| Failure is ok if it's unexpected by those who matter, right? |
[Sep. 3rd, 2008|01:44 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Office | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  cynical | ] |
Bad news - I did so incredibly poorly on the comps that normally they'd recommend I drop to a Master's right off.
Good news - I was such a good student that they are instead just flabbergasted at my failure and recommend I try again after figuring out what went wrong. |
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| Why must the world suck so very much? |
[Mar. 14th, 2008|02:12 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  Want to hit something | ] |
I'm gonna guess that many people will have heard of Eve Carson's death. Very tragic - senior, student body president, well-liked by all, killed in what seems to be a random act of senseless violence, possibly just a plain old mugging in a place everyone felt themselves safe. I didn't know her, but all reports have her as kind, charismatic, passionate, and going places.
Another college student died recently, Lauren Burk from Auburn University. The cases are often put together as they both come from Georgia, and there was some suspicion of a tie that doesn't seem to have played out.
On the whole, a rather shocking and tragic week in college student news... but not to Fred fucking Phelps and his goddamn hate church, Westboro Baptist Church. They have protested both memorial services at the girls' homes, and that I know of, plan to protest the memorial service here in Chapel Hill (I don't know their plans for any similar thing happening at Auburn). Why?
"God Hates American Colleges. They are filthy, anti-God, arrogant, debauched, decadent & depraved. This victim was student body pres."
"God Hates Fags! & Fag-Enablers. Ergo, God hates N. Carolina Univ. It is a cesspool of iniquity - throughout: top to bottom - staff, administration, faculty, alumni, student body."
American Universities are "God-defying, Satanic, and vile."
All quotes from their lovely site godhatesfags.com (I found them here , a nice writeup in itself)
There's a silent protest of the protest being planned, trying to block off the jackasses from the service, from the mourners (in the same vein as the Patriot Guard Riders here. Signs there: “God is Your Enemy,” “God Sent the Killer” and “You Eat Your Kids.”) As Sylvia mentioned, not quite as good as blocking them off with nunchucks, but strong in its way. I probably won't be going, as I don't trust myself to not haul off and attack the entire crowd of ignorant, worthless, craven, idiotic whores-get. |
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| Why the hell not? |
[Jan. 28th, 2008|06:22 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  exhausted | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Finger Eleven - yeah finally put aside the Sweeney Todd soundtrack | ] |
That 36 question survey meme - you're supposed to fill it out and leave it in the comments, then repost the blank one in your lj, yadda yadda
( Enter meme! ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|10:12 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  melancholy | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Sweeney Todd | ] |
Possible reworking of the Sacred series - it fits, but just barely, by dint of the fact that Deb's a big fat liar and the varying viewpoints means no two stories are gonna say the same thing. Continuing in this vein might actually give me a plot hook to tie thing together and have an actual story rather than scattered vignettes...
Links to other bits (in semi-chronological order by event, not by writing):
Sacred
Angels
Watching
( Champion ) |
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| Deprtmental Xmas partuy (leaving tyhe typoes here siolely to show people how serioudsly badly I typ |
[Dec. 2nd, 2007|03:07 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  ecstatic | ] |
e when drunk if I didn't go back and edit meticulously. (continuance of title)
So, for those who didn't know, tonight was the departmental Christmas party, with the entertainment of the night being a primary part of the first years hazing, where we had to perform a skit. That went well. A professor's wife told me I sounded just like Varchenko ( yes this was my actual role, he's a semi-crazy Russian professor) and in general we got a lot of compliments.
My two flasks ran out just after the game of Flip Cup in which the first year team trounced the non-first year team, which was good, cause then I might have been forced to drink shots of beer. I did have my first keg-stand ever, admittedly only staying up for a count of 5, but that was okay cause my only goal was to provide fodder for the peer pressuring of another of my fellow-classmates, who refused to go if she was gonna be the first girl-grad student ever to do a keg-stand at the Chirstmas party.
I also managed to impress a few of the older grad students during the after party, by chugging an entire Jack Daniels bitch beer type beverage (unfortunately half the 6-pack was a crappy cola flavor, so I have no more yummy berry JD stuffs, and don't remember the funny thing that was written on the label (I remembered the funny thing on the label! It had "certified colors"!)). This was, of course, during a drinking game called Kings, where the person to my right had to keep drinking as long as I did. She wasn't very happy with me.
Quarters is also a fun (drinking) game, though I think it'd be fun even without the drinking (though I apparently have an odd idea of fun. The only other thing worth noting were the cops blocking off the entrance to my complex which had me scrambling for a seat belt and to hide my remaining JDs, but after a detour to drop off the rest of the car, they had moved away from the entrance and all was good.
So, all in all, it was a pretty good night. :-) |
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| It's been awhile... |
[Jul. 2nd, 2007|02:41 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | I liked that car... | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | My Chemical Romance - Blood | ] |
So I thought I'd ramble a bit...
First off, I'm going to Chapel Hill, having been rejected by Toronto, as most decisions had already been made, and my showing wasn't good enough to knock people off that list. Damn postal service.
That said, it's been nice getting to pre-build a social network in the new place. It looks to be shaping up nicely, with a good balance and good people.
Other than shuffling between Chapel Hill (where Sylvia and I already have an apartment) and Greensboro, I've been working (spending my last summer boring myself senseless at IT&S), not playing WoW much and getting re-crazied about the SCA. Current plan involves authorizing before Pennsic, so that I can fight in the war. It's very possible, and perhaps even hopeful.
All-in-all, it's been a rather uneventful summer, up until yesterday when my car broke down while I was driving down the highway in between CH and G'boro and I got a ride with the nice tow truck guy (who clued me in to an apparently awesome 24 hour diner in CH) back to G'boro with my car, which now awaits only devoiding of stuff before being consigned to the junkyard. This saddens me, as I liked my car, and in general prefer it to my new ride, which is my grandparents' old car. Doesn't help that it's pretty much my own damn fault (though I still like claiming that it's Matt's unshakable faith in the crappiness of my car that caused that bit of the engine to fall off) However, at least I have a car...
Up in the future are the odd SCA event, my 21st birthday, Pennsic, moving, then orientation. Whee fun, and all that stuff... |
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| Good news/annoying news |
[Apr. 11th, 2007|07:30 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Harry Chapin - Sunday Morning Sunshine | ] |
Good news: I got an acceptance email from Chapel Hill today
Annoying news: They want an answer by April 15th (gonna see about an extension, given the date I got this)
Good news: I finally called up Toronto
Annoying news: The status "Decision Made" was false.
Good news: A decision will be made by the end of the week, and it will be emailed.
Bad news: I have no idea where I want to go.
Currently, it's come down to stability, nearby friends and more comfort vs new things, AEMMA and possible growth and such. Chapel Hill is secure and fairly steady; Toronto has big risks and big possible gains.
What if I will always regret not going? What if it turns out I just can't do it once I get there? What if...
I hate decisions. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 25th, 2007|04:16 pm] |
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Oh, and I second Alison's support. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 25th, 2007|01:43 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  hopeless | ] |
Anyone involved in the situation has heard me complain about the illogicity of all sides in this damned conflict. If you haven't, ask me about it. Ranting is stress-relief. I'm not gonna get into that here though. Blog posts are not the platform I would choose for debate. The lag time creates issues I don't like. So, I'm gonna use the blog as it usually is, as a whining pessimistic fit.
The problem here is not that Guilford doesn't teach its core values. It's not that someone was negligient in these areas. It is that people suck. One of the Quaker values I occassionally like to adopt is that there is that of "god" in everyone. Now, I interpret that liberally (in the non-political use of the term), as I don't believe in a god, but rather think of it as the potential for good in folks. However, in equal and sometimes greater proportion to that potential is the ability to just be plain fucking dumb. To tangent off into nerdiness, there is a fixed point in the equation of human life, and it's the point of being incredibly stupid. And it's a attractor fixed point. People tend to it. The more people you have, the more you iterate the function, the more fucking inevitable. It's not the goddamn responsibility of the administration to force their morality on us. That's why I chose to come here, even though it's a nominally religious institution, because you are not demanded to be religious or even of the same religion. Being a Quaker college means that the administration is to hold themselves to Quaker values, and promote them, not shove them down our throat. The inability of a few folks to follow said values reflects in no way on the Quaker-ness or not or the college. There are some things the administration could do better in regards to diffusing some of the issues that come up over this, such as looking over admissions policies for athletes/non-athletes (currently, athletes are given different tours, some information about the college is left out of registration packets and they have a completely different Chaos experience). But classes on what the Guilford/Quaker core values are fucking pointless in terms of fixing anything about what happened.
The main thing that is tearing me apart emotionally is not the anger (there is plenty of that) but the hopelessness. This is what people are. It's what humanity is. Even if we work together, change things, create a safer space, forge a true community, within 4-5 years it'll be gone and no one will even remember. One of the folks at the forum brought up something that happened 5 years ago - a series or rapes and assaults that happened on campus. After it, folks worked together to make things safer. And no recent entry knows anything about it. No matter how hard we work, it all goes away, more ephemeral than we are ourselves. There is, and can be, no long term hope. People fail and always will. |
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| I hate people. |
[Oct. 10th, 2006|12:57 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | Grrr... | ] |
It's time for the next PSA brought to us by the fun land of HelpDesk...
Lack of intelligence on your part is not an emergency in mine – nor is it my fault.
Point 1) No Ma'am, we do not have magic special technology of the future that insures that computers will never break. Typing for 4+ hours and *never saving once* is folly on an extreme level. I'm so very sorry that we didn't take pains to inform you personally that computers (especially their network connections) are not infallible and will, in fact, sometimes shut down, or lose connection. Don't blame me personally for the fact that through your stupidity, your already late paper is gonna be later. I just don't give a shit.
Point 2) Frankly, sir, your story-telling skills leave something to be desired. “All that shit” is not, contrary to your apparent opinion, an informative statement. I am the night shift. I've been working for multiple hours on little sleep at this point and it's 10 minutes before we close, making it 10:20pm. I had nothing to do with anything that happened to you earlier. If you didn't have the balls to come ask for help the first day you had problems, it's none of our faults that it didn't get fixed that day. Neither is it the HelpDesks' fault if there was a network setting messed up. In case you couldn't tell, we're not the ones getting paid by salary and given a comfy office. Furthermore, talking over me about how you're tired of all this shit, about how you work 60 hours a week and go to school fulltime (making sure to let me know that you're not some college student getting drunk all the time and goofing off) , about how my incompetence is just the last straw, how you wanna talk to a damned supervisor (guess who that is!) when I hadn't even begun the other options – lame. Just lame. The kicker to the whole damn story? Remember how you were so pissed that I said that your *Lotus* password had to be reset on campus? How I specifically focused on *Lotus*, as if it were, perhaps, special? Nice of to slip in that you see all your emails, but were “tired of all this shit” (if only I had a nickel for every use of that phrase) with your Lotus and class shit? Perhaps the multiple instance of “Lotus” in your email window, client, path to the web page didn't happen to tip you off that LOTUS IS YOUR GODDAMNED EMAIL! No sir, Lotus is not the same thing as Moodle,a nd the two words cannot be used interchangably. They are, in fact, very different, and conveniently enough for you, Moodle can be fixed over the phone. Now, doesn't that sound nice? Now shut up and get off my goddamned phone, you arrogant asshole. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 28th, 2006|06:28 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | tired | ] |
I have arrived safe and sound from the Frozen North! While I regret missing Brock's birthday thing, I had a pretty awesome time. And now, for an lj-cut of doom wherein I expound upon my adventures...
( Read more... )
So there we have, my crazy wacky fun trip to Canada. I just wish I hadn't had to immediately go to work... ;-) |
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| Reason #1 to never get ridiculously shit-faced |
[Jun. 16th, 2006|02:07 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
You scare the bejeebus out of 12-year-old boy who is sneaking out of the house to go hang out with a couple of girls *and* you delay an UBRS run by moaning and screaming loud enough to be heard two blocks away, thus requiring the only armed member of the household to go out and check to make sure you aren't being attacked. Also, you piss off your friend when random folk come up and ask if they can do anything and remind them that you're being god-awful loud...
OK, maybe those were reasons 1,2 and 3. It still makes for a good story. |
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| Spaulders... |
[Jun. 10th, 2006|01:56 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | amusedly annoyed and tired out | ] |
UBRS is a mighty fine dungeon... lotsa nifty plate drops, two pieces of Valor, Draconian Deflector, it's a pretty place. Until the pally raid leader, who "doesn't like master looter, so were[sic] doing group loot" (actually, there were probably a hell of a lot more typos) rolls need on the Spaulders of Valor. And beats me. A rogue rolled to, which might have annoyed me even more, but he didn't win. Mister Pally McBadGrammarPants did. After beating my poor desk for a hit or two, I calmed down and shrugged off his "omg"s, "i suck"s, and his "im totlly not a ninja, i promis", - it was an upgrade from his other thing (not by a whole hell of a lot, and not as much of an upgrade as it would have been for me but, meh...)- he paid me a bit of gold to ease his guilty heart, and we're off again.
Until we down the Beast. And Lightforge Spaulders drop. His first two tells? "omg" "i suck" Mine? "Heh" "That's almost funny"
After all that funness, we didn't even drop the General. Two tries we had, and no dead General. And that to the fact it appeared that at least three of the members didn't speak English as a first language, and were giving conflicting orders, and I just had another super-fun-happy PUG. Whee fun! ;-) |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 2nd, 2006|01:24 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | quixotic | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Skullcrusher Mountain - Jonathon Coulton | ] |
I recently had a friend ask me what I planned to do with my life. We had been joking aorund a bit before that, so I laughingly said "If I was insane, or if I was being rational?" He answered, "Both." So I told him about my plans to go through the steps of getting a PhD and being a professor. When I stopped there, he prompted me with "And if you were insane?" I said I'd find a western swords-master, become their student and eventually become a swords-master of my own right.
Well, I found one. And we all know how incredibly sane I am, right?
Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts (by the way, the unsafe links were restricted to that one entry, not any and all links I may ever give). It's in Toronto. I want to go. Initial analysis proclaims its possibility. Toronto does in fact contain a Graduate School of Mathematics (though only one that I could find), part of the University of Toronto. So I could even continue with that not-quite insane path.
The thing is, this whole professor thing came about after I jokingly responded to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with "A student." I would be the stereotypic professional student. I wouldn't make a stellar teacher... passable, for college level stuff, but not excellent. And while I have a great respect for teachers, it's never been anything like a passion of mine. I could handle being a professor, and it would mean getting to play with math and computers forever. With a job. A career. A means to support myself. Those rational, reasonable requirements of life nowadays.
Swords-master, on the other hand, has been a passion of mine since always. Except for one problem. It's been a passion because what I really want, what I have really wanted since I could first read, and read my first King Arthur, or Robin Hood story... I want to be a knight. A knight errant, roaming about the countryside, defeating monsters, fulfilling quests, rescuing damsels, finding my true love, courting and wooing her, then performing these great deeds for both her honor and mine. Being someone who upholds all those crazily idealized thoughts of chivalry, gaining respect and honor and giving safety and justice in return. But that can't fucking happen. It can't. There is absolutely no place in the world for someone to uphold ideals at the point of a sword, for someone to make a career, a living protecting the weak with their strong arm and stout heart. There are no superheroes. Battles take place elsewhere, in places where I'm everything but completely ineffectual, not on a field of battle, or court of chivalry. There are no people to honor me, no Lady who would love me, no king to serve and no country to defend. Those things are gone and dead or never existed.
However, the romantic in me refuses to give up. It whispers seductively, "But wouldn't it be nice to know you could? To know that, if evil showed up in the form of the Black Knight, you could strike it down? Or that if a challenge came up in the form of that Green Knight, that you could take the blow? Or that if love came around in the form of the Maid Marion, that you could protect her?" And it's winning.
I *can* do this. It's possible. Might be tough. Screw that. It's going to be hard as all hell... I'll have to leave here, support myself, live on my own, juggle working, school and training, pay for all that stuff. But I think it's possible. And I think I want to do it. We'll see if I can manage it... |
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| Ah, somniloquy |
[Mar. 29th, 2006|02:02 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  silly | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Bohemian Rhapsody | ] |
"I'm supposed to be a gumball..."
"What?!"
"I'm supposed to be a gumball."
"Are you asleep?"
"...maybe." |
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| Whatcha wanna do? Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers? |
[Mar. 14th, 2006|10:20 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
Th "Hacking" competition went great. It was, of course, more of a defense competition, 'cause hacking is bad, right?, but it was a blast. 18 hours of through the night, non-stop network defense. We came in third... out of four, still better than last. We confused the hell out of the hacking team though. By the time the 18 hours were up, we had all learned a hell of a lot, gloated over some of our victories and were ready for bed, having been up for 27 hours at this point. We did our best to stay up until the usual bed time, to keep a proper sleep schedule. I failed for a few hours right before dinner, but then we ended up staying awake fairly late, so sleep schedule ended up just fine.
The irony and great amusement of the weekend happened the next day. Sunday we slept late, hung around the hot tub, basically did nothing. That evening, one of the team by the name of Colin, checked up on the game server he runs at his house. It was being hacked. Incredibly well, too. This hacker was smart and the battle was made even tougher by the fact that Colin didn't have physical access to his boxes, and had to depend on appartently not very computer savvy family members to do any physical things. It ended up getting turned off accidently, not before it managed to infect the rest of his family's computers. They got turned off on purpose, and dealt with later.
**ATTENTION: do NOT go to any URLs I may provide. Don't do it. Please. **
At this point, Colin had managed to grab a bit of information, such as a URL (linux.nl) from a apt-get script. We pull out the laptops, which by our powers combined made four, and go to work figuring out who this bastard is. We begin work with the school's laptop by going to that URL. It's a Dutch Linux "security" team, but there doesn't seem to be a link for packages, as Colin expected. He tries adding a few random folder names to the end of the URL, which, interestingly enough, takes him to the custom 404 page of a different site entirely (widexs.nl). Poking around a bit later, we notice an added button on the bookmarks toolbar folder for widexs. Note: this is Firefox. Yes, Firefox got owned. At this point, checking msconfig and the Task Manager, we realize, the box just got screwed. We reset msconfig to its usual state, and restart while Gene goes for his Thumb Drive o'Tools. Colin migrates to the Mac and quickly learns that it has been infected, in that short period of time, by the school laptop. Yes folks, the same script gets Windows, Mac and Linux machines. This is a damn good hacker (or, as we found out later, a damn good team).
On restart, the school's laptop had to be passed to me, as I was the only one who knows the admin password. We decide this is inefficient, therefore, the most apt admin name/password combo for a Windows XP box ever was created - username: "DamnButWeAre" password: "pwnedguys". I've discovered an inate talent in myself for coming up with username/password combos... it's rather fun. Things progress with our information gathering - first things first, we put up ZoneAlarm (a mighty nice little product) and played around with HijackThis. Past that, we decide that, since the box is compromised already, let's poke around at those dirty sites, read us some source code, figure out how the hell they managed this. Source code pointed us to some very nice little JavaScipt and VBScript, I believe, packages that we promptly used wget to grab whole for their site. We learned that it was a hacking *team* by the interesting comments they left to each other in the html. We also learned they were demopartiers, associated with raw.scene.org
At this point, most of us headed to bed, as it was getting close to 1, and we had to be up early-ish for plane-catching. (grrr... plane catching. Another story entirely.) Colin, on the other hand, got no sleep that night. He stayed up analysing the boxes and the scripts and figured out what the hell these folks did. He didn't tell us everything about what he found, jsut the basics. They infected no .exes, just .sys files. They did process injection after a legit process had started. They liked changing time stamps on files, but if that was part of some over-arching plan, it escapes me. It's actually how Colin noticed where the infection was occuring the most, in addition to the fact that AIM suddenly took up +50% of system resources...
So we got a second test right after our first, with a slight difference... this time, we're allowed to fight back. I wouldn't be surprised if Colin already had. Damn, but we were pwned, guys. It was an awesome, awesome weekend. |
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| Sacred |
[Mar. 6th, 2006|01:33 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  weird | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Blizzard of '77 - Nada Surf | ] |
It's been awhile since I've been hit with the bug to write and an idea to write about at the same time. This is a prequel to this one that I don't believe I ever posted here. Still not sure if I'm happy with their connection though... ah well. Also tenously tied to this one.
( Sacred ) |
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| Feverish != a good thing when you have a hard enough time distinguishing between reality and not |
[Feb. 21st, 2006|10:07 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  wobbley | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | The Faint - Southern Belles in London Sing | ] |
If there is any evidence that a god exists at all, it is the fact that around the time I begin to be more vocal about the fact that I don't really believe in one, I get hit, in rather quick succession, with mono, recurrence of a problem requiring surgery, months of recovery from that, a badly twisted ankle and then, when all that is done with, the nasty flu bug that apparently has been going around, which is leaving me feverish, nauseated, shaky and with a sore throat and a headache. Previous to this year, I very, very rarely got sick - I think at one point I had gone ~5-6 years without needing to see a doctor. Which is good, considering how much I dislike them. Bah!
Stupid, stupid sicknesses, stupid year, sad Dani.
EDIT: Sigh. My baby cousin who was here last weekend apparently had strep in the form of a diaper rash, and I helped change his diaper once. Going for a strep test tomorrow-ish. Blargh. |
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