Well school's almost over. Once this week is done, we only have one real week left of classes, and then a week for finals. I'm really looking forward to the end of the school year this year because I have a lot of stuff planned for the summer. Problem is, I have a ton of work that I have to do, mostly for my English class. I have to read Vanity Fair (which I'm not gonna do) by next Tuesday. I also have to read The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I read half of by next Thursday. Then we have these 2 books by Evelyn Waugh, one a satire and the other a black humor. We have an in-class essay over those on like the last day of school. I actually hope to finish those books, but I just started yesterday. I haven't finished a book (minus Lord of the Rings) in 2 years. Kinda sad.

The end of the school year is always kind of bittersweet, but I think it will be even more so this year since I probably won't ever see my friends again. I will probably take my camera to school on the last few days, and if I'm brave enough, take pictures of the girls I like, and anything else.

Let's see...it's been a while since I've written in here. I got my driver's license about a month ago, and driving has really been fun. The first time I was in the car all by myself I felt really weird, but I soon got used to it. I have to take my brother to school everyday, and he's being...let's just say "difficult" in the past month or so. Sometimes I've driven to school alone because he has refused to get out of bed.

I've been wardriving with my friends on the weekends here and there. It's been really fun, and we've been able to get on to quite a few wireless networks and get on the Internet. I hope to get a laptop for my graduation present, and I'll get a wireless card, install Linux, and then I can go wardriving with my own equipment.

One of my best friends is into Ham radio, and he thinks I should do it as well. I think it looks cool and I might try to read up on it this summer and possibly take the test. He takes his radio wherever he goes. When we went wardriving he had it with him and we could listen to the police channel - kinda cool :).

So today is the last day of school before spring break. I am going to North Carolina to some town that I cannot pronounce. We're gonna be in a condo up in the mountains. We're going to leave tonight after school. I still have to pack but that won't take long. We're going to stop at my mom's cousin's house on the way there tonight and spend the night. We hope to be on our way tomorrow morning but somehow I doubt that.

I don't really know wat we're gonna do in North Carolina. We will probably go on some hikes and look at some waterfalls; this area is known for its waterfalls.

We get back fron N.C. on Wednesday and then we lave on Friday for Chicago. My parents are meeting some friends of ours up there and they're dropping my brother and I off at my cousin's place.

Then my birthday is the next Tuesday :).

I finally finished reading Lord of the Rings yesterday. It was really great. I started it midway into December, so it only took me around 2 months to read. I really regret not reading it earlier, especially before the movies came out. Oh well, nothing I can do about that now.

Now that I've read it, I realized how messed up the movies are. The Two Towers is probably the one that is messed up more. I mean, For one, Faramir seems a lot nicer in the book than he does in the movie. In the book, Frodo doesn't even go to Osgiliath, whereas in the movie he goes there and then quickly leaves. There's a lot of stuff they left out of The Two Towers that they have to include in the next movie such as the road to Isengard and the voice of Saruman, Frodo going to Minas Morgul, and the bit with Shelob. Only then can we get into the stuff from Return of the King.

I'm deffinately looking forward to Return of the King, now that I've read the book.

Bleh, now that I've finished LOTR I have to start reading Vanity Fair and Emma for school :(.

So I'm finally beginning to learn Perl today in my independent study. The school bought me 3 books: Learning Perl, Programming Perl, and The Red Hat Linux 8.0 Bible. Once they can find me a decent computer I'm gonna install Red Hat on it.

I think I'm going to begin with Learning Perl because that sounds like a good place to start (the whole "Learning" bit).

Today is our last day of school before our winter break. It's great. It's also finals week here, but I only have 2 finals. I have one next period, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Here are some of the things that I hope to do over winter break:
* Watch movies
      o LOTR:EE
      o Rashomon
      o Seven Samurai
      o ...anything else that comes to mind
* Finish my college essay - I hope to complete it this weekend. My mom won't let me host any LAN parties until it's finished
* Do some C++ programming
* Linux
* Read - I'm currently reading Fellowship of the Ring for pleasure, and Vanity Fair for school
* Drive - I still have to get my license
* Work

So tonight there was a LAN party at South, one of the high schools in the county. I go to North, and South is our rival, but I don't really care about that stuff. Their school is 100 times better than North, because they had a multi-million renovation a few years ago. North is supposed to be renovated in the next few years, which will be good, cuz it needs it.

Anyway, the LAN party. It was from 4-11, and it was a lot of fun, but I was the only guy from North so I didn't know most of the people. A few of my friends were there, so that made it a little more confortable. We just played WarCraft III the entire night mainly because the school didn't want us to play anything violent. The teacher that was there came up with the idea, so we owed him thanks.

According to a story on PCWorld.com, Microsoft is cracking down on users that have a domain with Windows in it. Steven Bink registered WindowsXP.nu two years ago, and is registering up to 20,000 hits per day. On Monday, Bink received a letter from Microsoft's Dutch counsel accusing him of trademark infringement and giving him until December 19 to sign over the domain, or face possible legal action.

Thanksgiving was fun. I got to see my cousin that I haven't seen since May, and it was nice seeing her. Our Thanksgiving dinner consisted of most of the usual stuff, but we lacked corn this year. We always have corn, so my plate was a little more empty than it usually is.

Friday morning shopping :). I just went to Best Buy. They had a GeForce4 Ti4200 128 MB for $89 that I wanted, but I got there around 7 AM and they opened at 6 AM so I didn't even bother looking for them. They probably sold out really fast, as did the CD-Rs. I only had $60 on me so I just picked up some DVDs. I got Monsters, Inc., Blade, Heat, and Men In Black II. If I had a little more money, I might've gotten a scanner. I have always kind of wanted a scanner but have never gotten one. They had a decent scanner there for $20.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Every year we go to my grandparents house in Carmel, Indiana. My cousins from Chicago also come down. We don't get to see them that often, and I really like them, so I really like Thanksgiving.

Then of course, there are the sales on Friday :). I never knew that it was called "Black Friday"; this is the first time I've heard of it called that. There are many stores in the Indianapolis area that we don't have in Bloomington, such as Best Buy and CompUSA, so I will probably be going to those. I might buy some CDs at Best Buy if they have some good deals. I remember last year my cousin bought about 10 cds for $100. She's a shopoholic, so I doubt I'll buy that many. I'd like to get a new hard drive as well. I visited CompUSA.com today, and they had a 120 GB 7200 RPM hard drive for $100, but it was sold out. I also need some CD-Rs and I know for a fact that those will be on sale, but they are one of the first things that sell out.

One of the bad things about Thanksgiving this year is that I'll be missing out on a LAN/birthday party while we're gone. It's a sleepover from Friday-Saturday. We're leaving Carmel Saturday night, so there's really no way I'll be able to go unless it's moved to Saturday-Sunday. :(

So I got Attack of the Clones (AOTC) and The Lord of the Rings extended edition (LOTR:EE) yesterday on dvd. I must say (and I knew it before), that these two dvds are excellent. First of all, I was eagerly anticipating AOTC on DVD because it was SOOO much better than The Phantom Menace, Natalie Portman is bitchin hot, and plus it's just Star Wars. The day has finally come :).

But the we have LOTR:EE. Man if this DVD doesn't have the most amount of extras, then I don't know what does (actually, the Pearl Harbor Vista Series might have this much). First of all, the movie is slightly longer than 3 hours, then there are 4 commentaries, so that's 15 hours right there. (3 hours (movie) + 3*4). Then there are at least six or seven more hours of bonus material on the 3rd and 4th discs, totally a whopping 21-22 hours of material. WOW.

The packaging for the LOTR:EE is totally awesome. It's made of thick cardboard (this is REAL cardboard), and then there is a little pack that contains the 4 DVDs. It all unfolds and looks very nice when laid out. It has a nice booklet with a map of the menus so you can find your way around (there's that much stuff!), plus a free ticket to The Two Towers! All in all, this package is over an inch thick. It's wonderful.

I had some problems with my copy of LOTR:EE that I got from DVDEmpire.com. The second disc would have a very hard time loading, and when it finally loaded, it was very jumpy and skippy. All the other discs worked fine. So today I went to Borders to see if I could exchange it there. Fortunately for me, they let me. I've actually done this 3 times now; having to exchange a defective DVD that I didn't buy there. I just tell them that I lost my receipt. But this new copy works great. I still haven't even watched the movie yet. I've mainly been going through the extras on AOTC before tackling LOTR:EE. It's gonna take me about a week to get through all of the material, but it'll be great doing it.

Computer Stuff
1. Cendyne Lightning IV CD Burner (48x/12x/48x) can be bought from Circuit City for $79.99)
2. A New case for my computer
3. A new motherboard
4. An Athlon XP, at least 2200+
5. 512 MB DDR3200 RAM

My idea behind the mobo is that I mainly want a new case, but since I have such a shitty and propriatary motherboard, I'd basically have to replace the motherboard, and I'd like to get a faster processor at the same time.

I could just get a new P4 motherboard and case, but
my processor is kind of a little slow, and......(grumbles)

Video Games (in the order that I want them)
1. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (PS2)
2. Unreal Tournament 2003 (PC)
3. Memory Card 251 for GameCube (the black one)
4. Metroid Prime (GameCube)
5. Animal Crossing (GameCube)
6. Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation)

DVDs and CDs
1. Back to the Future Trilogy (comes out 12.17)
2. 12 Monkeys
3. Jackie Brown

Books
1. A Beginning C++ book (this might change in the next month or so)
2. Learning Perl ($24.95 on Amazon.com)
3. Programming Perl ($34.97 on Amazon.com)
Both learning perl and programming perl can be bought on Amazon.com for $59.44

Clothes (all can be found on Thinkgeek.com, in the order that I want them)
1. LAN Party
2. Caffeine
3. You are dumb v2.0 (a bigger one, the one i have now shrunk, preferably
the black one)
4. WTF (black)

Misc. Stuff
1. A small fridge for my room
2. A better light bulb for my lava lamp

So one of the kids in my programming class today decided to install Linux on one of the school computers. I don't blame him, if we're actually gonna be doing some real programming later this year, I'd much rather use Linux. He was installing Mandrake 9.0 btw and we were going to use a bootdisk so no one would be suspicious.

The computer we were installing it on had 5 gigs of unpartitioned space, so we decided, what the hell, we'll just put it there.

So I was going ok before lunch, we had decided on what packages to install, but we hadn't actually installed anything yet.

After lunch, we started the install, but about 15 minutes before class ended, the teacher noticed that we were doing something suspicious with the monitors on one of the other computers (getting the model number) and the video card. She questioned him, and he basically told the truth but failed to mention that he was installing Linux. Once he said "Linux" then the teacher yelled at him and told him to go sit down and not touch anything. She then went over to her desk and called the Technology Coordinator (who I work with), and the Technician (who I know). They came down to the room and started questioning him. By this time, class was over, and I left, but they were still questioning him.

I didn't really have anything to do with it, but I stand behind him. I would love to have linux on one of the school computers, but it doesn't seem like it will happen. However, if I told someone that I stood behind him, then I might get busted too.

I think his penalty will be a D.O.R. or something bad. They mentioned the Acceptable Use Policy and that he was violating it, but if you actually read it, you'd be surprised with what it mentions. And he didn't have it signed anyways :).

Doesn't look good for our class. We've kind of had some rough times this year so far with our independence, but I am probably the one that hasn't done much (besides installing Mozilla).

Man my brother is such a dumbass. He's 15, and he deffinately has an attitude.

Right before my mom goes to bed, she tells him not to leave the house tonight or he'll be in big trouble. And yet, right after she tells him that, he leaves the house. He takes his bike with him, and we have no idea where he went.

According to him, he took his bike out of the garage and put it in the side yard, and then he was talking on the cell phone.

Now why would he take his bike out if he wasn't going to ride it? That's just fucked up. And why was he using the cell phone, when there are plenty of other phones in the house? It just doesn't make sense.

Anyways, he's grounded from the computer (again). He was grounded from the computer about a month ago for the same reason (leaving the house at night).

Basically, both my parents don't know if they can trust him. He is constantly making up lies and really bad excuses.

He's such a dumbass, at least I wasn't as bad as him :).

So we're having a LAN party, the first one that I've been invited to since the middle of August. It's gonna be lots of fun since it starts early (3 PM) and goes till noon the next day.

The bad part about it is that I will lose my 25 day uptime :(. This is currently my PR by far, and I'm really proud of it. But I have been wanting to mess with Linux a bit while I've had the uptime, but didn't want to lose it in the reboot process. I guess once I get home I can.

I work tomorrow from 8-12. I like working in the mornings because it means I can get it over with and have the rest of the day to do stuff. Plus, the library doesn't open until 9:00, so I have an hour when no one's there. It's a LOT easier to shelve when no one is in your way to bug you.

So my nice P3 866 got replaced at school today with a crappy PPro 233 or something. Boy does it suck balls. I installed Macromedia Studio MX last period cuz I need it to do my work, and it took the entire period to install (90 minutes). It then takes about 3 minutes for it to load.

I should be getting my old computer back sometime, but I don't know when :(.