Thursday, January 11, 2007

Short Rant today

“Opponents of the bill say their taxes should not fund research which involves the destruction of embryos.”

Well fuck!  My tax dollars should not fund your war!

Sunday, December 31, 2006

QUAAAAAAAKECOOOOOOOOON!!!

It's beginning to look a lot like:
QUAKECON 2007!
That's right! It may be winter outside, but it's time to start planning that summer vacation to the ultimate multiplayer gaming event and party QuakeCon 2007. We're locked and loaded for August 2-5, 2007 at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, TX, and we've got more gaming, events, exhibits and fun planned than ever before.

This year's BYOC Area will consume the entire Trinity Hall 1, with over 70,000 square feet of floor space, 2,700 player spots & over 1,000 more seats than 2006. We've also increased the exhibit area 5X to 25,000 square feet, enough to accommodate up to 50 exhibitors demonstrating their latest games and computer hardware. Of course, it wouldn't be QuakeCon without our high-stakes pro gaming tournaments; and attendees can also look forward to the return and expansion of our enormously popular and one-of-a-kind "Quick Draw" tournaments, which pit randomly selected attendees against each other in high-pressure battles for serious cash. And in keeping with QuakeCon tradition, every day will be packed full of contests, conferences, announcements, and entertainment.

BYOC Registration:
Registration for the BYOC Area will kick off at 9:00pm EST on March 2, 2007 at www.quakecon.org, and if you've been under a rock for the last 12 years, the event continues to be FREE thanks to the support of the incredible volunteer QuakeCon Staff, id Software, and our yearly sponsors and exhibitors.

QuakeCon Room Reservations:
The Hilton Anatole is now taking room reservations for QuakeCon 2007 through their custom QuakeCon reservation link or through their toll-free reservations number, 1-800-HILTONS. To receive our specially negotiated room rate of $131 (single, double, triple, or quad occupancy), and our special daily self-park rate of $5 (regularly $15 per day), you must request the group rate for "QuakeCon 2007" or book through the link above when making your reservation. The Hotel requires a $50 non-refundable deposit on group reservations, which will be credited to your final room bill upon check-out.

Sponsorship:
Companies interested in receiving information on our totally new sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities should email sponsors@quakecon.org. We've restructured the participation options to be more inclusive and affordable than ever before, so don't miss out.

More QuakeCon 2007 information, including airline and other travel discounts, will be available in early 2007 so stay tuned to www.quakecon.org. Now, mark your calendar, book your room, request the time off, and do whatever else it takes to join us & we're already looking forward to it.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Christmas in Review

Despite sounding like a christmas special, this is how my christmas went:

Spent the vacation in Sonora, CA which is about an hour and a half east of San Francisco.  Very quiet little town with lots of cows and little cell phone coverage.  Most of my mom’s side of the family were there, my grandma and my aunt and cousin Kendra, and us. 

Installed windows on tim’s macbook pro finally and played some trackmania nations.  He finally understands why Rick and I bought the mbps for games as he has now installed CS and stuff on it.  Windows XP has no good way to set up an Ad Hoc wireless network.  In fact, I don’t think there is even a way to do it.  We got it to work by setting up a network in OS X, connecting the windows computer to it, and then restarting the OS X machine into windows.  The network stayed and we could play.  Manual IPs.  Oh well.

I wasn’t very happy for the most part of the week.  I had told my mom that I wanted a Battlestar Galactica Season DVD set for christmas and she replied with “well you’re getting a trip to CA, cant afford anything else!”.  I’m not a scrooge or anything and I understand that being with family is more important than material gifts, but she didnt even seem to care about anything I wanted.  Especially when I went all out showing her how cool iTunes is and why iPods are so cool and successful, getting her 7 beatles albums, a 30 gig iPod, and a TV cable (all split 50/50 with Tim except beatles songs thx ben).  I felt like the scale of caring was a little one-sided.  Combine that with my general not caring too much about christmas, being away from Alison, and my mom’s getting crazy stressed over holiday travel (which went so smoothly it was no prob even with the Denver thing) I wasn’t in a good mood.

So christmas morning comes along and I’m all happy to be with family and my mom loved the iPod and everything which made me feel really good.  She ended up giving me one of those visa prepaid credit card things for $100 which is about twice the cost of a BSG season, which I would have been more happy with probably.  All in all I liked being with my family and seeing them happy and I may have been stubborn and immature in what she said, but I can’t really help how it made me feel.  I am in no means perfect.  I also got some shirts and moneys which will go to a brand new iPod and phone after macworld.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

A Plus for Plus/Minus

The plus minus system is designed to be a more accurate way to assess your abilities.  If you got an A-, it’s because you did A- work.  It is designed to separate the students abilities more accurately so not everyone graduates with honors. 

A lot of students respond with “Why isn’t there an A+, if there is an A-?  I will answer the question with another question.  Why should there be?  By getting the A-, you are only proving that you did not even do A quality work.  Therefore, the +/- system rewards you by helping your gpa when you should have gotten a B.

Now take a look at some college where every student gets an A in every class simply for breathing.  It looks like their college is so good at teaching, when in reality it just means that’s it’s ridiculously easy.

So when you go to get your next job in the near future, do you want your employer to say “Oh you went to kent state where everyone gets A’s just for breathing, maybe I should hire this Akron U. guy”, or do you want him/her to say “Oh wow, an honors student from KSU, he must work really hard”?

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Merry Christmas

I will be in California until the 28th.  Call cell if you really miss me that bad.  Otherwise see you then!

Merry Christmas!