Swimming in the Earth

One of the varieties of the class ring for Olin’s class of 2006. The rings are titanium and the blue parts are annodized.

So a few months ago I lost my Olin College class ring.

I figured I’d find it eventually, given that the last place I had seen it was in my apartment.

Last night I was doing laundry, when I heard clinking in the washer. Thinking it might be the ring, I dug around inside for awhile, realizing that I’d need to use a wrench to take off a bolt so I could remove the piece blocking the clinking object.

When I went over to where my tools were, I found my ring sitting right next to them.

The clinking object was a quarter.

Courtesy of my friend Scott. They’ve found a good home since then.

I’m a big fan of Campbell’s Soup.

It’s simple, easy to make, and as American as apple pie. And more importantly, there are more varieties than I can even comprehend.

I like to grab a random soup that I’ve never tried before and take the plunge.

About a year ago I tried Pepper Pot Soup, which apparently is a popular soup style in Jamaica that was traditionally thought to have been invented during the American Revolutionwhen Washington’s army was down to just beef tripe and peppercorns.

Sounds disgusting, eh? It wasn’t so bad, but it did take a bit of an open mind.

Right now I’m trying out Golden Mushroom, which is a savory creamy beef stock soup with lots of mushroom pieces. I think I like this one a bit better.

Anyway, the can of soup is a staple of the bachelor life, and offers better nutrition and selection than something like ramen, so it gets my seal of approval.

So after all that brouhaha I still managed to make it out unscathed, save for a couple hundred dollars in cash.

And one full day of bureaucracy later and I had already acquired my temporary driver license, my registration, my license tag, and my car inspection sticker, not to mention a brand-new 6-month car insurance plan.

And IKEA also failed to tell me that I was missing the midbeam for my bed, or the frame for my desk. I had my brothers stop at the Dallas IKEA to pick them up for me, only to find later that the table/desk top that they sold me was smaller than what I asked for. But I don’t have my receipt; it was in my lost wallet.

Austin, the person, has come down to Austin, the city, to visit. He’s looking for a good job down here. Finally he can live in himself. For now he lives on an inflatable mattress in my living room.

Other than that I’ve been working hard, since the next rev of Spiceworks is due out soon. This will be the first release with some of my code in it. I’m pretty excited about the feature I implemented. I think the users will notice it pretty quick. Can’t wait to hear the feedback.

But after my last post, where’s the adventure, you ask? Well today I was typing on my keyboard (as I often do at my job) and what looked to be a small roach ran around from behind my MacBook Pro and jumped on my arm. I also jumped. Looking closer, I saw that it was actually a very tiny gecko!

And if you’re wondering if this Gecko first sounded like Kelsey Grammar, then an RP Brit, then either a Cockney or an Australian (oh, the controversy), then you’d be disappointed. You see, he was much too small to make barely a peep. That didn’t stop him from running up and down the wall and behind my desk, however. And I got another brand of car insurance anyway.

If only I had setae…

Today as I was going to get some dinner, about six Chinook helicopters flew overhead. They were headed roughly northeast. It was quite a sight, and they were pretty low to the ground.

I had to check the radio and make sure it wasn’t yet World War III. It wasn’t.

Oops, I hope I didn’t blow the military’s cover.

Tonight I went outside. There was no wind. I saw a tree and was impressed by its stillness.

“Dining moves up on the college priority list” is an article that talks about the improvement of dining halls at colleges, especially highlighting Olin College’s dining hall, my personal dining hall.

The real question is, if dining really has moved up the college priority list, what did it surpass? Hopefully not anything like actual academics! I’m one to believe that there really isn’t such a priority list. Silly North Jersey Media Group. In the original Washington Post publication of this article, the headline was instead “Yes, Sushi’s on the Meal Plan”

I spent a few hours today walking up and down Venice Beach and reminiscing on life. I’ve always preferred heat to cold and so I appreciated being out of the Boston weather. I doubt I will ever choose to live so far north again after I graduate.

All of my friends out here are hired for jobs that last a few weeks, a month, or just a couple of days. My mom has also recently picked up this style of employment. Being raised by a salaried father, I realize I haven’t been exposed to the contract worker lifestyle, which is a lot different. Each week brings something new and the days off might be the weekend one week and weekdays the next. Not sure if I would prefer the randomness of this style or the regularity of a salaried Monday-Friday job.

Either way, it’s looking like I’m headed toward the entrepreneur lifestyle, which seems to be some weird mix of the two. Each day during the day I ought to be expected to contribute some real value to the company, anywhere from product design to keeping on top of everything else that’s going on. But when something big hits outside of the normal hours, there’s still work that needs to be done, sometimes on really short notice.

In a way, it’s a lot more work, but I love the diverse challenges, the freedom, and the do-it-yourself attitude, so I should be fine.

Lately I’ve been checking out a lot of books from the library. I used to be quite a book person when I was young, especially in elementary school. Most of my fondest memories from when I lived in Enid, Oklahoma, and went to Hoover Elementary School involve me in the library reading a book on language or music or computers or something else that I’m still interested in today.

At the time I had no idea that I was probably seeding ideas and thoughts that would recur throughout my entire education. The ideas that have come most readily to me over the years often involve pieces of my experiences from a few key times in my life in which I immersed myself in some sort of media, such as all of the digital stuff my friends and I toyed around with in high school.

Reading all of these books lately has gotten me thinking about how I want to keep up after I leave Olin. With Wikipedia to whet my tastebuds, I have found countless subjects that I want to learn more about, but each thing I find leads to three more. I’m a bit overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff I want to know about.

I think once I graduate this May I will initially fill most of my newfound free time with books and music and perhaps some documentaries. Fiction doesn’t interest me much, so I will probably spend only just a little time with my Thomas Pynchon books.

If I had all of the money in the world, I would buy music all day long. Of all of the songs I’ve heard, there are far too many by artists whose other music I have never heard.

I don’t know if I can really portray how I feel about all of this stuff out there. I know that on her radio show Dr. Laura always says she doesn’t know how people can ever get bored with so many books in the world. I think that people get bored when they lack social stimulation, and books don’t really solve that. But I’m pretty happy with my social situation, so I feel I can heed her advice and dive in.

There’s this certain depth at which I used to immerse myself into books that just cannot be duplicated on the Internet and in flashy video games, movies, and television shows. I think what has happened is that I’ve rediscovered it.