Archive for January, 2005

Stats back on

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 19, 2005
in Blogging, Cooking, Friends, Life, Movies and sIIs
. 0 Comments

Well folks, it appears the stats are back on so I don’t have to keep wondering how many posts I have. Maybe by the time I get to 300 they’ll be showing more than 300 or have come up with an archival system so we don’t have to worry about it.

Lots of news. Norm is moving to Muncie! He got a job with Ontario Systems which rocks. Another SammyII man is back in the mix and I’ll have somebody else to hang out with. This is awesome. Toll ended up being the only one to come over for Good Bye Lenin! tonight. It was good times. Toll also informed me that I cook better and am more domesticated than 90% of the girls on campus and I’m cooler than 100% of the guys on campus and the only reason I’m not married is cause girls don’t know me. I guess maybe I need to put an ad in the paper or something. Maybe buy a billboard on the side of the road and slap a big picture up on there. Wouldn’t that be hot?

Well JTerm is almost over here. It’s weird how time just keeps going by faster as I get older. It’s even weird to say ‘older’. I’m only 23. Toll and I were even talking about remembering when the Berlin wall came down. It’s really weird to think that communism was still around not that long ago. I wonder what it’d be like if the Cold War was still going on. Hmmm…something to think about.

I’ve decided that next weekend I’m either making enchiladas, taquitos or flautas. There isn’t that much of a difference between the last two. I haven’t actually made them before though. I’ve definitely eaten enough. My hermanita has been thinking of coming to see me. If she does she’ll definitely have a list of things she’ll want me to cook for her. At least she’s cool and does my dishes. That’s what I call service.

Out early

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 19, 2005
in Blogging, Movies and Music
. 1 Comment

I got the song School’s Out by Alice Cooper going through my head right now. I got out of work at 1:30 in the pm today cause I gotta get rid of some time from last week. Makes for a nice short day. I’ll probably do the same thing on Friday too. I’ve been reading a couple video blogs a lot lately and Aaron Flores has an awesome video out on his most recent post. You should check it out.

Tonight I got some people coming over to watch the movie Good Bye Lenin!. It’s a german movie about this kid taking care of his mom and it takes place when the Berlin wall was torn down. It should be fun. Well, I better get back to some sloth and idleness with this time off.

P.S. - Saw a preview for Intermission on the DVD for Coffee and Cigarettes. It looks really cool. A lot of actors from the UK are in it that you’ve seen in other movies/TV.

Movies I want to see

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 17, 2005
in Movies
. 0 Comments

I’ve been watching movie trailers and here’s a list of ones I haven’t seen yet/look good:

The Aviator
War of the Worlds
Batman Begins
In My Country
Hitch
Constantine
Assisted Living
The Longest Yard
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (I think this one is gonna rock)
Wedding Crashers (Vince Vaughn, Walken and Owen Wilson)
Phantom of the Opera
Sideways
Ray
Hotel Rwanda
Kinsey
Finding Neverland
The Motorcycle Diaries
House of Flying Daggers
Sin City
Spanglish
Ong Bak
Be Cool

Monday

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 17, 2005
in Cooking, DyKnow, Funny, Life, Story and Work
. 2 Comments

News of the day -
My hermanito finally bought that mexican flag hard hat he’s been drooling over for ages. I can’t wait to see him wearing it. It’s gotta look awesome. Work flew by today which was nice. I figured out today I gotta lose 6.5 hrs from the extra I was there last week working on those new machines. Today for lunch I took some tortillas, put spaghetti sauce on them, covered them with little pepperonis and topped it off with cheese. It’s amazing how much tortillas, cheese and an oven can brighten your day.

On the way back from the DyKnow training session my boss was telling me about trying to walk his dog around town this morning. He was gonna make two laps but wimped out after just one. It sounded pretty hilarious to me, but that’s one of those things you probably shouldn’t laugh at when told. It has been pretty freaking cold though. If I didn’t wear my trusty hat and have the beard going I think I’d freeze to death.

Tonight for supper I whipped up some scrambled eggs with lots of onions and some mushrooms and made some tacos out of em. Time to go check on that cheesy garlic bread.

Slow Day

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 16, 2005
in Favorite things, Free Stuff, Movies and Spanish
. 0 Comments

Not much going on today. In my extremely tired state I set my alarm way early last night so when I woke up it was just way too early. Then, in my once again tired state I reset the alarm for way too late and didn’t get up for church. Grrrrrr. Anyways, not much went on today. Last night however, Steve and I enjoyed a stuffed crust pizza and I introduced him to Guy Ritchie in the form of Snatch followed by Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. I always enjoy introducing people to films I love. Like Neville says, it’s like introducing one friend to another. Now I bet that sounds a little crazy. You’ll have to forgive us film fanatics.

Speaking of film, I watched Fists of Fury today. Bruce Lee has been and always will be the one human I would resurrect to be my body guard. That man can sure throw a punch. Also watched High Fidelity for probably the 150th time or something. That’s one of my top 5 if you didn’t know. Was supposed to watch Good Bye Lenin!, but Tim had to work on a website for somebody. So hopefully Wednesday will work out.

I realized today I haven’t been reviewing the spanish stuff much lately. Need to stay on that. One cool thing is that I’ll be taking an actual spanish class starting up soon. One of those perks you get working at a university is free classes. I thought, hey, why not beef up la lengua materna. My spanish skills have definitely deteriorated since I’ve been here. Tested out of a bunch of stuff before I was a freshman but never took anything since I was a Systems minor and got a BS degree. So now it’s my 2nd year out and luckily I was still able to test out of almost 5 semesters worth. It’ll also be interesting since I haven’t been in a spanish class for quite some time. The cool part is that it has always come pretty easily to me. Instead of learning something completely new, it’s almost like remembering stuff. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around people speaking spanish a lot.

Tomorrow should be interesting. Hopefully these laptops work for the training sessions. However, when we’re done I get to completely redo the images for them anyways. I guess that’s what you call job security. It is nice to get out of the normal surroundings and work on something different though.

171+1

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 15, 2005
in Blogging, Computers, DyKnow, Music, Technology and Work
. 0 Comments

Hey it’s a post - “post 171″ world now. Nothing really seems different. It’s sorta like your birthday. It’s not like you feel any older…you just are. Well, not much has been happening. Still working on those stupid Tablet PCs. Put in 3hrs this morning working on them. We had to scrap the image I was working on and just try to install the DyKnow on top of the basic Gateway crap. Now I just have to cross my fingers that the wireless works in there on Monday. Supposedly they’ve had 50 people connecting to one WAP before. This cart has 30, but there’s gonna be a lot more bandwidth being used than when they had the 50 users. Oh well, we’ll find out I guess.

Today is official ‘get stuff done day’. I’m cleaning stuff, getting stuff picked up, organizing some things and listening to music. The lineup today has been Gipsy Kings, Postal Service, Eels, Elliot Smith and Muse so far. I also need to get some thank you notes written from Christmas stuff. I’m so behind.

Post 171

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 13, 2005
in Blogging, Computers, Friends, Liz, Movies, Nerdy/Geeky and Technology
. 3 Comments

I remembered Liz saying something about blogger only shows 300 posts and anything before that sorta disappears. Since blogger put the statistics temporarily on hold, I decided to figure out how many posts I have left before I have to do something about it. I guess if this was a department store you might win a door prize. Sorry folks, I’m all out of those.

Had an enjoyable night tonight. Feasted on some tardy Pizza Hut with Liz, Jeremy, Sara, Robby and Megan. They took a long time to get our food out to us. Unfortunately Jeremy had to jet before we even got bread sticks. Jerks. Anyways, afterwards we went to see Life Aquatic. I definitely liked it.

Had a harrowing day at work today, but I was victorious nonetheless. I conquered Gateway’s attempts at foiling my mission. The mission to image our 30 new Tablet PCs for NL121. Well, not completely conquered. I just go the base image done so we’ll do 10 more tomorrow. Then I’m going to have to re-image them in a week to be ready for spring semester. I know that probably doesn’t make sense but if I went into great detail my nerdness would definitely shine through my light cloak of hip-ness and my disguise would be all for naught.

Wow, lots of big words. Weird what pops out of my head sometimes. Hmmmmm….it seems I’m at a loss for words now. Things to do for the rest of tonight…..check blogs, do some flash cards, take out contacts……

Rain

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 11, 2005
in Faith, Life, Stuff and Weird
. 0 Comments

I think this is probably the weirdest weather I’ve ever witnessed in a winter. It’s cold, it’s warm, it’s cold…..I think you get the picture. Last week we had ice storms that knocked out the power for a while. I hear there’s still people without power. Luckily my power was restored in only a day or so. It started raining yesterday and has been raining pretty steadily since then. I’d even go so far as to say it was pouring today. Now, as I’m sitting in my room watching Forest Gump, I can see lightning flashing outside and hear thunder. It’s January! This kind of thing shouldn’t be happening. Gotta love windows rattling.

I’ve sorta joined in on a religion-discussion on another blog. I’m always interested in hearing other people’s opinions. I don’t necessarily agree with all these other opinions, but who likes being around yes-men all the time? Not this bald kid. There’s basically three main points to this discussion: 1. There’s suffering in the world. 2. Death is something that shouldn’t be feared. 3. Organized religion is messed up. Now these aren’t exactly word-for-word, but it’s the basic idea. A lot of the people involved consider themselves agnostics and are really sick of christianity. It’s interesting because I consider myself a christian and I get kinda sick of ‘christianity’ at times too. I also agree with a lot of the bad things that are being pointed out about christians. This isn’t to say I got it all together by any means. I’m just as messed up as the next guy.

Has anybody noticed how quickly people have forgotten all the victims of the tsunami in SE Asia and the 5 million or so survivors who are homeless, hungry, shelter less, and in danger of dying still? Some friends of mine and I were talking about how soon this could happen not long after the tragedy occurred. It’s so sad that we’re so self-centered as a country at times. I wish I could physically do something about it or that I made more money so I could donate more. Sometimes I feel like I’m so wasteful because I have so much compared to others all over the world. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll get really fed up with it, get rid of my stuff and move somewhere cool like Mexico and hang out with la raza.

stuff

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 10, 2005
in Blogging, Computers, Life, Movies, Rambling, Spanish, Work and sIIs
. 0 Comments

Another full day of work. Tomorrow I get to jump head first into that pile o laptops. Also spent 3 hours trying to fix this stupid JVM (Java Virtual Machine) problem in the Reade Lab today. There’s this special training for a piece of software called Luminus that has to use Microsoft’s JVM and big surprise - Microsoft Windows is being all weird about Microsoft JVM. If only it used Sun’s version I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be having all these problems.

Rearranged some link things on the right there. This past week I stumbled upon the world of video bloggers and threw a couple links to two video bloggers (called vloggers by some) that I’ve found and enjoy so far. So check them out - I think they’re cool.

Got a Christmas-y card in the mail from my dad today. He actually followed through with a statement he made. That’s like the first time in…..well I can’t even remember. Says a bunch of cheesy stuff and that he wants to ’start a relationship’ with me. Do I believe him? Do I not believe him? Let’s just say time will tell. Twenty-three years of broken promises, heartache and betrayal have left me not un-like a Tenenbaum child at times. I guess I’d like to see him actually try. I think it’ll take a lot more than a year for him to get me to believe him.

So several people have asked me recently about my name, Chalupa. No, it’s not on my birth certificate. It’s one of those things I picked up a few weeks into college. My mom’s family is spanish but from Mexico. So I guess you’d call that spanish-mexican? Basically so-and-so Alba came to Mexico on the third voyage of Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus for you gringos). We’re mainly from Encarnación de Días in the state of Jalisco. So the name comes from a fateful day when Tab brought back one of those excuse-for-cucaracha-food things from Taco Bell and tries to tell everybody it’s a chalupa. I disagree because my mom has been making me chalupa every since I was a wee little lad and it’s one of my favorite things to eat in the world. So since I’m just a dumb freshman everybody just laughs at me and tells me to shut up cause how would I know? Well, this is back when I was a bit more forceful about opinions and still took great offense when people insulted my heritage so we got into a heated argument. I’m pretty sure I was yelling by no where near the end of it and eventually just left cause I was ready to punch the kid. So then just to piss me off everybody started calling me Chalupa. Well, if you went through college living with 80 guys and your life was similar to that movie Animal House (mine was minus most of that drinking but none of the craziness) then you’ll know that the good knicknames always come at the weirdest times. I have friends named Schnaps, Soulman, Timdog, Bendog, The Kid, Tiny, Lloyd, Ed, The Snake, Fat Mitch, Skinny Mitch, Gunga, Cuz, Paxil, Tsai Guy, Bente, Schmucker, Worm, Big E, Bhouse, Barn, Stavros, Smitty, Seltzer, Griff, Crickit, PJ, Otro, JRod, Crack Timmy, Norm, UPS, Beebz, Squatz, Bleu, 007, Uber, Butros, Queenie, Butch, TLoft, Rufio, Cinch…..the list could go on and on. Oh yeah, and people that had names that looked like actual names - those were nowhere near their real ones. So no, I don’t like Taco Bell…even though I eat it once in a great while.

Well, I should probably get that stuff re-read for my Bible study in the morning. Oh the joys of getting up early.

Back home

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 9, 2005
in Computers, DyKnow, Favorite things, Friends, Story and Work
. 0 Comments

Well, back from Columbus. Definitely a good trip. It’s always great hanging out with friends from college. Not that they’re way better than “other” friends or anything but I guess I’ll just stop trying to dig a hole on that one. Usually on these excursions we come up with a new quote or something like that. It’s weird how one phrase can just keep coming up over and over. I think our phrase this weekend was, “I haven’t lied for two days.” There was also this little dance thing but that’s pretty hard to convey in text. Made a trip to the Steak and Shake where ‘another pib dude?’ got started and visited Schmidt’s for a sausage buffet lunch where The Snake’s ‘meat headache’ happened. Got to see Ed and Annie but unfortunately missed Phil. Ed told us he got into a bit of a wreck Saturday morning so I hope he’s alright. He’s not in the hospital or anything - which is good. Had a good time tormenting Soulman’s cat, tossing the disc and watching Seinfeld, Simpsons and a couple movies. Now Soulman will probably spend the next week or so trying to figure out if we ‘borrowed’ anything.

Very thankful the power is still on and all that. Right now I’m busy getting all that laundry done that has piled up. I added an email thing off to the right. A few people have asked me what it is every once in a while and this’ll be one way for people to find it easily. I wrote it funny cause there’s those lovely bot-things that grab crap off of web sites and stuff. Also fixed the link for Griff’s blog.

Got in on a ‘religion’ conversation on another blog. Always love hearing what people have to say about that kind of stuff. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. Unfortunately a lot of conversations like these don’t go anywhere because the people involved can’t calmly and civilly debate/discuss.

Looks like I get to clean some stuff up and get geared up for another exciting week of work. I think I need to get a set of 30 new tablet PC’s up and ready to go for Dyknow Vision. It’s this cool thing where the Prof’s screen is shown and he/she can draw whatever since it’s a tablet PC. They can also pull up any student’s screen to show the class an example. This can also be used to make sure students are actually working instead of just spacing off in class. Definitely not something useful for every class, but a great resource nonetheless.