Pew pew pew Click here to comment

45/50 on M-16 qualification, bitches. Can you say Small Arms Expert Marksmanship Ribbon?

-TJ

Happy International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day! Click here to comment

YARRRR! I hope ye be havin’ yerself a grand day of lootin’ an plunderin’!

Be shure to visit http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ if’n ye don’t know what I be talkin about.

Anchors away!

-TJ the pirate (for a day)

Ding. Click here to comment

In the grand scheme of life, this guy just gained a level.

VT 2 comments

Good morning.

After reading Law’s post on the VT massacres (here) I was half-surprised that I came to the exact same conclusion myself, as far as the predicatable, what-could-we-have-done-better nature of the crime and the attempted scapegoating that followed.

First and most importantly, Rest In Peace to all the people killed at VT. My prayers go out to the dead, and to the family and friends of slain VT students and staff that now have to figure out a way to live out the rest of their lives without their loved ones.

…

Ladies and Gentlemen, the only thing we can figure from all this senseless violence is that it was senseless. There is no rhyme or reason to this kind of tragedy. How do you predict that which is irrational? IMO you don’t, you grieve when it happens, accept what has passed, and try to move on. It may sound heartless or unsympathetic, but really what can you do? This is a senseless killing. I see this as some guy flipping a coin, and commit to shooting if it lands on its side. This time, the coin landed on its side.

I think if anything–if anything–we can say we should have recognized the signs beforehand, what with all the disturbing work he produced for his classes, the plays, the poems… and the only thing one can do at that point is refer to a therapist. Some people are just fucked up… I personally don’t think all people who are fucked up and write about fucked up things and say fucked up shit are going to become mass murderers. But if anything we can attempt treat this like the Air Force treats suicide. If an Airman starts talking about killing themselves, we refer them to Life Skills and immediately attempt to build a support group for that person. Similarly, perhaps we should start referring people who talk about committing murder to a Life Skills-type of therapist. It would help by giving the troubled person a much-needed talking to and working with, and when word gets around that you get sent to a therapist for talking like that, people who are just talkers will be less likely to fuck around when it comes to talking about murder, the same way that people around here don’t joke about killing themselves anymore, since it’s well known (we’re trained on suicide prevention measures) that doing so will land a dude in Life Skills.

As far as blame goes, this is a random act of violence from a sick individual. These things just happen. You can only grieve for the dead, then try to move on. The University handled this situation to the best of their ability correctly… For people in charge of security, the first instinct is to make the right area safe. In this case, it was the dorm. From the indicators and the experience of the police, it looked like an isolated shooting given all the evidence they scrambled to find.

I don’t know. As with every tragedy that I witness (albeit third-hand), I scramble to make sense of the senseless, no matter how much I realize that it’s impossible to do so, and I imagine others out there react the same way. I guess it’s the humanity in us, where instead of saying “Well, these things just happen”, we’re driven and compelled to find ways not to let these kinds of tragedies happen again. We figure out how to prevent future building bombings, how to stop bombs from being sent to the mail, how to prevent our airplanes being used as missiles to kill people, how to stop kids from going on shooting rampages at an assumed-safe place….

I guess we just need time to accept what has happened and move on.

-TJ

Switching hosting providers Click here to comment

Well… I’ve been relatively slothy as of late, so today I’m going to do something I need to do… switch my hosting provider.I was with networkeleven for a long time, but it’s time to switch. Every time I have a problem with my account, there is no telephone support, and the support that is provided on the site does not have a quick enough response time, nor is it close to being user friendly.

Ah well. All I can say is it’s about time I did this.

-TJ

Status update Click here to comment

Yo yo yo.So lately I’ve been doing pretty well. I got over my initial discombobulation over being axed by Coffee Shop Sarah relatively quickly, relative being where it took me (in retrospect) about 8 years to *truly* get over Lisa Kim, it took me a whole 5 minutes to get over CSS, because I realized that a girl not liking me in no way decreases my worth as a human being. (No duh, right? Well now it is.)

Anyway, I’ve hung out with someone who works near me last Friday, as a matter of fact, and she seems pretty cool, too. I haven’t called her or anything since then, I hope she’s not expecting a call, but… anyway I’ll figure it out later.

Also, I haven’t been coding lately. I think I ran into a wall of sorts, or at least a very steep rise in the path with an incline of 3/8ths Pi or so, since I’m at the point where I have to now design the interface, aka make it look “pretty” and useable. And that’s just the admin portion. I still have the survey itself to be taken by the student to conjure up, but that’s relatively simple… I should have that up with 30 hrs of coding. I think I’ll work on it today. Downtown.

Well, with all that time freed up by not doing my volunteer work for a bit, I’ve been playing EVE Online, and it’s not so bad as long as I don’t get caught up in it. Character advancement happens when I’m offline, so I can log in, select the skill I want to train, and log out and do other stuff I need to do while my character skills up.

Yesterday I took my first violin lesson with a lady named “Azi”, her last name I can’t remember because it’s long and Russian. She seemed on edge the whole lesson, kinda like it was awkward for her to be teaching me or whatever, and I could have sworn I saw her bottom lip quiver when she said she would see me next week… in fact I’m 99.9% positive I saw that. She’s not bad looking, and the fact that she’s an accomplished violinist is pretty awesome, since I don’t get to meet a professional musician every day mulling about in Colo Spgs.

What else… I’m still looking for a perfect spot to work. I think I’ll be returning to Pike’s Perk downtown, but only once in a while.

Speaking of which, a factor to my not having been coding last couple of days was that my work situation has changed… suffice it to say, I don’t have as many hours of free time on a day I work, and when I’m off duty I’ve been playing EVE. I think I’ll be playing EVE and practicing violin for the next few days, and hopefully by the time EVE loses its novelty I’ll be coding and practicing violin.

Oh oh oh, also I’m registering for classes on the 12th of this month. I just found out on the UCCS website that they have two classes available online next semester, and just my luck they are the two that I’m interested in! So I hope I can gain entry into those two courses and I can simply take the classes online. If it was meant to be, it will happen!

Anyway, I’ll be posting here again later. Just lately I haven’t had any internal turmoil-ish concepts that I’ve had to work out. Life’s great.

-TJ

Obesity a big problem in Africa Click here to comment

Obesity a big problem in Africa - CNN.com

…

Huh!?!

-TJ
Labels: africa, obesity, wtf

Oh well. Click here to comment

I enjoyed the time that was given to me.

But I guess this picture aptly sums up
what needs to happen moving forward…

Let’s go!

-TJ

One more half-rational thing Click here to comment

To (you): I think I’m past the initial initial passion of finding new love… I’d like to try to build something up with you, because before I was unconsciously trying to fit you into the mould I had pictured the first time I paid attention to you. It’s not fair to you that I’m learning to deal with the prospect of a relationship (not even a relationship, but just the prospect of having one) and I met you. I guess it’s not fair to me either, because I really do like you, and I wish I were better equipped to handle my emotions regarding you and me. It would have been clutch if we had met later in life, with me more seasoned with handling my emotions.

But no sense in crying over spilled milk. I think I’m ready to meet you again, to meet the person I’m going to find in you, rather than the person I want to find in you.

-TJ

(Deeply personal? Damn right… I’m tackling more than one fear here. I’m still thinking efficiency :).)

I wish I could control who my heart picks. Click here to comment

Logic would dictate… nothing.

Doubleyou Tee Eff. So Here I am happily coding along and my mind starts drifting to you. I’ve already made the decision to modify a parameter in my routine. You conflict with me so much but for some reason I cannot comprehend I feel drawn to you. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it, I can’t figure it out.

So here it is… unedited, save for the spelling errors. Things that are unsaid here are unsaid on purpose and yet for no reason. This post confuses me the way my feelings for you confuse me. If this is me falling, I hope I can stop falling either by you catching me or me hitting the ground. Either way, I want it to happen sooner than later, but most likely it will happen later, and statistically and historically “it” has been me hitting the ground.

So here I am, falling through air? no… something else. There’s a substance, a kind of ether, meaning that it’s not nothing that I’m falling through… It feels like knowledge and experience.

This feeling is 10% anguish, but 90% I-don’t-know-what. I feel like I should explore this emotion, because it really is unfamiliar to me. It’s not the kind of martyr-ish feeling of love-so-much-it-hurts… too cliche, this is something I really haven’t encountered before. Nor does it carry the kind of insane pain that feeling tends to bring… I’m past that.

I want your love… or affection… or whatever its called. “It” is whatever makes me think you want to spend time with me. Strike out “think”, replace with “sense” or “feel”.

*breathe out*

*focus…*

(Coherent part of this post:)

If you read this, and you’re not the person I am addressing this to (or even if you are), don’t worry about me, I’m perfectly okay. I guess this is just the growing pains I’ve been avoiding all these years since… Lisa Kim.

Picture me with a slightly disappointed look on my face, slightly downcast eyes, slightly shaking my head, as if to say “God damnit… this sucks just a little bit of nuts, but I’ll deal.”

I always do.

Disappointment, because I wish I had these nuts that I have now back when I was younger… like 20. And yes… I’ll admit I must have hung myself on the end of that last relationship all these years. Not in the sense that I’ve hoped we’d get back together, but since then whenever I contacted a girl I was interested in, I’d always have a bitter pain in my chest and a badass fear of being rejected. Logic would dictate that since Kim was my last relation, and I haven’t had a girlfriend since her, *and* I’ve had this bitter reaction to girls I’ve been attracted to, that the emotion and my ended relationship were/are somehow connected. That’s “no-duh” kind of logic, though… just took me a while to see it.

So. No time like the present. No time like the present to learn to fly. I just hope my gift for learning will help me out in this aspect.

*Sends a text…*

Today… I will confront my fears. As my courage rises and falls, I’ll ride these waves in hopes that I reach the shore and feel that stable earth underneath my feet, that sense of reassurance that can only come from having worked so hard to get to land.

-TJ, confused but learning ever so slowly, changing every day.