David’s Ramblings

This Friday was Georgia Tech’s Annual Six Flags day. The school rents out the park and sells tickets at a discount to students. It’s a pretty sweet deal, $13 for a ticket that’d normally cost $30-$40. Plus, the lines are typically shorter than those you’d find on a normal day.

I love roller-coasters, and Six Flags has some good ones. Unfortunately, this year there were a lot of other students thinking the same thing. The lines for the Batman and Superman rides, two of the better coasters in the park, were hideously long. Like rumors of people waiting two and a half hours long. We opted not to risk waiting in those two lines for hours on end.

It probably didn’t help that the park was short a couple of rides they had previous years, but the unfortunate truth of the matter was that the park was a bit overcrowded this year as opposed to the last. There were long lines even for the rides that last year had practically no lines (mainly because people think they suck) – like the Ninja.

It wasn’t all bad though – we got in line for the Goliath relatively early, only waiting about an hour for what is arguably one of the park’s best rides. We also experienced pretty short lines for the Cyclone and the Scream Machine, two old wooden monstrosities that cause major headaches from the extreme rickety vibrations. Awesome, but also nauseating. The new metal rides are so much smoother, but they don’t give off that whole could-break-apart-and-kill-you-at-any-moment vibe.

We made our last ride of the night the Georgia Scorcher. This ride was probably my favorite, but the designer of the ride is undoubtedly the most spiteful person to walk the face of the planet. The seats are designed to hold you in by lifting you up by the groin and holding down your shoulders, so either the designer hates men or has a very kinky fetish. I’m talking major discomfort if you strap in wrong.

All in all, I’ll probably go again, but this next time I hope Six Flags has a few more rides running or Tech decides to sell a few less tickets.

Oh, and apparently everyone decides to go to Steak and Shake after Six Flags, so don’t think you’re the only one brilliant enough to come up with that idea, or you’ll be stuck waiting an hour to get your shakes.

Nothing sucks more than a math test you haven’t studied enough for. Except maybe a math test you haven’t studied enough for that starts at 8 am. We had our first combo test today. It wasn’t quite as bad as I expected it to be, but it definitely was painful.

Combinatorics is basically advanced counting. You wouldn’t expect it to be as complicated as it is. But when you start talking about strings of length 20 with 4 t’s and distinct beginning and ending letters, it gets kind of tricky.

Of course, I didn’t think it wasn’t necessarily hard, it was just too long. There wasn’t enough time to finish everything to the extent I would have liked. You can tell a test is too long when there’s not that random guy who finishes in 30 minutes and makes you feel like you’re completely retarded.

Luckily, when a test makes you feel down, there’s always a way to make it feel better – IHOP. It’s been a long time since I’ve been, and man did I need it. All the stress goes away when you bite into a fruit filled crepe. Yum, yum.

And on top of that, there’s the mid-season finale of Burn Notice, a show I’ve grown rather fond of. It may have started crappy, but today has ended pretty well.

Recently, I made my first journey into real internet where people other than my close friends see my work…

That journey was “Touched By His Noodly Appendage”, the documentary we made for Campus MovieFest. I sent a link to the movie to Bobby Henderson, the person who started the FSM rage. He posted in on his website for all of the other Pastafarians to see. Overall, the feedback was quite nice. It probably got over 1000 hits. I can’t tell exactly, I’m just going by the dent it made in our hosting transfer limit (almost .1%, considering how much transfer Dreamhost gives us).

It’s nice to get comments back on your work from the general public.

Booty -

Oh that was so inspiring! Thank you!
RAmen!

ihatemyspace -

Yarr, we truly do have talented brethren.
Pass the grog my way!

jessiebelle-

Bless your noddle ridden souls. That was one of the most inspiring documentary’s I have seen to date. Congratulations on a job well done, thank-you for the inspiration.

Captain Noodulous Silicate TBHNA-

Brilliant.
.
They really caught the spirituality of the experience.
It was like I was watching myself on the screen it was so accurate.
.
The Oscars are soon, this must be nominated for best short film about a starch based deity.
.
The music, the editing, the visual effects were all brilliant.
Clearly there was no acting and this was all genuine footagge.
.
When is it available on DVD?
Is there going to be a feature length version?
I think they should cast Russell Crowe as the Pastafarian.
Or George Clooney. Or Russell Crowe and George Clooney and Kevin Spacey.
.
Please please keep Kevin Kostner out of it. He sucks.
.
RAmen.

Needless to say, this reception is more important than the possibility of going on to the Atlanta MovieFest finale. We have been accepted by the Church. That’s what is most important.

Living in college can be tough. Tests, assignments, late nights finishing papers… It can all be quite stressful. It doesn’t help when you have to put up with the cramped space of your dorm room and share a bathroom with forty guys.

You can’t change everything, but you can build yourself a better life in your dorm room. You can find a place to put all that junk you almost definitely need in your dorm room. And more importantly, you can do it on the cheap. Enter the primary building materials of the college student: duct tape/painter’s tape and card board.

For this project we also use pieces of a destroyed bookcase. The shelves of the destroyed bookcase make for an excellent table top once they are duct taped together.

After that’s done, you can duct tape the top to a box, creating a table. Since the box is hollow, it also can double as a secret storage unit for all the things you’re not supposed to have, especially the flammable stuff.

Drop a table cloth or anything else handy you may have on top and you’ve got yourself a small table.

Other good ways to improve your room can include a futon, especially one you salvage from the back of a van.

You can also build shelves out of cardboard boxes, simply stacking them on top of things. With proper furniture configuration, you can milk a little more space out of the room. Eventually you may be able to to fit 13 computers in the room… like us.

It has been brought to my attention that I haven’t updated my website for quite a long time. I plan on posting a thing or two about why I’m such a non-posting loser later, but until then, I’ll continue to show that I’m a loser by spending my Friday night posting to my blog rather than out partying or something.

For those of you that may not have heard, I spent the summer doing a fantastically boring job – evaporating water. It wasn’t at all interesting, though I’m sure I’ll still write a detailed post on it later, but the good thing about the job was that I got to go home and see my family and friends. On the other hand, it also left me facing a long roadtrip back to Georgia.

I didn’t mind the idea of the trip too much. I mean, sitting in the car by myself driving 12 hours straight, two days in a row, isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but it’s livable. I was about ready to go, got all packed and had my foot out the door when suddenly I was being asked if my sister could join me for the trip. Suddenly, it wasn’t just me sitting in the car. I had a copilot, and, even better, my copilot had a better music selection for the trip.

So we got under way, and started toward Denver. The drive was pretty much uneventful the first night. That night we stayed in a hotel that was 3 days old, so our room had never been checked into. It had this nice, new hotel smell.

The next morning we got to drive through the wonderfully boring state of Kansas. We passed on the major tourist attractions (corn fields) since we wanted to get as far as we could the first day. Alyssa was miffed we didn’t stop to see the 800 pound prairie dog, but I made up for it by buying her a vanilla frosty.

As we travelled further, just past St. Louis, we found a killer storm waiting for us. The kind where your windshield wipers can’t go fast enough and cars in front of you are playing slip and slide. We decided to call it a night with that. The next day we planned on getting all the way to Atlanta, which we did quite uneventfully.

We decided to celebrate our arrival with pizza. I called up Pizza Hut and was put on hold for about 45 minutes. When I finally got a chance to talk to someone, I was lucky enough to find out that I had in fact called the wrong Pizza Hut. So then I called the one I was supposed to call. Luckily, they didn’t have to put me on hold some more. In fact, they were able to deliver my order in less time than I was on hold.

All in all, it was a pretty boring trip, just like I expected it to be in the first place, with the sole exception being that someone else was sitting in the car. Sunday morning I pulled onto Georgia Tech campus, got a parking pass and my room key, and moved my stuff in. It almost felt like coming home, which is weird, because that’s exactly what it felt like when I got home from Georgia Tech.

I even got the chance to feel like I was coming back for class since I took my roommate’s classes for him (he was in Alaska fishing). I actually have a work semester, my job starts this coming Monday. That’s good, because I wouldn’t want to take Tom’s classes for more than a week. I’m so glad I don’t have to take proofs again. That would make me sad.