When I was your age....
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: "When I Was Your Age" - Weird Al
Topic: Music
So I'm getting "old" - I'm nearly 22 years old! I've passed all of the milestones except being able to rent a car. So I got to thinking about how much things have changed in the 22 years I've been around, never mind how much they've changed since my grandmother was born. I feel that change is constantly accelerating (increasing in speed) so that more and more things change in a given year.

A short list of things that didn't exist when I was born:
The Internet (as we know it - it existed a loose collection of BBS and protoWWW stuff)
CDs
DVDs
cheap computers
ethernet
Windows
Linux

So I threw on this Weird Al song and it's really one of my favorite - I can't decide if it's 1 or 2 on my top list of Weird Al songs, but the lyrics are great. I guarantee that if you aren't laughing after reading the lyrics, which I will reproduce below, you have no sense of humour. I have enboldened my favorite parts...

"When I Was Your Age"
by Weird Al
as far as I know this is one of his original songs and not a parody

Let me tell you sonny... let me tell you straight
You kids today ain't never had it tough
Always had everything handed to you on a silver plate
You lazy brats think nothing's good enough

Well, nobody ever drove me to school when it was ninety degrees below
We had to walk buck naked through forty miles of snow
Worked in the coal mines twenty two hours a day for just half a cent
Had to sell me internal organs just to pay the rent

When I was your age. When I was your age
When I was your age. When I was your age

Let me tell you something, you whiny little snot
There's something wrong with all you kids today
You just don't appreciate all the things you've got
We were hungry, broken and miserable and we liked it fine that way

There were seventy three of us living in a cardboard box
All I got for Christmas was a lousy bag of rocks
Every night for dinner, we had a big 'ol chunk of dirt
If we were really good, we didn't get dessert

When I was your age. When I was your age
When I was your age. When I was your age

Didn't have no telephone, didn't have no FAX machine
All we had was a couple cans and a crummy piece of string
Didn't have no swimming pool when I was just a lad
Our neighbor's septic tank was the closest thing we had
Didn't have no dental floss, had to use old rusty nails
Didn't have Nintendo, we just poured salt on snails
Didn't have no water bed, had to sleep on broken glass
Didn't have no lawnmower, we used our teeth to cut the grass

What's the matter now, sonny, you say you don't believe this junk?
You think my story's wearin' kinda thin?
I tell you one thing, I never was such a disrespectful punk
Back in my time, we had a thing called discipline

Dad would whoop us every night till a quarter after twelve
Then he'd get too tired and he'd make us whoop ourselves
Then he'd chop me into pieces and play frisbee with my brain
And let me tell ya, Junior, you never heard me complain

When I was your age. When I was your age
When I was your age. When I was your age

Quotes - it's been a while
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Quotes
"Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing" - Dick Brandon, man files in linux

Ashley: dos semanas woot
Eric: it took me a second to parse that because I wasn't expecting spanish and l33t

"There's something very wrong with this, it was us who wanted to buy a caravan from them" - Tommy, Snatch

"You're like a Flintstones gadget - Prof pushes the button on the remote and you stand up and turn off the projector" - Ben to Me

How Yoda May Change My Life
Mood:  chatty
Topic: movies
I was watching Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back the other day with Danielle. I'm not a huge fanatic, but I appreciate the movies for the groundbreaking fantasy/sci-fi masterpieces that they are. They fundamentally changed sci-fi from a cheesy B movie category into a legitimate movie thus paving the way for everything that came after from Speilburg's career launching Close Encounters to Men In Black. In my ignorance I may have ignored some other important sci-fi movie, but for the most part all of the older ones I've been exposed to were quite cheesy with the exception of the original, not-dubbed-and-nuclear-weapon-desensitized-for-the-US, verion of Godzilla.

So I'm not one of those people who stood in line forever to see the new movies or the re-releases, but I appreciate them as an artform. I found out that Danielle had never seen any of them and, with all of the contemporary references, I knew that she had to see them. So we rented the trilogy and saw the movies over our free moments during the week - dinners and weekend study breaks.

So as I started off this post saying, we were watching ESB. Skywalker lands on Dantooine (SW fans, don't crucify me if I get it wrong or commit the worse error of spelling it wrong) in search of Yoda. While he's in the home of the last Jedi, Yoda begins a dialogue/monologue addressed to Ben Kenobi's ghost where he says, in description of Luke, something like, "Always looking towards the future - never his mine on where he was - on what he was doing." In fact, such an offense was this attribute that he says it with a stern voice.

That was Saturday night/Sunday morning around 2 am. But I haven't been able to get the quote, or it's gist, out of my head since then. I feel that it kind of applies to me as well. When I was a kid I couldn't wait to turn 16 so that I could drive. Quite a few waking moments were spent with me unable to wait until 16. Once I turned 16 did my longing for the future end? No, then I couldn't wait to turn 18 so that I could vote, be an adult, and go to clubs. Then I couldn't wait for HS to end. Now I can't wait for Cornell to end. What's next? Can't wait to have kids? To own a house?

Sometimes I am concerned that I spend so much time thinking about and planning the future that I am missing out on the present. Sometimes I can't wait until I get to a certain favorite class. Once I'm there I can't wait for it to end. I don't think this is right....

This isn't the first time that I've thought of this, but I haven't taken any steps towards remedying this because I don't know what the right balance is. Living solely in the present isn't good either - if I only lived in the present I would buy everything, recklessly have sex, and not study. Because today none of those things have consequences. So obviously, like everything else in life, there is a needed balance.

Well, we'll see what is the ultimate effect of Yoda's words, after all, it's not the first time that I've heard them. Perhaps this will pass and I'll stay the way I've been - afterall when we begin to worry about things, the negatives seem amplified. So it's always hard to tell if I'm being overly negative or if this is one of those moments that Tony Robbins, preachers, and other thinkers refer to as the moment of choice or the proverbial fork in the road. Is this a chance to radically change my life for the better or just everyday brooding?

We'll see what direction God guides me in. I know for sure that if this thought doesn't dissapear by next week that it's something that I need to act on.

hope you found a room
Mood:  chatty
Topic: School Stuff
Hope you found a room here for Graduation because every hotel from here to Syracuse is booked. Super 8 is even booked at a price of $999.99 per night.

First Snowfall of the school year
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: "Let It All Out" - Relient K
Topic: Ithaca
This is from last night around 11 or 12. The snow is here to stay.

A Quick, but Important Post
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: "Which To Bury, Us or The Hatchet" - Relient K
Topic: School Stuff
This Friday at 8:30p I'm going to be DJing for my fraternity (Phi Sigma Pi)'s AIDS Ball. So if you are a Cornellian reader, please come and support us.

Why?

1) I'm going to be playing some kick@$$ music
2) It's only $10
3) ALL of the proceeds are going to benefit pediatric AIDS so if you want to help lil kids whose have AIDS and it's not even their fault because they got it from their parents or something like that then you should come.

So please come and check it out - even if you can't dance, it's all good cuz dancing is subjective, just contort your body in a convincingly confident way and people will think that you can dance.

Brown Game Rocked!
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: "Maintain Consciousness" - Relient K
Topic: Hockey

We defeated Brown 7 to 2 last night in an awesome game! There was fighting, foul play, and lots of fun times! We even scored our first two goals 5 and 10 minutes into the game. It was much more exciting of a game than Harvard was.

If you want to see the best hockey Cornell can play, make sure to check out the Brown game next year. Or travel to Rhode Island to see them play the next one.

Star Wars III
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: movies
Check out this trailer for SW III: Revenge of the Sith. It is an awesome trailer especially since I was just recently watching SW IV and heard all of this - now I can picture it in my head.

HAR-VARD.....SUCKS!
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: "I So Hate Consequences" - Relient K
Topic: Hockey
We cremated Harvard at last night's hockey game. We shut them out with 2-0 over the two hour game. There weren't any fights, but usually the Harvard game is pretty quiet because we always play Brown the next day and if you get into a fight, you are ejected for two games. Brown is a pretty hard team, so we usually can't afford to lose a player over a fight. That didn't mean that the tensions weren't high on the ice. There were many confrontations and explosions of violence. At one point we were even 5 on 3 because two of their players got removed for high sticking and cross checking.

I have to say, though, that one of the most interesting things about our team is that we almost never score on a power play. We had 5 or 6 power plays last night and none of them led to goals. In fact, most of our goals were within 1-2 minutes after a power play. In the four years that I've gone to Cornell hockey that tends to be the general trend for us.

As usual there were fish on the ice - no amount of police pat downs could stop that from happening. It was less fish than before, but I think that reflects the fact that this year a lot of the fans are freshman, since most of the upperclassman fans have graduated. So when they heard that we couldn't bring fish, they got scared. But they didn't know that they tell us that every year and it doesn't really matter. You can't really kill a trend like that.

Tonight is the Brown game, and you can bet I'll be taking pictures there as well. I really love my camera's ability to take fast action shots. Over the last three years most of my pictures had blurred elements, but this year with my camera that allowed me to manually configure all the settings, I was able to shoot at 800 ISO with a shutter speed of around 600. I'll see if I can get some better shots today, my seats this year aren't as good for photography as in previous years.

Taking a break from my morning hw bash
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Who I Am Hates Who I've Been" - Relient K
Topic: random
Did you guys vote? I hope so!

I bought the new Relient K a couple of days ago. I got it in CD format because it's still not clear if WMA or AAC will be the format that lasts, and if I'm going to pay for music I want to be able to listen to it from now until I die, not until 2 years from now when they switch audio formats. The chords are awesome - that's Relient K's big strength. This is their fourth full album (not counting the Christmas album) and they continue their trend of exponentially improving their lyrics. If you shyed away from them around the time of their first two albums, definitely check out this release. They are awesome - I'm talking secular radio quality stuff here. If you like Blink192, Boxcar Racer, or Bowling for Soup you'll love Relient K. Speaking of being on the radio, they are being released by EMI this time around even though their official label is still Gotee Records. This has two consequences. First of all, you'll most likely find Relient K in the regular rock section of your music destributor, not in the Christian section - that's how it was at Best Buy anyway. Second, this means you may soon hear Best Buy on your pop station. I really hope they do get on the radio and maybe even MTv. They deserve it because their music is awesome. I'll be posting lyrics over the next few days.

If they do come out on the radio it'll be like Switchfoot. Some of you may not know, but they've been around forever. I have one of their first albums from ~4-6 years ago. Only now everyone's talking about them as if they were a new group because they finally got on the radio and Mtv. It's pretty funny - I wonder if that will happen to Relient K. I guess it's the Grateful Dead Effect because they had a huge following and a bunch of albums before that one pop song that EVERYONE knows.

Ithaca is getting VERY cold! My hands look like a boxer's hands because they've gotten so dry they are bleeding all over the place. In fact, according to the forecast, it's supposed to snow @ 4pm today. Who knows because the Ithaca forecast is always so far off, but if it does it will be the first snowfall of the year. It would also mean that I am officially an Ithacan after four years here because I accurately predicted that it would snow this week. I was talking to my grandmother and I said, based on how the weather has gotten recently and just on how the trees lost all of their leaves over a 2 day period as well as some things that I just can't put into words, I know it's going to snow by the end of next week. And here it is...maybe...well, it'll be snow AND rain, so it may be hard to tell if I'm right or not. And it definitely isn't going to stick because it's going to be too warm for that. Well, I'm certainly in no hurry for the snow to permanently arrive. It gets slippery, biting cold, and pretty darned depressing. I'm not THAT affected by SAD (seasonal affective disorder), but just like Superman (in one of his incarnations) life without the sun has some kind of weakening affect on me.

Well, I have to get back to stuff. At least this is a third "real" post in a row. q:o) I still can't believe it's been a year! Just to make it easy for you guys, here's the link to my first post ever in case you want to relive things. My first post - the beginning of It's A Binary World