The FBI called me on my cell phone while I was at the stadium in Rockwall this afternoon to let me know that I was again not one of the ranked applicants who they were considering for the internship. Apparently they skipped the interview process for everyone and just went off of the application materials. However, the person I was talking with did say that this year they were doing something new which was all of the other applications they would be forwarding onto the regional office for consideration of a position at the FBI HQ. The plus side is that this would be a paid position unlike the one here; the “negative” is that the internship is in D.C. Negative? Ok, sure…
HP did win tonight, 31-14, and now there’s only one away game left in the regular season. The next two weeks we have Pearce and Forney at home for Blue Out and Homecoming, respectively. The following week is at Greenville, and then finally we’re back home against West Mesquite for Senior Night. Failing a complete meltdown of the team, we will probably make the playoffs, and that means probably at least one trip to Texas Stadium and/or Tyler is in my near future.
Personal - Dallas
I picked up The Orange Box today, and for those of you curious, the entire box (one of those fat DVD cases) is actually orange plastic. It reminds me of a traffic cone every time I look at it, and seeing as how it’s sitting less than a foot away from my monitor, that tends to be pretty often. One issue that I did have was the hard drive space requirement; seeing as how there are five games in the box, only one of which I had previously, the install wanted about 12-14 GB of space. Normally not a problem, but my Raptor is getting slightly full and only had about 16 GB free. I went ahead and deleted UT 2004 to free up some more room, but even now I’m left with just under 8 GB free. This is definitely something I’ll take into consideration when I start computer shopping next summer.
Tomorrow the game is at 7:00 instead of the typical 7:30, so as soon as I get out of class I plan on getting on my phone and coordinating with Coach Harris on where to meet and what to do. I’m pretty sure that their plan is to leave HP by 2:15 because the team wants to leave at 3:30 which is before I even get out of my class at 3:45. Yeah, I have no idea how tomorrow is going to work, but I bet that the result is going to be that I sleep a bunch tomorrow night.
Personal - Dallas
We just had two quick power outages (one less than a second and another that was a couple minutes), so I figure that I might as well not wait any longer and make this post so that any future outages do not interfere with my posting desires. Theoretically if we had two UPSs out here (one for my computer, the other for the modem and router) I would be able to post even during a power outage, but that’s not even the case at my house (modem and router aren’t on one).
At the start of today I was anticipating that I would be able to claim that I beat two games today. Alas, I can only claim one as Bioshock is one of those games that always comes up with more stuff for you to do before the ending. That therefore means that I did beat Phantom Hourglass. I definitely enjoyed the game and would happily play it again, but I don’t think that it ranks in my top three Zelda games (those being reserved for OOT, MM, and Minish Cap). It’s actually really hard to have a top three since there are so many that are above average (LttP and TP both being in that category also). Tomorrow I pick up The Orange Box but will probably start on Episode 1 sometime next week (although Portal is completely fair game for being played at my house this weekend).
Personal - Dallas
For a game against a 1-3 team, the Cowboys game tonight was unexpectedly tense at the end. I’ll skip the in depth play by play, but the short version is that the Cowboys came back from a 16-24 deficit in the last 30 seconds to score a touchdown, miss the 2 point conversion, recover the onside kick, and kick a field goal (twice, actually) from 53 yards to win 25-24. So now they, like HP, have a 5-0 season record. This is not the Cowboys team of past years, and that’s a very, very good thing.
I’m pretty close to the end of Phantom Hourglass with what I’d guess is probably just one dungeon plus the final boss. Once I’m done with that I can return my attention to Bioshock, Super Paper Mario, and my various MMOs. I only have football one night this week: Thursday. Before you call me an idiot, that is the varsity game this week. Since we play at Rockwall, their stadium scheduling required us to have a Thursday night game. This also means that I do not have a JV game this week (which would be on Wednesday). Interesting way to get a Friday night free, but I’ll happily take it.
Personal - Dallas
One of the programs that lots of people talk about OS X having is Delicious Library, a collection manager for books, music, movies, and games. If I ever get a Mac, that’s one of the first programs I’m buying for it. However, in reading related articles today, I found a nice DVD collection manager that I downloaded and proceeded to put most (as I’m sure I missed a few) of my 150+ movies and TV seasons. If I keep it updated, my life will be much easier when people ask what movies I have or if I let someone borrow one and want to keep track of it.
My Zelda time today was cut short due to the necessity of doing homework, but I finished that up and played through a little bit more of Phantom Hourglass. If I work on it tomorrow morning and evening there’s the chance that I might finish it, but it’s almost a certainty that I’ll finish it sometime this week. I also need to look back at my posts to look at the new games I’ve started and update my game list accordingly. Who knew that actually being in a daily posting routine could have side benefits also!!
Personal - Dallas
When I woke up this morning my mom wasn’t up yet, so I went ahead and got ready to leave. By the time it was almost time for me to go she was awake but still in bed. I explained the situation to her, and her solution was that I go do what I needed to at HP and just not worry about going to our church. Not too often I get out of doing something like that, but that solution was fine with me.
I’ve been playing more Phantom Hourglass today and still have probably about a third of the game left. Zelda games are one of the only ones that I’ll never complain about them being “too long”, so I’m just enjoying going through all of it. I did have to reference a guide once today, but it ended up being a very wise decision to do so. If I hadn’t, it probably would have taken me an extremely long time (if ever) to figure out what I was supposed to do.
Personal - Dallas
HP hasn’t lost a regular season game since the very first game my senior year. Add up 8 wins that year, 10 the year we won state, 10 last year, and 5 so far this year, and the result is that we’re on a 33 regular season game winning streak. This year we also have the distinct possibility of being Division II in the playoffs as Pearce is 2-0 and will be the Division I school if they make the playoffs (largest school of the three playoff teams is always D1, regardless of record). Being D2 would give us six playoff games instead of only five, so the season would go a week longer if we were go to to state again.
Tomorrow morning poses an interesting scheduling conflict for me that can be resolved one of two ways. For who knows how many years, we’ve always had a “Church Cleanup Day” the first Saturday in October. That “officially” starts at 9:00, but I’m pretty sure we normally don’t show up until 9:30-9:45. Well, tonight after the game I got asked to come up to the stadium at 8:00 tomorrow morning to help out with treatments. That normally goes until about 9:00 or 9:30, so these are the two options I see: first, I can drive from the stadium over to our church and meet my mom there in our two separate cars (this is what I see as being most likely). The other option would be for my mom to come by the stadium, pick me up around 9:00-9:15, we go over to our church, and then on our way home she drops me back off at the stadium for me to get my car. Even though that sounds like it would be extremely out of the way, tomorrow being the Texas-OU game means that all the highways are going to be super crowded. The most likely non-highway (or “little as possible”-highway) route involves going very close to HP, so that’s why I see the second option as being a potential choice. Either way, I’m doing both, so the logistics will get worked out one way or the other.
Personal - Dallas
I noticed that over the past month or two, I had been getting emails about approving comments (all of which were spam) for the non-Facebook version of these posts. That was odd since usually spam comments would get filtered automatically. I finally go into the plugins tab in WordPress to see if there’s an update button for that plugin, and it turns out that I never reactivated it after I did an upgrade. Oops.
Tonight I have the option of starting on some HW due Tuesday or playing more of Phantom Hourglass. If you even have to think about that one, you just flat out fail. The choice is obvious: Zelda, of course!!! With that, I go off to my DS.
Personal - Dallas
Bonus points if anyone can tell me the reference I’m making with the title. Enough on that, though.
Today was my first day for “school observation” (read: slave volunteer tutoring), and it went fine. The math class I’m assigned to on Wednesdays was having a test, so I did virtually nothing in there except to pretend to fix the teacher’s computer. Then, the ironic part of the next 5-6 weeks began. Once I’m done in there, I go back to the mentor HQ to work individually with a student. They never told me what this was going to be, but at the orientation they talked a bunch about binder organization, so I figured it might be that. No, they have me working with a kid on arguably the single facet of my education career that I never really bothered to improve on but instead just brute forced my way through. Reading comprehension.
What? I’m a great reader though!! Yes, I agree; I love to read books, especially fiction ones. However, don’t ask me to give you stuff back like the main idea, what purpose the author was trying to convey, or really anything beyond my own personal entertainment value. That’s just not the way I read nor the way I want to read. If I’m thinking about all of that, I’m missing the point why I’m reading in the first place: for fun.
Personal - Dallas
I played some more Bioshock this morning and it got good. So good, I almost didn’t want to leave to go get lunch. I did, however, and now it’ll be a little while until I get back to it. Why? Why, it’s the second week of epic game releases! That’s right, friends, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the DS has arrived!!
I’m not quite sure where it ranks yet, but it’s definitely a fun game. The stylus controls take some getting used to, but it’s already becoming fairly easy for me to do everything except roll. Fortunately, Zelda doesn’t make you do that much. I’ll probably have beaten it before the weekend is over (even with football games and other free time destroying activities) which will allow me to get back to my normal repertoire of games next week.
Speaking of those games, the beta for Tabula Rasa has been extended. The producer basically doesn’t feel like that game is ready enough to launch in two weeks, so it’s being pushed back another two. I definitely applaud the decision to decide to delay the game even though it is an MMO and will have endless patching anyway. After Lineage II I never thought I would have anything to do with NCSoft, but Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa are starting to bolster my opinion of the company.
Personal - Dallas