My best friend is back from holiday, Its 2:20AM and we have been talking since 11. Still loads to talk about! oh how Ive missed her, she missed me too apparently despite being on holiday. Such a lovely girl she is :wub:

sorry to gush, but hey two weeks without my best friend, i was so bored.

I abhor exams. One down, next on Friday, then Saturday and Monday. Brief stint of alcoholism, followed by project submission next Friday. Today's exam didn't go too bad, I don't think. I'm hoping for at least 60%, but it was a management exam, so god knows how he's going to mark it... Back to real engineering now, with Fluid Mech up next. It shouldn't be too bad, given the fluids stuff I'm doing for our project is far beyond the scope of this course, but I know there'll be plenty of things for me to trip up on. Being honours exams, they're really setting out to make the questions as awkward as possible. For one particularly frightful example, a 20 mark past paper question asked for details of how the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moody_chart is constructed. That alone is enough to make a grown man cry. I'm very much of the "who cares, as long as we can use it" breed of engineers, so...

Think I might shut myself inside the uni all day again tomorrow. My flat is too cold to study


Belated good luck. I remember my Strathclyde interview being nothing too serious. I imagine Oxbridge might be a bit different. That said, my dad managed to get into Oxford, so...

You posted that a full two hours after my interviews.

Regardless, the first interview started off well, then descended into farce as I was asked about ionic bonds, covalent bonds, and lattices. We discussed crystals, how they were formed and so on.
All good except I was applying for Physical Natural Sciences...
The interviewer then asked me whether I was familiar with hydrogen bonding in biology. Unh, no. I still managed to give a good impression, I think.

Maths test was relatively okay, but I might have been too slow. I took my time in making sure I got the questions right, so I only managed to get 3 out of 10 questions. So did others though.

The last interview was the best one. Two physicists interviewed me, and I managed to slip into my explanation as to why I wanted to come to Cambridge, that I wanted to work with great minds, like them. They were flattered, so it must have worked.

Now I just need to spend the holidays wondering what's going to happen.

PS: Cambridge is better than Oxford :whisper:

Heh, I think I finally scared off this mortgage company that has been constantly calling my cellphone

These guys have been calling me for 2 weeks now, my phone says they've called 18 times now. Most of those have been times when I couldn't answer for one reason or another, so I couldn't do anything. They would never leave a voicemail either, so I didn't know what the heck was going on. last week I googled them to see who they were and it came up with a known spamming mortgage company in Florida who apparently don't take no for an answer.

So they finally just called at a time I can answer the phone, I've been pretty fed up with how much they've been calling me, so I answered it as followed:

(In my best robotic voice)

"Thank you for your transaction of $5000 to the Free Dalai Lama Fund", and before I had finished saying "Lama", they hung up.

I can't say it is a completely original idea, though, I got the idea from these here forums when a long time ago in a thread about spam emails someone posted the following:

Your coded message has been received. Per your request, US$2.0 million has been transferred to your secret Swiss bank account on behalf of the Free Tibet Now foundation. Please ensure that the Chinese Government does not find out about your involvement with this foundation. We thank you for your assistance in helping to free the citizens of Tibet and restoring the Dali Lama back into his rightful place in the world.

Those mortgage A-holes got you too, huh?

Mine is a tad more serious. Some dike that skipped town on a credit company used OUR phone number when he filled out a form. Now we constantly get vaguely threatening phone calls about it.

Problem must have solved itself, I haven't heard from that pack of crazies in a while.

Studying for my finals... GOD THIS svckS.

After doing this, I'm thinking of learning to make costumes using pepakura during the winter. I just found a good replacement for fiberglass resin, so all I need is a good costume to actually make. Oh, and some cardstock. And some brushes. And some sand paper. And the actual fiberglass replacement. And...


...Maybe I ought to pick a different hobby for now.

Yeah that calc test I was talking about before basically melted my brain. Some pretty crazy problems on there, surprised there was not much on integrals though.

Only a week and half until winter break and tomorrow I'll be finishing up my 14 hours of community service that I got from my ticket. This weekend I'll be snowboarding up in heavenly, which have some really nice slopes. Can't wait!

I didn't want to start a thread about this, I just needed to whine about it.

After 7 years I simply can't afford any more Xbox Live. I turned off the Auto-Renew option months ago when the price rose. Well, I get an email the other day warning me about the charges I should be expecting at the end of the month since the Auto-Renew is not only back ON but they've taken away the option to turn it OFF. Not only that, the people who've called the support line say the operators keep trying to get you to subscribe. Never has M$ earned that dollar sign more. If I wanted to keep playing live, I'd use one of the five 1-month cards that I got from my RROD's. Yes, I've had 5 RROD's, and no, I don't keep my Xbox in the microwave.



It's too bad we can't set up some way for them to actually donate $5000 to a personal account. I'd lose my patience after the 4th call.

You ever been boarding/skiing in Colorado?

There are some mighty fine places up here. Breckenridge is awesome. It was where I went for my first time skiing.

I managed to wrap myself around a tree at high-ish speeds and not break anything. I guess I took a page out of Turns-the-Page's book (pun very much intended) and just went thin so the trees only caught part of me.

Nope. But I live only an hour or so away from Tahoe, so that's good enough for me.

Ah yes, the stress is finally sitting in. 3 Finals in one day and it's a Monday. Golly-gee, my life is going to svck in a little over 4 days... It's even more horrible because I have to work this weekend too. I wish I could fast forward my life to next fall...

I can't wait for my upcoming break. I've secured a room to rent (with internet!) for the 6 weeks the break will last, so I don't have to worry about going back to New Jersey. I have a lot of stuff I have to do during the break, but for the first week or so I plan to be the laziest person ever to exist in the history of man. I will catch up with my various RSS Feeds, as I'm months behind on most of them, play videogames, and sleep a lot. It's going to be great.

Also, I recently switched rooms in my dorm and am no longer stuck with the [censored] of a roommate I used to have. I haven't been around my new roommate for long but so far he seems much easier to be around. He'll be my roommate for next semester as well.

The holdays had started! But then I'd be going to Melbourne and meeting up with the cousins, like we do every year. BLEGH :meh:

I'm glad you finally got out of that room. I've been waiting for the updates on that situation.

During my break I'm going to work as much as possible and make as much money as I can in 6 weeks. But I'll be sleeping and playing videogames whenever I can.

I'm happy to see that someone actually cared about my ranting

Yeah my dorm allowed students another chance to switch rooms this semester, thank god. My new roommate is practically invisible in comparison to the old old one. The new one plays music a lot, but he makes sure to keep it very low and has no problem putting headphones in if I ask. That's in comparison to the old one who played music very often but never cared one bit about the volume. He also goes on the computer a lot, helping make him seem even more invisible. I also don't have to deal with my old roommate having his druggy friends over anymore... yeah, he stopped bring friends over to play halo and instead brought new ones over to talk about, among other things, drugs. I'm not even exaggerating here, that's one of the main things they talked about. On one of the final days of my living with him they actually gave drugs to each other in the room as if I wasn't even there. As soon as I told him I was moving, he acted as if I was already gone, hence why they felt so comfortable exchanging drugs right in front of me. I'm no prude, but that's kind of ridiculous. But anyway, yeah, my new roommate seems much better. So far so good for sure.

Well I would suggest giving an RA an anonymous tip on the drug exchange you witnessed. My girlfriend was in the dorms last year and at least 5 people were kicked out for drugs/alcohol. She actually had to change rooms because her roommate was stealing her products while she was sleeping, she only found out after catching her snooping through her stuff. Her next roommate was nice to her but she hated me. She had like major control issues and I'm not one to be controlled, especially because I wasn't living there. I was fortunate enough to never have to stay in the dorms. But unfortunately that means I have to drive 100 miles a day round-trip.

I considered tipping them off but they would know it was me who did it in a heartbeat. That's probably why they were so confident about doing in right in front of me. Plus, the RAs don't really care. When they come in to do the occasional "inspection," and they do is stand in the doorway and ask you if anything isn't working, and do a quick look around the room from that same spot. I'm sure if I contacted the RD he would care but like I said, they would know it was me who ratted them out.

I'm hoping this will be my last roommate. One of the things I'll be trying to do during my break is get a job, and I hope I can get a place for rent by the end of spring that I can pay for with said job, so I don't have to live in the dorms after this spring. Housing, combined with the mandatory meal plan they make you purchase if you want to live in a dorm, actually costs more than all of my classes combined do, if you can believe that. Needless to say, not having to live in housing would drastically reduce the cost of my tuition.

Would they do anything to you if you did inform the RD?? If your old roomate had other roomates, then he probably brought in drugs as well, but I can't be sure. What you're doing is probably the best thing you can do now. And I wish you luck on getting that job and house! I'm gonna try to find a job and earn some money in my pocket during the hols, if I'm not feeling lazy, that is.

I went to this party last Tuesday...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESvNL-DrOvA

Hands down the best party of my life. I love this guy (Beardyman), such a talented guy considering all the noises come from his mouth. I'll never forget it.

Apart from this everything else is boring really, uni stuff, studying et cetera. Christmas holidays start soon in less than 2 weeks' time... will spend the majority of them studying, how nice. We've got a bungalow booked for xmas eve and we're going to a party for NYE.

I probably did one of the stupidest things I can think of, I had soccer practice today and we had to run 3 miles, I ended up rolling my ankles about a third of the way through and had to do a limp-jog type deal for the last 2 miles, and then I played ultimate Frisbee and my ankle hates me.

Oh and mid-terms are next week, I'm working really hard trying to study my three worst subjects (World History, English, and Engineering and Design) my english teacher said that since we weren't having a test on all the things we've learned about poetry, the mid-term test is going to be mostly stuff about poetry. The social studies test is going to be mainly on all the people we've learned through the entire 18 weeks of school which is not good for me because there's a whole bunch of European kings and queens that I have no [censored] clue what they did (also I should mention that I'm not the best at taking notes so my binder will be of no use, good thing I have a friend that takes good notes) Engineering and Design is probably going to be the easiest mid-term out of the three simply because my teacher gave us a PowerPoint to study that has everything we need to know for the mid-term .

Next week is going to be stressful, but on the bright side I've got an early Christmas present coming in the mail and it should be here tomorrow.

Lurking here instead of doing some graphics a good day for us lurkers, this is ^_______^

*TESV lurking lurks*

I finally got myself a job at foster farms sanitation department. Its not much but at least I got a job for the time being and if I stay there for 6 months they will send me to college for free so it's a good deal. but considering this is my first job and everyone else that works there is at least twice my age I feel a little nervouse....ok maybe a lot I just hope i can stay at this job and get good at it. I should have taken that 20,000 dollar scholarship while I had the chance. I begin fully working starting monday night at 10 till 6 in the morning.

I have finals all week and I need at least an 84% on all of them to keep my GPA. A couple of them are going to be quite tough to do though, such as accounting and my statistics final. Going to do some studying later tonight but who knows if it will be enough. Then once I am done with them on Thursday afternoon I am heading home for a few weeks. With all the snow lately and freezing rain I am a bit paranoid about the drive but I plan to take my time and pay quite a bit more attention than usual.

One I get home the first couple of days is going to be gaming, then after that spamming my resume on a few websites and making calls for jobs and internships for next semester. I also plan to work through a beginning Visual Basic.NET book and continue some projects in C#. Going to also look into books for Network+, Linux+ and Security+ and start studying those and hopefully take the tests in the summer. Going to be an expensive adventure but will cost far less then doing the courses at my college and then taking the tests. I already have some professors willing to help me if I get svck though which is nice.

School is canceled tomorrow so instead of being responsible and studying I'm going to spend all day watching anime because it seems like it would be more fun. Also might play a little Diablo 2 or Call Of Duty..... Man I really should study....

Went with a friend to see the new Harry Potter today. At least three times I said out loud, out of the blue, "...The Elder Scrolls 5 exists...," as if I was trying to make absolutely sure I'm not in a dream. It still feels surreal. I feel as if, somehow, the world is a slightly better place now. I'm such a nerd...

The movie was meh. I'm not a big fan of Harry Potter, but I've seen every movie, and after the fourth one I just started watching them for completion's sake. It had a few moments where it was painfully obvious crucial information about something was in the book but was not added into the movie, and I haven't even read the book. So that was annoying. But overall it was... yeah, just meh.

On the way to the movie we had a taxi driver from hell. Once we got to the theater he told us, essentially, that a fun thing for the two of us to do together would be look up our names in the bible, then cross off our names when we find them so we know how far we've gotten into it. And we sat in the cab, outside the theater, for a good 5 minutes, trying our hardest to find a way to end the conversation politely while he talked at us. He talked very slowly about it, as if he really thought we wanted to do this. Eventually I managed to pull out my phone and say "Aw damn, out movie starts in 10 minutes" (even though it didn't start for an hour). The worst part was that he started this conversation after we had payed him and tipped him for being a seemingly pleasant person to talk to on the way there. Oh my god, that was the most uncomfortable situation I've been in in a long time. In case your wondering, the problem I had was not his religion, but rather that he was pushing it onto us. That's not cool. Anyway, I don't want to break any rules here so I'll end this tangent now.

I've also been having some serious nostalgia for True Crime lately. I think I may even pick up the PC version of Streets of L.A. Deep down I have a bad feeling True Crime: Hong Kong will be a disaster, but dammit, I want to believe...



I'm sure they would try something, but I don't care about them anymore. My mind has been so at ease since I moved to this new room, it's like a totally different experience, so I couldn't care less about my old roommate. And thanks for the well wishes, I'll know for sure exactly what's going on with the room in the coming days, and I'll post any updates here.

I have off from school today because of conferences, although I have a myriad of math homework (not too much though), a writing assignment (will probably be pretty easy) and an optional social studies assignment. I will probably end up putting it off, but at least in the winter I put things off until around 5:30, as oppose to the summer or spring where I put them off until 8:00 (because I feel like it is 8), and I can do some math on the bus anyway.

I agree with xXAntibodyXx that the world feels like a slightly better place with TESV. Although it is raining outside, it feels like it is partly sunny (not that much better of a place).