chaz720.net - journal

May 01, 2002

You simply defy. I cannot even look to the sky. We try it single filed. Take on me, and it's my denial. I cannot ever find something safe, not done on the fly. I cannot live this way, Floor and me will kick the P.A. You wanna play with me? I'm really gonna rock your world. You want to comfort me? I'm gonna rock your world. You say everything is fine. I cannot compete with the skies. My sing has crossed the line. Come in me, I fly through the sky. I can not ever find You and me will make all the lines. Oh, if they could see the plague, no one would want to be me. You wanna play with me? I'm really gonna rock your world. You wanna comfort me? I'm gonna rock your world. So I fly. Take me. I cannot fly. Most people hate me. To fly away from this pain. Please take away, please take away my P.A...

Done with classes except for the old finals. I got my music paper back and I got a 90 on it. Mainly, she says, because it ended rather abruptly (this is because I finished it and walked out the door to my classes that morning) and also because I failed to cite any of my sources I used for the background material (again, something that I could have done had I not be a complete and utter slacker as the semeseter got nearer it's end. I also took my music test on Monday and did well enough on it that it is worth it for me to take the final and possibly end up with an A in the class. The way I look at it, I got nothing to lose by taking it.

I found out recently that I can't start at Motorola until the 28th of may, two weeks later than I had in mind, cutting the time I have at the end of the summer whence my trip to montana would be from three and a half weeks down to one and a half weeks. Still enough time to get a vacation in but it still leaves me with two weeks to sit around and mine my posterior with my pollex... Leandra has given me the task to actually write comment code for her site (I was going to do this in november, but again with the slacktitude) so mayhaps I will "get the urge"^TM to do so amidst my boredom in about a week. Time will tell.

I've gotten a couple calls about our roommate ad so far but nothing entirely conclusive, one pretty hopeful though and we've still got another week of running. I got my fingers crossed, and if you don't want to lose yours you'd best be doing the same.

Assuming I just kinda do alright on all my finals I will end up with straight 'B's accross the board, that's pretty much for certain. it will take certain finite globs of greatness to get 'A's in any or all of my classes and although I will do my best to swing hard at those globs with my bat, I do ask you all to keep in mind that I am in fact blindfolded, and I have been spun around three times...

May 09, 2002

I'm done with all finals except for music such as I have been since last saturday afternoon. The past several days has been pretty retarded and I haven't really gotten a whole lot done. I've mostly just sat around and watched people take finals all week. Hans is just packing up his car to go home now and I'll be here with Kevin and Fei until I leave sometime friday afternoon.

Tomorrow I have somehow been elected to go to JSM and oversee the signing of the sublease for the guys staying here this summer. Not sure how that happened but it appears to be the way things are. On a darker note, the guy who seemed so hopeful as our roommate for next year and seemed nothing but a signiture away from being so has mysteriously fallen off the face of the earth. He said something about calling Monday to go sign but I haven't heard from him and have since left two messages for him to no avail. I've been calling back people that seemed even remotely interested and seeing if they've yet found a place to live, to not much avail, that approach seems to be without any fruit. I just hope our guy was just busy and didn't have time to call rather than changing his mind. Hans says he plans on running ads in the Summer DI to try and get people. I'm just trying to remain hopeful, I have no idea what kevin thinks or is doing.

Moving out shouldn't be too big a deal (or too big a load) I'm bringing back my cloths, my few cases of various optical media, and a small box of items taken from my desk. I plan on coming down when marty moves in in june to make sure he can get his stuff in here okay. It shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Hans and Joel are going on a road trip to Ohio State, I think they are leaving tomorrow, and my final and the sublease signing appointment will keep me here... le sigh...

Studying for my music test sucks right now, it's hard to think about this test with everything else going on but I'm trying. I think it should go fairly well regardless. I got my final grade back for physics and I ended up with an A in the class despite my near death experience on the midterm, so that's good. No word on ece210 which I'm disappointed about, it's been about a week and they still don't have them graded. I personally think they just want everyone to go home first so as to avoid personal harm when they do release the grades.

I've decided a CS minor is too easy to pass up so I'm going to get one.

I ordered my new camera the other day and I'm having it shipped home so it will get there sometime next week. I'm pretty excited about that, don't know if I've mentioned it yet but I'm getting this one. It has pretty much the same tech specs as my last one but is quite a bit smaller and less cumbersome making it easy to carry around and thus, actually use on a regular basis.

May 11, 2002

On my way home, police car pulled me over. After they left, I puttered out of gas. 'Triple-A' came, but my card was expired! I had to walk home, and of course, it rained half the time. I tried to get some shut-eye, then I was abducted! They put cold things in my butt. They sampled a bit of my D.N.A. They left me on top of my sheets. I dreamt I went potty, then woke up drenched in me. This day sucked the hardest ever... I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. A little bit less than nothing would go my way. I got up to toss my soiled sheets, the hallway was dark and I stubbed my big toe. It was then that I sensed the irony(burning me) then I heard a voice say, "Come sail aboard S.S. Nepenthe!" I suppose I'm to blame for getting pulled over. I guess I'm the culprit for running out of gas. Let's assume I'm the guy who didn't pay his 'Triple-A' fee. In actuality, I let the zetas probe me. Yesterday was all my fault. I let negativity get the better of me. Thank goodness for the bathtubs and suds! They temporarily set free this quandary.

These lyrics posted due to one of the largest driving forces known to man-kind, getting joel to stfu!

I'm back at home now. The roommate thing is pretty much taken care of, I got a hold of Lamont and he was still interested so we went to JSM to finalize the whole thing. Unfortunately Hans had already left so he wasn't able to sign yesterday. I need to get Hans to sign some form so that another person can be added to the lease. After that gets faxed down to the housing place Lamont can sign whenever he gets a chance this summer without any of us being there.

Before I left everyone was convieniently in one place over at Al's place having a bbq so I was able to see everyone. That was cool, Al offered me a cheeseburger so I had some food for the road. BBQs are always fun.

Had a pretty uneventful drive back in that no one ran into me, I didn't run into anything, and I didn't get pulled over. Traffic was nice and smooth (save a small strech of 294, some jackass hit some other jackass and a couple cars were upside down in the ditch and everyone had to get a good look) and the day was beautiful for driving, sunny around 70º and a few cumulus clouds hovering around here and there.

Today I got a few errands taken care of including buying some new running shoes that actually fit comfortably. That's right I got running shoes now. The plan is I am going to run this summer every day before work. I decided it was retarded to get 8 hours of sleep every night and still be tired all the time, it was driving me nuts. I figured it was cause I didn't run enough and spent too much time sitting around wherever it was everyone was sitting around that day. Nothing too stressful, just a good 20 minutes of running in the morning. Maybe by the end of the summer I'll have more energy and not just want to fall asleep all the time. Plus if I wake up at 6:30, run for 20 minutes, take a shower and maybe spend some time in the steam room I'll get out and feel good throughout the day and not just come home and fall asleep right away.

It all sounds so good written out doesn't it?

I haven't gotten my new camera yet but the memory card came for it, the proprietary memory stick stuff that Sony has. It's not so bad now that they allow other companies to make it and you can get a 128MB mem stick from Sandisk for like 50 bucks if you look for a few minutes online. That's about the same price as anything else it could use and honestly, who actually has two or more products that use flash cards of some sort and use the cards interchangeably? No one, no one does that. That's people's only arguement against manufacturers making their own memory and maybe .01% of people who have cameras have ever used the memory cards from their cameras in an mp3 player, a pda, or a ... yeah that's pretty much all that uses that type of thing. Besides I like the memory stick, it's contacts are better protected from getting messed up than smart media and it's smaller than compact flash, so why not right?

Anyway, I think I'm going to go play pool and not have to pay for it...

May 15, 2002

It's 3 o'clock, And we ask ourselves, "Where are we now?" It seems we've wondered out of bounds again! (Over and over, we ask ourselves why we don't utilize things that are stored deep inside of our brains!) I'm on my own and I can't see straight! Am I so stoned that I can't see straight? Man, I've got to find my way back home, but I'm too deep inside. It's 4 o'clock, And we ask ourselves, "Where did we go wrong? We passed my house at least an hour ago!" Over and over, we ask ourselves why don't we utilize things that are stored deep inside of our brains! I'm on my own and I can't see straight? Am I sooo stoned that I can't see straight? It's 5 o'clock, And we tell ourselves, "We need to get home! The sun is creeping overhead again!" I'm way too deep inside to go home... I've got to get sane!

I am back at the motorola again...

So far things are good except there are some issues to be resolved involving my keycard, but that kind of thing happens. I already have a computer and all my accounts and passwords work beautifully working so I have much to be thankful for, and in an environment where everyone seems to be busy at all times I'm willing to count my blessings. The project I will be working on here is probably going to be pretty cool and was thought up mostly by me. I'm not going to get into details because I can't, but it involves PHP and MySQL, and will be useful to pretty much everyone in my department. This is good because it will give me a chance to put an instance of actually using my web-ish knowledge at a place of business rather than just saying "yeah I can do that" on my resume.

I'm going to do some redesign to my subwoofer setup in the trunk of my car. Hans or someone suggested that an alternative could be found to the beast of a box that's in my trunk at the moment. While it hasn't really been a problem as of yet, it would be nice knowing that I could fold my seats down and get big stuff in my car if I ever wanted to, and plus it would be a fun project and we all know how I love fun projects involving power tools. The basic jist of it would be rather than to have one gargantuan dual 12" bandpass box like I have now, replace it with two smaller ported boxes each housing one 12" sub and residing in the rear corners of my trunk. These boxes would not only take up much less space, but would also give me back the ability to fold my seats down and get large items in my trunk. This undertaking will probably be accompanied by the cleaning up of some of the wiring and other things I've been meaning to get around to but couldn't do while I was at school. As I said, a fun project.

I had some down time this morning so I took the liberty to choose my classes for the remainder of my college career. The good news is I will be able to graduate in four years and get a CS minor. The even better news is I don't even have to go over 15 hours a semester to do it. My last semester actually comes out to be 12 hours! So without further delay, here's what I'm taking from here on out.

For 5th semester:

ECE 229 - 3 hours - Intro to Electromagnetic Fields
ECE 249 - 2 hours - Digital Systems Laboratory
CS 173 - 2 hours - Discrete Mathematical Structures
TAM 152 - 3 hours - Engineering Mechanics I - Statics
MCBIO 100 - 3 hours - Introductory Microbiology
NRES 100 - 3 hours - Earth Care

For 6th semester:

ECE 340 - 3 hours - Solid State Electronic Devices
ECE 310 - 4 hours - Digital Signal Processing
CS 225 - 4 hours - Data Structures and Software Principles
CS 273 - 3 hours - Introduction to Theory of Computation

For 7th semester:

ECE 342/3 - 4 hours - Electronic Circuits
ECE 320 - 2 hours - Digital Signal Processing Laboratory
ECE 373 - 3 hours - Fundamentals of Engineering Acoustics
CS 311 - 3 hours - Database Systems
HIST 152 - 3 hours - History of the United States, 1877 to the Present

For 8th semester:

ECE 345 - 2 hours - Senior Design Project Laboratory
ECE 318 - 4 hours - Introduction to Image and Video Processing
ECE 303 - 3 hours - Topics in Audio Engineering
ASTR 304 - 3 hours - Astrophysics

And that's all she wrote. It's not only very easy for me to get a CS minor, there is no reason whatsoever not to. I found out that simply picking my general BSEE graduation requirements "correctly" will result in my having a CS minor without any overhead whatsoever. The classes: ECE229, 303, 310, 318, 320, and 373 will all work toward my specialization in audio equipment, and the rest are essentially just requirements that focus on designing circuits which is useful knowledge for EEs in any field.

May 19, 2002

it doesn't get much better than this ladies and gentlemen, it just doesn't, man do former instances of myself crack me up... This is why everyone should have a journal, because laughing at yourself 9 months after you make the jokes doesn't make you a loser, it makes you ment mentally defunct.

I began construction on the new boxes for my trunk and very quickly doubts have arisen in my mind. I want to make damn sure I can go back to my current box if what I build does not live up to the standards I have set forth for subwoofer performance. Hopefully the new enclosures will sound good, but I have a hard time gaurenteeing it to myself, I'm not entirely sure why that is. I guess I have a hard time letting go of something that for all practical purposes works just fine without first having something that works fine as well.

Something about this summer is weird and I can't put my finger on it. It feels as though it's taking on an entirely different texture from the last time I came home for summer and I don't really know where it's going. Things like working on car stereos remain the same as when I got back last time, but my job at motorola feels altogether different. Maybe familiarity has finally kicked in around there. Maybe it's because there are so many fewer friends from high school in the area. Maybe it's these damn cursed alergies that won't leave my sinus and ocular cavities alone for just one good night of sleep. I can't say to be honest. The one thing I know for sure is that leaving Champaign and going home for three months is a major culture shock. Not having people your age surround your every movement at all times of the day is really erie once you get used to things being that way.

Today whilst wondering stores in the Schaumburg area acting as an observer to a pursuit of shoes being carried out by my sister, I came across a wall of shirts intended for young teen girls that made my gag reflexes press into overdrive. Sporting such classy phrases as "Sure boys have feelings too but like, who cares?", "Kick him to the curb", and "I don't get headaches I give them.", how could you not find something for your daughter? I guess I missed the bus that drove everyone to the magical vacation land of "bumper-sticker ideas that aren't funny", but that's okay because it appears all they got were these lousy t-shirts.

May 21, 2002

The world has turned and left me here, just where I was before you appeared. And in your place an empty space has filled the void behind my face. I just made love with your sweet memory one thousand times in my head. You said you loved it more than ever, you said... You remain, turned away, turning further every day. I talked for hours to your wallet photograph, and you just listened. You laughed enchanted by my intellect, or maybe you didn't. Do you believe what I sing now?

I love the main guitar rift in this song.

Yep, the sub-box replacement plans have been shit-canned as suddenly as they were drawn up. I did take my speakers out and reseal them into the box with some of the liquid nail sealant I was going to use to build the new boxes and that made a rather drastic increase in sound quality as air must have been creeping into the sealed half of the box making for a mushy sound when quick bass strikes like bass drum in alternative music. Now it's nice and tight and it feels like someone's kicking the back of your seat again like it should :D. Also, I have re-run half the wires, the purple RCAs so far the rest to come probably tonight, through the center of the car underneath the carpeting/center consoles as opposed to "under" the trim pieces along the sides of the car which essentially just turned into "just laying on the floor of the car in plain view". I have to admire Matt's honesty in saying, "hey if I didn't know you I'd see the wires, break into your car and steal all your shit" thanks Matt, that's very helpful. The truth of the matter is that it has been like that for about a year now and nothing has come of it. The real reason I'm fixing it is because I'm obsessive compulsive and I simply can't take looking at it anymore or I'm going to go insane. But then again I'm taking the MTX Audio sticker off my car now so I might be a giant fucking liar too. (no really the red is faded and looks like ass)

Oh another note on my car... I'm getting my rear windshield and rear B-C triangle windows tinted. I found a place out in Mundline that supposedly does it well. Not blacked out or anything, but probably matching or a tad darker than my sunroof. Partially because I have leather and it gets really hot, partially because all the roof supports on my car are black and it would all look really nice if those windows were tinted and actually matched :D. I'll show you all how it looks once I get it done, not this weekend but the following one.

No, this weekend we are going camping up in Wisconsin which should, at least in theory, be fun. I don't have my camera yet because it's been on backorder but Hans should have his so we'll be sure to get pictures if anyone wonders too close to the campfire or something like that. Cause really, is anything fun if someone doesn't get burned alive?

May 27, 2002

Well I got back from camping up just outside the Dells yesterday. We stayed at this place called Rocky Arbor Park or something like that. Mainly because Devils Lake was all booked up. This place was actually pretty cool and considering pretty much all we did was eat, sleep, and burn things it suited us quite nicely. David put together a cool 360º panoramic photo of the campsite aqui.

Friday we had Culvers (omg delicious) and drove around taking a look at the Dells area and Devils Lake. When we got back we built a fire and roasted marshmellows. Or rather, David and I roasted marshmellows and Hans and Dave set marshmellows on fire and tried to convice us they were better that way. Saturday night due to miscommunication and lack of forsight I didn't have a pillow so I ended up sleeping on my hands in my sleeping bag. This worked great until the rain woke me up around 4:30 and both my forearms were completely dead to the world and I couldn't even lean on them to sit up without falling over. I imagine I looked quite a bit like a retard there for about 5 minutes trying to sit up, but other than that it wasn't a big deal. That morning it rained a bunch so we cooked eggs and bacon and drank beer under the overhang of the tent. Then we drove out to the Dells and walked around the street trying to stay under overhangs as much as possible. We were finally gravitationally pulled into another Culvers where we had some coffee and warmed up. After my third cup or so the waitress lectured us about how she knew of someone who had so much caffine it messed them up in the head altering their personality, ah I love the local people. We then all bought fudge and peanut brittle and went back to camp to play cards.

After it stopped raining Saturday we built a fire that was to last around 9 hours total consuming the rest of the wood we brought with us. So after some catch wtih a hacky-sack and a vedge session Hans and I went and got some more wood, eggs and ice. Oh yes and the most rediculous KFC bucket of chicken with mashed potatoes and biscuits I've ever seen. We all ate the chicken and threw the bones into the fire as we finished with them, commenting about how much the chickens had been completely owned. After that we attempted roasting more marshmellows only to be reminded that we had all just eaten altogether way too much chicken so that Idea was scrapped. I then passed out.

Sunday was beautiful, we had breakfast and packed up our stuff and headed to Devils Lake. We went on a couple mile hike up one of the bluffs that overlooks the lake and that was a lot of fun, after a while the path back just broke down and turned into a hike over rocks and shit to stay out of the lake, so that was fun. Hans said fuck it and trudged through the flooded out path. We then had Culvers again and took off for home, all in all a most enjoyable weekend.

I bought a gameboy advance the other day along with Doom. I got a white one because I don't want one that's clear because clear electronic devices are just kinda overdone these days, and my only other choice is purple. So white it was. I know we've all played and beated Doom but having it on this thing is great. I keep coming up to these levels and thinking "hey I love this level but I thought it was in doom 2, oh well happy fun surprise!!!". However, not long after I bought it I placed an order for an Afterburner kit because the display really is annoyingly dark everyone who's played it will tell you and anyone who hasn't has already been told. I can play it in my room alright cause I get a nice amount of daylight in there and it defuses nicely over the screen, but trying to play the thing with just about any type of artifical light source can really be a pain. People bitch to no end about the installation but seeing as I have everytihng you need to do the install and I am maticulous about doing things perfectly anyway, I can get some latex gloves to avoid fingerprinting any of the parts when working on it. I read the instructions already and I don't see myself having a problem with this. Hell I'd consider reselling gameboys with the thing installed if everyone and their monkey didn't already. I have a video clip of what the thing looks like in action in case you want to see what I'm talking about. I figured I'd rehost it here so as not to be a bandwidth mooch. As you can see it makes all the difference in the world and I have very high hopes, but enough about that.

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