True Nostalgia
Much to my own embarrassment I was looking around at some of the places I used to have my website located. The tripod free hosting service was where my whole experience with website design began. I returned yesterday to discover that I still had an archive of old blog entries that have become stale and musty. The site itself is defunct, but I was able to pull off my first 9 months of Blog posts. The year was 2001, the millennium was still young and so was I. I still am young, but it feels like an eternity ago that I wrote these things. So much has happened in the past 2 years that it seems I was a different person back then, and I suppose I was. Here is where it all began; my rantings are not really very different from what I write now. I am, at my core, still a geek. Though it may not be apparent to everyone that I come into contact with on a daily basis, my geek nature still shines through when I write for my web-site. It is only through this relatively unnoticed medium of communication that I feel completely comfortable expounding on the finer points of computer hardware and software. This is the place that I explore the intricacies of CPU architecture and price to performance tradeoffs for the mutual boredom and benefit of those poor unlucky souls that stumble upon my humble abode on the web. Not everything I write is purely computer geek focused. I tend to stumble onto other topics that I am ill equipped to form opinions about constantly. If you are bored enough to even be reading a little bit of those old archives (you can see them in a box along the sidebar), you will surely get a feel for where I stand on political issues as well as where my interests in entertainment lie. Let’s cover some of what was happening in my life at that time�
I was a measly 16 years old with big things happening, but little self motivation. After roughly a month of posting rants I moved to a small town just outside of a big town in Iowa, I had been living in a little town that I like to call �Hickhole, Nebraska� But the locals called it Wakefield. This was another interesting 2 year period of my life that comprised my sophomore and junior years of high school, within that time I learned very little of any use through actual school work, but learned a lot through my job at Inventive Communications as a data entry drone and a low level web programmer. I also had the unique opportunity to run a local access cable channel through our school, I got to be there at the beginning of this enterprise, choosing all the equipment necessary and spending hours and hours hooking up audio and video cable in various combinations. All that time running coax, component, and speaker cables has given me an intuitive sense of how to hook up most consumer electronics. When I get into it, I tend to think in the same way that signals flow through the system, I become one with the system, I am the cables, and all cables run through me. Sorting the whole system out a few weeks later because you forgot to label anything is trick that I am still working on.
The school itself, along with a majority of the people that lived in that little town was pretty intolerable. I was happy in many ways when we moved out of there and back to Iowa. The interesting thing was that by that point in my life I was pretty fed up with the whole high-school scene. That July before my senior year I began working at a local TV station as a Production Assistant. This means I was a peon who did whatever the bosses needed doing aside from my primary purpose which was running a camera in the studio. This was probably the most enlightening job I had in many areas, not just with technical information. I actually learned a lot about what not to do with my life from the people I worked with there. I was the first and only High-school student to work there, the rest were all in there mid 20�s and chronically single with little prospect for a real career. They taught me a lot about the world and all the dimmer corners of society. After quite a while in that environment I was got tired of the immaturity of high-school very quickly, even though I was barely there. So I decided to graduate a semester early and take a semester of classes at a community college. It worked out really well actually; I enjoyed the beginnings of my college experience quite a bit and really started to grow up more. By the time I was ready to move on to the university at the same time as the rest of the people in my high-school class, I already had 28 credit hours. I of course thought I knew it all when I came to Kearney, little did I know that my college experience had only just begun.
I have been quite a geek most of my life, living on the edge of high-school society, very close to being a reject throughout school. Luckily that did change in College, college is usually quite a bit more mature and people tend to worry more about their own lives instead of aiming to show their own superiority through belittling others. As with most people I changed quite a bit during that first year of college, and I assume I am changing even more this year. Probably one of the most significant changes in my life last year was when I joined the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. Most people back home who knew me well were pretty shocked when I joined a fraternity. It�s one of those things that I did for my own reasons, those reasons are far too complicated to make it worthwhile explaining to most people.
Another huge change in my life is Becca; we have known each other since middle school and have been dating since spring break last year. We have become so close over the past year and a half that I feel like I know her better than I know anyone else, even my best friend Jon, and we have known each other since age 1 or 2. Becca is the woman I love, and nothing will ever change that, she makes my life brighter whenever I think about her. And if I express anymore cheesiness here I may start sighing distractedly. Believe me; no one wants me in that kind of state. So I will move on from the very important feelings I have for Becca in order to maintain some aspect of order and coherence.
I have had quite a few jobs and opportunities that have grown my resume, including my work as tech-support for the UNK ITS Helpdesk, and packing boxes at a warehouse over the summer, and of course the projects that I jump into at a whim, such as Level 1 Media. My future is a little uncertain, but I do hope to graduate from Kearney in spring of 2005. Beyond that I have only a vague idea of what my goals and aspirations are, on both a personal and professional level. I honestly feel like I will be able to handle anything that comes along, simply because of what I have dealt with on my way to where I am now. I admit that my life has been fairly easy and trouble free so far, but I still have my share of stress to deal with on a day to day basis. I do tend to pile my projects and tasks on top of each other at the last minute.
Well, I get the feeling that I am rambling incoherently so I think it is time for me to finish this rant with some sort of profound quote about life the universe and everything. Umm� I got nothing. Perhaps I can leave you with something along the lines of �Try to do more than you think you can succeed at�, or perhaps �Don�t try to be something you are not�, or maybe �Don�t kiss your honey when your nose is runny, you may think its funny, but it� snot�.