Though it's been a while, I guess not much important has happened since my last post.

My American Government class is reasonably interesting. It's got me paying slightly more attention to politics lately. That, combined with a weird list of Republican candidates, and a random interview on the Colbert Report, has me as an active supporter of Mike Huckabee. Mostly, I like his Conservative-yet-bipartisan attitude - he says he's not one of those people who would just vote no on anything a Democrat wants and vote yes on anything a Republican wants. And for that, he wins a bundle of points with me. I hate how divided politics are right now. Huckabee talks about "Vertical Politics", where the focus is on things that will help America, as opposed to "Horizontal Politics" where it's just Republican vs. Democrat. And yet, he has all the values I'm looking for. So, that's my quick plug for him. Go, vote, or something, I don't know.

My life for the last month has consisted of:
27% Sleep
25% Work
11% Classes
10% Random Recreational Computer Activities
6% Eating
5% Homework
4% Driving
4% Assorted Religious Activities
3% Socializing
3% Other
2% Assorted Errands

This is a schedule which I do not mind entirely. It becomes difficult to really do much of anything else when I'm working 38 hours/week and have to write about 9 pages of English homework every week. Fortunately, that's my only really intensive class.

I had to decide to not teach PSR this year due to this schedule. I'm not terribly sure I was ready to deal with a bunch of 2nd graders all by myself anyway, so maybe this is a good thing.

My gaming life of late has consisted primarily of Star Wars online text games. I tossed in a bit of Sim City 4 and Civilization 4 for a couple weeks, but as I expected, once I spent a week on each throughly smashing the objectives to pieces, I got bored. I also tried Star Wars: Galaxies (the World of Warcraft of Star Wars) briefly. There is never anyone on, so that only lasted for about a day. However, they have a very interactive environment... much of the game is built by the players themselves. But as a MMORPG, it's just not much fun without the "MM" part. I might get back into WoW sometime soon, if I get bored enough. I don't know what else to play, at this point.

So, what else. Work has been steadily busy, but productive. I'm pretty much redesigning the entire Library website before the end of October. I've been working on it for about a month and a half, and I'm definitely getting close to being 75% done with all the hard coding.

And so, life goes on.

So it's been a while, I suppose. This is probably due to my World of Warcraft ... "hobby". But yesterday I decided I'm not addicted anymore, and now I'm bored with it. So now I'm trying to come up with things to fill the big gaping hole of time it left open... so this leads to making a new MP3 CD for my car. (MP3, of course, plays compressed audio files, letting one fit around 130 songs on a single CD)

The iTunes end of this was fine, if not a little annoying. I had to burn standard audio CDs of three sets of songs to strip them of their copy protection. (Grr, it's not like I'm trying to pirate these or anything...) However, instead of renaming all the songs this time after I copied them from the newly burned CDs, I found out that if you never eject the CD in the first place, iTunes remembers all the names. So that saved me quite a bit of time. Then it was time to burn my first CD directly through Vista...

I had a folder containing the 100-some files I wanted to put on the CD. So, I assume the process hasn't changed much since XP, right? Not quite... as soon as I dropped the files on the CD icon, Vista asks me to name the CD. Ok, fair enough, I do. But then it formats it. I'm like... huh? And it proceeds to begin burning the files to the CD. I'm still OK with this... surprised, but it'll work - I had all the files I wanted on the CD. But while actually burning the files, Vista writes each one individually. That is to say, it has the CD drive spin up, it writes one file, and the CD drive slows down. And this happens about 100 times. Very annoying - took around an hour and a half too.


But what else... ok, so it's summer. Even though it won't be for another month and a half, but hey, don't tell Walsh that. I finished last week. Now I'm working in Information Systems at Walsh. Making minimum wage again, but it's fun, so who cares. I still have the library job anyway, so it's not like I'll go broke or something. But it'll keep me "out of trouble", I'm told. Is that a good thing? Oh well.

Tree pollen... allergies... argh.


Edit: And, the CD that I burned with Vista did not work in my car, nor did it work in my mac. Windows? Compatible? Hah! So my solution? Copy the MP3 files to my mac, and burn the CD from there. Worked perfectly, and about 15x faster too, on a computer that's now 5 years old.

Before I start with something, I guess I'll talk about what I did in the last 2 weeks... naturally, the majority of the first week was spent at school or at work. Work is still pretty busy, for reasons that most people reading this blog probably know about. I've become re-addicted to WoW. I've gained 10 levels in the last week and a half, which I guess I'm pretty happy about, in a hopeless no-life way. Getting more involved in the guild and stuff. But anyway... I was supposed to go to an open house at the career center that week too, but the building had issues and I couldn't go. I'll go later this week, though. Ben came back from RIT just to go to the open house, so him and Brian and myself went to a movie and ate dinner and stuff instead.

This last week I went to a Handel concert by Apollo's Fire with Sarah C. and Mom. That was the first time I had been to a concert since way back when I couldn't even appreciate the beauty of live classical music. Gosh. And I'll have to go to another one, too, for my music class. So I'm looking forward to that more now.

On Friday I helped at the "Library Lock-in". Basically, 20 kids between the ages of 11 and 16 spent the night at the library. Most of them didn't sleep, at least not until later in the morning. I didn't sleep at all... until I got home, of course. But yeah, it was crazy for the first 8 hours, then they calmed down and got tired and cranky. I was up for 29 straight hours, I think. That's a new personal record, by far.

Ok, now I'm going to complain. Facebook has many groups related to so-called "Manlaws." Said rules are supposed to dictate how "real" men should behave. So, let's have a look...
This particular group has 112 things listed. To avoid making this too long, I guess I'll divide them up into general categories, because most of them are fairly repetitive.
"Real men" must drink lots of beer: 25
"Real men" should use girls as, erm, sex devices: 20
"Real men" must think of nothing but sex: 11
"Real men" must pay close attention to their appearance: 16
"Real men" must be rude and/or selfish: 17
Random other things not relating to morality: 23

So, come again? In general, "real men" have to behave like morally lost animals? Why is this? Has modern, secular society so distorted everthing? Ugh. Oh well, in that case, I'm perfectly alright with not being a real man. And I think I'm probably a lot better off for it.

I have a Calculus test tomorrow. I'm not anticipating doing extremely well. I guess I shouldn't complain incredibly if I get a B in the course (right now I have about 94%, I think) but I could have easily studied everything a bunch to do really well on the final. It's like "senioritis" all over again, except that I know it'll happen 7 more times before I graduate, with increasing severity. But at least after this Calculus class is over, I won't be made to do any more math for the rest of college. So I guess it's all good.
And on Thursday I have an English test, which will be easier but still obnoxious. But after that, I'll be done until early January! I can't wait! I have tons of huge plans - let's see if I actually do any of them, though. I'm going to try to not burn up all my free time on World of Warcraft. Mom is already making lists of chores that I will be made to do since I'll have "so much time". And I'm going to do my usual crazy Christmas lights thing, and go to some parties at work, and maybe even make some of the same old cookies that I always used to make for bake sales at the career center.

Gosh, one month will not be nearly enough time. I've got myself anticipating summer break now.

Considering that I don't even remember when the last time I posted on here was, I guess I'll just start typing.

Right now, it's 3:00 AM and I'm playing World of Warcraft. What a surprise. But I did all the homework I needed to do, and I'm not tired... and I just need to go get another tailoring skill set! And then another level, then maybe a quest... then I'll be done. Assuming, of course, that there are no more quests to do. Yeah right. So after this, I think I should probably go to bed.

Life has been good. Thanksgiving was nice - we got together with all the other Wagner cousins this year, in Troy, MI. My grandparents had recently moved to a half-assisted living apartment, but their house hasn't been sold yet, so we stayed there. It was really weird without my grandparents and half the furniture. We went to visit the new apartment, and Grandma was there almost crying about wanting to go back and missing the house (if I had lived somewhere for like 40 years, I guess I would miss it too.) Apparently, she had some weird thing go on the day before, with her diabetes, so she had another nostalgic episode then, but she forget that she did, so she had to have another one. Or something like that. But anyway, yeah.

And then we drove back (and it took us an hour longer than it was supposed to because we kept looking for a dairy queen, but never found one) and then I went to a LAN party at Ben's house with 10 other people. Great fun, especially in Call of Duty 2... though Mike wins too much. (or maybe it's just that I lose too much...) And that lasted until Saturday night, with several trips to restaurants and stores and whatever else.

And then tomorrow is school again, after the 5 day break. *grumbles* But only 5 more days of classes - I could get used to this college schedule. Then finals, but they should be easy. Hopefully.

Oh yeah, one more item of business...
My boss at the library has resigned to go to some other job or something. Since I don't have the required degree (yet) and I don't have time to work for 38 hours/week, I can't take his place... but, I'm really excited (and worried, anxious, nervous, etc) to see who my new boss will be. And then there will be a couple weeks when I'm the only technology employee there, so I'll be in charge... not that I'll actually have to do very much important stuff, but it'll still be kinda fun, as long as nothing important breaks.

So yeah, as you might guess from the ultimately failed attempt at humor in the title of this post, I've become addicted to the World of Warcraft. And it's all my old boss's fault. She plays, and she wanted someone to go on to quest with her. Naturally, it didn't take a whole lot of convincing.

So I've been staying up as late as possible to play this game, though I think maybe now my addiction is calming down a bit, and it's looking like WoW will be more of a hobby, not my life. At least, that's the plan. But we'll see. At least it's making me less addicted to facebook.

So, other than that, life is pretty much normal. School is fine, work is fine, albeit a little slow still. I always like the challenge of trying to finish a seemingly insurmountable pile of work. When I was a page, that happened all the time, whenever I came in and there were 6 full carts of books. Technology department, not so. I get maybe two or three problems every day, and they're never all that significant. Why can't some crazy thing happen that keeps me running around all day? Like, when all the patron computers go down, then the internet dies later that day? Bah.

And I got a 98 on this big giant paper we had to write for English class (big giant = 7 pages, in my vocabulary), so I can sleep peacefully now. And I have pretty much 2 days off of homework, since I had tests and/or meetings with my teachers for the last few days of school. It's funny how that turns out. And there are only 4 weeks and 4 days left until the semester is over. And it seems like I started a few weeks ago... crazy.