davemclain.com

I left my apartment at 8:30 this morning, I didn’t see it again until 10:30 pm.

This is probably the new SOP for mondays (Standard Operating Procedure (for the few CS majors not System.out.println())). I Hope those parentheses were nested properly.

So here’s how it went:

• 8:30-Bus
• 9:00-CS 310, floating point numbers = the suck
• 10:00-Ger 312L, bluffing my way through again
• 11:00-West Mall table
• 2:00-Accounting, if it doesn’t balance, change Stockholers’ Equity (just kidding, Dad but at least now you’ll get the jokes and maybe Mom won’t)
• 3:30-Study Session with Hunter/watching MXC
• 6:00-Reading for ACC
• 7:00-habitat for Humanity meeting
• 7:30-BYX
• 9:15-Waiting for Phi Lamb
• 9:45-Realize Phi Lamb isn’t coming, beg Summer for a ride home
• 10:30-Fall through apartment door

Rush = going well, as do classes so yeah

Campus Good, Oltorf Bad

The first day of school was today, everything that happened near campus was good. My classes went about as expected, I saw people, I met new people, all was happy. Everything surrounding Sterling apartments today could hardly have gone worse. My stereo was stolen again. I know my car was locked, luckily there’s no damage to the exterior, they used something non-destructive to get in, but I had my faceplate in the locked glove compartment. And they used something crude to ge tin there, so now there’s damage to my dash. They stole my cologne which I keep in the glove compartment, or I guess kept. They also stole my radar detector and my 3rd Nokia auto charger. All in all probably around 300 dollars in stolen goods. At least they left the $90 knife and dollar in the cupholder, right decent of them. Sterling is also charging me 70 dollars/month more than my roommates, and I’m about to start raising all hell at their corporate office.

Back nearer to campus, I played poker again, and won. So I do have 25 dollars extra to my name tonight, which hardly evens me out, but it got my mind off of it quite nicely, and I was doing great until I saw/felt the damage to my dash.

Guess you were right dad, I need a car alarm.

This world sucks

So I Definitely just finished setting my speakers back up after a fun filled evening of seeing John Murchison, going to BPK’s house and going to CostPlus.

Unfortunately, as I suspected earlier, the primary output jack for sound is broken, so I’ll eventually be dropping some funds on a sound card, cuz not having my rear speakers, and pumping the rear audio through the front is just going to bug me. Possible temp solution is getting a splitter and pumping the same thing to front and rear, but eh.

School starts tomorrow…..I dunno if that’s good or bad, but look out WL bus, here comes Dave McLain.

Well I ended up playing poker again tonight, and losing the 5 dollars I won yesterday. Hooray for all in pre-flop on the third showing of ace and 8. Hooray for the second storm in two days. California can have all the nice “weather” it wants, give me a Texas thunderstorm any day. I like finally having weather again. All the people at the tournament didn’t understand why when I went out of the game I went walking in the rain. Having not seen rain all summer it’s nice to have the purple sky pouring down rain with intermittend bursts of lightning.

Ultimate frisbee tomorrow, should be fun.

Well I placed in my first poker tournament, sure the silver doesn’t have as much glory as the gold, but I got back double my buy in, which is kinda nice. The storm passed north of us, so we caught a little rian but no hail. After the tourney ended at 2 am (4.5 hours of poker) I made some nice time back to the apt, since I got all green through downtown. Before poker I had gone over to the UT football practice, saw a few guys from BYX for the first time since spring, it ended early cuz of lightning. I love the lightning, and it sure felt appropriate. Definitely fit my mood, which despite all the good went from pretty darn excited to brooding in nothing flat.

So, stuff that’s happened: Not a whole heck of a lot

My carpet was apparently torn up by one Simon Merlin Croft. But it’s ok because Sterling is going to recarpet our entire apartment. Though that sucks because that means we have to move virtually everything we own. The computer I brought for Santosh exceeds expectations though it is in a dubious state of running. I love having a dual monitor setup again. It’s a very good thing that I brought my gun because otherwise Dare would have the only one, and that would be bad. I got hit three times last night

Looking towards the future: countdown to school starting is at 6 days. Scary stuff. Poker tonight, spending 5 dollars to hang out with friends, instead of doing it for free, ounds kinda shady to me ;).

So…where to begin? Ah yes, I’ll begin at the beginning

Day One: My car hit 120,000 miles literally in the driveway as I was leaving my house 5 minutes early, naturally I couldn’t leave early, so as I was passing Jesuit i get a call saying I left my AirSoft gun (complements of the poor judgement of some Jesuit student) I go back, get teh gun adn leave at 7:00am. On the road, stopping occassionally to fill up or empty, sometimes both. Which went great until my credit card started getting declined. Apparently when Wells Fargo online told me I had $1200.00 of available credit what it actually meant was that I had less than 12 dollars of available credit. Bah, the payment from the car work didn’t go through. Anyway….Day 1: 638 miles travelled. Filled up on gas twice: once before the grapevine (I only put in 10 bucks worth) and once in East LA, at East LA I had a trip meter of 515 for 16.8 gallons of gas, giving a MPG of 30.6. Not bad. mad props to the rubber circle on the back of my Nokia

Day Two: So I woke up after a terrible night’s sleep, stole two bagels and hit I-10. Stopped like three times in Arizona, Got 11 gallons in Phoenix, with 334.5 on the odometer (31 mpg). 403 miles of Arizona, then New Mexico. New Mexico sucks. It is just plain terrible. As I’m going through the last 20 miles of Arizona I notice some dark clouds on the horizon. I kid you not, I cross the state line and there’s immediately a visibility impairing rainstorm. There was like an inch of water on the road, I had to cut my speed by so much. This goes on for like 10 minutes and finally I get out of it. So now it’s just raining a little bit, and it’s hot enough that it lands on my windshield and evaporates. The road is now dry, despite the rain. New Mexico is really just a filler state as far as I’m concenred, luckily Texas has established a colony on the frontier so that you don’t have to spend any more time in that state than you have to. That colony is El Paso. Thank goodness I only had to endure 180 miles of New Mexico, or else I might have even more to complain about. So day 2’s mile total was 585, giving a total distance travelled of 1221. The Haddad family very kindly provided me with food shelter and a car phone charger, way beyond what I could have asked, Much thanks to Eric’s family.

Day Three:Having company on the road was great. Though I apparently suck at math leading to a rather unfortunate incident that is best left unspoken. I filled up before leaving El Paso since my gas light was on (I didn’t want to stop in New Mexico) 14.5 gallons for a mpg of 30. Final gas stop was an amazing 393 miles later with 11.2 gallons for 35 miles to the gallon. I saw that and I was stunned. I love my Honda Accord. Just plain wow. So anyway my welcome back to Austin was the first traffic I’d seen in 3 days. Blech. I don’t know my way around yet, so I very intelligently left 290 opting instead to take Riverside across South Austin….not very bright. But I made it to the apartment and even managed to sleep. Hooray. 1819 miles in 3 days. Whine to me about the drive from Houston or Dallas, please. Watched Men In Black at Trey’s with Amy King and Santosh Dawson, it’s good to be back.

Today: Slept 11 hours. Went to Wal-Mart and dropped 150 dollars on towels and sheets and stuff.

I’m in El Paso, despite what the progress meter above says. 1221 miles down, 600 to go. Look out Austin

Well its Friday night (the blog’s timestamp is done with Texas time) and I’m getting ready to sleep one last time in my bed before starting the long drive to Texas. If you’re reading this, give me a call, I’ve got time.

Peace.

For the first time all summer, time has become more scarce than other resources. Procrastination is a fickle beast and it’s turned ugly on me. Leaving Saturday morning, so Monday is way too early to start. Tuesday is clearly the time to start preparing to do the job. When Wednesday rolls around there are three afternoon/evenings to do the work, perfect. Now lets throw off the groove, Tuesday night I stayed up too late and thus began the sleep deprivation cycle, Wednesday I slept in til around 10, unintentionally. Wednesday after work is the Godspeed Mass, which was awesome, but naturally meant I was at Jesuit til 7:30, after which Joe Petek came back to my house to hang out one last time. This lasted til midnight. Suddenly my body is going to mutiny against me, but i have to at least get a load of laundry done, so I do so while watching the second half of Pirates of the Carribean (hence the word choice of mutiny). 2 am, head hit’s pillow, woefully underpacked. Now suddenly I’m faced with a thursday that involves picking up my family from the airport at 7:20, followed by a friday that will necessarily get cut off early cuz i’ll need my sleep.

You’da thought I would have learned my lesson from the end of the spring semester (you’d especially think so if your name was John Murchison and you graciously helped me back between the hours of 11pm and 4 am knowing full well exactly how much time I’d wasted in the previous week). But then again you probably also know that I rarely if ever learn from my experiences (see Shakely anecdote #3b: Getting JUG for the exact same offence two years in a row, see all other procrastination anecdotes).

Oh well it’s not like I’m an idiot who’s coming in to work the day before i leave…oh wait, I am

Final thought: radar detector = awesome