Finished With Classes
I’m finished with my classes for this section that I’m taking. I was two classes (which is my normal load.)
My class that I was taking online was “Ethical Decision Making in Business.” It is a required class for everyone that attends my college. At first, I resented being required to take the class, but I learned quite a bit in it. After the class, I was somewhat happy that I took it. It wasn’t hard. It was basically a bunch of reading, and then a good load of writing my thoughts about what the reading covered. There were also online forum conversations that I held with my fellow students. The class was run by a lawyer, and we had to cite all of our resources (which is normal,) but we also had to address all of our fellow students in formal language. When replying to someone else’s post, we had to address them as “Mr. Smith”, or “Ms. Jones” or something like that. It was kind of awkward. We also had to sign all of our postings with “Mr. Blumingworth” or whatever our last name was. I probably missed doing that last part on half of my postings. Now that the class is done, I expect to come out with an A in the class. My grades have been superb so far through the class. I fell a bit short on my final essay, but I think I’ll still manage to carry an A in the end.
My other class was “Security Breaches” in regards to computer security. I tried taking the class several times in the online forum, but there were never enough students enrolled for the university to justify holding the class. This meant that I had to resort to taking the class as a “guided independent study.” This means that the teacher tells you which books to read, and then they give you all of the reading assignments, homework, and tests up front. You then have to finish all of the homework, tests, and other exercises before the end of the class. I teach myself quite well, so this worked out great for me. This was my second GIS class, and I plan on taking at least two more. I prefer the online or in-class forum because I get interaction with my fellow students. However, I need the credits to finish the course work, so I had to resort to GIS.
My next two classes are going to be “Early Christian Ireland (431-1169)” and “Web and E-Commerce Security.” I’m really looking forward to both classes. The Ireland class is online, and the e-security class is also GIS. I ordered all of the books that I need for the classes, so I should be set by the time the classes start on October 23rd. I have all but one of the books. The univsersity bookstore was excellent. I ordered the books one day, and the next day, I had the books in hand. It worked out quite well. The last book that I’m waiting for is “out for delivery” today, so I’ll have it in hand when I get home from work.
There is also an award called the “The Lady Ada Lovelace Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer Information Systems, Computer Networking, Computer Science.” Yeah. Big name. It’s given to the person in a graduating class from the CIS, CN, or CS majors with the highest GPA. Two of my friends have earned the award, and I’m hoping to get it as well. My GPA currently stands at 3.75 (out of 4.00), but I’m not sure if that’s good enough to earn the award. Jhianna earned the award, but her GPA was much better than mine currently is. I’m hoping to be able to improve my GPA over the next couple of years. My GPA would be a little higher, but I got a C in College Algebra, and a B+ in a philosophy course. Everything else has been an A with a few A-’s thrown in. I’m through all of my hard courses, so I expect to be able to pull A’s in the rest of my classes. We’ll see how it goes.
Trip To Hell
Here’s a strange dream that I had a while back. I use nicknames for my friends here on the blog to protect the guilty, but in the dream, I didn’t know my friends by their real names. I had a mental block that prevented me from knowing their real names, but I did know them by their aliases that they use. It was quite odd.
I was hanging out in a forest with Max Guevera. Yes, the character that was played by Jessica Alba in Dark Angel. I recognized her as Jessica Alba, but I knew her as Max. That struck me as odd, but there didn’t seem to be anything that I could do about it. I’m not sure why we were in a forest, or what we were doing there.
Seconds into the dream, a hot wind blew across the trees, and they started to wilt right away. The trees quickly died, and were uprooted by the wind. The wind didn’t seem to effect Max or myself, but the trees were gone within moments leaving behind a blast landscape of dried dirt. The land went from a lush forest to something that resembles the surface of a dried salt flat where they race cars at insane speeds.
Max looked at me with a very sad look on her face. She looked down at the ground, and said, “Here we go.” With that, the ground gave away into a huge crater that lead down further than I was able to see. Max jumped into the crater, and I followed her. We seemed to glide more than fall, but the distance that we went down was unmeasurable. I’m not sure how long we fell, but we passed many planes and cliff edges that revealed people being tortured. The tortures started out minor at first, but eventually became more and more graphic and grotesque.
We finally finished gliding/falling down, and landed in a bleak black and white landscape. We were in the middle of a wheat field, and there were demons all around us. There was a small building off to one side of the field. We quietly, but quickly, made our way through the wheat and into the building. The demons saw us just before we entered the house, but we were able to sprint inside before they reached us. We closed and barred the door, and that seemed to be able to keep the demons out.
We were presented with warped and twisted hallways that ran deeper into the house. Max looked at me, and said, “We need to split up. You go that way, and I’ll go this way. We need to find all of our friends, so that we can get out of here with them.”
I took off down my hallway. I came to a door, and I knew that a friend would be behind the door. I opened the door and found Kolvedic there. He was standing in a blue light, and seemed very sad. He looked up at me and said, “I can’t find Jhianna. If I can find her, I’ll be happy again.”
I assured him that we would find her, and we set out on our way.
I recall running through the twisted hallways with no particular plan of action other than to open every door that I came across. Each room was filled with a different colored light, and each light seemed to have a different effect on the person in the room. I don’t remember the exact combinations but there were blue, purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, and amber lights. The moods that they seemed to cause were depression, happiness, anger, rage, hopelessness, lust, laughter, boredom, and a few others that I don’t remember.
We finally found Jhianna in a room that was bathed in red light. As soon as I opened the door, Jhianna lunged at me in anger. I had done nothing to anger her, but I recognized the effect of the light. I backed away from her blocking her attacks, but not attacking back. I eventually got her out of the room where she could see Kolvedic. When she stepped out of the red light and saw Kolvedic, she immediately started crying in happiness. They hugged each other, and that was when I knew that I was free from my trip to Hell.
I gathered all of my friends, and told them to follow me. I began leading them through the house, but that’s as far as we got because the alarm went off. I really wanted to go back to sleep to figure out where we were going and how we were going to get there. I guess I’ll never know.
Sleep Patterns
Craing and I were talking the other day about the strangeness of sleep patterns. It all started when I told him that I needed 4 alarms to go off in the morning to wake me up. Even then, I still need Kiara to come kick me sometimes to get me out of bed. He told me about a patient that he had back when he worked on the psych unit that could not be woken up for anything, but he managed to find a way.
I told him that when I was a child I had a sleep study done to see when I slept the lightest. This was done so that I could setup an alarm clock to go off at that hour of the night to go to the bathroom. This way I could train myself to wake up at night and go to the bathroom rather than wet my bed. The sleep study that I went through for a week showed that I took a while to get to sleep, but once I was sleep, I went into a deep sleep and stayed there for pretty much the entire night. I would even go into REM sleep for almost a full hour several times a night.
Craing seems to think that the vividness and details in my dreams can be attributed to the fact that I sleep so deeply during the entire night. That very much could be the case. I don’t remember every dream that I have, but those that I do remember have tons of detail and color in them. Most mornings when I wake up, I remember the sensations of my dreams. There are times when I wished I could remember all of my dreams because I’m pretty sure that most of them are interesting.
Addictive Personality
The older I get, the more I start to believe in nature over nurture, but I’m still not convinced that either way is the absolute truth. It’s probably a little of both with a good dose of free will thrown in. I’ve got bad teeth, and so do both of my parents. I have a temper on me (that’s gotten better now that I’m on meds) and so do both of my parents. I’m bipolar (thus the meds) which is a genetic condition. More proof of nature over nurture.
This makes me wonder if the tendency to fall into the trap of addiction is a genetic one? I smoke, and Kiara hates it. I don’t like it either, but it’s one of those things that I need on a regular basis or I turn into a complete asshole. I can go for days without a smoke, but I start to get edgy, and temperamental. I would love to be able to stop, but I don’t like the way I feel without cigarettes.
I had three teeth pulled last Friday, and my doctor offered to write me a prescription for Vicodin. I turned him down, and he asked if it conflicted with my bipolar meds. They don’t conflict (as far as I know,) but I’m afraid of becoming addicted to pain medications. I often wonder if I have an addictive personality, and it concerns me. I have a high pain tolerance, and ibuprofin usually does the trick for most of my aches and pains. Even having teeth pulled only causes me a minor amount of discomfort, so I avoid the heavy drugs.
When I was 15, my right arm was almost removed from my body in a car wreck. After a 3 hour surgery (and a week in the hospital) I was sent home with my arm in a cast, and a prescription for darvocet. I took one pill every four hours to manage the pain, and it barely did the trick near the end of the fourth hour. I would have taken them more often, but my grandmother wouldn’t allow it. She was very strict when it came to medication. After taking the pain meds for almost a full month, I started to feel different when I was off the meds. It was my first touch of addiction, and I didn’t like it. I needed the pain meds to feel normal even though my arm was not hurting as much.
I grew up with drug addictions because both of my parents were drug users when I was a child. My mom is totally clean now, but my dad still has a problem with alcohol. I knew the signs of drug addiction, and I realized that I was starting to have a problem. I quit the darvocet cold turkey even though my arm was still hurting from time-to-time. It was at that point that I decided that I would avoid narcotic pain medication if I had a choice in the matter.
Is drug addiction genetic? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows. However, I’m not taking any chances with it. Just hand me some ibuprofin for my pain, and I’ll be in good shape.
Last Sunday
I spent Saturday night getting blitzed at a friend’s birthday party, and I paid for it the next day. I got to bed around 2:30 in the morning, and was asleep pretty much instantly. Something in my brain triggered me to wake up at 8 AM. I woke up and was wide awake, and I didn’t feel too bad…. until I got out of bed. I got up, and started to stumble to the bathroom when I realized that if I took another step, I was going to puke, pass out, die, or just have my head explode right there on the spot. I turned around, fell back into bed, and went back to sleep.
I woke up again at 9, 10, 11, and 12. Each time I woke up, I felt a little better, but not good enough to crawl out of bed. Finally, at 1 PM I woke up again, and I decided that I needed to get out of bed. I had people coming over for a BBQ and hockey game in 3 hours, and I didn’t have anything in the way of food for them.
After brushing my teeth and taking a quick shower, I felt much more human. After a quick trip to the grocery store, we had what we needed for the BBQ. While shopping for food, I realized that I was starving, so I hit Arby’s and got some beef ‘n’ cheddar sandwiches. I got home, ate, and hung out for a few hours while waiting for people to show up.
Around 4ish people started to show up, and we had a good time watching some football before the hockey game started. Just before the game started, we fired up the grill. Kiara, Shinto, and I took turns flipping burgers and brauts on the grill. I was told that I would have my man card revoked if I didn’t help with the grilling.
The food was good, and we had a good time watching the Avs whip up on Vancouver. It was a good thing Vancouver kept taking so many penalties. It seemed as if we could only score on the power play. I hope that’s not a trend for the rest of the year.
Sunday ended with Kiara and I in bed watching “Along Came A Spider.” It was a crime drama with some twists. It wasn’t a bad movie. It was a good thing that Morgan Freeman was in it. He managed to carry the movie the whole way. That’s all I’m going to say about the flick because, like I’ve said before, I’m horrible about reviewing movies.
Chewie’s Birthday
A friend of mine, Chewie, celebrated his 30th birthday Saturday night, so we had a party at his place. I showed up with a 6 pack of 1554 black ale, but I only touched two of them. We spent the night hanging out, playing foosball, watching weird videos that Fred had collected on the PC, and playing a horribly fun game called beer pong.
Chewie had an 8 foot table setup with wide-mouthed, eight ounce cups setup on each end. There were 8 cups on each end of the table. Six of them were about half full of beer, and arranged in a triangle shape. The other two held a shot of either tequila or Tattoo (spiced rum). We had two person teams at each end of the table. The point of the game was to throw ping pong balls into the six cups at the other end. If you made the ball into the cup, then one of the people on the other team had to drink. Once all of your opponents’ cups were empty, you were declared the winner, and had to take on the next set of challengers.
“What about the shots?” you ask. Those didn’t count towards winning the game, but if you made the ball into one of the cups with the shots, then the other team had to drink the shot that was in the glass.
Being a winner at this game isn’t as good as it sounds. Most people only won by a margin of a glass or two, which meant that as a winner, you had to down about a beer’s worth of alcohol. Since you were the winner, you had to take on the next set of challengers, which meant more drinking. I won a few rounds, and lost a few rounds. As the night grew longer, I started winning more. I’m one of those rare people that can keep my coordination when inebriated, so I started gaining an advantage as the night wore on.
The night ended for me around 2:30 in the morning when I finally crashed. The next morning sucked very hard, but more about that later….
Dentist Recap
I went to the dentist Friday to have three teeth extracted. If you’ve been reading, then you already know the state of my teeth. These three had to go. Two were molars and one was a bicuspid. The procedure went very well. On a lark, I started my stopwatch as soon as they put the bright orange topical anesthesia on my gums, and stopped it when the doctor said that he was done. The whole process took 16 minutes, and there was quite a bit of waiting for the novacaine to kick in.
The doctor did a great job, and there were no bone fragments left in the root cavities. He warned me there might be a chance that my sinus wall would tear when he took out the teeth since they were in the upper jaw. When we were done, he had me open my mouth and exhale out my nose. He put his ear to my mouth, pinched my nose shut, and listened. I figured that if there was a tear in the sinus cavity, that there would be some whistling noise. I didn’t hear anything, and the doctor apparently did not hear anything either. My sinuses are in good shape.
He declared the procedure a success. He offered to write me a prescription for vicodin, but I declined. I an handle pain fairly well, and ibuprofin is generally all I need. Granted, I’m taking 800 mg all at once, but that’s to help keep swelling and pain down.
The next step in all of this is to wait a few months, and then get prepped for some implants which will cost an arm and a leg. I’m really looking forward to getting all of this finalized and taken care of.
No Blog Today
Hrmm… I guess by posting, that I’m actually making a blog today. I normally have 3-7 ideas queued up and ready to post at any one time. I’m actually out of ideas to post. This weekend will give me some good stuff to post about, so next week will be better. Today, all you get is this filler post, so that I can claim to have posted every day this month.
Plans for the rest of the day include going to the dentist to get three teeth pulled. Yeah. Loads of fun there. I’m actually looking forward to it because the three teeth that are being pulled are horribly rotted, and hurting me from time-to-time. It’s time to get rid of them, and get some implants put into place to replace them.
Plans for the weekend include a birthday party for a friend Saturday night, a hockey party at our place Sunday afternoon/evening, and lots of pain killers for me. Last time I had major dental work all I needed was ibuprofin. I’m assuming that all I’ll need this time is some ibuprofin. We’ll see how it goes. If the dentist gives me a prescription for something heavier, I’ll fill it in case I need it. I don’t want to drive to the pharmacy in total pain waiting for pills that should already have in hand.
Tooth Pain
I’ve got a set of three teeth (a bicuspid, and two molars) that are horribly rotted away, and in dire need of extraction. One of them started hurting me about three weeks ago, but the pain went away after a day or three. That same tooth started hurting me again yesterday, so I think it’s time to get the teeth taken care of.
I have an appointment with my dentist tomorrow afternoon to get the three teeth extracted. In addition to this, two of them are going to be replaced with implants, but that is several months off. It all depends on the condition of the bone underneath the teeth. I’ve been told that the implants won’t be put in until 4-6 months from now. That’s a good thing. It’ll give us time to save up money to afford the implants.
I’ve also got some minor dental work (a few fillings) that needs to be done, but I’m going to put that off until the major work is completed.
Here’s to hoping that I’ll be in good enough shape to enjoy the weekend as we have a party planned for Sunday for the Avs game against Vancouver.
Zaurus
I got my Sharp Zaurus in the mail Saturday, but I didn’t get a chance to dig into it until Sunday evening. It’s a great little PDA. One of the things that I really like about it is that it runs Linux. That means that if I can find packages built for the ARM processor, I can install them. I’ve already got the wireless setup at home, and I have an ssh client installed. It’s really slick.
With the ssh setup, I can ssh into my server and check my email from pretty much anywhere that has a hot spot. I’ve tried to get the VPN here at work setup on the Zaurus, but I haven’t had much success. I’ll poke on it a little later, and see if I can get it working.
One thing that is a huge improvement over my old Handspring is the color screen, and the clarity of the images. It’s really nice to look at the new screen.
I was even able to import my Handspring address book, calendar, todo list, and other goodies into the Zaurus. This saved me tons of time that I was afraid that I was going to have to spend on manually entering all of that data.
The one thing that I’m missing is hearts. I used to play hearts on my old Handspring quite a bit. I haven’t been able to find a hearts game for the new Zaurus just yet, but I’m sure there’s something out there. If you know of a hearts game for the Zaurus, please let me know.
