ohhim

Just drove by a flaming couch at the corner of S. Bouquet and Bates Street in Oakland. Actually, I drove around the flaming couch, trying not to run over too many partying Pitt students who were dancing around it. Quite the inconvenience... as driving around it (Bates and S. Bouquet is a tight intersection) probably wasn't that smart as I could feel the heat inside my car...

Spent the day with family up in East Liverpool Ohio (about an hour from Pittsburgh) gorging on the usual 4th of July barbeque fare. Nice to spend some time with family as I bid farewell to the folks (heading back tomorrow, but staying overnight in E. Liverpool with the uncle/aunt).

Not much else... just glad to be off work and not in class.

Rob's out of town. I'm on the air until 10PM. Call in with your favorite metal requests (Power/Black/Death Metal 8-9PM, Grindcore 9-10PM). 412-621-9728. or AOL IM WRCT883. Listen at http://www.wrct.org or 88.3FM in Pittsburgh.

Much to my relief, I had my last class of the first summer mini semester last night. I now have no outstanding homwork, and I'm in the free and clear for the next 7 days before the tormet continues with mini 2. Unlike the first time I took 3 classes at a time, this mini kept me a bit busier and upped my weekly homework hours to about 10 to add to the 9 hours of in-class time. Still, taking 3 classes isn't the end of the world, and doing it for 2 more minis won't kill me.

For reference, my outside of class work hours broke down as follows:
Contract Law: 16 hours reading stuff, 9 hours taking notes for the final exam = 4 hours/week of out of class time
Management communication: 6 hours preparing and following up on each of my 2 20-minute presentations, 2 hours preparing/working after my 1 meeting, 3 hours reading the relevant textbook = 3 hours/week out of class time
Distribution and Logistics: 4 hours working on 2 homework assignments (each), 4 hours preparing slides for a final presentation, 5 hours determining a solution to a street cleaning problem & presentation, and 5 hours working on a group warehouse optimization problem. = 3 hours/week out of class time.

In retrospect 19 hours/week isn't too ugly of a time commitment to allow me to finish off the MBA a semester early. In retrospect, going part-time and finishing in 2 years 3 months was definitely better than finishing in 2 years full time. Had I gone full time, I would have been bored stiff.

All is now well, except... my parents are flying in tomorrow so I'll have a few commitments for the weekend and next week and will need to do some laundry and a touch of apartment cleaning before they drop by. I think after graduation in December, I'll try to block off a week (take off a week around X-ma.. what am I? nuts?) so I can get lost in the wild. It wouldn't have to be somewhere warm, just somewhere I could sit around and stare into space. Skiing is kinda good for that sort of thing and so are beaches. Some time alone to reflect on what I want to do with my life would definitely be a good thing.

Otherwise, I still have 11 vacation days left to use, but figure I'll just space 6 of them over the fall since taking off for more than a week would be dangerous.

In other news, I decided to renew my lease (buying a house right now is more responsibility than I really want) so I'll remain in my apartment in Oakland (fifth-neville) for another year or so.

Final exam tomorrow for my contract law class. The ENTIRE grade comes from the one exam so I'm hoping that I don't mess up too badly and will put in another 7 hours this evening studying. Still, I think I'm going to give up on the 4.0 this mini since I know that I'll be lucky to get an A- in my management communication class, and figure that a classmate could make better use of any merit money awarded at the end of the summer.

In other news, given that I'll need to renew my lease in the next 10 days, I decided to do a quick online house search to see if anything looked interesting and noticed that most houses were being listed at 2x their property tax assessed values. Ugh... I guess low interest rates are encouraging folks to overspend on houses.

Still, given how many of the folks who are listing their homes for those insane numbers have appealed their property tax increases, I was kinda considering lobbying the city to pass legislation that would force anyone who is contesting their assessed property value to sell their home for 25% above the assessed value to anyone who offered. It would probably get most folks to pay their fair share (instead of me having to pay more flat taxes) and could raise a buttload of extra revenue for the city by assessing at real values.

Too bad there isn't enough in-town new house building to get the market back into whack. I guess I'll just have to wait until everyones ARMs shoot up in another year and folks start defaulting on mortgages to bring the market back to reasonable levels. I'm still unsure how long I want to stay in the city so postponing a buy right now might not be a bad idea. Given that my rent is going up to $685/month for my 600sqft apartment with an indoor parking space in a prime location, I'm probably better off just renting and not having to worry about property taxes and maintenance.

Long term, I'll have to think more about getting a house and might be better off just finding a nice plot of land and building something nice.

From http://espn.go.com/sportsbusiness/news/2003/0619/1570581.html

"As long as I know that they belong to me and I can rub it in to my brothers that these are mine, that's just fine with me."
- Spawn Creator Todd McFarlane on bidding for Barry Bond's 73rd home run ball to add to his collection of McGwire's 70th and Sosa's 66th

Had my first encounter with an online-only friend in from San Francisco this evening - dactyl - who despite media hype to the contrary failed to kidnap me, chain me up in an old abandoned dungeon to make me her sex slave, and then hack me up into little pieces. Oh well...

We seemed to get along well, and she definitely was as interesting of a person in real life, not entirely unlike her projected online personna. We hung out for about 2 hours and it kinda felt like hanging out with an old friend as many things didn't need additional explanation. I'm sure we'll do it again in another 2 months once she descends on the 'burgh for longer periods of time.

Glad she found an apartment.

In other news, I'm polishing up one project for an ops class due tomorrow evening but should try to get a reasonable amount of sleep this evening.

After a search through my metal collection failing to find more than one artist (Meshuggah) that I bought 2 or more CDs from (as I've mostly been filling in missing gaps from the station), I noticed that the overwhelming majority of my music collection is single albums by interesting artists. Still, there have been a few bands I've dug deeper into the back catalogs for...

Artists I've picked up 2 or more CDs from... (number)

Rock
Fiona Apple (2)
Barenaked Ladies (5)
Beatles (3)
Beck (2)
Ben Folds/Five (3)
Bush (2)
Cake (3)
Tracy Chapman (2)
Chumbawamba (3)
Cowboy Junkies (2)
Crash test dummies (2)
Dave Matthews Band (2)
Don Caballero (2)
Bob Dylan (2)
Everlast (2)
Hum (3+Glifted & Centaur debuts)
Jewel (2)
Karl Hendricks Trio (3)
Living Color (2)
Looper (2)
Sarah McLachlan (3)
Modest Mouse (2)
Beth Orton (4)
Radiohead (5)
Red Hot Chili Peppers (3)
REM (2)
Semisonic (3)
Smashmouth (2)
Sugar (2)
Toadies (2)
Verbow (3+Jason & Allison Disc)
Verve Pipe (2)
Wierd Al (5)

Country/Alt Country
Johnny Cash (2)
Mark O'Connor (2)
Wilco (3 & Uncle Tupelo - Anodyne)

Industrial
Front 242 (2)
KMFDM (10)
Tool (3)

Metal
Meshuggah (2)

Punk
Bad Religion (9)
Boysetsfire (2)
Descendents (2)
Fugazi (8)
Millencolin (2)
Moneen (2)
Offspring (2)
Pulley (3)
Ramones (2)

Electronic
Chemical brothers (2)
Moby (2)

Hip Hop
Beastie Boys (4)
Mos Def (2)

Jazz
Count Basie (2)
Miles Davis (2)
Lionel Hampton (2)
Woody Herman (3)

Classical
Mstislav Rostropovich (2)

I have most of my presentation writeup done, but I just don't want to spend the extra 5 minutes polishing it up. Feeling particularly unmotivated tonight after contract law and some walking around Squill. At least the family guy was pretty good on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

Looking forward to putting a voice/body to dactyl tomorrow if time works out.

Diet Journal:
Weight this morning: 230
Lunch: Small chicken parm sandwich & 12 oz chicken soup (500 calories)
Dinner: Subway buffalo chicken sub (850 cal)
Snack: Goetz carmels (150 calories) & lots of gum (50 calories)
Exercise: Walked 2 miles w. techstep - ran into buoren who indicated that he is still up for some quartet work if I can dig up a cellist