Brent Pirolli's

It’s just like you to contest, wear it like a label on your breast, don’t you see what this takes of me? – Dashboard Confessional

I can’t wait to get outta here.  I’m getting that “caged animal” feeling and it’s not even February!  College life has run it’s course for me.  I’m nearing the finish line and I’m able to look back and regret nothing.  I never got drunk, never slept around, never failed a class, never missed a deadline.  I was responsible, busy, productive, and I learned quite a bit… (not $50,000 worth, but that’s another entry…)

Now I’m ready to move on.  I look at my fellow dorm residents and think, “What is wrong with you??!?!  IT’S 2:30AM ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT!!!  I HAVE TO GET UP IN 5 HOURS FOR CLASS!!  WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE MY DOOR?!??!”  Then I want to bash their drunken heads together and leave them passed out with their heads in the toilets…. But enough with my homicidal tendencies…

Seriously… I feel like I’m babysitting half of the time here.  A bunch of idiotic slack-jawed yokels trash our bathroom all the time… People urinate on the floors, rip down signs, leave all kinds of stuff in the sinks…  It’s disgusting.  I want out.  I want a life where I have a home, with my wife, by ourselves.  No sharing bathrooms and living spaces with strangers…. I hope living in an apartment won’t be this bad…. I can’t imagine it will be… All we’ll share is a stairway and some noise….

Aside from that complaining, things are good here.  I’m keeping busy as usual.  My class schedule will clear up a ton in the coming months though.  I finish my curling class in March and I have no more Friday classes starting the third week of February.  Yes… I mentioned curling.  It’s freakin sweet.  I get to slide around on ice and sweep heavy rocks as they smash into other ones…. then I get to yell, “HARD!!! HARD!!!”  It’s fun…. I like to pretend I’m Canadian, but it doesn’t pass with the three Canadians that are in the class…. one of which is the instructor….   I just say, “eh?” a lot and I try not to use the letter “o” much….  I pretend I’m Rick Moranis in Strange Brew… that seems to fool most people… “Oh I gotta take a leak so bad I can taste it….”

In other news, I’m fighting the virus war on a virtual and physical level…  I’ve had a sore throat for the past two days, but I’m not sick… yet.  I’ve also been fighting an onslaught of viruses at work.  We’re being slammed by the Novarg (MyDoom) virus, along with three others that have hit every now and then (Klez, Dumaru, and Beagle).  Thankfully our anti-virus software is the best on the market, and it covers all our server applications, clients, and emails… But there is still the possibility of infection by someone opening an email attachment if it wasn’t cleaned by the anti-virus software… I have yet to see this happen (nothing has gotten by the anti-virus), but there are some loopholes which I’m frantically running around and closing to make sure this doesn’t happen…. ::sigh:: The exciting life of a Network Administrator!  I like it though, it’s a challenge and it’s never repetitive!

Ok, off I go… to prepare for another day of pretending I’m Canadian.  I might as well be… it’s frickin freezing here…. It’s been in the negative degrees for the past couple weeks!!!  ::looks left, then right, then straight ahead… Walks off into the distance singing the Canadian National Anthem::  “Oh Canada…. Our home and Native land….”

Happy Birthday to SaverP

That’s right…. It is my sister’s birthday today…. She’s officially 35 now…. …. er…. 18…. either or…. she has hit her official “white trash” birthday.  Now she can smoke, buy lottery tickets, and purchase a gun.  DO IT UP SISTA!

The Lack of Rational Thoughts

My brain is fried.  I feel so out of whack.  A ton has happened in the past month, but I’ve been so tied up DOING those things, that I’ve all but fallen off of planet Xanga.  I don’t know where to begin, so we’ll start with school…

School is here again.  I’m in week 2 of 16 of my last semester.  Yes… 14 weeks from now I’ll be graduating…. Then 6 days later I’ll be getting married.  No more school….. NO MORE SCHOOL!!!!!  I can’t describe the size of this goal in my head.  It fills my brain and pushes important things out of the way (like “first underwear, THEN pants”).  Some may argue that this is a moot point, because it can be solved by one simple question, “Why wear pants in the first place?”  Good point…. moving on.

So I need 19 credits to graduate.  I started this semester by taking 19 credits.  That sucks.  I’ve realized now that taking 19 credit hours, while working 42 hours a week between two jobs, helping plan a wedding, and still maintaining time to eat, sleep, and see Sarah….. is nearly impossible.  So, I’ve dropped one of my courses (so now I’m down to 16 hours), and am going to try to test out of Video 2, which I’m not currently enrolled in.  This would give me those 3 extra hours so that I can graduate still.  Granted, if I blow the test, I am one class short of graduating…. that would suck.  BUT, I only need a C or better on the test…. and the prof knows me…. and I get to read the book and all applicable readings prior to the test…. so I don’t think it’ll be a problem.  I already tested out of Video 1 a couple of years ago…  No worries.  God is in control.

We’ve found an apartment.  I don’t know if I’ve said that before or not.  But we signed a lease that starts April 1st, 2004.  We’ll move furniture in during that month, then she’ll live there once school is out May 6th (ish) and I’ll live at home for a week until we’re married.  The problem?  RENT MONEY!  We need to come up with $525 each month.  Normally this isn’t a problem once I’m working full-time, she’s working a bit, and we have financial aid from her school stuff….. BUT I’m not going full-time until June, she’ll be unemployed in May, and financial aid doesn’t come through until September.  So we need rent for April, May, & June before I can afford to pay it via work money.  Well, April can be paid for with her birthday money and our tax returns hopefully… May is a mystery, and June will be paid for by wedding money…. Then once I’m full-time, we should be fine.  God will provide.

Finances are tight.  We’ve established our budget awhile back, and now that we’re trying to save for a honeymoon AND for rent…. finances are on a “spending freeze.”  Money sucks.  I wish we all just went to work then were able to share our resources for everybody to enjoy…. what’s that called again….. ….. oh wait…. that’s Communism…. never mind.

Sleep patterns are out of whack.  I work Tues. and Fri. nights at the desk from 12am-4am to get some extra money.  This is all well and good, but the problem starts when you see the rest of my schedule.  I get up at 7:30am on Mon., Tues., Thurs., Fri., & Sun.  Then on Wed. & Sat. I sleep till 1pm….. This REALLY makes my body hate me.  But ya know…. ya gotta do what ya gotta do…. and that extra 80 bucks every two weeks pays for gas and some food…. Man I feel so poor.

CedarCreek is doing great.  We’ve added another service.  We now meet Sat. nights at 5:30pm, and Sun. at 9:00, 10:30, and Noon.  We maxed out at over 4,000 people two weeks ago…. so it’s good we’re adding our fourth service this week.  Plus, assuming giving goes up with more attenders, I can go full-time in June!  I’ve worked a major bug out of our email server recently.  That felt GREAT!  It took over three months to figure it out, but when it worked…. I literally ran down the hall and jumped in the air…. I’m a nerd.

Sarah and I are starting our Pre-Marital Counseling now.  We’ve both been working in our workbooks and are meeting with Ed and Dawn Bellner on Tuesday nights after our Small Group… This should be fun.  I’m looking forward to it.  It’s a LOT of writing though…. I hate writing.  Bah.  “Doesn’t this book come with a keyboard?  Where’s the ‘on’ switch??!?!?!”

Ok…. that’s enough for now…. I gotta go work on my workbook more…. or nap…. whatever happens…. happens….

PEACE OUT!  Hopefully I’ll update in a day or so instead of a month or so….

P.S.  Monster Garage, Monster House, and American Chopper are all that Discovery Channel should EVER air.  I’d never turn it off.

New Year…. Uhh…. Yeah.

I haven’t updated in a good three weeks or so…. That’s because my PC doesn’t have internet at home, and I’m home on Christmas break until January 12th.  I have my Mac Laptop that has a wireless card in it and I use it to connect, but Xanga isn’t extremely Mac friendly.  They’re getting better, but it still is a far cry from the world of PC.

Life is good.  I was sick for a couple weeks, then I shook it for a week and thought I was fine, but now I’m starting to get sick again…. ::sigh::  Stupid head colds…

I got some major computer upgrades done last Tuesday.  I thought they’d take at least 12 hours, but they only took 7.  I’m still in shock that they’ve worked as well as they have so far.  Very few errors or complaints!  It was a good day.

Sarah and I spent Christmas at our homes, then I went to Cinci to see her family over New Year’s Eve.  We played poker with my new poker chips (thanks Sarah! ), went shopping, went to the Cincinatti Zoo for the “Festival of Lights,” and we went to lunch with Mary and Adam (Sarah’s Maid of Honor and her fiance).  We had some good “hangtime” with Sarah’s parents and found out that Adam can play the piano like nothing I’ve ever seen…. He’s a mad man… He’s self-taught, only played for 6 years, but was playing some insane stuff that he wrote (fast enought that his fingers were blurry to the eye…. I picked my jaw up off the floor and laughed at his mad skills.)  We’ve asked him to play for our wedding, but don’t know if he’ll do it yet… more to come on that.

Now I’m trying to do a buttload of work in the remaining days of my “break.”  I’ve got to do a brake job/oil change on my car, format 20 or so computers and install Windows and all their drivers, clean my room and box up stuff to move to the apartment in April, set up a RIP for a printer at work, and somewhere do the normal duties of my job, eat, and sleep….. all in 7 days.  I don’t think I can do it all, so I have to prioritize what is important and work on those first…. Sleep is ranking pretty high right now.    But I don’t think it’s going to win.

OK, well, I gotta split.  I’m at work (during the 9:45am service) and the message just finished so I gotta pay attention now…. (I know, I’m so bad…. but I’ve heard the message three times by the time the day is over!)  Love, peace, and hair grease.

Holiday Cheer… or …. WHAT THE CRAP?

So I just returned from the biannual book raping.  Those of you who are college students know what I’m talking about.  This is where once a semester you go to the bookstore and “sell back” your books.  In reality they take your books, bend you over, then give you pennies to the dollar for what you paid for them.  This semester I had over $300 in books… I got back a total of $82.50.

The thing that really ticked me off was that all of the books were brand spanking new (I opened them each about 2 times).  On top of that, two of them which totaled over $200 of the price paid were not being used next semester.  THEY JUST CAME OUT!!!  The profs are already bagging them…. Why?  Well, I think I know why.  One was legit.  One did have a new version come out.  The other one…. my 1,300 page law book…. the $120 version… was written by the lady who teaches the class.  She’s not using this book next semester, rather she’s going back to an older book she wrote.  This means that every bookstore in town (3 of them) has to shelf her old book again… So they have to buy it from the publisher and sell it to students.  11.4% of all profits made on book sales goes to the author themselves (per BGSU’s bookstore facts).  So when all these new books get purchased, she wins a buttload of cash.  If she reuses the book, used copies from the stores kill her cash flow.  Yes…. It’s all about the Benjamins.

Now you say, “But all knowing and extraordinarily good looking Brent, why would bookstores have to buy her old book from the publisher if they’ve used it before?  Don’t they have it in stock already?  Didn’t they buy a bunch of old ones from students before?”

To this I reply, “NO!”  See, a bookstore, like any business, hates to have inventory on the shelf.  If inventory isn’t moving, they’re sitting on degrading profits.  So, if a book is no longer used, the old copies are purchased by the stores at crazy prices (I’ve seen as low as 50 cents).  Students don’t care.  They just want to get rid of the book, so they take the low amount.  The bookstore then sells those books to other stores around the country who DO use the book, at ridiculous profits (20-60 dollars per book).  Now they no longer have the book, but have made a decent amount of money on it.  So when the old book comes back into usage a few, couple, single year later, they buy all new books from the publisher and then the prof reaps all the benefits of her 11.4% payout.

So is it by design?  Yeah…. She hoed us good…. She can’t possibly complain about the book since SHE FREAKING WROTE IT!  So why is she going to the older version?  Cuz she wants money.  Who suffers?  We do.  What can we do about it?  Squat.

This kind of reminds me of the fact that we have to pay a fee to apply for graduation…. How janky is that?  Yes, I’ve given you 60,000 dollars over 4 years….. But I know that you need my extra fee for you to say, “Yeah, you can graduate.”  Freaking money-mongers…. I hate this robber baron system…. But again, what am I going to do about it?  NOTHING!  Why?  Cuz I’m just a cow moving through the herd…. Moooo.

Thanksgiving, Playstation 2, Ebay, Finals, and Apartments

So it’s been almost 3 weeks since I did a good solid post.  I figured I’d give you all the pleasure of hearing from me…. as I’m sure you all care deeply…. …. for….. …. uhhh…. me?

Thanksgiving was preceded by a week of hardcore report writing.  I finished about 40 pages in a week time frame.  The following week was spent in Mason, OH (a suburb of Cincinnati) at Sarah’s house.  Don’t get me wrong, they’ve got a decent sized house with a finished basement, but when you cram 12 people into a house plus 1 to 4 friends visiting each day… You run out of space real quick.  Sarah’s Aunt Tish, Uncle Brian, Grandma and Grandpa (Mom’s side), all drove in from Oklahoma.  Then her brother Joshua and his wife Erin and their daughter Hannah (my future Niece) flew in from Boston.  On top of that were her parents (David and Rita) and her other brother Michael, myself, and Sarah.  Even though it was a lot of people, we had a lot of fun and Thanksgiving dinner was GOOD!  I thoroughly enjoyed it! 

When that week was over, we drove the 2.5 hours back north and returned to BG.  The next day classes resumed and so did the Homework!  Sarah finally suggested that we buy a Playstation 2 (since we played her brother Michael’s all week) and I … ….. after changing my pants…. agreed calmly.

Being the cost-conscientious shopper I am… I jumped onto Ebay and warmed up my clicking finger.  Eventually after many stressful hours of fast online auction action, I came away with a pretty good deal.

Brand New Sealed in the Box:
   Playstation Console (w/ one controller)
   2nd Controller (Official Sony Brand)
   Memory Card (Official Sony Brand)
   DVD Remote Control

Used:
   Hot Shots Golf 3 (What Sarah and I played a lot)
   Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (packaged with Hot Shots Golf 3)

This came to a grand total (after shipping and handling) of $202.62.  I can swing that baby!  A PS2 alone retails for $180 plus tax.  In fact, in a store this would have cost around $300.  Nothing like 33% off!  I’m still wanting some games, but I’m going to wait till after Christmas to see if we get them, or if we get money to get them.  On my “most wanted” list is:

Simpsons: Road Rage
Simpsons: Hit and Run
NHL 2004
Medal Of Honor: Frontline
Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun
Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo (PS1 Game)

So if you have and suggestions of games to get, drop me a comment…. tell me what game, what type of game it is (RPG, First Person Shooter, etc.), and why it’s good.

I also finally got our budget into Quicken 2003.  Sarah’s dad gave us that software since he bought the 2004 version.  I tell ya what… I’m a pretty quick guy at picking up software, but this one took me a few hours!  It’s pretty hardcore accounting nerd style.  ANYWAY, it’s done now, so now I can see a computerized printout of how poor we are…. SCORE!

On another note, Sarah and I looked at apartments today.  We put a deposit down on one that we couldn’t see yet, (people are still moving out) but we saw 3 others like it and this one is supposed to be nicer than those… It’ll be open for us to see the second week of January (which just happens to be when classes resume) so we’ll make the final lease agreement decisions then.  With any luck, we’ll love it and know where we’re living in a few months.  Our lease would start April 1st, 2004 and we’d move furniture in that month.  Plus, one of us could stay there and we could use it for whatever we wanted (Sarah’s Bridal Shower Guests).  Then Sarah’d live there for the week that we have between the end of the school year and our wedding.  I’d be living at home for a week, then we’d get hitched and already be settled in…. Who knows, maybe it’ll work out that nice without any problems!

Back in the land of current responsibility however, I am burdened with a few tough take-home finals…. and I give a presentation tomorrow (later today technically) on a final project I made.  Slowly the stress will be fading away and I’ll be on Christmas Break.  Break?  Are you kidding?!?!?  I have to clean out my room at home and prepare my furniture to be moved to an apartment in a few months, format and fix my sister’s computer, work on some software issues at the Creek, update the Creek’s server software, format and install windows and drivers on about 20 older machines, set up an auction system for those machines, take a trip to Mason for the Holiday (probably around New Year’s), pull together the Christmas Eve services at the Creek, and at some point relax enough to enjoy vacation…. and then come back to a whole new set of classes.  God help me.

Life

Is busy…

The SeaGate Event

So we at CedarCreek had our “SeaGate Event” tonight (Nov. 21st).  It was definitely awesome.  It’s so funny to me to realize that 3 years ago I sat there and ran PowerPoint and was in awe of the video guys…. and now here I stand one of them.  I ran a switcher, CG system, PowerPoint, and all the video playback… and another guy ran a second switcher and directed the 3 camera guys.  We had 3 screens…. it was pretty sweet…  God was good to us and I only had one mistake throughout the 2 hour deal.  I’ll take that any day!  Especially since it was a minor mistake and I’m sure barely anyone noticed.  Score.

So 1,500 people gathered for a catered dinner and a message by Rob Bell Jr.  He’s the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI.  They have over 10,000 people there in just under 5 years or so.  They bought a mall to fit everyone in…. heh heh… ANYWAY, go to www.nooma.com if you want to see some of his teachings.  He’s very cool and by far one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard.

So I stayed up tiill 6am last night finishing another report.  21 pages on the topic of digital file-sharing and copyright laws…. (the RIAA lawsuits, Napster, etc…)  It’s pretty good stuff…. I have a PDF version of it if anyone is interested.  Dugan, I know you asked so I’ll email you one shortly.  And with that, I must sleep.  I have to get up and make slides for church tomorrow…. and I’m exhausted.  GOODNIGHT NEVERLAND! (That was from “Hook”…. not…. Micheal…. Jackson….. …. ….. What’s up with him anyway?!?!?)

THE COUNT-O-RAMA:

7 Reports done
1 final project to do

85 Pages written
2 take home finals to write 

40 Lady Bugs removed from room
57 Lady Bugs stuck behind screen…. heh heh…
0   Lady Bugs in room…

Mood:  What day is it?  Who’s talking?

Name who, where, why, and who they’re saying this about:

“Bonjouuuuuuuuuuuuuuur, Ya cheese-eatin surrender monkeys!”

There’s Luke’s chance to redeem himself… So anyway, I’ve been slaving over the keyboard for the past 4 hours typing another report…. I’m on page 9 of a 15 page minimum essay on MP3, peer-to-peer, and file sharing legality… Let me know if you’re interested in it and I can send you a PDF version of it when I’m done.  Ok… back to the typing… I just wanted to take a break and share with you the above quote that popped in my head for no good reason!

Mood:  Silly… Like a goat….

Name the show, characters, and people being imitated:

“Them Derringer bullets is weak…..”

“Yeah… Powerful weak….”

Let’s see what you’ve got class….   Speaking of class…. One of mine is cancelled today, SCORE!  On the other hand, one starts in 20 minutes across campus… so uhhh…. time to go….