Oh how much I hate writing. Today in my ICS 139W class (upper division writing for ICS majors), I had to write some in class essay that's supposed to indicate whether or not we're 'up to par' with the rest of the class. Not only was it spontaneous writing, but it was handwritten! I don't usually handwrite things, and that was pretty evident in my hand cramps around paragraph 1. Anyways, the topic we had to write about was 'describe what it is like to be you for a morning'. We were supposed to write 2 handwritten pages in about 35 minute on that topic. My morning is definetly not that interesting, so I had a fairly difficult time thinking of what to write. Good thing is that the writing itself was fairly decent, I just had nothing to write about. The irony in all of this is that I came online to write about how much I hate writing. I guess it's not as bad when you WANT to write something. Plus, it's easier to write about something you either really hate or really love.

So I had my first day of school yesterday. It started off on the wrong foot when I my class location was changed at the last minute. I was just sitting in the old class when I heard lots of people talking about Socialogy instead of ICS Writing. Someone else was in the same position I was and he asked some people what class it really was. Good thing he asked them or else I would have probably sat through at least the first 10 minutes of class wondering what the hell was going on. So after my first class, I went to see a counselor regarding grad school. Come to find out, I DID start thinking about grad school a little too late. Well, the counselor didn't exactly say that, she said I should always apply and see what happens. But I don't really have any teachers that I can get a good personal recommendation from, nor do I have any research done. I was PLANNING on doing research later in the year, but by that time it's pretty useless to the following year's grad school application. We (the counselor and I) finally decided on the best course of action for me to take. Basically, go suck up with as many teachers as I can, as well as really suck up to my ICS teachers this quarter. Then I should take the GRE sometime before Christmas and send (hopefully) 3 good recommendations along with some (hopefully) high GRE scores to the grad school board in Janurary. Now because they have so many students, as well as the Ph.D program to review, they won't get to the master's applications until March or so. So I will do a quarter of research during the winter quarter and ask my research professor to give me a recommendation sometime in March. That and I will take a graduate course in Winter as well so that it will look better on my application. All in all, my counselor said I have a 'better than 50-50' chance of getting in.

So I've been fairly busy lately. I forgot to write about my weekend. First off, Heather and I went to Magic Mountain on Friday. It was a lot of fun, except for the heat and the drive through the hell that is LA traffic. But we had a blast and got to ride MOST of the rides with a mere 5-10 minute wait. I made Heather go on the rapids ride (whatever it's called there) thinking that we might get a little splashed. We ended up under a giant wall of water and got very soaked. Heather was not happy. Let me tell you something about Heather. She is like a cat that does not like to get wet. She even hisses at you if you try :) Anyways, we came back and had Fatburger for dinner which made the day pretty good. Heather paid for all of this for some reason, so I found it only fitting to repay her by cooking her a great dinner and desert. Last night I made a REALLLLLLLLLLLLY GOOD cheesecake. It is very good. I took some to work and everyone just loved it. I also will be making Heather one of her favorite dishes, a Thai Chicken Pizza (ala CPK). We all know the dough will turn out great, so I hope I don't fuck up the toppings. If it turns out anything like the cheesecake, it will be awesome. I'll post the recipes later for anyone who's interested in making them.

So here's my school schedule for Fall 2003 for anyone who's interested.

36400 I&C SCI 125    T T   03:30 04:50  ET   204    TAYLOR, R.
36401 I&C SCI 125   M W F  08:00 08:50  ET   202    TAYLOR, R.
36402 I&C SCI 125   MTWTF  07:00 09:50P CS   192    TAYLOR, R.
36420 I&C SCI 139W  M W F  11:00 11:50  ELH  110    TONNE, D.
36421 I&C SCI 139W    W    12:00 12:50  CS   253    TONNE, D.
36620 I&C SCI 184   M W    05:00 06:20P SH   134    LI, C.
60040 ANTHRO  2B     T T   09:30 10:50  HH   161    EGAN, J.
60041 ANTHRO  2B    M      10:00 10:50  SSL  129    STAFF

EDIT: ICS 139W changed locations

So lately I've been thinking about life after college. After talking to several people from work and #teamslack, I've been thinking that perhaps I should go for a masters degree as soon as I graduate. The problem lies in my current GPA. My ICS GPA is a respectable 3.4 but due to some laziness on my part, my overall GPA is about 3.2 (not counting the 2 bad math classes that I will probably retake). Of course the average GPA of ICS grad students at UCI is like a 3.7-3.8, so I don't know if I could even GET IN, let alone pass it all. It would be nice to go to work and get a masters at the same time. I guess the first thing I do when school starts in a week is to find an ICS counselor and ask them a bunch of questions. I also need to ask him about doing research for some professor. Regardless of whether or not I go to grad school, I will probably end up doing some research this year because I only have 3 classes to take after Fall quarter. woo

Well, today was not exactly the best day so far. First off, my Pittsburgh Steelers lost pretty bad to the Chiefs today. Oh well, at least Andrew's 49ers lost as well. At least my team didn't lose to a 2nd string quarterback. Also, the power seems to be going out sporadically around here. It was out for like 45 minutes earlier today and then went out shorter after it came back on. Ironically my UPS did shit for me. What a waste of time/money. I also saw Seabiscuit last night with Heather. It was actually a pretty good movie. I mean, you KNEW what was gonna happen and who was gonna win the races, but it was a good story nonetheless.

Grr, I'm very upset. I wish that debates and such wouldn't be played at 5pm PST. That's when I get out of work and I ended up missing both the Democratic Presidental Debate as well as the California Recall Debates. I really wanted to see if my candidate Howard Dean (don't laugh) would bust a move on any other candidates, but it ended up being pretty low key. Pretty much just an hour and a half of Bush bashing (although it is mostly deserved, I don't know if I like the way that the Democrats are bashing Bush politically, but that's another story). The highlight of the debates ended up being the Rev. Al Sharpton. That guy is very interesting. The recall debate wasn't much fun without Arnold there. Of course I did miss Arnold on the Fox News Channel last night too, what a jip.

Just a little over 10 days till International Talk Like a Pirate Day! LINK

This pirate walks into a bar with a big ship's wheel down his pants. The bartender says, "Excuse me, sir, but do you know you have a ship's wheel down the front of your pants?"
And the pirate says...
Aaargh, it's driving me nuts!!

I had a fairly enjoyable past few days. First off, I didn't have work on Friday so that's always a big plus. I also helped Heather clean her room and move her furniture around. That was fun. Also, one of the best things of this weekend was that it was the start of the football season! It just made my day when the Steelers essentially f'ed up the Baltimore Ravens 34-15. That was just great. Go Steelers! While watching football yesterday, I experimented a little bit and made myself a peanut butter and jelly pizza. As some of you may know, I make my own pizza dough (using THIS recipe) and then I just added some peanut butter and jelly on top of it before I cooked it. I got this idea after watching Food TV (or maybe it was the Travel Channel). For those of you who are wondering, THIS is the place that I saw on TV. It's called East Of Chicago, and they make the peanut butter and jelly pizza. It turned out pretty good actually. Basically it was a hot peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Last but not least, I registered margulieux.com. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but now I have it. On the topic of new domain names, Heather just registered her own domain name. Go visit her at hipsterdf.com. I believe this is her first trip into the land of HTML but it's already looking pretty good. Oh yes, almost forgot. I capped off this weekend with a game of hockey up in Brea. We tied 4-4 but I had 1 goal and 1 assist. Woot.

Sigh. I had an 'interesting' day at work today. So I trying to help a co-worker get a popup message on his screen. At first I thought of winpopup, but WinNT doesn't come installed with that. So then I tried 'net send localhost hi' but that didn't work for some reason. So I then try 'net send * hi'. About 1/2 a second after I hit enter I muttered 'oh shit' as I proceeded to mass-message the entire network here at work. About 10 seconds later 10-15 people came up to me and started joking around and asking me what happened. Then slowly throughout the day people came up to me and jeered me about it. I never did find out how deep into the company the message went. At least the president never approached me today. On the plus side, a lot of people saw my last name and just assumed it was my dad's fault. So he took a lot of blame too :)