If I knew that updating a .plan file was this entertaining, I would have started doing semi-regular updates a long time ago. Oh well. My web space is located at http://nuthouse.org/~hendersa and I can be reached via e-mail at hendersa@icculus.org. Archived .plan entries can be seen at http://nuthouse.org/~hendersa/finger. ************************************ *26 January 2003 - Playing Catch-Up* ************************************ No, I'm not dead. Yes, I've very been busy. Yes, grad school is going well. Managed to swing a 3.8 last quarter. No, work has not decreased as I thought it would. Yes, it looks like my ulcers have quieted down. Go medical science! No, I'm not going to stiff all of you out of a bunch of .plan updates. It's that last point that I'm going to elaborate on. Here's a bunch of .plan entries. I have a few more that are half done, but these should help make up for the large expanse of "dead time" between this set of updates and the last update that happened way back in September. I know that there are still some people checking the .plan on a regular basis, which just plain amazes me. I would have bailed on me a long time ago. If I weren't me, that is. So here's a few stories from college. Enjoy them, damn it. **************************** *26 January 2003 - Arrival * **************************** My trip to college for the first time had not been an easy one. You see, I was going to be starting my first semester of college at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, which is located in Daytona Beach, Florida. After 18 years of shovelling snow in upstate New York just so I could get out my front door in the wintertime, I decided that it would be a smart idea to go to school located someplace really warm. I had tried to pick a location that was about as far south as I could go without having to speak Spanish. That location had ended up being the state of Florida. It's pretty sad that one of the primary considerations influencing my choice of higher education was whether it was located in a place where I could wear shorts in December. As you have probably already surmised, Florida is quite a hike from New York. In my particular case, it was around 18-20 hours by car and about 6-7 hours by plane. My parents had decided that I could manage everything by myself, so they weren't going to drive or fly down to Florida with me. I was just going to have to tough it out myself. I had never even seen the campus beyond what was pictured in the flyers and recruiting material for the school, and the extent of what I had with me were two overstuffed duffel bags. Luckily, a high school friend of mine, Kristen, had driven down to the school with her parents a few days before I was due to fly down. She had been nice enough to let me stash my computer in her car when her family did the drive down to Florida. So it was just me, two duffel bags of clothes that I checked, and my backpack. The flight itself wasn't pretty. Due to some technical difficulties with the plane I was supposed to be flying on, I sat in my seat for 45 minutes and repeatedly noted that there was a distinct lack of airplane movement. I had to scramble back into the terminal to the customer service desk to book a new flight once the flight staff finally confessed that there was no way our plane was going to be leaving the runway under its own power. The woman behind the counter in the terminal quickly printed me up new tickets and told me to run as fast as I could to a gate way the heck across the airport in order to catch a flight to Philadelphia that would enable me to catch a connecting flight to Daytona Beach. After scurrying through multiple terminals, I just made the flight at the last second. Apparently, luck was with me this time. Once onboard the plane and in mid-taxi, I flipped open the new tickets that had just been printed and I made a suprising discovery: The ticket agent had typed in "DAY" as my destination airport. "DAB" is the airport code for Daytona Beach. "DAY" is for Dayton, Ohio. I was wishing I had found out this little tidbit BEFORE I had gotten on the plane. Once I arrived in Philadelphia, I ran to the closest ticket counter and pointed out what to the ticket agent what had happened. She examined by tickets for a few moments, and then began busily tapping into her computer to see what she could do. She must have typed for only a minute or two, but the loud clacking of her long fingernails against the keys made it seem far, far longer. The long and short of this whole adventure was that I eventually made it to Daytona Beach. I had to fly back to Philadelphia, then to Atlanta, and then to Daytona, but I finally made it. So next time you whine about having a lay-over when flying somewhere, keep in mind that I had four layovers and a total trip time of 17 hours. As a nifty side-effect, my two duffel bags containing all my clothes were now getting a tour of the baggage carousel at an airport in Dayton, Ohio. So now I was in Florida. I had no bags aside from the backpack I had as my carry-on throughout my travel experience. Kristen and her parents were nice enough to meet me at the airport and drive me over to the dorms on the college campus. I had my head on Kristen's shoulder in the car, and was starting to nod off. It had been a really long day. I was quickly signed into Embry-Riddle's McKay Hall by the RA on duty. McKay wasn't your typical dorm... it was more like a cheap motel that had been converted into student housing. Everyone had a door that opened to the sidewalk outside (thus avoiding that claustrophobic feeling one gets in the typical military prison-type dorm), and the rooms were arranged in a suite setup that consisted of two living/bedrooms (each with a full bathroom) and a common dining-type room in the back. Three students were in each of the rooms, so there were a total of six people crammed into the 1000 square feet of the suite. Do you think this sounds spacious? Undoubtedly, some of you do. I'll certainly be deluged with e-mail from people claiming to have lived with twice as many people in a quarter of the space. Suggestions like "why didn't you each just claim a chunk of the floor space?" will be proposed to me in tones that will be roughly analogous to "You're a flat out idiot." Well, it wasn't quite that simple. First off, we had three desks and three beds in each of the rooms. True, two of the beds were bunked. But still, that furniture cuts into a lot of your space. Second, if I was going to lay claim to an area, I would most certainly have claimed the floorspace of the bathroom and charged the others a usage fee. I had no qualms about sleeping on the floor in the shower if it came to defending my turf. That plan would have certainly met with resistance. Third, while it did cross our minds to move a person or two into the back room, housing had strictly forbidden it and would enforce the policy through random inspections and evictions. Three rooms, two bathrooms, six guys, and no direct adult supervision. No internet connection, no cable TV, and no TV reception to speak of. Hell, there wasn't even a TV. The two refridgerators in the back room were teeny-tiny, and they each had one of the suckiest microwaves on the planet perched on top. That was about it when it came to amenities. Anyway, the point was that I was being crammed into a small space with five other students that I was going to have to live with for at least two semesters. One could only hope that they'd be relatively normal, clean, and likeable guys. In this case, it would seem, hope would be the closest I came to that dream. ******************************************** *26 January 2003 - The Roommates From Hades* ******************************************** To start off, there were two guys besides myself assigned to my college dorm room. The other room in the suite had been assigned three guys as well. So, most of the time I would only have to deal with two guys in close quarters. The two guys I was assigned to room with were Gordon and Chris. Chris was (quite unfortunately for me, I might add) the first person I saw when opening the door to my new room. He was, and probably still is, an excellent reason not to have children. The young man had more fat in his ankles than I had in the entirety of my body. "Oaf-ish" is just as good of a descriptor of the kid as any, though "annoying", "grubby", "loud", "sluggish", "stolid", "tactless", and "unkempt" could certainly do in a pinch. Chris is the product of parents who apparently escaped from the life of trailer parks and RC Cola by coming into a large sum of money. While I am appreciative and supportive of a good "rags-to-riches-claw-your-way-to-the-top" story, I feel that the opportunity was wasted on Chris and his kin. Chris saw his position as not having been given a chance to go further in life, but more as a spot in which he could safely turn around and sneer back at the trailer park of his past while waving a bag of the highest-quality beef jerky and yelling, "Look what I gots!" at the top of his lungs. Almost immediately after speaking with Chris for the first time, I began hoping that an engine would break off of a low-flying aircraft nearby and land on his head. He waved his arms around while talking in a voice that only had two volume settings: annoyingly loud and riot control. The arm waving was punctuated with the large bag of beef jerky he had clenched in the fist that was residing at the end of his fatty appendage. He was quite adamant about whatever point he was attempting to confer, but after hearing what he had to say, it was quite apparent that whatever he was saying was not worth the effort of listening for. In the few moments when Chris was not speaking, chewing small objects, or, more likely, chewing larger objects he later intended to swallow, his mouth reached its resting position that mimicked a perfect "duhhhh...." expression. I'm not sure what evolutionary purpose is served when people stand there with their mouth half open, but I'm guessing that it's related to the hope that food will simply show up and decide to pop on in. Chris turned his head towards the door when I entered the dorm room for the first time. He waved a bag of jerky at me for half a second before bellowing "THE OTHER GUY IS HERE!! GUYS!! THE OTHER GUY IS HERE!" I visibly winced, since Chris was perhaps 10 feet from me when he yelled at what I was going to later find out was his "inside voice". Kristen was right behind me, and she giggled a little at the welcome call. She could immediately see that I was stepping into a situation that was going to immediately start degrading. He nodded once in my direction and said, "I'm Chris!" Then, he ran into the other room. After he tried to heave his bulk around the corner into the other room and bounced off the doorframe in the process, I turned to face Kristen. She was smirking at me right before she told me, "You're just going to love it here! I can see it now." I answered her with only a raised eyebrow. She giggled again before giving me a hug and telling me to play nice with the other kids. I told her and her folks goodnight, and I went in to meet the rest of my suitemates. Luckily, no one else was anywhere near as bad as Chris. He was far, far worse that the rest of the lot. Unluckily, he was one of my roommates. When I wandered around into the other room, I spotted Chris and three other guys closely hunched around a computer. One of the three, Gordon, was my other roommate. Gordon was almost exactly what you'd want if you were looking for a roommate who was quiet, polite, respectful of your privacy, and not interested in getting to know you that well. He was a nice guy, but he saw the dorms as a place to sleep and occasionally study. He wasn't there to make close friends with his roommates. I could certainly respect that, so I made a mental note to afford Gordon the leeway he needed. I shook Gordon's hand first and then met the other two guys. One was Moe, and the other was Randy. The two of them were going to be my suitemates. As for suitemate number three (a gentleman with big hair and a glazed-over look who was named Chuck), he was out wandering around somewhere. Moe was interesting because he looked like a beach bum, talked like he was half-baked, and attracted unbalanced women almost constantly. I couldn't isolate exactly what about him attracted these women, but he probably could have bottled it and sold it as cologne to men with low self-esteem. The fragrance would have to be named after the behavior of the women that were infatuated with him, though. Perhaps something nifty like "Bipolar". Over the next year, Moe showed us over and over that he was truly on a different planet than the rest of us. He would walk outside in his boxer shorts in the morning, look at the rising sun, stretch, and then hear the quiet *click* of his door closing and locking him outside. He would then knock on our door, and one of us would let him into the suite through our room. It would be funny if it weren't for the fact that he did it dozens of times. Aside from all his quirks, Moe was a really nice guy. A little slow sometimes, but a nice guy. The last of the people there, Randy, was the one that ended up being the most memorable. Randy was, in many respects, a lot like me. He was a sharp guy that was savvy with computers, quick with the butt-kicking at [insert almost any video game here], and had dialog handy that ranged from bitingly cynical to downright funny. Hailing from the state of South Carolina, Randy gave the south a good name. Of course, in my opinion Waffle House serves the same purpose, so take that comment as you will. Randy and I were often seen as a double-dose of trouble. Most everyone knew us simply as "Randy and Andy", but unless you knew us personally, you probably couldn't say which one of us was the Randy and which was the Andy. After all, we were both seen burning things, blowing things up, running across campus carrying opposite ends of a ladder, climbing down off the roof of the dorm via a TV antenna in an effort to escape campus security... that sort of thing. If something was going "fwoosh" or "boom" on campus, the dynamic duo of Randy and Andy were often the prime suspects by default. So, needless to say, Randy and I got along just great from the start. We still do. Randy was out here in California for a visit not too long ago. A quick peek into the future shows that the suite situation didn't remain too stable. First off, Gordon left our merry company only a week or two into the semester. He assured me that it was Chris's total lack of finesse, respect, and hygene that were the reasons for his departure. He got along fine with the rest of us, but he found another suite that had a vacant space that he could move into. The vacuum left by Gordon's departure was soon filled in with a large bang. Enter Christian Rosado. I can feel safe in mentioning Christian's last name since he certainly has no way in hell of ever being elected to a position in public office. Christian was a tall, imposing guy from Guatemala that had hair that could only have been achieved by minor electrocution or holding in a really big sneeze. He was know as "Chris" for only a few days, but it wasn't long before everyone in the suite (and everyone on campus who knew him) refered to him as "Foreigner". This was largely because he was tired of having the other Chris scamper into the room like an excited puppy when one of us said "Hey Chris!" and it was the big Guatemalan guy that we wanted to talk to. Foreigner was smart. He sure wasn't going to let anyone in on that fact, though. He was an absolute party animal, as were Moe and Chuck from next door. Foreigner hated Chris with a passion. I witnessed Foreigner jamming the brake calipers of Chris's bike into their open position using super glue. When I asked him why, he just shrugged and said, "I hate that fat fuck. He needs to take a fucking shower, dude". Fair enough. Other acts that involved Foreigner terrorizing Chris were things like death threats and throwing Chris's matress into a tree outside our dorm. You could just feel the love. After realizing that having Chris and Foreigner in the same room was a funeral waiting to happen, we shuffled our rooms around. We swapped the suites around so that Randy, Chris, and myself were in one room and Chuck, Moe, and Foreigner were in the other. All the party animals were in one room, and Randy and I could gang up on Chris and light his ample supply of oily skin on fire. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Anyway, back to that first night. After a few hours of getting to know everyone, I went outside and sat on one of the picnic tables outside our dorm. It was really humid and hot outside, which was just fine by me. Randy wandered out a little while later, and he filled me in a little more on how he ended up at that college. He also said how he was sorry that I had to share a room with a fat bastard that was annoying and didn't shower. Then we got to talking about blowing things up. Things took off from there. Probably about 3 in the morning, I decided to call it a night. I was exhausted, and all I had were some bedsheets and my computer (which Kristen had been so nice as to bring down from New York for me) and whatever I had stashed in my carry-on backpack from the flight down from New York. My luggage was wandering around Ohio, and I was in a new (and mighty strange, I might add) place. I was going to be living with a bunch of nutbars, too. Looked like life was going to be pretty lively for the next few years. Classes were going to be the least of my worries. **************************************** *26 January 2003 - Unofficial Roommates* **************************************** In Florida, the roaches are huge. Often an inch or two in size. The local tourist board will tell you that they're actually called "Palmetto bugs", but trust me... they're roaches. These little guys have evolved far beyond their centimeter-long cousins that can be found in colder climates. Aside from super size and super strength (well, for a roach, anyway), they also possess a limited ability to fly. The flights of fancy that most roaches take, however, usually end with the roach bouncing off of a large solid object (like a wall) that it should have been able to avoid. So I call roach flight an ability that is limited. I mean, let's face it... it would be great to run at 90 miles per hour, but how great would it be when you could only stop when you ran into a wall? At first, my roommates and I didn't see any of these super roaches in our dorm room. I chalk that phenomenon up to the fact that we hadn't yet become nocturnal, so our chances of seeing a roach dropped dramatically. One night, though, I heard something skittering across my desk. I thought that was rather odd, so I quietly leaned up out of bed and flicked on the light for the room. The resulting sight was one that still makes my skin crawl. It was as if the floor was running away. Roaches were running in all directions, looking for cover from the light. I just opened and closed my mouth a whole lot of times and sputtered. My mind quickly wrapped itself around a series of topics in rapid succession: 1. There are roaches. Everywhere. 2. They must have us outnumbered us a dozen to one from just the ones I saw. 3. Chris's unnatural biology is probably attracting them. 4. It's crunching time. Crunching time? Oh yes. Crunching time. Those little critters were going to rue the day they poked their antenna into our room. This was war. It became common practice to catch and torment any roaches we caught unawares within our floorspace. At first, we just stepped on them. The odd thing was that the roaches were largely indifferent to this treatment. Sure, they made a nice crunchy noise that was similar to the noises made by Chris biting into a potato chip. But once you lifted your foot up, they'd look up at you for a moment and then hurry off on their way. For all I know, the crackles and pops I hear when tromping a roach were little more than me loosening up a tight muscle in its little roach neck. It was probably looking up at me to tell me thanks before scrambling under the fridge to tell its roach friends that they should come out in the light a lot more often. We later decided that physical brutality wasn't the way to go, since results were usually disappointing. Death by microwaving was certainly a good second plan, though. If we couldn't destroy the little buggers with an external approach, we'd have to take an internal one. The standard procedure was to locate a roach and then either thwomp it with your foot to daze it or catch it in some sort of container. Once you had your prisoner, you confined him within the interrogation chamber. Then, you set the interrogation chamber to the "popcorn" setting for a few minutes. For the first 10 seconds, not a lot would happen. The roach would sit there and ponder life for a bit. Then the fun began. As if lit on fire, the roach would kick into high gear and begin running laps around the inside of the microwave. This behavior would continue for perhaps another 20 to 30 seconds before the little guy would suddenly stop, flip over, and stop moving. For those people who think that roaches will be the only thing left after a nuclear war, I present solid scientific evidence to the contrary. The upshot of this method of roach roasting was the satisfaction you receive by sending a message to those lower than you on the food chain: Mess with us and you'll end up sleeping with the hot dogs. The downside was that microwaving roaches really does make your room and microwave reek quite badly. It's a good thing that we only microwaved roaches in our suitemates' microwave. One day, Randy and I headed down to the local fireworks store. Unlike most states, the Florida legislature tends to lean towards a "natural selection" style of goverment. Concealed weapon permits are handed out like candy, education is underfunded, and the purchase of fireworks is pretty much encouraged. True, you did have to sign a form saying that you were using the fireworks for either signalling trains or for mining and/or quarrying (I'm dead serious, too), but I see that as a minor technicality. Besides, we figured that the chunks of ground that were sent flying by our fireworks usage counted as quarrying, so that was all good. Armed with tiny 16-packs of firecrackers, we gave a particular roach a send-off he won't soon to forget. The unfortunate little guy was first captured in a plastic bowl and then soaked in bleach to drain his spirit. Randy examined the roach as it rapidly swam through the bleach around the inside the bowl. "Wow, look at him go. He should have been in the Olympics," Randy noted. After a nice bleaching, we snagged one of the roach's legs with a pair of bulldogs. The bulldogs were used as an anchor to keep the little guy in place. Then, we attached a second pair of bulldogs to another leg. That little guy wasn't going anywhere. I pulled out a tube of super glue and dumped a large portion of it onto the roaches back. Once the glue was on, Randy gently set a pack of firecrackers into place on the roach's back. While we waited a few moments for the firecrackers to bond to the roach, we theorized about the outcome of this scientific research. Theories aside, we were soon going to observe what was going to happen first hand. I lifted the roach back up via the bulldogs and deposited it ouside. And then, the fuse was lit. It was a little surreal at first. The pack of firecrackers began running across the parking lot, heading for cover. But death had already marked this roach via industrial-strength epoxy. The firecrackers started popping in machine gun fashion, and the entire pack stood up and began to dance. Once the 16 firecrackers had all blown, their burnt-out husks fell back to the ground. After a few seconds, the charred wad of blown firecrackers started running across the parking lot in much the same fashion that the non-blown firecrackers had been running for cover a few moments earlier. Our test subject was clearly one of those super roaches that I had mentioned earlier. Randy and I looked at the mobile pack of spent firecrackers, then each other, and then the firecrackers again. Both of our mouths were agape. This was clearly not what I was expecting when I was told I was going to have roommates at college. ******************************* *26 January 2003 - Spin Cycles* ******************************* As a general rule, doing laundry at college bites. You have to find all your dirty socks and t-shirts, pack them into a laundry basket of some sort, lug them to the nearest laundry facility, camp out for a while until a washer becomes free, plunk all of those quarters you've been hoarding into the washer, and then sit there and wait for your unmentionables to stop running laps around the inside of the washer. Once you manage to get that part out of the way, you'll come to the shocking realization that all clothes dryers on the planet that are paired with a washing machine will have a drying cycle that takes roughly double the time that the washing cycle takes. This results in a large backup of wet clothes as queues of college students grumble and impatiently rip dry clothes out of a dryer the instant the dryer completes its cycle. It's not a pleasant experience by any means. To aggrevate the situation further, Randy and I used to glue quarters to the sidewalk right outside our dorm room's window so that we could watch people peel their fingernails off in an effort to suppliment their laundry budget. More often than not, people would kick at the quarter in an effort to dislodge it, and then shoot a nasty glance in through the window that was clearly directed at both Randy and I. Oh well. One day, Randy and I had our laundry washing schedules sync up, so we decided to head down to the laundry room together and get the pesky task done. Of course, there was a considerable line of freshman waiting to do laundry at our dorm, so Randy and I hiked across campus with our laundry in tow. A nearby dorm had a laundry room, so we figured we'd have better luck over there. To get an accurate image of this scene, you would have to imagine me lugging a ten gallon garbage can of dirty laundry across the campus quad while Randy trudged along beside me and groaned under the weight of a few duffle bags of laundry slung over both of his shoulders in a bandolier-like fashion. We must have looked like a couple of refugees. Then again, we lived like refugees, so I guess it fit the whole motif. We were pleasantly suprised to see that the other dorm had both washers and dryers that were available and ready to go. And to think that those suckers over at our dorm were still waiting in line for their chance to wash their skivvies. We quickly got to work. Randy and I stuffed every washer available, and were quite proud of the fact that the two of us managed to take seven of the twelve washers. After a whole lot of quarter depositing, our laundry began making the transition from being pretty nasty to being springtime fresh. During the 25 minute wash cycle, Randy and I bummed around the laundry room. There wasn't a heck of a lot to look at, and it would have been much interesting to leave and come back later, but we couldn't risk leaving and losing our chance at moving everything straight from the washers into the dryers. The chances of the two of us getting seven dryers without having us camp out and wait for them were pretty slim. Once the washers began to cheerfully chime that they were done with their job, Randy and I started to yank out all of our dripping-wet clothes and to madly stuff them into all the available dryers. After another flurry of quarter depositing, a total of eight dryer-loads of laundry began their drying cycle. We were only 55 minutes away from clean laundry. Once your clothes were in the dryer, people tended to leave them alone until the dryer hits the end of its cycle. So, Randy and I didn't have to sit there and babysit our blue jeans as they were spinning this way and that. The two of us wandered out the front door of the dorm and walked onto a small bridge that spanned a pitiful little stream of sludgy water that ran by the front of the dorm. The stream was very shallow at that particular moment, but once it began to rain hard you could expect the level of the water to rise several feet. The groundskeeping staff had been taking advantage of the recent lull in the rain (a rarity in Florida) by wading through the shallow water and chopping down the brush that had begun to grow on the sides of the steep enbankment that led down to the water in the stream. The groundskeepers had abandoned their work for some reason, but there was a clear demarcation where the trimming had stopped. I craned my neck towards the area where the trimming had ended because I thought I spotted something on the ground. Something metal. Sure enough, something was over there. Randy and I walked over the enbankment to take a closer look. There were ladders lying on the ground... two of them. They were partially concealed in the brush, but the bright sun overhead had reflected off of them just enough to tip me off to their location. One was a ten-foot tall A-frame ladder, and the other was a segmented ten-foot ladder that could be extended to a length of almost twenty feet. This was clearly a find that was ripe with possibilities, and Randy and I were about to make the most of it. So what kind of trouble do two college kids get into when they have possession of two ladders and about an hour to kill? A good question. A good question indeed. Next College Update: Rising To The Occasion