Ah, life is good with Halo PC. Just got done with some awesome gaming. Banshee battles are teh r0x0rs! Err... excuse me. I'm tired, so here are the highlights of the past few days.

The football game against CCC was a blow-out. 36-0 in the first quarter, held throuought the rest of the game. For the halftime show we were the only band, but it was muddy so we did the whole track thing again. No flag dodging this time, though. We came and played one for our side at the visitor's stands basically because no one was there to hear us at the home stands.

Sunday: First Team meeting and the Kickoff. For those of you who don't know, and I'm assuming that includes everyone reading this, Team is the organization responsible for putting together the bi-annual LifeTeen retreats, and this is the first year I'm old enough to be on it. I can already tell it's going to be a lot of fun. Then the kick off was everything it was hyped up to be, although we could have had more time on the activities. The movie they made was great.

Oh, here comes the drama part, Monday. Mass in the morning. Whoever decided to do that is an idiot, because it means I have to be there a half hour early, on a MONDAY! First off, I couldn't get any volume out of the amp I used. Being, in all likelihood, the best guitarist there, I wanted to be heard. I bet not a one of you heard my solo. Arg. Then one of the two songs I wanted to do got cut. I'll say it now, Miss Hawley should be tied and fed to rabid chipmunks. Fried. Alive. That about wiped me out for the rest of the day.

Today, basically band practice. We have to learn a new show in 2 days. Again. Not fun. It'll work, but I wish we had more time to work on the music, because, IMO, Bohemian Rhapsody is an extrememly well-written piece. If we can pull this off, it'll sound really good.

Can't leave without a word about homecoming, can I? My group, as far as I know, includes:

Me, Rachael, Joe, Rob, Matt Talty, Lora, Kristen.

Joe, Rob, and I are going to the St. Helen CoffeeHouse around 5, and meeting at Matt's around 6:15, then going to the Bass Lake Tavern for dinner, then to the dance, then back to my place to hang out until everyone has to leave. We'll see how it turns out.

Today I got to play my Guitar at the St. Helen Coffee House. Results: I need a band. Steve, Eric, and Jim all grabbed guitars and rocked, and then there was me, all by my lonesome, doing the best I could, but I couldn't sound anywhere near as good as they could. What I need is another person or couple people I could play with, maybe write some music, play some good music, and have fun.

In case you haven't, I suggest that everyone go check out the /. poll, it's hilarious. Now, on with the post...

I've had Joe telling me all the wonderous things in Halo PC that I'm convinced I must have it. So, naturally, I beg my mom. We come to a compromise: she'll buy it for me if I agree to go to homecomming. She thinks I'm being all anti-social and whatnot, which is probably true, but I don't really care, 'cause homecomming usually sucks pretty bad. But, no matter how bad homecoming is, Halo PC wins out. So, unless someone wants to ask me, I'm going with Rachael's group, which includes Joe, so I won't be completely bored.

On a more technical note, I tried to install Linux kernel 2.6-test6 today, it didn't work. Well, the kernel itself worked very nicely, but my wireless drivers wouldn't compile, so I had to revert to 2.4. Fortunately, Matt found me some that might, so I'll try again tomorrow, sometime.

Setting new records all the time, I woke up at 7:26am this morning, and was out the door by 7:40. Not bad. My alarm clock must die for letting me down again, but it's nice to know I can do it.

Wow, I haven't written here since last Thursday. Seriously, if I go more than, like, half a week, someone yell at me.

Friday, Major Halo Party. Rob and Joe at my house, doing some serious "beta testing" of Halo PC. I'm really going to have to get that game when it comes out... which was today actually. On that note, I really need a job. Anyways, the Halo was great, I played one of the most awesome games of starcraft I've ever played, and we stayed up till 6. Woke up at 10 to go play at a football game. That was interesting. We were standing, waiting for the pregame, and I just wanted to get to our seats so i could sleep, but I woke up once I stepped on the field. There were major thunderstorms that night, and it was slipper as all heck. In fact, they wouldn't even let us play the half time show on the field, we had to stand in lines and play, which was a wholly unpopular move. I didn't like it because I have a relatively long instrument, and when we play like that, more often than not I end up hitting people. To make things worse, they decided to have the flags still run between us.
See blue in peripheral vision. DUCK!!!

After the game, there were two parties, one at Chris' that started right away, and one at Rachaels that started at 7. Oh, perfect, I'll go to Chris' until around 6:30, then go to Rachael's. Not exactly. It went alright until I picked up Joe and we headed for Rachael's party. We were 15 minutes late and were the first ones there. Cue alarm bells in head In fact, only two other people showed up, one of them only for about 15 minutes. Joe and I were bored out of our minds, so after about an hour and a half, we ditched as politely was we could, and headed back to Chris's, where we basically played more Halo and I got lots of examples of what happens if you take one wrong step backwards. Think respawn time of about 25 sec.

Sunday, we played at the Chicken Barbeque, where the only notable thing was that my trombone was really playing bad and starting to piss me off, and we got free ice cream. Really good ice cream. After that, I hung around at home until the LifeTeen Mass at 6, followed by a coffee house party 'till 9.

Monday, we didn't have to go to school, but there wasn't much to do on a day that was about 50 degrees and rainy. I did basically nothing untl I started my Chemistry project at 10pm.

Today, I woke up at 7:24am. Not a good thing, as we have proven that if I leave later than 7:44am I will be late to school. Set record time getting dressed and packing books and was out of the house by 7:40. Not too bad. Sat through religion class, got a test back in Chem. that I aced, didn't turn in a 5 paragraph essay for History, and took it relatively easy during band class. Cleaned my trombone, finally. Joe got out at 2 because he was supposed to get his license back, but his mom did it for him earlier, so we just sent him to go get us food, which was very nice. We need to elect one person per practice day to go get food for the rest of the band. Anyway, practice was cold, but I play better when it's cold. I don't remember most of the moves for the first show, glad we're not doing it this week. Joe and I measured our respective vehicles to see who's was taller, we both called it a tie.

Sorry about the extreme length of this post, from now on I'll try to abide by the open source mantra: Release early, release often.

Well, let's see, what's happened since Monday... Wednesday, I was interrupted while watching Jake 2.0 to have to take Tyler's friends home. I wasn't happy about that. I tried to scare his friend by pulling the crazy-driver routine, but she was kinda screwed up in the head. I guess that won't get me out of having to chauffeur Tyler's friends around.

Today, I taught Successful Teen Living for the first time, it was better than I thought it would be. On top of that, I got to ditch a half-hour of Religion.
During the lunch block, I had practice for Music Ministry. I'm slowly learning that a band and a choir are two different things, and choirs should not sing songs written by a band. Well, there go all my ideas for new, fun, and interesting songs to play.
I got out of school early to take Tyler home so he could sleep. Yeah, I thought it was a dumb reason, too, but it gave me the opportunity to get food before band, which is always good. Except now my car smells like Italian sub. Well, I think it does, I should actually go put the windows up before anything bad happens. So, I guess that's it for now.

I haven't posted in a while, because I've been *really* busy. Saturday, we had the football game, which went well. I have all the music for the new show memorized, well, for the most part. NDCL completely slaughtered Trinity. Anyways, after that, Joe and I went to "Airport Day," and hung around all the planes basically for the rest of the night. We almost got a ride, well, I did, Joe flew himself around for a couple minutes, then we pulled the plane out to listen to everyone on the radio. I want my license more than ever after that.

Sunday, the first thing I had to do was go play in the Stage Band for the Chicken Barbeque. I got my share of music this weekend. Only notable thing that happened there is that we couldn't talk the nuns into giving us free food, hopefully with some planning we can get our chicken next weekend. After that, I drove out to Hudson for St. Mary's Lifeteen 10th Anniversary party. That party was hopping! There were 3 different bands, more pizza than I could eat, and then a couple huge cakes after that. I got home from that and just crashed.

Today, at school, the only remotely interesting part was the Candy Bar Drive Assembly. A group of seniors made the thing hilarious. I about died when they told Mrs. Bellini to, "Sit down, shut up." Then, after school, my brothers, one of Tyler's friends, and I, took my Jeep to go play in the mud. That was pretty good, and for letting him drive, Tyler will now clean my Jeep inside and out. Score!

Now, for some geek-drama. A couple days ago I'm IM'ed by this guy who joins my site because he saw it one day. He instantly annoys me, although Joe assures me he's cool. Of course, me being me, I just deal with him, but it didn't take long for him to find someone who wouldn't put up with his attitude, and now he and Rob are having a dissagreement, and he seeks protection from me. Again, me being me, I give him the best advice I can, but I really wish he'd either grow up or get out.

As I speak, Joe's over, and we've been playing some major multiplayer Halo. Right now, we're taking a break, and he's bragging about how he has his computer hooked up to my 61" bigscreen television. Now, that's some monitor!

Other than that, not much has been happening today. My new computer is ready for my website, all I need to do is transfer files. Wget should have been able to do it, but it followed links instead of recreating the directory structure, and it all screwed up. rm -rf *

That's it for today.

Another day at school. Same old, same old. Let's see if I can pick out some highlights.

Well, there was Liturgy Band practice. I love playing my guitar, and we worked on some of the good songs today. A problem is that half of the choir has never heard the songs I want to play.. I hope we can teach it to them, because I don't want to have to go back to the stuff we always play.

French was boring as usual. Skip straight ahead to Programming, what'd we do, one quick program. It's better than nothing, I'll just have to whip out the white book pretty soon. I will become the king of extra credit.

After school band practice went fairly well. I tried it without music this time, and did fairly well, there were only a few notes I didn't have memorized. With a bit of practice I hope to be able to play tomorrow sans music.

All in all, nothing really exciting happened today, I fell asleep around 6, got woken up at 8 for dinner, and watched TV until now, at which point I'll take a shower, make an attempt at doing my homework,a nd maybe get a decent amount of sleep.

First of all, anything good I said about Mrs. Mack in my last entry is hereby taken back. The lesson today about quantum mechanics was horrible. She even managed to lose me for a few minutes, which really isn't that easy.

So, as I was leaving school today, someone rear-ended me. Of course, it didn't do any damage to my Jeep, but there is probably at least $500 worth of damage to the front of his car. Then when I got home, I called mom:

Mom: Did you call the police?
Me: No.
Mom: WHY WOULDN'T YOU, YOU *HAVE* TO FILE A POLICE REPORT!
Me: uhhh... (intimidated by fierce show of emotion)
Mom: Ok, I'll take care of it.

I'm not too worried about it.

I'm currently watching Enterprise, they really butchered the opening song, I liked it first season. At least they didn't mess with the graphics.

Well, I've managed to get most of my friends on /., so I might as well start using the journal. A shout-out goes to rLobster and Qeto9876, and if anyone else I know has an account, comment.

Anyway, in school today I was sitting in French class, not paying attention to anything, really, and I realized that this year I've never really paid attention to anything in that class. So much of that class is repetition of repetition of repetition, it makes my head spin. Or makes me want to play Mario, one of the two. In contrast, today in H. Chemistry we learned about quantum mechanics. Mrs. Mack had my attention all through class, even though she was just giving notes that were displayed on the overhead. I think I was so interested only because it was a topic I was interested in, but didn't know much about. In the end, I guess 'tis our lot in life to suffer through the mindless bore that is the modern education system. I'll finish with a quote from "The Hacker's Manifesto"

"...we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. the few taht had somethign to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert."