On an up side, I finally finished my latest creation called Vitrification and it's posted at Deviant Art. Here's my account page. Hope you enjoy it. It seems like others are. :)

Thursday, July 25^th 2002 — 11:58pm Central Time
Truth came out this evening. My dad's learning Adobe Acrobat for use in his teaching (he's a teacher) and he was showing me things periodically that he made. He sends me files from the basement where he's online up to my room where I'm online. He came upstairs to explain something in more detail to me in person so I understood it better. When he was done, I showed him the latest design I was working on. I told him it wasn't finishe obviously, but I had learned a new technique in Photoshop that I thought was cool. He said it was nice but he had a goal with what he was working on which directly implies that I didn't have a goal at all with my design. He quickly backtracked and tried to make up for what he said with some excuse that I didn't really buy into but let him leave anyway. Guess I now know what he usually thinks of my art. *sigh* What a wonderful way to end the night.

Thursday, July 25^th 2002 — 11:08am Central Time
Ahh...thursday. One of my two days a week where I have off from everything. No work. No school. Too bad it's kinda gloomy outside right now though. Oh well. Can't have everything. But for the next two weeks, Thursdays will be my only days off from everything. My coworker is going on vacation and I'm taking over some of his hours for that time so I'll be practically living at the library. Heh. It's okay though. There are MUCH worse jobs I could have and be stuck at. It'll be some good extra money, too.

It's been slow around here lately. Not much has been happening and as you can see, I'm still stuck for a design for this site. I'm sure all of you out there reading this could come up with a spectacular one but nothing hasn't clicked in me yet. I need inspiration without feeling jealous of what I'm looking at. Hard to do. Just a short rambling for today. More to come.

Monday, July 22^nd 2002 — 11:55pm Central Time
Well gee. Oh how I love it when I'm trying to be serious with a friend and they think I'm being "silly." God forbid I actually try to say something meaningful. I wonder why I try sometimes.

Monday, July 22^nd 2002 — 03:03pm Central Time
Look! The site looks exactly the same as before! I'm running low on creativity lately so I can't decide on a really good new interface design so for now (and for however long it takes me to design a new one), the site will continue using this cheesy theme. Well, I better get to explaining the stuff I said I would, eh?

Got grades from finals:
What can I say? Tests don't really phase me much when I know what I'm doing. I got great grades on all my finals, even Netprep, surprisingly.

Went on a road trip with friends:
Oh my we had a blast! It was our first road trip as a group and our first really big thing all together. Surprisingly, we all survived and didn't bite each others' heads off too much! Heh heh. We were all pretty much civilized throughout the whole trip as well which was a nice change of pace from how we normally are. :) Steph and Joel drove the whole way up which we are all eternally grateful for. It was smooth riding all the way up. I took tons of pictures of everything and everyone but I won't be posting them out of respect for their privacy and just because some of them aren't meant to be seen by others. :) Hey, we all have pictures like that, okay? Don't give me that look! We went swimming every night there, played games, and had a generally good time the entire time. We brought along WAY too much stuff though. We were overly prepared but I guess it's better to be overly prepared than not prepared at all, right? See, we rented a cabin up north and didn't know how stocked it would be with the general stuff so we brought pots, pans, coolers, sleeping bags, and way more food than we needed. The place was basically like a little house with everything in it like an entire kitchen, two full baths, two bedrooms, and a wonderful living room. We were amazed at how much it had and how nice it looked. It actually looked like a hole in the wall of a place when we drove up but it was beautiful inside and MUCH bigger than it looked. It even had a spiral staircase! (I love those.) I won't bore you all with what we did while we were up there becuase 1)You don't want to know and 2)I don't wanna tell ya. ;) Just know that we had a great time.

Got a new cushy job:
While driving up to the cabin, I got a phone call from my mom who I had instructed to call me if she heard that I got the library job I applied for or not and she said I got it! :) I whooped and hollered and was in a good mood for the rest of the trip knowing I had a job waiting for me when I got back with a steady income. What do I do at the job? Heh. Not much! I sign people up to use the Internet on the public computers in the reference section of the local library here. That's it. I just wait for people to come up to me and ask to use a computer. As long as I keep track of who's using what and when they're getting off, it's an easy job. When no one's asking me to use one, I can play on the Internet or do my homework or do whatever else I want because I have my own computer there. :) Believe it or not, I play online scrabble every time I go to work. And not just one game, but several. And they LET me! I'm such a good little employee. Hee hee. The best part is, I get paid a pretty decent amount to do this job to boot so all's good. :)

Transferred to a different college:
After spending one year as a full time student at the local community college, and hearing my friend Amanda rave about her college, I decided to switch to hers. See, she goes to ITT Technical Institute and is getting her associate's degree in multimedia there. Whenever we would get together, she would always rave about how she was learning new stuff in Photoshop, Flash, 3D Studio Max, etc. I kept wondering, Why aren't I going there?! That's what I LOVE to do! So I asked her where the ITT campus she went to was and to my surprise it was 5 minutes away from my house! How convenient is that?? So, I told my dad that I wanted to go take a tour of the place. He and I went over and looked around one day and I was pretty much convinced that I wanted to go there. We signed all the appropriate papers and such and I started the day I got back from the road trip. Incidentally, I started at ITT and my job at the library on the same day. That was a busy day! My schedule there rocks. It's a two-year institution and for my entire time there, all my courses are planned out for me since I'm taking the multimedia track along with Amanda. I have class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 8am to 1pm. That's it! I got used to that schedule VERY quickly. I'm loving it. It's like a dream schedule. Like I said, the courses are all planned out and everyone starts out in the same classes because they're the general stuff. The MWF morning classes is just one schedule you could have there and doesn't seem like a popular one since it's so early so there are only 7 people in my classes. I love a small class like that. More personal. I have one class a day so each class is 5 hours long which isn't bad considering we get 3 breaks and on the longest one, I can come home to eat a little something. I couldn't have asked for a better setup.

Got a new kick ass video card:
*Giggles uncontrollably* Yep! I splurged and got a brand new sweet GeForce 4 TI 4400 128MB RAM video card. It was originally $270 with a $30 rebate (which we mailed in already of course) but my generous dad paid for part of it so I only had to pay $200. :) It's SWEEEEEET...VERY SWEEEEEEEET. Hee hee hee. *Continues giggling uncontrollably*

Learned new fun coding:
Yeah, so I learned CSS which is just a simple extension of HTML but I'm glad to know it though. Nothing big, I know but it will come in handy whenever I actually get some creativity back in me and create my new site. I'll make VERY good use out of CSS when redesigning this site. Wish I knew of it and how to use it when I started this site. Sheesh. Converting it all is going to be a pain but I'll be glad to do it because I wanna do some good old hand-coding again. I haven't done that for anything for a while.

There, now that you're all caught up to date on the "Period of Silence" that you all painfully endured while I was too lazy to update, it's time for the current happenings!

My dad came home Saturday from his week's stay in California/Arizona where he stayed with friends and family. He took lots of pictures because he went hiking in the desert in Arizona and had a great time. The pictures turned out great and one day I might post them but I'm not sure. I wanna redo this site before I do anything as nifty as posting pictures again. (Yes, I'm lazy.) While he was out there, my digital camera developed an odd problem though. It still takes pictures just fine, but now, whenever the SmartMedia disk is taken out, it beeps rapidly and continuously. It never used to do that before. If any of you know what's wrong with it, please, don't hesitate to email me or fill out that Suggestions/Comments box over there to the left and let me know. I have an Olympus Digital Camera D-460 Zoom.

Steph left for a week-long vacation up north yesterday and I miss her already. I'm sure she'll read this when she gets back and wonder about that but I do. She's become such an amazing friend over the past year and I can't talk to her for a week now so it's like torture because she and I understand each other so well that we don't usually have to explain ourselves when we complain or ramble about something. It's great having a friend like that. And believe it or not, we've never fought about anything. Really, not once in the 5 years we've known each other. Cool, huh? Only person I've never argued with out of all my friends. She's so cool. :)

It's my parents 24th anniversary today! HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, MOM AND DAD!!!!

All the ramblings for May (all one of them...heh) have been moved to the Archives.

That's all for now. My fingers are quite tired from typing all of that. I'll definitely be updating more frequently (even probably while at work! LOL) now since I'm in the mood to ramble lately about all sorts of stuff. :)

Friday, July 12^th 2002 — 06:47pm Central Time
Yes, you may kill me now for the lack of updates. You'll see that this one is dated July and the one May entry has not been moved to the archives yet. I'm working on an entirely new site design combining all three sites of mine: Mengermania, Practical Fractals, and My Ramblings. It's in the works and will hopefully be bigger, better, and more fun to look at than this annoying little site. I've learned some new coding things so it will be better in that respect as well and MUCH easier for me to update and code (and change should I need to). Oh my gosh will it be easier! :)

So, until I finish the update (don't expect it any time in the extremely near future...hopefully in the semi-near future), I'll leave you with a very brief account of what's been happening since May 22^nd.

Got grades from finals. Good.
Went on a road trip with friends. Very good.
Got a new cushy job. Quite good.
Transferred to a different college. VERY good.
Got a new kick ass video card. Very good.
Learned new fun coding. Very good.