Jared’s Blog

I’m sitting here enjoying one of my Christmas gifts. Fight Club on DVD. It’s just classic. I had been hounding my dad to see this movie and my mom finally bought it for me so we can watch it. I’m listening to the commentary by Brad Pitt, David Fincher, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter and it’s just great. There’s so much more to this film than you can ever get in the first couple times watching it.

On to that ever so famous Christian holiday. If you know me, or if you’ve read my bio then you know I’m not Christian and therefore I shouldn’t be celebrating Christmas. Unfortunately, I don’t have the heart to tell my parents. And actually I’m going to miss it. It’s not so much the presents, but how everyone is genuinely nice. Anyway, I’ll give a rundown of the gifts I got. A Pizazz pizza cooker, a $20 gift card to Best Buy, a $25 gift card to Sam Goody, Two Towers Extended Edition DVD, Fight Club DVD, The Matrix Reloaded DVD, a 128MB PNY USB 2.0 Thumb Drive, a MN Wild jersey, a MN Wild hat, a pair of MN Wild pajama pants, a pair of MN Wild shorts, a MN Wild long sleeve shirt, tickets to a MN Wild game, Joe Boxer pajama pants, Adidas cologne, a pair of khaki pants, a pair of boxers, a $10 gift certificate to the local movie theater, a sweater, and a bunch of stocking stuffers. All in all, I was really surprised at what I got. It was the first time in a long time I didn’t know so much exactly what I was getting. Like I said before, going without Christmas is going to seem unnatural the first few years, but I can truly say I could go without all the presents and the commercialism. The shear amount of pressure to buy, buy, buy is sickening. People overspend themselves entirely way too much around this time of year. Do some research, and you’ll quickly learn that much of the world’s debt is accumulated during the month of December. A sad, but true, fact.

Fall semester grades came out today. I managed a 3.25 GPA this semester. I was pretty surprised I did so well. I think this is my best semester yet. The thing is, I didn’t feel like I worked that hard in classes. I had two classes I was just dreading because I knew they would be very hard and they turned out to be not so bad. I guess I can appreciate the work I put into them now. The grades certainly made my parents happy. I think I might even get a break on my car insurance. This brings me to my last semester of college… maybe. I’m definitely on the lookout for a job. In fact to today I applied for a web design job with Polaris Snowmobiles. But I saw way too many of my friends end up unemployed or working somewhere that you don’t need a 4 year degree. I’ve got a backup plan. If by the end of March or beginning of April, I don’t have anything promising, I’m going to go to school for another year or go to grad school. I figure I can take out more loans and I won’t be so much worse off. Chances are the job market will be better in time, I’d be qualified for more, and I get more time to learn some things I don’t get taught in class like web design or graphics design. I’d be more than happy to land a job in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area making enough to pay the bills. In fact, that’s my ideal future. Chances are, things won’t quite happen that way, but a guy can hope.

Lastly, I’ve put up a few more things in the artwork and about me sections. Check them out. Also make sure you read my friends blogs’ sometime.

Lot’s of news to talk about. I don’t even know where to start. It’s been almost two weeks since my last non-update and damn close to a month since my last real update. Those 3 weeks back at school before the end of the semester were ok. My second to last semester of college is in the books and what a damn good one it was. Met a bunch of new friends, actually did well in classes that I thought were gonna kick my ass, got a new job, and grew up a little more. I can honestly say college will be the best years of my life, and there’s no doubt about that. Next May holds a sad day for sure.

Last Saturday St. John’s beat Mount Union in the Stagg Bowl 24-6 to be Division III National Champions. John and I were watching the game on ESPN2 and what a game it was. Blake Elliot had a huge game. 4 guys each got an interception, one of them run back 100 yards for a TD. I was damn proud to see that highlight in the Sportscenter Top Ten plays of the week. My favorite fan sign from the game said “MOUNT THIS!” That sums things up nicely.

On my things to do list over semester break is to dual boot my main machine with a stage 1 Gentoo install. Now only you Linux nerds will know what I started as soon as I got home and unpacked (about 8PM). Got through compiling the kernel at about 3AM and decided to call it quits for the night. In the morning when I woke up, I started again. Actually it was 2 in the afternoon cuz I got up at 1. Sleep rocks. So anyway, I finally finished up getting the OS installed later in the day. Then I had to compile video drivers, X, and KDE. That took me until about midnight. So far things are pretty good. As far as I can tell most everything is working. My first couple attempts at getting the 2.6 kernel compiled and running were unsuccessful so that’s first on the list tomorrow. Once I get that done hopefully my sound card will be working with ALSA. Then I can move on to getting all the apps I need. In time I hope I can totally convert to Linux for my normal computing. For games I may have to go back over to Windows.

My other project which I haven’t really started yet is designing my friend Andy a website. In the last few months my graphic design skills have improved thanks to this cool site called www.good-tutorials.com. I get a lot of ideas from that site. I’m sure I’ll post my progress on the site here.

I’ll leave you with a little plug. The new 36 Crazyfists album leaked. Man is it fucking awesome. Destroy the Map is one amazing track. I can’t get over the lyrics on this one. Brock Lindow is a weird guy. Oh yea the album’s name is called A Snow Capped Romance. It’ll still have to pass my initial enthusiasm test. Which basically means if I’m listening to it in a couple months straight through like I am now, then it’s truly great. I find that I’ll be all hyped up for a new album to come out and then when it does I’ll listen to it for a week or two. After that it seldom gets and play. The new Korn and Limp Bizkit albums were like that. I liked em initially, but now they don’t seem so great.

This is just a quick update to say I haven’t updated in awhile. I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t really felt like writing much. I won’t be around much this weekend and finals are next week. I don’t have any til Wednesday, so I’ll try to update sometime early next week. That is all.