February 2005 Archives

So I was trying to get a MySQL issue worked out on the webserver the other day, in order to make some new databases made up for Dave Fowler. Somehow in the process I managed to destroy the database that held all of my and Jared's weblog data. Yeah. Then I couldn't figure it all out so I gave up, backed up what I could, and then reinstalled everything. Only now is everything back up. More or less. After 4 times I have the whole webserver install thing down pretty well.

Friday Heidi and I went to see The Life Aquatic which was the campus movie this week. Kookie, to the max. Funny, but a very dry funny. I still like Rushmore more, but Aquatic was a darn good movie. Despite what Ben says.

Yesterday I went and helped with music scholarship auditions. I gave tours of the music building. I actually stuck around for quite a while giving tours well past my scheduled time. Call it a bit of payback because I remember how I felt 4 years ago when I was here auditioning. Yeah, college goes by fast.

Later Zach, Jolene, another Heidi, Seth, and I all played Trivial Pursuit over at Jolene's place. We went down to the bar for about 20 minutes so Seth could attempt to buy a trendy Guinness Cup. I was reminded again why I dislike American bars. Loud, smokey, and expensive. Oh well. At least I'm not missing much.

This little flash game is so stupid, so Japanese, and so addictive. My highest score is only 5700 meters, though the highest one listed on the webpage is some 22,000 meters, which is hard to believe. Zach and Ben find it quite amusing, though every girl who sees it is quite puzzled by the whole thing. All I have to say is that this game is the いちばん。

Ben, John, Zach, and I are planning a spring break trip to the east coast. If anyone has any ideas or comments or anything helpful to say, let us know. We're thinking of hitting DC, Boston, New York, and driving back across Canada. All of this is about 10 days. Yes, we're crazy, and yes, why not.

I posted some new photo albums. Just the stuff from my Hiroshima trip and my fun adventure to Chicago for my JET interview. Nothing too exciting.

I also made a page for my Radio Show info. Once again, nothing too interesting. Just something to write about.

Speaking of which I keep forgetting to go through and actually approve comments when they're posted. The new weblog software I've been using, MT 3.15, is a whole lot nicer for combatting comment spam, though the downside is I have to approve comments when they are posted here.

I've been given a new assignment at the GAC Library. It seems as if I've taken on the job of redoing and updating the Library's informational page that tells about the person who our library is named after. I even need to track down an old NBC news reel from the 50's which talks about the library. I guess I have my work cut out for me. I'll keep you posted as to the progress. That is, when I get rid of this darn XBOX and remove HALO2 from my life.

This week has been rather dull so far. Seriously. Dull.

My legs have been causing me nothing but pain after many a long run in my Conditioning class. Tell me about it.

Ben Hayes left his XBox in our section this week, along with a copy of HALO 2. This is bad. Very bad. Not only am I not so good at HALO 2, but its very addicting for Ben Hardy and I. Plus I do really have better things to do with my time. Seriously!

I had my first stint at the KGSM Radio station on campus. A night of Japanese music was played, and some bad jokes were made. By me. Even Ben said they were bad. Which is true. I think I'll be having a radio show every Wednesday night from 8:30-9:30, an hour later then usual because of orchestra sectionals. If you want to listen to the show you can thanks to the magic of the internet, just click on the webpage and follow the directions. If you want to use iTunes you can, you just copy the URL that they give you on the webpage (as linked here, or just copy in this: http://kgsm.gac.edu:8000/kgsm.mp3) and paste it into iTunes. In iTunes click on the menu "Advanced" and go to "Open Stream." Paste the URL there. Its that easy. Now if only I had some funny material for he how, I'd be happy.

I'm going to make a listing of all the songs I play on the radio and stick it up on the page. I found a fun little utility that would do all the work for me. In fact, I have the first attempt at this already up. I'll make a master list page and everything eventually.

My friend Michele sent me a fun card in the mail. All the way from South Carolina. She must really be board.

Japanese class is a bit easy these days.

Nothing more to see here. Move along.

I'm back at GAC after some fun time in Milwaukee with my Dad and Heidi. On Friday we all went out to eat some fun Greek food at a fun local place. Downtown Milwaukee is just full of nice places to eat. A really fun place to be. GReek food was a change form the usual, and helped us get through the bitterly cold day. And was it cold. I would know because we spent a good deal of time walking around downtown.

We spent the majority of the afternoon at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Not only is it a super cool building to look at (situated right on the Lake Michigan), but it has a most impressive art collection on the inside. I'd been there once before, on my freshmen orchestra tour, but we didn't have time to look around the art collection. There were several cool painting I wouldn't mind having for myself, as well as a nice suit of armor. But then again, who couldn't use a nice full suit of metal armor? At 5 O'clock the wings of the Museum close down and I took a whole lot of photos showing the change. I'm sure I'll post them eventually.

That evening the three of us saw the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra play alongside three amazing female violinists, who each had their own special style of music. The show started off with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg playing some very technically difficult classical music. We then had Eileen Ivers come out with her group (drums, guitar, and pipe) and play some super cool Celtic music. Lastly we had Regina Carter come out with her group (piano, base, and drum) and play some amazing jazz violin music. Then to top it off the three of them played together for a song. Lets just say any of of these ladies could have had a concert by themselves and dazzled any audience. Quite the cool show.

After the show we went to a local Irish pub for some fine spirits and live music. Oddly enough I got carded at the door. I never get carded. At least I still have my youthful good looks. We heard some more good music by a duo of guys called The Orphans, who are known in the Milwaukee area for good Irish and American music. They put on a good Hotel California. If only our local pubs around GAC had good music like that, I'd go out more.

So Saturday came around and it was time to leave Milwaukee. On the way back we stopped for Indian food in Rodchester. Nothing like Indian food to say "There is a party in my mouth, and everyones invited." If only the average American person knew what they were missing when it comes to Indian food. Hell, Asian food in general.

So Heidi and I traveled all the way to Chicago without too many problems along the way. Driving 8 hours in one day is never any fun, but we did manage to stop a few times when things caught our eye. Along the way we pulled over and took quite a few photos of the Mississippi river off of I-90, when Minnesota becomes Wisconsin. Nice view. We eventually made it to Milwaukee and had dinner with my father who is working there. I now have a newfound respect for Milwaukee after seeing a bit of the town. Who knew the city was so pretty, or that the night life was so entertaining.

We ended up sleeping at my father's cousin's place in Chicago, which was lucky for us. Mark and Heather have two really cute daughters and a really cute little baby son. The girls were cute, and warmed up to Heidi and I after a while, though they were confused as to our presence in the house at first. But they were still really cute.

I've been in several big cities before. I've lived in a big city before. I've never actually driven in one before. Chicago was interesting, and after much driving in circles thanks to one street that had not street signs, we made it to the interview site. Heidi's interview was at 10:45 am and mine was in the afternoon at 2:15 pm so I had some time to talk to several people waiting for their interviews as well as watch a lot of cheezy promotional videos. As if I didn't actually know what was I was interviewing for. I ended up talking to a girl who was from Sioux Falls named Katie, who also held my distain for South Dakota. The three of us went to lunch after the girls had their interviews and then had some time to walk around the city for a while. As always I was impressed with the many varieties of architecture that made up the Chicago skyline. The gothic to the modern, to the not so modern. So I took some pictures. While we were taking photos this guy who was walking by stopped and told us we should go to the old Chicago Library, which is now a Cultural Center, because it had some really cool artwork. And it was free. Now who says people in big cities arn't friendly? The old Chicago Library was the main library of Chicago for 110 years and has two really amazing domes along with a whole lot of mosaic tile work. Well worth our walk, as seen in the photo I have so kindly supplied. On a downside we were unable to see "The Bean" of Millennium Park because it was being buffed, and thus inside a giant bean tent. I seriously wanted to see it.

So my JET interview. It went ok. I was grilled on several subjects. There were three interviewees. One Japanese person, one random person, and one JET alumni. The Alumni looked like she had just walked out of a punk concert, and the Japanese person looked kind of annoyed at being there. Here are the breakdown of the stuff I remember, more or less:

1) Why Japan.
2) What kind of experience teaching do you have. (As if my application didn't already say)
3) Do you think you can handle a class room full of kids.
4) No really, can you.
5) Are you really really really sure.
6) Say it again one more time, just in case we wern't listening.
7) Can you handle being in a situation where your fellow teacher doesn't speak much English.
8) Variation on same above question four or five times,
9) What teaching prop would you bring with you.
10) Give an example of your teaching skills by telling us about Thanksgiving.
11) Back to that question about language skills.
12) What if the teacher isn't using you.
13) Once again, lets dwell on this last question again. For a long time.
14) Would you do stuff outside the classroom to get to know people better?
15) Would you be willing to get drunk (drunken orgie was said once in punk person's line of questioning) with your co-workers to get to know them better?
16) Could you deal with smokers.
17) You have allergies, would this bother you. Oh, and that smoking thing again.
18) Introduce yourself... in Japanese.
19) Can you deal with the weather.
20) Do I have any questions?

So I guess the theme of my interview was "Lets grill Josh over the same thing for five minutes at a time." Sigh.... At least I know I did the best possible job that I could. I just hope that I impressed them enough for the job.

So as a stress reliever after my interview Heidi and I walked a block down to the Chicago Apple Store on North Michigan Ave. It was a nice big store, one of the largest (if not the largest by like 2 square feet). There were no iPod Shuffles on hand, due to popular demand. The new 30 in LCD screens are super nice. The Mac Mini is super small. Like, we're talking majority small. This being the 4th Apple store I've now been to I must say this: Its like being a kid in a candy store for me. Major techie overload. If nothing else these store draw in large crowds of people off the street.

We drove back up to Milwaukee were we're going to stay until we come back on Saturday. At least we got out of a couple of days of classes. PS: My feet hurt from my dress shoes. A lot.

What did I do for Valentines Day? Well, besides make great fun of it I went bowling. Duh. It was Monday night. How could a group of like 10 college buddies pass up $2 bowling.

I managed to get up a working error page for my site. Now if you try and go to a dead link, you'll get a cute little message! I also helped Jared set up his own php online Calendar. I'm such a good buddy. I even left him a heart on his bed, shaped out of condoms. All out of love.

Jared, Nate, and I went to the Study Abroad Pizza Party for students who studied abroad. Free pizza, not bad. Some people from Gustavus went to some fun places abroad. I also got some information on this years International Photo Contest, to which I'll be competing against Jared. Some people from a work abroad program come to the party and gave us a talk on being able to work abroad in ay England or Australia for a year, which wouldn't be so bad. Maybe I'll bum around some other country after I try Japan for a year.

Speaking of Japan I have my big interview with JET this Thursday, which means I'll be traveling to Chicago tomorrow. All eight hours. No fun at all. But at least I made some business cards for the trip. Wish me luck, this job would be really awesome to have after college. If not I'll be living in my parents basement along with my 3 Macintoshes. All the more reason for me to get a job.

It was raining all day today, which was good because it got rid of all the now. The downside was that this constant rain eventually turned into a lot of snow. Wet, thick snow, that covered everything. I hate this snow. Now everything will be really ucky and wet for quite some time. Curse you Minnesota. Though on an upside I was able to take some cool new photos.

I had to reinstall my entire system yesterday, which was a pain. Though on the upside it was relatively painless and now my system runs a whole lot better. Yeah, I was still using the factory install up till now.

Over Touring Break I had some 30 or so pictures printed off at a local photo store and I finally found a use for them. Eight of them now adorn my dorm room door, showing off Japan, China, and Wilson. The rest are either above my computer desk or on one of my closet doors. I also put up a couple of interesting Japanese things on my wall, but you'll have to come visit me to see what they are.

I leave for Chicago on Wednesday. Wish me luck with my interview.

Oh, a heated discussion about the size of various star ships (mainly the size of a Romulan War Bird vs a Super Star Destroyer) turned up this site. A size comparison of a whole lot of ships from a whole lot of shows and movies. Cool stuff.

After tonight I finally realize the true brilliance of Walker: Texas Ranger. No one can really argue with that. Not with his cool 'round house kick.'. No one.

The cafeteria was a laugh today. The first big laugh was this bookmark that was being handed out by a group on campus, along with some lemonade. Now the first thing you'll notice in the bookmark is the Female Athlete Triad. Which has a great acronym: FAT. Clearly someone was thinking ahead on that one, I mean, I can't even make a joke about it. It would be too easy. Now the thing I can make a joke about is the Authenic Sex program. Really, authentic sex on this campus? I'm wondering how many calls Jackie Alvarez will be getting about that one. I mean, I'm even thinking of signing Jared up for some. Or would that be too mean? The third funny thing about this bookmark is what was crossed off on the bottom of each one. It says Get "LAID" and below it says Feb. 23-25 On Campus. Wow, only three days. Thats a lot to get done in such a small amount of time. I mean, with some 2500 students on campus, plus with a ratio of 60% female to 40% male on campus, some people are going to have to put in a lot of hours.

The last funny caf thing was something Zach Armstrong noticed (NOTE: He noticed it, no one else did. Zach.) at a different table. Apparently some girl was having thong problems, which reminded me of the Bill that just failed in Virginia which would have fined people for showing thongs or underwear. And, as always, Zach had his camera with him. I think you get where this is going, and the photo thats posted here is probably a dead give away. I guess this is what happened when the weather is so nice out.

The most recent OS X update, 10.3.8 has caused me some major problems. First off there was a bug in which the driver for my USB game controller ate up all my free space (26.2 GIGs) in about 14 hours though a giant log file. Now there is still an issue where something is consuming 100% of my CPU power all the time. There are several forum threads on how to fix this problem at Apple and MacNN. There are also some free programs you can use to kill the log file without using the terminal. Either of these two will work. Best of luck.

Who knew that an early morning badminton would be so easy and fun! The only downside is that its an 8am class, though very very easy. Who knew that hitting a little birdy over a net for about 40 minutes would be so fun. And once again, so easy.

So I can't say I did much today. I ate some yogurt. Zach talked me into playing racquetball today for an hour. I won two of the five games. Zach hit me a few times with the ball. Once in the ear. I will soon have my revenge on him.

I did some much needed work on the old webpage. I actually put up a Link page. Its been more or less empty for the past 6 months. I also changed some links, and ran into a weird issue where my blog wouldn't let anyone post comments. Ever. So I had to delete and reimport my entire blog. Not too tough. I'm looking forward to the weekend.

The snow falling this morning was something out of a movie. It was a nice light snow, that had covered the entire campus in a think white layer. Looking out over the valley there was a light white hazy, much similar to fog, but with the added bonus of covering every building with a nice white outline. Too bad I had to go to Japanese class where I appear to have forgotten all the simple stuff they're doing and am now focusing on all the new dumb vocab they learned. For some reason the book my class is using, and has been using, has the most random and seemingly useless words. Like the Japanese word for "School of economics" and "law school." Which would be great, except this is so completely useless at this point of learning. Sigh.... I've got to study more of these vocab words from hell.

The campus has fenced off Old Main for some much needed renovation. Its the original building on campus and its not up to code in any way. The downside to this renovation is the lack of classrooms and the lack of offices for professors. Now a lot of profs are holed up and sharing space in the library. Poor guys. I guess having an elevator and air-conditioning and heating that works is a good thing.

Steve broke the futon tonight. Or he and several people broke it when they sat, leaned, and straddled the futon at the same time. A bolt from the left side jumped out and now the entire structure is held together but an allen wrench. Not the best thing to do, but it'll work until I get into town this weekend. I can only hope that it doesn't kill anyone in the time being.

Jared has got his webpage back online and on his new domain. After a few problems, mostly caused by me, he has restored the vast majority of his posts and is in the process of fixing all the various parts of his webpage. I'm trying to help streamline all his stuff. You know, automate and simplify every process. But Jared likes to take the hard route. Doing everythign by hand. From making his schedule by hand in html to manually making photo albums, Jared is the king of 'doing it the hard way.' Heres to you Jared.

Conditioning sucks. I am soooo out of shape. Lets not even go into it.

AIM away messages are really annoying me. As we all know AIM is a great way to talk to people, and when you're not at your computer an 'Away' message lets others know what you're doing. At least, this was its original purpose. The last couple of years everyone has been turning their 'Away' message into a personal form of expression ranging from poems, to comedy, to extremely long quotes or descriptions of things they find interesting. If I wanted to know this about you, or if it was really that funny you would take the time to tell me in person. All I wanted to know was where you are or how I can get ahold of you. Not how your life is an endless supply of pain/suffering/drunken ramblings. 'Away' messages are not forms of personal expressions.

So this was the first day of my last semester, in college. Or at least undergrad college. I had to get up quite early to try and sign up for work time at the library. Lets just say that I got to the library at 7:40 am, I found that the only times left were between 7:30 and 10:30 am, times when I have class. Plus I really hate mornings. Who doesn't really. So I guess I'll just be doing Electronic Reserves work on Thursdays. Most of the day. Or I'll just be there doing random stuff, trying to pass off my 'goofing' as 'work.'

Lets see, Japanese 102 may be easy for me. As long as I can do a lot of vocab review and learn some new words this week. Not too bad. I should be a few notches ahead of them in several areas, but I really need to review a lot of the conjugations for words. Which I really really suck at. That and spelling. Which I also suck at in english as well. Whats worse is that I have to spend some big bucks on a Japanese book/workbook/a bunch of CDs. I am poor.

My phys-ed classes look like they could be fun. To a degree. I switched my canoeing/ kaiaking class to badminton. Good choice on my part. My conditioning class is just a "run for 40 minutes" class. Yeah, I need that. Then again, social dance looks rather fun. A place for me to try out my cool moves. As if I had any.

So a group of us went bowling tonight, $2 bowling on Mondays. Zach, Ben, John, Heidi, and I. Oddly enough Ben actually knows how to bowl, and does so decently well. I didn't do too shabby, and John eventually pulled his game together. I was quite happy that I was able to break 100 on both games which I usually struggle to do. Hopefully we can end up doing this every Monday night. The only downside is that some silly freshmen played the worst music on the jukebox. The insanity.

I turned in my schedule for KGSM the campus radio. Currently the radio is only available over the internet, but they're trying to get an AM transmitter installed so that it will be available over the airwaves. At one time the radio station was Gustavus' main source of music on campus, but alas, it fell in to disrepair. I guess its time to start picking out my random music....

In an odd turn of events it appears as if my site comes up when you search for porn on MSN search. If you go to MSN search and type in "nude woman pictures" my linkblog is the fifth link down. I hate you MSN.

I updated some random stuff on my webpage. My schedule is now online and I'll try and keep it up to date.

So I spent the last few days up north with Heidi and her family. We went cross country skiing along Lake Superior for a while, which was good for me. I do enjoy falling down in 2 foot deep snow. See the snow up north is deep. Easily two or three feet at any given point. So when I fell, which happened seeing as how this was my first time cross country skiing, I went in deep. Yeah, I know. I'm really really bad. The Lake was really cool though. You know, it is winter and all. The next day we also played some racketball. Yes, my arms do hurt.

Best of luck to Heidi's brother and his fish tank full of fish. In which one disappeared within 6 hours, and another died. Best of luck man.

So I feel I should post a photo of Wilson. Just because. Well, because he is really big and people don't realize it. He is quite big. And playful. After being gone for a semester I must say I went in to cat withdrawl. Thats right. Cat withdrawl. Now you can all see why I miss the crazy antics and loving of Wilson. Because he is super cute and super... yeah. Cat. Anyhow, heres a big Wilson. Again. With my laptop. Knocking stuff over.

Oh, the Superbowl commercials and half time show kind of sucked. We wonder why Jared is not back yet, but then again, he always finds his way home. Somehow. Back to putting stuff on eBay. Good old eBay.

So I have now just spent a day and a half working on the webserver and getting it and the new weblog software working again. Luckily it only took three complete installs of Mac OS 10.3 Server before I got it working right. Well once was for me to refresh my memory. The second was to figure out the install. And the third was actually getting it right. Already the fresh install has solved several problems webserver side, and the new weblog software is very slick and handy. Now I just need to do a few updates to some thing. I've decided to ditch the domain SeeNoEvil.org completely. I'm instead using completelyinsane.com as the overall main page of the server, though this will not effect anyone seeing how Jared bought Jared-Lee.com and I'll be using joshuazimmerman.com. The downside to this is some of my old image links in my weblog are connected to the seenoevil.org domain, thus I need to go back and change a bunch of links. Small cookies.

Monday my parents, Heidi, and I went out for Japanese food in Sioux Falls. A small place called Sushi Masa, which had the best Japanese food ever. It was like being back in Japan. The warm towels, the chop sticks, the great food. So darn good. The upside was that I could read the menu and the waitress spoke english. Kinda nice.

My JET interview will be Feb. 17th at 2:15 in the afternoon. I'm looking forward top that one.

So I have a few other things I need to get done concerning the webpage, but for the most part, all is well. Like you really care. (Plus the SPAM issue shouldn't be a problem any more. Finally)