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For the week of january 19, 1997
sunday, january 19, 1997 04:21 EST
Sitting here playing the Geography Game with my friends. You know, name any geographical location and then the next person has to follow with another location which starts with the same letter that the previous location ended with. This is quite peculiar. Reminds me of when i was younger, taking car trips with my family, and playing the game with my sister.
The big problem would be all of the double letter places. Especially double A's. That would always get you into an infinite A loop. Africa, Asia, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Argentina, etc. It would go on and on until you hit something like Arkansas. Of course then if you were unlucky you'd hit Ohio, Ontario, Oswego and you'd get stuck until you got to Omaha and then everything would be alright again.
Play for about 10 minutes and you realize how little geography you actually know. Or how amazing that whole random access thing that your brain can do is.
Must get back to the game now, and the more and more I think about the game, the less and less I can concentrate on this entry. I'm going to sleep.
Today basically served as a wakeup call. Welcome to the new semester.
i had a meeting for the show that i'm working on. a read through. it was pretty good. it was cold in the theatre. my friend and i went to the other theatre to try to find the hog so we could lower the garage doors. open the door to the shop of the other theatre. look inside.
the sprinklers are going off.
let me state now that the tech director had already called plant operations earlier in the day to tell them that some of the sprinkler heads were already leaking. it is, after all, 33 degrees in the shop. yikes.
so they've got people in there working, so we go in to the theatre through the other entrance. we find the hog. We notice at this point that there's water starting to leak in under the door between the shop and the stage so we start shoving stuff under the door to try to stop the water. at this point the fire alarm's going off, and the fire company starts showing up.
we go outside to see the water leaking out of the theatre over the edge and creating a waterfall flowing down to one of the doorways to the postoffice (right under the theatre).
We're finally allowed to go back into the building. The water's leaking into the trap room under the stage. We start mopping and cleaning the stage. The vacuum crew finally arrives. We leave.
We go back to the other theatre to collect our things. Go back outside. Walking by the theatre we look at the side of the building and see another waterfall cascading down the side of the building. Go back inside to see another leak, and about an inch and a half of water in the back of the shop. Start vacuuming the shop. The mop crew shows up again to work on that part.
All of this and the water is freezing all over the place outside and the theatre is still cold. I can see my breath. It's actually warmer outside than inside. I hope it makes it through the night. I hope the stage doesn't freeze.
All this (presumably) because the university decided to save some money by cutting the heat to the theatre. When we put the call in they were already working on another job in another building on campus. So much for saving money.
tuesday, january 21, 1997 23:21 EST
The last day of freedom, so to speak. Gotta start those classes again tomorrow. Looking forward to it? I dunno. Maybe. Be nice to get back to a routine. On the other hand I already am in this theatre routine already. Do I need another one?
And then I wonder what I'm really doing in school. I love the school atmosphere. I love my friends here. I love all of the projects that I'm doing. This environment does make learning very easy, surprisinly enough. But I don't know if I'm cut out for this whole school thing, exactly. Courses, I dunno, fun and all. But I'd much rather be playing. Of course that's probably the case with everyone, but sometimes I feel like the only person in the world completely slacking off.
Am I here just because it's the thing to do? Am I here because you aren't anything without a college degree these days? No, that's not true. My father has always told me that college is a substitute for talent. If you're really talented at something, you're set. People will recognize that. If not, you'd better go to college so at least people think that you have talent (in some way).
So, if that's the case, then what the heck am I doing taking the courses I am. What am I going to do with a computer science degree? Do not want to program for the rest of my life. Doesn't seem appealing. I guess I'll just keep taking interesting courses and see where that gets me in another few years.
Thank goodness for being able to take courses pass/fail.
I've noticed that I've got five classes that look really interesting that I want to take. This would mean a lot of work. And not that I don't want to do work, but I think that I've already got me to last me a while. The plan at the moment though is to take all five. For as long as I can. Until I break.
If/when that happens, I'm going to figure out which of the classes I'm going to drop. Or possibly audit, depending on how interesting they are. I've decided that I really want to take advantage of this whole college thing, and I want to learn. I don't want to deal with the bullshit of grades. I want to measure the worth of a class not by how it affected my GPA, but by how it affected my life. Will I be able to look back and see that some of my ideas on life have been changed or strengthened by a given course?
If so, then the course was a good one. I learned something. Something about my self. Something about others. Something about the world. Should it matter what grade I got in the course? Should it matter that it shows up on my transcript? Nobody's going to look and say, "Hey! This guy took Philosophy 19 and learned about free speech!" Doubtful. But if I can better formulate my opinions on free speech, then who cares if anyone even knows that I took it? In this game, I'm the only one who counts.
Eh, nothing big. Getting back into the swing of that school thing. Don't really remmeber how to study, how to do work. It's a bit annoying. Having to deal with a schedule that's planned out for me. Not one that I've chosen for myself (well, yes, i did choose the classes myself).Enough.
Read through michael's entry for yesterday reminds me that I'm not going to be here forever. I was complaining the other day about not knowing what I'm doing here. I still don't know.
What I do know is that I do belong here. The theatre, the lab, my friends, the construction going on outside my window. I belong here. College is more than learning derivatives. It's a little bit more like coding for hours and days on end with friends in the lab. It's going to the dining hall and complaining about the food. Staying up late, just for the hell of it. It's installing linux for the first time, and having people around to tell you that it's cool. It's more about life than it is about classes.
I'm sure that I'm not ready for the Real World (tm), but this is as good a transition as any.
As the joke between my friends and I go, "HTML = CA$H"
Of course, every time this comes up, it comes as a big joke. This is, of course, because all of my friends are "serious" computer science people, and the thought of anyone wasting time on such things as HTML is just plain silly. It's just that web page design doesn't carry as much prestige in the computing world (at least in my circles) as does, say, coding your eyeballs out.
But I know that I don't want to be coding for the rest of my life, so what am I going to do? I love the web. I love the medium. I'm learning how to use it better (I hope). I like the end user stuff much more. I don't want to be writing the programs, I want to be using them with people, for people. And the web seems like a perfect place for it.
Besides, I get to use that scripting that I love so much. That's some sort of real coding.
I guess we'll just see where the web goes in the next few years. And whether I go with it.
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