Mood: More then slightly agitated…

I am not pleased. Not pleased at all.

I got up at the godforsaken hour of 4am, navigated to the overnight vehicle drop off point even with faulty directions, and entered the airport with plenty of time to spare. And yet I’m back home.

My initial flight was with Delta. I got there and they didn’t have someone to check me in so I had to stay on their customer service line for 40 minutes before I got a response. After going through that the nice lady found out that the person who scheduled my flight had put down July 29 instead of June 29. Obviously this doesn’t quite work. Now that probably wouldn’t have been a big deal but apparently today through Sunday, Delta has an embargo, a black out weekend, against ticket types such as myself. My Mom works at Alaska so we can get free or cheap standby tickets with either her airline or many of the other ones.

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In about four hours I will be leaving for the east coast to join with the rest of my family. I’m almost ready. Always waiting until the last moment is one of my bigger flaws. Hopefully I can train myself out of that.

Earlier today I went to my UWB orientation last lasted three hours shorter then I thought it’d be. Apparently I won’t be able to get my triple minor (focuses as they called them. The business program doesn’t have traditional minors for the subcategories) like I had hoped nor will I be able finish in five quarters thus saving me money. Oh well. Two minors are more then possible.

Later I finished The Office when I got home. The Office is now my favorite TV show. Though… Firefly was pretty cool too… Hmm… Anyways… I will publicly declare myself in favor of Karen. Hah! Take that you Pam-loyalists!

Lastly, I went over to “help” (more like be there for moral support) at the TBQ fireworks stand. The stand which was held up by ducktape and staples. My expertise in crisis management was needed in the form of using ducktape to patch up leaks. Wet fireworks do not sell very well… This year should be interesting as general volunteers aren’t quite as readily available. Last year I pretty much lived over there and now I have a job which I pretty much need to work at so this year my availability has kinda been shot. I’ll be able to help out a bit but nowhere near the amount that’s needed. Oh well.

Anywho, I really should get to bed now. After I through some clothing into my backpack though…

I’ll be back late Sunday or early Monday morning. I’ll post about the reunion when I get back~

Early Friday morning (5am eek!) I got up and took my family along with my great aunt and uncle to the airport. Once again the Fischbeck Three Year Family Reunion has come upon us.

Unfortunately I need to work and attend an orientation meeting for UWB so my family went ahead of me leaving me all by my lonesome in this nice big scary house. However! this time my Dad bought me corn dogs, burritos, and cereal before leaving so I wouldn’t starve. He’s so nice~ Last time they left me for a week with not only an empty house but an empty fridge as well.

Having been woken up from my slumber earlier then traditional, I decided that it wasn’t worth taking a quick nap before I had to work my eight hour shift so I watched some episodes of The Office. The Office is insanely awesome by the way.

Unfortunately when I returned from my shift (10pm, evening shifts are annoying…), I found out that half my family wasn’t able to get a flight (we use standby as it’s much cheaper to fly that way) so instead of getting my decent night’s sleep as I had intended, I repeated my Friday morning trip on Saturday as well. After dropping them off, I met with Rabenstrange and his sister at their house to go climb Mt. Si.

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The Silver Ship and the Sea by Brenda Cooper
Reviewed on June 21, 2007.

The Silver Ship and the Sea was a very interesting book. Based in the far off future, it portrays the settlers of a wild planet as they recover from a horrid war between themselves, “pure” humans, and alters, humans who were modified to better suit the needs of the planet. The book is focused on the child survivors among the alters who face such animosity as they try to integrate themselves into a society that despises their very being.

I liked the concept that she pursued and the way she introduced the alter and how they operated was interesting. She touched upon how they were different from the pure humans but going deeper would’ve added to the emotion of the story. It would’ve given more justification for the fear that the pure humans had.

Overall the story was entertaining but not great. There was a lot of potential there but the execution didn’t live up to it.

Category: Sci-Fi
Audience: Everyone, focused on Teenagers

Rating: Three out of Five Stars

For my communication online class we had a final group project in which our goal was to write about a “two-tiered society based on the information haves and have nots” in relation to technology and/or new communication methods.

For this project I decided that I wanted to go a different route then the ever so popular powerpoint presentation. While powerful in it’s own way, it is overused and, even worse, incorrectly used by the college population. So I decided to experiment with a report using wordpress after being inspired by BijanBlog. Basically it makes your report more of an exhibit similar to what our online teacher used to present his lectures.

I am quite pleased with how it turned out visually but when it came down to crunch time, we failed in our presentation of the actual data. You know… the important part. We had divided up our topic into parts and were supposed to submit our individual write-ups to me to compile it all. Apparently there was some confusion as to what needed to be done and the like so I didn’t get as much data as I would have liked.

However it’s all good as we got a decent grade. The main remarks about it was that we failed to combine our presentation with images which I fully agree that we should have. Images do add a lot to presentations.

Anyways if you’d like to see our presentation on the “Future of Information”, it’s located here. I really liked the “Theoretical Timeline” section. I was really surprised by that one as it was really far out but it’s pretty good. That timeline queues the beginning of The Postman. The Postman was a pretty good book if I recall correctly.

Mmm… Now I want to reread The Postman…

I’ve decided to go to Japan this August. I’ll be going with Rabenstrange when he leaves to go back for school and will stay there for 3 weeks or so. I went to the post office today to get my passport process started and I should have it in a month. I had to expediate it as it would’ve taken 10-12 weeks otherwise. That would have been pushing it…

I’m pretty excited. It should be a good experience for me.