Jared’s Blog

Well, it only took 5 months. I finally got myself a car today. It’s a maroon ‘96 Dodge Stratus with 32500 miles. And I got it for $5000 out the door. I took a look at it on Saturday and gave it a test drive. It seemed solid, it was in my price range, and it was pretty clean. I even talked them down quite a bit by doing my homework. See, they originally had it listed as $6900, but the dealer said he could do way better than that without me even haggling him. So he brought it down to $5500. I was happy with that and pretty much ready to jump on it, but I figured I’d take a look around to see what else I could find for that price. I didn’t really find much. But what I also found out is according to 3 different car pricing guides, that car was worth somewhere between $4000 - $5000. So I printed out copies of all the prices I’d found and brought them with me. I talked the guy down to $4700. It feels good to know that I’m, finally rid of that van. It served me well in the 5 years that I drove it.

I snapped a few shots of my new car. You can check them out in the Pictures section.

With my car purchase, I’m one step closer to my move to Plymouth (Minneapolis). My application for the townhome I’m trying to get into was mailed today and I should hear back from that within a few days. It’s kind of funny, I haven’t even thought about packing yet. I guess I got so good at it during my college years, it’s not much of a deal anymore. I used to be able to pack just about everything of value to me into that van. I can remember the summer before my sophomore year… My family had moved away to Alabama. I finished up work a couple days early. Partied hard for a day or two and took off. I think that was the most freedom I ever felt. I could go anywhere. Now in reality, I was just headed a few hundred miles south to college, but I’ve not felt freedom like that since.

RPS means Rock Paper Scissors.
Ok now that you know that, the first thing you need to do is go to http://worldrps.com/ and marvel in the amount of content there. Next, you need to play the online trainer. Then go read the advanced strategy. Last, post comments here.

…or something like that. I figured since my internet is sucking, there might be some ways to improve upon it with my own methods. So last night I read up on BIND, which is a DNS server. For being notoriously confusing, I found the default install on my Gentoo system to be easily modified. With only a few changes to the conf file, I was up and running.

As for some other geekiness, I was looking at my Gmail account today and noticed I had 6 invites laying around. Come and get em before they’re gone!

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-32182369a5-6532bcf5da-7a5900e138
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-32182369a5-6c25a10cd4-76d14fdee8
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-32182369a5-edf177b17a-1d09549453
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-32182369a5-c45c7109ea-53735863f9
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-32182369a5-e6fa982d54-ad71248b07
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-32182369a5-71f2663d21-cf41b378f9

Finally found time to post here. Once again lack of motivation struck me. That aside, life continues on.

Last weekend was family weekend down at college for my sister. I took off Friday and spent some time with John and Co. in VM140. Rick and Kristin were even around and I got to spend some time with the as well as each some delicious Chipotle. Saturday was mostly a family day although there was one addition. Bev and I spent a few hours hanging out and getting some food. My family showed up later in the day and we went out for a late dinner. Not much else to remark about from that weekend. It was weird being at the ol’ college two weekends in a row. It was almost like I was in school again.

This week my near future became a bit clearer. I will in all likelihood be migrating south for the winter and there after. There’s still too many things left uncertain for me to make a definate statment. Right now its one of the only bright spots on the horizon, so the moth in me is getting drawn in.

To keep myself busy the last couple of days I’ve been working feverishly on Andy’s site, CoolerThanYou.net. I must say the final product turned out pretty damn good. The old saying “practice makes perfect” held true. I look at the progression of my site designs and they just keep getting better and better. Bottom line is Burns is happy. So I’m happy.

And as an aside, you’ll have to deal with the site being a tad on the slow side these days. My cable internet has been on the fritz. From what I can gather, its something having to do with intermittant packetloss, DNS, or both. For now I’m left with about 14k service instead of 2-3Mbit service. I doubt Mediacom will be busting their ass over the weekend to do anything for me, so expect problems for another couple days at least.

So today, I see there’s a security update for Wordpress. I accidentally overwrote my comment popup template so if it looks plain its because I messed it up. I didn’t have the patience to go ahead and fix it yet. Soon!

EDIT: I’ve fixed the comments popup, lucky for me I found some of my old code.

This is a couple of days old, but I’m now unemployed. I have to say it sucks. While getting up at 7AM every day wasn’t my cup of tea, I dealt with it just fine. The money is what I really miss. Knowing I’ve only got 1 more paycheck and no job lined up is a little unsettling. At least this time I’ve got some cash stashed in tbe bank. It’s never enough though. The plan now? Move!

I’ve been offered an apartment in Plymouth with a friend. It’s a pretty sweet deal too. Townhome for $550/mo. My only concern is once again the job. I doubt I’ll have anything before moving down which means I’ll have to find something once I’m down there. If it’s not career oriented, then I’m going to end up taking a crappy job for a little while. Not something I want to do, but if needed, I will. At least I’ll be out of this wasteland.

One thing I need to do before moving down is get a new vehicle. As I said above, money is pretty good right now, but once I get a car, it won’t be. Chances are I’ll have to use a good portion of my savings on a used car and that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for anything else. It’s going to be very tight once I do get down to Minneapolis. Will I stretch myself too thin? One thing is for sure, moving back home will not be an option.

Last Thursday I took off for St. John’s with Brandon. Thanks to Star Wars on DVD. the trip wasn’t as boring as normal. We also set up a little surprise for John. He thought we hadn’t left yet when in fact we were more than half way there. So when we knocked on his door, he was totally floored.

Upon arriving, we jumped right into a poker tournament. I went out early because I’ve got the rocks. After watching the other guys finish up the tournament (and enjoying a few spirits), I headed over to see ChoCho, Johnson, and Jason. This year they didn’t get screwed on housing and actually have a nice apartment. We hung out and drank some with them, but it being Thursday night, they went to bed somewhat early. We made it back by about 1AM and crashed ourselves.

Friday got off to a slow start. We moved our computers into John’s apartment for some game installing. I really didn’t get much of that done before John came back and we took off for the frisbee golf course joined by Brandon and Scotty. The air was chilly and the wind was whipping around pretty good, but I managed a nice game. Fortunately my skills were better than the other 3, so I didn’t look bad at all.

Brandon and I headed to pick up some supplies for the rest of the weekend at the “special store” and Cashwise. I gave my sister a call on the way back through St. Joe and we decided to go eat at Subway together with her roommate and Brandon. Subway was eh as I’ve been eating it so often, but it was fun to hang out with Brenna and catch up on things with her.

The girls weren’t up for any SJU partying so Brandon and I headed back and went over to Placid 111 again. ChoCho and Johnson decided to do Edward 40 Hands. That’s where you get 2 40’s, 1 for each hand. Tape them to your hands, and you can’t do anything until you finish them both. No peeing, no playing card games, nothing. Just 40 drinking! The night whizzed by unbelievably fast and soon enough we were back at John’s going to sleep.

Another somewhat late start saw us getting to the LAN party around 11:30. There were a moderate amount of people there already (about 20). The St. Cloud gamers always show up early because their wives tell them they have to be home by dinner time. My future wife better not stop me from gaming all day! Anyway, since I slacked on installing games the day before, I got some installed right away. By this time, there was a decent number of people playing UT2K4, so I hopped in. I was doing pretty good at CTF, but once we changed to Deathmatch, I got pwned.

After some more installing, I got into Star Wars Battlfront. It’s a Battlefield 1942 type game based on all the major Star Wars battles. The graphics are decent (even on my crappy little card) and the grand scale (64 player maps) of it make it a great game. I think dinner came next. Good ole greasy Gary’s Pizza and pop.

After dinner, I rounded up a bunch of freshman and a few of our old Warcraft 3 players for some Hero Battles. Teams sorta ended up lop sided. We pretty much dominated even though it was 4 on 5. Then Weasel introduced us to something called Hero Lines. I was so confused the first time we played the first time. There was so much going on. You had to keep your hero alive somehow while defending your circle from the other teams baddies. I just kept dying right away. We played again and I got the hang of it kind of, but it was just too complex.

I finished off the day with a little more UT2K4 Onslaught. The bonus and community packs contain some pretty cool new vehicles and maps in them. It made it even more fun that we had about 16 of us playing at once. A bunch of people left at once and that killed things. Brandon and I grabbed our stuff and started for John’s.

On the way down the ramp from the gym we were in, my chair with my monitor and tower fell over. I sort of caught it, so nothing really broke. The chair did get a small rip in the leather though. I was surprised the monitor didn’t break because it fell right on the screen. We made the rest of the journey safely and headed back to help clean up. I grabbed some spiked Dr. Pepper while we were back though. After downing most of that, I was feeling good. Cleanup finished releatively fast with a lot of hands. Once back at Placid 111, we commenced the drinking some more. Fat Tuesday (153 proof vodka) and Koolaid is damn tasty. We decided to let those guys sleep at about 3:15AM and headed back to Johns to go to bed. But when we got there, John was still awake and a couple of his roommates came back shortly after. So we commenced the drinkin again. I think about 5:30AM we went to bed.

I thought maybe we’d make it out on Sunday for another game of frolf, but alas, we did not. No Chipotle either. And no casino stops. I got home around 8 on Sunday night and just got all my stuff unpacked. It was a great weekend. So full of stuff to do. Next weekend I’ll be back down for Family Weekend.