I’m back to blogging. It’s been three weeks since my last blog post. Considering I was writing one or two a week previously, it’s been a bit of a stretch. I’ll try to start blogging on a weekly / bi-weekly basis. I plan to write a guide on every little application hidden in the C:/WINDOWS/system32 and C:/WINDOWS/system folders. There are some little known but useful applications in there. There are also things like sol. Just trying pressing WIN-R and typing that in. You’ll see what I mean. Anyway, given my track record (non-existent), I may never do it; it’s just been percolating in the back of mind since I rebooted this blog back in Feburary. Fuck. February. Why can’t they fucking spell Feburary (Fuck Februrary [FUCK February]) like I spell it in my head. Would make my life so much easier. *mutter mutter* *grumble*. (Just like Wenesday [Wednesday F|UCKING SPELLING AND TYPOS]) Guess I’m in not so a lucid mood after all. (see link)

In other new, finals are coming up. Maybe its time for another tirade against college and high school. Unlikely, though, just because I’ll be too busy getting my ass handed to me by the final exams. On a plate. Made of a 50-50 gold-platinum alloy.

Other things I’m too: adding some meta-data (aka “Custom Fields”) to my blog. Now, at the bottom of my blog, I’ll show the music, books, tv shows, games, apps, and other hobbies I’ve been into. Also, what I’ll do after I write the blog. I’ll try to make it faintly humourous (get it?). Never mind. Turns it’s not supported in wordpress.com (ie hosted by wordpress) blogs. Guess I’ll either do a page which I’ll update, or just put it in the bottom of my blog posts.

Um…

Maybe I’ll start a facebook/myspace account for a friend… Just to piss him off. Heh. Unless someone does it first.

Couple of other things going on. Got a job over the summer, paying roughly ~9 dollars an hour; it’s a programming gig (Actionscript 3+Flex 3) which is decent experience, and decent pay considering my tender age (75 years old). Gonna be ordering 1000 feet of Cat5 (ethernet) cable, along with crimpers and connectors and shit; ~$80 online including shipping, so a good deal. Me and my dad (My dad and I, fucking dickheads) are gonna spend a weekend over the summer with some heavy (hopefully) power tools rewiring our house’s failing cabling system (wireless sucks balls).

And that’s it. Here’s the so-called metadata (decided on the latter, I suppose):

New Albums I’m Listening To (to which I am listening? Fuck it): Wreckage by Overseer, Metallica by Metallica

TV Shows *ahem* To Which I’m In: Doctor Who, Season 1, Lakers

Apps I’m Into: Firefox 3 RC 1, Virtual Dimension

Books/Mags I’m Reading: New Scientist(.com), New York Times(.com)

What I’m Doing After This: You really don’t want to know. Let’s just say I go to bed, pull the covers up tight…

and start snoring. See. I told you; you really didn’t care/want to know that in the slightest. Outie. (although my sister’s an innie. Guess it isn’t genetic)

Build-up/Filler: Here I’ll outline another random writing tip which is extremely useful when you don’t know the exact name of someone or something, but will look it up later. Maybe you are too tired search for a name buried deep in your (horrendously messy, if you are(?) I) notes. Maybe you are without internet, as I am, riding a bus home from work (here as a programmer). Maybe you are in “the zone” and even the moment’s pause looking something up will break your concentration, and your work flow. Whatever the circumstance, this method makes it nice and simple for you.

Breakdown: Let’s say you are writing an essay on Pakistan’s prime minister (or president, or whatever), and you don’t know his name. You could just leave it blank, and then go through the document, inserting his name in two dozen different places. Or, just use a placeholder. Just a word or a phrase to let you (and the computer) where the name should be. I like to use NAME1, because then, if you need another name, then you can use NAME2, and also, the computer won’t confuse it with name, or Name. The trick here is to use the greatest of inventions, the “Find and Replace” dialog. Pressing Edit - Find or CRTL-F brings it up in most applications. Then, making sure to press “case sensitive,” type in NAME1 to find, and the guy’s name as the replacement. And, presto, all done.

Thought that this was kind of funny. The Onion, a parody newspaper, had an article on their website (here) which was, as you can see below, was a bit mature in language

If you want me to help you find plane tickets, you best unlearn all that shit they taught you in Sunday school. I got your back, yeah—but I can turn on you in an instant. I just don’t give a fuck. Expedia, Hotwire, Cheapflights? Fuck them bitches. I got my own methods, shit you ain’t never seen before. Shit you never knew existed. But I ain’t holding no hands, I ain’t babysitting—you don’t like my style of airline-ticket purchasing, then get the fuck out of my home office. Shit.

I ain’t afraid to open up my eyes and see the world of air-travel ticket searches for what it is. Sometimes you gotta look right into the credit-card payment field and see that nothing’s down there but fear. Sometimes you gotta get your soul a little dirty. That’s what I do when I get on FareChase. I’m not looking to win the Mr. Nice Guy Award for booking plane tickets, cuz if I was, I would never get shit booked. Every second can either make you or break you, and it can put your baby nuts in a vice and crack ‘em like motherfucking pistachios, but I’m man enough to stand up there and say, “Fuck you, Priceline, you bitch-ass motherfucker.”

And after reading all that, at the very bottom of the article, below everything else, underneath the links, right next to the copyright is

The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

Ahem.

With the end of the school year approaching, and thus finals, and then summer, I have increasingly noticed a feeling of general apathy about myself. This is not dissimilar to the “senioritis” which many of the graduating students of my high school currently suffer from. According to Wikipedia, though,

Senioritis is not to be confused with general apathy that one may experience at the end of any other academic year.

I don’t know what it is about it, but with my internship at a place called uWink as a programmer, and my 4.14 GPA (including PE, but that’s what the colleges see), I have frankly stopped caring about school work, school, grades, and even how I conduct myself in classes. This in turn is related to my previous post about college and my general feelings about college. Honestly, having taken two or more college courses each summer for the past few summers, and expecting to take another one this upcoming one, I just don’t care. It all seems so stupid, and boring, and kinda depresses me: why do in a year what you can just do in a quarter of a year? The boredom, along with my general good grades, has pretty much stopped me from doing very much academically anymore. I still do the homework when I have to, but, with as little effort as possible.
I mean, college is upcoming, and next year, frankly, will be a bitch. I’m taking AP English, AP History, AP Chemisty, Honors Biology (by popular belief the hardest class you can take as a Junior), andHonors Pre-Calculus. But, really, considering my current job aspirations (as a computer programmer of some kind), I don’t see the need to go to MIT or CalTech. Indeed, there is one way of thinking that going to merely a good school instead of a HOLY-FUCKING-GOD-YOU-GOT-IN-WHERE?!?!?!? is better. At the best universities, you know that your professor(s) are probably both teaching your class and trying to secure that 11 million dollar research grant. This means that you may not get the same education as someone who is pretty much devoted to teaching you.
This kind of persuasion, unfortunately, causes me to generally leave academics in general on my list of priorities. For example, I’m writing this blog post instead of the French quiz I have tomorrow. I’ll feel it in the morning, though. I’m also neglecting a shower. These two, in turn, lead to my lowest grade at the moment in French, and the horrification of any future girlfriends (hah) I may have, as well as the general repulsion of my friends/classmates from me. Don’t worry, I’ll take a shower, and then study for the quiz. But really, this is an example of my apathetic tendencies as of spring break.

Who knows, maybe next year will dawn new and bright, I back to school motivated, attentive, and interested, but, then again, maybe not. The summer may be enough to rejuvenate what hitherto gleamed in mine eye, mayhap recover vital joy in learning upcoming, the loving embrace of genteel Summer restoring heart where heart had congealed, or mayhap not. Only time, cruel mistress , binding humanity into her ensnaring web, will reveal the future’s secrets, and her lips are impregnable stone.

Shakespeare owns.

Peace out.
Note: You’ll notice that I put this as one whopping blog post instead of having a more button a third of the way through. I do this both so that my friends on Facebook, which posts my blog posts automatically as notes to my profile, can read them a post from start to finish; and also because, as seen in my removal of my hits counter from the main page, I stopped caring about hits. (yet another example of lassitude [ooh, vocab word of the day sweeeet*])

*: See, I still care about a few things in life.**

**: I just proved this entire blog post wrong. Shit.

A sort of comic relief after my previous post.

This is why I don’t let my mom use my computer:

In my high school, where tuition is $27,000 and rising annually, where the incomes of many families is measured in the millions (not mine, unfortunately), where every single student is expected to continue onto college, college is a big deal. Forget all those heartwarming stories in the movies of kids without money or ambition getting inspired or getting financial aid, and going to college, perhaps against a parent’s wishes; at my school, not going to college is taboo. If you tell people you don’t want to go, then you are told by every single person that you should: your friends, your teachers, your parents, your college counselor, even your neighbors. (more…)

First, in order to comprehend (vocab word of yesterday [heh its one in the morning]) the following, please read this blog post explaining the proper safety precautions. Or, just read the following quote:

What does this mean for you, the obviously not-very-beloved reader who I’m sure is stalking me right now (I assume one person will read this blog post; I consider myself popular). Usually, you can tell how much rambling there is by how many layers of parentheses, brackets, square brackets, etc. there are. Seeing as I hit three, ([{, I must be in an odd frame of mind. (compare this to my previous posts)

Wait… what? Oh yeah, heh. The IMPLICATIONS.

Thank you, and good luck. Well, good luck after the jump… (THE MORE HITS THE BETTER MWAHHAHAHAHAHAHHA MY DIABOLICAL PLAN IS WORKING) (more…)

So, until I find a better DNS service I have just a temporary forwarding from nostalgiaofthemind.com to nostalgiaofthemind.wordpress.com . This means that all those RSS feeds don’t need to be changed. Peace out.

UPDATE: I just realized I wasted nine dollars. I registered the domain name nostagliaofthemind.com, which, as you can see is not nostalgiaofthemind.com (moved the first “L”) Sometimes, you just want to bang your head against the wall…

ATTENTION

ahem…

Now that I have your attention, I am changing my domain name from nostalgiaofthemind.wordpress.com (the current) to just http://nostalgiaofthemind.com.

For those who would like to know, I spent like $12 for a year including a 2GB email account and private Whois lookup (no personal information yay). This was through 1&1.com (pretty decent prices). If I ever get around to it, I may use them as a hosting service for this blog, but for now, I’m sticking with wordpress hosting.

For all of you who have RSS feeds, I’m changing it tomorrow night, so get ready.

I think that I’m going to do it. The unthinkable. The unforgivable. The unexplainable. Somehow, through my many years of loyalty, I have grown tired of needless, pointless, and meaningless complications which been thrust upon me by an unforgiving and uncaring overlord. But what has wrought this change, this malicious, malignant, and malevolent act against the loyal cause that I have advocated for some many years? My malcontent, like a flower, has been growing, and now, is blossoming into this secretive subversion of all my previous thoughts against, turning into glowing grievance and galvanizing gripes; those so which propel my actions into the nether, the great beyond, a step off the fatal cliff, a dive off the edge of the knife. (more…)