Parallel Johnny

I finished my degree with a cumulative GPA of 3.33.  I’m happy with it, but knowing that I could of easily avoided the GPA crash in my second semester by taking a summer course, It could have been higher.  I was 0.1 away from graduating with distinction.  I’m still proud though that I never cheated to get my degree.  I witnessed a bit of it and from talking with others,  there was a bunch more.

Anyways who cares.  I’m a graduate!

PS anyone interested in coming to my house this new years eve, give me a comment/call/IM/email/smoke signal.

My iTunes player is prejudice.  I went to play my mp3 of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s Good Vibrations and it refused to play.  I thought maybe nothing was playing so I tried another song (one not from 1991) and it played.  I then checked to see if the file was corrupted, but all the other music players had no problem with it.

iTunes, you Funky Bunch hater, its about that time to love all my mp3’s …..rap, rock, blues, jazz - feel the vibration.

From the CampusWatch monthly newsletter:

On July 18, 2007, WSUPD Officers received a run to The Towers Residence Hall on a “fight in progress”. On arrival they met with a 22 year old female resident and her roommate. Investigation revealed that one roommate objected to the way the first room mate “looked at her” and began striking her repeatedly with a coat hanger. The victim sustained numerous welts to her arms, shoulder and wrists. A broken coat hanger was found at the scene.
   The aggressor room mate was arrested and charged with felonious domestic violence. The victim room mate was transported to Detroit Receiving Hospital for treatment and later released. The case is proceeding through the Wayne County Court system.

The semester starts in 6 days.

Had a semi-productive weekend.  Thursday night I went to bed at 9:30 and slept for about 11 hours.  Compared to the usual 4-6 hours I get, it felt like a lifetime.  I was up by about 9 the next day.  Did some cleaning around the house, laundry and finally disassembled by labyrinth project.  Later on, Lauren and I went to the bank to open a CD for the wedding.

Saturday my Speedway platinum card came in and all this finance stuff put me in a kick.  I finally fixed the online banking problem I’ve had since Standard Federal became LaSalle.  Finally being able to look at my statements online I noticed that I was paying some monthly fee to a Triple Advantage.  Turns out I was being unknowingly charged for a credit monitoring service.  I lost about $200 over the past two years to the scam.  I got that cancelled as well as any other unwanted charges I had tied to my checking account.  Once got everything settled, I decided to set up Quicken.  Maybe all my finances will be in order for now on.

Sunday was pretty lazy, I tried sorting out the papers at my desk, but got lost in watching the Tiger’s give up on a 4-3 game.  We have tickets to Wednesday’s game against the tribe.  Hopefully things start to turn for the better.  Sunday ended with me visiting Lauren and watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding and falling asleep to The Beautician and the Beast.

Like I said, ’semi-productive’.

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For those who couldn’t make it to the concert, someone recorded most of it and placed it on YouTube. Here’s Fiona’s Bluegrass Criminal. Read the rest of this post »

This weekend was the Nickel Creek: Farewell {For Now} Concert at Meadowbrook.  We had front row seats (4th row if you count the pit).  It was a good concert but I was a bit irked.  Fiona Apple was their special guest.  Apparently her a Sean are friends who play small gigs together at some venue in LA.  So when Fiona came on stage, she joined the other four and sang some songs from Extraordinary Machine.

Let me first say that I am a fan of Fiona.  Despite her quirkiness beyond measure, I love her music.  If in fact this had been any other concert where the five of them teamed up to play each other’s music, i would have thought it to be awesome.  However, this was the farewell tour.  Nickel Creek is no more.  They split up about a year ago after the last album.  This was their time, my time to hear all my favorite Nickel Creek songs live, with them 20 feet away.  Fiona was on stage for at least an hour of the 2 and a half hours that the show lasted.

It was a good concert nonetheless.  They played just about every instrumental song they had.  Most songs were from Why Should the Fire Die.  Fiona came on twice during the night, the first time was completely her time with the band playing her music.  The second time she came out towards the end of the night was dedicated more to bluegrass with Fiona trying to sing in a bluegrass style.  It was amusing.  They did a great Patsy Cline cover of Walkin’.  And the funniest thing was when they tried turning Criminal into a bluegrass song.

All in all, if they would have billed the concert as Nickel Creek and Fiona Apple rather than Nickel Creek wsg Fiona Apple, I may have been more welcoming to the fact that she took half the concert.

Oh, had my reunion yesterday.  I’ll rant about that later.

It’s finally Friday.  I cant wait for the weekend to start.  5 more hours of work.  After work, Lauren and I are going to see Joe and Keara perform in Boxfest at Planet Ant.  Its a bunch of 15 minute shows.  Joe’s show (”Super Mario Bros. 3″) was picked by the committee to be one of the performances.  Everyone should come.  For $10 you get to see 15 shows and food.  Come at 6 for cocktail hour.  Kevin has his show tomorrow at the same place.  Unfortunately I cant make it, because I will be at the Nickel Creek/Fiona Apple concert (hell yeah).

So it’s finally over.  I got it to partially work.  We gave our demonstartion, then he wanted to talk to each of us privately.  I was thankful he gave me the chance to speak out what I’d been thinking all semester.  For some reason, the group member in charge of sending in the report decided not to give it to him at the demonstration.  We had to wait until he received it to get our grades posted.  So I looked this morning to see if it was posted and it was.

A-

I’m curious to know if this was based off our private talks.  Maybe he graded the report individually since he asked me which parts of the report were written by me.  Even if I got 100% on my report, that meant the lowest grade I received on my project was a 75% ( I was expecting between 40% and 60%).

I’m now officially a cumulative B student.  I wonder if its enough to place me in the top 20%.  It would be great to gradutate with distinction.

Good news and bad news about my design project…
Bad news is that its not working in any way, shape or form.
Good news is I got a 94 on my exam, which means…

Exam - 37.6/40
HW - 8/8
Presentation - ?/8
Report - ?/14
Design Project - ?/30

I have a guaranteed 45.6% in the class.  If I get at least 70% on my presentation and report tonight, that puts me at 65% which is a passing grade without getting anything on the project.

Which means despite this class from hell, in 1 week’s time I will be 7 credit hours away from freedom.

Oh and I finished book 7, but I’ll write about that some other time (It was awesome).

I was listening to NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me podcast today and a question came up about Muppets. The question was asking the origin of Scooter. It turns out that his mother was a parrot and his father was an unknown species. They cited this answer from a book titled Of Muppets and Men.

I immediately went on Amazon looking to buy a copy. I had recently just won a $20 voucher from winning the Music I-Quiz contest and thought it would be a great way to use it. Turns out that the book was published a quarter century ago and has long been out of print.

The average going price is a few hundred dollars; beyond my budget. Has anyone seen this book? i wonder if any of the local libraries have a copy, ’cause I am extremely interested. Just another book in my queue after I find the time to finish …Deathly Hallows.