All posts by Benjamin Flessner

Dead fish.

Well, Frankie’s dead. So it’s only fitting for a memorial song…. (and no, I didn’t eat my fish. eew)

Fish heads, fish heads. Roly poly fish heads
Fish heads, fish heads. Eat them up yum.

In the morning laughing happy fish heads; In the evening floating in the soup

Ask a fish head anything you want to; They won’t answer they can’t talk

I took a fish head out to see a movie; Didn’t have to pay to get it in

They can’t play baseball they don’t wear sweaters; They’re not good dancers they don’t play drums

Roly poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women … yeah.

Difficult summer decisions

My summer plans are so uncertain. It would be great to get an internship somewhere, but then again, there are one or two classes I would like to take this summer and get out of the way. Not necessarily mutually exclusive, but mutually difficult at best. Thing is, if I don’t take these classes, next year is going to be a nightmare…. Not really something I want to deal with in my senior year.

Then we have my CyRide job. Theoretically it shouldn’t be difficult to get a regular 20-hour work week this summer (unlike last summer where I only got 6-9 because my seniority was so low), and I could probably pick up extra hours all summer. Then again, we have this "dispatcher" complication. I’m hoping to find out in a day or two whether or not I’ve even been offered the job. Probably warrants another CL entry of it’s own I suppose. I guess I could just stay here, take my classes, work at cyride, and maybe volunteer time in some engeineering project.

It’ll cost me $1000 to stay in freddie this summer, and about another $1500 if I take two classes. Driving at 20 hours/week, I’ll JUST break even. Suppose I could always pick up extra hours.

Guess my big decision is… try for internship or stay here, work cyride, and get classes out of the way. Internship would be some good experience in a future career, but volunteer work might be similar too. ARGH. So confusing.

Velcro is such a wierd thing

I’m so glad I dropped my 10am class. No running across campus on a snowy day like today; plus, I get a whole hour to piddle around online and update my websites for all my loyal viewers! … yeah right.

Anyway, not much happening today. Yesterday was pretty stressful, working almost 6 hours and then enduring a 2-hour group meeting for a project. This class requires us to do a semester-long project in a graphical, object-oriented language, with only C++ as a prerequisite. Somehow this seems very wrong. Have a course to teach you a language, and then a course in software engineering… not the other way around. Bleh. Somehow I don’t see another 4.0 happening this semester 😛

I’ve also made a re-commitment this weekend. Nothing that I’ll go into detail on here, but my closest friends know about it, and, though it will probably be very difficult (I’ve already had some trying times in the first two days), I’m pretty confident that I can pull through this with a little bit of Outside Help.

Yay, typical ambiguous Ben there…. yup yup. Anyway…. I’m gonna go play with my website now.

Moved In (Mostly)

Right at the beginning of Christmas break, I got an email saying there was a super-single apartment open, but Alta wanted to know by January 2. Now I liked my old roommates a lot and didn’t really want to ditch them, but I was starting to have way too much stuff in my room. That, coupled with one or two other motives, made me really want to make the move, providing that the new roommate was a semi-decent guy. So I spent most of Christmas break trying to get ahold of SOMEONE who could give me some information. Without delving into a lot of details, I found out that it was 1st floor in my same building, and I finally got to take a look at the apartment, and I was sold.

I spent most of last week moving everything one armful at a time into the new room. By now, most everything is put away save for a small pile in the middle of the room. But it’s so sweet that I can actually MOVE around in the room…. even with that pile there. I have a sink in there with room for my refrigerator next to it. I have my desk, my TV stand, and the frederiksen desk all in a row, and I even have room to keep my keyboard set up permanently. Probably get pictures up on gallery sometime in the next couple days for anyone who’s interested.

I’m sure I’ll miss hanging out with the guys from time to time, though I can always head up there for pizza and a movie on MY dvd player. (It’s still mine, Nick, until you pay me!) Ultimately, I think I’ll enjoy the new room thoroughly, and maybe Tom can even move in next year. Yaay!

Room rearrange…. again

So I have this cool plan….
but I can’t take the desk apart until I take the hutch off,
and I can’t take the hutch off until I move the bed over a foot,
but I can’t move the bed over a foot until I move the computer,
and I can’t move the computer until I move the chest of drawers,
but I can’t move the chest of drawers until I slide the TV into the corner,
and I can’t slide the TV stand until I take apart the desk.

Difficulties…..

Blizzards are fun

So I get out of EE333 lab an hour late at 10:00, and get on Russ’s bus in our first Blizzard of the year. Knowing that we have a ton of newbies driving night shifts, I offer my services and end up just taking over the green minibus right in front of him. Maybe sliding around in a big bus would be fun, but I’ll probably get to do that tomorrow. The mini, though, was pretty sweet. Tap the brakes and the antilock comes on. You’d do donuts on ever corner…. lots of sliding fun. But when Russ offered his help at 10:30 they had almost everything covered…. so I said… "Um, if Russ wants some more hours, he could relieve me since I have an 8am class." So he did. And now I’m going to bed. Because I have an 8am class…. unless I’m snowed in. Meh.

What a crazy life.

I can distincly recall three times over the last two weeks when I wanted to update but didn’t. However, I cannot recall what I was going to update about, so nuts to that.

Let’s see. Thanksgiving break was great. I got to spend a lot of time with Amanda, got to build my new computer. finished a paper or two, and had Thanksgiving with the whole family. All nieces and nephews present (I can say that now that I have 2 nephews…. well 3 if you count ny niece’s new husband). Then I spent a couple days at Amanda’s home and got to play a bunch with Luis, the cute little puffball. He seemed to like it when I mooed, so either I should become a cow, or he will be well suited to his dairy-farm life. Moo

Coming back to school, of course I had two projects due at 5pm today so that was lovely. Of course I worked on them a bunch last night. Now I have an exam on Thursday, and a cookbook lab plus a big lab project in EE333 to finish by next week. Other than that, things look pretty cake-easy. Stress-free end (hopefully) to a good semester.

How big is my tank anyway??

I used to think my car had a 12 gallon gas tank ’cause I never got more than 11.6 in even after running on E for a week. Last time I filled up, though, I got 12.7 gallons in, and today I put in 12.91. So maybe it’s 13 and I was really close this time, but 13 seems strange. But if it’s 14 or more then I think my gauge is way off. I dunno. We’ve been thinking this car has been pieced together from other cars, so it could have some really strange gas tank. But it looks just fine and runs pretty well too. Ahh well. Pretty car. Has good AC, cruise, and speakers. That’s all I really care about.