Archive for December, 2009

Capt. Grouchy Pants Esq.

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Today.
I hate my life.
Well not really. Just a couple of gripes I need to vent.
Gripe #1. I hate my “Visual Analytics” class. It’s just a monumental waste of time. Instead of doing a “online course” evaluation that I pretty much translate as “no one ever reads” or in nerd talk would correspond to ” > /dev/null” I think I may be preparing a multi-page document that will be emailed to the Dean. This *may* be a bad idea. I think sometimes you just gotta find out. I’m a little too pissed off that they actually “teach” these classes.

Gripe #2. I had a final exam today. *clear throat* Err…*had* a final exam scheduled for today. So Purdue has this weird thing they call “dead week” where professors are prohibited from requiring final projects to be turned in or from having exams the week before finals start. My MA/CS 514 Professor, Dongbin Xiu (really a nice guy, good teacher), asked us if we wouldn’t mind getting done early. For the most part people were in favor of getting one more thing done early. There were a few dissenters that got us to change the date around. Well it so happens that a certain dissenter took their issue to the university. Therefore I show up to class expecting to take an exam and get the damn thing out of the way so that I can go home and relax and recover the lost sleep due to studying. Instead two schoolgirls…er ladies if you prefer, in the class show up to tell us that we’re not having an exam. WTF? Good and bad since I didn’t get to prepare as much as I wanted to because I had to finish a project and paper for the much hated “Visual Analytics” class. (Remember that whole thing about dead week??? Yeah..) So apparently (now I forget if the girls told us or the prof), someone squealed and bitched that we were having an exam during dead week. The prof was told late yesterday not to have the exam, and that he couldn’t even offer the exam to those who wanted to take it. Eventually, the prof showed up more late than usual (he’s a nice guy and the subject is interesting so I don’t mind), and tells us the situation and how he wishes that the individual would’ve come to him personally to make some separate arrangements etc. You can tell he is pissed because he keeps his hands in his pea coat the entire time like he’s got a gun in it. He talks with his hands a bit so he was flailing around his jacket. Anyway I’m not exactly happy. Sure there is a bit of Klosterman luck going on since I didn’t get to properly prepare, but now I have to study more and the torture won’t be over until next Wednesday. To make things worse it will be a more comprehensive 2 hour exam from 7p-9p at night. He was even being nice to us by heavily hinting at what to study for the abbreviated exam in class. But seeing as how he is more than a little peeved about what transgressions occurred,….well no more Mr. Nice Guy. Class is still 1:15 but that would’ve been a heck of a lot better than 2 hrs (or the 3hr finals I was used to at UIUC). I am an equal opportunity perpetrator and would like to find\
the person and kick him in his balls or punch her in her boobs or perform some other act of bodily harm on said individual if they are a hermaphrodite or transgender. Come on I’m at a university and we are supposed to be open to all kinds of people. Therefore, I have to strike down upon said person(s) with great vengeance and furious anger on all perpetrators equally.
I do have a good hunch of how to single out said individual: seeing as how they squealed they knew the exam wasn’t going to be held and therefore didn’t show up. (It wasn’t the girls as they emailed the prof late in the day asking for help and he responded about the exam delay.)
I know this threw off some people’s plans. One kid had all ready booked his flight back home (to Japan!) based on being done with everything this week.

Gripe #3. Saturday we had our Triathlon Club holiday party. We do a gift exchange. We also had it themed so people were to wear an ugly Christmas sweater. It was fun. There was beer. There were underage people. There were underage people drinking beer. (Shocking I know.) I took pictures. I posted said pictures on Facebook only allowing certain individuals view them. One of said individuals who has been a pain in my ass previously wanted me to take them down. In not so many words I said that I’ve taken precautions against getting in trouble. Said person has a reputation for being weird and irrational. I still stand by what I did seeing as how no one else has complained. Said person will be told what they can do to themselves if they don’t GTFO my back.

Here’s hoping your 8th of December 2009 is more delightful than mine :)

Holiday Party with me ole hearty friends.....

Holiday Party with me ole hearty friends.....

You know how someone famous said that you don’t regret the things that you DID do but those that you didn’t? Well one of the reasons that I wasn’t prepared for my math exam was because of the above pictured party. I’m glad I didn’t miss out on it because of the “non-exam.”

Minnesota. I miss you !

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Nick rocking the short shorts at Whitewater S.P. in St. Charles MN.

Nick rocking the short shorts at Whitewater S.P. in St. Charles MN.


Scoring with the ladies at the AGM...

Scoring with the ladies at the AGM...


Getting jiggy with it on the dance floor at CJ's Midtown Lounge!

Getting jiggy with it on the dance floor at CJ's Midtown Lounge!

Just putting up some pics from the recent trip up to my old stomping grounds.

Picture of the day huh….?

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Yeah I suck at doing this lately. Anyway…
It snow flurried today on my way in. Super excited for winter. It should be fun.
What else…oh yeah I had a nightmare, well more of a bad dream really, last night of being stuck in an airport and losing my wallet on my flight out to Turkey. Eventually I got it back but it was a weird stressful dream. I don’t know why I had such a dream (maybe I was a little nervous about my meeting with my prof this morning which went ok. And I’m glad I’m not the only one who is nervous about meetnigs with their prof as another guy in our lab confided that he is always nervous about how those 1:1 meetings will go.) I do suspect that it had something to do with not sleeping well the past couple nights. I got up at 3:30 and then at 5:30 for good to go and do a group workout. I had forgotten to turn the alarm off last night for that early wake up and so I got a nasty wake up again at 5:30 this morning when i didn’t want one. Tomorrow is another 5:30 workout so we’ll see how that goes.