One semester of college down, 7+ left to go!

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

Well, the game’s still going and I’m still alive. I’m one of ten people left in the game. I don’t think that the game is going to last that much longer; my target is somewhere on the floor above me, but from what I’ve been told, that is where most of the people that are left in the game are. It will be pretty hard to get someone up there.

-Allyn

Lately, I’ve been playing one of the greatest games ever. Its called Assassins, and the the whole point is that you are assigned a target somewhere in your residence hall and you have to find that person and kill them with any soft object. Most often these are Nerf guns ( I have a Maverick). I’ve made 5 kills so far, one of them being via a bounty I set on my target’s head (who also happened to be the administrator of the game). According to the rules you can contract a bounty hunter to kill your target, the target is notified that there is a bounty hunter out to get them and then the hunter has 24 hours to make the kill. All of this is registered online, so when you make a kill you register the target’s codeword and you are credited with a kill.

The trick to this game is that every assassin also has an assassin hunting him. This causes frequent panic attacks and acute paranoia. Especially if you have survived as long as I have. There were 110 people at the start of the game on Monday and now there are only 25. I’ve killed 3 targets and 2 of my assassins. Its this last assassin that gave me a near heart attack.

The guys hunting me and Aaron had teamed up and were doing joint raid against our room. Basically we had to clam up and act like we weren’t home during that time. Aaron was killed by that mob this morning and just a few minutes ago, my assassin came back for me. He apparently knew generally what I looked like and I knew generally what he looked like, so Aaron (already dead) jumped out of the room and shot my assassin trying to trick him into thinking it was me. After he talked with them a while they decided to go back up to thier own floor. At this point, I jumped out from behind the door and shot them with an automatic nerf gun that I was borrowing from my RA. I only hit one of the two guys that were there and I hoped that he was the one that was my asssassin. They said no and then a shootout ensued.

I ran and grabbed another gun and used Aaron as a shield while the other guy got his nerf gun and blowgun and used his friend as a shield. We kept backing up till I got to my room and then I jumped in. The guy stood outside our room and lowered his weapons because you can’t shoot you target in thier own room unless you are invited in. So I jumped out and shot him. Turn out they were only joking and the guy that I hit was my assassin after all.

Crazy amounts of adrenaline.

I hired my RA to kill my next target because he has her in his German class, so I’m hoping he can get her.

Heart. Pounding. Sheer. Terror.

Walking to the bathroom is dangerous.

Staying alive.

-Allyn

When an audiophile (like me) has a dream, it is usually has music playing. In those dreams, the sound comes from all directions as if every single object in the world was a finely tuned speaker aimed directly at you. Since we can’t really do that here, Andrew Tan made the ATSoundProcessor for foobar2000.
BJ, this is for you. You intoduced me to the ultimate player, and now I’m introducing you to the ultimate plugin. This plugin takes mp3s and actively creates 5.1 surround audio, and it does an amazing job. I only have 4.1 audio (surround without the center speaker.) and it simulates the center speaker for me! It actually sounds like my monitor is singing at me.

I’m pretty sure that this plugin will also create a virtual surround system on two speakers. I’m not going to tear my own system apart to test that, but I definetly reccomend getting this plugin and giving it a shot.

fb2k ftw!

-Allyn

Well, this would make it the second hard drive to fail on me in the past month. Now I’m only down to 20GB. I lost all my music, and videos and pictures I had taken or made. (sigh). Well, at least now I’ve found the source of all the problems that my computer has been having lately.

Next Mission:

Try to convince Dad that I could make better use of one of his multiple 200GB drives that he doesn’t really need…

-Allyn