The Cat's Nuts

For those of you that don't know my story, I go to Columbia University. After my Junior year, I took two years off from school for "personal" reasons, or at least that's what I tell people. When I think back, I remember numerous times where I was on campus, walking around by myself, it would be a beautiful day, or a quiet morning, and I would think to myself "damn, you are one lucky son of a bitch. You go to one of the best schools in the world, and have everything going for you."

When I had to take the two years away from school, my life felt crushed. I mean totally fucked up. Everything that I had planned seemed to fall apart, and for a solid year, I had a real hard time dealing with things. Granted, I sucked it up and gained some good experience working at a little law firm downtown.

So now, with graduation just a two weeks away, school ending in 12 days, I was thinking to myself "damn, you are one lucky son of a bitch"

It was kind of an epiphany, where I was sitting there and I realized that I have so much. I have this awesome apartment with lots of great stuff, but aside from the material things, in two weeks I'll have a degree from an awesome school (well...their reputation anyway), I have a great girlfriend that wholeheartedly loves me, I have a family that is supportive of me, I've got a great job lined up with an amazing starting salary, and hell...things are just going right again.

It's amazing really. Two years ago, it felt like my life was really in jeopardy of not heading in the direction that I planned, but at this point, I think that I'm better off now that I would have been if I didn't take two years off.

There were times in the past that I was talking to Laura and trying to explain to her these times when I would walk around campus, and I remember my mother telling me that I didn't appreciate what I had. My parents were actually really hard on me about the two years off. They were constantly telling me that I didn't appreciate everything that they had given up for me and everything that they had sacrificed in order to get me through school. I wished, during those badgering sessions, that I could rewind time and let them hear my thoughts. So I figured that I would take the time and jot down how I was feeling, so that in the future, I could go back and refresh myself when I, inevitably, feel like my life isn't as I thought it would be. Now I'll know how good I have it.

Edit: The work 'epiphany' was incorrectly spelled when I first wrote the post, so I corrected it so as to increase people's faith in humanity through my spelling skills.

Posted by Michael at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This is one of the most beautiful days in quite awhile. The sky is blue, the birds...pigeons are chirping and it's a perfect temperature. The NFL draft is on TV, and I get to sit on my computer, toiling away on my damn papers.
I'm not going to lie about this, I have a tendency to believe that I have ADD. I'll walk away from my computer for the smallest distraction. So I came to that conclusion...I have ADD, then I realized that I've sat for three hours stints if not more, editing photographs and playing video games. It's just a simple matter of the material I'm working with. Oh well.

So all last night and this morning I've been working on editing my paper. It's amazing that even after going through the thing three times, there are still areas that need massive amounts of work. It doesn't help that the thing is 40 pages, so that really slows down the number of drafts, but that's okay.

Yesterday Laura left for Ireland for the week, so that sucks. She was my awesome editor. I don't know what I would have done if it weren't for her guidance and whip cracking. I guess I'd have written more blog entries :)

I got a call from one of the attorneys that I used to work for inviting me to work on this project this weekend. I was ready to tell him no way, not a chance...I have to work on my paper and then he told me that they were paying $45/hr. Well... I thought... I can't very well leave him hanging in a lurch :) So I think that tomorrow I'm going to head over there for a few hours worth of work. I'm going to get to bed early tonight so that I can get in at least two solid hours of paper writing, then head over to DUMBO Brooklyn to the warehouse and work on that. Then later on in the evening I am going to be working at some convention for the Democratic committee. Not really something that's worth my time, but I owe the guy that's running it, so I should throw in a few hours. I'll get paid...I think like $10/hr...not quite the $45, but still decent.

Well now that's it's 3:00, I'm going to get cracking on my paper again. I have about three pages worth of writing that I need to mesh back into a section that's in the paper. It's going to be amazing.

Posted by Michael at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click to increase the size...it's damn big too...
My life as I know it is on the brink of massive changes. I can't fucking wait. :) I've got four more classes, two today and two more on Monday. I'm pretty damn excited. My 9:00 class was canceled for the last two days, so I've gotten the luxury of sleeping in today and not getting up to Columbia till 11:00.

Yesterday I went on an interview at Standard & Poor's for their Capital IQ software. The called the position a Customer Relations Analyst, which is fancy talk for "Tech Support". I had a nice interview, the people were young and nice, and I'm sure that it would be a nice place to work, but there are a few reasons that I don't think I'd take the job if it were offered to me. 1) There is no hierarchy...no titles...that's a little strange to me. I know why they do it, but I think it's a little more confusing than it's worth. 2) They won't pay me enough. I've got a solid financial offer from another consulting firm, and I just don't think they'll match it. 3) For the first 6 months I'd be working on learning financial markets (that's a good thing) and learning the software (it's pretty much a data management tool) and answering people's questions on the phone. I'm not too keen on answering phones for a living. 4) I feel like having a job where the software is the focus (this was Laura's comment) and not the consultant is really going to limit where I can go afterwards, because I'll be learning to think in terms of the software and less about general business. We'll see. I've yet to get an offer (I'm supposed to hear by the end of the week), so it'll be interesting at least to see if I'll snag the offer.

Anyway, I've gotta head up to Columbia to finish off 50% of the classes that I have left. :) Excellent.

Posted by Michael at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Around 7:00 today Laura and I decided to go for a short little walk around the area. We constantly walk around towards the Bedford area (Hipsterville) and towards Greenpoint, but it's rare that we venture into the other areas surrounding our house. So today we ventured down Metropolitan Ave away from civilization and towards Ghettoness. It's amazing down there. You would swear that you are in Post-soviet Russia or something. Just garbage everywhere, buildings falling apart, but if you walk just a litte further, you come across the real Brooklyn. Where all the artists have retreated to. It's kind of cool to see where huge industrial buildings that are obviously housing people with all the lights on and plants in the windows. It was rather neat. Makes me want to live in a loft, then I realized that I want to live near a subway and therefore can't afford to live in a nice loft. Ahhh... dreams. :)

So for the remainder of the night, I'm going to be cooking steaks (finally got Propane) and then trying to slap together a rough draft of this damn religion paper that I neglected to start or even look into till today. That's okay because tomorrow I can hand in a draft for a preliminary grade and see if I want to re-write it, so that's great because well....I can put together a shitty paper and still have lots of suggestions and know where I stand. Sweet.

I also recieved good news about my planet earth paper which is due on Tuesday, so it pretty much just made the paper 100x easier to write, even though it was already going to be a cake walk. Life is good ;), but will be better in two weeks.

Okay...just found out a bit of disturbing news. So Laura was able to get her blog on Google because she's the primary account holder or whatever for the domain, so I get shafted, but anyway.... we were looking at the keywords that people used to search for her blog. And on three different occasions, someone found Laura's blog while trying to search for "how to sexually arouse your cat"...fucked up world.

Posted by Michael at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This afternoon Laura and I went out to Chelsea Market (snazzy upscale Wholefoods-ish kind of group of stores) to get some cooking stuff. Laura has been on a cooking kick recently (I can't even tell you how many "30 Minute Meals" are on my DVR) so we ended up getting a new fry-pan and lots of food. So at one point we decided that we should stop and get some lunch. So we sat down to eat lunch outside this little seafood market thing. After finishing eating, I stupidly left my umbrella (nice big golf umbrella...well, not nice, but it was big) and we started to walk away. We literally got maybe 30 yards away and realized that we didn't have the umbrella, so we walked back to get it. Of course....it was gone, and of course it was pouring rain out, so that made for a nice time walking to the train with bags of food in the rain. It wasn't all that much of a good time, I have to tell you.

So we also stopped at a little grocery store across the way in order to get ground turkey (which looks like nasty ground up brains) for breakfast stuff tomorrow. So we got in line to pay for the $1.27 worth of ground turkey, which was amazingly like a pound and a half (what a deal!) anyway. So from behind us, up walks this obese man. And I'm talking like a solid 6-7 months away from being a shut in. God help him if he ever realizes that he can get his groceries delivered. At first, I didn't want to judge him, I mean he could have a thyroid problem or whatever, so I didn't really think about it, then he started to put his food up on the counter. Up came two large bags of Cheetos, 2 bags of 'spicy' pork rinds, a BOX of glazed doughnuts (I believe it was a 20 pack), numerous sugary drinks and whatnot. It became very obvious as to why this man resembled the Stay-Puff Marshmallow man. Ugh. Oh well, at least I'm a solid few years away from that state.

Posted by Michael at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is that just fucked up or what?

Posted by Michael at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last night, as a celebration for my handing in the 3rd draft of my huge ass paper, and the realization that I'm going to be locked in my apartment for the next two weeks studying, Laura and I decided that it would be nice to go out and socialize.

So we met some of my old friends from back in the day out at a rather lame upper east side bar. You know the type, terrible music, lots of neon signs and people getting way too involved with the baseball games on TV. The night ended up being filled with lots of cheap beer and cigarettes, so as you can imagine, this morning isn't exactly a good time.

I think the worst part about it is that when I got home, instead of crawling into bed, I decided to stay up and play some video games... yeah, didn't end up getting to bed till around 5:30. So getting up at 10:00 this morning is going to hurt later on. At least I know that I'll be curbing myself tonight and just hanging out so that I'll have a productive day tomorrow.

Today is going to be a nice relaxing rainy day. Sometimes when it's just gross out, it just feels good knowing that you really don't have to do anything and you won't feel bad for "wasting a beautiful day" so that's kind of nice, and to top it off, before I went out last night, I was able to procure a propane tank for the grill, so not only can I hang out and do nothing all day, but I can grill up some steaks later. Awesome.

Click for bigger version

Posted by Michael at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I decided to take the day off, and no it wasn't the good kind, like going to the beach or going and sitting in the park all day. I took the day off to get some work done on my paper. I got up around 9:15 and started to work around 10:00. I'm not going to lie, it's actually going well, well...except for this shot break that I'm taking to blog. I got myself some more great library books from Columbia yesterday, so I've been using those. Let me tell you, they are gold. :)

The problem with writing papers at home is that I sit here and am looking into my backyard. It's right there... like 3 feet away from me and my god it's beautiful. Last summer Laura and I put down grass seed and really did a decent job on the lawn. We watered it all the time and we has extremly successful growth, but then something happened... well, it was really the bastards from the ebay store that I ordered our lawn mower from... the mower didn't come for ages (2 weeks) and our grass grew to mamoth proportions. Needless to say, we ended up cutting it down with a steak knife...I know ghetto, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, we now have lush green grass, a rusty push mower (the old school type without a motor), a grill without propane (Still didn't get any) and a bunch of plastic chairs. I can't wait for summer :)

Damn, I can't believe it's already 12:40. This day is just flying by. Figures that when I am actually working and need the time it's not there, but when I'm sitting in class listening to a terribel professor talk about interpreting the Bible in 1000 different ways it just is terriblely slow. Oh well, that's life I suppose.

Posted by Michael at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I was sitting in my terrible religion class and jotting down some of the upcoming events that I have going on, mainly the due dates of my final papers and things like that. I quickly realized that I have quite a bit of work to do this weekend. On the up side, after this weekend is over, the only paper that I'll really have left to work on is my Pullman paper (35 page terribleness) and some in class essays. So that kind of puts a smile on my face. But on the bad side, I'm going to be working on papers pretty much from Thursday (I took the day off from work) till Sunday night.

Turns out that I am able to hand in another draft of my Pullman paper to get some more feedback from my professor. This sounds like it's a great idea, but it must be handed into her by Friday at the latest, so I've got to really settle my ass down and get working on that. Ogh... one more full week of classes, and then it's a study week, then finals week.

Of course I don't have all that many finals, but what I do have is crammed into the smallest space of time. On the evening of Tuesday, May 9th, at 7:00pm, I have my first final which is a long in-class essay in my Leadership class. The following morning, at 9:00, I have my Planet Earth final, which is again, fairly simple, just a matter of looking over the book. My final exam is directly after the Planet Earth and is my Terrorism and Counter Terrorism final. That one isn't going to be easy, and it's going to require a ton of reading and a ton of prep work. I just hate when everything falls into a short period of time. But believe you me, the night of Wednesday, May 10th is going to be wonderful.

I already have it planned out, Foreign Guinness that's been sitting on my shelf since last May is going to be drunk, relaxation will commence.

I've decided that I don't like working, so the most obvious thing that I could do when I finish school is to stop working, but alas, the great Money Gods won't allow me to do that, so I'm going to be stuck working. I've decided that a solid 20 hour a week schedule will allow me to get plenty of reading done, working out and such, while still making just enough as to cover my rent. I can suck up the extra $200-$300 that I'll loose out on that month for the sheer pleasure of being able to sit back and do nothing. :) mmmmmm I can't wait.

One of the most urgent upcoming events is Laura's departure to Ireland. Laura is my editor for all my papers and she's very helpful. As much as I don't like it at times, she's the one that really keeps me from handing in total crap. So I kind of rely on her to crack the whip on me and get my ass to produce some quasi-palatable papers. She's going to be leaving for Ireland the week before my paper is due. She'll get back the day before! It's actually not a bad thing because it's going to really force me to get a move on on the paper before she leaves so that I have some help with it.

Either way, my life in the next two weeks is going to suck. Lots of work, but lots of reward at the end, so I'll make it through.

Posted by Michael at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was googling myself and found some more of my pictures online. So I decided to share.

Posted by Michael at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sitting in class today I came to the relization that it's not very long till graduation. It's really come down to the last two weeks. Next Monday is the start of the last full week of classes. I'll have one more monday following that and bam, it's over. It also occured to me that I still have a ton of work to get done before it's all over. But that's okay, it's the final stretch, and I'll be able to make it through, I know it :)

This past weekend Laura and I went up to my parents house for Easter. It was nice. We played with their puppy, I wrote a paper for school that's actually due in about an hour and we had a nice time. We ended up going to the outlet stores at Woodbury Commons, so that was a good time. Because we have decided that we're not going to be going on a vacation, I have a bit of money to spend. Not that I can just go crazy, but I didn't mind spending some money to get some new shirts which I was in desperate need of. I could also use some new jeans, but that's a story for another day.

Other than school coming to a close, things are pretty much just cruising along. There's probably about 1000 different things that I think of during the day that I could write about, but I'm going to just leave those things alone and focus on school. Being as such, it's now time to make sure I can print out that paper and get to class.

Posted by Michael at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those rotten terrible people at Apple have once again struck at the heart of America. Take a look at this story from Engadget:
"So as the story goes, eight year old Shea was learning to write letters in her third grade class; Shea also happened to be really into her iPod nano. So she decided to hit up Stevie J. with a list of her ideas on how to improve the nano -- you know, standard stuff like "slip a little chip" in there to add support for lyrics, movies, etc. (what, don't you want to officially play Doom, too, or at least Pac-Man?). After three months Shea received a reply from Cupertino... signed by Apple's Senior Counsel, Mark Aaker, who put the little girl in her place by stating "please do not send" suggestions, and letting her know Apple doesn't accept unsolicited ideas. Said Shea, who went running to her room, "It was kind of like they were saying, 'Oh, we don't want your idea -- it's not good or anything.'" (Hey, don't feel bad, whenever we write about improving Apple's products we tend to get harshed on too.) While the story didn't exactly end happily, at least Aaker called the little girl to personally apologize, but not before holding a meeting to change policies regarding responses to letters from children. And just for that, all of our staff's children will be swarming Apple with letters on such varied topics from Apple's potentially increased market share with Boot Camp, to the mysterious video iPod -- replete with backwards Es and Ss."

Bastards. Thanks Engadget for your lovely commentary once again.

Posted by Michael at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For a guy, the epitome of being a girl, is having a shoe fetish (of if you are a ghetto thug that matched every outfit to a pair of shoes). Well, luckily, I don't have this problem. I'm probably one of the worst people when it comes to buying new shoes. Recently I have been wearing (when I say recently, I mean the past three years) this pair of brown Rockports that I absolutely love. They go with anything from jeans to slacks and are more comfortable than my sneakers. So it's a no brainer in the morning when I'm going to work and I need to throw on a pair of shoes.

So the ever comfortable, ever stylish Rockports are getting a little bit...worn out. I was getting kind of upset about this because well, they are the greatest thing ever. I've been searching around shoe stores for them for about the past year so as to buy a replacement. No luck. It finally occurred to me today that perhaps I should look inside them to see if there is a tag or a label that tells me the model number. Sure enough, right on the tongue there it is...golden.

So I found them on-line in a few different places for around $90. And the best part about it is that they come in brown AND black? And this is there the sad part is.... I'm way too excited about it.

For those of you that have had the pleasure of hanging out in my apartment, you know that I have a big "L" shaped couch in my living room. Well, because it was purchased used, it's seen it's fair share of wear. Not to mention my fat ass sprawled out on it most nights. So Laura and I decided that it was time to do something about it. So on one of Laura's many trips to Mississippi or Virginia or whatever else she was going, she was searching through the illustrious Skymall catalog. Sure enough, there was the "Couch Saver". We quickly put an order in for the $15 device that was apparently going to save our couch. Well upon arrival of this mystery device, I was less than thrilled. It turns out the thing is really just a piece of 1/8" plastic covered in a PVC wrap. Not exactly sturdy. Oh well, at least it wasn't $20?

Recently my computer at home has been acting kind of funny. Every 10 minutes or so, the main cooling fan in the back of the computer would turn on and sound like a freaking jet engine in my computer. I figured it was
some clogged stuff somewhere stopping the airflow but I couldn't really see where the problem was. So last night I got a new DVD-Burner and installed that. To install it I had to take the cover off the front of my Dell. Well I quickly saw the problem. It looked as if my computer had sucked a grey kitten into it's faceplate because there was a 1cm thick layer of grey hair and dust just clogging all the little vent holes in the front of the case. I plucked that off (it had woven itself into a nice coaster sized block) and threw it away. Waaa Laaa....no more jet engine noises.

No...I didn't take that one, but it's me wrestling in the old days, so it's still fun.

So tonight Laura and I are going to be heading up to my parents house for the Religious weekend. Even though no one in my family (except my grandmother) is religious, it's more of an excuse to get together. I'm going to be spending some time writing up a paper on Terraforming Mars for my Planet Earth class, so that should be fun. If I can get that out of the way, then I'll only have 1 religion paper and my main Pullman paper (35 pages) to finish up. Laura read a bit of my paper on her way home last night and she told me that it doesn't flow and doesn't go along with the outline like we planned....so I'm not really looking forward to looking critically at the paper. It's very easy to churn out 30 pages, but it's a bit harder to make it all flow and follow along a clean plotline. So we'll see. That's a task for another day.

So yesterday was a good day for me. I found that I could get another paid of my favorite shoes, I got a DVD-Burner, I found the kitten stuck in my computer, and to top it all off, I got a copy of my 2003 state tax returns in the mail so now I can re-file my 2003 taxes for a hopefully large tax return that I stupidly mis-filed back in '04. If that ends up happening, I'm going to be QUITE happy. I think that if I end up getting that money back, I may take a 2-3 week vacation or something prior to my starting my new job. It would be awesome. I'd just hang around New York, going out on photoshoots during the day and going to Barcade in the evening. It would be great. I think that I'd probably get pretty bored of it in about a week and a half. Maybe I'll just continue with my school schedule at work even though I'll no longer have classes. I'd have plenty of time to play but would still be making enough money to keep the bank account alive. Hmmmmm.... so many decisions.

Posted by Michael at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So today was perhaps the most uninteresting day that I have ever gone through. Nothing really interesting happened. I went to school, sat through three classes where I learned very little if anything at all. I came home, ran, showered, had two beers and now it's about time for bed. Oh, I also wrote up my Terrorism and Counterterrorism memo, so that's pretty much done. I just have to review it tomorrow and it's good to hand in.

Seven is still humping me like a terrible hyperactive poodle, and I don't really know what to do about it.

Laura is currently away in Michigan on business, so that sucks. I'm just kind of hanging out on my own tonight. It's really amazing how long the evenings feel when you don't have anyone else there to talk to. I mean I can talk to the cats, but when they don't say anything back, it gets kind of boring.

Speaking of kind of boring, I think this post is kind of boring. I think the only reason I posted tonight was because I felt bad and I had two more pictures ready to go, so enjoy your visual feast of the day.

Posted by Michael at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week when Laura went out of town, I was sitting at my computer and up hopped my three-legged cat, Seven. In addition to having three legs, he also have numerous extra toes on his paws, so needless to say, he's a special type of beast. Normally, Laura is home (she works from home) all day so she holds him, cuddles him and just gives him way too much attention. On this day, I had been at work all day, and Seven had been denied his daily share of loving. He hopped onto my lap and I pet him while I was perusing various sites. All the sudden, it felt like I had a mini jackhammer in my lap, and there was Seven, kneading with his front feet, and humping with hi s one back leg posted out for balance. I have to say, I wasn't the least bit amused.

When Laura returned from her trip, I told her about this and she confirmed that he had been humping her on occasion also. So we just kind of chalked it up to be being a weird cat and continued on. But it's been getting worse. Pretty much every time he's on your lap for more than a minute, the jack hammering starts.

So I did what any other worried pet owner would do, I went on the internet and tried to self diagnose his issue. According to this post on www.TheCatSite.com (notice the similarity to this site's name?) which explained why he was acting so strange. I honestly think that Laura has actually spoiled him rotten. Terrible. Now I have a needy cat that punishes you with his jackhammer finesse. What a life.

So this weekend Laura and I got into a pretty serious discussion. Aside from us coming to some conclusions, I think that I've finally gotten to a point where I know what I'll be up to at least for the rest of the summer. I figure that right now, I could move out of NYC and really not even give this job that I have a chance, or I could just suck it up, stay in NY for the time being, enjoy living in this great city with cash in my pocket. I think what New York really comes down to is it really sucks to be here when you are broke and can't do shit. You can't walk around the city for the day without dropping $20 on random shit. Forget grocery shopping. I'm not going to say that I won't miss the idea of being in Austin, or being somewhere where I can get back to nature, but I think for the time being, while I'm still young and able, Brooklyn will be my home. At least until somethign else comes along that's just that much better.

Posted by Michael at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At least it's a friday. Last night I came home from work, went for a run, and came back to a voice mail message from my boss telling me that a candidate that I was supposed to interview was in the office waiting for me. Needless to say, I wasn't about to go back out to Midtown to tend to them, so my boss had to run the interview. Oh well. It was just something that I didn't need. So I settled down and wrote some more of this George Pullman paper that I have coming up. Hopefully I can throw it together in the next two weeks so that I have two weeks to really get it nice and polished up before I have to hand it into the professor.

So I've been trying to get a good idea of how good shape I have gotten in recently, so I decided that the best way for me to know how far I've slid from my previous levels as a college athlete was to time how fast I could run a mile. So two days ago I ran myself down to the track and ran a mile. When I was in my prime, I was able to haul my fat ass around the track at a 5:15 mile pace. Granted, that was once, but that was the crowing glory of my running days. So I figured that I was going to be somewhere waaaaay far off from that. Turns out the first day that I ran, I came in at 7:15. Not too shabby. The next day, I did the same thing and was able to cut it down to 6:45. I was rather impressed with myself, and well... I still am. So apparently I'm not in as bad shape as I thought that I was.

I have come to the realization that I should be writing my paper instead of blogging, so I'm going to go and do that.

Posted by Michael at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So recently I have been spending a bit more time on my blog that I think I should be, but I really can't help it. Everything about it is interesting to me. I get to play with my pictures, edit them, thus giving me a reason to work with photoshop. I get to play with the coding of my CSS and HTML which is sub-par right now, but I'm working on it, so that's fun and interesting. I get to keep a journal of my life, which at this point I'm sure will be interesting to me in the future, so I suppose all this time that I've been spending on it recently isn't that much of a waste. But then I saw something today that just irritated me and I don't really know why.

I've been trying to get my blog to get posted on Google (this is taking a bit longer than I had hoped) and I was browsing around and I saw that on some blogs there is a "Google Ads" tag at the bottom, and at first I was really confused. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want shitty little ads on their blog. I mean they are cluttered, tacky, and most of all, not quality content. So why in hell would you put it on there. Then I saw the real reason. Google pays people for clicks. Fucking pay per clicks. I hate that shit. Why bother? I mean most people that have blogs don't get any traffic that's going to make it worth their while to have advertisements. I mean hell... figure that you have 1000 people that come to your web page a month. How many are going to click your shittty little ad? How many will even notice it down there? Probably not that many. For the 1/2 cent that you get for the click, is it really worth it? It's kind of like musicians selling out. Just goes against the spirit of what all of this stood for. Ugh.

So I got back my worst grade of the year in my Terrorism class. Yep. I got a C. That sucks right? It's only 25% of my grade, and as terrible as it sounds, my first three years of college got me well aquainted with the half circle that we call the "C". So I'm okay with it. I'll probably go and have the TA's look at the grading, but I need to brush up on the readings a bit if I'm going to go and challenge that one.

So I was able to procure a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS Total Training, and I have to say, that's some nifty software. The guy that does it is amazing, I mean he's just a photoshop guru. Maybe I'll actually improve my photoshop skills. I'm in the process of getting the Adobe GoLive tutorials. Hopefully those will help my in my attempts to master the CSS on this site. I've been getting the hang of it, but I've yet to find an application that I can easily use to really mess with the site. I may have to eventually just pick up a book like a normal person and read a little about it.

At least Monday is over. I have to go and contend with my "Violation" at court on Wednesday, so that should be fun. I've got an appointment scheduled with the Dean at Columbia to talk about seeing if I can't get my record cleaned up a little bit in preparation for maybe going to grad school in the future. Who knows. I doubt anything will come of it.

Posted by Michael at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So for my Planet Earth class I had to make a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History and check out the Darwin exhibit. I have to admit, there is something fun about that museum. Granted, the vast majority of it is just stuffed animals, but it's still fun to walk around and mock the various exhibits. Apparently for my course, there is going to be a question about Darwin on the final. Laura and I walked through the whole thing, but I couldn't really bring myself to read a whole lot. I had this wicked headache from going out the night before, and seeing as how the clocks moved forward, I was robbed of an hour of much needed sleep. Oh well. I got through it and should be okay for the final :) As if I was actually worried about it.

Tonight Laura has two friends over and we're making fajitas. We had them going on the grill and about half way through the process I realized that the grill was no longer working... yeah damn propane ran out. If you've read through my various posts, I've ranted on the hardship of procuring propane in the past. There is no where that's easily accessible to get propane and couple that with the quasi-legality of bringing 20 lb. tanks of propane on the subway and you have an intersting situation. Hopefully I can arrange to have my parents bring me down some the next time they come down, but as for now, the grill in our backyard is just a nice decoration.

Posted by Michael at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)