Cultivated Nonsense

Didn't want to go with a cliched title like "I am...Iron man!" or something, so you can imagine it yourself. In any case though, I saw the new Iron Man movie last night with my friends.

In a word...awesome.

I would have to say that this is my favorite super hero movie of all time, my close second being Batman Begins. Pretty much everything about Iron Man was perfect.

The IRS has decided that it would send me my stimulus payment yesterday. So I went about stimulating the economy like a good little citizen.

As I've mentioned in the past (although it was a while ago), I've always wanted to learn how to play some kind of an instrument. I used to know how to play trumpet from my elementary school days, but I dunno if that really counts. I decided that I needed a new hobby, something that was more constructive than hanging around and playing video games. So I decided to buy myself a keyboard (well, a MIDI controller actually) so that I could learn more about music and how to play stuff.

It's always something I've been interested in doing, but I never got the motivation to go out and do it. But now I'm going to try to change that. So I ordered myself up a Korg K61P after doing some research. Now I just have to figure out how I want to go about the learning process. I don't think I want to take a class or lessons right off the bat anyway. I'm not terribly interested in making this a formal thing that starts feeling like work. I may do something down the line, but right now I just want to kinda mess around with stuff. Probably not the best way to go, but I'm not one for one on one lessons in most cases anyway. We'll have to see.

As you may reall, I'll be heading down to Washington DC in a couple weeks to catch Progressive Nation '08 which consists of Dream Theater, Opeth and Three. Well, there's another band, but I don't particularly care for them. Anyway, what I didn't plan on was heading out to Albany to catch another show of the same tour the weekend before. But here we are.

The story starts last monday. I returned home from work to a message from Wassy simply stating "!!!!". I asked what was up and she quickly informed me that she had just recieved a message from a guy that's a regular on the Mike Portnoy.com forums that I visit often. He bought platnium tickets for the show, which means he spent $300 per ticket to get let in early to get up front, as well as get backstage passes to meet the band, get stuff signed and take a picture with them. However, it seems he doesn't want to do the meet and greet thing...so he's offering his two backstage passes to us, for free.

We had originally intended to go to Albany that day anyway because the drummer (Mike Portnoy) was going to be having an in-store apperance and we wanted to go. But now we're going to the show too. Can't pass this opportunity up, that's for sure as I don't think I'd ever be able to justify spending $300 per ticket to go backstage.

So needless to say, I'm extremely excited at the chance to meet the band that pretty much opened my eyes to all the good stuff that's out there underground, even if they're not my favorite band anymore.

As you may or may not have noticed...I've pretty much fallen off the face of the earth for the past couple weeks. This isn't because I wanted to stop blogging or because I died or something. It was because I was spending my time working extremely hard on finishing up my last semester of college.

And I'm proud to say that, as of 12:30pm on May 5th, 2008...

I'm done.

Letting that sink in for a minute here...

I'm...done.

For the past 7 years I've been working through school, sometimes full time, sometimes part time while working full time...fighting against people giving me the wrong information, taking classes I didn't really need...not knowing that I had to take certain classes that I wasn't...

But it's over. I handed in my final project this afternoon, I have my final grades, my overall GPA, my name was in the paper as graduating from the school.

I'm done...

*collapse*

I'll write more when I can stand up again.

My meeting with the professor overseeing my project yesterday went fairly well I thought. I really should have been keeping on top of things before so it didn't come down to the wire like this, but all in all it wasn't bad. He generally liked what I had done and just had a few suggestions for extra functionality to add which I'll try to stuff in over the weekend. It's going to be a fairly busy weekend/next couple days for working on stuff. He also told me I had a little buffer for getting things in if I needed to take it in order to get the project finished up correctly since grades don't absolutely need to be turned in until the end of May. I should be done next week or the week after at the absolute latest.

In other news, it looks like my degree evaluation has been completed finally and I meet all of the requirements for graduation assume I pass all of my courses this semester. So it looks like the end is in sight. Hopefully. Maybe.

Something will get screwed up, I know it...

It seems I forgot to do a post for last week, so I'm going to be doing a combined post. It's been a bit of a rocky road over the past few weeks due to stress and/or lack of time to exercise. I managed to get off my long standing plateau of just above 250 and now I've traded that in for one just below 250. But I haven't really been exercising as much as I would like to be as of late. Hopefully that will change once school is over and I have some more free time to play with. At least I'm maintaining which is a good thing in my book.

The warmer weather recently has highlighted that I need to go shopping for a couple pairs of shorts. I seem to only have size 42 and size 38, one of which is way too big for me and the other is a little tight right now. I must have either tossed the 40s or my swing in weight totally skipped a size in between a summer.

And because of the warmer weather, I've been walking outside for the past couple of weeks when I have the time to go out and walk. Partially to help build up some endurance for the trip out to Washington DC coming up in a little more than month and partially to get some more different and/or outdoor type activities going to keep things interesting.

This friday though I kinda walked a little longer than I had meant to. There's a couple of different routes I can take around where I live. I usually just do an out and back kinda thing that works out to be about 3 miles total. Friday though I decided to try walking around the loop, as there's a couple of streets that form kinda a ring. I'm in a pretty rural area, so this isn't a small loop. Roughly five to five and a half miles to be exact. So an hour and twenty minutes later, I had almost finished. I stopped into my parents house for some water because I didn't have any cold water at my place and they're just down the road from me and practically collapsed on the living room floor. That's not something I really care to do again in the near future. Maybe once I build up my endurance a bit...

New shoes would be helpful too. My current shoes are a little on the old side and really aren't terribly supportive anymore. So I just purchased a new pair of New Balance MW792's to fix that problem. They should be here Wednesday. Since my size is 13 and I need a wide, it's a little hard to find decent walking shoes in a store, so I usually have to internet order stuff. Darn genetics.  

Another weekend, another weekend summary post! This weekend was a long time coming after perhaps one of the slowest weeks ever.

Saturday I was a nice, relaxing day of hanging out with my friends. I went out to the local zoo with Wassy (Jay was supposed to come, however events earlier in the day ran long and he wasn't going to be able to make it so we went without him) and had a nice time wandering around, viewing animals and dodging annoying children. Well, viewing some animals...some of them didn't seem to want to have anything to do with me. Like the ducks.

The zoo has a duck pond. Well, more accurately it's an alligator pond that some ducks have moved in on and the zoo put up a sign saying it was a duck pond, with bonus alligators. They have this thing set up where you can feed the ducks. Pretty standard setup, put in your quarter, get some pellets, throw to ducks, they eat the pellets and everyone goes away happy and satisfied. Except for these ducks that is. They weren't having any of this feeding stuff. So it kinda made me look stupid, throwing pellets to ducks who were totally ignoring me. So I just threw the whole handful at them. Take that jerks!

I should also mention we found a free-range peacock just wandering around. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't have been wandering because we saw them get thrown in a cage immediately after. It seems slightly disjointed that I mentioned that fact here, but I wanted to get it out of the way before I mention the human based story.

As we were trying to escape from a gaggle of kids (of the annoying variety) we walked past the place where they sell all the drinks and food and stuff of that nature. There was a family consisting of a boy, probably around 6 or 7 years old and his parents. As they approached the building, his mom said "Ok honey, we're going to have to wait in line..." The kid responded reasonably with a very loud yelling of "F--k!!" that made my head turn. It seems his parents were fine with this as well as they didn't seem totally shocked. I couldn't believe it and it made me want to weep for humanity's future.

After the zoo trip we went back to their apartment to meet up with Jay and begin the general hanging out portion of the day, watching some anime (Full Metal Alchemist) and then Sweeny Todd, a movie which will forever prevent me from going to a barber shop to get a shave. It was good though. Very artfully done and Johnny Depp is incredibly awesome in it.

Sunday was the standard day of work. I had some housework to get done, and some programming type things that needed to be taken care of. Hopefully my weekends where I need to do school work are coming to an end relatively soon here as there's only a couple weeks left in this semester which is hopefully my last.
 

Just some quick school updates in case anyone was interested. First, statistics. I ended up getting a 90 on that test I took last week, despite finishing about 30 minutes before everyone else. So that's a definite plus!

Also, I was finally able to get my project sponsor to acknowledge my presence (also mentioned in my post last week) which is another definite plus. I'm supposed to swing by his class on Tuesday and show him what I have done. Hopefully he likes it and doesn't make me totally redo it because that would mean one very, very long week for me next week, and I'd rather do more constructive things with my time.

So, as promised, a couple of quick school updates for you. I have some musical stuff that I need to write about too later if I remember. I've just been (again) too busy to post anything recently, so I've got a backlog of things that need discussing.

As the April 15th tax filing deadline looms, many gay couples are facing higher tax bills because they do not get the federal tax benefits that accompany marriage. The same is true for heterosexual couples who chose not to get married. Do you think this is fair?