope everyone understands that I’m NOT saying that I wouldn’t want my kid(s) to be Christian.

 

The last thing that was addressed, which was by my dad was that he thought the bible was pretty explicit about saying that Christians shouldn’t marry those not of the faith. I’d really rather not go into why I disagree with the interpretation that God thinks that, in any absolute fashion, here. If someone is interested, as always, talk to me about it.

At any rate, I talked to Hannah about a large portion of the conversation later. It was clearly not easy for her to deal with the fact that my dad had stated that opinion. I guess it does throw a bit of an air of disapproval on his part. He also could have wanted to make sure I’d looked into it fully for myself. I don’t really remember exactly what he said, so it would be hard for me to say.

04:07 am: Jrmlgy.p oyguu

For those of us who are sane and can’t read that mess it’s my latest pursuit of perfection! Seriously though, I’m trying to learn to spend extra time learning to type with the Dvorak keyboard. I really think this is worth my time. What’s not worth my time is taking breaks and switching back to the QWERTY keyboard to write posts. The title is me typing what would be “computer stuff”, if I had been using QWERTY.

At any rate, here’s your warning that I will be talking about computer stuff for the rest of this post; this may not interest you.

For quite some time, (since I found out that Warcraft 3 had a platinum rating for Wine) I’ve been planning to get a Linux dual boot going on this computer. I’m not sure that I’d want to permanently switch over in the foreseeable future, but there doesn’t seem to be a disadvantage at present. There’s also a quaint little set of programs for fixing up your windows installations to have all the updates drivers, components, and registry setting you want them to have, without the stuff you don’t need. My windows for a number of reasons could use the reinstall anyways, and it sounded like something interesting and quite honestly a valuable program to have experience with for my presumed line of work. Its main purpose being to have unattended installs for a lot of similar hardware coming in, or for those of us who are just that compulsive. That’s me alright!

 

My original intent had been to back everything up and see if I could repartition off of my current windows partition for the Linux one. That worked oddly enough, though the current Ubuntu install apparently can’t detect my RAID 0 (it could detect the individual drives) which was holding the rest of the boot information for everything. So, that turned out to be an epic fail and I ended up spending about 16 hours and 13 failed attempted CDs with slightly altered iterations of windows (vista and XP) trying to fix everything up. Most of the windows CD’s wouldn’t even fully install. (Which is why I ended up formatting; combined with the fact that windows will not install on a partition except one defined as C [Nobody loves you Microsoft]) Other CDs\DVDs just had things left out they should have had. Installing OS’s over and over gets time consuming. I ended up leaving the house three times while I didn’t have a bootable OS, which made me rather proud in some sick way.

 

Anyways, now everything’s peachy but I didn’t actually get the Linux partition to work due to a problem with the Grub Boot Loader. I wish Nathan was still here... Hopefully I can resolve that soon. I do have an awful lot of time only taking one (2 credit) class right now.

Overall the whole experience was fairly enjoyable to me. The only times I was put off were for 10-30 seconds after some CDs installs failed, then I was back to being chipper. That’s why I’m made for IT! My computer was down for a few days, but it was worth it. I’m on a pretty weird sleep schedule now.

 

I guess that’s about it for computer stuff.

05:54 am: Excuse me, that expired in 2000

When Philip moved out of our Beaverton house, to go to college, he tried to get rid of a lot of his old junk by trying to convince me I wanted it. Among the useless items I was coerced into taking was a slightly dented 150ml can of sprite. I think it was saved from our Norway trip, just because of how comically small a portion we Americans find it to be. At any rate, that had been knocking around for a while. I finally noted the best to drink by date being 2000 and became curious how it would taste. I was disappointed, though not rightfully so, that it tasted exactly like sprite. If I had gotten it in a cup, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing. It wasn’t even flat…Sadness.

 

On another slightly more serious note, I’m becoming outraged at the number of people while I’m in various public places (mostly public transit) who want me to say “excuse me” for certain things. Not only that; obviously they feel the need to tell me that I need to say it, otherwise I wouldn’t know. They always either do it in a smug or rude manner; it’s tending to piss me off. I’m not sure what this cultural thing is. As I understand it and thus how I would use it is if I were to inconvenience someone, especially if I want them to move for me. I don’t understand what people get offended about if I touch going by them or contort myself as I go by to avoid them needing to move. Maybe there’s just something I’m misperceiving in every case. It’s happened 4 times in the last couple months though. Kind of confuses and angers me.

 

I have rather high opinions of the people in this city (and perhaps elsewhere) in terms of helpfulness and such. I don’t feel like they could just all be assholes…

11:16 am: Columbine animals (maybe vaguely disturbing; who knows)

I tried to write this general sort of entry about the columbine a couple times, and seem to keep failing to be satisfied. I found this odd given that I normally just post whatever I write. What I wrote just happened to feel very misrepresentative; hopefully this is better.

 

Some odd amount of months ago (2 maybe) I went to see a play called Columbinus. It was about the columbine massacre of 99 that everyone is so familiar with. The play itself was amazing. Since I’d never really thought about the topic in that much detail, even the dramatization with a large amount of basis in real events (or at least how witnesses remember it) was a good staring point. This got me very interested to take a look into the event. I also wanted to watch “bowling for columbine”, just out of sheer curiosity at this point.

 

Here’s a bit of a tangent: When it actually occurred, I was younger sure, but in terms of large events (not necessarily scale but attention) like this I have a tendency to not embrace them after they just happen. In fact rarely do I naturally care about such distant things without some effort. There’s an emotional component to it as well but since I feel like justifying that, I think I will. I like to wait until events like this have died down in terms of people’s emotions and in terms of large media coverage to examine them. My thought is it’s better to observe these events when I can experience my own emotions, semi unaffected by other peoples, since others have since stopped caring. Also, everything I look at tends to be just more calm and rational. There’s sometimes some insight, instead of emotionally based speculation.  I just figured I’d mention this is not an uncommon process for me.

 

So, I did a fair bit of looking into it. Once I had a good feel for what happened factually, as best I could I stumbled upon a movie whose idea was to make an educated guess about the video diaries nature. It’s called “zero day.” I decided to acquire it, which turned out to be quite troublesome, especially because of some dumb recent film called “day zero” and zero day being some sort of military lingo. Eventually I found a torrent for it, so I went with that. It was rather slow, due to no one being very active, but eventually I got it.

 

Nathan and me watched it. It was really good, as far as I’m concerned. Most of the last 25 minutes is some pretty intense school shooting recreation, ending in two suicides, so keep that in mind if any of you tries to go watch it. I can give it to anyone who might be interested in seeing it. It was fairly disturbing though.

 

 

In social psych I had to do en experiment involving thinking about where my food comes from and one of the corresponding sections in my breaching book mentioned a film called simply “ the animal film” depicting the sorts of things that normally go on in slaughter houses etc. Since I couldn’t find a film by that name, I emailed the author, who quite promptly emailed me back. He said he uses a different film called “earthlings” now. I found that quite easily, and watched that. It had 5 sections about how America (and some on other parts of the world were depicted too) abuses animals for Pets, food, clothes, entertainment, and medical\cosmetic testing. A lot of it was stuff I knew but wanted to see depictions of, some of the things the voice said were kind of sketchy honestly. It said, for example, that over consumption of meatsleads to diabetes. That said, it’s kind of hard to refute how the animals were being treated though. I didn’t know pigs were generally mistreated aside from close confinement and… well eventually they are killed, I knew that. Normally the piglets have their tail cut off then cauterized, followed by their ears, followed by their teeth. All so they can be kept in close confinement safely! Eventually they are hung up, have their throats slit and bleed out along the conveyor they’re hanging on. However, the place their bodies are taken on this conveyor is to be dunked in boiling water, to purify the pig’s body. As it turns out different pigs bleed at different rates, which means they are not uncommonly submerged, alive, into boiling water, lovely…

 

It also has some other interesting facts. If I remember correctly, America consumes more chicken every day than they did in a year about 70 years ago.

 

This film is something I wish people would watch, but probably no one wants to. I’m the only one sadistic enough. Having watched it the day after Zero Day, I was also able to compare how disturbing they were. Surprise, surprise, Earthlings wins over school shooting.