Roller coaster

Sometimes I use a roller coaster to describe my life. Earlier this summer, it was all fun and what not and now it feels like things are pettering out. There is still plenty of time to save summer though!!!

I'm going home august 11-16th. My parents foiled my plans of not having to go home again until christmas. They had planned to bring my siblings and themselves over to DC in August, but decided not to (they had enough traveling in China); so they offered a cunningly crafted invitation that left me no room to decline. Its not that I don't like my family, but I really like being independant here in DC. Here, I have to do stuff for myself; there, if I go to do something, someone else does it for me. Its rather frustrating. But, I'll be able to see the few people back there that I actually give a damn for (you know who you are, if you're reading this. Everyone else from 2004 can fall off the face of the earth).

I got myself a new machine built. Foxconn NF4K8MC-ERS(mATX mobo), Athlon 64 3000+ Venice, 1gig PC3200, 2x160GB WD Caviar SATA drives, NEC ND-3540A DVD burner, Winfast PX6600 GT THD Extreme edition video card; all packed into an Aspire X-Qpack case. Its a beauty, and runs Doom3 on high mode like nobodies business even anti aliased.

Work has more or less ground to a halt. Bar exams are done, as are summer classes at the law school. No more laptops, considerably lessened useage of the computer labs...life is sweet..but spending my day here is still about as exciting as looking at the horizon while stranded in the ocean. I really like doing stuff that'll challenge me. Thats the only downside to this job, little I do here challenges me. At ISIS, as least I had to fix mechanical systems, swapping out parts to make reciept printers and their POS brethern work, digging through technical manuals that were 15 years old to figure out if a NCR board is compatible with a certain style of tube gun assembly (The joys of dumb terminals, none of this putty emulation crap). I do lots of reading here, lotta technical and news stuff. I've been slowly working on Lolita, which is almost too good to read...I can only read so much of it each day.

But I"ve taken up DVD authoring at home. I've got tons of Divx/Xvid movies/episodes/cartoons that I want off my harddrive but in a readily playable format. I finally got chapters to work yesterday, I'm not too concerned about menus. I'm done with writing now.

Independance Day

Watching the fireworks over the national mall last night was amazing. CI is almost over, one more round to go. Class is done. Computer is ordered. MythBox should be coming along later this month. Biking should be getting into better gear soon [hurt my ankle 2 weeks ago]. Hurrah.

Summer begins tonight [or how Md has liqour sales]

Calc is done as of tonight. I've got my final at 6pm [not too psyched about it but i've got alot of time to study for it]. Last night me, Matt, Ben and Rich went to Bethesda, in Montgomery county, Md to buy booze. Why, you might ask. Montgomery county is liqour controlled, the county determines pricing across its bounds. One thing goes on sale, its on sale everywhere. The list has 18 pages of stuff....it makes it well worth the trip to Md. Hypnotiq, Alize Wild Passion[i don't remember if it was Wild or Red, the bottles and color are so strikingly similar], some more Jack [can never go wrong with the bourbon whiskeys], some Southern Comfort and Kahlua Especial. Similar runs will be made in the future, ultimately culminating in a serious liqour cabinet.

So CI has been going okay. I like to do the volunteer work with SEAS, and meet some of the incoming freshies. There are 80 incoming biomedical engineers in a class of 187 at SEAS. They don't know what they're getting themselves into. Soem people are doing rotc+biomedical engineering. Its insane, these people are taking 20-21 credit hours their first semester of college; I can only hope they make it but damn, I had enough trouble with my 15 [granted, I was partying a bit, but that is definitely what the first semester is for].