that….by far….was the most amazing show I’ve ever been to. I’ve seen cursive before, but…wow….that was just incredible. I can’t talk. I’m going to athens wednesday to see them again, that’ll be awesome. brittany I think will go and julie I think. brittany wasn’t supposed to go but I ran into her as it was over with rhys. and I met dave (fortner) there and talked a bit, met his friend from sweden. anyway, that was the first time I think I’ve seen them and known like every word to every song and just screamed for an hour straight. emily didn’t know it but she was very pleasant throughout and made the experience that much better. too bad amanda dissed us, oh well. I had mexican beforehand, that’s always good. so anyway, an amazing night, I hope to have one close to it in 4 days.
I remember one time people were over like amanda and stephen and we had a 2 liter of cherry coke and it sat out opened and I eventually put it in the refrigerator and left it and now I’m drinking it about a month later. it doesn’t expire until oct 13th. still. it doesn’t taste exactly right. but I need caffeine and sugar and such.
I finally printed out 3 pages of Prob/Stats. Hopefully it’s all right. check this crap out. I have no idea what it means, either. Seeing as it’s 4:30am, and that I got out of class at 4:30pm, and I haven’t done much besides homework…well…yeah. Anyway, I’m gonna sleep for 4 hours, I suppose. now I have to make it to these classes to get this stuff turned in.
I have been sitting here since I got home from class doing homework. hours and hours and hours of it. physucks took a while….but at least I had a clue. somehow. but this prob/stats is really making me mad. and it has been for a long time.
my company got bought out monday or tuesday for $60M, by our competitor who was suing us. I’m very worried. Extremely even. I try not to think about it, but this could break a lot of plans. Badly. I mean I’m trying in school now, but still my GPA is never going to recover.
I was talking to Reed tonight and he outsourced a job to me:) A small website backend job in PHP that I’ll knock out sunday for $18/hr w/ $100 minimum. I need it too, I feel as though I’m badly broke. And I probably am. Well I just went and checked, and it’s not as bad as I was afraid, but still. I need to buy some health insurance (I’m uncovered at the moment, oops) and my car insurance is due and I feel like there’s something else. So anyway, working for >= $18/hr at something I enjoy doing is a good thing. I finally got technical issues worked out with Synchrologic and tried to work yesterday. John had some stuff for me to do but it was mostly crap, and either impossible or close to it or just plain not worth doing (energy expenditure vs benefit). So yeah. PHP work = good. Plus I need to have money left over to help for spring living, and who even knows if I’m gonna have a job come january?? ack. I have a lot of skills and I’m a pretty decent programmer (I’ve kind of fallen out of practice with non-scripting languages, but I could pick it back up in 10 minutes), but my grades are awful and the only people who know my worth are Synchrologic people. Anyway I’m done. Actually, I’m going to email my manager and probably his manager….I’d almost feel comfortable emailing our (former) CEO since he likes me….anyway I’m gonna email them and ask them how the buyout may affect Co-ops. If I’m going to be out a job in a couple of months, I need to start looking now. ARGH what am I thinking, NOBODY will hire a co-op for one semester or even two, especially one with low grades.
Hmm. I’ve just been thinking out loud. Don’t read it. I’m sorry.
I should be homeworking
First things first: if you have a login to my site (maes, comics, etc) you can now leave comments on my posts. Please do. I’m jealous of other-journal-folk. Click Apply for Access if you need a login.
If you’ve used a computer in my apartment, you probably know that I use a different keyboard layout than most people. I have a regular qwerty keyboard, but when I hit, say, the S key, it types an O. The D key types an E, the F types a U, and so on.
The Qwerty keyboard was invented around 1900, because typists were typing too fast. Typewriters were getting jammed because of this fast typing, so the creator of the typewriter moved keys around to slow the typist down.
Somewhere around the 1950′s, this guy named Dvorak decided that this was stupid, and set out to make the optimal keyboard layout. It’s best to keep your fingers on the home row. It’s hard to move your fingers to the bottom row, and easier to move them to the top. Alternating hands is best (one hand types a key, then the other, then the first, etc) because it gives the fingers time to get in place. He went by a few more rules, but anyway. If you notice, in the english language, the high majority of words have a consonant then a vowel then a consonant then a vowel, etc. Soooo….put all the vowels on one hand, and the most frequently used consonants on the other hand, and you’re getting somewhere with the alternation. Put the most frequently used consonants on the home row, and the least used on the bottom row. Put the least used consonants on the left side, since the left hand is busy typing vowels.
So Dvorak did all this and made the layout that I showed above. Try this link for an example of the efficiency. Paste some english text into the box and hit calculate. For normal text, you’ll see that the home row usage is MUCH higher on dvorak, and the distance traveled is usually around half of the distance traveled using qwerty.
I printed out a full-page pdf version of the keyboard layout, and changed my keyboard layout in linux and windows to dvorak. It took me about a week to memorize where all the keys were. I basically went cold turkey to dvorak, and it was quite painful. But in about a month I was up to my previous speeds in qwerty. And no, I can’t really type in qwerty anymore. If I have to then I look at the keyboard, or if I’m going to be using it for a while, it takes about 2 minutes in windows to add the dvorak layout as an option.
So anyway, what prompted this whole post was that I maxed out at about 65WPM (words per minute) on qwerty, and now here’s what I’m getting now with dvorak after using it for a year or two:
OOOOH I forgot. I also got pierced again.
Amanda used to have quite a few piercings, most of which she got at piercing experience, where I go (if you know me very well, you know how adamant I am about going there:) ). so anyway, she still has 8ga plugs in her ears, and I was realizing how much I like them.
sooooo…. one night when she slept on my couch, I got back from classes at noon and we went down to PE. he didn’t have her plugs anymore, so I was kinda sad. but then he pulls out 8ga glass plugs, and I was like “heck yeah!” so he shoved 8ga needles through my ears, and yay I had plugs. it didn’t hurt too bad, I almost wish I got it done at 6. but whatever. I do plan on stretching, but only to 4, or maybe 2. I don’t like huge plugs, and I want them to shrink back when I outgrow piercings in a coupla years. I went swimming like 3 days in a row just a couple days after getting them, which is a no-no. And the right ear kept getting hit. so it stayed pretty swollen, right? so on like a monday morning I woke up, and the big end of the plug, the front, was sunken inside my ear. I went to brian as soon as he opened and he shoved it back through, it hurt a lot. It bled a bit. emily accidently hit it last saturday when I was in ringgold, and sunday it was back inside my ear when I woke up. I shoved it back through….it hurt a lot again. aaaand it happened once again. but anyway, I think it’s getting close to healing. my left one sunk in once, but it didn’t bleed. it’s kinda good, cause it means my earlobes are pretty stretchy. ANYWAY here’s a crappy cell-phone picture, and I was making a funny face. and that’s that.
(haha ok I didn’t realize I had already posted a plugs story. oh well.)
OK I’ve had so much to say, but no time to say it.
most important things first…I’ve been talking to a young lady for a very long time, we are together now and extremely happy. Her name is Emily, she’s ultra cute and ultra short and makes me laugh. Here’s the only picture I have of us at the moment, we were hot and tired and I’m making a funny face. But anyway, yeah, click it for a bigger version and such. And I am 9 or 10 inches taller than her. Anyway, she lives close to my parents, so it’s a weekends relationship for the time being. That’s almost a good thing, given…
SCHOOL — After 9 months or so away from school, I’m back in it, and let me tell you, it SUCKS. I’m taking the heaviest courseload I ever have (16 hours), including Physics 2 (again) and Probability & Statistics (again). Phys2 I failed, and Prob/stats I dropped cause I had this russian grad student that couldn’t teach or speak english. Well, this time he isn’t a grad student, but he IS russian and he’s quite possibly a worse professor. And I got this guy I really don’t like for phys2, but maybe he’s not so awful. guess we’ll see about that. so anyway, I haven’t seen any of my friends since school started, I am seriously working on homework all day when I’m not in class. I’m supposed to be doing some right now. speaking of friends…
For a short while I was actually social! if you can believe it. going out all the time, late night trips to suwanee, swimming at 4 am, staying up all night… since school started though I haven’t done much of anything, it really is quite sad. starting from the beginning….I was with a girl at applebee’s; two weeks later I get a friendster message from my waitress. it was crazy. she remembered what we ate and how much I tipped and stuff. it was funny. so she was like “come in and see me” and I said maybe. Then I said I would. so not long beforehand, I was talking to this girl Amanda online, who I knew through Dani. actually I didn’t even know her, we just talked online sometimes, for 6 months or something. she was talking about how she never hangs out with her friends, and I said “meet me at applebee’s.” and what do you know, she came (albeit late). it was interesting meeting her, especially since she’s taller than me. but we got along really well. she saw a picture of Stephen on my phone and HAD to have him hang out. oh, and here’s amanda. so anyway, to make a long story short, we all hung out all the time and it was great. and my friend holly got back from europe, and she hung out sometimes, and sometimes lindsay did some hanging out (the waitress from applebee’s). so anyway that was like the most social I’ve ever been ever, and now it’s kinda over. amanda was unemployed for a while, me and stephen worked flexible hours, and had no after-hours responsibilities, and weekends were pretty empty. now amanda’s working all the time, I’m gone on the weekends usually, and I work on schoolwork when I’m not in school (which is many hours every day). so yeah. I really miss hanging out with amanda all the time, she’s really one of my favorite people ever. we just made really good friends.
