chaz720.net - journal

February 01, 2003

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road. Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go. So make the best of this test, and don't ask why. It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time. It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right. I hope you had the time of your life. So take the photographs, and still frames in your mind. Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time. Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial. For what it's worth, it was worth all the while. It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right. I hope you had the time of your life.

Being on fire is definitely a contagious ailment.

Oh dear lord the ece310 homework� That was the longest, most annoying, and painful assignments I�ve had to do since ece313. It wasn�t even that is was difficult but it was just� argh, no words�

Yesterday I went out to Canopy and saw a couple bands play. The first one that was on was really good and I was enjoying their music quite a bit, but the second band we saw just sucked, so I decided to just walk back, I needed the rest anyway.

Today has been a really nice day, it warmed up a ton and most of the ice and slush on the sidewalks and streets has cleared up so walking and driving have returned to the list of viable modes of transportation. Tomorrow is supposed to be really nice as well, it may even get up to 50�, and that would certainly be welcome.

This morning the space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas at about 200000ft or so scattering debris all over the state. I heard about it on the news this morning, but they had very little information at the time I was listening to the news so it�s hard to really comment on it. =/ It�s really just disheartening more than anything else. I hope they find it was some device or piece of equipment that broke somewhere and we can chalk it up to the general risks of space travel.

February 05, 2003

Well, there went a day or two of our DSL being out. Something was screwed up with SBC as they were switching some things over. Really it's not that big a deal and they did fix it pretty quickly, but more information than simply "check our website for system status and known outages" (does this seem ironic to anyone else?) when you called their support number would have been nice.

Mr. Beer report. It's in bottles now in my fridge. I, unfortunately, have too much to do to drink any of it at the moment, but I assure you this will change come weekend, I'll let you know how it goes.

Update: okay so I have stuff to do, but I cracked a bottle open anyway. It actually tastes pretty damn good. But I think it's under-carbonated and over-alcoholed. I'll have to see how to go about fixing that.

My classes are getting into full swing with material and assignments now. Which is nice cause now the review assignments (these are the hardest as they require you to come up with knowledge you learned more than a month or two ago) are done and I can sink into a rhythm which, if history repeats itself, I should be able to ride all the way to the end of the semester. This works out well for me, even if at times it does get boring.

Speaking of getting boring...

I feel like I've run out of cool things to talk about here. All I've done for the past couple months has been to ramble on about what I've done in the last couple days or so in sentences so long it would make past English teachers roll over in their graves, that is, if they were dead. I'll prolly just keep the ball rolling for now, but I'm thinking about switching up the format that I write these entries in. Maybe some kind of narrative story or just pick some observation I've made and expand on it. It may still encompass things that happen to me, but I'll make no claims as to what percentage is real, and what percentage is just some weird scenario I was thinking of, or that came up in a dream, or god knows what.

Now, I know some people read this to keep up to date with what I've been up to, but really, most of the truely interesting stuff that happens to me I don't even write about here anyway, for reasons you are all aware of. If you aren't aware, then ignore this paragraph please.

Oh yeah, and fuck instant messenger, feel free to e-mail me if you like.

February 20, 2003

You can force it but it will not come. You can taste it but it will not form. You can crush it but it's always here. You can crush it but it's always near. Chasing you home saying, "Everything is broken. Everyone is broken." You can force it but it will stay stung. You can crush it as dry as a bone. You can walk it home straight from school. You can kiss it, you can break all the rules. But still... Everything is broken. Everyone is broken. Everyone is, everyone is broken. Everyone is, everything is broken. Why can't you forget?

For some reason I had forgotten that The Bends was the best album ever made.

It's warming up outside, and either I'm getting over my cold (or more likely flu based on the symptoms) or at the very least the DayQuil is doing it's job more than adequately. Anyhow, in light of that I figured I'd make a quick update while I take a break from studying for my ece310 test tonight.

The past couple weeks have been pretty busy as my all-engineering schedule is prooving to be very good at supplying a steady stream of work. With projects, circuit designs, programs, and problem sets due at least once a week from every class, there's never a dull moment no-sir-ee. And surprisingly enough, I've actually been pretty good about finishing most all of my work earlier in the week when I have my time off as opposed to leaving it for thursday or friday right up against the deadline. I guess my little Procrastination plaque I have on my desk isn't doing it's job very well.

I figured I'd have been much worse about the difficulty of this semester from the simple standpoint that 1) last semester was easy as all hell and I never really had any work to do besides one class, and 2) I did nothing productive whatsoever during winter break. It's hard to come off a run like that and get back into the thick of things, but I always felt I was one to be able to accomplish just about anything if I felt I had to. Sure we all have times when we are feeling lazy and we don't want to do something that's put in front of us, but not doing it doesn't really present itself as an option to me... does that make sense?

Well, speaking of not necessarily wanting to do something but having to anyway, I suppose I should get back to studying for my ece310 test.

Studying for tests is kind of a funny thing, as you go back and review the material one of two things will generally happen. You'll either go over the material and it will come back to you and you'll remember how easy it was, making you more and more confident about how you will do on the exam. Or when you look at the material, you will swear one of your alternate selves must have done that particular assignment and you have no idea what's going on, making you fear for your very life on the exam. If only you could somehow contact that alternate self and have him explain it to you, I'm sure it would make a lot more sense.

February 24, 2003

Two jumps and a week, I bet you think that's pretty clever, don't you boy. Flying on your motorcycle, watching all the ground beneath you drop. Kill yourself for recognition, kill yourself to never ever stop. You broke another mirror, you're turning into something you are not. Don't leave me high, don't leave me dry. Drying up in conversation, you will be the one who cannot talk. All your insides fall to peices, you just sat there wishing you could still make love. They're the ones who'll hate you when you think you've got the world all sussed out. They're the once who'll spit at you, you'll be the one screaming out. Don't leave me high, don't leave me dry. It's the best thing that you ever had, the best thing you ever had is gone away. Don't leave me high, don't leave me dry.

This weekend I took a trip out to Ohio State to visit Rosie, John, and Joe. It wasn't really what I was expecting, but it still managed to be a good time. There's a few photos of the journey in the photo section, who's adding script is no longer broken so I can actually use it again.

I want to get some spare time and clean up some old entries. I was looking up something to figure out about how long ago it happened and the entry was all crazy and was in the old "all in one big block" format, I'd like to change that and make as much of this have the same kind of feel to it, even if the content has changed a great deal.

But for now, Hans pointed out an article in the paper today which demonstrates the highly liberal campus that I go to school on, and I figured I'd share a few points on it here. One of the things the guy was talking about doing in this little rant of his, was repealing tax breaks that were issued, and instead placing even larger taxes on the rich, and no taxes on the poor. And now I'd like to explain why this makes him a communist...

Something a lot of people that favor a movement like this seem to misunderstand is the following truth. People don't just get rich by luck. Lotto winners get rich by luck. People get rich by establishing businesses and, not surprisingly, employing people who make less money than they do. By taxing employers more heavily, what you are doing is raising the cost of earning that extra dollar you could be making, by having a larger business with more employees. This makes small businesses stay small, as crossing the gap into a medium-sized or regional business has become more arduous, due to the fact that in order to actually start making more money, you first have to overcome the new tax bracket you've just found yourself in. Really, this isn't that big of a deal because people seem to like small businesses, and it makes job positions more competetive. yay.

Here's the problem...

What happens to the medium-sized businesses? Or the large businesses? You can't just tax them more, you will actually make it a profitable decision to decrease the size of the company, laying off workers until you can get yourself right up against the bottom edge of a tax bracket. The only ways to deal with this would be to either assume that suddenly people will spring up from the woodwork to incorporate these freshly laid off individuals into new small businesses which, and this is moot but I stand by it, is not something I believe the economy has the capacity for on the kind of scale which it is bound to happen. Or you could impose restrictions on these companies denouncing and restricting mass-downsizing as a viable form of keeping your company out of the red due to these new tax increases. And if you did this, then as a government, you'd have to keep the company out of the red yourself or the whole thing would go in the toilet.

And this is where our friend dons a red blazer complete with a little embroidered hammer and sickle. Unless he's got a better way of getting people to remain employers while he slowly makes it a living nightmere, he's going to have to create some kind of legal "incentive" for them to keep people in jobs. And getting ourselves into this kind of situation is asking for trouble in more ways than I can even paint.

The solution, well that's simple, make people want to be employers. Make it a nice, warm, comfy feeling so that we as a country can squeeze every bit of entrepreneurship out of society. It's a rare trait and we shouldn't make it more so by damning those willing with more taxes. Hell, provide tax breaks or some other incentives on having employees. In the end you'll have a lower class that won't be paying zero taxes, which might have sounded nice in a stump-speech, but they'll all have jobs, which I hope we can agree actually is nice.

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