I got a flat tire for the first time this past weekend. I got home from work on Thursday night and thought everything was fine, but when I went outside a bit later in the evening I noticed that my rear driver’s side tire looked pretty flat (but not all the way flat). I’m kind of a hypochondriac with my car sometimes, so I was genuinely shocked that one of my tires was actually flat. I put air in the tire right then, but I could hear a hissing noise signaling its refusal to stay put as soon as I finished. I thought the tire would be completely flat by the next day and was starting to think about having to buy new tires, but when I woke up the next day it was kinda flat, but not horribly so. It wasn’t in any condition to be driven on though, so I had to call in to my internship and tell them I wouldn’t be able to come in, and then get to work on getting things fixed. I had to be at work (job, not internship) at 3:00pm, and was hoping I’d be able to make it.
So, I took off the semi-flat tire, put on the spare, and went over to Dunn Tire, which is right down the street. They said they could fix the tire in about an hour. I walked over to a discount bookstore in Northtown Plaza, killed a bunch of time in there, actually bought a book (about how the Democratic Party has alienated young voters by catering to “the middle” and also by being run by old, out-of-touch people… obviously written before this current election, which makes it all the more interesting in my opinion) and then went to Manhattan Bagel, got a cappuccino, and started reading the book. (It seems pretty interesting.) After that, an hour had passed, so I went back. It was all set, cost around $25, and left me with plenty of time to get to work. All in all, not a horrible experience! As far as getting a flat tire goes, it sure could’ve been a lot worse.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: the culprit was a rusty nail. Why there are rusty nails just sitting in the middle of the road waiting to ruin somebody’s day, I will never know.
In other news, I was playing with the website that I did for my last assignment in Programming for the Web. For the assignment, we were still supposed to use a table for at least part of the layout, so that’s what I did. I wanted to see how easy it would be to convert the page to a full CSS, no tables layout. Turns out it was extremely easy! You can check it out here if you’d like (at least until I start working on the third assignment, which will eventually go in that location). It doesn’t look too different from the old version I linked to in my last post. It’s more different on the inside than it is on the outside.
For some reason I have absolutely zero interest in doing my homework. I guess I better do it anyway!
I had to do an assignment for my Programming for the Web class on Wednesday night. It took forever, but I think I learned a lot! I got really into it while I was working on it; I spent a long time just tweaking stuff and playing with settings and such to see what would look good. CSS is really cool. I never learned it because I always thought it would be very complicated, but it’s really the easiest thing possible, and it makes designing pages a lot simpler overall.
If anybody wants to see it, you can do so here: Web 2.0 Technologies. The content and pages were dictated by the assignment, so it wasn’t really up to me. Personally, I think blogs (naturally) and RSS are really interesting, but podcasts not so much.
It’s finally starting to be sunny outside again! I never remember how oppressively dark it is in the winter until it starts getting sunny again in the spring. Now if only the temperature would follow suit… what’s with it still being in the 30s and 40s all the time? It’s almost April! I’m really looking forward to the 50s and 60s. That’s probably my favorite kind of weather.
Everything has been going pretty well lately. My classes, certainly, have been going as well as I could expect. Japanese, for me, is on one of the upswings where I feel like I kind of know what I’m doing, although that’s sure to change when I start attempting to write the 5-10 page paper that we have to write this semester. (Rough draft is due next Wednesday, so that’s pretty soon, ideally!) Advanced Digital Art is going well too. I feel like after all this time, I finally have a somewhat of a handle on how to make work that means something. And Programming for the Web is exactly as I thought it would be: sometimes a bit dry, but successful in filling in a lot of the gaps in my web design knowledge.
As for a job search: well, since I’m holding down my classes pretty well, I have to find something else to excessively procrastinate with, and I think the job search is exactly that. My shoulders are getting sore from the excessive amount of shrugging I’ve been doing lately because of all the times someone asks me what I’m doing after graduation. It’d be nice to have something laid out for myself, but I’m not really in a hurry. I’ll make something happen sometime… I just hope that something is a good something, haha.
I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros Brawl a lot lately. It’s pretty awesome! It’s a great game to play when I have some friends over, and it’s also a great game to play by myself. It’s really convenient for my friends and I, because now instead of sitting around trying to figure out what we should do, we just play Smash Bros. It was funny to come back from break and hear so many people talking about it… that might just be a function the kind of people I like to hang out with, though, haha. I bet there are bunches of kids in the dorms playing it all the time. Almost makes me wish I still lived on campus.
One of the cool things about it is online play. I got the game while I was away over break (which also probably contributed to my lack of posting!) and played online with one of my friends in Buffalo. I know people have been playing games online with PCs and Xbox Live and such for years, but there haven’t been too many games with online modes that are actually the kinds of games I like to play. I tried playing Tetris DS online, but I just lost horribly every time. Apparently the kinds of people who play Tetris online are just universally more skilled than I am, haha.
If anybody who reads this has any interest in playing online sometime, leave a comment with your friend code! Even if we’ve never met, I’d be happy to have a good Smash Bros Brawl.
I’m sick again, not too long after I was sick the last time. I don’t get it! I didn’t get sick for years, and all of a sudden I’m sick twice in the span of one month. I had to miss class and work today because I have a fever. Being sick was cool when I was a kid and my parents would take care of everything and I could just play Super Nintendo and watch Godzilla movies, but at this point it’s really annoying. I had to stumble to the Rite Aid on the corner today just to buy a thermometer. (That shows you how long it’s been since I’ve had a fever!) I want to be able to function again. Also, I’m constantly either freezing, overheating, or doing both at the same time. On the plus side, my class is canceled tomorrow, so I just have work and my internship… if I’m not doing any better I might have to call in sick to one or both of those, but I’m pretty hopeful that I’ll have recovered by then.
I had a really good spring break! It was so good that I forgot that I hadn’t posted in my blog, haha. You can count on me posting in the next couple weeks to catch up.
It’s Spring Break (for me…starting a day early) and I’m at my girlfriend’s house in Tennessee. She had to work today, unfortunately, so I’m relaxing at her house. It’s pretty nice though. I’ve been using her laptop to surf the internet while also watching TV pretty much all day. I don’t have one, but using a laptop is fun to me, because I think somewhere along the line I got really sick of sitting at a desk and using a computer. (It’s probably a result of the fact that my job, my internship, and 1/2 of my classes involve sitting at a desk and using a computer.) I’m not really sure why I got sick of the desk aspect before I got sick of using computers in general, but that doesn’t really surprise me. I was thinking about buying a MacBook soon anyway, and this only makes me more inclined to do so.
I actually have a fairly decent reason for watching TV all day. This is pretty surprising for some people, but I don’t have cable in my apartment. Because of this, the only time I watch TV for anything other than to kill time is when Family Guy and American Dad are new. I mean, I do watch random garbage at least a few hours a week, but that’s just watching whatever sitcom isn’t completely intolerable or finding something that isn’t a judge show. I had cable when I was growing up and when I lived in the dorms at UB, so going back to watching a bunch of cable TV is like returning to some culture that I left long ago. It’s also pretty enlightening, because lately I’ve felt like having cable would be nice, but from watching all day today I’m reminded of the fact that even with over 100 channels, there still isn’t really anything very interesting to watch.
One thing that I was especially interested in seeing was cable TV news. I’ve been reading a lot of news since the primaries have been going strong, but I haven’t watched any on TV. I’ve been curious how they were presenting things. I watched CNN, CNN Headline News, and MSNBC for a few hours today, and being that I was never really a fan of TV news to begin with, I was left unsurprised in the worst way possible. It’s so simple and repetitive, but even worse than that is how divisive it is. There were so many discussions about “winning” and “losing” and about pointlessly vague concepts like “momentum”. Not once did I notice anyone mention that delegates are split proportionally according to voting percentages. Someone who wasn’t already aware that that was how things work (which is probably a lot of cable TV news viewers) would just hear these incessant conversations about recent “victories” and not realize that the actual delegate counts haven’t changed that much. It’s a clear misrepresentation, and I could rant about this for days, but I just don’t get why it goes on. Like I said though, I’m not really surprised at all.
What I find even more frustrating than this is how they keep dividing people into groups and telling them what to think. Anytime any results are discussed it gets broken down into white, black, Hispanic, men, women, old, young, rich, poor… I’m all for analyzing things through extensive data, but this isn’t how politics should work. This kind of “news” supports the idea that you need to pander to each group separately instead of appealing to everyone through ideas, principles, and policies. Worst of all is that it gives an impression of predetermination. They seem to subscribe to a theory that if you can nail down every separate demographic, you can use these generalizations in combination with demographic statistics from various states to predict the outcomes of future primaries. I guess if you’re gonna be talking about something for over 12 hours a day, you have to find something to say, right?
Wow, I got into a serious rant there. Time to turn off the TV and the computer and have a good vacation!
I finally finished editing and uploading the other clips I took at International Fiesta. You can find the video of clips of all the different performances here: International Fiesta highlights
Today’s weather was really weird! This morning I had to brush off AND scrape off my car, which makes sense since it there was freezing rain for a long time last night, followed by some snow. That was really annoying, but by the time I was leaving school today, everything had melted off my car except for a HUGE SHEET OF ICE on my windshield. It looked like the ice from the top of my car had just slid forward onto the windshield or something, but it was totally ridiculous. It was seriously a huge piece of ice the size of my entire windshield. Luckily it was the kind of ice that easily slides off, so I just put on my gloves, picked it up, and tossed it on the ground. It unfortunately broke into pieces when I tried to pick it up, thus depriving me the fun of throwing a huge slab of ice on the ground and watching it shatter.
Tomorrow, I leave town for Spring break! I can’t wait.
UB’s International Fiesta was this past Friday.
It was really cool! I wish I had gone all the previous years I’ve been here.
Here’s how it works: a bunch of the different student associations representing people from different regions or of different backgrounds each perform in some way, involving dance, music, or both. Everyone did such a good job. I was really impressed! In particular I want to say that Japanese Student Association was wonderful, and not just because I had one friend and one classmate who were in their performance. (Great job Allie and Mari, if either of you happen to read this!) JSA won the previous two years, and this year they performed last. All of the groups were so good that I was starting to be concerned about how JSA could impress me after all of the awesome performances that had been going on, but they were really excellent. Their performance was great, and it really reminded me of how much I like Japanese stuff, which sounds like exactly the kind of thing one should be reminded of at an International Fiesta.
Naturally, I took lots of pictures and videos. Some of the coolest pictures:
I also took some video clips. I’m currently in the process of editing them together into a highlights video. I did record the whole JSA performance, and that’s already online. You can check it out on Youtube here. Also, if you want to see the rest of my pictures from International Fiesta, you can check them out on Facebook here. I’ll be sure to post that other video as soon as I’m done with it!
