They
I�m convinced that my University is trying to kill us all. I�m not sure what their motive is since we pay them exorbitant amounts of money to attend this school. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time to begin tearing up the main east-west sidewalk right in front of the Otto Olson building. There is a gaping crater in the earth where our sidewalk used to be. This forces the hundreds, if not thousands of students who use that route each day to walk in the street for a short distance. So the university practically forces us to walk through a very busy street in order to get to classes, a street full of commuters who are probably in a rush because they are going to be late to their classes because there is not adequate parking on campus for all the students, and the department of public safety usually oversells parking permits. Now it�s about 5 degrees outside and they decided they didn�t need to clear all the sidewalks of snow and ice from the weekend. So the sidewalk before and after that huge hole in the ground have not been salted or plowed, making walking even more treacherous. If this is how UNK handles the first snowfall of the year then I may have a plethora of excuses at my disposal for skipping classes as the winter progresses. Now that all my righteous fury is spent I will get back to my homework, which I like to do at work instead of at home.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/24/2003 at 09:11 AM
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Los Tres Friends
The question remains� if the moon were made of barbeque spare ribs, would you eat it? It�s a simple question, a baby could answer it. As for myself, I think I would not eat that moon.
The world as I know it is interestingly boring. A lot of up and downs in my life the past several days. Sunday afternoon, just mere hours after I finished that Terminator movie marathon, I was supposed to do a bunch of taping for a class and of course nothing went as planned. Some people weren’t there on time etc. I had to leave early that evening from taping to prepare for the fraternity meeting that night. I am in my second year of college and 19 years old, I have a Junior standing. This means that I am already starting to feel my college time slipping away. So, what this means is that I ran for recording secretary for my fraternity and won. This means I get to be on the exec board, which is pretty dang cool. So Sunday night was a long night yet made me quite happy.
Around midnight my roommate and I decided to go to Hardee�s for some Swiss and mushroom burgers, we had forgotten that the new Hardee�s menu made all their burgers much bigger, so we bought 2 each to sate our impressive hunger. This proved to be a bit of a mistake, 2/3 pound of beef piled high with sautéed mushrooms and Swiss cheese is more than mortal man was meant to ingest.
Now it�s suddenly Wednesday and I have no idea what happened to the first 3 days of the week. As far as actual school work goes, I have had very little to do this week. A little video editing last night, and a test yesterday morning were the extent of it. I now have an assignment to finish up in freehand, but I can luckily do that assignment away from the lab.
I had quite a nice length of time this afternoon where I had nothing to do so I took a nap and excelled at doing nothing. I just don�t feel right not having anything to do or anywhere to go for multiple consecutive hours. I�m sure I could have found some pressing task to take care of at that time, but I didn�t.
This rant has had very little to do with anything that anyone other than myself would really care about, so how about I actually get down to a little ranting. I suppose it isn�t the smartest idea to hide real content within my inane ramblings about my personal life.
My opinions on Adobe premiere are not exactly wonderful. We have to use Adobe premiere in the labs at school for video projects, that is the program that everyone learns because it is a sort of industry standard for NLE. Sadly I am not so naive to think that Premiere is the only option out there. My buddy Aaron turned me on to Vegas Video which is a simply awesome video editor that far surpasses the compositing abilities of Adobe Premiere. Vegas allows for such simpler operation and makes producing more precise and complex projects that far exceed what is possible with the rather pedestrian premiere. As far as functionality goes it is more of a combination of Premiere with After effects all in one seamless package. I�m not going so far as to say that I don�t like After Effects, it really is a powerful tool, but not as beautifully simple as Vegas Video is.
One program that I desperately wish to use is Final Cut Pro, they have it installed on the brand spanking new G5s over in the art department, but that doesn�t do me a lot of good. I have heard that Final Cut Pro really blows Premiere out of the water as well as fulfilling some people�s masochistic desire to spend money on Apple computers.
Aside from my forays into video editing lately I have been still looking at portable digital audio players. The complexities of all the options is really frustrating, the deciding factor for me at this point is that I cannot actually afford to purchase any of the devices that I have been looking at. Perhaps if I get another job or two I will then be able to� nah never mind I always have something more important to spend money on. Speaking of which, I will get to see my wonderful woman Becca next week for thanksgiving break. I can hardly wait 
My contacts on the inside tell me that wal-mart now has Dance Dance Revolution for sale, I mean they have the PS2 game as well as the whole metal pad to stand on. I have been trying to convince a friend with a PS2 to purchase this game and allow me to come over and get my boogie on. This is probably the only way that I am going to get any sort of physical work-out as a college student, excepting the walk to the union to get some T-Bell.
I will leave you with the most interesting linkage I can remember coming across in the past few days, a detailed analysis of the ever important question �What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?� You just have to know these sorts of things when you�re a king.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/19/2003 at 07:11 PM
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Timewarp
Early? Nah, this ain�t early. It�s approaching the 6 o�clock hour here, and I am just getting in now. �What have I been doing?� you may ask� well, I have been doing what any college aged guy would be doing late on a saturday night/early sunday morning. Watching all three Terminator movies of course. My good buddy Mayday and myself decided around midnight to go rent the entire Terminator trilogy and watch them consecutively. I should probably just get to bed seeing as how I need to get up for church in a few hours� but this is a time of day that I rarely see. And rarely do I stay up this late, let alone get up this early.
I�m starting to feel coherence slip out of my grasp so I had better make this quick. Some people say that sleep is good, and I do have a full day ahead of me tommorow. Perhaps I will tell you about it� tommorow, which is actually tonight, unless I end up staying awake late again, in which case it might actually be tommorow when I tell you about what is in reality the events of today. Righto.
G�night all.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/16/2003 at 06:11 AM
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Hilarious and Disturbing
I had seen this website some time ago and promptly forgotten about it, last night I was reading the rant I just wrote and remembered the Tard Blog. Many people find it offensive and callous. It is somewhat offensive to laugh at kids with disabilites. Be warned that this sped teacher is really venting a lot of frustration when she writes these stories, making the telling of these stories very� colorful. I admit I find it a little disturbing to laugh at something that is such a taboo to talk about in our culture. If anything, I can actually sympathize much more with the plight of these mentally handicapped children, and the teachers who deal with them on a daily basis. As is usually true, real life is so much funnier than anything that can be made up.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/14/2003 at 09:11 AM
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Julia Childish
Alright boys and girls here is Timbly�s Annual Recipe of the Day, or as I like to call it the TARD. This recipe is designed specifically for LAN party usage.
WARNING: consumption of large quantities of caffeine and other energy supplements may not be healthy, unless you are a college student that lives on Mountain dew and Ramen noodles.
I�m calling this one the �Dew Brew.� First you must have a 32oz container for drinking liquids from. A Nalgene water bottle would be preferred. Buy a six pack of 24oz bottles of Mt. Dew and 6 8oz cans of Amp energy drink from a gas station, or wherever you can find them. You may substitute amp for another energy drink if you so wish, but I cannot guarantee the results. Pour an entire bottle of Mt. Dew and an entire can of Amp into your bottle, close the bottle and shake vigorously. Viola! A concentrated energy brew that is sure to make you a better computer gamer and keep you awake though all the prime gaming hours(sunset to sunrise).
I�m busy procrastinating right now so I thought I would submit some �stuff� as well as some �things� for your perusal. Contained within this post is some random bits of information that you may or may not find useful, interesting, insightful, or pertinent to anything. With that disclaimer lets go ahead and give you all some linkage to site in which you should be wasting your time. Right off the bat let me fill you guys in on a sweet site that I just found a few minutes ago. Gracenotworks.com is a very awesome site that offers some insightful articles on various subjects for Christians to think about. Not only that but I am totally impressed by the design of the site, the graphics are very clean and the layouts are impressive, plus their pixelated sheep is very cool. Let me tell you, not many web designers can pull off using that much green on a site.
If you haven�t seen Homestar Runner by now then I have to ask what kind of rock you are living under, please check our this hilarious site chock full of flash cartoons, the humor of which is comparable only to the work of Monty Python.
Another site that I tend to spend a good deal of time on is ArsTechnica. That particular tech news site provides me with some great technical information, as well as the latest news from the realm of the geek world. Speaking of the geek world, and more specifically, stuff that geeks would like to own, you should check out Think Geek and you should also buy me caffeineated products from there, if you want to send me said products, email me at tim@level1media.com.
If you are in search of more web-comic goodness then you should be reading PvP, go there, read it now. I have probably forgotten more web-comics than most people have ever heard of. It�s scary really how they all interconnect. The web-comic community could be a truly interesting study in social dynamics if you were into that whole studying social dynamics thing.
I should probably finish up the video stuff I�m supposed to be working on right now, so I will leave you with assurances that if you didn�t suffer a seizure reading this site then you might survive drinking that brew of dew. Good luck peoples.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/13/2003 at 05:11 PM
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A Little Behind the Times
I decided to go ahead and buy Halo for the PC. I have obviously heard a great deal about Halo ever since it was release with the XBOX, which seems like quite a while ago now. I, of course, do not own an XBOX and do not intend to buy any gaming console any time soon. I simply do not see the value in owning a console when I have a perfectly good PC right here that does so much more for me and plays games. I have played Halo on the XBOX and enjoyed the multiplayer experience, I wasn�t really that impressed with it because as a PC gamer I can say �Been there, done that.� I�ll tell you that having played the original Tribes back in like� 2000 with up to 32 people on a server and voice chat really makes the gaming experience of Halo on the XBOX look rather elementary. The fact that most console gamers had no experience with true multiplayer features led them to latch onto the first decent Multiplayer FPS as if it were a gift from God himself is a little sad. Especially when you consider the low resolution graphics on a TV set, and the pudgy and inaccurate controls you get with a console, you realize why I prefer a PC for these sorts of games. A mouse is obviously a superior aiming tool when compared to that fat little joystick on the XBOX controller. So the point is, multiplayer Halo on a console is little better that anything else I�ve experienced, Multiplayer on the PC is still an unknown, at my college the port that Halo runs on is blocked off for outgoing and incoming traffic. And I cannot play with anyone on the LAN because stupid Microsoft won�t allow 2 computers with the same Halo CD key to even play over the local network. Jerks. Though I doubt that the PC multiplayer is much better than any other FPS game out there right now, the single player campaign is quite sweet. I actually am enjoying story line and am intrigued by where the plot is going. So far I would say that Halo offers one of the finest FPS single player campaigns I have experienced since� oh probably Half-Life.
There was a funny little bug with the game that only developed after I had played for a while, I would be playing for a very short time and my computer would suddenly Blue Screen and restart. I ended up fixing it by upgrading my video card drivers, but it still seemed odd that the issue wasn�t existant until I had played the game for quite a few hours.
Moving on from my gaming rant� my weekend was quite fun. It consisted of a nice little camping trip with some guys that are good friends. Sure it was really cold, in fact it got down below freezing outside Friday night. I know this because there was a thin layer of ice forming on my cup of cola while I was drinking it. Of course we had several large fires, and melted metal down. We did the usual sort of guy things, threw axes at stuff, ran around and tackled each other, slept on the dirt, ate lots of meat, and shot things. I don�t care who you are, if you�re a guy that stuff is fun.
The pledges to the fraternity that I am a member of have to get ask several questions of the active members and get their signatures, usually 10 actives per week. Yesterday their notebooks of information were due and all the pledges were running around like crazy trying to get the last of their signatures. I seemed to be on their target list yesterday and on of the things that we have to tell them, so they can write it down in their notebooks is our Words of Wisdom. Though I do not claim a great deal in the wisdom department I just thought that these words of wisdom would be good to sign off with. These were actually the words of wisdom that I received from a man I respect a great deal last year when I was a pledge in the fraternity.
Proverbs 17:17 - A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/10/2003 at 03:11 PM
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True Nostalgia
Much to my own embarrassment I was looking around at some of the places I used to have my website located. The tripod free hosting service was where my whole experience with website design began. I returned yesterday to discover that I still had an archive of old blog entries that have become stale and musty. The site itself is defunct, but I was able to pull off my first 9 months of Blog posts. The year was 2001, the millennium was still young and so was I. I still am young, but it feels like an eternity ago that I wrote these things. So much has happened in the past 2 years that it seems I was a different person back then, and I suppose I was. Here is where it all began; my rantings are not really very different from what I write now. I am, at my core, still a geek. Though it may not be apparent to everyone that I come into contact with on a daily basis, my geek nature still shines through when I write for my web-site. It is only through this relatively unnoticed medium of communication that I feel completely comfortable expounding on the finer points of computer hardware and software. This is the place that I explore the intricacies of CPU architecture and price to performance tradeoffs for the mutual boredom and benefit of those poor unlucky souls that stumble upon my humble abode on the web. Not everything I write is purely computer geek focused. I tend to stumble onto other topics that I am ill equipped to form opinions about constantly. If you are bored enough to even be reading a little bit of those old archives (you can see them in a box along the sidebar), you will surely get a feel for where I stand on political issues as well as where my interests in entertainment lie. Let’s cover some of what was happening in my life at that time�
I was a measly 16 years old with big things happening, but little self motivation. After roughly a month of posting rants I moved to a small town just outside of a big town in Iowa, I had been living in a little town that I like to call �Hickhole, Nebraska� But the locals called it Wakefield. This was another interesting 2 year period of my life that comprised my sophomore and junior years of high school, within that time I learned very little of any use through actual school work, but learned a lot through my job at Inventive Communications as a data entry drone and a low level web programmer. I also had the unique opportunity to run a local access cable channel through our school, I got to be there at the beginning of this enterprise, choosing all the equipment necessary and spending hours and hours hooking up audio and video cable in various combinations. All that time running coax, component, and speaker cables has given me an intuitive sense of how to hook up most consumer electronics. When I get into it, I tend to think in the same way that signals flow through the system, I become one with the system, I am the cables, and all cables run through me. Sorting the whole system out a few weeks later because you forgot to label anything is trick that I am still working on.
The school itself, along with a majority of the people that lived in that little town was pretty intolerable. I was happy in many ways when we moved out of there and back to Iowa. The interesting thing was that by that point in my life I was pretty fed up with the whole high-school scene. That July before my senior year I began working at a local TV station as a Production Assistant. This means I was a peon who did whatever the bosses needed doing aside from my primary purpose which was running a camera in the studio. This was probably the most enlightening job I had in many areas, not just with technical information. I actually learned a lot about what not to do with my life from the people I worked with there. I was the first and only High-school student to work there, the rest were all in there mid 20�s and chronically single with little prospect for a real career. They taught me a lot about the world and all the dimmer corners of society. After quite a while in that environment I was got tired of the immaturity of high-school very quickly, even though I was barely there. So I decided to graduate a semester early and take a semester of classes at a community college. It worked out really well actually; I enjoyed the beginnings of my college experience quite a bit and really started to grow up more. By the time I was ready to move on to the university at the same time as the rest of the people in my high-school class, I already had 28 credit hours. I of course thought I knew it all when I came to Kearney, little did I know that my college experience had only just begun.
I have been quite a geek most of my life, living on the edge of high-school society, very close to being a reject throughout school. Luckily that did change in College, college is usually quite a bit more mature and people tend to worry more about their own lives instead of aiming to show their own superiority through belittling others. As with most people I changed quite a bit during that first year of college, and I assume I am changing even more this year. Probably one of the most significant changes in my life last year was when I joined the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. Most people back home who knew me well were pretty shocked when I joined a fraternity. It�s one of those things that I did for my own reasons, those reasons are far too complicated to make it worthwhile explaining to most people.
Another huge change in my life is Becca; we have known each other since middle school and have been dating since spring break last year. We have become so close over the past year and a half that I feel like I know her better than I know anyone else, even my best friend Jon, and we have known each other since age 1 or 2. Becca is the woman I love, and nothing will ever change that, she makes my life brighter whenever I think about her. And if I express anymore cheesiness here I may start sighing distractedly. Believe me; no one wants me in that kind of state. So I will move on from the very important feelings I have for Becca in order to maintain some aspect of order and coherence.
I have had quite a few jobs and opportunities that have grown my resume, including my work as tech-support for the UNK ITS Helpdesk, and packing boxes at a warehouse over the summer, and of course the projects that I jump into at a whim, such as Level 1 Media. My future is a little uncertain, but I do hope to graduate from Kearney in spring of 2005. Beyond that I have only a vague idea of what my goals and aspirations are, on both a personal and professional level. I honestly feel like I will be able to handle anything that comes along, simply because of what I have dealt with on my way to where I am now. I admit that my life has been fairly easy and trouble free so far, but I still have my share of stress to deal with on a day to day basis. I do tend to pile my projects and tasks on top of each other at the last minute.
Well, I get the feeling that I am rambling incoherently so I think it is time for me to finish this rant with some sort of profound quote about life the universe and everything. Umm� I got nothing. Perhaps I can leave you with something along the lines of �Try to do more than you think you can succeed at�, or perhaps �Don�t try to be something you are not�, or maybe �Don�t kiss your honey when your nose is runny, you may think its funny, but it� snot�.
Posted by
sirtimbly on 11/04/2003 at 04:11 PM
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