All set? Good.

Yesterday afternoon, I found out that I do still need a humanities course in order to graduate, but it can be of the 200-level or 400-level. This fucking sucks. It also means that I won't be getting my diploma at the same time as all of fellow classmates, but I have to wait until it gets delivered to me in late September. It also means I have to take ONE DAMN COURSE this summer, which EXTREMELY sucks.

The reason for this huge amount of sucktitude is four-fold: First off, it means that I'm gonna have to postpone making lots of money working for some company until the end of June; maybe as late as September if they really want to be anal about the fact that I don't actually have my diploma. This is kinda bullshit, too, since the course I have to take isn't even an information technology course nor has any relevance to what I will probably be doing for the rest of my work life.

Secondly, it means I have to stay in Troy, NY for a little longer than anticipated. This reason kinda overlaps with my first reason. Since I only have to go to class twice a week for a few hours per class period, I will have a lot of free time to do... uh... whatever I want to do. Hence, I will probably work. However, I will have to work for a company somewhere in the capital district of New York, thereby eliminating a lot of the other locations I was willing to work after graduation. If I end up working for some IT company, I may end up staying with them after I take and easily pass my one damn course. Ok, this is a really weak reason (since I don't have to work in Albany forever), but it also means I should concentrate my job searching in where I'm currently typing this post from. Interviewing for a company in Boston seems fruitless at the moment. Maybe my current belief will change after I stop feeling bummed out yet pissed off.

Unless, of course, I can take the class from the comfort of my own home... that would be cool. H&SS courses are so bullshit anyways, I might as well be told at the beginning of the semester what kind of papers I have to write and just email them to the professor by the time the course ends in June. Spare me of the boring lectures. Actually... hmm... I'm seriously going to have to look into that, in which case reason #2 can be waived.

Thirdly, it also means I have to cough up about $3,000 to take this one damn course. I may have to cough up even more for housing. And what wonderful courses I have to choose from. To graduate, I'm going to have to pick between American Films of the 80's (wtf?), Asian Philosophies (because I might almost be interested in this), Environmental Philosophies (maybe if I was still into environmental engineering), or Writing for the World Wide Web (I think we have a winner!).

Fourthly, I could have avoided this a lot sooner had my advisor said something earlier. The problem with the IT curriculum is that I have two advisors. I visit one of my advisors once a semester to confirm which classes I should take and make sure that I'm going to graduate. Unfortunately, it was the other advisor that spotted this H&SS problem. And I thought I had met the H&SS requirement for AT LEAST three semesters. Even my workstudy peeps thought I was fine. Guess not. And do you know how much free time I had this year? I could have EASILY taken another humanities course last semester or this semester without being overloaded. Bam. Problem solved. Graduate on time.

Fucking A.

Heh, and I didn't even mention the wonderful CANOS exam I had last night.

What a great time to be me. :p

BAt At the end of this e-mail is a recipe for Jello Jigglesrs. Bill Cosby would
be very amused is f all stugraduates brought with them a jello jiggler. There
will be a large bowl on the stgage when you revcieve your diploma to place
the jigglers in. Good luck with the res t of oyour semester.

If you can read the message through the sea of typos, some RPI genius thinks Bill Cosby would love it if there was Jello in the hand of every graduate during commencement. While many of the people at this school like to brag about how much money they'll be making and how intellectually superior they are, it is very clearly evident that most of them lack common sense.

HELLO! Jello melts! That's exactly what I want in my hand for three hours while waiting to get my piece of paper and bolting out the door, never to return. And I'm sure the guy that hands out each diploma would love to shake every sticky Jello-filled hand in the graduating class. Bill Cosby himself will probably be thinking "What a bunch of tools" and/or "These kids sure like using their $50 gowns as napkins" or something else that he shouldn't have to think.

Think before speaking, people. And use a spell checker. Sheesh.

And thanks for saying something stupid for me to ridicule.

This is why you should use Eudora. :)

Bill Cosby rules. And long live the Jello pudding pop.

I think you need the most recent version of ICQ in order to get this to work. I am running v2000a, and I ended up having to reinstall ICQ after installing this patch.

I feel like I have nothing to post about. There's things in the news that are kinda important and should be addressed, but... whatever. I don't care. They don't spark anything in me. So, send me a message using one mean or another, preferably something that I can use to belittle you on this unvisited web site. :)

Actually, your input is probably not necessary. I do have stories to tell, it's just a matter of actually typing them out. That, of course, requires motivation. Like the story of how RPI tried to screw me last semester with my financial aid; and now this semester, they don't want me to leave by claiming I need a high-level humanities course in order to graduate.

On second, thought, I'll tell the "RPI doesn't want me to graduate yet" story. It's a short one.

I got a letter last week saying that I wasn't going to graduate this May because I need to take a psych capstone project course and a 400-level humanities course. Too bad there's some flaws in this logic. I'm currently registered for my psych capstone. In fact I talked about it near the end of this page. I should get an "A" on that, assuming a certain someone actually builds the physical models for the project (hehe ;)). And the humanities course? Supposedly, I need it to meet RPI's humanities and social science requirement: I have to have a total of six such classes, no more than three can be freshman level, one must be 400 (junior / senior) level, two must be in the humanities category, and two must be in the social science category. So, I need a 400-level H&SS course of some sort, not necessarily a humanities course. Lucky for me, my IT concentration is psychology. In that particular curriculum, I have to take a zillion 400-level psych courses, and psych courses fall into the social science category. I win.

I talked with my advisor about this. He's kinda new to the whole advisor job, so he sent me to see someone who deals with H&SS requirements for a living. I have a meeting with this person on Thursday. I should be able to graduate in May after seeing her. I can guarantee it. I know the woman, and she's friends with the people that work in my work study office, so I got some pull in my favor. :) But it would still suck if I didn't get my diploma for a graduation requirement I thought I completed at least two or three semesters ago. Ick.

In barely 60 days, Bush has attacked clean air, clean water, national forests and federally protected lands. [...] How far is Bush willing to go? Consider this. He'll even leave more arsenic -- yes, arsenic! -- in your drinking water, if that's what the mining companies want. They do. He just did.

Yum. That's one of the beauties of having a Republican president: business gets highest priority, followed by rich people.

These rules, also adopted during the last few weeks of the Clinton presidency, merely required hardrock miners, operating on federally-owned lands, to post a bond guaranteeing to clean up their sites when finished in order to prevent groundwater contamination. One would think that would be standard procedure. But mining companies balked. And Bush walked.

I want to run a project and not have to clean up after I suck the place of its resources! I also want to be a person who writes commentary and ends his paragraphs with three-word rhymes.

I don't want to comment on what the rest of the article has to offer, but here are some of the other cool things Bush did:

* Continued logging of timber in national forests
* Not adding carbon dioxide to the list of pollutants that cause global warming (and therefore, industries don't have to worry about restricting the amount of it they throw into the atmosphere)
* Bringing back nuclear power. Actually, I don't have a problem with this, although the author does. A lot has changed technology-wise in 25 years that I believe nuclear meltdown won't occur as often. But what do we do with the added nuclear waste?

I want to see what Bush is gonna do with Alaska's oil and national forests. I bet it will be good... for oil companies.

As a sample of some of the crazy stuff people have tried to pawn off on online auction sites, take a look at this. Nothing says lovin' like a big storage tank for... well... go find out!

And why is it snowing right now at the same rate as that crazy snow storm where RPI actually had to cancel two days of school? It'll be April in a week, for crying out loud!

And Blogger ate my archives. Son of a... well, at least recovering my archives will divert my attention from the mail for two minutes.

I've had this for a while now, and since today has been slow and boring the hell out of me, here's something you may want to play with. Keep in mind that this is an executable file, so, uh, scan it for viruses just in case.

So what do you do with this file? Install it. Then play it. It's a game where you are given a chasm of varying depth and length, and you need to build a bridge (or bridges) for a train to be able to cross without it plummeting down into the center of the earth. You also have a budget to work with, so you can't just slap an infinite number of trusses together. Thanks Atticus for the file.

Hmm... I'm having an urge to install Diablo II on my compuer again... But I also don't want to start a game in vain if I get my copy of Tribes 2 from Electronic Boutique in less than a week(!).

Why does Everquest get an award for best MMORPG of the year? Bah.

Deus Ex got a number of awards. You have to play this game if you are usually interested in first-person shooter type of games, or strategy games, for that matter.

I'm kinda happy I don't live over on your side. :p