The first step to help yourself is admitting that you have a problem…

but hey, I like that song.

-Allyn

Last night I got an email from Apple. It basically says: “Don’t buy Vista! Buy a Mac!”

I was very touched with Apple’s concern for me. They obviously don’t want me buying an inferior product. Go Apple!

(For any of you reading this, feel free to donate a MacBook Pro to my cause*)

-Allyn

(*Allyn’s cause is to get a MacBook Pro)

yum.

(btw, this is the only thing that Chartwells Catering has done right at the TJ Cafeteria so far.)

-Allyn

This Christmas, I used my Best Buy gift cards to buy myself a set of these. Logitech X-540 5.1 surround speakers. They are sweeeeeeet!

They definitely beat my old 4.1 system that I pieced together out of a cyberacoustic 2.1 system and an old 2-speaker altec lansing multimedia speaker set. Logitech thought of everything. They put all the audio controls on a control pad instead of on a satellite, they even made the center speaker’s stand have the ability to clip on to most flat panel monitors!

One of the coolest things that it does, though is that it has dynamic bass equalization , which means that the subwoofer never distorts even when it gets loud! It also has this feature called “Matrix Mode” which takes a 2 channel stereo signal and converts it into a 5.1 signal. That is pretty darn cool. I really like this system.

-Allyn

Happy New Years!  I hope you are all having a good Christmas break, and are enjoying the time at home!

-Allyn

I want one…

Really bad…

I’m trying to pitch this to my family that its a console that everyone can have fun with.

I thought that this was just perfect.

Needless to say. Its cool. And way too much fun.

-Allyn

Its over. I won. I killed the last two targets this evening, and now I get the free tshirt, but the best part about it is that I am now the winner of an assassins game. It was suggested to me that I put this on my resume, but somehow I don’t think that employers are going to like “Assassin” as a listed skill.

I killed my last target in a duel in the hallway outside his room. It was pretty cool, even though he had two weapons and I only had one (cheater), but I got him anyway (muahaha).

Well, I’m glad that’s finally over.

-Allyn

Wednesday = 65 and sunny

Thursday = 25 and sleet/snow

bizzare.

-Allyn

My uncle flew up from Texas over the weekend and he spent some time with us and then he took me, my dad, and my brother flying in his airplane. (He has a Piper Archer). We flew all the way  back to Rolla and saw it from the air which was really cool because seeing your school from the air is fun and it only took about half an hour to fly down there instead of the hour and a half for driving. The REALLY cool part about it, though, was that on the way back, he let me fly the plane! That was so cool! Now I really want to get a ton of extra money so that I can afford a plane and flying lessons. Its way cooler that I thought it would be.

In addition to that, Uncle Jon brought up Flight Simulator X for us to try out because my dad really wanted to play it. His computer couldn’t install it because he didn’t have a DVD drive, so we put it on my computer, and that is where things started going bad.

The game doesn’t have very high requirements at all, but for some reason, my computer would not run it on anything except for the lowest settings and even then, it was really choppy. If that was the only problem, I would be fine, but the entire computer ran slow ever since we installed it, and when I tried to get rid of it. I started loosing files and getting “delayed write errors.” t3h suck.

I wanted to go ahead and reinstall windows anyway so I could free up a drive for Linux, but I didn’t bring my install CD home with me so I couldn’t reinstall windows. bummer. So I’m going to have to take care of that when I get back to the dorm room next week.

Here’s to hoping I don’t loose everything on this computer before I get a chance to fix it.

-Allyn

Power Outage is the name of a cool Homestar Runner Remix by Tyler Neff, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

Rolla has some major power issues. Earlier this semester, power went out on campus twice, causing delays of tests and cancellation of a class or two. Its weird. Even with a power plant on campus, we can’t seem to maintain power all of the time.

Sunday night, though, power went out in a big bad way on campus. They blew one of the main transformers and they couldn’t get power restored in time for classes on Monday, so they just canceled all of the classes for that day. It was awesome for us because our dorm is not actually on campus and is on a different power grid than campus. We had power and no classes. It was pretty awesome.

What was even cooler than that, though, was the fact that because Chem Lab was canceled on Monday, and they didn’t want anyone to get behind, they canceled Chem Lab for everyone for the entire week. AWESOME! (Especially because that is a three hour long class that is just a general pain)

That made a pretty good start to the week, but just a few minutes ago, power went out again, but this time it was here in the dorm. It was actually really funny, because suddenly all the lights and the computer went out and within seconds, you can hear shouts of ” AAAAHHH!” and “NOOOOOOO!!!” from all over the hall. I didn’t really care, but I thought it was funny that we could hear it from inside the room.

This just goes to show that if you are the type that never saves and freaks out if you loose a bit of data, BUY A UPC!!!

-Allyn

Edit: you can get Tyler’s song here