So, the other day I picked up Tres from the airport and took him to go pick up his car, at Tom’s house. This was pretty cool, cuz I hadn’t seen Tom in a while. When I mentioned that I was interested in playing guitar, his eyes lit up and he attempted to teach me a few things.

So I learned some barre chords, which are fairly hard, and a couple open chords, which are fairly easy. He started trying to teach me Bad Fish, by Sublime, but I’m not fast enough yet. If you’re familiar with the song, and you listen carefully, you can tell that its close, and I can personally tell I’m already getting better. So then Tom said, “here, borrow this guitar til you get your own”. To which I said, “sweeeet”.

So now I have a temporary guitar. It’s a Nylon 6-string Acoustic. I’d forgetten entirely about Nylon string guitars. And when I actually played this one I was surprised that I could tell the difference in the sound between steel and nylon string. Oh, and the guitar? Yeah. It’s a Royce. Yup, thats right. A Royce. Now for those of you wondering what a Royce is, it’s a guitar brand. This will probably be the first and last time you ever hear of a Royce brand guitar, even if you were to pick up a guitar tomorrow and become infused with the combined spirits of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bob Dylan (ooops, nm he’s not dead yet), and Frank Zappa (cuz in every five-man-team in which their-forces-combine in some communist idea that by giving up personal glory/power they serve a greater good, there’s always one guy who’s just kinda there cuz he’s worthless by himself [“Power of Heart”? what kind of crappy power is that?] So yeah. That’s why I put the Genius in France here.) Anyway. If you were to be infused with their combined souls tomorrow, and become the greatest guitar god(dess) EVAR, you’d still probably never hear of it, because its some no name brand.

Wow, that was a long paragraph. I still want to get my Ovation, though. I guess I’ll just need to get 3 guitars now. My Ovation, an acoustic Nylon string, and eventually an Electric ;o)

Anyways, gotta write a paper.

Guri is no longer with us. Eowyn won’t be shortly. These are probably things better left untalked about.

I’m beginning to realize I don’t like javascript. I mean, it seems nice and all… but it also sucks in every way perl kicks ass. If there’s a problem, for example, the script simply doesn’t run. Unlike perl, which will either say ‘hey dude, you screwed up over here, might wanna fix this shit here.’ or even just running and stopping after a few things.

No, it just doesn’t do anything. I get a blank page. And thats not even for big errors. That’s just misspelling a word, misplacing a punctuation mark.

Oh well.

I want these.

Ah. Our contract with SBC is finished as of September 10th. We’re kinda deciding between Speakeasy and Cox. I’m leaning toward Speakeasy, because even though its $10 more than Cox, they’re more than friendly to running servers. Which you can’t really say for any other ISP. Especially SBC. Unfortunately, it looks like currently their cheapest Static IP service is $60/month, which is a little out of our price range. But I’ve dealt with dynamic IP’s thus far, another few months won’t kill me.

Anyway, we’ve yet to make any plans with regards to our email service, so if you notice I’m not online for a few days, its cuz I’m waiting for internet. Don’t send me anymore mail to my SBC account, btw. Use the email address at the top of this page… my ‘rohan’ account.

This is interesting. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Apparently my political ideology is somewhere around Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and The Dalai Lama… something like a Socialist Libertarian… which fits, I think.

In other news, I’ve made some serious progress on my web-journal. Right now it reads from a file for certain info, then posts that info into a webpage. As of right now the only way to add posts is to edit this file, but I’ve started work on the ‘add entry’ page. Then I work on handling replies. Then I can pretty it up ;o)

btw. If you ever had any doubts about Third Eye Blind having some … err… songs inappropriate for mixed company… download Slow Motion by them. They don’t even try to slip in innuendo… its just right there.

Leon, the best damn common goldfish ever, passed away yesterday. He was about seven years old.

Ok, I was prematurely interupted by a Star Craft match.

Back to the guitars.

The one I want looks like this. Though I’m not sure about which color.

Anyway. So you may wonder what the difference is. Well, it’s lighter, its not as bulky, and the action is great. Action being how easy it is to hit the frets. It just felt right. For a while I was really weirded out by the rounded back, so I didn’t even try one, but I actually like it better having held one. It’s also the same one Clare has, and she loves hers.

I’ve also learned two chords now! I know a C Major and a D Major. w00t. I’m on my way to becoming a rockstar…

I need it. At first, I went to Scotty’s Guitar… I figure, hey, support local stores wherever possible. So I stop on by, look around, and find this Fender DG-8 Acoustic starter kit for $250. Comes with case, extra set of strings, tuner, picks, and a teacher DVD. Well, as it turns out, that set isn’t thought of very highly. I guess that makes sense, as it is amazingly cheap.

Well, every day since then I’ve been to Guitar Center. I’ve messed with Yamahas, Taylors, Martins, Epiphones, Fenders… and then Tristan pointed out an Ovation. And so I went and picked one up to try. Oh my God. I still can’t play guitar, but now I want to more than ever. And I want this one.

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.”