Fall 2k6 - Fall 2k7

I guess I should start where I left off. The snake died. It was just a baby one, so it must not have been healthy or something. I thought I took pretty good care of it. Oh, well. In order to make use of the cage and equipment my roommate and I bought, we went to the pet store and bought a new pet. It is a Western Collared Lizard. We named him Clint Westwood. Right now he's living with my family in Texas since my new apartment does not allow pets.

At the end of the fall semester, it turns out I concentrated more on passing my other classes than on AI, and I had to retake AI. I'm doing that now. *sigh*

Something funny about Mr. Westwood. I was going to get him some crickets in January. It was a cold day, sort of misting outside. The roads seemed fine when I started driving. However, when I went over a bridge (I wasn't even really aware that I was on a bridge, actually.), my car suddenly fishtailed. I had run into a patch of black ice on the bridge. The corner of my rear bumper hit the cement rail on the side of the road, which really disappointed me. My dad fixed it up pretty nice this summer, though. Still, I wish it hadn't happened.

Oh, I did mention I got a new apartment, right? Well, I wanted to renew my lease back on Houston Street. However, the apartment had recently been acquired by Olty, LLC. The manager, David Chapman, asked me if I wanted to renew, and I confirmed that I did. However, my roommate was uncertain, so we didn't sign a lease right away. He gave me a lease, and never contacted me again about it. I never knew a deadline to find a new roommate or renew or anything. So in February, I get a call from the place letting me know that my place had been leased to other people. No one even came to look at the apartment... At least to my knowledge. Weird.

David Chapman says that it was a misunderstanding and that he tried to tell my roommate that he needed the signed lease back. I wish he would have contacted me instead of my roommate, since I was the one that was going to renew. Whatever. A huge annoyance (moving) that could have been avoided by better communication skills on his part, but I can sort of understand what happened.

However, when I move out during the summer, I have the electricity turned off. I come back this fall and tidy up the place a little bit so that it is not a dump. I haven't damaged the apartment at all. When I first moved into the apartment, I had to do a lot of cleaning, and I had to turn the electricity on, so I figure the best thing to do is leave it how it was when I got there. In the lease I signed with Olty, it doesn't say anything about needing electricity on or paying for professional cleaners. However, when David comes to check the place out for damages, he tells me that I'm required to have electricity on and that cleaners will be coming. I am to be charged for emergency electricity switch on and for the cleaning. I tell him that it's not in the lease.

We get into a huge argument about the charges, even though I'm right. Finally, this past week I receive a check with most of my security deposit. They charged me for carpet cleaning and a couple of light bulbs, but I don't think that's worth fighting over. They were going to pretty much deduct my entire deposit. They also gave me only my half of the deposit instead of the full one. I'm pretty sure they're banking on my old roommate not wanting to fight to get his half of the deposit back. What slime balls. I almost went to court with these people. Ugh.

Anyway, you've probably heard enough about the happenings that transpired here at Virginia Tech on April 16th, so I won't go into too much detail. I was on campus at the time of the shootings. As a matter of fact, I was right next to Norris Hall at the time of the second shootings. The police were not even at the scene yet. I was in my morning class when a person interrupted us and told us to evacuate the campus because of the first shootings (which had happened two hours earlier). I was about to walk out the door and right by Norris when a some people standing around the doors told me to get back inside because they had heard gun shots. I turned around and walked home the long way, avoiding campus.

I got home, signed on instant messenger, and started talking to my friend Steve that I met at MCS. The bad news just began to pour out the rest of the day. Eventually, Steve and his wife offered to come and pick me up. That's a 5 hour drive one-way, so they made quite a trip to come and get me. I'm glad I have such good friends.

Interesting thing happened on the way back to campus. I agreed to let a reporter follow us and get my perspective and thoughts on returning to campus the week after the massacre.

Over the summer I ended up with an internship at Verizon Business. My brother's girlfriend's father is a pretty important person there, so he pulled some strings to get me the internship. My position was SAP Basis, which is an administrative support position for a very popular (and expansive) ERP software suite. I basically learned how to make sure things ran smoothly on a bunch of computers without actually ever seeing the computers. I met quite a few new friends there. Jesus, Fareed, Carol, to name the ones I got to know the best. Good people. I miss them.

This semester started, and I move into my new apartment with the help of my old friend, Anthony. I get to know my new roommate, Vinh, a little bit before school starts by doing stuff like playing some softball, going to karate, going out to eat some, etc.

We ended up going to a movie with a couple of his friends, Anthony and Thien. I ended up really liking Thien. Even though I wasn't looking for a relationship at all...

So now I have a girlfriend. A great girlfriend. I guess will spare you from any further mushiness for this post, and just give you a picture:



Really looking forward to going to Busch Gardens with Thien, Steve, Stephanie, and Vinh next weekend. Hope everything works out well. Also going to go to Thien's family's place the weekend after that. Kind of nervous about that one, but I think I will end up having fun.

Other than that, right now I'm taking a bunch of difficult classes and trying my best to get a good enough GPA to graduate in December.

I think that's enough catch-up for now. It feels good to get that out of the way. Until next time...

Transfer from Xanga

Hello, Blogger! I have just moved all of my old posts from Xanga. I used Xanga mainly as an online journal. At first, I actually left trivial updates as often as I could. That will not be happening anymore.

Now, I expect to be writing three things here.

1. Random thoughts, opinions, observations, commentary, etc.,
2. Reflection on things that have happened in my life,
3. The occasional, longish autobiography-style journal entry.

The only reason for #3 is that I think the other two might not make as much sense without it.

That said, I have had to edit a few of my transferred Xanga posts in order to put them back into context. Also, I was subscribed to the semi-active-at-the-moment Xanga journals of Anthony and Larry.

Snakes and salaries

Caught a checkered garter snake in my room the other day. Went out and bought a cage for it, and now it's my pet. We'll see how well this goes. Hopefully it doesn't have worms or anything.

Changing topics here, but I read this morning in New York Times that "wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s". This makes me love big business and corporations even more, hurray!

Hyped about AI Class

Went to my Artificial Intelligence class this morning. I'm really hyped about this one. Gonna use Python in it, and A.I. just seems really interesting to me.

My hectic first day of (cancelled) classes...

I went to my first class, thankfully, and turned in my force add form. Got out of that class, which got about halfway through.

At like 10:30, some lady barged in and told us all that we had to leave. They were evacuating the entire campus. Evidently, a killer named William Morva was on the loose. Next, I couldn't go back to my apartment because of the blockades since I live about 3/4 mile from the spot on Huckleberry Trail where he was hiding. I couldn't go to the library or downtown to sit and wait it out. I couldn't call a friend to pick me up because the cellular towers were completely busy for like 30 or 45 minutes...

I'm glad they caught the guy. Not fun to have a murderer running around free near my apartment. I didn't get anything done at all today cuz all I could do was sit at my friend's apartment.

All that said and done, I'm beat. Good night.

Back in Blacksburg fall '06

Well, I'm back in Blacksburg again. Had a great time with my family. Got a nice tan from relaxing in the pool, got a brand new Nintendo DS Lite...

First half of 2k6, and then some.

So, it's time again for my extremely long update about my life and what has happened in it! I'll begin where I left off somewhere around January.

As I said before, I headed back to Blacksburg. I was on academic suspension. Totally sucks. My focus wasn't in the right place. I had a video game and Internet addiction. I think I still have a slight Internet addiction, actually. I've got to work on that. Anyways, I headed back to Blacksburg. I looked for a job and did land the one at PC Land as a computer technician.

PC Land
Now, I love being a computer technician. I wouldn't want to do it for the rest of my life, but it's an enjoyable job to fill my spare time. But man was the owner of this place a royal pain in the neck. The rest of the people that worked there were pretty cool, but the owner really irked me.

I swear he was trying to run a sweatshop or something. He didn't allow music or mp3 players because he thought it would distract us from our work. In case you don't know, being a computer technician requires absolutely no brainwork at all once you know the procedure of things. When he would come out of his office and ask what we were working on, it would be in such a sour, irritating manner that it began to burn into my senses like a spark sent with the wind into the dry mesquite of Texas on a mission of wildfire. I was never in a good mood when he was around. My thoughts were always dwelling on how pissed off I was because of this guy (whose name I won't mention). "What are you doing?" "Is it okay?"

He never had any praise to give. It was always criticism. He'd call everyone stupid, asking why we couldn't be smart. Over stupid stuff. Like giving a potential customer plastic standoffs. And throwing away an old, broken case and motherboard. Yeah, I was the one that threw away the old, broken case and motherboard. I was in Roanoke when he found out. He called me at Roanoke from Blacksburg and started yelling at me, barking at me like a dog. The stupid thing wasn't worth 5 bucks and he was about to fire me over it. I mean, the time I would have spent trying to fix it would have cost him more money than he would have gained from selling it. So I took the good parts out of it and threw the bad parts away. I thought this was reasonable.

I was wrong. This man drove up to Roanoke and began to berate me in person. When he asked me why I did what I did, I attempted to answer, only to be cut off. Later in the conversation, he accused me of trying to argue with him. He said I was stupid because I didn't see what I did was wrong since I was defending myself. Grrrr...I was only trying to answer the question, but he wouldn't hear any of it. He wanted to sell the broken piece of crap to a customer. Maybe they would want to fix it on their own, he said. Alright, whatever. I didn't know we were a junk store.

I could definitely go on, but I think I should stop now. I won't mention his lack of English skills (he's Chinese) or the how he reacted to an unavoidable situation where Norton Ghost didn't work as expected. Enough of him.

My time away from work--my projects and my roomate.
So other than working, I had decided on some personal projects to occupy my free time. My old friend Kyle gave me an old AMD-K6/2. I decided to install Ubuntu on it and set up an ftp server. I decided to finally make the switch from Windows to Linux on the computers that I actually use once I quit World of Warcraft.

I did accomplish the ftp server quite easily. Set it up with vsftpd. While I was at it, I set it up as a Teamspeak server, as well.

I had done a default install of Ubuntu on that machine, not knowing any better. I should have done a server installation so that Gnome didn't come with it. I did disable Gnome, but it's still taking up unnecessary hard drive space. I've decided I'm going to format the whole thing again soon and install the LAMP server on it. Learning scripting languages and SQL are actually my current projects. I've also got to figure out PAM, I think, to require a password to access my ftp server. It's annoying to get port scanners hitting my machine 24/7. Sometimes they leave random files in my upload folder, and there was one instance where a guy started downloading something my server. Not only was he downloading, he was very aggressively downloading. I have pages upon pages of logfiles of him attempting to access a single file, but my computer was refusing because too many connections were already open. After that, I turned my server off until I decided to reinstall and learn more about ftp authentication.

Moving on, my new roomate for the semester ended up being a guy from France coming to Virginia Tech on an internship. He ended up being a really cool guy. His name's Fabien.

He actually somehow motivated me to get out of the apartment and socialize with other human beings! Yes, this actually surprises me. I enjoyed it, though. Because of this, I ended up quitting World of Warcraft early. I haven't played the game since April or so. My account expired a few days ago, I hear from my brother.

I don't think I had even been to a bar in Blacksburg before Fabien arrived. Now, though, I'm pretty familiar with all of them. He also introduced me to rock-climbing, which was very tiring but fun.

Anyways, Fabien was great. He was really easy to live with. He cleaned up after himself, he was polite, he was friendly, he made an effort to include me in things. I'm really gonna miss the guy. He moved out of the apartment last weekend. He'll be moving back to France mid-September.

So since I quit World of Warcraft, I was safe to switch over to Linux completely. For about a month I was setting up a custom set of packages on a basic, or "server", installation of Ubuntu to create a good Fluxbox environment. Fluxbox was great, but I decided that maintaining my own set of packages was too much work. Ultimately I decided on KDE. So I installed Kubuntu! Pretty happy with it so far.

I've figured out one reason I don't have many friends, even when I do get out and socialize. I don't know anyone at all that really shares my passions and interests. Learning Linux, programming languages, network security, how the Internet works, etc. are my passions right now. Can't find anyone to share my experiences with. Oh, well.

Summer, into the fall.
Actually, I did go on one "date" this summer. My first one since high school. Nevermind the fact it was with some chick that found me on MySpace. Nevermind the fact that she's seven years older than me. Bah, it was a heck of a lot better than sitting at home doing nothing... She seems like a cool person.

This summer I started classes up again. Actually, they went pretty well. I'm amazed at how much a teacher can make a difference in how well I do in a class. I got an A- in the first class, where the teacher was amazing. The second class I got a B- in, and the teacher was not-so-good. He was genuine and caring, but his teaching style sucked. He was never really prepared for class, and all he did was basically give a brain dump onto the blackboard, hoping we'd gain an understanding of the material through hearing his thought processes.

Well, thankfully I don't have many more classes to take that don't interest me at all. I just got done with Electronics, which was centered around transistors and CMOS. The last two classes that I am not really looking forward to are Optics and Microprocessor System Design. After that I get to choose stuff that looks nice. Stuff like Operating Systems and Internet Programming. I'm going to try to get into an Artificial Intelligence class this fall, actually.

I've got to try to try to get into an Operating Systems course here in Dallas, though, I think, so that I can take Internet Programming and some other courses in December 2007 so that I can graduate then. Hopefully that works out. We'll see.

Yeah, I'm in Texas with my family right now. My summer vacation consists of staying here with my family and my visit from Steve last weekend.

Steve... my old friend from MCS computers. I am never around the 757 anymore since my family moved to Texas, but I still keep in touch with my old co-worker Steve.

When I started working at MCS, Steve was the one that brought me under his wing. We seem to think alike more often than not. Steve and I had a pretty good time in Blacksburg. We partied pretty hard, and I'll leave it at that.

So now I'm at home with my family. Relaxing, enjoying the sun and the pool. Enjoying seeing my family (and my grandma's here, too, until tomorrow!).

One thing I am noticing, though, which is kind of depressing me, is how my brother is distancing from me. We are still pretty close, but we used to talk all the time when we gamed together over the Internet. MMORPGs gave us a common interest and let us stay in touch.

I come home, and now he just talks to his girlfriend on the phone. We don't really have much to talk about. He isn't all that interested in the things I'm interested in, so I can't do that stuff with him. All I can do is try to find more common ground and find what else he is interested in so I can get involved.

It's difficult. It saddens me.

And it's not the only relationship of mine that seems to be faltering. Another one that I want to keep alive is between my old friends from high school, with Ralph and Robbie and Alan and the gang.

I feel sort of guilty because I never wrote my old friend Ralph a thank-you note about letting me stay at his place over Thanksgiving... Now I wonder if he'd want to let me chill there again this year. Oi.

I hope he forgives me, and maybe if I call him he invites me or something so that I can make it up.

Well, that's all for now.