The primary motivation for this post is my excitement about the Iowa caucuses tonight. But, as long as I'm here anyway, I figure I'll talk about my life since late October.



Huckabee wins in Iowa! I sort of expected it... polls were going that way anyway, though he was on a bit of a downslide there since his 22-point advantage a few weeks ago. In my opinion, here's what will happen...
Huckabee goes up a bit. People can see him as possibly viable (as in, they're not the only ones supporting him anymore, and he can actually win.) A lot of people who liked his message but were scared of his popularity will start noticing him, I think. If nothing else, he gets TONS of free media coverage, at least for 5 days until New Hampshire. I doubt he'll win there, but it's not impossible.
Romney does a bunch of damage control. He's denying it, but I doubt he had much room for an Iowa loss. If this helps McCain beat him in New Hampshire, I don't see him recovering.
McCain and Giuliani have parties. Their biggest problem, as of yesterday, was Romney. Now, not so much. Unless Huckabee jumps up a lot, they come out of this minus one formidable opponent. This, as McCain is rising nationally and Giuliani keeps slipping.
Ron Paul will, of course, send out his legions of cyber-spammers to add 5986743958734 comments to every news story they can find a "Comment" button on.

Democrats... Barack Obama! I'm actually quite a bit excited about this. I REALLY don't want Hillary to win. Edwards is nothing special, I don't even really think about him. But tonight was my first significant exposure to Obama. I loved his little victory speech. And, as his was after Huckabee's, I realized that a lot of things that attracted me to Huckabee are shared by Obama. He emphasizes the need to work as one nation and see past party lines, and they're both for big change. I'm still undecided on whether I approve of the Iraq war or not, but the pro-life issue remains, which is one of my biggest. But, following a Giuliani/Obama nomination, I might end up siding with Obama. Unless Huckabee was Giuliani's VP, which I could easily see.



In other news, for everyone who cares enough about my personal life (you stalkers...), I'm now a sophomore and a half, which means 2.5 years to go. (Please pass quickly.) School starts again on Monday. Blech. But my earliest class is at 9:10 on M/W/F, and 9:45 on Tu/Th. Much better than 8:00. Taking sociology at a Juvenile Detention Center should be ... interesting. I think I'm looking forward to it, but we'll see. Sociology doesn't excite me.

Got oil for my car, baked potato chips, a gift certificate, and maple candy for Christmas. I'll enjoy/use it all, and considering that I generally just buy something when I want it, I can't think of anything I wanted that I didn't get.

Back to World of Warcraft, for a few months anyway. I've got one character of each class now, all at least level 16. Woooo.

Christmas/New Year were both wonderful and fun. I was mostly sick on Christmas and the day after, but recovered enough to hang out with nifty relatives for the remaining week of Holiday goodness. Going back to work is a pain.

The Colbert Report is coming back on Monday. Hopefully it won't be too drab without the writers. I'm pretty much excited. It'll make starting school the same day not quite as horrible.

And, that's about all I have to say.

Just 2 more weeks until the library's new network/website/catalog goes live... it's getting busier, but I still love it. Maybe addiction to change will get the better of me after all the excitement is over... but then, I'll be tweaking and adding things on the website for months after this.

Even more of "Go Mike Huckabee!" than the last post: He's won the last two events (FOX debate last night, American Family Council conference on Saturday) without anyone else even coming close. (Ok, so Mitt Romney paid people to vote for him, and Ron Paul once again assembled his army of cyber-spammers, but Huckabee wins in a fair debate. If only there ever were such a thing...) But, there have been more donations on his site today than there were in the last week. I can't wait for next week's poll numbers after all the attention has time to go produce effects there. Oh, and perhaps even more importantly: Chuck Norris supports Huckabee! Clearly, nobody should even consider any other candidate anymore.

I'm still reading "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming". This is an incredible book.

If we claim our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-sixtieth the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid eighty-five million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better antimalaria policies. Which should be our first mission?

And, shockingly enough, Al Gore's logic is not flawless. He loves to say "If Greenland and a certain ice shelf in Antarctica slide off and melt in the ocean, water levels will rise by 40 feet." This is generally followed by horrible, awful, emotional pictures of the water levels in Florida and California. What he fails to recognize is that the Antarctic ice cap is at its highest volume of ice in recorded history. He also doesn't really support his theory either. Anyone can say "If all of Antarctica slides into the ocean, water levels will go up 400 feet." That doesn't make it a reality.

And, whaddya know, yet another political remark: We played with some numbers in my American Government class this morning and figured out that the average taxpayer would have to pay $20,000 every year for the government to break even, and that government spending has about doubled every decade for the last fifty years. Spooky.

Fall break was this weekend. I worked for 30 hours. That is all. Oh, and I went to the Career Center for an "Advisory Committee Meeting". There were only five people there (including Mr. Wright and Brian) but it was great to go back and say hello to assorted random people.

My single Thursday class was canceled, and I have no lab on Friday. This means that I may actually have some free time this weekend, since I didn't during the two days of break. Mmmm, free time. Oh wait, maybe I forgot what that is.

In other news, only 3 weeks and 2 days left until I need to have the new library website complete. It's been a great project so far, and I've had the chance to change a lot of things (mostly behind the scenes code stuff) and add things that I've wanted to see there for a long time. (I've now created a blogging system, a wiki system, RSS feeds generated from the blogging system, and other goodies.) This is probably the first big deadlined project I've ever worked on, and it's fun. So, no complaints there. Coding for 11.5 hours on Monday was a bit brain-frying, though.

I watched the Republic presidential candidate last night. Most of it was either vague, confusing, or both. I got a couple laughs out of it, though... like Mitt Romney's lawyers who he'll consult if he ever wants to declare war on Iran. The debate didn't change my thoughts (Go Huckabee!) though it was annoying that the four major candidates got probably 75% of the debate time, and the other four less major candidates weren't left with much time to say what I think are some very valuable opinions. Huckabee is now on Rasmussen Reports' list of major Republican candidates, though. So, getting closer. It is useful to point out that he's the only one who has been steadily increasing.

And, I think today is officially the beginning of Fall. It's 60 degrees, and wonderful outside. I could live in this weather all year. (Minus the ragweed allergies.)

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.

It is shocking how well life works sometimes. Example: I get my new job at the library (which started today) and quit working at Walsh, just in time for Vacation Bible School to start at our church, which I get to help at from approximately 5:00 - 9:30 every night. And, just in time for the LAN party this weekend. Working 54 hours per week like I was, there'd be no way to handle that much stuff going on. But now that I'm down to 38 hours, it's all fine. Ok, so I would have had to take some vacation days - no huge problem. But it's things like this (and getting the job I wanted last year right after I decided to go to a local college, and randomly deciding at the last minute to go to the Career Center, and randomly deciding that I wanted to work at a library in the first place) that remind me to be thankful for either bizarre circumstantial luck, or divine intervention.

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.

Hmm, so let's see here.
Dad and I have been finishing the basement. I've put up about 60 feet of wall frame in the last few days. So, that's probably about 200 nails. My wrist is now sore. However, I suppose I'll keep hammering away anyway, because I'd like to have at least two of the rooms done before a big recital thing we're having in a week.

And all the Christmas stuff is up now, with the exception of the tree. And we actually have our lights on now... prior to this year, mom and dad never let us turn them on until a week before Christmas or something. But the lights look pitiful, as we don't have enough to sufficiently decorate the house and stuff. Oh well.

I need to buy a cello. But I think I'll have to wait until the beginning of summer break for that. And speaking of break, it's now happening. I love college - mom can't make me do school over Christmas break anymore!

And finally, a server died a couple weeks ago at work, so I've been busy running around and fixing people's profiles and stuff. Fun, fun, fun. But I'm glad I have something to do now, since I don't have any homework to do. And the library hired my new boss yesterday, I haven't met him yet though.

And good night.

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.

Yikes, I'm busy. Really, really, really busy. So I forgot about this for a while. But anyway.

The new job has been going really well. I've been fixing a few things here and there, and the rest of the time I get to do homework. So it's not all that horrible on my schedule. And I got my first paycheck from the new job today... much better than shelving books, I can say that much. Do I miss the old job at all? Not a bit.

I've been obsessing over some programming for the last couple days... the forums from the text game crashed for some reason, and I've been trying to piece together bits and pieces of the database to recover as many posts as possible. It's fun... I just like it too much and ignore homework because of it, heh.

So yeah, about that educational stuff... I had a few tests this week, which were all pretty easy. I'm definitely not looking forward to writing a 7-page paper for english, though. And the math test won't be too great either. Ick.

I've been going to daily Mass on campus, too. It's really nice, especially because I wanted to go to Steubenville in the first place because of all the Catholic stuff there. There's not a big group of students who are active in campus ministry activities and stuff, but there are enough to get noticed. And to top it all off, the head of the computer science department goes to daily Mass a bunch too. So, I'm happy about that. And I get to eat lunch with the "Mass crowd", too. Instead of by myself in a corner. Which was getting a bit old, I guess.

Oh, one more thing. I've moved the date for getting my new car back to Christmas break. 8 more months is too long to wait when I'm this obsessed, heh. And I decided that a car loan won't be so bad after all... I'll pay what I can, which will be at least half, and then I'll just have to pay an extra $800 or so in interest by the time I pay it off. Insurance will be a big pain, though. Stupid "18-year-old-males-are-guaranteed-to-get-drunk-and-wreck-their-cars" stereotypes. Doesn't a completely clean record for 2.5 years mean anything?

Hmm. Well, the new job has been going pretty slowly. I don't know enough yet to start working on any of the projects we have to get done, and stuff isn't broken enough to keep me busy. (Not because it's running Windows. That's just an anomaly.) So I've mostly been sitting around more in our little basement office-cave thing doing nothing of much significance. Next week should be a bit more interesting, as my boss says he's going to start training me in some of the other stuff we do.

Homework this week actually ended up being surprisingly easy. I still have a bunch of calculus problems to do for Monday, but most of the other stuff I was able to get done during the week. It might get a little interesting when I have a bunch of exams in the same week or something. But oh well, I suppose I can always take a day off for that.

Oh, one more thing... my dad's old car thing pretty much started to die recently. The muffler doesn't really muffle anymore, so it sounds like a car straight out of a demo derby or something. Kinda funny, but not very practical. So anyway, today he went and bought a 2002 Honda Civic. Now I'm temporarily jealous, heh. I'll just have to wait until May when I buy a Scion tC. Heheheheh.

So yeah, that's that. Only 12 more weeks of classes to go for this semester!