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.