This guitar/fish thing has gotten my brain so fucked up – I just applied deodorant to my toothbrush.

Yes. Thats right.

Grrr. I *hate* popups. Looks like I’ll have to reinstall windows before the next LAN party…

Ok. Lately I’ve been having two simultaneous thought processes, but until recently they had been quite separate.

Thought the first was: I think I’m getting over keeping up all these fish tanks. I think it’d be easier on me if I only had one up and running. It would also cut back a little on electricity (though fish tanks don’t really use all that much).

Thought the second was: Man, chicks really really dig guys that play guitar.

I don’t really think I have any skills that members of the opposite sex would find interesting. Rarely have I stood in line for school books and heard one girl lament to another, “But his website just wasn’t w3c compliant, and the colors? Who uses red for text? I had to dump him”. And no girl has ever looked over my shoulder while at school and said, “Wow, is that perl? Hey what are you doing tonight?” The list goes on and on. Most – hell probably all – people who read this thing don’t care about HTML, Web Servers, Linux, Syllable, kioslaves, perl or graphics libraries.

And thats fine. You people already know me, and have some sliver of fondness for me, I hope. So you deal with my occasional rambling about nerdy stuff that interests me. Of course, I suppose I should say that there most certainly are girls out there who would find these sorts of things interesting, but that number is decidedly small. And it certainly is no one’s fault by my own. I simply never took the time to master another skill.

So back to guitar.

• Fact. Chicks dig guys with guitars.
• Fact. Merely holding a guitar in your hands raises your coolness by 20 points, but doesn’t necessarily lower your nerdness.
• Fact. People are impressed by other people who can make music.

Now lets run down the list of known guitar players here:

• Tristan -plays guitar, has gf
• Tom -plays guitar, doesn’t have gf solely because he doesn’t want one
• Kimble -plays guitar, status unknown, but could easily get many chicks
• Steve from dorms -played guitar, got crazy laid by >3 other dormites.

It seems the decision is all too easy. Sell fish tanks. Buy guitar. Get lots of chicks.

Ok, so that obviously wasn’t really my first day of class.

By the way, if you were wondering why no update, and no online this week… well, see, I caught the plague. And I felt pretty damn shitty for a few days. I consumed about 2 gallons of OJ, 4 Sobe’s, ~6 dayquil gel capsuls, ~6 echinacea pills, half a box of kleenex and about 10 orange otter pops. And I think I can safely say that none of it helped much at all.

But my first day did go alright, I suppose. I’ve got Jahnel for history again, so no suprises there. My CS classes are both online – which is nice – but it looks like my javascripting teacher’s webpage kinda, well, sucks – which, makes me wonder. And she’s using Blackboard, which she referred to as the “Bee’s Knees”. Personally I think Blackboard is pretty crappy, and more than a little awkward to use. And again, as a Website Designer, I’m not sure why she’d pick that, instead of making her own (like my perl scripting teacher has done).

My english teacher reminds me of that pothead guy from Road Trip… or Alexander, the Pussycats’ Band Manager if you prefer. Somewhat in looks, but totally in the way he talks.

I think I may ask this Lisa from work if she wants to hang out. She’s most definitely one of the nicest people I’ve met at PetCo. She’s a lot different from some of the other people that work there, too. Especially for a cashier. I don’t know why, but management has this tendency to hire cashiers based on one or more of these factors:

• a) as old as possible
• b) completely bitchy and cynical
• c) deer in the headlights look
• d) Those yet to make it to Step 1
• e) wow, is it totally sick that I acutally remembered how to do an unordered list in HTML by hand? I feel the need to bathe…

Anyway, the point is, she managed to squeeze in between my store’s stringent anti-decent policy, and is probably one of my favorite people to talk to there, especially now that Melinda’s gone. She’s always good for a laugh, and she liked Fight Club and Memento.

Thats pretty much it.

So it’s the first day of classes. Strangely enough, we can see the CSU students in their rooms, only a street away. I make a joke, somewhat to myself, but outloud about how uncomfortable those seats look, compared to ours. A girl standing nearby that I’ve never met before chuckles. I smile at her and as she turns her head to talk to someone else.

Finally the teacher shows up, and lets us in. Everyone goes to pick a seat, and I consider sitting next to the girl. But then I notice she’s still talking with the other girl from outside, and it sounds like they kind of know each other. And yes, they’re picking seats at the end of the row. So I go to pick a seat more towards the other end of the room, then I turn around, and she left a seat open at the very end. So I say what the hell, and go sit down next to her.

She’s still talking to her friend, and it kinda seems like they know each other, but probably wouldn’t like each other. The friend seems to disagree with whatever the girl is saying. So they stop talking and the girl faces forward.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

The teacher butts in, “Alright, class will begin now.”

“I’m Bill.”

“I-“

“There will be no talking.”

So its going to be one of those classes. And sure enough, we’ve got a quiz. She hands us all sheet of printer paper, then turns the overhead projector on and waits, staring at the clock. I look at the girl like ‘wtf?’ and she shrugs. So I just start copying stuff down. The she switches overheads, and its the same overhead, but all the information I just copied down is now being asked in questions.

The girl is lost. I’m not doing much better, either. She keeps asking me questions, in a sarcastic manner, about the questions on the quiz. I tell her the answers, but she doesn’t write them down. She looks at my quiz, quite blatantly, but doesn’t copy my answers, just makes silly comments about them.

Class ends. She invites me over to her house. She’s got Soul Calibur 2 on GameCube, and thinks she can play Seung Mina better than me. So we go to her house to play the afternoon away. We talk and I fix her computer. At the end of the night, during a shy, quiet moment, she kisses me. And thats when I remember my other dreams. And I know that she’s the one I kept seeing. Then I realize that I still didn’t see her face, or get her name.

*ring* *ring*

“Hey, wake up call, dude. Don’t be late to work, so they don’t have to fire your ass.”

“Thanks Greg.”

There’s something nice about having a whole day where you simply do nothing.

So I got my hair cut a few days ago… its pretty short. I decided to follow the advice of the fine people at “Great Cuts” and try putting something in my hair… so now I have this waxy substance that I use to give it a messy-spikey look which I’ve gotten a few compliments on. I figure if I do it enough times it’ll just become a habit, like taking my keys with me everywhere I go.

Still no luck on getting the dual-monitor setup to work… the information I’m finding on the web is leading me to believe that nVidia motherboards (the one I’m using) only work with nVidia video cards (one of the two I’m trying to use). I’ve seen some hacks and drivers to work around it, but haven’t felt like going through quite that much effort.

I have, however, been playing with iPhoto. I only have about 90 photos in my iPhoto Library, but I’ve got them all labeled and commented. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that the comments will carry over if I send them to someone, or copy them to another comp. Hopefully someone will write a little utility to do that for me :o)

School starts… holy crap, school starts next monday! Ew. Spent $200 on books, and apparently tuition has been raised again… now its $26/unit! It was $11 just one short year ago… Thanks for leaving a lasting legacy Gray Davis. *sigh*

I hope I can do well this semester… I need to bring my GPA up… I’m taking this Unix class (a different one… “Intro to Unix”) which I’m hoping will be actually based on Unix, and not Linux. Sadly, from looking over the textbook, it looks more basic than any Unix class I’ve taken so far. So now I’m left with the dilemma. Do I take this class, when going into it I’m fairly sure I won’t learn anything, but maybe improve my GPA? Or look for another class thats more interesting/challenging? I think I’ll check the catalogue later, and see what else I might be able to take instead, just in case. There’s a video game programming class…

In closing, I want these shirts.

So I’m busy messing around with getting my computer to run two monitors at the same time, right.

I plug in the Voodoo card to configure it, and take out my GeForce4. I happen to read the back of the card, and where the cable plugs in, it says “Vedio”

Typos on hardware…. thats a new one.

So mom wakes me up this morning.

“Billy guess what we found this morning? It starts with ‘Q’.”

“Does it end in ‘Zar’?”

“YES!”

So.

Err… Entry. I’m in San Jose, at my mom’s house. Up here for my cousin Tony’s weddin’. Well, thats the excuse I’m using anyway.

Really, it makes for a good reason to see the famn damily. And to visit Apple’s Corporate office!

Yeah, thats right. San Jose is right next to Cupertino, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. So this trip, mom made plans for us to go visit. So visit we did. They have an Apple Store there! So mom bought me an Apple shirt! So now I have an Apple shirt.

I also took some pictures for the fun of it, but I can’t seem to connect to my home computer right now, so I can’t post them, so you’ll have to wait.

In the meantime, I’ve got a wedding to get ready to go to, and Mel wants the computer.

Oh, and a name has been proposed for the fruit/car smushing game: Squishy. Although I also like Squishy-Smooshy