While you were oot

I'm going to be in Atlanta for the next couple of days as a father's day surprise to my dad. And to answer the obvious question, no, he does not read this site.

I know this because I posted about this a while ago, so theoretically he would know if he read this blog.

And when he bitches to me about having to go to dinner with my stepmom and her kids tomorrow night (er, tonight technically, but whatever, I haven't been to bed yet, it's still tomorrow) instead of going to see the Braves-Red Sox game with Pedro Martinez pitching, you know he has no idea who's coming.

This is going to be an entertaining weekend. See ya sunday!

The joy of blobdom

I turned into a blob today.

I slept til 2, got up, ate breakfast, watched The Magnificent Seven, took a shower, watched Simpsons, farted around, watched more Simpsons, went to dinner, saw Insomnia, and came home and farted around some more.

I didn't even get dressed until 5pm. It was fantastic.

I just have to get up at 8:30am tomorrow...

Driver's license photo tips

I went and got my driver's license renewed today, since I had to renew my registration and get hideously ugly new license plates anyway.

The floating head of Abe Lincoln (seen here as a prisoner behind two zeroes) really creeps me out. It's like "I'm the Great Emancipator...and I'm coming to get you!!!"

Anyway, I have some tips based on both my previous driver's license experience and this one:

Do not try to smile. I tried this last time. It only makes you look like even more of a tool.

Wear a dark-colored shirt. A light-colored shirt will only blend into the background and make you look like a total fatass.

When they tell you to look somewhere, look there. Last time I looked directly into the camera instead of slightly below it, and it made me look like quite a grinning idiot.

If you have a chubby face, wear a necklace. Distracts from the double chin.

Overall, I think my photo came out quite a bit better this year. Last year's I looked like a jolly fat moron, and this year I just look like I'm being booked on charges of being a serial killer.

Which is a big step up, in my book.

Fun link

Courtesy Dave Weigel: Using Booze And Breasts To Get Voters.

I'm moving to Prague. Who else is in?

Wide Load

I just widened the sidebars of this thing so that people might potentially have a prayer of finding some of it...I still gotta figure out how to get a link to just an archives page instead of having all my bloody archives listed on one page.

Meh. Bed.

Something that does not amuse me

Remember the construction workers that woke me up the other day?

They were back this morning. With a backhoe. At 7am. When I had gone to sleep at 5am.

Not only that, but after they dug a 3 foot deep trench, they simply slapped a steel plate over it and left. The problem with this is that any time a car goes over the plate, there's a very loud, metallic THUMP-THUMP! noise directly outside my window.

It's been giving me a massive headache all day, though since Jon let me borrow his window air conditioning unit for the summer earlier tonight, it's not been quite as excruciating since i've been able to close the window.

And by the way, Jon Lewis is a golden god for letting me borrow his a/c for the summer. He lives in an actual air-conditioned building, and is the nicest man alive.

However, the thumping, which is the actual topic of this post, has not ceased. I'm thinking of going out there and sticking a newspaper in the gap between the plate and the road in order to get the damn thing to stop banging, but there are a couple of problems with this:

1) It's 2am and I'll probably get hit by a car.
2) I'm tired and I'm going to bed.

However, if the thumping isn't fixed by tomorrow, I'm definitely going to at least try the newspaper thing. Because you have no idea how annoying this noise is.

Something that amuses me greatly

Since I can't post images directly in the weblog, I'll have to link to it: click me.

I have to find out where to acquire that shirt.

Look ma, I is a journalist!

I hate to dissappoint my News and New Media professor and TA (sorry, no embarassing story he wrote), but I have a dirty little secret: I'm not a journalism major.

I've had to act like I was for the last few weeks, though.

I weaseled my way into News and New Media, which is a class in the prestigious Medill School of Journalism, a place where many of my friends have spent the last four years of their lives learning the ins and outs of real journalism, like how to beg for a job, how to kiss ass (or any other portion of your supervisor necessary), and occasionally, how to write a moderately accurate article.

I took the class because I decided I needed a better theoretical foundation in web design, and the only other major class offered in web design that I knew of and hadn't already taken was more geared towards back-end databasing and coding in JSP.

Which I was not about to do.

I figured it would be easy and useful, which it was, right up until the very end. You have a final project, which is to create a website from scratch, and do all original reporting. I knew about this requirement when I signed up for the class, but I also knew that it was traditionally done in pairs or groups of three.

I figured I'd find a Medilldo who didn't know a damn thing about web design (and didn't care to) to write all the articles and I'd just copy/paste them into a snazzy little site. This quarter, however, there were no groups of three, so the odd man out got to do a solo site.

Guess who the odd man out was.

It wasn't horribly difficult until I had to write the final story, which of course I procrastinated terribly on, because I had absolutely no desire to face up to my pseudo-journalistic destiny. Then, I realized, oh shit, this is due tomorrow, and I have interviewed...no one!

Ok, I had interviewed one person, but...no one! sounds much more dramatic.

I frantically sent out emails to a bunch of musicians I know, and called several people in an attempt to at least get something coherent down on...well, not paper, but you get the idea. And I'd like to publicly thank Aaron Childs, Laura McLean, and Sarah Pinsker for pulling my ass out of the fire and giving me great quotes.

Anyway, the finished product of the final website is now up on my Northwestern web space, so please let me know what you think.

Oh, and if you catch any glaring errors, please let me know sooner.