Blogger discovered in wreckage of own procrastination: Forced to resume posting

So, it may have come to your collective attention that I am lazy. Good for you, here's a prize. Now then, on with the events of my life.

I've been spending a lot of time burning my way through the House archives lately, thanks to Greg, who owns all four seasons. Now on to the first season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and then leisurely through the Lost archives. Once again, thank you ABC for putting all four seasons of Lost on the Net. Also in television, the Heroes premiere was nothing short of epic, and has completely banished all of my fears of the show descending into mediocrity after the rather lame second season. The Knight Rider series premiere, unfortunately, presented itself horribly, riddled with worn-out cliches and badly written dialogue. The only thing it had going for it was the incredible animation for KITT, but that was hardly enough to save it.

Enough about TV, let's move onto . . . TV! More specifically, lets move from broadcasting to hardware. A few weeks back, Chris picked up an open-box 26" LCD HDTV, discounted from $500 to $426 due to its open-box status. We soon found out the reason it was originally returned; the DVD player was completely out of whack, rejecting half the DVD's we put in with "cannot read" errors, and only playing half way through many of the DVD's it did accept. We both found this incredibly annoying, so this past Saturday we took it back and explained the problem, and Chris picked up a shiny new 32" LCD HDTV. Yeah. That's right. We now have the biggest TV in the hall. Unfortunately, our cable still sucks.

In other recent (and not-so-recent) events, I attended the Newman Community Dreams & Visions retreat on 19-20 September, which was great. I met a lot of people, made a lot of friends, and had a lot of fun. A few of us who met on the retreat have started going to brunch (or lunch, as the case may be) after the 10AM Mass. Also on the topic of Mass, I lected for the first time today. (Yes, I use "lect" as the verbal form of "lector". Sue me.) Note to self: read the reading at least once before coming to Mass. Finally, John Beatty, Kevin . . . someone, and I have started having short circles hosted by Dr. Hughes, an Opus Dei numerary, before Mass.

Also, I'm doing an English project on railguns.

Alright, that should be enough to tide you over. You can thank Ashley for making me get off my butt and do this. (In a purely figurative sense, of course. I've been sitting the entire time I've been typing this.) You will hear from me by Thursday.

Can't stop the signal.

--
SMike

Slideshow finished!

So that slideshow that I mentioned a couple of times is now finished; if you haven't already seen it on Facebook, or you'd like to download it, here it is:



I've been sick for a couple of days now, but my cold seems to have been relegated to just a stuffy nose now; hopefully I'll be entirely over it by Monday.

Something I forgot to mention in the last post was that I'm now a lector for Newman, the Catholic community here. Apparently I need to speak slower, but I'm fine on projection, emphasis, etc.

The weather here can't seem to make up its mind; it's either in the high eighties or the low sixties. It's kind of annoying when I get up and put long pants on, then discover that the temperature has jumped back up again.

I found out that in addition to being a Browncaot, Prof. Cover is also an xkcd fan. This is going to be a fun year.

I'm pretty excited about the fall movie lineup: Eagle Eye looks shiny, definitely going to have to see that, and some of the comedies coming out look absolutely hilarious. Looks like The All-American Rejects and Trans-Siberian Orchestra have albums due before the end of 2008, and the upcoming Oasis album looks like it's going to be great; I heard "Shock Of The Lightning" on the radio a while back and loved it.

Alright, that's all for now. See you all Tuesday.

Over and out.

--
SMike

English instructor found to be "one o' them scumbag innapennants"

For those of you who missed the reference, my English instructor is a Browncoat. If you still don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.

If you somehow missed this in the last post, Chris and I now have a TV. We went to Best Buy in Christiansburg to get Chris a webcam and found an open box TV. Turns out that the built-in DVD player is broken in a big way. But we still have a TV, which is nice.

Nothing else has really happened since Monday . . . so I guess I'll be ending this here. Hopefully more stuff will happen between now and Saturday.

Over and out.

--
SMike

Blogger misses update

Alright, so I missed Sunday's update. But! I have a lot of exciting stuff to show you.

First of all, dorm photos!

Here's my desk and bed

From Freshman Dorm Room

The foot of my bed and closet

From Freshman Dorm Room

The sink

From Freshman Dorm Room

Chris's closet

From Freshman Dorm Room

The door and Chris

From Freshman Dorm Room

Chris's bed and desk

From Freshman Dorm Room

The fridge and TV

From Freshman Dorm Room

The dresser, toaster oven and microwave

From Freshman Dorm Room

And finally, the whole room

From Freshman Dorm Room

I went to the Furman game on Saturday; rough first half, but we wrecked them in the second. I forgot to wear sunscreen, so now the left side of my face is burned, but I'm fine now.

I also went to the scene shop for the first time today. They have a LOT of different saws in there. The show we're building for is A Skull in Connemara, by Martin McDonagh. It's apparently some sort of dark comedy. Guess what I'm helping make for the show? STONES! For a flagstone floor, not a wall, but still.

One last thing before I go: I mentioned in the first post that I was making a senior year slideshow. Thanks to Picasa 3, it's done, but I'm having some trouble getting it on the internet; let's hope I figure it out soon, because it turned out REALLY well, and I want you all to see it.

Finally, just because I missed the Sunday update doesn't mean I won't keep to the original schedule. Next update will be Wednesday, and hopefully I won't miss many more after that.

Over and out.

--
SMike

Boy unable to properly hit volleyball

It would appear that it's time for another update. Now, I could just cheat and stop there, but that would make me something of a jerk, so I won't. As you may have noticed, today's title is in the form of a headline. I've decided that since I named the blog "Headlines of My Life," and because it would be funny, I'm going to lead off with a headline-style title from now on.

On to the headline itself, then. For the second time in as many weeks, Chris and I (and a bunch of other people) played a game of volleyball after sundown. I probably hit the ball six or seven times, and every single time a bumped it open-handed, which is exactly the wrong thing to do; the ball loses way too much energy if you do this. Even after the second and third times, though I still couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I was doing it wrong. Hopefully I'll get better; after all, it's not like we're keeping score.

On Wednesday, I overslept for the first time since I got here. Chris and I have been doing pretty well as far as waking up goes normally, but on Wednesday he hadn't plugged his iPod into his alarm clock the night before, depriving me of the chance to wake myself up by waking him up and telling him to turn off his bloody alarm. That's not the real story, though. So I wake up late and get to my Engineering workshop as fast as I can (just my luck, couldn't have been late for a lecture class, could I?). I walk in and apologize to Anand (all the workshops are TA-run) for being late, explaining that I overslept. Anand asks my name and then tells me that he conviniently happens to be standing with my project group. I walk over and introductions ensue, I'm SMike, you're Francesca, that's Thao. (Both girls, if you're curious). As I sit down and they fill me in on what I missed, I notice that Francesca seems startlingly familiar. I realize that she looks just like a junior that I knew back at TJ (at the time, I couldn't remember the name). I mention this, and Francesca says, "that's weird," and we go on working. As I mentioned, this is my project group, so we exchange contact info at the end of class; turns out Francesca has a 703 phone number. I say "ah, from northern Virginia, then?"
She says, "yeah, Great Falls."
Me: "Oh, I went to TJ."
Francesca: "My sister goes to TJ!"
Me: "Wait, what's her name?"
Francesca: "Lexie."
Me: "That's it! That's who I know that looks just like you!"
It turns out Francesca's a nerd, too, which I was grateful for; I was beginning to think I wouldn't find anyone else who read xkcd who I did'nt already know from TJ. Truth be told, there are probably lots of people as nerdy as me that I just haven't found; I haven't met a whole lot of people in my classes yet.

Alright folks, I've pretty much exhausted my supply of interesting stuff to say. See you all on Sunday, over and out.

--
SMike

First!

Had to get that joke in there, didn't I. So I've decided to try this blogging thing, both because I think it will be good for me to be responsible for regular updates, and because there are certain people *cough*Mom*cough* who would like to know what's going on in my life.

So, where to start . . . well, for one thing, I'd just like to say that I like this tablet a whole lot. I retain information a lot better when I take handwritten notes, so having a computer I can literally write on is helping save paper and is also a lot easier to keep organized. It's also cool that I can just move my marks around on the page instead of erasing something and rewriting it somewhere else.

As far as extracurriculars go, I went to a swing dance on Saturday night, which was was more fun that several proverbial barrels of particularly proverbial monkeys, so I've signed up for lessons. I got a lot of compliments about how well I was doing for it only being my first night, and Christian even said on the way back from the dance that he could see me becoming a better dancer than him in the very near future. Yay for having rhythm; Fish and I both agree that drumming and marching actually helped a lot by forcing us to really focus on rhythm and beat. I wish I'd started doing this at TJ, if only for the fact that I wouldn't have had to pay for lessons.
Also under the umbrella of extracurriculars, I signed the interest sheet for Hall Council, so we'll see how that turns out.

After putting together 100-odd photos for my screensaver, and browsing through a lot more in the process, I'm feeling rather nostalgic, so I'm putting together a senior year slideshow (that's actually from the summer before senior year until now) composed entirely of photos I've taken during that time period. It should be done soon, I'll post it when I finish.

My favorite class so far would have to be PHIL 1504: Language and Logic. It's basically a class about how to argue. I only just met the professor today, as he was out for the first week, but it looks like it'll be fun. My English class is pretty great too; the assigned readings are actually interesting, and we're going to be doing collaborative papers using a wiki, which I personally think is absolutely brilliant. On the other end of the spectrum is CHEM 1035, which is currently all stuff I've learned before (that's TJ chem for ya). To top it off, my professor has such a thick accent that I can barely understand what he's saying. It's annoyingly crowded, too; my Languange and Logic and EngE classes are in nice big lecture halls with the seats spread out to give you space to work, but in Chem the seats are all squished together like a theater, and I feel like I barely have room to breathe.

I mentioned earlier that I would try to maintain a regular update schedule, so a few of you are probably wondering what that schedule will be. I'm going to update at least once every three days, so the next update will be Thursday at the latest. Until then, I'm out.

--
SMike